02.14.11
Posted in Cyberterrorism at 12:41 pm by George Smith
At Cryptome, a proposal put together by HBGary F, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies.
Here.
It is a draft copy pitch for the team’s services to corporate America, presumably for the purposes of spying on and dirty-tricking critics or adversaries. It is part of the document leak which resulted when the hacking group Anonymous struck back at Aaron Barr of HBGary Federal for exposing members in a story to the Financial Times.
One paragraph implies creation of fraudulent content on the web in order to discredit targets:
If needed or desired we have the capability to create very realistic web content to engage specific audiences to gather more specific information … This encompasses persona creation, landing pages and other new media content. For this to be successful it [sic] requires a strong understanding of the target as well as a strong understanding how to use such techniques in operations.
The individuals involved in the pitch are Aaron Barr of HBGary Federal, Doug Philippone of Palantir, and Guy Filippelli of Berico.
Philippone “commanded multiple Joint Special Operations Command outstations in support of the global war on terror. Doug ran the foreign fighter campaign on the Syrian border in 2005 to stop the flow of suicide bombers into Baghdad and helped to ensure a successful Iraqi election.
The corporate pitch was for use by Hunton & Williams, the law firm identified as intermediary for connecting the spying firms with Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce, for use in plans to target WikiLeaks, Glenn Greenwald, ThinkProgress and other, as yet unnamed, journalists.
Related: The ‘Odious corporate spying firms’ collection.
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Posted in Phlogiston, Rock 'n' Roll at 11:10 am by George Smith
Good news, lads! Good news! It’s voodoo economics.
In case you thought the posts have been a little bleak lately, today I have a remedy.
Fiscal Discipline Rock — here.
C’mon gentle readers, just a little titter, now. It’s funny.
Guest appearances by Professor Schnitzel and a local chapter of the DAR.
Listen for the hidden lyric landmines.
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Posted in Made in China, Permanent Fail at 10:08 am by George Smith
Continuing the subject that the US economic environment preserves arms manufacturing while allowing everything else to go to hell in a handcart, DD gives readers a small profile of Combined Systems, the Jamestown, PA, firm recently in the news as the manufacturer of the tear gas used on crowds in Egypt.
It’s already been noted that the other US product, the M1 tank, was used to lay smokescreens. And, in this, the Egyptian model, one which led to revolt, is similar to the US model.
Nothing for the people who went into the streets — which is why they pulled down the dictator. But no expense spared for arms acquisition.
Combined Systems is here and it is the primary employer in Jamestown, PA.
Its entire business is arms manufacturing with a subsidiary in handcuff production. As such, in the market it is not subject to the pressures which have destroyed US non-military production.
The federal governments, as well as those of states and municipalities — the taxpayer, underwrites it. And while there may even be layoffs of state workers, like policemen, in the time of austerity, usually hardware is not sacrificed in such budget cutting.
Obviously, Combined Systems has a significant business in the sale of tear gas worldwide, Egypt and Israel being two notable customers.
A brochure on high-explosive rounds, called FRAG-12, produced by the company is here.
“We believe FRAG-12 is a game-changing technology for the warfighter engaged in urban combat,” it reads.
A brochure post on the web describes the Combined Systems corporate setting:
The Combined System campus is comprised of 18 buildings on 160 acres in Western Pennsylvania. The workforce of 160 includes a full R&D department, electrical, mechanical and chemical engineers, a full quality assurance department, in house machining department, and in process quality department, and is fully ISO 9001:2000 certified and is DoD 4145.26-M compliant.
Founded in 1981, CSI by Michael Brunn and Jacob Kravel the company has grown to revenues of approximately $25 million, and has a very hands on corporate structure …
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows unemployment in Mercer County, where Combined Systems is located, to be among the worst rates in the state. It is, for example, tied with Schuylkill County, where DD was raised.
In December 2009, unemployment was at 11.7 percent in Mercer. One year later it had decreased to 9.6.
Mercer County did have domestic non-military production. You can guess how it has fared.
From a 2009 report in the county newspaper:
The local economy continues to bleed jobs as two leading industries on Tuesday announced layoffs totaling more than 70 workers.
