The first global cyber war has begun

[seemslikeadream]

wonderful stuff Plu

When we look at an authoritarian conspiracy as a whole, we see a system of interacting organs, a beast with arteries and veins whose blood may be thickened and slowed until it falls, stupefied; unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its environment.

[Plutonia]

Your welcome SLAD.

Just in case we're not all clear about the mess these donkeys (sorry to malign our long-eared ungulate friends) have created for themselves, this story is just breaking re Thomas Drake and the attempt by the Obama admin to prosecute him for whistleblowing about the billion dollar pile-of-poo super sekrit NSA surveillance software TRAILBLAZER:

Thomas Drake Proved To Be Bloody Well Right

As you will recall, Tom Drake was belligerently prosecuted by the DOJ on trumped up espionage charges (See: here, here, here and here) and their case fell out from underneath them because they cravenly wanted to hide the facts. As a result, Drake pled guilty to about the piddliest little misdemeanor imaginable, and will be sentenced, undoubtedly, to no incarceration whatsoever, no fine and one year or less of unsupervised probation on July 15, 2011. But the entire Tom Drake matter emanated out of Drake’s attempt to internally, and properly, cooperate with a whistleblowing to the Department of Defense Inspector General.

The report from the DOD IG in this regard has now, conveniently after Drake entered his plea, been publicly released through a long sought FOIA to the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), albeit it in heavily redacted form:

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecuted Drake under the Espionage Act for unauthorized possession of “national defense information.” The prosecution was believed to be an outgrowth of the DOJ’s investigation into disclosures of the NSA warrantless wiretapping to The New York Times and came after Drake blew the whistle on widespread problems with a NSA program called TRAILBLAZER. Most of the Espionage Act charges against Drake dealt with documents associated with his cooperation with this DoD IG audit. However, this month the government’s case against Drake fell apart and prosecutors dropped the felony charges. Instead, Drake pleaded to a misdemeanor charge of exceeding the authorized use of a computer.

The report, which was heavily redacted, found that “the National Security Agency is inefficiently using resources to develop a digital network exploitation system that is not capable of fully exploiting the digital network intelligence available to analysts from the Global Information Network.” The DoD IG also found, in reference to TRAILBLAZER, that “the NSA transformation effort may be developing a less capable long-term digital network exploitation solution that will take longer and cost significantly more to develop.”

Here is a full PDF of the entire redacted public version of the report in two parts because of file size: Part One and Part Two.

The report speaks for itself and I will not go in to deep quotes from it; suffice it to say, the DOD IG report proves that Tom Drake was precisely correct in his initial complaints that the TRAILBLAZER program was a nightmarish fraud on the taxpayers and inherently inefficient compared to the THIN THREAD program originally devised in house. The money quotes, as noted by POGO, are:

…the National Security Agency is inefficiently using resources to develop a digital network exploitation system that is not capable of fully exploiting the digital network intelligence available to analysts from the Global Information Network.

and

…the NSA transformation effort may be developing a less capable long-term digital network exploitation solution that will take longer and cost significantly more to develop.

So, in sum, thanks to POGO’s FOIA release here, we now know that not only was the persecution of Tom Drake by the DOJ completely bogus and vindictive, Tom Drake was bloody well right about TRAILBLAZER versus THIN THREAD to start with. Who couldda predicted?

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/ ... um=twitter

And here's a backgrounder about TRAILBLAZER, from the time of Drake's leak - 2006:

Little-known contractor has close ties with staff of NSA

When the National Security Agency went shopping for a private contractor to help it build a state-of-the-art tool for plucking key threats to the nation from a worldwide sea of digital communication, the company it chose was Science Applications International Corp. [<---That's SAIC, remember that for later, kay?]

More than three years later, the project, code-named Trailblazer, still hasn't gotten off the ground. And intelligence experts inside and outside the agency say that the NSA and SAIC share some of the blame.

Investigations of Trailblazer's early years by Congress and the NSA inspector general criticized the agency for its "confusion" about what Trailblazer would ultimately accomplish and for "inadequate management and oversight" of the program to improve collection and analysis of mountains of digital information.

Unsolved problems
When SAIC came on board as the lead contractor in 2002, NSA had not solved those problems, said intelligence officials with extensive knowledge of the program.

But SAIC did not provide computer experts with the technical or management skills to pull off a system as complex as Trailblazer, the intelligence experts said. Moreover, they said, SAIC did not say no when NSA made unrealistic demands.

Trailblazer has cost taxpayers an estimated $1.2 billion, former intelligence officials told The Sun.

"The system in the Pentagon and defense-related agencies is notoriously susceptible to slippage and overruns," said Gordon Adams, director for security policy studies at George Washington University.

"A lot of the [information technology projects] are traffic accidents waiting to happen," said Adams, who was speaking generally. "There's a penchant, particularly in the [information technology] area, to overdesign things, promise it will deliver all kinds of things and not be able to deliver on the project."

SAIC is among the fastest-growing government contractors in the country, expanding from an annual revenue of $243,000 in 1970 to more than $7.2 billion today.

43,000 employees
The federal government accounts for two-thirds of San Diego-based SAIC's work, and the company has offices in 29 Maryland communities.

Some of SAIC's 43,000 employees worldwide could become millionaires if the company follows through on its plans to go public this year.

As SAIC has grown, it has forged close ties to several key defense and intelligence agencies, including the NSA. Among those who have served on SAIC's board of directors are former NSA Director Bobby Ray Inman; former CIA Directors John M. Deutch and Robert M. Gates; and former Defense Secretaries Melvin R. Laird and William J. Perry.

The door swings so regularly between the NSA and SAIC that the company has earned the nickname "NSA West" inside the intelligence community.

The Trailblazer project illustrates that point. William B. Black Jr. retired from his position in the elite senior cryptologic executive service at the NSA in 1997 to take a job as assistant vice president at SAIC.

Three years later, NSA Director Michael V. Hayden called Black back to the spy agency. By 2002, Black was overseeing NSA's Trailblazer project, with SAIC as its prime contractor.

