Something I wrote for Federal Computer Week awhile back, on the leaking mindset, those like Edward Snowden, not like those on the government contract who spread chumpbait.
Back in the early 1990s, I edited an electronic newsletter that dealt with the culture of amateur virus writers — hackers who wrote mobile malware. Julian Assange was a subscriber. This is only to illustrate Assange’s bona fides as someone from the original world computer underground, a place where one of the driving philosophies was to reveal the secrets of institutional power.
Once confined to what was considered a computer geek fringe, that ideology is now entrenched. It’s no longer an outsider mindset, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Now it’s inside, with its originators entering middle age. And younger adherents of the philosophy are coming along all the time.
They’re everywhere — employed by government, the military and corporate America. And because we have come to the point that the United States is considered by some to be a bad global actor — whether you share that point of view or not — the government is faced with a problem it cannot solve. Its exposure is thought by many to be deserved.
In this new reality, as in nature, a vacuum is abhorred. The mainstream media no longer fulfills the role of speaking truth to power. It opened the door for Assange and WikiLeaks …
“But the good news [for the federal government and its contractors] is that, although you can’t eliminate the Bradley Mannings, they won’t be common,” I wrote.
And they are not. In fact, I’ve been surprised — even dismayed — at how so many of Edward Snowden’s colleagues remain silent in view of what they must see as things Americans ought to know about.
In 2013 America, money — a good job — does buy a lot of silence. Ours is not a culture of bold iconoclasts ready to make life-changing sacrifices. This makes Edward Snowden legitimately remarkable.
The Edward Snowden affair has done many things. One of the most signal is its (at least momentary) destruction of the US government/national security megaplex’s campaign of cyberwar shoeshine.
In the weeks preceeding the emergence of Edward Snowden’s information on cyber-spying in the US government had conducted a carefully staged p.r. operation to paint China as the primary sinner in cyberspace — a country that was not playing fair, one mercilessly targeting our networks and “intellectual property” in the cyber equivalent of a clandestine war.
This was said, most notoriously by NSA director Keith Alexander, to constitute “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.” The economic future of the United States was imperiled by Chinese espionage.
The Snowden affair has silenced Alexander on this matter. If only for the time being. And the crisis has forced him to explain, very poorly, what US cyber-spying and cyberwar operations are really up to.
That’s easy to summarize. It was so before Edward Snowden spilled the beans to the Guardian.
The US has been quietly building the biggest cyberwar machine in history.
This should not be a surprise. It’s been fairly obvious to people on the outside who follow the matter, even looking at the black box.
The US outspends every other nation, in every facet, of military development and deployment.
Why should cyber-operations be any different?
The hypocrisy on the subject, practiced by the majority of the US mainstream media is overwhelming.
A couple months back, while running the fund-raising pitch for DD blog, I noted the mainstream media had simply gone absent. It stopped serious reporting on many national security issues and almost completely took up the government line that many enemies were preparing to cut the country down through remote manipulation.
The United States was being surveyed and probed, its networks penetrated in advance of a time when the financial system would be attacked, nationwide power blackouts caused, the water poisoned, almost all facets of modern life disrupted.
And the media accepted all of it, passing on what’s called the “chumpbait” unhindered, no skepticism allowed. Critical response, I remarked — half jokingly, had been banished to, at best, 140-character tweets on Twitter.
The week leading up Snowden’s expose delivered a perfect example of US cyberwar chumpbait.
The Washington Post had been leaked a “confidential” portion of a Pentagon report on China. The “confidential” part was said to reveal massive Chinese infiltration of US networks and the making off with unspecified details on expensive and very important US weapons systems.
If you’ve been following along it’s no secret the US government and the national security industry have been waging an increasingly concerted campaign to increase cyber-defense spending. The linchpin of the strategy is the relentless argument that Chinese hackers, under the guidance of its government and military, are into all American corporate business, military networks and the nation’s infrastructure. Because of this catastrophe looms.
Another ploy in this orchestrated theatrical production arrived today in the guise of the Defense Science Board report, Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat …
However, it is not the same report the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima publicized in a big story on alleged deep Chinese cyberespionage directed against the US military and its arms manufacturers.
