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Paul Merrell

China seen probing IBM, Oracle, EMC after Snowden leaks | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...hina-ioe-idUSBRE97F02720130816

surveillance state NSA IBM Oracle EMC NSA-blowback China E.U.

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • (Reuters) - China's Ministry of Public Security and a cabinet-level research center are preparing to investigate IBM Corp, Oracle Corp and EMC Corp over security issues, the official Shanghai Securities News said on Friday. The report follows revelations by former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden of widespread surveillance by the National Security Agency. It also comes as Beijing probes Western drugmakers over allegations of bribery and over-pricing.
  • China has been a focal point for the Snowden case since he stopped in Hong Kong en route to Moscow. He also claimed that the NSA hacked into critical network infrastructure at universities in China and in Hong Kong.Daniel Castro, a senior analyst with the Information Technology & Information Foundation, said he was concerned that a Chinese government probe could result in demands for U.S. companies to provide authorities with the blueprints to their technology so that Beijing can screen them for potential security threats.
  • Some experts have warned that Snowden's leaks could hurt the sales of U.S. technology companies in Asia and Europe, as reports of their complicity with NSA spying programs may lead foreign businesses and governments to purchase equipment and services from non-U.S. suppliers.The foundation, a think tank, last week projected that U.S. cloud computing firms could lose $21.5 billion in sales over the next three years, eventually ceding 10 percent of the foreign market to European and Asian competitors.
Paul Merrell

Testosterone Pit - Home - NSA Revelations Kill IBM Hardware Sales in China - 0 views

www.testosteronepit.com/...m-hardware-sales-in-china.html

surveillance state NSA IBM NSA-blowback NSA-targets hardware hardware-backdoors

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The first shot was fired on Monday. Teradata, which sells analytics tools for Big Data, warned that quarterly revenues plunged 21% in Asia and 19% in the Middle East and Africa. Wednesday evening, it was IBM’s turn to confess that its hardware sales in China had simply collapsed. Every word was colored by Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s hand-in-glove collaboration with American tech companies, from startups to mastodons like IBM.
  • The explanation is more obvious. In mid-August, an anonymous source told the Shanghai Securities News, a branch of the state-owned Xinhua News Agency, which reports directly to the Propaganda and Public Information Departments of the Communist Party, that IBM, along with Oracle and EMC, have become targets of the Ministry of Public Security and the cabinet-level Development Research Centre due to the Snowden revelations. “At present, thanks to their technological superiority, many of our core information technology systems are basically dominated by foreign hardware and software firms, but the Prism scandal implies security problems,” the source said, according to Reuters. So the government would launch an investigation into these security problems, the source said. Absolute stonewalling ensued. IBM told Reuters that it was unable to comment. Oracle and EMC weren’t available for comment. The Ministry of Public Security refused to comment. The Development Research Centre knew nothing of any such investigation. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology “could not confirm anything because of the matter’s sensitivity.”
  • I’d warned about its impact at the time [read.... US Tech Companies Raked Over The Coals In China]. Snowden’s revelations started hitting in May. Not much later, the Chinese security apparatus must have alerted IT buyers in government agencies, state-owned enterprises, and major independent corporations to turn off the order pipeline for sensitive products until this is sorted out. As Mr. Loughridge’s efforts have shown, it’s hard to explain any other way that hardware sales suddenly collapsed by “40%, 50%” in China, where they’d boomed until then. This is the first quantitative indication of the price Corporate America has to pay for gorging at the big trough of the US Intelligence Community, and particularly the NSA with its endlessly ballooning budget. For once, there is a price to be paid, if only temporarily, for helping build a perfect, seamless, borderless surveillance society. The companies will deny it. At the same time, they’ll be looking for solutions. China, Russia, and Brazil are too important to just get kicked out of – and other countries might follow suit. In September, IBM announced that it would throw another billion at Linux, the open-source operating system, to run its Power System servers – the same that China had stopped buying. It seems IBM was trying to make hay of the NSA revelations that had tangled up American operating system makers. Linux, free of NSA influence, would be a huge competitive advantage for IBM. Or so it would seem. Read.... The Other Reason Why IBM Throws A Billion At Linux (With NSA- Designed Backdoor)
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  • The first shot was fired on Monday. Teradata, which sells analytics tools for Big Data, warned that quarterly revenues plunged 21% in Asia and 19% in the Middle East and Africa. Wednesday evening, it was IBM’s turn to confess that its hardware sales in China had simply collapsed. Every word was colored by Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s hand-in-glove collaboration with American tech companies, from startups to mastodons like IBM.
  • Paul Merrell on 18 Oct 13
     