Two other top NSA managers who worked on Trailblazer - Hal Smith and Sam Visner - also left the spy agency for jobs at SAIC. There, Smith worked on Trailblazer and the FBI's Virtual Case File program, according to a former senior intelligence official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity.

The FBI pulled the plug last year on the $170 million Virtual Case File program, which was supposed to bring the bureau's computer system into the 21st century, after it was criticized as unworkable by the Justice Department's inspector general and members of Congress.

The inspector general said the bulk of the program's problems were the fault of the bureau.

Black, Smith and Visner declined requests for interviews. An NSA spokesman denied repeated requests for comment.

An NSA spokeswoman told The Sun in 2003 that Black sold his SAIC stock when he returned to the agency in 2000 and recused himself for a year from "involvement in any matter affecting the financial interests" of the company.

Varied criteria
The spokeswoman said SAIC, which was selected as the prime contractor for Trailblazer in 2002, was one of three companies seeking the contract. The choice, she said, was based on a "formal source selection process" that looked at technical issues, management, cost and past performance.

SAIC officials declined requests for interviews for this article, referring questions to the NSA.

In 2003, Mark V. Hughes, then executive vice president of SAIC, told The Sun that the company hires former government officials not for influence but for their expertise. "We do a much better job for our customers if we have people in the company who really know the customers," he said then.

Hughes also said the company is scrupulous about obeying laws designed to prevent conflicts of interest. "As a government contractor," he said then, "just one or two violations could cause us to be suspended from government contracts. That would destroy our company."

Hughes has since left the company.

Jacques Gansler, a former undersecretary of defense who is now vice president for research at the University of Maryland, said the revolving door between government agencies and private government contractors has an upside.

Without former government officials in their ranks, he said, companies would have a difficult time navigating the labyrinth of the government procurement process. Before he took his Pentagon job dealing with acquisitions, Gansler was a senior executive with TASC, a major defense contractor.

http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=5666

Riii-iight.

So what would you pay to see a NDA between Aaron Barr/HBGary and SAIC with regards to the Apple/Disney/Google mass surveillance mega-buck project COIN just exposed by Barrett Brown? Yeah. That's right. Aaron Barr lol and SAIC bwahahhahhaha! Of course! That's where he got all his great ideas!

http://hbgary.anonleaks.ch/ted_hbgary_c ... s/2030.pdf

[Stephen Morgan]

What sort of conspiracy keeps it's information on networked computer systems? A stupid conspiracy.

[82_28]

Or a conspiracy meant to emulate stupidity in order for the real McCoy to be pulled off perpetually behind the scenes.

[JackRiddler]

.

simple answer: it's not to their minds a conspiracy but an operation sanctioned by the state

an operation with enough moving parts in so many different corporations that they find it necessary to network their data, and why should they not do so?

an operation that acts with impunity knowing that there is no risk of trouble with law enforcement, or of exposure in the media, or of too many people taking notice, even if everything about it is revealed by some hacker on a few web sites

an operation of people who no longer understand or pay mind to concepts like legal-illegal, or right and wrong

for we own the state and we are the state, we appointed ourselves through our enterprise and ambition to do what we do, we won the contract, life is an emergency, we have a higher mission, and anyway our personal mission is itself a noble thing for greed is good, we are made men

now this isn't to say that layers of legend and misdirection and false-flaggery are not applied liberally, which is to be expected especially in psychological and propaganda and disinfo operations such as the ones described in barrett brown's latest

but i am extremely dubious on the idea, often voiced here, that the obvious bad guys sitting in the saddles of the obvious institutions of power are always just a cover for the real bad guys you don't know, and i think such scenarios are going to be very rare

you don't get to know all the secrets but you can see how the world works

it's only rocket science

and those of you who see the dmt elven controllers and embodiments of pure non-corporeal evil can take pity on me for thinking they're just a metaphor (or a fantasy) and still being loyal to the likes of uncle karl, grandpa sigmund and papa einstein

.

[Sounder]

I like what you say Jack, (and I may be turning into more of a structuralist in my dotage.)

Jack wrote...

and those of you who see the dmt elven controllers and embodiments of pure non-corporeal evil can take pity on me for thinking they're just a metaphor (or a fantasy) and still being loyal to the likes of uncle karl, grandpa sigmund and papa einstein

but am still inclined to add that 'modern' thinking is no less metaphor than are more archaic expressions. And literalizing any metaphor is asking it to do more than it is capable of doing. Is the speed of light really a universal constant?

I will be so happy when the current crop of metaphor posing as 'knowledge' is broken down by the tide of events.

This will alternate with sadness upon observing desperate attempts to maintain old (conceptual) structures because 'made men' are not going to easily give up their power and stature.

Ahh, the ferment of humanity. Kinda smells like napalm in the morning.

[JackRiddler]

I like what you say Jack, (and I may be turning into more of a structuralist in my dotage.)

Jack wrote...

and those of you who see the dmt elven controllers and embodiments of pure non-corporeal evil can take pity on me for thinking they're just a metaphor (or a fantasy) and still being loyal to the likes of uncle karl, grandpa sigmund and papa einstein

but am still inclined to add that 'modern' thinking is no less metaphor than are more archaic expressions. And literalizing any metaphor is asking it to do more than it is capable of doing. Is the speed of light really a universal constant?

Oh no, I think the three mentioned men were probably wrong or bound to be overcome in almost everything they wrote. Their most important contributions were not analyses or laws or manifestoes but discoveries of what had always been there, which can be put as metaphors or very basic insights. Einstein's was that there is no universal frame of reference and time and space are the same thing and created by motion. Whether anything will remain of the structure he put to that in 1000 years doesn't matter. Freud in effect discovered that you're not who you think you are, that your motives are irrational, that most of us is subconscious, that there are hidden primal drives, that these conflict with the reality of being helpless children at the mercy of parents and elements and produce psychodynamics and developmental stages, that sex drive is central to most of it and because you start out helpless it sets you up as a future neurotic before you even talk. What does it matter that he got almost everything about these phenomena wrong in the details? So did Copernicus. So did Galileo.