“Designs for many of the nation’s most sensitive advanced weapons systems have been compromised by Chinese hackers, according to a report prepared for the Pentagon and to officials from government and the defense industry,??? writes Nakashima for the Post.
The public version of the DSB report contains only three instances of the word “China??? and only one of “Chinese.??? “Espionage??? appears only four times in report’s 146 .pdf pages.
What does this mean?
It means one of the Defense Science Board’s members or minions — which can be any number of a pool of representatives from arms manufacturers like Boeing and Northrop Grumman, to consultants to these same businesses or small national security “think tanks??? or lawyers in legal firms providing consultation on cybersecurity issues under contract to the Department of Defense — leaked the real report, the “confidential??? part, to the Washington Post.
These are never selfless acts to get word out about an emerging national threat. That’s not how things work.
What it is is another report, among an increasing number, aimed at growing the national security industry’s cyberwar and cyber-defense programs, in which many of the Defense Science Board’s members are employed.
The secret report, the one the Washington Post tells us about, is to redirect attention toward a new threat. It is part of a national argument that generally lumps all cyber-crime , cyber-spying and claimed cyberwar into one big threat aimed at the United States, over everyone else.
Leaks aimed at fostering government and industry agendas on national security are always applauded. They’re perfectly acceptable shoeshine for national security aims.
On the other hand, Edward Snowden-style leaking, material that shows what the national security complex is really doing, stuff that immediately starts up an acrimonious global stink is abhorrent, even treasonous.
China made its first substantive comments on Monday to reports of U.S. surveillance of the Internet, demanding that Washington explain its monitoring programs to the international community.
Several nations, including U.S. allies, have reacted angrily to revelations by an ex-CIA employee over a week ago that U.S. authorities had tapped the servers of internet companies for personal data.
“We believe the United States should pay attention to the international community’s concerns and demands and give the international community the necessary explanation,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a daily briefing.
The Chinese government has previously not commented directly on the case, simply repeating the government’s standard line that China is one of the world’s biggest victims of hacking attacks.
A senior source with ties to the Communist Party leadership said Beijing was reluctant to jeopardize recently improved ties with Washington …
Snowden told the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s main English language newspaper, last week that Americans had spied extensively on targets in China and Hong Kong.
He said these included the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the site of an exchange which handles nearly all the city’s domestic web traffic. Other alleged targets included government officials, businesses and students.
At the briefing, Hua rejected a suggestion that Snowden was a spy for China. [This claim has been delivered by Dick Cheney, among others.]
“This is sheer nonsense,” she said, without elaborating.
Just ended at the Guardian, an on-line interview with Edward Snowden. Snowden gave answers showing completeness and sophistication.
The last question he answered was germane to an alleged “free press” operating in a country that isn’t really a true democracy anymore:
So far are things going the way you thought they would regarding a public debate? – tikkamasala
[Snowden]:
Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.
When Republican Roscoe Bartlett was booted out of the House permanently during the last election, it marked the official death of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy. That’s because the head of the electromagnetic pulse cause in the House went solely into the hands of the leader of EMP caucus, Trent Franks of Arizona.
Trent Franks, in the video below, demonstrates that he barely even qualifies as a human being with the power of thought.
Yes, he’s one of the GOP’s large number of “legitimate rape” wackos.
The only good thing in this character defect from the heart of WhiteManistan is that it completely alienates the part of the country that isn’t despicable as well as insane.
And with the likes of Trent Franks in charge, the Cult of EMP Crazy is never going anywhere.
No, it’s not a video game or a bad zombie movie; it’s a simulated cyber attack to prepare banks, brokerages and exchanges for what has become an ever-bigger risk to their earnings and operations.
Organized by the trade group SIFMA, Quantum Dawn 2 will take place on June 28 – a summer Friday that, with any luck, will be a relatively quiet day in the real markets.The drill involves not just big Wall Street firms like Citigroup and Bank of America, but the Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to SIFMA officials.
