Wikileaks under attack- TrapWire

[MayDay]

http://www.businessinsider.com/trapwire ... z23Hv98Ttr

The U.S. cable networks won't be covering this one tonight (not accurately, anyway), but Trapwire is making the rounds on social media today—it reportedly became a Trending hashtag on Twitter earlier in the day.

Trapwire is the name of a program revealed in the latest Wikileaks bonanza—it is the mother of all leaks, by the way. Trapwire would make something like disclosure of UFO contact or imminent failure of a major U.S. bank fairly boring news by comparison.

And someone out there seems to be quite disappointed that word is getting out so swiftly; the Wikileaks web site is reportedly sustaining 10GB worth of DDoS attacks each second, which is massive.

Anyway, here's what Trapwire is, according to Russian-state owned media network RT (apologies for citing "foreign media"... if we had a free press, I'd be citing something published here by an American media conglomerate): "Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology—and have installed it across the U.S. under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.

Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it's the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America’s intelligence community.

The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who’s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation's ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented. The details on Abraxas and, to an even greater extent TrapWire, are scarce, however, and not without reason. For a program touted as a tool to thwart terrorism and monitor activity meant to be under wraps, its understandable that Abraxas would want the program’s public presence to be relatively limited. But thanks to last year’s hack of the Strategic Forecasting intelligence agency, or Stratfor, all of that is quickly changing."

So: those spooky new "circular" dark globe cameras installed in your neighborhood park, town, or city—they aren't just passively monitoring. They're plugged into Trapwire and they are potentially monitoring every single person via facial recognition.

In related news, the Obama administration is fighting in federal court this week for the ability to imprison American citizens under NDAA's indefinite detention provisions—and anyone else—without charge or trial, on suspicion alone.

So we have a widespread network of surveillance cameras across America monitoring us and reporting suspicious activity back to a centralized analysis center, mixed in with the ability to imprison people via military force on the basis of suspicious activity alone. I don't see how that could possibly go wrong. Nope, not at all. We all know the government, and algorithmic computer programs, never make mistakes.

Here's what is also so disturbing about this whole NDAA business, according to Tangerine Bolen's piece in the Guardian: "This past week's hearing was even more terrifying. Government attorneys again, in this hearing, presented no evidence to support their position and brought forth no witnesses. Most incredibly, Obama's attorneys refused to assure the court, when questioned, that the NDAA's section 1021 – the provision that permits reporters and others who have not committed crimes to be detained without trial – has not been applied by the U.S. government anywhere in the worldafter Judge Forrest's injunction. In other words, they were telling a U.S. federal judge that they could not, or would not, state whether Obama's government had complied with the legal injunction that she had laid down before them. To this, Judge Forrest responded that if the provision had indeed been applied, the United States government would be in contempt of court."

If none of this bothers you, please don't follow me on Twitter, because nothing I report on will be of interest to you. Go back to watching the television news network of your choice, where you will hear about Romney's latest campaign ads, and whether Obamacare will increase the cost of delivery pizza by 14 to 16 cents.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/trapwire ... z23Mv4nmue


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/trapwire ... z23MuyIOke

[Wombaticus Rex]

Today I was joking "Think how dangerous Anonymous would be if they read books" -- I've been poring though Timothy Shorrock's "Spies for Hire" for a second round of note-taking and followup Googleage, and so much of what has been "outed" via email leaks was already reported on by journalists like Tim. These for-profit operations are pathologically compelled to spill classified details in the name of attracting investors. TrapWire was actually not a secret prior to these email leaks.

It is, however, a fascinating slice of what Total Information Awareness looks like when the private sector takes that project on. There are many other parallel structures in the works -- have been since the days of the Western Goals Foundation stealing LAPD records in rented trailers -- but I think that recent coverage of this TrapWire is overall a big win. As always, Lamestream Liberal Media has been mighty quiet, eh?

http://storify.com/bendoernberg/test-post

[justdrew]

so wikilieaks should publish ALL the IPs participating in the DDoS, they can't all be spoofed. Could lead to the capture of the botnet, and identification of the attacking parties.