BUT ANYWAY EYE CAME HERE TO BRING lATEST NEWS fROM bIZZAROlAND:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ ... ePage.html

Google Ideas think tank gathering former extremists to battle radicalization

By Allen McDuffee, Published: June 24

Technology giant Google, having conquered the Internet and the world around it, is taking on a new challenge: violent extremism.

The company, through its eight-month-old think tank, Google Ideas, is paying for 80 former Muslim extremists, neo-Nazis, U.S. gang members and other former radicals to gather in Dublin this weekend to explore how technology can play a role in de-radicalization efforts around the globe.

Think Tanked blog: Follow Allen McDuffee's daily reporting from the Google Ideas conference

The “formers,” as they have been dubbed by Google, will be surrounded by 120 thinkers, activists, philanthropists and business leaders. The goal is to dissect the question of what draws some people, especially young people, to extremist movements and why some of them leave.

Stop! Triggers ahead:

Brace yourself to hear what a pre-former still-radicalized young man says. It's pretty stunning and highlights why it's so important to learn ways to help such cases leave their extremisms behind before they do too much damage.

“We are trying to reframe issues like radicalization and see how we can apply technology to it,” said Jared Cohen, the 29-year-old former State Department official who agreed to head Google Ideas with the understanding he would host such a conference. “Technology is part of every challenge in the world and a part of every solution.”

Ha, did I get ya?

!O TECH GOD REMAKE OUR NEMESES!

The thing about that sentence is, it doesn't have to be a manifesto. You could always read it as an embarrasing generality, like, say: "Everything's atoms, man. The problem and the solution!"

In forming Google Ideas, company officials said, they were eager to move beyond the traditional think tank model of conducting studies and publishing books, saying their “think/do tank” would make action a central part of its mission.

But in its first venture, the decision to enter the space between thinking and doing is also drawing some criticism as Google steps enthusiastically into what many view as an intractable, enduring problem — and one that has traditionally been left to governments.

Google Ideas may be setting its sights too high, said Christopher Boucek of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and getting terrorists to give up violence may be a more attainable goal than getting them to change their sympathies.

“You’ll never make a hard-core jihadi into a Jeffersonian democrat — it’s just not going to happen,” he said. He also noted that while there may be common threads to why individuals join extremists groups, the remedies to that problem are more likely to be “culturally, and even country, specific.”

Pah! Analogue piker! We shall find the Frequency of Mind-Change and tune The Algorithm to Actuate It!

Harvard University professor Joseph S. Nye Jr., who specializes in theories and application of power, agreed that the endeavor “could be problematic — especially if it is perceived to be in conflict with the foreign policy of the United States.” He added that the ambition could “complicate things further since profit is ostensibly involved.”

Uh, hello? This is attempting to develop the next generation foreign policy of the United States. In which profit is always involved: who could suggest otherwise, my god are we not still gentlemen? But I see where there can be your usual bureaucratic struggles over it. Vulcans vs. Mind-Googlers vs. Killemall-Drone-Obliterators, and whatnot.

Heh, it's also easy to see where this is likely going, which will be nowhere, but a lot of fat data sets and checks produced in the meantime. But since radicalization and its reverse process are conceived as a matter of individual mental frameworks to alter, rather than questions of politics and economics and justice and ideology as well as one's particular biography... these guys are going to be like materialists, but without probing most of the material plane.

Officials at Google express little concern that their efforts are overly ambitious or will tread in others’ territory.

Well duh, gotta hype for buyers, man.

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said the company decided to get in the think tank business with the goal of tackling “some of the most intractable problems facing mankind by combining a new generation of leaders with technology. . . . We’re not looking for silver bullets but new approaches.”

Radicals!

Up to now, efforts to reform extremists have largely been government-run and focused on distinct groups. Many of the programs have operated in Muslim countries, and their sponsors have struggled with whether it was enough to get radicals to disengage from extremist movements or whether they must reject extremism and embrace mainstream values.

Cohen said the approach at the conference will be to treat extremism as a universal problem that cuts across cultural, ideological, political, religious and geographic boundaries.

In other words, as I've implied, to fail. Filtrate out any trace of history, and see if the universal radical virus can be isolated in your test tube!

Bringing together former extremists from a variety of backgrounds, he theorizes, could point to common factors that pull people into violence.

“If we compartmentalize different radicalization challenges, that also means we compartmentalize the de-radicalization solutions,” and that could be a lost opportunity, he said.

By leaching out the differences, you're actually left with a pretty small compartment that may not speak to anything except your pre-planted paradigm that radicalization is a kind of a universal psychological bug, and not (at least also) the product of circumstances.

But wait. Now, we shall learn that the superpowered Orwellian promises were just a set up for hellacious disappointment:

Although he didn’t want to prescribe an answer, he said a campaign in the coming months could harness the power of YouTube, employ advanced mapping techniques or create alternative Web spaces to compete with radicalizing voices.

That's it? More material for overstocked Google subsidiary YouTube, and a new social network realm for repenitent radicals? http://www.FormersMeetup.net?

Plop!

Cohen, a former aide to Secretaries of State Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Rodham Clinton who had focused at the State Department on counterterrorism and radicalism, said he joined Google to escape some of the limitations on what can be done within a government agency to address extremism.

Is it ambition? Striking out on his own? Maybe!

“You can’t build things,” said Cohen, noting that government often lacks the resources to create technologies aimed at complex social and political problems.

Or is this exactly what government is doing -- dispatching him to this new assignment at a joint ideas incubator with Google?

In his new job, heading a think tank supported by a company that earned $30 billion in sales last year, the limitations are quite different.

“There’s no sense in bothering with some of these challenges at a place like Google if we can’t take risks,” he said.

In the future, Cohen predicted, the think tank will take on the challenges of fragile states, democracy building, and questions about the Internet and society.