The drill, run by an ex-Marine who went to work for Goldman Sachs, aims to simulate attacks on the “equity markets.”
Failure of which, everyone knows, would bring the US to a screeching halt.
Naturally, it’s also a way to raise money on a service of no social good to anyone except the people collecting the price of the tickets.
“About 40 firms will participate in the operation, having paid fees of $1,000, $5,000 or $10,000 depending on the size of their revenue … Each firm must send three executives: one from business continuity, one from information security, another from operations whose job is to keep trading, settlement and clearance running during market crises,” informs Reuters.
“A firm called Cyber Strategies, which works with the Department of Homeland Security on cyber threats, will receive the fees for overseeing the exercise.”
Here you have it, folks. The ultimate in cyberwar shoeshine, the servant class of the one percent, in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security, for an inside circle jerk that asks you to swallow the idea that the most important thing now is protecting “equity markets” on Wall Street. From the hordes of cyber-enemies who have figured out all that’s needed to kneecap America is to cause “unusual slowness, in trading, or [have] viruses trying to invade the systems.”
“The [market players] will also have to call one another to figure out what’s going on.”
On the other side of the coin, the majority of Americans would still like protection from Wall Street.
“I don’t like you. Fat. Wealthy. Think you understand pain.” — Rorschach, Watchmen.
The fake news — Ted Nugent died in a jet ski accident at an island resort. Ted’s not fit enough to jet ski. He has often been seen walking with a cane (this, friends, is the cane) and has either had or needs double knee replacement.
Click the link. And what kind of dork wears shirts with his initials monogrammed on the pocket? (TNbmf = Ted Nugent, ballistically maximized firepower.)
On the other hand, WhiteManistan is very slowly dying out.
Deaths exceeded births among non-Hispanic white Americans for the first time in at least a century, according to new census data, a benchmark that heralds profound demographic change.
The disparity was tiny — only about 12,000 — and was more than made up by a gain of 188,000 as a result of immigration from abroad. But the decrease for the year ending July 1, 2012, coupled with the fact that a majority of births in the United States are now to Hispanic, black and Asian mothers, is further evidence that white Americans will become a minority nationwide within about three decades …
Nationally, said Kenneth M. Johnson, the senior demographer at the Carsey Institute, a research center based at the University of New Hampshire, “the onset of natural decrease between 2011 and 2012 was not anticipated.??? He attributed the precipitous shift in part to the recession, adding that “the growing number of older non-Hispanic whites, which will accelerate rapidly as the baby boom ages, guarantees that non-Hispanic white natural decrease will be a significant part of the nation’s demographic future.???
But fear of the non-white man in the White House made them vote for the very people whose economic policies (how many red states have decided to fight Obamacare) make their “natural decrease” to increase.
Socialism, tyranny! Over our dead bodies!
Trivia: Clicking on the WhiteManistan link is an easy way to see Google summarize the art and pictures of the blog. It’s an amusing idiosyncratic collection of modern Americana and lethal trinkets.
Question for readers: Should I change the name of the blog? Escape from WhiteManistan? Culture of Lickspittle?
Authorities have returned to a Texas home linked to the investigation into ricin-tainted letters sent to New York City’s mayor and President Barack Obama.
FBI agents wearing hazardous material suits were seen going in and out of the house in New Boston Wednesday. The house also was searched last Friday.
Gathering more evidence for the case against Shannon Richardson?
Or looking for more because the FBI does not completely believe the stories of Nathaniel Richardson?
Was it a one person operation?
You must admit the now not-unique idea of framing your husband with a ricin letter sent to the President because you believe the resulting publicity may raise your profile in Hollywood is a tortured one.
“The U.S. always reserves the right to overdo things. That’s the legacy of the last 10 years,” [George Smith] said. “And to the world at large, it’s viewed as a nation that sees every potential problem as a nail to be hit with the hammer of the military and/or security contractors.”
So could Smith think of any possible cyberattack that would warrant military response? Blacking out the entire Eastern Seaboard? Opening the floodgates on the Hoover Dam?