[JackRiddler]

From
http://truthaction.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 9&start=45

There really needs to be a mass movement against the surveillance state.

Anything less will be inadequate, pathetic and suicidal.

There's several reasons why it's not happening. Among them are:

- Research has demonstrated people behave differently when they know they are being watched. Hence, Surveillance breeds docility.
- People concerned about privacy are concerned about losing their privacy fighting against privacy invasion
- Most people don't have the slightest clue about IT, this includes young people who use Facebook and Twitter and are addicted to their smartphones.
- Young people have been raised the last ten years without any sense of liberty, privacy or justice to conserve. In other words: the next generation has been successfully indoctrinated to embrace the surveillance state, and will at best be indifferent to it. Let's call it the generational murder of the concept of privacy.
- Creeping normalcy / shifting baseline; the "step-by-step" concept spreading out the adverse effects of moral outrage about erosion of privacy and civil liberties has been quite successful.
- Popularization of voluntary self-disclosure and surrender of privacy through Facebook, Twitter, et cetera; using egocentrism as a stimulus.
- Popularization, desensitization and alteration of perception of privacy invasion through mainstream media entertainment.

Dutch media tycoon John de Mol created and introduced the world to 'Big Brother'.. De Mol's recent project, exploiting the suffering of foster children for entertainment, was reluctantly canceled by him after public outcry. One of his pupils, former soap actor Reinout Oerlemans, was recently embroiled in a privacy scandal involving hidden cameras in an emergency room.

De Mol and his many imitators have succeeded in defeating Orwell by associating "Big Brother" with "fun".

For anti-surveillance activism to work, people need to overcome their fear, their ignorance and their indifference, and they need to believe that totalitarian policies which have been implemented really are reversible if we really want to. They also need to realize that the surveillance apparatus is realized in a step-by-step fashion and needs to be recognized as such. The easily recognizable 'sudden transition' is never going to come. I would use the boiling frogs analogy if it was biologically accurate, unfortunately it isn't.

The awareness that the surveillance state surveils thoughts and expressions against it inhibits such thoughts and expressions, and will deter some people from expressing their feelings in this thread, knowing they might be swept up by some automatic natural language processing web spider (similar to Googlebot) designed to scan forums and blogs for subversive "anti-government", and thus potentially "threatening" sentiments, even though they cannot grasp the technical intricacies of such a surveillance tool. In fact, not knowing or not fully understanding might cause people to attribute almost omniscient powers to the state. This is irrational: in some ways, while growing its surveillance apparatus, the state is struggling to maintain it like any other IT system.

A Dutch parliamentarian standing up for privacy, Sophie in 't Veld was targeted by the US, put on one of those murky "threat lists" and they still refuse to say why.

And, of course we know Jon Gold and Cindy Sheehan were under direct surveillance too for their anti-war activism.

I would say overcoming fear of the current, fully operational (and rapidly growing) surveillance system is the first and most important step. The power of example helps. Ignorance and indifference are much harder to overcome, let alone collaboration.

Most of all, people must be taught to resist the addiction to a risk-free society. Risk is part of life. If a large terrorist attack happens tomorrow which could have been prevented through surveillance, and it happens because we have no surveillance, you must be willing to morally accept this possibility. This is the essence of Benjamin Franklin's infamous quote about freedom and security: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

... And ironically, explained by one of Niven's laws:

F × S = k. The product of Freedom and Security is a constant. To gain more freedom of thought and/or action, you must give up some security, and vice versa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niven%27s_Laws

When I say ironic, I mean ironic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Nive ... nvolvement

[Luther Blissett]

http://www.businessinsider.com/trapwire-everything-you-need-to-know-2012-8#ixzz23Hv98Ttr

Anyway, here's what Trapwire is, according to Russian-state owned media network RT (apologies for citing "foreign media"... if we had a free press, I'd be citing something published here by an American media conglomerate): "Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology—and have installed it across the U.S. under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.

Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it's the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America’s intelligence community.

I think this might be exactly what I bore witness to firsthand in a demonstration to children in the spring, and posted about here. There was a lot of speculation on how exactly it was being done but the quote above falls in line with my suspicion.