    It's starting to look as though the price of NSA collaboration is bankruptcy. Look for Big Blue to attempt to recover the loss from the U.S. government via some juicy deal.
Gary Edwards

Warren Buffett Explains How The Bailout Is Crushing Healthy Companies - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/shing-healthy-companies-2009-3

financial-crisis warren-buffett socialism banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Mar 09
     
    ".....There's a lot of talk about how the bailouts are creating moral hazard and rewarding bad behavior. But those are pretty abstract ideas, the kind of things people wonder whether or not we can afford to worry about while the economy is tanking. Sure we'll pay a long run price  for screwing up the market's discipline but in the long run we're all dead. So forget "moral hazard" and just look at Warren Buffett's description of what is happening to his home construction business, Clayton Homes. Clayton, which makes pre-fab homes, also has a lending business. Surprisingly, Clayton hasn't been crushed by the markets because it maintained high lending standards and doesn't have a balance sheet overflowing with defaulting loans..." And the solution is? Buffett is/was a successful capitalist. Yet he fully supported a socialist takeover of the government. Obama's campaign rhetoric was that of a hard core socialist declaring war on constitutional capitalism. And there was Buffett, standing at Obama's side, arguing that all capitalist should be supporting the systemic change Obama socialism promised to deliver. And now Buffett's complaining? What is it about socialism that attracted Buffett in the first place? Did he really think the socialists he worked to elect would pour tax payer debt money into the capitalists hands, and let the markets go their merry way? The socialist seeks to control the means of production, limit the rights of property ownership, and redistribute the wealth created by capitalist. Socialism does not have a wealth creation model. Redistribution of wealth and control over the means of production is something Buffett supported with both his money and his personal assurances to constitutional capitalist everywhere. Yet here we are. Exactly where Buffetts advice and pleas intended us to be. And now he's complaining? Buffett didn't like the belief in big government programs, big government spending and crisis interventionism of Bush's compasionat
Paul Merrell

Enron Corpus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Enron_Corpus

Enron-corpus litigation database emails

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The Enron Corpus is a large database of over 600,000 emails generated by 158 employees[1] of the Enron Corporation and acquired by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during its investigation after the company's collapse.[2]
  • The Enron data was originally collected at Enron Corporation headquarters in Houston during two weeks in May 2002 by Joe Bartling,[3] a litigation support and data analysis contractor working for Aspen Systems, now Lockheed Martin, whom the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) had hired to preserve and collect the vast amounts of data in the wake of the Enron Bankruptcy in December 2001. In addition to the Enron employee emails, all of Enron's enterprise database systems,[4] hosted in Oracle databases on Sun Microsystems servers, were also captured and preserved including its online energy trading platform, EnronOnline. Once collected, the Enron emails were processed and hosted in litigation platform Concordance, and then iCONECT, for the investigative team from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Department of Justice investigators to review. At the conclusion of the investigation, and upon the issuance of the FERC staff report,[5] the emails and information collected were deemed to be in the public domain, to be used for historical research and academic purposes. The email archive was made publicly available and searchable via the web using iCONECT 24/7, but the sheer volume of email of over 160GB made it impractical to use. Copies of the collected emails and databases were made available on hard drives.
  • A copy of the email database was subsequently purchased for $10,000 by Andrew McCallum, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.[6] He released this copy to researchers, providing a trove of data that has been used for studies on social networking and computer analysis of language.
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  • The corpus is unique in that it is one of the only publicly available mass collections of real emails easily available for study, as such collections are typically bound by numerous privacy and legal restrictions which render them prohibitively difficult to access.[6] In 2010, EDRM.net published a revised version 2 of the corpus.[7] This expanded corpus, containing over 1.7 million messages, is now available on Amazon S3 for easy access to the research community. Jitesh Shetty and Jafar Adibi from the University of Southern California processed this corpus in 2004 and released a MySQL version[8] of it and also published some link analysis results based on this.[9]
Gary Edwards

