07 Other Atrocities – Page 508 – Public Intelligence Blog

Warrantless-Wiretap Win Nets Victims a Paltry $40K

WIRED December 21, 2010

David Kravets

A federal judge on Tuesday awarded $20,400 each to two American lawyers
illegally wiretapped by the George W. Bush administration, and granted
their counsel $2.5 million for the costs litigating the case for more than
four years.

It was the first and likely only lawsuit in which there was a ruling
against the former administration’s secret National Security Agency
surveillance program adopted in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror
attacks.

Read rest of article….

2010/12/22

Journal: Denial of Service Attacks on Humanitarian Sites

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Computer/online security, Gift Intelligence, IO Multinational, Non-Governmental

berto small — Berto Jongman Recommends...

DDoS Attacks Continue to Plague Human Rights Sites

By: Chloe Albanesius

PC Magazine, 12.22.2010

WikiLeaks and Operation Payback have put distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in the news recently, but independent media and human rights Web sites have been battling these attacks on a consistent basis with no easy solution in sight, according to a Wednesday study.

While major sites can fend off a DDoS or recover quickly, smaller sites can be crippled by these attacks, which often hit in conjunction with other attacks like filtering, intrusions, and defacements, according to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

“DDoS is an increasingly common Internet phenomenon capable of silencing Internet speech, usually for a brief interval but occasionally for longer,” the report said. “Our report offers advice to independent media and human rights sites likely to be targeted by DDoS but comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that there is no easy solution to these attacks for many of these sites, particularly for attacks that exhaust network bandwidth.”

The report's authors suggest that DDoS attacks will become more common amidst news about similar WikiLeaks and Operation Payback attacks. Even before that, however, DDoS attacks on independent media and human rights sites were quite common during the last year, happening even outside of major events like elections, protests, and military operations.

These sites are being hit with two types of DDoS: application and network. Application attacks exhaust local server resources and can usually be rectified with the help of a skilled system admin. Network attacks, however, exhaust network bandwidth and can usually only be fixed with the (costly) help of a hosting provider.

Read rest of article….

2010/12/222010/12/22

Journal: CIA WikiLeaks Task Force (aka WTF, One Down From REMF)

07 Other Atrocities, Computer/online security, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), IO Sense-Making, IO Technologies, Officers Call, Policies

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius Recommends

CIA launches task force to assess impact of U.S. cables' exposure by WikiLeaks

By Greg Miller Wednesday, December 22, 2010; 12:24 AM

The CIA has launched a task force to assess the impact of the exposure of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and military files by WikiLeaks.

Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it's mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: W.T.F.

The irreverence is perhaps understandable for an agency that has been relatively unscathed by WikiLeaks. Only a handful of CIA files have surfaced on the WikiLeaks Web site, and records from other agencies posted online reveal remarkably little about CIA employees or operations.

Read full article….

Very cool map and other graphics

Phi Beta Iota: We understand that CIA used to handle Department of State Embassy traffic, and the ugly little fact associated with WikiLeaks, that the Department of Defense is now handling Department of State traffic, has been buried. The DoD “Grid” is hosed and is never going to be fixed absent a a clean sheet break from the legacy and the contractors. GAO is interested in doing an update to its first two damning indictments of DoD's Swiss Cheese Communications environment, it just needs one Member of Congress to ask for it….

Afterthought: CIA had a chance in 1986, under Bill Donnelly (DDA), Ken Weslick (C/DO/IMS), and Robert Steele (PM Project George (Smiley)), in combination with the superb work of Gordon Oehler, Dennis McCormick, and Diane Webb in in DI/OSWR, to get it right. They were specifically told at the highest levels that they needed to do two things: change the paradigm from “once in, everything visible” to “need to know tracking and accountablity,” and implement the “reverse hit” strategy that disclosed need to know hits to the owner of the clandestine or covert information rather than the seeker. With Bill Casey's death CIA lost whatever chance it had of entering the 21st Century moderately coherent. We have wasted close to a quarter century because DoD had a death drip on ADA and refused to contemplate object-oriented programming or open source software for decades beyond ADA's natural death, and OMB gave up the concept of inter-agency interoperability and secure information-sharing in the 1980's. At the same time, the National Information Infrastructure was all theater and no security. Marty Harris meant well, but he simply would not focus on fundamentals such as code-level security, education, and strict classification limitations.