Google Ideas, with six full-time employees working out of the company’s New York offices, is somewhat removed from the Washington environs where Cohen had operated for the past several years. He had become known at the State Department for bringing together unlikely participants, often in gatherings with a strong technology component.

In 2009, Cohen drew attention when he asked his friend, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, to delay a scheduled maintenance shutdown so protesters in Iran could coordinate during an uprising and reach international media.

!THAT GUY! That's Cohen then.

The White House had wanted to fire Cohen after the incident, out of concern the U.S. would be seen as meddling in Iranian affairs, according to a report in the New Yorker, but he stayed in his job.

** cough kabuki cough **

This weekend’s conference, formally known as the Summit Against Violent Extremism, or SAVE, will run Sunday through Tuesday.

The name alone demands abolition. But at least we're not all Jesus-y about our salvation narrative. It's about finding and expressing your inner American.

Among the speakers will be T.J. Leyden, a former skinhead leader from California and now executive director of Hate2Hope. Leyden has said he began to turn away from the white supremacist movement as he watched his young children take on his anger and bigotry.

Another participant, Maajid Nawaz, is a British citizen of Pakistani descent who resigned from Hizb ut-Tahrir, a pan-Islamist group whose goal is to establish a global Islamic state, and now leads an organization that counters Islamic extremism.

The conference will also include Carie Lemack, whose mother was killed in one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. Lemack co-founded Global Survivors Network, an organization for victims of terrorism and produced the documentary “Killing in the Name.”

Anyone know this movie? Sounds harrowing to say the least.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Killing-I ... 6082693879

“The hope from the conference is that we will figure out some of the ‘best practices’ of how you can break youth radicalization,” said James M. Lindsay, a senior vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations, which is helping organize the summit.

Simplistic ideas, like not bombing them and helping them put their national/regional development ahead of global capital's needs, may not appear on the agenda.

Cohen also turned to the Tribeca Film Festival, which was founded to help bring people back to the lower Manhattan neighborhood after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Jane Rosenthal, co-founder of the festival, is making a film about de-radicalization that will draw on the work coming out of the conference. “You have to create deeper opportunities for involvement,” she said.

Follow Allen McDuffee’s reporting from the Google Ideas conference at Think Tanked and live updates on Twitter.

I see nothing more at those links.

Keyword: Involvement! Which I can't help reading as the individualized inverse to CHANGE.

Another tangential thought that occurred to me is how much applied radicality must have gone into finding the solutions for making Google, whatever else you say about it, into such a powerful search algorithm.

But onwards and upwards.

.

[Plutonia]

This says it all, Jack:

“The hope from the conference is that we will figure out some of the ‘best practices’ of how you can break youth radicalization,” said James M. Lindsay, a senior vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations, which is helping organize the summit.

I s'pose the idea is to draw the herd with some bright and shiny, revolutionary-style play-pen. It reminds me of that appalling Personal Democracy Forum whose co-founder Micah Sifry, smears Assange with Bill Keller's and Daniel Domscheit-Berg's smegma every time he appears in public. Bleh. Fake is fake.

Also, how ironic is this?:

Harvard University professor Joseph S. Nye Jr., who specializes in theories and application of power, agreed that the endeavor “could be problematic — especially if it is perceived to be in conflict with the foreign policy of the United States.” He added that the ambition could “complicate things further since profit is ostensibly involved.”

Or maybe Joseph S. Nye Jr has a highly radicalized sense of humour.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So here's what some radicalized youths got up to today:

LulzSec announced it's retirement today after 50 days of unbelievable hacks and leaks (BTW, my guess is that they've sent lots of stuff to Wikileaks and have only made public a tiny bit of their haul):

Again, behind the mask, behind the insanity and mayhem, we truly believe in the AntiSec movement. We believe in it so strongly that we brought it back, much to the dismay of those looking for more anarchic lulz. We hope, wish, even beg, that the movement manifests itself into a revolution that can continue on without us. The support we've gathered for it in such a short space of time is truly overwhelming, and not to mention humbling. Please don't stop. Together, united, we can stomp down our common oppressors and imbue ourselves with the power and freedom we deserve.

http://pastebin.com/1znEGmHa

Their final data-dump includes network info for AOL, AT&T, email passwords for private investigators and 12,000 NATO employees, among other things.

Then the Aussie internet censorship program hit a snag:

It is understood Telstra was last night still grappling with the decision as to whether to commit to the voluntary filter because of fears of reprisals from the internet vigilantes behind a spate of recent cyber attacks.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/austral ... 6081618113

Then Verizon totally POed the entire old-timey hacker community by dicking around their cherished news hub, 2600:

LATEST VERIZON DENIAL OF SERVICE ENTERS FOURTH DAY
Posted 25 Jun 2011 15:49:51 UTC

It seems incredible that we continue to be victimized by either the horrendous ineptitude or the endless malice of Verizon - but the evidence leaves no other conclusion.

This latest denial of service began immediately after the last broadcast of "Off The Hook." We immediately reported that our main machine, where all email and communications at 2600 are coordinated, was off the net. ...

http://www.2600.com/news/view/article/12106

Wait. Did I post about LulzSec's Chinga La Migra* dump of Arizona law enforcement docs on Thursday? Or the Peruvian Antisec hack** of the Águilas Negras or Black Eagles Special Police Unit? I think I forgot.

*Here http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/23/br ... c-lea.html

**and here http://www.itproportal.com/2011/06/24/l ... ice-group/

And here's a tasty little summary:

Why arresting lulzsec won’t change anything

Federal law enforcement agencies from around the world have been working to arrest members of the group known as lulzsec. Love them or hate them lulzsec has changed how the public views hackers and hacking. It has brought more attention to the cyber world and the cultures that develop there, and they have changed how some hackers operate Instead of quietly hacking smaller websites or targets of personal interest, they hack or attempt to hack government targets and post about it on social network and public chat rooms. Lulzsec declared war on the US Government and others like them have answered the call to arms. By doing this lulzsec has ensured that even if they themselves are caught their cause will live on without them, in fact if caught this would only likely motivate their followers further.