“I’m not really in the business of making predictions, particularly here. Too many variables, and the intelligence on such matters is always fuzzy,” Smith replied. “I’m going with a conservative ‘no.'”
There’s no putting the US’s cyberwar toothpaste back in the tube.
Keep calm and breathe from a paper bag, national security shoeshiners, this will be over by August and you’ll be able to go back to dictation to the newspapers on all the awful things China and Iran are up to.
Between Ricin Mom and the Snowden affair, an embarrassment of riches. Too amusing to pass up.
After serving as conduits for the US government’s push tarring Chinese cyber-spying as a serious threat to the nation, as well as being unsporting, our free press is hip to let us all know what “state run” Chinese media has to say.
From the Los Angeles Times, where the reporters don’t know shit from shinola on the topics of cybersecurity, cyberwar and cyber-espionage (no backlink, tar-baby scripting and infinite load):
After days of silence, state media have let loose with a barrage of criticism concerning Snowden’s allegations of a massive electronic surveillance program by the United States. The English-language China Daily ran a large cartoon of a shadowed Statue of Liberty, holding a tape recorder and microphone instead of a tablet and torch …
In Hong Kong, the pro-Communist Party Takungpao newspaper added: “If the U.S. is the true defender of democracy, human rights and freedom like it always described itself … President Obama should sincerely apologize to the people from other countries whose privacy was violated.’’
Of course, the criticism is irresistible, the opportunity too rich to pass up. For months now, the U.S. government has demanded that the Chinese government rein in an extensive military-sponsored hacking operation. During last weekend’s summit between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, cybersecurity was the main item on the U.S. agenda.
Snowden, the 29-year-old former U.S. government contractor who says he leaked National Security Agency secrets and is now in hiding in Hong Kong, alleged in an interview published early Thursday in the South China Morning Post that there had been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations internationally, hundreds of them directed against China and Hong Kong.
“Chinese dissidents say they fear that the scandal will weaken the United States’ ability to take the high ground in pushing for more freedoms from Beijing,” adds the reporter.
“It is unfair to compare what the U.S. does to China … The U.S. program is trying to prevent certain terrorist activities, while China is listening in to monitor what dissidents are saying and writing. People get thrown into jail here just for an email,’’ one dissident told the reporter.
And people get thrown in jail for lots of things in the US. That ain’t much of a counter-argument anymore.
But we have freedom to shop and say whatever we like on Facebook and Twitter.
Bet on it, this will be just a faint memory by August. Especially after we’re told about all the terrorists we were saved from, Monday.
Coming from the White House blog, an excellent essay on how inequality in rock music has mirrored inequality in the country. Actually, it is worse. The growth of the winner-take-all society has made popular music even more unequal than American society, generally.
The music industry is a microcosm of what is happening in the U.S. economy at large. We are increasingly becoming a “winner-take-all economy,??? a phenomenon that the music industry has long experienced. Over recent decades, technological change, globalization and an erosion of the institutions and practices that support shared prosperity in the U.S. have put the middle class under increasing stress. The lucky and the talented – and it is often hard to tell the difference – have been doing better and better, while the vast majority has struggled to keep up.
These same forces are affecting the music industry. Indeed, the music industry is an extreme example of a “super star economy,??? in which a small number of artists take home the lion’s share of income …
[Krueger explains that digitization and the Internet have greatly decreased income from music sales. This in turn made artists go to performance as the only way to preserve income. As a consequence, ticket prices have exploded. But only for the benefit of the topmost.]
The top 5 percent [of pop music artists] take home almost 90 percent of all concert revenues.
This is an extreme version of what has happened to the U.S. income distribution as a whole. The top 1% of families doubled their share of income from 1979 to 2011.
Krueger also discusses how luck has an increasingly outsized effect on a society distorted by inequality.
Specifically, he shows a study on popularity, one which tested what numerical counts of downloads meant to success.
Here at DD blog I’ve discussed it before when testing effects of Google AdWords campaigns and how view counts are gamed on YouTube. Ranking, as I’ve long maintained, means a lot.
If you aren’t returned in the top page of findings at Google, if YouTube search doesn’t return your video or display it in “recommends” because it has low numbers, you do not exist.
