Corruption – Page 647 – Public Intelligence Blog

Huh?

How a single DMCA notice took down 1.45 million education blogs

Web hosting firm ServerBeach recently received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violation notice from Pearson, the well-known educational publishing company. The notice pertained to Edublogs, which hosts 1.45 million education-related blogs with ServerBeach, and it focused on a single Edublogs page from 2007 that contained a questionnaire copyrighted by Pearson. ServerBeach informed Edublogs about the alleged violation, and Edublogs says it quickly took down the allegedly infringing content.

Instead of calling the matter settled, though, ServerBeach took Edublogs' servers offline last Wednesday, temporarily shutting off all 1.45 million blogs, according to Edublogs. ServerBeach confirms taking all of the Edublogs offline, telling Ars that the outage lasted for “roughly 60 minutes before we brought them back online and confirmed their compliance with the DMCA takedown request.”

As you might expect, ServerBeach and Edublogs have slightly different accounts of how it all happened.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The criminal insanity of how ServerBeach handled this matter should be broadcast widely. We certainly would not trust any company so cavalier, so utterly oblivious to the unwarranted cost of their unbirdled actions. This specific instance should be the poster child for why an Autonomous Internet is needed with multiple backups such that no one unprincipled moron can wreak such havoc. ServerBeach – posterchild for how not to do business.

2012/10/152012/10/15

David Isenberg: Secret Contracting – Totally Beyond the Reach of Inspectors-General

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude

The use of private contractors is not just for the Pentagon or the State Department. It is also for that frequently crashing collection of agencies euphemistically known as the intelligence community (IC).

I have written previously on this but let's consider some of the costs of using contractors in the IC. The following is taken from a paper, “‘We Can't Spy … If We Can't Buy!': The Privatization of Intelligence and the Limits of Outsourcing ‘Inherently Governmental Functions” by Simon Chesterman of the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law, presented at a meeting of the International Studies Association in San Diego back in April. Chesterman is author of the book One Nation Under Surveillance: A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom Without Sacrificing Liberty, published last year.

Just like old Pentagon contractors, IC contractors can go way over budget. One example was the “National Security Agency's contract with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to modernize its ability to sift vast amounts of electronic information with a proposed system known as ‘Trailblazer,'” according to Chesterman's work.

“Between 2002 and 2005, the project's $280 million budget ballooned to over $1 billion and was later described as a ‘complete and abject failure'. Perhaps the most spectacular such failure was Boeing's Future Imagery Architecture, a 1999 contract with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to design a new generation of spy satellites. It was finally cancelled in 2005 after approximately ten billion dollars had been spent. Nevertheless the pool of potential contractors — in particular given the requirement for security clearances — remains small. Thus when the NSA sought a replacement to the failed Trailblazer, the contractor it retained to develop the new programme ExecuteLocus was SAIC.”

Continue reading “David Isenberg: Secret Contracting – Totally Beyond the Reach of Inspectors-General”

2012/10/13

Winslow Wheeler: Facts on US Military “Superiority”

Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

WinslowWheeler Cropped — Winslow Wheeler

Are US armed forces “the best in the world”? What makes you think so?

Not All That It Can Be

The myth of American military superiority.

WINSLOW WHEELER

Foreign Policy | OCTOBER 11, 2012

EXTRACT:

We also heard a lot of bombast after the first war with Iraq, Operation Desert Storm in 1991; then, the technologists declared a “revolution in military affairs.” The Government Accountability Office (GAO) spent two years looking at that: The air campaign should more accurately be characterized as bombing a tethered goat led by a military jackass, and even then, the air campaign did not live up to the hype. The high-cost “silver bullet” of the war, the F-117 stealth light bomber, badly underperformed its puffery. For example, in contrast to claims that “alone and unafraid” it destroyed Saddam's air defense system in the first hours of the first night, the F-117s actually had help from 167 non-stealthy aircraft and were confirmed by the Defense Intelligence Agency's bomb-damage assessments to have effectively destroyed only two of the 15 air defense targets assigned to them that first night. Overall, the GAO found that effectiveness did not correlate with cost and that on many dimensions the ultralow-cost A-10 close-combat attack aircraft was the top performer.

Full article below the line.

Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: Facts on US Military “Superiority””

2012/10/102012/10/12

Richard Wright: Jim Clapper Speaks to Excessive Dependence on Technical Intelligence, and the Evident Non-Existence of Human Intelligence in the Middle East

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, Military

Escaping Excessive Dependence on Technical Intelligence

Speaking at the GEOINT 2012 Symposium (09 October), Director of National Intelligence (DNI) General James Clapper (USAF ret.) argued that the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other U.S. citizens in Benghazi, Libya caught the U.S. by surprise because the attacks did not “emit or discuss their behavior” beforehand. Colin Clark, editor in chief at AOL Defense has interpreted this to mean the attackers “apparently maintained web, cell, and radio silence” prior to the attack, giving the U.S. no prior warning.

If Clark’s interpretation is correct, the only conclusion that can be reached is that saving for technical intelligence (Signals Intelligence (SIGINT)) there is no serious U.S. effort to maintain contact with and develop an understanding of the various groups involved in the so-called Arab Spring anywhere. CIA apparently has not seen fit to even establish its now usual liaison relationship with the official Libyan National Security Establishment, let alone build up contacts with the various militias (and tribal leaders) who appear to dominate so much of Libya. It is of course possible that CIA was tracking the perpetrators of this attack as an al Qaeda affiliate but was unaware of its intentions to attack embassy compound but this seems improbable.

