Some background on this old report…..this conference has been going on for some time, fluctuates between Garmisch and Moscow…The US has offered to host it but has been consistently turned down. China showed up two years ago and the next conference (2012) is scheduled to be in Beijing…..if the US cannot, with is efforts in technological development, host a cyber conference it is indicative of what the rest of the world thinks of us….
As Washington airs plans for a new “cyber command,” a top Russian official discusses the threat of cyberweapons.
Phi Beta Iota: The lack of intelligence and integrity in the US Government is chillingly deep, especially within the US secret intelligence, and nowhere more irresponsible than within the National Security Agency/US Cyber-Command – both oxymorons. The Chinese are all over NSA and Cyber is not a Command.
The declines in US Federal prosecutions for financial fraud that began under G.W. Bush have followed that down trend that in the first three years of the Obama Administration. That might make more sense if Obama had not been elected as a reform president in response to one of the greatest financial frauds in American history.
Kiss My Shiny Ass....
In the first three years of the Obama Administration, federal prosecutions have been running at new highs. Over half of the prosecutions involve illegal immigration. Another 17% are drug related.
Illegal immigrants and drug dealers have the reputation for being notoriously cheap in providing campaign contributions.
Prosecutions for financial fraud however have dropped to the lowest levels in over 20 years.
Phi Beta Iota: When Goldman Sachs continues to “own” the Secretary of the Treasury, has its own lobbyist in the office of the National Security Advisor to the President, and can count on a the Fed Chairman–as always, both Jewish and ensnarled in conflict of interest relationships with the major private banks, we can only conclude that Bush-Obama are one.
Within human social and economic systems, pathogenic behavior is spreading. This is particularly true among powerful, successful, and wealthy people (finance, economics, politics, etc.) in the developed world. What specifically do I mean by pathogenic? An ever greater number of these people are adopting behaviors that are actively hostile to the human systems we rely upon. They actually think it is OK to put these systems at risk for personal benefit. This is very dangerous. Given the massive amounts of network, technological, and financial leverage that's currently available to these people, even a single bad actor can wreak global havoc like never before (as in, they could cause an economic collapse that's so severe that it could kill more people than every war we've ever had to date, combined).
So, why is this happening and how can we prevent it? This has been a tough section of the book I'm currently writing. Fortunately, I think I'm starting to unravel it. Here we go. In order to understand why some bad actors are willing to do grievous harm to the complex systems they rely upon, we need to visit the cutting edge of microbiology. Let's start that exploration with a look at an amazing article by Brett Finlay in the Scientific American called, “Stopping Infections: The Art of Bacteriological Warfare.”
The rise of the web and Google means that spies in the UK need to work really hard to produce genuinely secret intelligence, former director of the country's intelligence agency has said.
Former chief of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Sir David Pepper pointed out that “the Google effect” of so much information being readily available online had “very substantially” raised the “threshold for producing intelligence” for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.
“Nobody wants the easy stuff anymore and there is no point spending effort and money collecting it,” the Telegraph quoted Sir David, as saying.
“Many of the sort of things for which (officials) once would have turned to the intelligence agencies are now readily available to them online,” he added.
Sir David said that with the help of technologies like Google Maps and Streeview anyone could now see photographic detail of far away countries, which hitherto would have been available only through secret and highly sophisticated national satellites.
“Intelligence producers have had to become very sensitive to this phenomenon and very careful not to put effort into producing intelligence that purports to be secret which is in fact not secret at all,” he added.
Phi Beta Iota: Evidently the British have not yet realized that intelligence is about decision-support outputs rather than secret inputs, but at least they have a clue with respect to open sources. In another related article, AFIO points to Congress asking the US secret intelligence community to focus on domestic targets–marijuana growing on federal lands is evidently a major threat to national security, along with the majority of the US population that supports its legalization. Evidently corruption and idiocy in Congress complement each other. Meanwhile, CIA–with the explicit abdication of moral or intellectual leadership from the DNI– fights the Open Source Agency with every dirty trick it can muster including outright lies to Congress and the media. All this means is that the US Government will remain very expensively stupid, while other countries advance the M4IS aspect of the craft of intelligence.
This article was originally published by TomDispatch.
In every aspect of human existence, change is a constant. Yet change that actually matters occurs only rarely. Even then, except in retrospect, genuinely transformative change is difficult to identify. By attributing cosmic significance to every novelty and declaring every unexpected event a revolution, self-assigned interpreters of the contemporary scene — politicians and pundits above all — exacerbate the problem of distinguishing between the trivial and the non-trivial.
Phi Beta Iota: This is one of Bacevich's best pieces. He frames and then itemizes four converging vectors: the collapse of the freedom agenda; the Great Recession; the Arab Spring; and Europe's demise, this time without an American rescue being possible. He quite adroitly illuminates the idiocy, ideology, and insipidness of all of the Republican candidates, while dismissing the incumbent in passing. What he does NOT cover is the depth of the corruption that created these four vectors, or the deep white-hot anger among the 99% that are now awake to the treason committed by their elected officials–not just in the USA, but across the Western world less the Nordics and The Netherlands.