The latest layoffs have led two local economic advisors to peg Mercer County’s manufacturing unemployment rate at 40 percent.
Cattron Group International Inc. said it was laying off 32 workers at its Sharpsville operation while Salem Tube Inc.’s Pymatuning Township plant said it laid off 41 workers since February and more will follow unless business improves.
These are the latest in a series of layoffs that have whipsawed the local economy. Large industrial employers such as Wheatland Tube Co. and Duferco Farrell have been forced to undergo rolling layoffs which have hit hundreds of its workers.
Other companies opted to shut their doors forever such as Signature Aluminum in Sugar Grove Township. When the company folded the local plant in March it employed 280.
Another story on lay-offs for state education workers — teachers — reads:
Hold-ups and haggling over the Pennsylvania state budget in Harrisburg, mean layoffs are coming to Mercer County Head Start. Right now, early childhood education staff for about 10 state-funded classrooms are being put on hold.
“The Senate Republican budget would cut “Pre-K Counts” by 46 percent, about $40 million. It would cut $20 million out of Head Start, which is a 50 percent cut,” says State Representative Mark Longietti, (D) 7th District.
“And the impact that that has is about 152 children will not be able to receive early childhood education as a direct result of this,” adds Larry Haynes, a consultant with Mercer County Head Start.
A collection of links on layoffs in Mercer County, at the county newspaper, is here.
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Posted in Made in China, Permanent Fail, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 8:22 am by George Smith
From the New York Times, Louis Uchitelle’s conclusion that losing the manufacturing base wasn’t such a good idea.
Quotes from various “experts,” easy observables by anyone on the street:
Losing an industry or ceasing to manufacture a particular product, in this case stainless steel flatware, has indeed become a fairly frequent event. Just in the last few years, the last sardine cannery, in Maine, closed its doors. Stainless steel rebars, the sturdy rods that reinforce concrete in all kinds of construction, are now no longer made in America. Neither are vending machines or incandescent light bulbs or cellphones or laptop computers.
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Concern is increasing that this decline has gone too far. “I think there is a growing recognition that a diminished manufacturing sector will undermine our economy,??? says Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics. (Unintentional knee slapper by ‘economic expert.’ Correction: “Has undermined the economy through mass unemployment and diminished buying power.”)
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How did the nation get into this situation? It gambled, in effect, that by importing more from foreign suppliers and from American companies that had set up shop abroad, consumer prices for manufactured products would fall, without any sacrifice in product quality. Low-wage workers abroad would make that happen.
American manufacturers, on the other hand, would be the world’s best innovators, developing sophisticated new products here at home and producing them, at least initially, in their domestic factories.
The first part of the arrangement worked very well. Consumer prices did fall as imports flooded in — from foreign manufacturers, of course, but also from factories newly opened abroad by American multinationals … The second part of the arrangement, however, has been more problematic. As it turns out, the United States is not the only path-breaker.
===
The loss of manufacturing capacity, measured in lost workers, is startling. From the high point in the summer of 1979, through last month, employment in manufacturing has fallen by 8.1 million, to
11.6 million, with most of the drop in just the last decade. While consumers have benefited from lower prices, made possible by unrestricted imports, on the other side of the ledger are tens of billion of dollars in lost manufacturing wages.
Something else is gone, too. “We had a storehouse of knowledge and skill built up in these workers and we can’t use it now,??? says James Jordan, president of the Interstate Maglev Project, promoting a high-speed rail technology that uses special magnets to levitate and propel trains. Maglev was invented in the United States … [but not used here].
Uchitelle’s piece, of course, forgets one big thing.
The US still manufactures weapons. Lots and lots of weapons. And that’s about all.
Furthermore, weapons manufacturing is not constrained by any of the things which have destroyed domestic product-making in the US.
It is not subject to death spiral pricing competition; its workers are not constantly downsized for cheap overseas slave labor. And it is underwritten entirely by the US taxpayers even if the taxpayers can afford it less and less.
There is no network of Walmart superstores pillaging the business, offering equivalent dirt cheap Chinese made kit for every missile, armored vehicle, landmine and drone manufactured in the States.
