The same has been said about the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism, et al…..and nothing seems to back up the dire rhetoric, but the spending of tax dollars rolls on just the same.
In last month’s State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to pass “legislation that will secure our country from the growing dangers of cyber threats.” The Hill was way ahead of him, with over 50 cybersecurity bills introduced this Congress. This week, both the House and Senate are moving on their versions of consolidated, comprehensive legislation.
The reason cybersecurity legislation is so pressing, proponents say, is that we face an immediate risk of national disaster.
“Today’s cyber criminals have the ability to interrupt life-sustaining services, cause catastrophic economic damage, or severely degrade the networks our defense and intelligence agencies rely on,” Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said at a hearing last week. “Congress needs to act on comprehensive cybersecurity legislation immediately.”
Yet evidence to sustain such dire warnings is conspicuously absent. In many respects, rhetoric about cyber catastrophe resembles threat inflation we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War. And while Congress’ passing of comprehensive cybersecurity legislation wouldn’t lead to war, it could saddle us with an expensive and overreaching cyber-industrial complex.
A disturbing Ministry of Trade report circulating in the Kremlin today is raising serious concerns over the United States plan to shut down significant parts of the Internet on 8 March in a move many Russian experts warn could be a prelude to massive attacks against the growing number of dissidents in that country.
According to this report, The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will unplug on 8 March the Domain Name System (DNS) servers it set up to replace rogue DNS servers that sent victims to malicious sites. A report on Infoworld said the removal of this temporary fix may affect “a substantial number” of users, as half of Fortune 500 companies and US government agencies are infected with the malware, not to mention tens-of-millions of privately owned American computers.
Phi Beta Iota: When government gets into areas it really does not fully understand, “first do no harm” and the precautionary principle should be foremost in the managing agency head's mind. There is also the matter of the Israeli Mossad and their long history of penetrating governments with malware, ostensibly in pursuit of their own “higher good” never mind the cost to others. Bottom line: A few extraordinary successes aside, no one seems to have a grip on the cyber terrain over which their diplomatic, information, military, and economic communications are running.
Hacker group Anonymous on Friday took down the website of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), online publication PC Magazine reported.
The website is still offline.
“CIA TANGO DOWN: https://www.cia.gov/ #Anonymous,” the @YourAnonNews feed tweeted.
Anonymous did not make public the attack’s details, but the group’s hackers normally use distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to knock their targets offline.
“We are aware of the problems accessing our website, and are working to resolve them,” CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said Friday night as quoted by the CNN.
Last month, Anonymous briefly took down the websites of the Department of Justice and the FBI in retaliation for the Megaupload file sharing site’s shutdown.
Phi Beta Iota: The solution was clearly stated in 1994 and again in 2010. Until the US Government gets a grip on “Smart Nation” and “Whole Earth” concepts of security at the code level, migrating to open source software across the board, and reinforcing all the shared nodes, it will continue to be easy to take down individual capabilities. And if all else fails, most systems can be taken down by cutting their obvious external big wires and/or their satellite downlinks, most easily reachable from outside the wire with various means.
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.
Two British tourists were detained after tweeting a joke about Marilyn Monroe. Is Homeland Security monitoring social media too closely?
Mathew Ingram
Bloomberg/Businessweek, 30 January 2012
Planning to make a joke on Twitter about bombing something? You might want to reconsider: According to a report from Britain, two tourists were detained and denied entry into the U.S. recently after they joked about destroying America and digging up Marilyn Monroe. That the Homeland Security Dept. and other authorities—including the FBI—are monitoring such social media as Twitter and Facebook isn’t surprising. That these authorities are willing to detain people based on what is clearly a harmless joke, however, raises questions about what the impact of all that monitoring will be.
Leigh Van Bryan, a 26-year-old bar manager from Coventry, told The Sun that he and friend Emily Bunting were stopped by border guards when they arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and were questioned for five hours about messages Van Bryan had tweeted saying he planned to “destroy America.” After the questioning, during which Homeland Security agents threatened the two, said Van Bryan, they were put into a van and taken—along with a few illegal immigrants—to a holding cell and held overnight. The next morning, they said, Van Bryan and Bunting were forced to take a plane back to England.
According to a report in the Daily Mail, the officers gave Van Bryan a document that detailed why he was refused admission into the U.S. The document reads like a bad joke itself, saying:
“He had posted on his Tweeter [sic] website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe. … Also on his tweeter [sic] account Mr. Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.”
Van Bryan told the newspaper he tried to explain to Homeland Security officials that the term “destroy” was British slang referring to a party and that his comments about “digging up Marilyn Monroe” were an attempt at humor, but the officers didn’t listen. The authorities even searched the two tourists’ luggage for shovels and other tools, he said.
