Coming back to work topics after a weekend of covering Twitter's endless nerdwars I am pretty horrified by the news coming out of Syria.
Ethnic Kurds are the largest group of stateless people in the world. Their population straddles the meeting point for Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. I read a few weeks ago that the Assad regime had recognized early on that Kurdish disinterest was in their best efforts and they left the far northeast provinces alone. That is apparently changing.
The new round of fighting broke out in Tel Abyad, a border town near Turkey in the rebel-held Raqqa province. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said clashes began after Kurdish militias in the area discovered fighters from an al Qaeda-linked rebel group trying to rig one of their bases with explosives.
In a surprise last minute move, the European Union set forth a strong set of economic sanctions against Israel, leaving that nation both surprised and reeling.
The sanctions, stimulated by what the EU refers to as “Israeli intransigence” regarding peace talks with the Palestinians, cover all financial dealings, loans, awards, transfer of “instruments” and severely limiting economic cooperation between Israel and all EU member nations starting in 2014.
The sanctions are against any Israeli “economic activity,” not just within what has been referred to as the “occupied territories” but broad areas of Israel that had been designated for the establishment of an “Arab State” in 1949.
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Phi Beta Iota: This has a function if that is the function you seek, but ythe results are nowhere near the coolness and utility of DuckDuckGo or Qwant.
Sounds like the equivalent of the US “coke can” nuke. Unverified information. Eight hours highly suspect unless pre-positioned in their embassies. Since US still cannot detect proliferation devices based on content rather than containers, and HUMINT is non-existent, we will just have to wait and see.
TERMINAL X SPECIAL REPORT – 001
Dated: July 20, 2013
SOURCE REPORT
Over the past few years, Pakistan’s strategic forces, responsible for the country’s primary deterrence program, have been doing extensive research into the design and development of smart weapons i.e. nuclear weapons that have a dynamic and compact form, and which can easily be transported from one location to another.
“In Russia, President Putin’s office just stopped using PC’s and switched to typewriters. What do they know that we don’t? Perhaps it’s Intel NSA inside.”
The NSA has been incredibly thorough in nailing down every possible way to tap into communications. Yet the one company’s name that hasn’t come up as part of the surveillance network is Intel. Perhaps they are the only good guys in the entire Orwellian mess.
Or perhaps the NSA, working with Intel and/or Microsoft, have wittingly have put backdoors in the microcode updates. A backdoor is a way of gaining illegal remote access to a computer by getting around the normal security built-in to the computer. Typically someone trying to sneak malicious software on to a computer would try to install a rootkit (software that tries to conceal the malicious code.) A rootkit tries to hide itself and its code, but security conscious sites can discover rootkits by tools that check kernel code and data for changes.
But what if you could use the configuration and state of microprocessor hardware in order to hide? You’d be invisible to all rootkit detection techniques that checks the operating system. Or what if you can make the microprocessor random number generator (the basis of encryption) not so random for a particular machine? (The NSA’s biggest coup was inserting backdoors in crypto equipment the Swiss sold to other countries.)
Rather than risk getting caught messing with everyone’s updates, my bet is that the NSA has compromised the microcode update signing keys giving the NSA the ability to selectively target specific computers. (Your operating system ensures security of updates by checking downloaded update packages against the signing key.) The NSA then can send out backdoors disguised as a Windows update for “security.” (Ironic but possible.).
More (check out the many very instructive replies to this article):
“John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA's secret war in Angola in
1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned. Stockwell's book In Search of Enemies, published by W.W. Norton 1978, is an international best-seller.”
“The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people and U.S. Congress from knowing what the nation's leaders are doing. Secrecy is power. Secrecy is license. Secrecy covers up mistakes. Secrecy covers up corruption.”
The following is an excerpt from Shut the Chamber's new 28-page report, “Bagful of Cash: How the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Orchestrated a Corporate Takeover of Government.” My goal when writing the report was to publish a one-stop-shop for everything relating to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's domination of all institutions of merit, from Congress to the courts, to the election cycles. This report also shows how the U.S. Chamber has invested millions of corporate dollars into opposing all legislation relating to healthcare, financial reform, closing corporate tax loopholes, and climate change. The report also highlights the U.S. Chamber's support of austerity, fracking, the Keystone XL pipeline, and mostly Republican pro-corporate candidates running for Congress. You can read the full report at bit.ly/bagfulofcash.
They knew; they always knew what they were doing. And they ruined the lives of tens of millions of people anyway. And no one was truly held accountable. You cannot have a healthy democracy when people can commit crimes of this magnitude and be considered above the law.
In a shocking new survey [3] commissioned by the Labaton Sucharow law firm, Wall Street insiders say that breaking the law, screwing your clients and covering up crimes is a way of life on Wall Street. The shock is not that cheating is going on. We all know that. The shock is that these financiers would actually admit it on a survey. This should tell us that the Wall Street culture is so brazenly corrupt, so confident of not getting caught, so certain that a passive public won't fight back that those surveyed didn't even bother to lie about the fact that they were living, breathing sociopaths.
As we repeatedly focus on wealth inequality in the United States (i.e.; just four hundred persons in the US have as much in assets and income as the bottom 50% of Americans), a video points out the even more extreme global wealth disparity.
Phi Beta Iota: A sound analysis of all of this would always show that it is the lack of ethics in politics that enables the lack of ethics in finance. A two-party tyranny that excludes all others, that gerrymanders, that votes on the basis of cash instead of constituent need, is a crime against humanity. The bribery is “just business.” Demanding the bribes, that is the real crime. There is nothing wrong with America the Beautiful that cannot be fixed and fixed quickly by the Electoral Act of 2013 in time for 2014 and 2016.
