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Published on Friday, October 8, 2010 by Robert Reich's Blog

The Secret Big-Money Takeover of America

by Robert Reich

Not only is income and wealth in America more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years, but those hands are buying our democracy as never before – and they’re doing it behind closed doors.

Hundreds of millions of secret dollars are pouring into congressional and state races in this election cycle. The Koch brothers (whose personal fortunes grew by $5 billion last year) appear to be behind some of it, Karl Rove has rounded up other multi-millionaires to fund right-wing candidates, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is funneling corporate dollars from around the world into congressional races, and Rupert Murdoch is evidently spending heavily.

No one knows for sure where this flood of money is coming from because it’s all secret.

Read the entire article….

Phi Beta Iota: The FACTS are that Al Gore took the bribe offer delivered by Warren Christopher to roll over and play dead on the Florida high crimes and misdemeanors, and then Barack Obama took the bribe to receive $300 million still unaccounted for dollars in order to “play” President. What is happening right now is–we hope–the last act in the theater of democracy. It is time to flush both criminally irresponsible parties down the toilet, carry out Electoral Reform, and get back to being a Republic Of, By, and For We the People–respecting the Constitution and if necessary demanding the wholesale resignation of the Supreme Court Justices that confirmed corporate personality.

Review: Selling Out

Review: Grand Illusion–The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

Review: Running on Empty–How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It (Paperback)

2008 ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig

Review: Threshold–The Crisis of Western Culture

Review: Shooting the Truth–The Rise of American Political Documentaries

Review DVD: The AMERICAN Ruling Class

Review: Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth

2010/10/12

Journal: Desecration of American Flag in Phoenix

07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Secrets

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius Recommends

Protesters desecrate American flag in Phoenix

Posted: Aug 04, 2010 10:57 PM EDT <em>Wednesday, August 4, 2010 10:57 PM EST</em> Updated: Aug 12, 2010 4:36 PM EDT <em>Thursday, August 12, 2010 4:36 PM EST</em>

KOLD News 13 Videos (from August)

PHOENIX, AZ (KOLD) – New video has surfaced from last week's SB-1070 protest that brought people to Phoenix from across the country, including immigrant-rights activists bused in from California.

The video shows those activists desecrating the American flag. They used spray paint to write, “deport Arpaio” and “impeach Brewer.”

There's also a toilet seat on the stars. They displayed the desecrated U.S. Flag and Arizona flag while a man sang the national anthem.

Below the line: Suspected “Urban Myth” email chain mail with photo that is now circulating among US troops. Note that is has taken two months for this to get up to speed. We would not be surprised to find the Koch Brothers behind this as part of their Tea Party mobilization and “anonymous” Information Operations campaign toward the public.

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2010/10/092010/10/09

Journal: Who Controls (and Secures) the Internet?

10 Security, Computer/online security, Cyberscams, malware, spam, IO Secrets, Military, Officers Call

Who controls the internet?

By Misha Glenny

Published: October 8 2010 23:40 | Last updated: October 8 2010 23:40

Squared-jawed, with four stars decorating each shoulder, General Keith Alexander looks like a character straight out of an old American war movie. But his old-fashioned appearance belies the fact that the general has a new job that is so 21st-century it could have been dreamed up by a computer games designer. Alexander is the first boss of USCybercom, the United States Cyber Command, in charge of the Pentagon’s sprawling cyber networks and tasked with battling unknown enemies in a virtual world.

Last year, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared cyberspace to be the “fifth domain” of military operations, alongside land, sea, air and space. It is the first man-made military domain, requiring an entirely new Pentagon command. That went fully operational a week ago, marking a new chapter in the history of both warfare and the world wide web.

In his confirmation hearing, General Alexander sounded the alarm, declaring that the Pentagon’s computer systems “are probed 250,000 times an hour, up to six million per day”, and that among those attempting to break in were “more than 140 foreign spy organisations trying to infiltrate US networks”. Congress was left with a dark prophecy ringing in its ears: “It’s only a small step from disrupting to destroying parts of the network.”

Phi Beta Iota: Of the $12 billion a year to be spent, roughly 90% if not more will be spent on “vapor-ware.” To understand the gap between the 67 people who actually know what needs to be done, and the hundreds of thousands who will be employed in cyber-theater (pun intended), see below. There are multiple sucking chest wounds in this enterprise, the two largest are a) the DoD Grid is a mess with no integrity in the fullest sense of the word, trying to “secure” that mess is next to impossible; and b) the only way to make Pentagon information operations safe is to make ALL operations safe, but this is not how the US Government and especially not how the Pentagon thinks–hence, another decade will be wasted. The upside is that OpenBTS and all sorts of other opens are emergent, and we may all end up going to Web 4.0 while the Pentagon stays at Web 2.0.

See Also:

2010: OPINION–America’s Cyber Scam

1994 Sounding the Alarm on Cyber-Security

Continue reading “Journal: Who Controls (and Secures) the Internet?”

2010/09/202010/09/20

Journal: Norwegians Smack Down Quantum Crypto

08 Wild Cards, Government, IO Secrets, Officers Call

Quantum Cryptography Breached With Lasers

Using lasers to blind quantum cryptography photon detectors, Norwegian computer scientists were able to obtain a copy of a secure key without leaving any trace of their presence.