Continue reading “Richard Wright: Jim Clapper Speaks to Excessive Dependence on Technical Intelligence, and the Evident Non-Existence of Human Intelligence in the Middle East”

2012/10/102012/10/10

Greg Palast: Nine Ways the GOP Will Steal the 2012 Elections

Communities of Practice, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Knowledge

Greg Palast on How the GOP Is Planning to Steal the 2012 Election

EXTRACT:

In all, 5,901,814 legitimate votes and voters were tossed out of the count in 2008. In '12 it will be worse. Way worse.

THE BOOK: Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps

The ‘9 Easy Steps'

1 Purging is the use by partisan election officials of computer databases that identify voter characteristics (race, ethnicity, residence location, etc) to remove from registration rolls names of persons likely to be sympathetic to the “wrong” political party. Plausible pretexts for the removals are sometimes offered, but often not. Purging is what Katherine Harris did to tens of thousands of Florida voters in 2000, claiming the mostly black voters were felons when they were not.

2 Caging is the mailing of do-not-forward, first-class letters to selected groups and using letters returned as ‘evidence' that voters' listed addresses are fraudulent. Partisan election officials can then strike the voters' names from registration rolls and/or throw out their mail-in ballots. This can happen en masse to military people serving overseas and voting absentee from their home addresses. Likewise to students away at school, and even to voters whose addresses on registration rolls contain fatal typos made, accidentally of course, by election data entry workers.

3 Spoiling is accomplished in a variety of ways. A famous one is to put punched-card voting setups in districts tending to the “wrong” party. Then disqualify all votes where the voter did not manage to punch the hole all the way through, as in the infamous “hanging chads” in Florida in 2000.

Continue reading “Greg Palast: Nine Ways the GOP Will Steal the 2012 Elections”

2012/10/082012/10/08

Chuck Spinney: Questions Not Asked in Presidential Debates

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Military

National Insecurity Questions That Won’t Be Asked in the Presidential Debates

How Bad Will Things Get in Afghanistan?

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY.

Counterpunch, October 08, 2012

For reasons that were quite clear well before the Afghan “surge” began (see here and here), America’s Afghan adventure is now ending without achieving its goals. The prospects for a civil life in Afghanistan are likely to become even more remote than they were before we intervened. Indeed, some experts think the ground work has been laid for an even more destructive civil war than that which occurred after the Soviets left Afghanistan with their tail between their legs in 1989. Only time will tell how bad things will be, but it is a virtual certainty that events will be ugly and murderous.

One would expect a healthy accountable democratic government, intent on learning from its errors, would be inclined to seek an understanding of how it got itself into such a mess.

For example, will there be soul searching lessons-learned exercise by a military that repeated most of the strategic and tactical blunders it made in Vietnam? To wit: it dumbed down strategy into a mindless attrition strategy driven by body counts and assassinations in the name of winning hearts and minds. It substituted high-cost contractor-intensive technologies for low-cost tactical smarts in a guerrilla war. It over-relied on air power and killing from a safe distance. It allowed its reactive obsessions with force protection to the displace tactical initiative of small unit commanders. And perhaps most decisively, it relied on a fatally flawed grand strategy to quickly create a huge, materiel-intensive, indigenous army out of whole cloth, trained and equipped in the US military’s image. Don’t expect to hear any questions about these issues in the Presidential debates. And don’t expect to see any serious introspection by a military – industrial – congressional complex (MICC) intent on perpetuating its lucrative business-as-usual.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Questions Not Asked in Presidential Debates”

2012/10/08

Chuck Spinney: Predictable Meltdown in Afghanistan – Strategic Decrepitude and Lack of Integrity Go Hand in Hand

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, Lessons, Military, Officers Call

The below BBC report, Afghanistan's ‘green on blue' collapse of trust, places the fatal flaw in the McChrystal plan used by Mr. Obama to justify the Afghan surge in 2010 — namely General McChrystal's failure to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the plan to rapidly build up the Afghan Army/police — into sharp relief.

This flaw was unconscionable for at least two reasons:

First, Obama's surge was premised on achieving quick results that would enable a rapid withdrawal of the “surge” force. That withdrawal that has now take place, despite the fact the surge did not achieve its desired result, namely weakening the Taliban to a level where it would be forced to parley on our terms.

Second, our disastrous experience with South Vietnamese army should have taught the American military the fallacy of rapidly building up a huge army, cut out of whole cloth, in America's own high-cost, logistics-intensive image. Armies — at least successful ones — take time to build and must be compatible with the culture from which they emanate.

That this fatal flaw was easy to see well before the fact. For example, I wrote about it here, here, here, and here in 2009 and early 2010, before the surge took effect — and I was not alone.

This grotesque oversight proves the post-Vietnam reforms touted by the US military and the Reagan Administration (which chose to throw money at the problem) were entirely cosmetic and did not get to the roots of the malaise that led to our defeat in Vietnam, notwithstanding the parades, yellow ribbons, and juvenile braggadocio that accompanied our rout of Saddam's tin pot army in 1991. Kosovo (for reasons explained in Domestic Roots of Perpetual War), the 2nd Iraq War (the existence of which gave made a lie of our claim of a decisive victory in 1991), and now our clear defeat in Afghanistan are or ought to be lessons to the contrary. They certainly would be treated as such in a healthy society that endeavors to correct its errors instead of compounding them by sweeping them under a rug.

Category: Corruption

Mini-Me: Web Hosting Firm ServerBeach Cannot Be Trusted…