These “daughter groups” seem based on their region , on twitter I have seen “lulzsec” based groups for brazil and there have been reports of graffiti tags showing the word “antisec” and lulzsec’s mascot image in San Diego, I do not know how many other groups such as this are out there, but considering lulzsec’s over 200,000 twitter followers the number could be significant. Considering law enforcement’s history with dealing with cell based groups if they seriously want to stop the antisec movement they are going to need a different approach than the one they are currently taking, fighting them directly is only going to expand the antisec movement and fuel its anger.

Right now lulzsec and its allies have the advantage because their operation is popular and costs very little to operate but does a significant amount of damage, while Government forces cost significant amounts of money to train and operate and do very little damage. Considering how slow that governments are to adopt change, even when it directly benefits them lulzsec and its allies will be at this for quite some time.

If the governments were truly serious about stopping this threat they would work to defuse the anger and outright hate people feel toward the government these days, they would take steps to show people that they are not the bad guys and stop taking such a hard approach. They would pay more attention to public perceptions and address the issues that people have in a honest and transparent manner, being answerable to the public when questions are asked. For example there may be a perfectly rational explaination as to why the FBI took servers that didn’t seem to have anything to do with lulzsec from DigitalOne, but the people will never know why because they won’t comment, and when they do people feel like what they are told does not really explain anything, so without answers from official sources right away, people will just draw logical conclusions based on the available evidence , and said evidence makes it look like the FBI has no idea what it is doing and they have good reason to believe that.

As of late the governments actions in public have been disastrous and it has gotten to the point where people feel compelled to act to stop it. People feel like their rights are being stripped away and that they have no control over their own private lives. They are afraid. So when someone comes along and is not afraid, and not only not afraid but willing and able to act against the target of their fears, they rally around them and support them, feeling less afraid to act themselves, and after enough time they lose all fear of any legal repercussions because they believe they are morally right. This is the point we are at right now, they have motivated and emboldened people that the government has alienated and ignored. Stopping lulzsec won’t stop antisec, in fact it will likely do the opposite. The game has been changed, and right now the only winning move is not to play.

http://howtheygetitwrong.wordpress.com/ ... -anything/

Followed by this n00b's very first hack and leak:

@Connexion_Lulz Connexion
@AnonymousIRC My fleet takes over the chartered waters and we dumped the contents of pchardware.ro just to get started. pastebin.com/01gzxcD5

[2012 Countdown]

Looking for a place to put this. I guess here is as good as any...

Anonymous Continues Its Fraternal Ownage of The Arizona Police
Jun 30, 2011 11:31
Kelly Hodgkins — Wow, Anonymous has struck a third and deadly blow on the Arizona police. This latest grab includes personal information and emails for 1,200 officers including usernames, passwords, email addresses, credit card numbers and more.

Some of the emails are ripe with racist remarks about torturing "ragheads", crude Anti-Obama slurs, and pornography. Other emails discuss the recent hacks and the PR strategy to defuse public reaction to the revelation of a sex offender in their ranks. Hundreds of private documents from the FOP and mail spools from the upper level police administration are now in the wild, too.

Anonymous is not done, not yet. They have password lists to email accounts (hotmail, gmail, etc) and have been reading all the emails. This task is way more than they can handle. They are asking the hacking community for help in parsing these email accounts and exposing the secrets contained within. Judging by what they found so far, we should hear a lot more about the Arizona PD in the coming weeks.

http://gizmodo.com/5817317/anonymous-co ... ona-police

===

[seemslikeadream]

Hacking on Fox News Twitter reports Obama's death

(AP) – 2 hours ago

NEW YORK (AP) — Hackers broke into Fox's political Twitter account early Monday, posting updates saying President Barack Obama had been assassinated.

A series of six tweets coming from the FoxNewsPolitics account reported that Obama had been shot to death in Iowa and the shooter was unknown.

In a statement posted on its website later Monday morning, Fox News called the tweets "malicious" and "false." It said the hacking is being investigated.

Obama plans to spend the July Fourth holiday at a barbecue at the White House with military families and administration staffers.

Fox's political Twitter account has more than 34,000 followers.

[American Dream]

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com ... up-on.html

SUNDAY, JULY 3, 2011

Security Grifters Partner-Up on Sinister Cyber-Surveillance Project


Last week, the White House released its National Strategy for Counterterrorism, a macabre document that places a premium on "public safety" over civil liberties and constitutional rights.

Indeed, "hope and change" huckster Barack Obama had the temerity to assert that the President "bears no greater responsibility than ensuring the safety and security of the American people."

Pity that others, including CIA "black site" prisoners tortured to death to "keep us safe" (some 100 at last count) aren't extended the same courtesy as The Washington Post reported last week.

As Secrecy News editor Steven Aftergood correctly points out, the claim that the President "has no greater responsibility than 'protecting the American people' is a paternalistic invention that is historically unfounded and potentially damaging to the political heritage of the nation."

Aftergood avers, "the presidential oath of office that is prescribed by the U.S. Constitution (Art. II, sect. 1) makes it clear that the President's supreme responsibility is to '...preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.' There is no mention of public safety. It is the constitutional order that the President is sworn to protect, even if doing so entails risks to the safety and security of the American people."

But as our former republic slips ever-closer towards corporate dictatorship, Obama's mendacious twaddle about "protecting the American people," serves only to obscure, and reinforce, the inescapable fact that it's a rigged game.

Rest assured, "what happens in Vegas," Baghdad, Kabul or Manama--from driftnet spying to political-inspired witchhunts toillegal detention--won't, and hasn't, "stayed in Vegas."

Cyber Here, Cyber There, Cyber-Surveillance Everywhere

Last month, researcher Barrett Brown and the OpMetalGearnetwork lifted the lid on a new U.S. Government-sponsored cyber-surveillance project, Romas/COIN, now Odyssey, a multiyear, multimillion dollar enterprise currently run by defense and security giant Northrop Grumman.