Crony Capitalists Are the Ruling Class, the Forgotten Cause of Free Markets and Sound M... - 0 views

www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article39260.html

David-Stockman Banksters Corporate-Facsists

shared by Gary Edwards on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Mar 13
     
    David Stockman, former Reagan Budget Director, gives an amazingly insightful and indepth analysis of the 2008 financial collapse.  He also identifies the banksters, fascist corporatists, politicians and political forces behind the collapse.  Great read, but also a very long speech.  Worth every bit of your time though.  Very informative.
Gary Edwards

Character Matters and Mitt Romney has it - 1 views

The following eMail message is being forwarded around the Web and it does confirm my own personal experiences with then Governor Romney in 2005-2006. The issue then was the Massachusetts Open Gove...

Romney ODF Massachusetts-Lesson Massachusetts-RFi Microsoft OOXML

started by Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 12 no follow-up yet
Paul Merrell

Profiting from Your Thirst as Global Elite Rush to Control Water Worldwide :: The Marke... - 0 views

www.marketoracle.co.uk/article38167.html

banksters water water-rush privatization

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 May 14 - No Cached
  • A disturbing trend in the water sector is accelerating worldwide. The new “water barons” --- the Wall Street banks and elitist multibillionaires --- are buying up water all over the world at unprecedented pace. Familiar mega-banks and investing powerhouses such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Macquarie Bank, Barclays Bank, the Blackstone Group, Allianz, and HSBC Bank, among others, are consolidating their control over water. Wealthy tycoons such as T. Boone Pickens, former President George H.W. Bush and his family, Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing, Philippines’ Manuel V. Pangilinan and other Filipino billionaires, and others are also buying thousands of acres of land with aquifers, lakes, water rights, water utilities, and shares in water engineering and technology companies all over the world. The second disturbing trend is that while the new water barons are buying up water all over the world, governments are moving fast to limit citizens’ ability to become water self-sufficient (as evidenced by the well-publicized Gary Harrington’s case in Oregon, in which the state criminalized the collection of rainwater in three ponds located on his private land, by convicting him on nine counts and sentencing him for 30 days in jail). Let’s put this criminalization in perspective:
  • Billionaire T. Boone Pickens owned more water rights than any other individuals in America, with rights over enough of the Ogallala Aquifer to drain approximately 200,000 acre-feet (or 65 billion gallons of water) a year. But ordinary citizen Gary Harrington cannot collect rainwater runoff on 170 acres of his private land. It’s a strange New World Order in which multibillionaires and elitist banks can own aquifers and lakes, but ordinary citizens cannot even collect rainwater and snow runoff in their own backyards and private lands.
  • In 2008, Goldman Sachs called water “the petroleum for the next century” and those investors who know how to play the infrastructure boom will reap huge rewards, during its annual “Top Five Risks” conference. Water is a U.S.$425 billion industry, and a calamitous water shortage could be a more serious threat to humanity in the 21st century than food and energy shortages, according to Goldman Sachs’s conference panel. Goldman Sachs has convened numerous conferences and also published lengthy, insightful analyses of water and other critical sectors (food, energy). Goldman Sachs is positioning itself to gobble up water utilities, water engineering companies, and water resources worldwide. Since 2006, Goldman Sachs has become one of the largest infrastructure investment fund managers and has amassed a $10 billion capital for infrastructure, including water.
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  • Citigroup’s top economist Willem Buitler said in 2011 that the water market will soon be hotter the oil market (for example, see this and this): “Water as an asset class will, in my view, become eventually the single most important physical-commodity based asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals.” In its recent 2012 Water Investment Conference, Citigroup has identified top 10 trends in the water sector, as follows:
  • Specifically, a lucrative opportunity in water is in hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), as it generates massive demand for water and water services. Each oil well developed requires 3 to 5 million gallons of water, and 80% of this water cannot be reused because it’s three to 10 times saltier than seawater. Citigroup recommends water-rights owners sell water to fracking companies instead of to farmers because water for fracking can be sold for as much as $3,000 per acre-foot instead of only $50 per acre/foot to farmers.