2006 General Accountability Office (GAO) Defense Acquisitions DoD Management Approach and Processes Not Well-Suited to Support Development of Global Information Grid

2004 General Accountability Office (GAO) Report: Defense Acquisitiions: The Global Information Grid and Challenges Facing Its Implementation

Journal: Pentagon Flails in Defending Cyberspace

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

2010/12/22

Journal: Israel Persists on Polard–an Information Operations (IO) Case Study

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Sense-Making, Military, Officers Call

In Wash Post article on CIA's Wikileaks TF, passed u/s/c, the following quote closes the piece, “the former high-ranking CIA officer said. “Nobody could carry out enough paper to do what WikiLeaks has done.”” Not sure that's true. Open source reporting not long after his trial indicated that Pollard hand carried tremendous volumes of paper documents out of his office to the Israelis; if memory serves, it amounted to hundreds of cubic feet. Volume was so great that the Israelis set up a safesite equipped with a copying machine of significant capability so that they could quickly copy Pollard's offerings and let him carry them back to the office.

New York Times December 22, 2010 Pg. 6

Israel Plans Public Appeal To Ask U.S. To Free A Spy

By Isabel Kershner

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel will officially and publicly appeal to President Obama in the coming days for the release of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the American serving a life term in a North Carolina prison for spying for Israel, Mr. Netanyahu’s office announced Tuesday.

Read rest of article that makes clear Israel believes it can win on this perfidious demand.

Phi Beta Iota: The facts are clear. Pollard approached other governments before he approached Israel. His elevation into a national hero to be brought home to accolades is perfectly consistent with what every Jewish male cutting a swath through Christian girls accepts as his mantra: “Chiksas don't count.” Evidently the crew and families of the USS Liberty don't count either. We strongly support the US Intelligence Community's view that Pollard is a traitor and should die in prison. We also strongly support the need to for a comprehensive review of how every US taxpayer dollar is spent in the Middle East, with the objective of ending military support to dictators and financial support to Israel. Creating a regional water and educational trust makes more sense to us. At the same time, the fact is that at least three quarters of what we have classified should not be classified, and we are out of touch with unclassified reality across all ten high-level threats. We need to heal ourselves before we attempt to heal others, Pollard is an excellent case study of how out of touch both Israel and the White House are with reality.

2010/12/212010/12/21

Undersea Cables: The Achilles Heel of our Economies

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Computer/online security

Franz-Stefan Gady

Foreign policy analyst, EastWest Institute

Huffington Post, Posted: December 21, 2010 02:20 PM

In December 2008 within milliseconds, Egypt lost 70 percent of its connection to the outside Internet. In far away India, 50 to 60 percent of online connectivity similarly was lost. In Pakistan, 12 million people were knocked offline suddenly, and in Saudi Arabia, 4.7 million were unable to connect to the Internet. The economic costs of this 24-hour outage: approximately 64 million dollars.

The recent revelations by WikiLeaks of U.S. national security interests in critical infrastructure vulnerabilities mention the often neglected underpinning of the current connectivity revolution sweeping the planet–undersea cables. In December 2008, four undersea cables were cut simultaneously, affecting Internet users all over the world. While cable cuts happen from time to time nothing, the scope of the cuts illustrate the exposure of our economies to disruption once we lose connectivity.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: In 1990 Peter Black published a “top ten” hit list for cyber-space in WIRED Magazine, and the conventionals went nuts. Shortly thereafter Winn Schwartau testified to Congress on the possibilities of an electronic Pearl Harbor, and Robert Steele added to the conventional hysteria by pointing out that absent “action this day,” there would indeed be a day off reckoning in the future. Now here's the key bit (not byte): Information Operations (IO) is mostly about information access, assurance, and analysis. It's about ensuring that the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide Act) Loop for all deciders, all action officers, all front-line mission specialists, is as good as it can get. It's about culture, education, leadership, mentoring. A huge part of that lies in addressing human errors & omissions, fully 50% of the data or capability loss; and in the design of the over-all global, national, state, and local information architectures. Redundancy, for example–but we still have companies putting BOTH cables in the same ditch where they can be cut by ONE swipe of a backhoe…. The underwater cables (not just in the ocean but in inland waters as well) have been pointed out as the Achilles heel since at least 1990, 20 years ago. One wonders what it will take …..