By Mathew J. Schwartz
InformationWeek
September 8, 2010 07:00 AM

Norwegian computer scientists have perfected a laser-based attack against quantum cryptography systems that allows them to eavesdrop on communications without revealing their presence.

Phi Beta Iota: Clever Norwegians. We have zero sympathy. The US secret community, at $75 billion a year and climbin, is beyond waste, fraud, and abuse and heavily into betrayal of the public trust as well as high crimes and misdemeanors. It should be scaled back to $25 billion or less and the savings redirected to education & research. The reality is that what the US taxpayer–and all other citizens everywhere need–are transparent governments that create trust, enjoy legitimacy, and can deliver value.

2010/09/122010/09/12

Journal: Who, Exactly, is Behind Burning Koran?

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Secrets, Media

TIME? or CIA?

Viewpoint

Christianophobia: The Lesson of Terry Jones

by Tim Padgett, Friday, September 10, 2011

Pastor Terry Jones, right, of the Dove World Outreach Center speaks to the media in Gainesville, Fla., as Imam Muhammad Musri of the Islamic Society of Central Florida looks on. Phil Sandlin / AP

Even ogres can serve a purpose. The “Reverend” Terry Jones has at least shown us the ugly consequences of the Islamophobia that was this summer's political fad — by turning the tables. How does it feel to be caricatured as a nation of Koran-burning radicals? Americans were appalled to find that a solitary religious bigot and his tiny congregation of 50 pseudo Christians had hijacked our global image. We squirmed as a warped little corner of America's Judeo-Christian culture colored the entire country in the eyes of the world — the way Americans let a warped little corner of Islamic culture color all Muslims, even Muslim Americans.

Tip of the Hat to Rob Sentse at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: There are no coincidences within totalitarian corporate-controlled governments. The combination of the Christian dupe calling for the burning of the Qu'an and the manufactured theater of the Muslim mosque with CIA funding at Ground Zero are all too reminiscent of the FBI-sponsored car bombing of the World Trade Center in the 1990's, and totally consistent with what Buckminster Fuller called “White House Theater” and Noam Chomsky calls “manufacturing consent.” In light of this shallow and manipulative TIME story, the five “filters” that Chomsky and his co-author identified bear reiteration:

From Wikipedia “Propaganda Model:”

First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the “Propaganda model” views the private media as businesses interested in the sale of a product — readers and audiences — to other businesses (advertisers) rather than that of quality news to the public. Describing the media's “societal purpose”, Chomsky writes, “… the study of institutions and how they function must be scrupulously ignored, apart from fringe elements or a relatively obscure scholarly literature”.^[1] The theory postulates five general classes of “filters” that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five classes are:

Ownership of the medium
Medium's funding sources
Sourcing
Flak
Anti-communist ideology

Today anti-communism (which was nurtured in part by the CIA's importation of 100+ senior Nazis each year after the end of WWII) has been replaced by the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) and its occasional theatrics such as the “Underpants Bomber.” The tragedy is that 80% of the US public has been so dumbed down and anesthitized as to take this garbage seriously, while the 20% that “get it” are marginalized, which is of course the point of it all.

Review: Grand Illusion–The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

2008 ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Disinformation, Other Information Pathologies, & Repression

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Empire as Cancer Including Betrayal & Deceit

Worth a Look: Impeachable Offenses, Modern & Historic

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Institutionalized Ineptitude

2010/09/092010/09/09

Journal: Army Industrial-Era Network Security + Cyber-Security RECAP (Links to Past Posts)

Hacking, IO Multinational, IO Secrets, IO Sense-Making, Military, Peace Intelligence

Army Times article, second below, reports what the beginning of what I expect will be a major decline in functionality of Army computer systems. While some sort of institutional response to the alleged Wikileaks traitor, Specialist Bradley Manning, is appropriate, I don't think this is it. This is a simplistic approach, the sort of thing the KGB did and presumably the sort of the SVR continues to do.

By the way, IMHO, 91K classified documents on the Internet is not some sort of an inadvertent security violation. It's almost certainly one of the national security crimes; I think it's treason. Better to concentrate on the perpetrator — try him, convict him, and then, maybe, violate in some significant ways his Constitutional protection against “cruel and unusual punishment” as a highly visible deterrent against espionage.

NOTE: Image links to source generally as persistent link not available.

Below the line: PBI comment and cyber-security recap (34).

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2010/08/27

Journal: Pentagon Flails in Defending Cyberspace

03 Economy, 04 Education, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, IO Multinational, IO Secrets, Military, Officers Call

Beyond belief, but here it is: the “official” explanation of why we are going to waste 12 billion dollars a year on contractors without a clue (vapor-ware). There is zero return on investment here for the taxpayer, only for the contractors and Congress, neither of which will be held accountable for fraud, waste, and abuse.

September/October 2010

ESSAY

Defending a New Domain

The Pentagon's Cyberstrategy

William J. Lynn III
WILLIAM J. LYNN III is U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense.

In 2008, the U.S. Department of Defense suffered a significant compromise of its classified military computer networks. It began when an infected flash drive was inserted into a U.S. military laptop at a base in the Middle East. The flash drive's malicious computer code, placed there by a foreign intelligence agency, uploaded itself onto a network run by the U.S. Central Command. That code spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control. It was a network administrator's worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary.

Read Entire Article Below the Line.

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Category: IO Secrets

Journal: Reich Whines Because Gore & Obama Took the Bribe, Now Democrats Realize They Were Theater