  • One of the world’s largest banks, JPMorgan Chase has aggressively pursued water and infrastructure worldwide. In October 2007, it beat out rivals Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to buy U.K.’s water utility Southern Water with partners Swiss-based UBS and Australia’s Challenger Infrastructure Fund. This banking empire is controlled by the Rockefeller family; the family patriarch David Rockefeller is a member of the elite and secretive Bilderberg Group, Council on Foreign Relations, and Trilateral Commission.
  • Barclays PLC is a U.K.-based major global financial services provider operating in all over the world with roots in London since 1690; it operates through its subsidiary Barclays Bank PLC and its investment bank called Barclays Capital. Barclays Bank’s unit Barclays Global Investors manages an exchange-traded fund (ETF) called iShares S&P Global Water, which is listed on the London Stock Exchanges and can be purchased like any ordinary share through a broker. Touting the iShares S&P Global Water as offering “a broad based exposure to shares of the world’s largest water companies, including water utilities and water equipment stocks” of water companies around the world, this fund as of March 31, 2007 was valued at U.S.$33.8 million.
  • Deutsche Bank is one of the major players in the water sector worldwide. Its Deutsche Bank Advisors have identified water as a part of the climate investment strategies. In its presentation, “Global Warming: Implications for Investors,” they have identified the four following major areas for water investment: § Distribution and management: (1) Supply and recycling, (2) water distribution and sewage, (3) water management and engineering. § Water purification: (1) Sewage purification, (2) disinfection, (3) desalination, (4) monitoring. § Water efficiency (demand): (1) Home installation, (2) gray-water recycling, (3) water meters. § Water and nutrition: (1) Irrigation, (2) bottled water.
  • Moreover, Deutsche Bank has channeled €6 billion (U.S.$8.55 billion) into climate change funds, which will target companies with products that cut greenhouse gases or help people adapt to a warmer world, in sectors from agriculture to power and construction (Reuters, October 18, 2007). In addition to SCM, Deutsche Bank also has the RREEF Infrastructure, part of RREEF Alternative Investments, headquartered in New York with main hubs in Sydney, Singapore, and London. RREEF Infrastructure has more than €6.7 billion in assets under management. One of its main targets is utilities, including electricity networks, water-treatment or distribution operations, and natural-gas networks. In October 2007, RREEF partnered with Goldman Sachs, GE, Prudential, and Babcok & Brown Ltd. to bid unsuccessfully for U.K.’s water utility Southern Water. § Crediting the boom in European infrastructure investment, the RREEF fund by August 2007 had raised €2 billion (U.S.$2.8 billion); Europe’s infrastructure market is valued at between U.S.$4 trillion to U.S.$6 trillion (DowJones Financial News Online, August 7, 2007). § Bulgaria --- Deutsche Bank Bulgaria is planning to participate in large infrastructure projects, including public-private partnership projects in water and sewage worth up to €1 billion (Sofia Echo Media, February 26, 2008). § Middle East --- Along with Ithmaar Bank B.S.C. (an private-equity investment bank in Bahrain), Deutsche Bank co-managed a U.S.$2 billion Shari'a-compliant Infrastructure and Growth Capital Fund and plans to target U.S.$630 billion in regional infrastructure.
  • In my 2008 article, I overlooked the astonishingly large land purchases (298,840 acres, to be exact) by the Bush family in 2005 and 2006. In 2006, while on a trip to Paraguay for the United Nation’s children’s group UNICEF, Jenna Bush (daughter of former President George W. Bush and granddaughter of former President George H.W. Bush) reportedly bought 98,840 acres of land in Chaco, Paraguay, near the Triple Frontier (Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay). This land is said to be near the 200,000 acres purchased by her grandfather, George H.W. Bush, in 2005. The lands purchased by the Bush family sit over not only South America’s largest aquifer --- but the world’s as well --- Acuifero Guaraní, which runs beneath Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. This aquifer is larger than Texas and California combined. Online political magazine Counterpunch quoted Argentinean pacifist Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the winner of 1981 Nobel Peace Prize, who “warned that the real war will be fought not for oil, but for water, and recalled that Acuifero Guaraní is one of the largest underground water reserves in South America….”
  • Paul Merrell on 23 May 14
     