Diminished buying power and lost wages have no effect on US weapons manufacturing. Sacrifice is for everybody else.
Uchitelle’s story frets that the US will cede “innovation” due to loss of domestic manufacturing. Unless you count Mark Zuckerberg, future Nobel laureate, Pulitzer prize winner and global bringer of freedom to oppressed populations worldwide.
It has not lost “innovation,” if that’s what one calls it, in arms manufacturing.
There are General Atomics drones for every future possible application in global assassination, new varieties of cluster bombs, elaborate grenade launchers for blowing up people hiding behind rocks, and robots galore, to no discernible effect, for the forever war in Afghanistan.
It’s a great game for those on the winning side. For most of us, however, not so much.
The most highly read story on the blog early this year has been Not Made in China: US Bullshit Manufacturing. (Basically because of Internet random event. A high traffic sight, WhatReallyHappened, linked here after a few Twitters. Paradoxically, I don’t use Twitter anymore, being obsolete in my mental processes.)
From it:
[While] what production of durable goods in the US that remains is charted, it — along with the fortunes of the middle class and the new mass of unemployed — cratered in 2009. However, military production did not.
It went through a minor dip and then soared.
This is immoral. It destroys any argument on fairness and shared burden and consequences being a part of US society.
It is also economic treason.
The related series: US Bullshit Manufacturing.
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02.13.11
Posted in Cyberterrorism at 9:39 am by George Smith
Odious corporate spying forms HBGary Federal, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies continued to enjoy outrageously bad publicity as their botched plan to attack WikiLeaks and Glenn Greenwald was discussed in the mainstream press over the weekend.
The New York Times ran an item, notable for the statistic on a growth corporate industry whose products appear to be predatory behavior and throwing sand in the gears.
It reads:
Jonathan E. Turner, who runs a Tennessee-based business that gathers intelligence for corporate clients, said that companies nationwide relied on investigators to gather potentially damaging information on possible business partners or rivals. “Information is power,??? said Mr. Turner, former chairman of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.
He estimated that the “competitive intelligence??? industry had 9,700 companies offering these services, with an annual market of more than $2 billion, but said there were limits to what tactics should be used.
Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce distanced themselves on Friday from any effort to embarrass or collect disparaging information about their critics.
The Anonymous hacking group again raided the e-mails of HBGary Federal, promising the revelation of more incriminating and potentially criminal behavior.
None of this is particularly surprising in 2011 US of A. It’s fairly apparent that there is virtually no enthusiasm in the US government for regulation of companies whose business model is providing services for often illegally attacking the citizen critics of big corporations.
The banner motto for this story remains Palantir Technologies now shown to be fatuous claim:
Palantir was built by technologists serious about protecting privacy and civil liberties.
Cryptome samples some of the documents taken from HBGary Federal here.
They can be fairly characterized as deadening to mediocre slide show presentations in .pdf format, aimed at pitching the CEO’s expertise in various general security and social networking matters to dull but potentially evil white businessmen in corporate America.
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02.12.11
Posted in Extremism, Permanent Fail at 10:06 am by George Smith
Krugman breaks out the GOP recommendations for budget cutting. It’s called Eat the Future:
WIC 1008 million
Food for Peace 544 million
NOAA 450 million
NASA 579 million
Energy efficiency and renewable energy 899
Science 1111 million
Nuclear nonproliferation 648 million
Federal buildings fund 1653 million
Homeland security administration 489 million
FEMA, various, around 1.2 billion
EPA clean water and drinking water about 1.8 billion
Community health centers 1.3 billion
Centers for disease control 900 million
WIC is nutritional aid for pregnant women and women with young children; let’s cut that, because the damage to the nation from malnourishment is a problem for future politicians. NOAA is weather and climate — hey, what we don’t know can’t hurt us. Nuclear nonproliferation — well, we probably won’t feel the pain of a terrorist nuke assembled from old Soviet fissile material for a couple of years. FEMA — well, how often do hurricanes hit New Orleans? CDC — with luck, by the time plague hits someone else can be blamed.
Contrast the cuts for science and homeland security.
