That’s become the rallying cry of an army of keyboard warriors known as Anonymous, which in the last 18 months has targeted everyone from the Tunisian government to the Boston police, the Vatican to Sony, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews to PayPal, blocking their websites or retrieving embarrassing files and emails for the world to see.
MONTREAL – The elusive “hacktivist” collective, identified only by its logo of a headless man in a suit or its Guy Fawkes masks, has hacked into the Syrian defence ministry and Bank of America. It has eavesdropped on Scotland Yard and the FBI. And it has outed alleged white supremacists across Canada, including a couple in Quebec City.
With over 15 million page views on its main news website and more than 560,000 Twitter followers, it’s clear the world is paying attention to this nascent form of politics – and for good cause.
A useful report that ignores the obvious: the internal errors and omissions as well as the “legal” penetrations and outside-of-legal warrant exploitation.
Talking to some IC insiders who simply do not get it, am forced to conclude that there is regressive de-evolution, and the US IC is the poster child for going backwards.
Phi Beta Iota: The National Security Agency (NSA) was directed by the President many many years ago to be responsible for commercial security. NSA chose to leave commercial security exposed for its own convenience–NSA, in other words, has been criminally irresponsible with respect to the public interest, for decades.
There is not much new here, other than Curveball's public admission, but note Colonel Wilkerson’s comment below. One the one hand, Wilkerson admits he was a party to the “sexed up” intelligence; on the other, he wants us to believe Powell (and by extension himself) was being used. Given that “Curveball” was suspected of being a liar by the German intelligence (BND) as well as the CIA, the most charitable interpretation of Powell’s enthusiastic imitation of Adlai Stevenson's speech to the UN during the Cuban Missile Crisis is that once the decision to attack Iraq was made, neither Powell nor Wilkerson had the courage to resign on principle, and both chose instead tobe a party to the fabrication — or as we used to say in the Pentagon he chose to be “used” by going along to get along.
A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.
“Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi's lies used to justify the Iraq war.
(J. Scott Applewhite — Associated Press) “Dysfunction in Washington … threatens our security and raises questions about the capacity of our democracy to respond to crisis.”
That warning came from Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta Thursday night at a dinner sponsored by Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, which had just given him its Eisenhower Award for excellence in leadership.
He called the dysfunction “a political crutch” and “not a part of the American spirit.”
Behind Panetta’s remarks is the frustration he feels looking at the current political deadlock in Congress over deficit reduction. He has been there before — as chairman of the House Budget Committee, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and chief of staff at the White House.
“One thing that I’ve learned over my career is that governing requires people coming together to get things done, not to pound their fists on the table and stand in the way,” he told an audience that included present and former government officials, members of Congress, defense industry representatives and dozens of college students.
Panetta’s predecessor, Robert Gates, last December gave the same type of lecture, in which he talked about Washington’s short supply of “civility, mutual respect, putting country before self and country before party, listening to and learning from one another, not pretending to have all the answers and not demonizing those with whom we differ.”
Gates, too, talked about politicians’ inability “to sustain bipartisan strategies and policies needed to address our very real and serious problems.”
There must be something good in the Pentagon’s water.
Phi Beta Iota: Pincus is the low-rent version of Ignatius. This article so lacking in intelligence and integrity as to be the epitome of Washington–bottom feeders “honoring” bottom-feeders. Panetta and Gates are both unethical toadies for the military-industrial-congressional complex. They dishonor the Constitution, the Republic, and the flag. All those associated with this charade are in betrayal of the public trust. If they were *only* betraying the US public trust, that would be one thing — when combined with the global war crimes and other atrocities done “in our name,” all of this qualifies Leon Panetta for an appearance before the International Tribunal, along with the CIA drone team, the four service chiefs, and the chains of command for Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen, inter alia.
Certain types of life science research involving “high consequence pathogens and toxins” would be subject to new review and risk mitigation procedures which might include classification of the research or termination of the funding, according to a U.S. government policy issued yesterday by the National Institutes of Health.