With some $10.8 billion in revenue largely derived from contracts with the Defense Department, Northrop Grumman wasNo. 2 on the Washington Technology 2011 Top 100 List of Prime Federal Contractors.

"For at least two years," Brown writes, "the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once."

Information on this shadowy program was derived by scrutinizing hundreds of the more than 70,000 HBGary emails leaked onto the web by the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous.

Brown uncovered evidence that the "top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr--the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients."

Readers will recall that Barr claimed he could exploit social media to gather information about WikiLeaks supporters in a bid to destroy that organization. Earlier this year, Barr told theFinancial Times he had used scraping techniques and had infiltrated WikiLeaks supporter Anonymous, in part by using IRC, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

According to emails subsequently released by Anonymous, it was revealed that the ultra rightist U.S. Chamber of Commercehad hired white shoe law firm Hunton & Williams, and that Hunton attorneys, upon recommendation of an unnamed U.S. Department of Justice official, solicited a set of private security contractors--HBGary, HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico Technologies (collectively known as Team Themis)--and stitched-up a sabotage campaign against WikiLeaks, journalists, labor unions, progressive political groups and Chamber critics.

Amongst the firms who sought to grab the Romas/COIN/Odyssey contract from Northrop when it came up for a "recompete" wasTASC, which describes itself as "a renowned provider of advanced systems engineering, integration and decision-support services across the intelligence, defense, homeland security and federal markets."

According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, TASC's head of "Cybersecurity Initiatives," Larry Strang, was formerly a Vice President with Northrop Grumman who led that firm's Cybersecurity Group and served as Northrop's NSA Account Manager. Prior to that, Strang, a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel, was Vice President for Operations at the spooky Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

Brown relates that emails between TASC executives Al Pisani, John Lovegrow and former HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr, provided details that they "were in talks with each other as well as Mantech executive Bob Frisbie on a 'recompete' pursuant to 'counter intelligence' operations that were already being conducted on behalf of the federal government by another firm, SAIC, with which they hoped to compete for contracts."

In fact, HBGary Federal and TASC may have been cats-paws for defense giant ManTech International in the race to secure U.S. Government cyber-surveillance contracts. Clocking in at No. 22on Washington Technology's "2011 Top 100 list," ManTech earned some $1.46 billion in 2010, largely derived from work in "systems engineering and integration, technology and software development, enterprise security architecture, intelligence operations support, critical infrastructure protection and computer forensics." The firm's major customers include the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's geek squad that is busily working to develop software for their Cyber Insider Threat (CINDER) program.

Both HBGary Federal and parent company HBGary, a California-based security firm run by the husband-wife team, Greg Hoglund and Penny Leavy, had been key players for the design of malware, undetectable rootkits and other "full directory exfiltration tools over TCP/IP" for the Defense Department according to documents released by the secret-shredding web site Public Intelligence.

Additional published documents revealed that they and had done so in close collaboration with General Dynamics (Project Cand Task Z), which had requested "multiple protocols to be scoped as viable options ... for VoIP (Skype) protocol, BitTorrent protocol, video over HTTP (port 80), and HTTPS (port 443)" for unnamed secret state agencies.

According to Brown, it appears that Romas/COIN/Odyssey was also big on social media surveillance, especially when it came to "Foreign Mobile" and "Foreign Web" monitoring. Indeed, documents published by Public Intelligence (scooped-up by the HBGary-Anonymous hack) was a ManTech International-HBGary collaboration describing plans for Internet Based Reconnaissance Operations. The October 2010 presentation described plans that would hand "customers," presumably state intelligence agencies but also, as revealed by Anonymous, corporate security entities and public relations firms, the means to perform "native language searching" combined with "non-attributable architecture" and a "small footprint" that can be "as widely or narrowly focused as needed."

ManTech and HBGary promised to provide customers the ability to "Locate/Profile Internet 'Points of Interest'" on "individuals, companies, ISPs" and "organizations," and would do so through "detailed network mapping" that will "identify registered networks and registered domains"; "Graphical network representation based on Active Hosts"; "Operating system and network application identification"; "Identification of possible perimeter defenses" through "Technology Research, Intelligence Gap Fill, Counterintelligence Research" and "Customer Public Image Assessment."

The presentation described the social media monitoring process as one that would "employ highly skilled network professionals (read, ex-spooks and former military intelligence operatives) who will use "Non-attributable Internet access, custom developed toolsets and techniques, Native Language and in-country techniques" that "utilize foreign language search engines, mapping tools" and "iterative researching methodologies" for searching "Websites, picture sites, mapping sites/programs"; "Blogs and social networking sites"; "Forums and Bulletin Boards"; "Network Information: Whois, Trace Route, NetTroll, DNS"; "Archived and cached websites."

Clients who bought into the ManTech-HBGary "product" were promised "Rapid Non-attributable Open Source Research Results"; "Sourced Research Findings"; "Triage level Analysis"; "Vulnerability Assessment" and "Graphical Network and Social Diagramming" via data mining and extensive link analysis.

Undoubtedly, readers recall this is precisely what the National Security Agency has been doing since the 1990s, if not earlier, through their electronic communications intercept program Echelon, a multibillion Pentagon project that conducted corporate espionage for American multinational firms as researcher Nicky Hager revealed in his 1997 piece forCovertAction Quarterly.

Other firms included in Lovegrove's email to Barr indicate that the new Romas/COIN/Odyssey "team" was to have included: "TASC (PMO [Project Management Operations], creative services); HBGary (Strategy, planning, PMO); Akamai (infrastructure); Archimedes Global (Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning); Acclaim Technical Services (specialized linguistics); Mission Essential Personnel (linguistic services); Cipher (strategy, planning operations); PointAbout (rapid mobile application development, list of strategic partners); Google (strategy, mobile application and platform development--long list of strategic partners); Apple (mobile and desktop platform, application assistance--long list of strategic partners). We are trying to schedule an interview with ATT plus some other small app developers."