Since we know the GOP despises science, it’s a natural for them. It cannot, of course, cut all funding for science since this would not only destroy many universities, most government agencies including the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Health but — most importantly — private sector arms development, too.
The homeland security cut is trivial, as one might expect, a 0.8 percent sliver from its 56 billion 2011 budget. And there is found humor in that the GOP wishes to cut more from “nuclear non-proliferation.”
However, the GOP wishes to cut 25 percent from the FEMA budget, since that agency’s aspect of homeland security is, well, you know the story.
In BAD, Paul Fussell wrote in 1991:
Bad ideas are those that are palpably unsound, like constructing a building from the top down, or trying to run a car with a pill in it. Some people can always be persuaded to embrace such notions, but most would agree that except as the material of jokes, they are a waste of time. Bad ideas, on the other hand, are widely accepted and so familiar as to go largely unquestioned …
[Another bad idea]: … [disease], homelessness, poverty and drug addiction are justly punitive, and will probably go away if we do nothing about them.
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Posted in Made in China, Permanent Fail at 9:10 am by George Smith
Stagnant US labor market encounters rising number who “leave” unemployment rolls because they are permanently or semi-permanently severed from workforce.
Mike Konczal has started to answer the question from a Reuters news item today:
Since 2008, the American labor force — that is, the number of people either working or actively working for work — hasn’t grown at all, The Economist reports, looking at Labor Department numbers.
That’s not unusual during a recession, which typically leads some of the unemployed to become discouraged and give up looking for work, or to retire early. At the other demographic end of the labor market, recessions can also prompt some young people to go to school instead of entering the workforce, The Economist explains.
But things usually turn around during the recovery. This time, however, that’s not happening: Since the Great Recession officially ended in mid 2009, the “participation rate” — the share of the population in the labor force — has continued to decline, especially among the young.
But the problem appears to have deeper roots. In the 1990s, the labor force grew by 1.3 percent a year. Last decade, that figure dropped to 1 percent. And the Congressional Budget Office predicts that over the next decade, it will grow by only 0.7 percent.
Taken together, the slow growth of the labor force and the low participation rate mean that the offiical [sic] unemployment rate, now at an already high 9 percent, underplays the actual rate of joblessness even more than such official figures usually do. That’s because the official rate doesn’t include workers who have grown discouraged and stopped looking for work–and that number appears to be unusually high.
The obvious irony here is the case of Egypt, illustrating what happens on the extreme end of the curve, with its decades-long entrenched system of throwing away its human capital for the sake of a looter upper-class holding the reins of power.
Question: What happens when all manufacturing and jobs have gone overseas and there are less and less who can even raise a demand for the cheap stuff?
Answer: Like Walmart, you build overseas or diversify into things like drug sales to the elderly, which the US government underwrites, or white-knuckle banking and financial services for the poverty-stricken who still need to buy a few sticks of clothing. Or like Target, you turn half the store into a supermarket because people still must buy food, which the government can help pay for with food stamp programs.
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Posted in Made in China, Permanent Fail at 8:55 am by George Smith
Latest giant product recall, faux-American company in Woonsocket, RI:
Baby Monitors recalled due to strangulations
Everything the company peddles is made in China.
Without discussing the poor designed product, the incident is just another illustration of why the US labor force is stagnant, except for high-end goods for the wealthy and arms manufacturing.
Since there is no obvious or easy way to reverse this without a radical overhaul of the country, one that’s not politically possible, it is now permanently embedded as part of a bleak landscape.
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02.11.11
Posted in Cyberterrorism at 2:16 pm by George Smith
One of the paradoxes of the corporate spying campaign against WikiLeaks and Glenn Greenwald is the use of Palantir Technologies intellectual property.
If you fish around on the company website, you quickly find stories, usually from business sections of daily newspapers, on the nature of its terror-network finding software.
It’s literally described as almost the best thing since sliced bread.
Palantir will end the devastation in Haiti. Its product is greatly desired by the US government and intelligence agencies who are said to be using it in the war on terror. And Palantir will be used to find fraud in stimulus spending.