Phi Beta Iota: Good news is that our experiences with TSA do not bear out the many horror stories in the media. Bad news is that DHS may be retarded beyond all expectations.
Not many people think of shantytowns, illegal street vendors, and unlicensed roadside hawkers as major economic players. But according to journalist Robert Neuwirth, that’s exactly what they’ve become. In his new book, Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, Neuwirth points out that small, illegal, off-the-books businesses collectively account for trillions of dollars in commerce and employ fully half the world’s workers.
Amazon Page
Further, he says, these enterprises are critical sources of entrepreneurialism, innovation, and self-reliance. And the globe’s gray and black markets have grown during the international recession, adding jobs, increasing sales, and improving the lives of hundreds of millions. It’s time, Neuwirth says, for the developed world to wake up to what those who are working in the shadows of globalization have to offer. We asked him how these tiny enterprises got to be such big business.
Wired: You refer to the untaxed, unlicensed, and unregulated economies of the world as System D. What does that mean?
Robert Neuwirth:There’s a French word for someone who’s self-reliant or ingenious: débrouillard. This got sort of mutated in the postcolonial areas of Africa and the Caribbean to refer to the street economy, which is called l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy, if you will. I decided to use this term myself—shortening it to System D—because it’s a less pejorative way of referring to what has traditionally been called the informal economy or black market or even underground economy. I’m basically using the term to refer to all the economic activity that flies under the radar of government. So, unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, but not outright criminal—I don’t include gun-running, drugs, human trafficking, or things like that.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Wired: Certainly the people who make their living from illegal street stalls don’t see themselves as criminals.
Neuwirth: Not at all. They see themselves as supporting their family, hiring people, and putting their relatives through school—all without any help from the government or aid networks.
Wired: The sheer scale of System D is mind-blowing.
Neuwirth: Yeah. If you think of System D as having a collective GDP, it would be on the order of $10 trillion a year. That’s a very rough calculation, which is almost certainly on the low side. If System D were a country, it would have the second-largest economy on earth, after the United States.
Phi Beta Iota: System D is completely separate from straight forward black crime (organized crime) or white crime (Goldman Sachs et al). What this really means is that governments have lost all legitimacy and two thirds of the global economy now considers governments to be at best a meddling (and costly) nuisance and at worst the enemy to be defeated by any means necessary. Governments brought this on themselves.
Read this at least three times. This is a talking points memorandum for the Empire cabal, which is now ready to take on the white guys (including the white guys with guns). They believe blacks and hispanics are cowed, “weed and seed” has been a success story (in their view). This is a subtle hit job that sets the stage for treating white guys as failures who lost their cultural compass and must now be treated with the same federalization of state and local force and ultimate incarceration that has been used so extensively on blacks.
The Rodney King riots were the beginning of the breakdown of US Government legitimacy in the eyes of its own public. The economy is being juiced and the Republicans are playing along with the fiction that the economy is getting better. It is not. Unemployment is at 22.4% and 2013 is going to be catastrophic. Now imagine the Rodney King riots, this time with while guys who are armed to the teeth and very very pissed off, with nothing to lose and everything to gain from a populist revolution.
The ideal of an ‘American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.
Charles Murray
Wall Street Journal, 21 January 2012
EXTRACT
Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.
. . . . . . .
As I've argued in much of my previous work, I think that the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration. Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of.
. . . . . . .
Meanwhile, the formation of the new upper class has been driven by forces that are nobody's fault and resist manipulation. The economic value of brains in the marketplace will continue to increase no matter what, and the most successful of each generation will tend to marry each other no matter what. As a result, the most successful Americans will continue to trend toward consolidation and isolation as a class. Changes in marginal tax rates on the wealthy won't make a difference. Increasing scholarships for working-class children won't make a difference.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010” (Crown Forum) will be published on Jan. 31.
Phi Beta Iota: The eight stages of genocide established by Dr. Greg Stanton are as follows: 1) Classification (us versus them); 2) Symbolization (codewords–e.g bums); 3) Dehumanization (equated with animals, eugenics applies); 4) Organization (federalization of state and local police, opening of the Halliburton-build civil disturbance camps now ready for use); 5) Polarization (attack all independent and centrist movements and leaders); 6) Preparation (use NDAA to incarcerate without due process those who object to the nazification of the USA); 7) Extermination (through a mix of precision kills and “accidental” epidemics, gut the white middle class now diving into poverty); 8) Denial (already taking place at Davos 2012 – capitalism failed, not the elite).