You need luck, you need someone important to promote it on a site with lots of eyeballs. If such things are not available, and luck again has a lot to do with such fortune, then numbers languish. Their are few magical resurrections, few spontaneous rises to the very top.
And, indeed, YouTube music popularity mirrors the yawning inequality Krueger writes about at the White House blog.
Google and its properties, along with social networking sites, have made an environment in which most value is accrued only by numbers of likes, views, inbound links and increasing [counts] which allegedly measure legitimate followers and friends. With web search, this has instated a winner-take-all digital ecology in which there is always strong incentive to cheat, to purchase rigging.
So I discovered that about two weeks after I’d written the linked piece an anonymous account had ripped “GE and Jeff (Taxavoidination)??? and uploaded it under their account.
Subsequently, the user — going under the name Mega Grilled Ham & Cheese, rigged its views.
[Note: Mega Grilled Ham and Cheese’s YouTube account was purely engaged in testing how to artificially boost counts on YouTube. Eventually YouTube pinched him off but the point and techniques had been made.]
But back to Krueger’s piece.
In it he shows a chart in which two songs in a research test are shown, rated by download count.
Those tested were invited to download all songs available in the test for free and the songs ranked by popularity. Halfway through the test, and unknown to those tested, the counts presented to half those tested were flipped, that is — the most popular tune by downloads was given the count of the lowest, and vice versa.
Here is the chart…
Says Krueger:
In the alternative world that began with the true rankings reversed, the least popular song did surprisingly well, and, in fact, held onto its artificially bestowed top ranking. The most popular song rose in the rankings, so fundamental quality did have some effect. But, overall – across all 48 songs – the final ranking from the experiment that began with the reversed popularity ordering bore absolutely no relationship to the final ranking from the experiment that began with the true ordering. This demonstrates that the belief that a song is popular has a profound effect on its popularity, even if it wasn’t truly popular to start with.
A more general lesson is that, in addition to talent, arbitrary factors can lead to success or failure, like whether another band happens to release a more popular song than your band at the same time.
Quality does have an effect, he adds, but the perception of popularity in a winner-take-all society like ours is a big influence.
“The same forces of technology, scale, luck and the erosion of social pressures for fairness that are making rock ‘n roll more of a superstar industry also are causing the U.S. economy to become more of a winner-take-all affair,” continues the economic adviser.
The United States, he explains, has the highest inequality among advanced nations. And the divide is getting bigger. The US now also has the highest level of social immobility than all other advanced countries.
The American Dream is now a myth. It was fast fading into it when I was in grad school.
Eventually he gets around to saying, in a very gentlemanly way, that a lot of the inequality has to do with corporate America screwing over the middle class for the last three decades.
Krueger warns, gently, that there will be increasing consequences.
In returning the country to Great Gatsby/Roaring Twenties levels of disparity, the corporate market economy is creating increasing inefficiencies. These inefficiencies spring from research that seems to conclusively show that workers who perceive unfair treatment by corporations exact a toll in efficiency.
Again:
It is not hard to find reasons why the institutions and practices that long enforced norms of fairness in the labor market have been eroded. At a time when market forces were pushing an increasing share of before-tax income toward the wealthiest Americans, the previous administration cut taxes disproportionately for the well off.
Even earlier, in the 1980s when inequality was starting to take off, the nominal value of the minimum wage was left unchanged from 1981 to 1989, causing it to decline in the value by 27 percent after accounting for inflation. The minimum wage serves as an important anchor for other wages, and the whole wage scale was brought down by the decline in the minimum wage.
A lower minimum wage and regressive tax changes sent a clear signal that maintaining fairness was not a priority.
Just coincidentally (ahem), “Taxavoidination” was a rock and roll video on one of the causes of growing economic inequality, corporate tax avoidance, or “profit shifting” to countries which have built finance-sheltering systems for the purposes of tax evasion.
“Rock and Roll, Economics, and Rebuilding the Middle Class,” at the White House blog, is here.
The post title, a not-subtle dig at “Reaganomics” and “trickle down.”