The policy applies to research involving 15 specified biological agents and toxins which “pose the greatest risks of deliberate misuse with most significant potential for mass casualties or devastating effects to the economy, critical infrastructure or public confidence.”
Research that increases the lethality or transmissibility of the agent or toxin, or otherwise enhances its harmful consequences, will be subject to the new review procedures.
Based on the outcome of the review, a risk mitigation plan may be developed. If less restrictive measures were deemed inadequate, the new policy would allow for national security classification of the research or termination of government funding.
Phi Beta Iota: Nice but inadequate. The government is paying lip service to this necessary precautionary principle. If they were really serious, such a policy would encompass all agricultural and industrial processes without exception.
Here are some especially good observations from this article:
“… a certain class of people – sociopaths – are now fully in control of major American institutions. Their beliefs and attitudes are insinuated throughout the economic, political, intellectual and psychological/spiritual fabric of the US. What does this mean to the individual? It depends on your character. Are you the kind of person who supports “my country right or wrong,” as did most Germans in the 1930s and 1940s, or the kind who dodges the duty to be a helpmate to murderers? The type of passenger who goes down with the ship or the type who puts on his vest and looks for a life boat? The type of individual who supports the merchants who offer the fairest deal or the type who is gulled by splashy TV commercials?”
March 28, 2012 — CIO — Federal cybersecurity officials on Wednesday gave lawmakers a sobering warning about the vulnerabilities of critical information technology systems across the public and private sectors, describing a laundry list of threats and the challenge of keeping up with hackers who are continually seeking new methods of attack.
Appearing before a House subcommittee, cybersecurity authorities from the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Communications Commission and other government arms testified to the work their agencies are undertaking in response to the ongoing threats, both internally and in concert with the private sector, but acknowledged that the challenges remain formidable and appealed for expanded government authority to shore up the nation's digital defenses.
“Cybersecurity threats are a real and present danger to our current economy and well being,” retired Adm. James Barnett, chief of the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, told members of the Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. “No one would tolerate the level of criminality, thievery, vandalism or invasion of privacy if it were done in the physical world, and we really can no longer afford to tolerate it in cyberspace.”
Barnett and other witnesses described a wide range of threats and vulnerabilities that imperil communications networks, including weaknesses in the domain name system, or DNS, man-in-the middle attacks, route hijacking and weak spots in the supply chain.
But while there is broad agreement that the threats are severe and constantly evolving, deep divisions arise in the policy debate over what role the federal government should play in developing and overseeing the nation's digital defenses.
The Department of Homeland Security is at the center of that discussion. In the Senate, competing bills have emerged to address the cybersecurity challenge. One proposal, backed by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), would grant DHS new authorities to oversee private-sector digital infrastructure that was deemed critical. A competing bill takes a far more limited approach, focusing instead on facilitating the sharing of information about cyber threats among public and private entities. The Republicans backing that measure, the SECURE IT Act, have been sharply critical of DHS' performance on many security fronts, including cybersecurity.
Those same suspicions were on display in Wednesday's House hearing. Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.), who yesterday introduced the companion bill to the SECURE IT Act in the lower chamber, cited the department's handling of the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program, which she said has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars without measurably improving the infrastructure of the chemical sector. How, then, could DHS be trusted to oversee cybersecurity?
Phi Beta Iota: The US Government is incompetent and does not represent the public interest. The only thing dumber than giving billions of dollars to the US Army and the Potemkin Village called “Cyber-Command” is to give any amount of money to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which is the lowest common denominator across the board. The fact is that the US Government is irrelevant to cyber-security–what expertise there is exists outside the government, and the government is the last to know anything, with nothing to contribute except hype and inflated printed money. Absent a non-violent revolution in governance, one that restores intelligence and integrity to the how of governance, what the US Government does in the cyber world is generally going to be part of the problem, not the solution.
