Hacking network Anonymous has released a recording of a conference call between the FBI and UK police in which they discuss efforts against hacking.
The call, said to have taken place last month, covers the tracking of Anonymous and similar groups, dates of planned arrests and evidence details.
Anonymous also published an email, apparently from the FBI, showing the email addresses of call participants.
The FBI confirmed the intercept and said it was hunting those responsible.
The loose collective Anonymous have targeted a number of big institutions in recent years
“The information was intended for law enforcement officers only and was illegally obtained. A criminal investigation is under way to identify and hold accountable those responsible,” it said in a statement.
London's Metropolitan Police's central e-crime unit said the matter was being investigated but that no operational risks had been identified.
A comment on one of the Twitter accounts linked to Anonymous, AnonymousIRC, said: “The FBI might be curious how we're able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now.”
Phi Beta Iota: This is too funny for words. Hackers and Phi Beta Iota have been very clear for over 20 years that most law enforcement systems are easy to hack into, especially now that they are all digital and controlled by a server where no one has had the brains to change the factory installed root password. What is really happening now is that government incomtence in security is being “outed.” CIA has worked overseas for decades, pretending to be clandestine when in fact all case officers have been known to local liaison. Similarly, government “security” is an oxymoron. On the one hand, it does not exist, and on the other we are spending tens of billions on the well-intentioned but ignorant threatics of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) and the world's most expensive coffee klatch, the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC). This is what you end up with when a government of arrogant “experts” and even more arrogant politicians refuse to listen to both insider iconoclasts and outsider “loyal opposition” minds that actually know what they are talking about and see these things 20 years before the “leaders” at the top, who are really nothing more than clerks fighting for budget share, without a strategic bone in their bodies.
If you have any money and you want to understand the lies that “your” government tells you with statistics, subscribe to John Williams shadowstats.com.
John Williams is the best and utterly truthful statistician that we the people have.
The charts below come from John Williams Hyperinflation Report, January 25, 2012. The commentary is supplied by me.
Here is the chart of real average weekly earnings deflated by the US government’s own measure of inflation, which as I pointed out in my recent column, Economics Lesson 1, understates true inflation.
This chart (below) shows the behavior of inflation as measured by “our” government’s official measure, CPI-U (bottom line) and John Williams measure which uses the official methodology of when I was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. The gap between the top and bottom lines represents the amount of money that was due to Social Security recipients and others whose income was indexed to inflation that was diverted by the government to wars, police state, and bankers’ bailouts.
This next chart shows the gains that gold and the Swiss franc have made against the US dollar. The Swiss franc is the top line and gold is the bottom. When gold and the Swiss franc rise, the dollar is falling. Notice that during President Reagan’s first term, when I was in the Treasury, gold and the Swiss franc dropped, that is, the dollar rose in purchasing power. Obviously, the supply-side policy that Reagan implemented strengthened the US dollar. It was only with the advent of the Bush policy of endless trillion dollar wars, reaffirmed by Obama, that the US dollar and economy collapsed relative to gold and hard currencies.
The recent drop in the Swiss franc is due to the Swiss government announcing that the country’s exports could not tolerate any further run up in the franc’s value, and that the Swiss central bank would print new francs to accommodate future inflows of dollars and euros. In other words, Switzerland was forced to import US inflation in order to protect its exports.
Here is nonfarm payroll employment. As you can see, the US economy has been in recession for four years despite the easiest monetary policy and largest government deficits in US history.
Here is consumer confidence. Do you see a recovery despite all the recovery hype from politicians and the financial media?
Here is housing starts. Do you see a recovery?
Here is real GDP deflated according to the methodology used when I was in the US Treasury.
Here is real retail sales deflated by the traditional, as contrasted with the current, substitution-based, measure of inflation.
These graphs courtesy of John Williams make it completely clear that there is no economic recovery. In place of recovery, we have hype from politicians, Wall Street, and the presstitute media. The “recovery” is no more real than Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” or Iranian “nukes” or the Obama regime’s phony story of assassinating last year an undefended Osama bin Laden, allegedly the mastermind of Islamic terrorism, left by al Qaeda to the mercy of a US Seal team, a man who was widely reported to have died from renal failure in December 2001, a man who denied any responsibility for 9/11.