Recall that AT&T is the NSA's prime telecommunications partner in that agency's illegal driftnet surveillance program and has been the recipient of "retroactive immunity" under the despicable FISA Amendments Act, a law supported by then-Senator Barack Obama. Also recall that the giant tech firm Apple was recently mired in scandal over reports that their mobile phone platform had, without their owners' knowledge or consent, speared geolocational data from the iPhone and then stored this information in an Apple-controlled data base accessible to law enforcement through various "lawful interception" schemes.

"Whatever the exact nature and scope of COIN," Brown writes, "the firms that had been assembled for the purpose by Barr and TASC never got a chance to bid on the program's recompete. In late September, Lovegrove noted to Barr and others that he'd spoken to the 'CO [contracting officer] for COIN'." The TASC executive told Barr that "the current procurement approach" was cancelled, citing "changed requirements."

Apparently the Pentagon, or other unspecified secret state satrapy told the contestants that "an updated RFI [request for information]" will be issued soon. According to a later missive from Lovegrove to Barr, "COIN has been replaced by a procurement called Odyssey." While it is still not entirely clear what Romas/COIN or the Odyssey program would do once deployed, Brown claims that "mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program."

And given Barr's monomaniacal obsession with social media surveillance (that worked out well with Anonymous!) the presence of Alterian and SocialEyez on the procurement team may indicate that the secret state is alarmed by the prospect that the "Arab Spring" just might slip from proverbial "safe hands" and threaten Gulf dictatorships and Saudi Arabia with the frightening specter of democratic transformation.

Although the email from TASC executive Chris Clair to John Lovegrow names "Alterion" as a company to contact because of their their "SM2 tool," in all likelihood this is a typo given the fact that it is the UK-based firm "Alterian" that has developed said SM2 tool, described on their web site as a "business intelligence product that provides visibility into social media and lets you tap into a new kind of data resource; your customers' direct thoughts and opinions."

This would be a highly-profitable partnership indeed for enterprising intelligence agencies and opaque corporate partners intent on monitoring political developments across the Middle East.

In fact, a 2010 press release, announced that Alterian had forged a partnership with the Dubai-based firm SocialEyez for "the world's first social media monitoring service designed for the Arab market."

We're informed that SocialEyez, a division of Media Watch Middle East, described as "the leading media monitoring service in the Middle East," offers services in "television, radio, social media, online news and internet monitoring across most sectors including commercial, government and PR."

That Barr and his partners were interested in bringing these firms to the Romas/COIN table is not surprising considering that the Alterian/SocialEyez deal promises "to develop and launch an Arabic language interface for Alterian SM2 to make it the world's first Arab language social media monitoring tool." Inquiring minds can't help but wonder which three-lettered American agencies alongside a stable of "corporate and government clients, including leading Blue Chips" might be interested in "maximising their social media monitoring investment"?

Pentagon "Manhunters" in the House

On an even more sinister note, the inclusion of Archimedes Global on the Romas/COIN team should set alarm bells ringing.

Archimedes is a small, privately-held niche security firm headquartered in Tampa, Florida where, surprise, surprise, U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) has it's main headquarters at the MacDill Air Force Base. On their web site, Archimedes describes itself as "a diversified technology company providing energy and information solutions to government and businesses worldwide." The firm claims that it "delivers solutions" to its clients by "combining deep domain expertise, multi-disciplinary education and training, and technology-enabled innovations."

While short on information regarding what it actually does, evidence suggests that the firm is chock-a-block with former spooks and Special Forces operators, skilled in the black arts of counterintelligence, various information operations, subversion and, let's be frank, tasks euphemistically referred to in the grisly trade as "wet work."

According to The Washington Post, the firm was established in 2005. However, although the Post claims in their "Top Secret America" series that the number of employees and revenue is "unknown," Dana Priest and William M. Arkin note that Archimedes have five government clients and are have speared contracts relating to "Ground forces operations," "Human intelligence," Psychological operations," and "Specialized military operations."

Brown relates that Archimedes was slated to provide "Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning" for the proposed Romas/COIN/Odyssey project for an unknown U.S. Government entity.

Based on available evidence however, one can speculate that Archimedes may have been chosen as part of the HBGary Federal/TASC team precisely because of their previous work as private contractors in human intelligence (HUMINT), running spies and infiltrating assets into organizations of interest to the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) throughout the Middle East, Central- and South Asia.

In 2009, Antifascist Calling revealed that one of Archimedes Global's senior directors, retired Air Force Lt. Colonel George A. Crawford, published a chilling monograph, Manhunting: Counter-Network Organizing for Irregular Warfare, for the highly-influential Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.

JSOU is the "educational component" of United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). With a mission that touts its ability to "plan and synchronize operations" against America's geopolitical adversaries and rivals, JSOU's Strategic Studies Department "advances SOF strategic influence by its interaction in academic, interagency, and United States military communities."

Accordingly, Archimedes "information and risk" brief claim they can solve "the most difficult communication and risk problems by seeing over the horizon with a blend of art and science." And with focus areas that include "strategic communications, media analysis and support, crisis communications, and risk and vulnerability assessment and mitigation," it doesn't take a rocket scientist to infer that those well-schooled in the dark art of information operations (INFOOPS) would find a friendly home inside the Romas/COIN contract team.

With some 25-years experience "as a foreign area officer specializing in Eastern Europe and Central Asia," including a stint "as acting Air and Defense Attaché to Kyrgyzstan," Crawford brings an interesting skill-set to the table. Crawford writes:

Manhunting--the deliberate concentration of national power to find, influence, capture, or when necessary kill an individual to disrupt a human network--has emerged as a key component of operations to counter irregular warfare adversaries in lieu of traditional state-on-state conflict measures. It has arguably become a primary area of emphasis in countering terrorist and insurgent opponents. (George A. Crawford, Manhunting: Counter-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare, JSOU Report 09-7, The JSOU Press, Hurlburt Field, Florida, September 2009, p. 1)


Acknowledged manhunting masters in their own right, the Israeli settler-colonial security apparat have perfected the art of "targeted killing," when they aren't dropping banned munitions such as white phosphorus on unarmed, defenseless civilian populations or attacking civilian vessels on the high seas.