     Like the land rush for Arctic lands soon to be bared of ice by global warming, banksters are also moving to capitalize on looming water shortages, aided by IMF privatization loan conditions the the dwindling of potable water supplies globally via pollution, deforestation, and aquifer depletion. All trace to the common problem over human overpopulation of the planet.  
Paul Merrell

Operation AURORAGOLD: How the NSA Hacks Cellphone Networks Worldwide - 0 views

firstlook.org/...nsa-auroragold-hack-cellphones

surveillance state NSA NSA-methods cell-network-penetration AURORAGOLD

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • In March 2011, two weeks before the Western intervention in Libya, a secret message was delivered to the National Security Agency. An intelligence unit within the U.S. military’s Africa Command needed help to hack into Libya’s cellphone networks and monitor text messages. For the NSA, the task was easy. The agency had already obtained technical information about the cellphone carriers’ internal systems by spying on documents sent among company employees, and these details would provide the perfect blueprint to help the military break into the networks. The NSA’s assistance in the Libya operation, however, was not an isolated case. It was part of a much larger surveillance program—global in its scope and ramifications—targeted not just at hostile countries.
  • According to documents contained in the archive of material provided to The Intercept by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA has spied on hundreds of companies and organizations internationally, including in countries closely allied to the United States, in an effort to find security weaknesses in cellphone technology that it can exploit for surveillance. The documents also reveal how the NSA plans to secretly introduce new flaws into communication systems so that they can be tapped into—a controversial tactic that security experts say could be exposing the general population to criminal hackers. Codenamed AURORAGOLD, the covert operation has monitored the content of messages sent and received by more than 1,200 email accounts associated with major cellphone network operators, intercepting confidential company planning papers that help the NSA hack into phone networks.
  • Karsten Nohl, a leading cellphone security expert and cryptographer who was consulted by The Intercept about details contained in the AURORAGOLD documents, said that the broad scope of information swept up in the operation appears aimed at ensuring virtually every cellphone network in the world is NSA accessible.
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  • “Collecting an inventory [like this] on world networks has big ramifications,” Nohl said, because it allows the NSA to track and circumvent upgrades in encryption technology used by cellphone companies to shield calls and texts from eavesdropping. Evidence that the agency has deliberately plotted to weaken the security of communication infrastructure, he added, was particularly alarming. “Even if you love the NSA and you say you have nothing to hide, you should be against a policy that introduces security vulnerabilities,” Nohl said, “because once NSA introduces a weakness, a vulnerability, it’s not only the NSA that can exploit it.”
  • The AURORAGOLD operation is carried out by specialist NSA surveillance units whose existence has not been publicly disclosed: the Wireless Portfolio Management Office, which defines and carries out the NSA’s strategy for exploiting wireless communications, and the Target Technology Trends Center, which monitors the development of new communication technology to ensure that the NSA isn’t blindsided by innovations that could evade its surveillance reach. The center’s logo is a picture of the Earth overshadowed by a large telescope; its motto is “Predict – Plan – Prevent.”
  • The NSA documents reveal that, as of May 2012, the agency had collected technical information on about 70 percent of cellphone networks worldwide—701 of an estimated 985—and was maintaining a list of 1,201 email “selectors” used to intercept internal company details from employees. (“Selector” is an agency term for a unique identifier like an email address or phone number.) From November 2011 to April 2012, between 363 and 1,354 selectors were “tasked” by the NSA for surveillance each month as part of AURORAGOLD, according to the documents. The secret operation appears to have been active since at least 2010.
  • By covertly monitoring GSMA working groups in a bid to identify and exploit security vulnerabilities, the NSA has placed itself into direct conflict with the mission of the National Institute for Standards and Technology, or NIST, the U.S. government agency responsible for recommending cybersecurity standards in the United States. NIST recently handed out a grant of more than $800,000 to GSMA so that the organization could research ways to address “security and privacy challenges” faced by users of mobile devices. The revelation that the trade group has been targeted for surveillance may reignite deep-seated tensions between NIST and NSA that came to the fore following earlier Snowden disclosures. Last year, NIST was forced to urge people not to use an encryption standard it had previously approved after it emerged NSA had apparently covertly worked to deliberately weaken it.