A government and media that will deceive you about simple things such as inflation, unemployment, and GDP growth, will lie to you about everything.
Phi Beta Iota: Here is the paraphrase as reported previously, from Ellen Seidman, former member of the National Economic Council:
CIA reports only focus on foreign economic conditions. They don't do domestic economic conditions and so I cannot get a strategic analysis that compares and contrasts strengths and weaknesses of the industries I am responsible for. On the other hand, Treasury, Commerce, and the Fed are terrible at the business of intelligence — they don't know how to produce intelligence.[1]
When you add a lack of integrity across the board to basic incompetence on the part of both consumers and producers of intelligence, you end up with lies that neither patriotic nor helpful.
[1] Seidman was speaking to the Open Source Lunch Club on January 1, 1994. Her observations were subsequently reported in OSS Notices 94001 dated February 21, 1994
As companies resolve these issues, management styles will evolve. The days when a leader can confidently say “I know best” will come to an end. Managers will no longer be able to communicate with just a small circle of trusted advisers — they'll be expected to interact digitally with a much broader range of people both inside and outside the company.
Not every company will be pleased by this turn of events, of course, but those that embrace it will have new competitive opportunities. With knowledge flowing more freely throughout the organization and decisions being made more quickly, the company will be able to react more nimbly to the ever-increasing pace of change.
Phi Beta Iota: Stewart Brand, founder of the Co-Evolution Quarterly and then Whole Earth Review, knew all this in the 1960's and 1970's. Herman Daly, Paul Hawken and many others got it in the 1980's. What we are seeing here is a fascinating extension of the ignorance in place timeline. It used to be that the “avant guard” was 20 years ahead of the mainstream. Now we see them a half-century ahead o fthe mainstream. What this really tells us is that the 1% have held off constructive change to the bitter end, and we are now about to see a clash of cultures–Epoch A top down because I said so versus Epoch B bottom up because it makes sense to all of us. The US Government generally, and the US intelligence community specifically, have wasted a quarter-century of time–the one strategic variable that cannot be bought nor replaced–because of their refusal to abandon the secrecy paradigm for the openness paradigm. Intelligence, not. Integrity, not. It's called collective intelligence – integrity comes inside.
Do you think anthropogenic global warming is a hoax? Are you unconvinced that your ancestors had more in common with Cheetah than with Tarzan? Have you any doubts about the official version of how 9/11 went down? Then you, according to Evgeny Morozov, are part of a “kooky” “fringe movement” whose growth must be checked by forcing you to read “authoritative” content whenever you go looking for information on such topics on the Internet.
Morozov is a visiting scholar at Stanford University, a contributing editor to Foreign Policy magazine, and a former fellow at George Soros’ Open Society Institute — in other words, a reliable bellwether of globalist establishment thinking. His musings in Slate — in which he argues that while outright censorship of the web may not be possible, getting browsers and search engines to direct people to establishment-approved opinions would be an excellent idea — offer “proof of how worried the bad guys are about popular disbelief in State pieties, and about sites … that stoke it,” Lew Rockwell averred, citing his own website as an example. The New American undoubtedly would fall under that rubric as well.
The problem, as Morozov sees it, is that people who “deny” global warming or think vaccines may cause autism — opinions that conflict with those proffered by governments, the United Nations, and other globalist organizations — can post anything they want on the Internet with “little or no quality control” over it. As a result, he says, there are “thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories.”
In addition, Morozov worries that those searching for information on a disputed topic will, because of the way search engines are structured, tend to find sites giving the politically incorrect version of events first and may never get around to reading the “authoritative” sources on the subject. “Meanwhile,” he argues, “the move toward social search may further insulate regular visitors to such sites; discovering even more links found by their equally paranoid friends will hardly enlighten them.”
Then comes the big question with the foreordained answer: “Is it time for some kind of a quality control system?” Morozov, not surprisingly, replies strongly in the affirmative. Since dissuading those already committed to these outré views may be impossible, he thinks “resources should go into thwarting their growth by targeting their potential — rather than existent — members.” “Given that censorship of search engines is not an appealing or even particularly viable option” — note that he doesn’t say he opposes censorship per se — Morozov argues for changes to browsers and search engines that would notify users that they are about to see something that the self-appointed arbiters of acceptable opinion have deemed unfit for human consumption and, if possible, direct them elsewhere.
