Category: Ineptitude

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Jim Bamford: Elergy on Keith Alexander Pseudo-Geek

Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military
Jim Bamford
Jim Bamford

The Secret War

INFILTRATION. SABOTAGE. MAYHEM. FOR YEARS FOUR-STAR GENERAL KEITH ALEXANDER HAS BEEN BUILDING A SECRET ARMY CAPABLE OF LAUNCHING DEVASTATING CYBERATTACKS. NOW IT’S READY TO UNLEASH HELL.

James Bamford

Wired, 12 June 2013

EXTRACT

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Alexander runs the nation’s cyberwar efforts, an empire he has built over the past eight years by insisting that the US’s inherent vulnerability to digital attacks requires him to amass more and more authority over the data zipping around the globe. In his telling, the threat is so mind-bogglingly huge that the nation has little option but to eventually put the entire civilian Internet under his protection, requiring tweets and emails to pass through his filters, and putting the kill switch under the government’s forefinger. “What we see is an increasing level of activity on the networks,” he said at a recent security conference in Canada. “I am concerned that this is going to break a threshold where the private sector can no longer handle it and the government is going to have to step in.”

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Owl: Are You One of the Eight Million in the US Government’s Priority One “Neutralization” Database?

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, DHS, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement, Military
Who? Who?
Who? Who?

While the Ed Snowden story getting all the attention, another story came and went never got enough attention when it first came out, but perhaps this older story is more relevant now than when it first came out. It's the story of “Main Corp,” which was first written by Christopher Ketchum of Radar Magazine. The roots of this program go back to the 1980's. Ketchum wrote:

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect.

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NIGHTWATCH: Pakistan to US/CIA – Stop the Drones or We Will + Drone Operator on Video – “I felt like a sociopath”

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War
CIA Drones Have a 98% ERROR Rate
CIA Drones Have a 98% ERROR Rate

Pakistan: In response to two US drone attacks since taking his oath of office last week, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif issued an official statement after his first cabinet meeting. “The policy of protesting against drone strikes for public consumption, while working behind the scenes to make them happen, is not on.”

He told the cabinet that drone attacks were a violation of national sovereignty and the government “had chalked out a policy” to counter them. He said it was a matter of concern that after he took charge of the government' drone attacks were launched which was not acceptable in any way

Comment: Over the weekend, the new government summoned the US Ambassador to deliver an official protest. The statements at the cabinet meeting signify that the new government will go beyond issuing pro forma protests. Sharif has a policy in mind and changes are likely.

Sharif also ordered a 30% cut in the staff of the Prime Minister to set an example for the rest of the cabinet whom he ordered to cut 30% of non-developmental expenditures. He told the cabinet to set priorities consistent with his guidance and report back to him in two weeks on how to revive the economy. He also advised that those who fail will be replaced.

RELATED:

“I felt like a sociopath” – Drone Operator Says He Is Haunted By The 1,600 He Killed

Former drone operator says he's haunted by his part in more than 1,600 deaths

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Doug Rushkoff on CNN: Edward Snowden is a hero — uncovering the MACHINE

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement, Military
Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas Rushkoff

Editor's note: Douglas Rushkoff writes a regular column for CNN.com. He is a media theorist and the author of the new book “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now.”

(CNN) — When I was a kid, I remember a guy named Daniel Ellsberg leaking some classified documents to the New York Times about the Vietnam War called “the Pentagon Papers.”

When the whistle-blower finally stood trial for espionage, my parents weren't quite sure how to feel. But when Richard Nixon's crew was revealed to have been conducting illegal wiretaps in an effort to discredit the former intelligence contractor, well, they were outraged and decided Ellsberg was a hero. So did the judge and most of America.

I wonder whether Ed Snowden, the 29-year-old Booz Allen Hamilton employee behind last week's series of leaks about National Security Agency surveillance on the American public, will be rewarded with the same admiration. You'd think we would be even more outraged by what he uncovered than we were by the surveillance of Ellsberg. After all, it's not just one lone loose cannon being wiretapped here, it's all of us being monitored.

Douglas Rushkoff

Snowden has not uncovered a human conspiracy here but the workings of the machine itself. And it's a machine that really does require some human intervention.

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Steven Aftergood: Secret Surveillance and the Crisis of Legitimacy

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military
Steven Aftergood
Steven Aftergood

Secret Surveillance and the Crisis of Legitimacy

Intelligence, Leaks, Oversight, Secrecy

In December 1974, when a previous program of secret government surveillance was revealed by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times, the ensuing public uproar led directly to extensive congressional investigations and the creation of new mechanisms of oversight, including intelligence oversight committees in Congress and an intelligence surveillance court.

The public uproar over the latest disclosures of secret domestic surveillance by The Guardian and the Washington Post different cannot produce a precisely analogous result, because the oversight mechanisms intended to correct abuses already exist and indeed had signed off on the surveillance activities.  Those programs are “under very strict supervision by all three branches of government,” President Obama said Friday.  In some sense, the system functioned as intended.

Nevertheless, all three branches of government performed badly in this case, by misrepresenting the scope of official surveillance, misgauging public concern and evading public accountability.

Official Dissembling and Misrepresentation

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Jon Rappoport: NSA as Front for Two Israeli Companies, Narus and Verint, Specializing in Mass Surveillance & Getting Zionist Copy of Everything

08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military
Jon Rappoport
Jon Rappoport

NSA, the secret AT&T spy room, and 2 Israeli companies

Boom. Explosive revelations. The NSA is using telecom giants to spy on anybody and everybody, in a program called PRISM.

But the information is not new.

Three books have been written about the super-secret NSA, and James Bamford has written them all .

In 2008, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviewed Bamford as his latest book, The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, was being released.

Bamford explained that, in the 1990s, everything changed for NSA. Previously, they'd been able to intercept electronic communications by using big dishes to capture what was coming down to Earth from telecom satellites.

But with the shift to fiber-optic cables, NSA was shut out. So they devised new methods.

For example, they set up a secret spy room at an AT&T office in San Francisco. NSA installed new equipment that enabled them to tap into the fiber-optic cables and suck up all traffic.

How Bamford describes this, in 2008, tells you exactly where the PRISM program came from:

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