Public Intelligence Blog – Page 2177 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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Google Begs Court to Reconsider Ruling That Wi-Fi Sniffing Is Wiretapping

David Kravets

WIRED, 25 September 2013

Google is asking a federal appeals court to reconsider a recent ruling finding Google potentially liable for wiretapping when it secretly intercepted data on open Wi-Fi routers.

The Mountain View-based company said the September 10 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will create “confusion” (.pdf) about which over-the-air signals are protected by the Wiretap Act, including broadcast television.

The case concerns nearly a dozen combined lawsuits seeking damages from Google for eavesdropping on open Wi-Fi networks from its Street View mapping cars. The vehicles, which rolled through neighborhoods around the world, were equipped with Wi-Fi–sniffing hardware to record the names and MAC addresses of routers to improve Google location-specific services. But the cars also gathered snippets of content.

The search giant petitioned the San Francisco-based appeals court to reconsider its decision that allowed the case to proceed at trial — a ruling that upended Google’s defense.

Google claimed it is was legal to intercept data from unencrypted, or non-password-protected Wi-Fi networks. Google said open Wi-Fi networks are “radio communications” like AM/FM radio, citizens’ band and police and fire bands, and are “readily accessible” to the general public and exempt from the Wiretap Act — a position the appeals court rejected.

Read full article with more links.

2013/09/26

Winslow Wheeler: USAF Seeking to Kill A-10 — At What Point Does Personal Greed and Professional Idiocy Become Treason?

Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

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Yet again, the Air Force is trying to get rid of the A-10. The matter has been covered in the defense-specialized, but not the major, news media for about a week.

It comes as no real surprise to long-time observers of the A-10, but it is a very unpleasant surprise to US ground forces who have observed–all too closely–what the A-10 can do on the battlefield.

Air Force management has tried to defuse the growing controversy by fobbing off the plan as “pre-decisional,” but a briefing slide from Air Combat Command's 2015 budget plan shows that a decision has been made. Today, Defense News and others are reporting that Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) has put a hold on the nomination of Deborah James to be Secretary of the Air Force until she “gets answers” on just what the Air Force thinks it is up to.

One of the previous Air Force gambits to unload the A-10 was exposed by author Robert Coram in 2003 in the New York Times. Coram has been following the Air Force's new gambit since before it became public, and he has now written about it again. His new piece points out that the Air Force has been planning to dump the A-10 for some time by engineering things to strip out A-10 training and to push up A-10 operating costs, has tried to mask the strong preference of troops in combat for A-10 support, and has risen to a new level of willfully ignoring the painful lessons of combat.

Find Robert Coram's new commentary on the Air Force's 2013 effort to unload the A-10, “Air Force Brass Ignores War's Lessons to Wipe Out A-10s,” at the new website of the Straus Military Reform Project.

(In case the embedded link above does not work, the url for this commentary is http://www.pogo.org/our-work/straus-military-reform-project/weapons/2013/air-force-brass-ignores-wars-lessons.html.)

Coram is also the author of “Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Air of War,” which addresses the early genesis of the A-10–and of the F-16 and of the F-15.

2013/09/26

CIA’s Deadly Cultural Ignorance

Government, Idiocy

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CIA’s Deadly Cultural Ignorance

Fear of officers “going native” keeps our intelligence agencies ill-informed about Somalia, Syria, and other hotspots.

When the British ran an empire they did it the right way, if one is into imperial management. They created an entire bureaucracy, the Colonial Service, which was manned by officers who were expected to go out to foreign posts for extended periods, to learn the local language, and to acquire an understanding of the indigenous culture. The knowledge gained was invaluable, enabling John Bull to skillfully manage a polyglot empire upon which the sun never set. Understanding the interplay of local ethnicities enabled London to play off one group against another, often empowering a minority which would remain loyal to the crown because to do otherwise would be suicidal. The formula worked in places like Iraq, where the minority Sunnis, initially propped up by Britannia, held sway over the more numerous Shi’ites until the Baath regime was toppled by U.S. forces in 2003.

Continue reading “CIA’s Deadly Cultural Ignorance”

2013/09/26

Berto Jongman: Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Special Report Fixing Intelligence on Syria?