. . . . . .
Morozov’s concerns about the Internet’s openness to anti-establishment views are not new among the power elite. As far back as 1998, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton bemoaned the lack of a “gate-keeping function” that allows anyone to post anything on the web. Morozov’s proposed solutions to this perceived problem are not exactly original, either, as Paul Joseph Watsonobserved at Infowars.com:
[Morozov’s contention] represents a similar argument to Cass Sunstein’s “cognitive infiltration,” an effort by Obama’s information czar to slap government warnings on controversial websites (including those claiming that exposure to sunlight is healthy). In a widely derided white paper, Sunstein called for political blogs to be forced to include pop ups that show “a quick argument for a competing view.” He also demanded that taxes be levied on dissenting opinions and even suggested that outright bans on certain thoughts should be enforced.
Indeed, notes Watson, “Morozov’s rhetoric is merely one aspect of the wider move to turn the Internet into an echo chamber of establishment propaganda.” We can, therefore, expect calls for Internet censorship to continue and even become more pronounced. Many people thus have good reason to fear that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a back door to government censorship of the web.
Clearly the globalist establishment is running scared. As the anti-SOPA blackout and the popularity of Ron Paul attest, the Internet is enabling individuals to see through the smokescreen of propaganda emanating from Washington and to mobilize effectively against threats to their liberties. In fact, that very free flow of information on the web may be the one thing standing between the elites and their dreams of — as Watson put it — “Chinese-style thought control.”
Alexa: When AIDS was discovered, it was determined by the government and other authoritive agencies, that it was impossible for HIV to be transmitted through blood. As a result many people were infected through transfusions provided by the Red Cross. If we had listened to a Morozov perspective, thousands or millions more people would have been infected because of donated blood. The people who discovered the real source of the problem would be considered kooks in Morozov's eye. Also, the world would still be flat and the sun would be revolving around the earth. Questioning conventional wisdom reveals truth.
Phi Beta Iota: In the Real World Order (RWO), control is a delusion and also a fraud – it introduces friction that accelerates entropy. You have to give up direct control in order to re-establish inherent controls that can only be actualized by freedom and liberty of all. The magic of the cosmos is that it is self-actualizing.
I was recently asked to review this World Bank publication entitled: “The Role of Crowdsourcing for Better Governance in Fragile States Contexts.” I had been looking for just this type of research on crowdsourcing for a long time and was therefore well pleased to read this publication. This blog posts focuses more on the theoretical foundations of the report, i.e., Part 1. I highly recommend reading the full study given the real-world case studies that are included.
“[The report serves] as a primer on crowdsourcing as an information resource for development, crisis response, and post-conflict recovery, with a specific focus on governance in fragile states. Inherent in the theoretical approach is that broader, unencumbered participation in governance is an objectively positive and democratic aim, and that governments’ accountability to its citizens can be increased and poor-performance corrected, through openness and empowerment of citizens. Whether for tracking aid flows, reporting on poor government performance, or helping to organize grassroots movements, crowdsourcing has potential to change the reality of civic participation in many developing countries. The objective of this paper is to outline the theoretical justifications, key features and governance structures of crowdsourcing systems, and examine several cases in which crowdsourcing has been applied to complex issues in the developing world.”
The research is grounded in the philosophy of Open-Source Governance, “which advocates an intellectual link between the principles of open-source and open-content movements, and basic democratic principles.” The report argues that “open-source governance theoretically provides more direct means to affect change than do periodic elections,” for example. According to the authors of the study, “crowdsourcing is increasingly seen as a core mechanism of a new systemic approach of governance to address the highly complex, globally interconnected and dynamic challenges of climate change, poverty, armed conflict, and other crises, in view of the frequent failures of traditional mechanisms of democracy and international diplomacy with respect to fragile state contexts.”
Open Access (OA) to scientific publications could provide more effective dissemination of research and thus increase its impact.
The costs and benefits of different models of providing OA to publications need to be considered if a comprehensive shift to OA is to be financially sustainable.
OA to research data could enable others to validate findings and re-use data to advance knowledge and promote innovation.
Sharing data openly requires effective data management and archiving. It also presents challenges relating to protecting intellectual property and privacy.
Expanding access to scientific information requires researchers, librarians, higher education institutions, funding agencies and publishers, to continue to work together.