Like their Israeli counterparts who come highly recommended as models of restraint, an American manhunting agency will employ similarly subtle, though no less lethal, tactics. Crawford informs us:

When compared with conventional force-on-force warfare, manhunting fundamentally alters the ratio between warfare's respective firepower, maneuver, and psychological elements. Firepower becomes less significant in terms of mass, while the precision and discretion with which firepower is employed takes on tremendous significance, especially during influence operations. Why drop a bomb when effects operations or a knife might do?(Crawford, op. cit., p. 11, emphasis added)


Alongside actual shooters, "sensitive site exploitation (SSE) teams are critical operational components for Pentagon "manhunters." We're told that SSE teams will be assembled and able to respond on-call "in the event of a raid on a suspect site or to conduct independent 'break-in and search' operations without leaving evidence of their intrusion." Such teams must possess "individual skills" such as "physical forensics, computer or electronic exploitation, document exploitation, investigative techniques, biometric collection, interrogation/debriefing and related skills."

As if to drive home the point that the target of such sinister operations are the American people and world public opinion, Crawford, ever the consummate INFOOPS warrior, views "strategic information operations" as key to this murderous enterprise. Indeed, they "must be delicately woven into planned kinetic operations to increase the probability that a given operation or campaign will achieve its intended effect."

Personnel skilled at conducting strategic information operations--to include psychological operations, public information, deception, media and computer network operations, and related activities--are important for victory. Despite robust DoD and Intelligence Community capabilities in this area, efforts to establish organizations that focus information operations have not been viewed as a positive development by the public or the media, who perceive government-sponsored information efforts with suspicion. Consequently, these efforts must take place away from public eyes. Strategic information operations may also require the establishment of regional or local offices to ensure dissemination of influence packages and assess their impact. Thus manhunting influence may call for parallel or independent structures at all levels..." (Crawford, op. cit., pp. 27-28, emphasis added)


While we do not as yet have a complete picture of the Romas/COIN/Odyssey project, some preliminary conclusions can be drawn.

"Altogether, then," Brown writes, "a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms--capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence."

Although Brown's initial research concluded that Romas/COIN/Odyssey will operate "in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners," with a firm like Archimedes on-board, once information has been assembled on individuals described in other contexts as "radicals" or "key extremists," will they subsequently be made to "disappear" into the hands of "friendly" security services such as those of strategic U.S. partners Bahrain and Saudi Arabia?

We're reminded that "Barr was also at the center of a series of conspiracies by which his own company and two others hired out their collective capabilities for use by corporations that sought to destroy their political enemies by clandestine and dishonest means."

Indeed, "none of the companies involved," Brown writes, have been investigated; a proposed Congressional inquiry was denied by the committee chair, noting that it was the Justice Department's decision as to whether to investigate, even though it was the Justice Department itself that made the initial introductions. Those in the intelligence contracting industry who believe themselves above the law are entirely correct."

Brown warns that "a far greater danger is posed by the practice of arming small and unaccountable groups of state and military personnel with a set of tools by which to achieve better and better 'situational awareness' on entire populations" while simultaneously manipulating "the information flow in such a way as to deceive those same populations."

Beginning, it should be noted, right here at home...

[hanshan]

...


Plutonia:

This says it all, Jack:


Quote:
“The hope from the conference is that we will figure out some of the ‘best practices’ of how you can break youth radicalization,” said James M. Lindsay, a senior vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations, which is helping organize the summit.




I s'pose the idea is to draw the herd with some bright and shiny, revolutionary-style play-pen. It reminds me of that appalling Personal Democracy Forum whose co-founder Micah Sifry, smears Assange with Bill Keller's and Daniel Domscheit-Berg's smegma every time he appears in public. Bleh. Fake is fake.

Also, how ironic is this?:


Quote:
Harvard University professor Joseph S. Nye Jr., who specializes in theories and application of power, agreed that the endeavor “could be problematic — especially if it is perceived to be in conflict with the foreign policy of the United States.” He added that the ambition could “complicate things further since profit is ostensibly involved.”



Or maybe Joseph S. Nye Jr has a highly radicalized sense of humour.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~


T'was it ever thus? Youth, the enemy.


...

[JackRiddler]

I s'pose the idea is to draw the herd with some bright and shiny, revolutionary-style play-pen. It reminds me of that appalling Personal Democracy Forum whose co-founder Micah Sifry, smears Assange with Bill Keller's and Daniel Domscheit-Berg's smegma every time he appears in public. Bleh. Fake is fake.

Playpen without play.

Based on how they are presented I think the likely result of these efforts, if any, will be a foundation prize-winning but completely unnoticed ad campaign, featuring middle-class apolitical Gutmenschen (good people) extolling the virtues of sports and charity work as alternatives to anger and blowing yourself up in a mall. The most measurable effect will be the transfer of some as-yet undetermined number of millions of dollars from Account A (federal discretionary budget) to Account B (corporate consultancy slush-fund).

.

[barracuda]

Not sure if this is the right thread for this, but...

Fox News Twitter feed says Obama dead in apparent hack

[hanshan]

...

I s'pose the idea is to draw the herd with some bright and shiny, revolutionary-style play-pen. It reminds me of that appalling Personal Democracy Forum whose co-founder Micah Sifry, smears Assange with Bill Keller's and Daniel Domscheit-Berg's smegma every time he appears in public. Bleh. Fake is fake.

Playpen without play.

Based on how they are presented I think the likely result of these efforts, if any, will be a foundation prize-winning but completely unnoticed ad campaign, featuring middle-class apolitical Gutmenschen (good people) extolling the virtues of sports and charity work as alternatives to anger and blowing yourself up in a mall. The most measurable effect will be the transfer of some as-yet undetermined number of millions of dollars from Account A (federal discretionary budget) to Account B (corporate consultancy slush-fund).

.

Ummm:



...