  • The NSA focuses on intercepting obscure but important technical documents circulated among the GSMA’s members known as “IR.21s.” Most cellphone network operators share IR.21 documents among each other as part of agreements that allow their customers to connect to foreign networks when they are “roaming” overseas on a vacation or a business trip. An IR.21, according to the NSA documents, contains information “necessary for targeting and exploitation.” The details in the IR.21s serve as a “warning mechanism” that flag new technology used by network operators, the NSA’s documents state. This allows the agency to identify security vulnerabilities in the latest communication systems that can be exploited, and helps efforts to introduce new vulnerabilities “where they do not yet exist.” The IR.21s also contain details about the encryption used by cellphone companies to protect the privacy of their customers’ communications as they are transmitted across networks. These details are highly sought after by the NSA, as they can aid its efforts to crack the encryption and eavesdrop on conversations.
  • One of the prime targets monitored under the AURORAGOLD program is the London-headquartered trade group, the GSM Association, or the GSMA, which represents the interests of more than 800 major cellphone, software, and internet companies from 220 countries. The GSMA’s members include U.S.-based companies such as Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Microsoft, Facebook, Intel, Cisco, and Oracle, as well as large international firms including Sony, Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson, and Vodafone. The trade organization brings together its members for regular meetings at which new technologies and policies are discussed among various “working groups.” The Snowden files reveal that the NSA specifically targeted the GSMA’s working groups for surveillance.
  • Last year, the Washington Post reported that the NSA had already managed to break the most commonly used cellphone encryption algorithm in the world, known as A5/1. But the information collected under AURORAGOLD allows the agency to focus on circumventing newer and stronger versions of A5 cellphone encryption, such as A5/3. The documents note that the agency intercepts information from cellphone operators about “the type of A5 cipher algorithm version” they use, and monitors the development of new algorithms in order to find ways to bypass the encryption. In 2009, the British surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters conducted a similar effort to subvert phone encryption under a project called OPULENT PUP, using powerful computers to perform a “crypt attack” to penetrate the A5/3 algorithm, secret memos reveal. By 2011, GCHQ was collaborating with the NSA on another operation, called WOLFRAMITE, to attack A5/3 encryption. (GCHQ declined to comment for this story, other than to say that it operates within legal parameters.)
  • The extensive attempts to attack cellphone encryption have been replicated across the Five Eyes surveillance alliance. Australia’s top spy agency, for instance, infiltrated an Indonesian cellphone company and stole nearly 1.8 million encryption keys used to protect communications, the New York Times reported in February.
  • The NSA’s documents show that it focuses on collecting details about virtually all technical standards used by cellphone operators, and the agency’s efforts to stay ahead of the technology curve occasionally yield significant results. In early 2010, for instance, its operatives had already found ways to penetrate a variant of the newest “fourth generation” smartphone-era technology for surveillance, years before it became widely adopted by millions of people in dozens of countries. The NSA says that its efforts are targeted at terrorists, weapons proliferators, and other foreign targets, not “ordinary people.” But the methods used by the agency and its partners to gain access to cellphone communications risk significant blowback. According to Mikko Hypponen, a security expert at Finland-based F-Secure, criminal hackers and foreign government adversaries could be among the inadvertent beneficiaries of any security vulnerabilities or encryption weaknesses inserted by the NSA into communication systems using data collected by the AURORAGOLD project.
  • Vines, the NSA spokeswoman, told The Intercept that the agency was committed to ensuring an “open, interoperable, and secure global internet.” “NSA deeply values these principles and takes great care to honor them in the performance of its lawful foreign-intelligence mission,” Vines said.
  • Documents published with this article: AURORAGOLD – Project Overview AURORAGOLD Working Group IR.21 – A Technology Warning Mechanism AURORAGOLD – Target Technology Trends Center support to WPMO NSA First-Ever Collect of High-Interest 4G Cellular Signal AURORAGOLD Working Aid WOLFRAMITE Encryption Attack OPULENT PUP Encryption Attack NSA/GCHQ/CSEC Network Tradecraft Advancement Team
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Dec 14
     