See Also:

Journal: Weaponizing Web 2.0

Journal: Information Security Seven Guiding Principles

1994 Sounding the Alarm on Cyber-Security

Review: INFORMATION WARFARE–Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway

Review: Terminal Compromise

2010/12/212010/12/21

Reference: Private Military Corporations–A Non-State Actor-Nuclear Terror Nexus?

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

Private Military Corporations: A Non-State Actor-Nuclear Terror Nexus?

Robert L. Brown
Temple University

August 16, 2010

Abstract:

The risk of nuclear terrorism is hyped by some as possible and high consequence (Allison 2006) while others dismiss the strategy as too difficult and too risky for terrorist organizations (Jenkins 2008). However, analysts have no data from which to directly analyze the probability of terrorist acquisition and use. One methodological solution is to extend the range analysis to include analogous cases: private military corporations (PMCs) are one class of non-state actors (NSAs) who may possess the capacity and autonomy to pose a risk of nuclear terrorism for their state masters. I find that the while the technical and military capabilities of PMCs may be greater than those of terrorist organizations with respect to nuclear weapon construction or delivery, they are still be insufficient (and PMCs must also somehow acquire fissile materials). Also, PMCs benefit from agency slack, as demonstrated by Blackwater’s performance in Iraq, but this autonomy does not appear sufficient to carry out an illicit nuclear plot. Therefore, PMCs may be more capable than most terrorist organizations if they sought to acquire nuclear weapons but they are still unlikely to succeed.

Keywords: Nuclear Weapons, Terrorism, Private Military Corporations, Blackwater, Xe

Working Paper Series
Brown, Robert L., Private Military Corporations: A Non-State Actor-Nuclear Terror Nexus? (August 16, 2010). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1659785

See Also:

David Isenberg, Jack Bauer Beats Blackwater, Huffington Post 20 december 2010

Journal: Near-Term Demise of Private Military Contractors

2010/12/202010/12/20

Journal: Corporate Hijacking of Cyber-Space

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Mobile, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Privacy, Reform, Standards, Strategy, Technologies

The Wall Street Journal

OPINION
DECEMBER 19, 2010

The FCC's Threat to Internet Freedom

‘Net neutrality' sounds nice, but the Web is working fine now. The new rules will inhibit investment, deter innovation and create a billable-hours bonanza for lawyers.

By ROBERT M. MCDOWELL WS

Tomorrow morning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will mark the winter solstice by taking an unprecedented step to expand government's reach into the Internet by attempting to regulate its inner workings. In doing so, the agency will circumvent Congress and disregard a recent court ruling.

How did the FCC get here?

Read entire article….

Phi Beta Iota: The public is now much more aware that neither of the two political parties can be trusted, and that trust for any given government element, policy, or point of view is contingent on a much deeper examination of bias and motive than many would wish. There are two sides to this issue, irrespective of the competency and good faith of government: on the one side are the corporations, including Google and Verizon, that wish to hijack cyber-space and claim that they own it. This will allow them to charge premium prices for access to high-speed services. On the other are those whose taxes paid for the creation of the Internet in the first place, the US taxpayer–they see the vital importance of open spectrum, open source software, and open source intelligence as the tri-fecta of cyber-freedom. At OSS '92 John Perry Barlow said that the Internet interprets censorship as an outage, and routes around it. Our view is that the corporations will succeed in hijacking cyberspace in the near term, but in the mid-term and beyond OpenBTS and other bottom-up public innovation solutions will restore the noosphere to its rightful owners, the human minds that comprise the World Brain.

Category: 07 Other Atrocities

Journal: Warrantless Wiretap Judgment Against USG