Communities of Practice – Page 808 – Public Intelligence Blog

Russian Advanced Weapons for Syria: Unrevealed Secrets of Vladimir Putin’s Recent Visit to London

[Editors Note: We had reported earlier that when the Israelis used an American made mini-nuke bunker buster in the Damascus attack that they had crossed Russia ‘quiet red line' of using a tactical nuke against an non attacking opponent.

This not only forced them to move Syrian air space defenses to block additional Israeli attacks, but also get fully deployed when the calls from the Israeli Lobby shills like John ‘McQaeda' McCain and Lindsy Graham for a no fly zone which none of our military thinks is a smart idea, the wrong fight, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

With the Russian navy back in the Mediterranean and the Israelis threatening to attack their air defense weapons in transit, this gave the Russians no choice but to deploy all of their top line weapons systems to protect their defensive deployment. Unsaid has been that any pre-emptive attack on the Russians would be dealt with in a full response so that the attacking party could then explain to it's citizen once again why Syria was worth the devastation.

NATO is a hollow shell that could not fight its way out of a paper bag. America is expected to do most everything and of course pay for it. And if someone on our side makes an aggressive move I expect to see a quick response. We would do the same. But no one is threatening us.

We and our proxies are the threatening parties here, taking us to war inch by inch thinking they will be able to pull some incident out of the hat to make it all look like we were attacked and then responded. No one will believe that…because it will not be true. And if the Saudis and Gulf States think they are going to move armor into Syria and not pay a price for it I suspect they will be getting an education the hard way…Jim W. Dean]

… by Gordon Duff, VT Senior Editor

The following report comes to us from intelligence sources that have been able to confirm some of the “legend” behind the story. If this is true, and we have confirmed that the S 300 missile defense system has been, for some weeks now, in the hands of the Syrian military despite denials by the “pop culture press,” Putin has made an interesting and very necessary move.

Continue reading “Gordon Duff: Update on Advanced Weapons Into Syria”

2013/06/192013/06/19

Chuck Spinney: Imperial Idiocy Wrecks Middle East (Fruits of Treason) — End of Sykes-Picot Betrayal, Five Inter-Mixed Conflicts, Return of the Tribes

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 05 Iran, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence

Patrick Cockburn has written a very important essay on Syria in the London Review of Books (attached below). The essay is aptly titled but has only a few oblique, albeit important, references to Sykes – Picot Agreement, a document some readers may not familiar with. Let's begin with a little background.

The Sykes-Picot agreement (it was a secret agreement concocted by two bureaucrats) is one of the most cynical documents in the creation of the modern Middle East.

The Encylopaedia Britannica describes it accurately as follows:

It was a … “secret convention made during World War I (1916) between Great Britain and France, with the assent of imperial Russia, for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The agreement led to the division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into various French- and British-administered areas. The agreement took its name from its negotiators, Sir Mark Sykes

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Imperial Idiocy Wrecks Middle East (Fruits of Treason) — End of Sykes-Picot Betrayal, Five Inter-Mixed Conflicts, Return of the Tribes”

2013/06/192013/06/19

Marcus Aurelius: SOCOM Working on Global Network — Comment by Robert Steele

Advanced Cyber/IO, Ethics, Government, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

Well worth reading between the lines.

Socom Officials Work on Plan for Global Network

By Donna Miles

American Forces Press Service

MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla., June 3, 2013 – About 100 people are hard at work at the U.S. Special Operations Command headquarters here on a new plan that will operationalize the way the command provides manpower and capability in support of the new defense strategic guidance.

The plan, due to the Joint Staff in late August, is part of the Special Operations Command 2020 vision Navy Adm. William H. McRaven introduced shortly after taking the helm as Socom commander in 2011.The building of a global network of special operations forces, as well as U.S. government partners and partner nations, is a major component of Socom 2020, McRaven explained during the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference in Tampa, Fla., earlier this month.

McRaven’s Socom 2020 vision calls for a globally networked force of special operations forces, interagency representatives, allies and partners, with aligned structures processes and authorities to enable its operations. Globally networked forces, he said, will provide geographic combatant commanders and chiefs of mission with an unprecedented unity of effort and an enhance ability to respond to regional contingencies and threats to stability.

McRaven noted his own experience working with the Joint Special Operations Command in Afghanistan. “It has been interesting to work in a network like that, and we do that very, very well on the direct action side,” he said. “We need to figure out — and it is part of the Socom plan — how do we take that network, and be able to extend that out to the theater special operations commands,” down to special operations forward elements and forces assigned to them.

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: SOCOM Working on Global Network — Comment by Robert Steele”

2013/06/18

Berto Jongman: TWA Flight 800 Whistle-Blowers — Flight Shot Down?

Corruption, Government, Media

TWA Flight 800 investigators break silence in new documentary, claim original conclusion about cause of crash is wrong

A group of whistleblowers, including a number of aviation experts, have come forward in a new documentary to claim that the official explanation for the crash of TWA Flight 800 was wrong and a gas tank explosion did not bring down the flight off the coast of Long Island 17 years ago.

However, the six whistleblowers, all part of the original investigation team, stopped short of saying the plane was shot down.