    Notice that they've cracked even 4G.
Paul Merrell

Palestinians sue billionaire Sheldon Adelson for Israeli war crimes | The Electronic In... - 0 views

electronicintifada.net/...don-adelson-israeli-war-crimes

war & peace lawfare Palestinians litigation Israel-funders

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • A group of Palestinians and Palestinian Americans are seeking $34.5 billion dollars in damages from wealthy individuals and companies they accuse of financing and profiting from Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank and other abuses of their rights. The plaintiffs include Palestinians who have lost family members in Israeli attacks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Their lawsuit is the latest effort to expose and curb the role of organizations that operate as tax-exempt US charities in fueling violence and settlement expansion on occupied Palestinian land. It names as defendants US tycoons Sheldon Adelson, Haim Saban, Irving Moskowitz and Oracle founder Lawrence Ellison.
  • Adelson is renowned for using his huge casino fortune to advance his pro-Israel political agenda and is a major financial backer of both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the US Republican Party. Saban has donated millions of dollars to US Democratic Party presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. Moskowitz is one of the main financiers of settler efforts to force Palestinians out of their homes in occupied East Jerusalem. The lawsuit also names Israeli diamond magnate and settlement builder Lev Leviev and Christians United for Israel founder, the US Evangelical pastor John Hagee. Twelve US-based charities and a number of Israeli and US corporations are also named as defendants. The charities include Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, The Hebron Fund and Christian Friends of Israeli Communities.
  • The plaintiffs, represented by the law firm Martin McMahon and Associates, allege that the defendants are directly responsible for violence and for the expansion of settlements. The lawsuit, filed in a Washington, DC, federal court on Monday, alleges a wide range of crimes under US and international law, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, conspiracy, money laundering, racketeering, perjury and pillage. It alleges that charitable donations are sent to the Israeli army, a violation of US laws against funding a foreign military. Last December, some of the same plaintiffs using the same law firm sued the US Treasury for allowing billions of dollars of tax-exempt donations to flow to Israeli settlements. This lawsuit targets those who are supplying the money. Several are powerful billionaires who the lawsuit contends have defrauded the US tax authorities by funnelling huge sums of money meant for illegal purposes through tax-exempt organizations. According to the lawsuit, approximately $1 billion is sent through these organizations each year, with $104 million going to the Israeli army in 2014.
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  • The lawsuit alleges that the defendants donate money to tax-exempt organizations knowing that it will be used for criminal activity, such as funding the theft and destruction of private property and financing racially discriminatory practices such as Jewish-only towns and highways.
  • But this lawsuit reaches even more broadly than charities that fund political agendas abroad. Seventeen international corporations are named as beneficiaries of the unlawful activities of the tax-exempt entities and donors. The lawsuit calls this money loop a civil conspiracy to defraud the US government. “The settlement enterprise is a very successful industry,” the law firm states in a press release. The US-based real estate firm RE/MAX has grossed $9.5 billion for selling 26,000 new homes in the occupied West Bank, according to the lawsuit. Other corporations named are G4S, Hewlett Packard, Motorola and Volvo. Israeli banks that process international wire transfers for other defendants are also accused in the conspiracy. By targeting both the funders and the profiteers, the lawsuit aims to capture the criminal economic cycle that has helped make Israel’s occupation sustainable for everyone but Palestinians.
  • Separate from the civil conspiracy charges, the lawsuit also accuses Ahava–Dead Sea Laboratories, Israel Chemicals and Nordstrom department stores of the war crime of pillage. Nordstrom sells Ahava cosmetics made with Dead Sea minerals taken from the occupied West Bank.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Mar 16
     