Corruption, Government

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Special report: fixing intelligence on Syria?

If there is anything to learn from the Syrian conflict, it is that in the fog of war, truth really is the first casualty. Narratives and counter-narratives of the conflict have plagued media accounts and the blogosphere ever since it erupted in the form of angry street protests over two years ago. From the White House dossier to the United Nations report, from Syrian nuns to revelations from former and active intelligence officials, the propaganda war between pro and anti-interventionists to control the paradigm through which we understand the conflict — manifesting in Bashir al-Assad’s latest call for a ceasefire — may be feeding into little-known strategic imperatives that see the Syrian people as mere pawns in a wider gambit.

Read full article.

2013/09/262013/09/26

David Swanson: Top 45 Lies in Obama’s Speech at the U.N.

01 Poverty, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 09 Terrorism, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, Peace Intelligence

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Top 45 Lies in Obama's Speech at the U.N.

1. President Obama's opening lines at the U.N. on Tuesday looked down on people who would think to settle disputes with war. Obama was disingenuously avoiding the fact that earlier this month he sought to drop missiles into a country to “send a message” but was blocked by the U.S. Congress, the U.N., the nations of the world, and popular opposition — after which Obama arrived at diplomacy as a last resort.

2. “It took the awful carnage of two world wars to shift our thinking.” Actually, it took one. The second resulted in a half-step backwards in “our thinking.” The Kellogg-Briand Pact banned all war. The U.N. Charter re-legalized wars purporting to be either defensive or U.N.-authorized.

3. “[P]eople are being lifted out of poverty,” Obama said, crediting actions by himself and others in response to the economic crash of five years ago. But downward global trends in poverty are steady and long pre-date Obama's entry into politics. And such a trend does not exist in the U.S.

42 additional lies below the line.

Continue reading “David Swanson: Top 45 Lies in Obama's Speech at the U.N.”

2013/09/26

Owl: Supreme Court Justices on Tyranny in America

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, Cultural Intelligence

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Justices Souter and O’Connor, Intelligence Agency Heads and Congressmen All Warn of Tyranny in America

Former Supreme Court Justice David Souter told University of New Hampshire School of Law that the “pervasive civic ignorance” in the U.S. could bring dictatorship:

“I don’t worry about our losing a republican government in the United States because I’m afraid of a foreign invasion. I don’t worry about it because of a coup by the military, as has happened in some other places. What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed people will not know who is responsible, and when the problems get bad enough — as they might do for example with another serious terrorist attack, as they might do with another financial meltdown — some one person will come forward and say: ‘Give me total power and I will solve this problem.’ That is how the Roman republic fell. Augustus became emperor not because he arrested the Roman senate. He became emperor because he promised that he would solve problems that were not being solved.”

2 U.S. Supreme Court Justices – And Numerous Other Top Government Officials – Warn of Dictatorship

2013/09/262013/09/26

SchwartzReport: Exploding Galazy, US Citizen Subsidies for Big Business, 6 Shocking Revelation About Private Prison Profiteering

07 Other Atrocities

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Here is a fascinating cosmological report. Something that renders human activities as minor events.

The Galaxy's Core Is About to Explode
JEFF WISE – Popular Mechanics

The next time you see some pompous businessperson or political whore, expounding on how we have to stop food assistance, or stop “coddling” poor people, remember this story. This is America's real welfare queen story.

The Average American Family Pays $6,000 a Year in Subsidies to Big Business
PAUL BUCHEIT – AlterNet (U.S.)

This is part of the New American Slavery trend. This is what happens when a public function like law enforcement and imprisonment are privatized and turned into a profit making activity. Part of this is also to put the prisoners to work, for pennies per hour. What a deal. You have people completely under your control. It's even better than the old slavery, because they can't run away, and public monie! s pay for the upkeep of the slaves. There are now more New Slaves than old slaves in the pre-Civil War South. We have 2.7 million people in prison bondage, most of them Black and Brown. It is the world's largest gulag. We have five per cent of the world's population, and 25 percent of the world's prisoners. That's the reality of American Exceptionalism.

6 Shocking Revelations About how Private Prisons Make Money
APRIL M. SHORT – Salon