Flight 800, a Boeing 747, had just taken off from JFK airport with 230 people aboard on July 17, 1996 enroute to Paris when it exploded and crashed off the coast of nearby East Moriches, Long Island, killing everyone on the plane.

“..This team of investigators who actually handled the wreckage and victims’ bodies, prove that the officially proposed fuel-air explosion did not cause the crash,” reads a statement by the producers of the film, which will debut on cable network EPIX next month. “They also provide radar and forensic evidence proving that one or more ordinance explosions outside the aircraft caused the crash.” However, the statement said they did not speculate about the source or sources of any ordinance explosions.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: TWA Flight 800 Whistle-Blowers — Flight Shot Down?”

2013/06/182013/06/18

John Robb: Iran, Cyberwar, and the Perils of Lazy (or Corrupt) Thinking

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military

Iran, Cyberwar, and the Perils of Lazy Thinking

For those of you that don't know, the US doesn't spend much time/energy/effort on military strategy and theory. They do spend money on political scientists and engineers to provide a substitute. Regardless, this deficit means the US continually falls victim to strategic errors due to stale military theory.

The big one we recently fell victim to?

The US unilaterally launched an arms race in autonomous weapons (for more on this read my article; Pandora Smiled).

NOTE: In fact, in all of the work I've done for the national security system (CIA, NSA, DoD, JCS, DNI, etc.), I've never run across a true military theorist. They don't exist in the 2 m plus person bureaucracy, despite trillions in spending based on those theories. Go figure?!? It's like building a Large Hadron Collidor without a physicist.

Well, that arms race is starting to bite us back, but not in the way our lazy national security strategists expected. There's a pretty good article in Vanity Fair about cyberwarfare and Iran by Michael Joseph Gross that details how.

It starts with a nice kick at the start, like Brave New War (on its fifth printing), but for cyberware:

The data on three-quarters of the machines on the main computer network of Saudi aramco had been destroyed. Hackers who identified themselves as Islamic and called themselves the Cutting Sword of Justice executed a full wipe of the hard drives of 30,000 aramco personal computers. For good measure, as a kind of calling card, the hackers lit up the screen of each machine they wiped with a single image, of an American flag on fire.

As you can see, if you like my stuff, it's worth the click to read the entire thing. Here's one of the payoffs:

In the U.S., the escalating bug-and-exploit trade has created a strange relationship between government and industry. The U.S. government now spends significant amounts of time and money developing or acquiring the ability to exploit weaknesses in the products of some of America’s own leading technology companies, such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In other words: to sabotage American enemies, the U.S. is, in a sense, sabotaging its own companies.

Here's another one from a bug developer:

“You don’t have to be a nation-state to do this,” he says. “You just have to be really smart.”

BTW: the lead graphic is close to an article I did for Wired in 2007, When Bots Attack. From the Vanity Fair article:

It reminded me of this graphic from my Wired article that I thought you would enjoy:

2013/06/18

Stephen E. Arnold: Open Source Security a Corporate Concern

Commerce

Open Source Security Remains Corporate Concern

Posted: 22 May 2013 06:15 AM PDT

When it comes to enterprise information technology concerns, security is usually at the top of the list. Some say that using open source software leaves an organization more susceptible to security risks, while others argue just the opposite. This very debate continues in the Java World article, “Survey: Control and Security of Corporate Open Source Projects Proves Difficult.”

The article hones in a particular component of the security issue, whether or not an organization utilizes an open source policy. Results were compiled through a survey:

“When the 3,500 survey respondents were asked what are the biggest challenges in their company’s open-source policy, the main reasons listed were ‘no enforcement,’ ‘it slows down development’ and ‘we find out about problems too late in the process.’ When asked who in the organization has primary responsibility for open-source policy and governance, 36 percent ascribed that role to ‘application-development management,’ 14 percent to ‘IT operations,’ 16 percent to legal, 13 percent to an open-source committee or department, 7 percent to security, 7 percent to risk and compliance and 7 percent to ‘other.’”

So of the organizations that do utilize an open source policy, many acknowledge little enforcement paltry oversight. These concerns are real. However, an organization may benefit from a compromise, a value-added open source software option. A solution like LucidWorks is fully packaged and supported; not just free-roaming bits of code to be grabbed from the free web. Users and managers can feel more confident in LucidWorks because it is packaged in a way that is easier for them to understand. Most importantly, LucidWorks has long-term industry support and positive track record.

Emily Rae Aldridge, May 24, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search

2013/06/162014/04/08

Michael Scherer: The Geeks Who Leak — Robert Steele Comments

Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement, Military

The Geeks Who Leak

The President calls them a threat to national security. the Internet calls them heroes. A new wave of hacktivists is changing the way we handle secrets.

By Michael Scherer

Time, June 24, 2013, Pg. 22

The 21st century mole demands no payments for his secrets. He sees himself instead as an idealist, a believer in individual sovereignty and freedom from tyranny. Chinese and Russian spooks will not tempt him. Rather, it's the bits and bytes of an online political philosophy that attract his imagination, a hacker mentality founded on message boards in the 1980s, honed in chat rooms in the '90s and matured in recent online neighborhoods like Reddit and 4chan. He believes above all that information wants to be free, that privacy is sacred and that he has a responsibility to defend both ideas.

Continue reading “Michael Scherer: The Geeks Who Leak — Robert Steele Comments”