    Somewhat ironic that the path to prosecution in the U.S. for damage awards against foreign governments as "sponsors of terrorism" by the Israeli Mossad front, Shurat Hadin is now being used to go after those in the U.S. who fund Israeli terrorism against Palestinians.  More coverage here: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/03/palestinians-sue-pro-israel-tycoons-345bn-160307191923877.html
Paul Merrell

Are The Middle East Wars Really About Forcing the World Into Dollars and Private Centra... - 0 views

www.washingtonsblog.com/...d-private-central-banking.html

banksters dollar reserve currrencies Libya Iran Africa Gadafhi

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Why is the U.S. targeting Iran’s central bank? Well, multi-billionaire Hugo Salinas Price told King World News: What happened to Mr. Gaddafi, many speculate the real reason he was ousted was that he was planning an all-African currency for conducting trade. The same thing happened to him that happened to Saddam because the US doesn’t want any solid competing currency out there vs the dollar. You know Gaddafi was talking about a gold dinar. And as I noted in August: Ellen Brown argues in the Asia Times that there were even deeper reasons for the war than gold, oil or middle eastern regime change. Brown argues that Libya – like Iraq under Hussein – challenged the supremacy of the dollar and the Western banks: Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. What do these seven countries have in common? In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That evidently puts them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers’ central bank in Switzerland.
  • The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq, the two that have actually been attacked. Kenneth Schortgen Jr, writing on Examiner.com, noted that “[s]ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to accept euros instead of dollars for oil, and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar.” According to a Russian article titled “Bombing of Libya – Punishment for Ghaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar”, Gaddafi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Gaddafi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency. *** And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank. In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed:
  • One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned … Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.
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  • Adding credence to the theory about why Gadhafi had to be overthrown, as The New American reported in March, was the rebels’ odd decision to create a central bank to replace Gadhafi’s state-owned monetary authority. The decision was broadcast to the world in the early weeks of the conflict. In a statement describing a March 19 meeting, the rebel council announced, among other things, the creation of a new oil company. And more importantly: “Designation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.” The creation of a new central bank, even more so than the new national oil regime, left analysts scratching their heads. “I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising,” noted Robert Wenzel in an analysis for the Economic Policy Journal. “This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences,” he added. Wenzel also noted that the uprising looked like a “major oil and money play, with the true disaffected rebels being used as puppets and cover” while the transfer of control over money and oil supplies takes place.
  • Similar scenarios involving the global monetary system — based on the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency, backed by the fact that oil is traded in American money — have also been associated with other targets of the U.S. government. Some analysts even say a pattern is developing. Iran, for example, is one of the few nations left in the world with a state-owned central bank. And Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein, once armed by the U.S. government to make war on Iran, was threatening to start selling oil in currencies other than the dollar just prior to the Bush administration’s “regime change” mission. While most of the establishment press in America has been silent on the issue of Gadhafi’s gold dinar scheme, in Russia, China, and the global alternative media, the theory has exploded in popularity.
  • Posted on January 13, 2012 by WashingtonsBlog The Reason for the Wars in the Middle East and North Africa:  Dollars The Middle Eastern and North African wars – planned 20 years ago – don’t necessarily have much to do with fighting terrorism. See this,  this and this. They are, in reality, about oil. And protecting Israel (and read the section entitled “Securing the Realm” here). But as AFP reports today, there is another major motivation for the expanding wars: The latest round of American sanctions are aimed at shutting down Iran’s central bank, a senior US official said Thursday, spelling out that intention directly for the first time. “We do need to close down the Central Bank of Iran (CBI),” the official told reporters on condition of anonymity, while adding that the United States is moving quickly to implement the sanctions, signed into law last month. *** Foreign central banks that deal with the Iranian central bank on oil transactions could also face similar restrictions under the new law, which has sparked fears of damage to US ties with nations like Russia and China. “If a correspondent bank of a US bank wants to do business with us and they’re doing business with CBI or other designated Iranian banks… then they’re going to get in trouble with us,” the US official said.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Jun 14
     
    I only highlighted snippets. Lots more and lots of links. 
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