What’s absent, of course, is what one of its big applications appears to be now:
Enabling corporate America to dirty-trick and attack critics by establishing their networks, which are generally right out in the open, anyway. And then outlining and defining them as targets or pressure points with reputations, civil liberties and privacy to be potentially rubbished.
One supposes that from the point of view of a Bank of America or US Chamber of Commerce, critics and journalists are considered terrorists.
Which makes the market — the US financial sector — for Palantir’s tools very clearcut.
Although it probably goes without saying, the market for doing evil domestically is now quite a lure. With a company like Palantir, and its obvious desire to market to the private sector as well as government, it is not too hard to imagine employees brainstorming ways to pitch the company’s products as solutions for various ‘problems’ in corporate America.
And such problems now appear to be, obviously, how to define, neutralize, discredit and suppress networks of critics, journalists and leakers.
Lot of business opportunity there.
Which continues to make any corporate claim that its founders prize privacy and civil liberties something of a laugh riot, at this juncture.
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Posted in Cyberterrorism, Stumble and Fail at 1:22 pm by George Smith
Odious corporate spy firms Palantir, HBGary Federal and Berico Technologies continue to reap the whirlwind of messing with the Anonymous hacking group.
Consider for a moment, firms which rely upon alleged expertise in computer security dieing by the same sword.
By way of Digby, Palantir et al were also doing dirty tricks for the US Chamber of Commerce, another famous villain on the national landscape.
“ThinkProgress has learned that a law firm representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the big business trade association representing ExxonMobil, AIG, and other major international corporations, is working with set of ‘private security’ companies and lobbying firms to undermine their political opponents, including ThinkProgress, with a surreptitious sabotage campaign,” reports the website of TP.
It reads:
According to one document prepared by Team Themis [Palantir, HBGary Federal and Berico), the campaign included an entrapment project. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,??? to give to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then to subsequently expose the document as a fake to undermine the credibility of the Chamber’s opponents. In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona??? to “generate communications??? with Change to Win.
It’s always worthwhile to scan the self-serving websites of companies like Palantir, particularly after it has been exposed as place where the professional product appears to be dirty-tricking and trying enable the throwing of sand into the gears of the lives of others.
“At Palantir, the best idea wins,” reads the Palantir page here. “This means the respect of your peers must be earned; seniority has no place here. We are radically transparent and we despise politicking.”
This is also particularly trenchant now:
We embrace the adage, if you never fail, then you aren’t taking enough risks. We take failure as an opportunity to literally ask “Why?,??? until we’ve diagnosed the problem and figured out how to prevent it from happening again. At Palantir, hiding a failure is taboo; here, you get respect for letting the rest of the company know what happened and how to avoid the same pitfall.
“Awhile back we shared some screenshots of the Elvish Palantir Workspace,” reads one company blog.
It is also worthwhile reviewing this bit of self-serving rubbish:
Palantir was built by technologists serious about protecting privacy and civil liberties.
“Palantir’s user-friendly analysis program is becoming a major player in the war against terrorism and cyber espionage, stimulus spending accountability (Palantir is literally powering the administration’s efforts to identify fraud in stimulus projects), health care, and even natural disasters like the recent earthquake in Haiti,” reads more self-serving press from a happier time.
The company is fond of touting its terror-network finding software to business publications.
Which explains why the wars in Afghanistan and Yemen are all but over with Osama bin Laden captured in 2009. Oh, wait …
Now that Palantir has stepped in it, here’s an apology from its CEO, Dr. Alex Karp.
Short version: We do not do the awful things it looks like we’ve been caught doing because our name/insignia was all over those damning slides etc, etc.
It’s also worth noting the coincidence and serendipitous nature of their current trouble.
None of this would have likely made big news if one of the corporate spying firm employees hadn’t felt compelled to brag about how great he was to journalist Joseph Menn at the Financial Times.
When Menn bit on the story he was, basically, giving publicity to forces of evil.
The unexpected snapback, which came from the hacking group Anonymous — which the story had targeted — resulted in troubles and embarrassments for Palantir, HBGary Federal and Berico, things the three firms were planning for WikiLeaks and others.
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