Peru — a top cocaine-producing nation — joined the ranks of world governments that have added commercial spyware to their arsenals. The purchase from Israeli-American company Verint Systems, chronicled in documents obtained by The Associated Press, offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look into how easy it is for a country to purchase and install off-the-shelf surveillance equipment. The software allows governments to intercept voice calls, text messages and emails.
Another week, and more concerns about the Italian banking system. A reminder: Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), the world’s oldest bank founded in 1472, has an estimated $55 billion in bad loans on its books and is expected to be among the worst performers in European banking stress tests next week. Shares in the 544-year old bank, the third-largest in Italy by assets, are trading at 8% of book value. Italian officials have been pushing for government assistance to help bail out the bank, but E.U. banking rules require private investors to be wiped out first before there is public assistance.
They are called “pirate libraries,” but one would be better-served envisioning Robin Hood than Blackbeard. Atlas Obscura takes a look at these floaters of scientific-journal copyrights in, “The Rise of Pirate Libraries.” These are not physical libraries, but virtual ones, where researchers and other curious folks can study articles otherwise accessible only through expensive scientific journal paywalls. Reporter Sarah Laskow writes:
“The creators of these repositories are a small group who try to keep a low profile, since distributing copyrighted material in this way is illegal. Many of them are academics. The largest pirate libraries have come from Russia’s cultural orbit, but the documents they collect are used by people around the world, in countries both wealthy and poor. Pirate libraries have become so popular that in 2015, Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers in America, went to court to try to shut down two of the most popular, Sci-Hub and Library Genesis.
Being stupid on government time used to be a court-martial offense, at least in the “old (Marine) Corps.” Northrup Grumman will probably not be indicted — and they probably should be…
‘Unless these issues are resolved, which would likely require redesigning, they will significantly limit the CVN-78’s ability to conduct combat operations,' the Defense Department's Michael Gilmore wrote.
The term “false flag” is no longer marginalized. Everyone seems to understand that this is a very real aspect of government (and rogue actor) operations against the public interest.
The scope of the present paper is to investigate the identity and the dynamics of the major criminal actors of the transnational and the international system as well as to analyze criminalism as an intrinsic and driving force of the established world order.Indeed, we maintain that, due to criminalism,not only is the border between the established world order and the contemporary underworld order blurred, but also there are organic channels of communication/collaboration between the social establishment and the underworld. In this context, we study the creation and global march of what we call here the “Black-Red International,” namely, a postmodern, global network of mobsters, political extremists/terrorists (transcending old dichotomies between the ‘Right’ and the ‘Left’), former spies associated with the historical Nazi and Soviet ‘deep states’ and their secret plans for world domination, autonomous subgroups of several nations’ secret services, and a group of complacently nihilistic businessmen who act as the financial facilitators of this “Black-Red International.”
“Dominoes of the collective begin to fall. The whole rotting structure begins to collapse, a wing here and a wing there, and the robots open their eyes and turn off their cameras.”
If you can’t see the background of a crime, you aren’t seeing the crime, you’re seeing the sensational effects, that’s all.
