Skip to main content

Home/ Socialism and the End of the American Dream/ Group items tagged car-hacking

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Paul Merrell

Newest Remote Car Hacking Raises More Questions About Reporter's Death - WhoWhatWhy - 0 views

whowhatwhy.org/...uestions-about-reporters-death

Dark-State car-hacking Hastings

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • As readers of WhoWhatWhy know, our site has been one of the very few continuing to explore the fiery death two years ago of investigative journalist Michael Hastings, whose car left a straight segment of a Los Angeles street at a high speed, jumped the median, hit a tree, and blew up.Our original report described anomalies of the crash and surrounding events that suggest cutting-edge foul play—that an external hacker could have taken control of Hastings’s car in order to kill him. If this sounds too futuristic, a series of recent technical revelations has proven that “car hacking” is entirely possible. The latest just appeared this week.
  • Hackers, seeking to demonstrate the vulnerability of automobiles to remote attacks, were able to largely take over the Jeep Cherokee driven by a writer for the tech magazine Wired:Their code is an automaker’s nightmare: software that lets hackers send commands through the Jeep’s entertainment system to its dashboard functions, steering, brakes, and transmission, all from a laptop that may be across the country.They were able to make his car decelerate suddenly, causing the writer to “narrowly avert death” at the hands of a semi-trailer coming up behind him.In an earlier demonstration, they had been able to do similar things with other vehicles:In the summer of 2013, I drove a Ford Escape and a Toyota Prius around a South Bend, Indiana, parking lot while they sat in the backseat with their laptops, cackling as they disabled my brakes, honked the horn, jerked the seat belt, and commandeered the steering wheel.
  • All of this is increasingly drawing the attention—and action— of the authorities. U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Edward J. Markey (D-MA), members of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, introduced legislation Tuesday seeking to establish federal standards for security and privacy of drivers in today’s computer-laden cars.What we do not hear is any discussion about whether the risk has gone beyond the realm of possibility…to a reality.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Back when Michael Hastings died, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke—by all accounts a sober, no-nonsense man—said that the Hastings’s crash was “consistent with a car cyber attack” and that it was likely that intelligence agencies knew “how to remotely seize control of a car.”It is worth noting, too, that the day before his death, Hastings had “urgently” requested to borrow his neighbor’s car—he wanted to get out of town, but he feared his own car was being tampered with.How is it then that “mainstream” publications, including even Wired, do not talk about the very odd circumstances surrounding the death of a journalist who had made powerful enemies? Did the fact that he had caused a famed general to be fired, that he was investigating the CIA chief, that he told colleagues he himself was being investigated by the FBI—did none of this at least raise the slightest suspicion on the part of our journalistic community? How about the fiery explosion when his car hit a palm tree—which automotive experts say should not normally take place; what about the fact that the engine flew out of the vehicle and landed a considerable distance away–which, again, we are told, is highly unusual?
  • As with so many of these things, the authorities raced to conclude that it was all an unfortunate accident and that there was no more to the story. And virtually the entirety of journalism—Left, Right and Center, Mainstream and “Alternative”—accepted this conclusion without so much as a hint of skepticism.So, now that it has been dramatically demonstrated that accidents can be caused remotely by those targeting a driver, will we see other media stepping up to take a good hard look at the key question: What really happened to Michael Hastings? We hope so, but we aren’t taking any bets.
Gary Edwards

Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...14-forecast-burning-down-house

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14
     
    Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.
Gary Edwards

'Clinton death list': 33 spine-tingling cases - 0 views

www.wnd.com/...-list-33-most-intriguing-cases

Clinton-Body-Count

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Feb 17
     
    "(Editor's note: This list was originally published in August 2016 and has gone viral on the web. WND is running it again as American voters cast their ballots for the nation's next president on Election Day.) How many people do you personally know who have died mysteriously? How about in plane crashes or car wrecks? Bizarre suicides? People beaten to death or murdered in a hail of bullets? And what about violent freak accidents - like separate mountain biking and skiing collisions in Aspen, Colorado? Or barbells crushing a person's throat? Bill and Hillary Clinton attend a funeral Apparently, if you're Bill or Hillary Clinton, the answer to that question is at least 33 - and possibly many more. Talk-radio star Rush Limbaugh addressed the issue of the "Clinton body count" during an August show. "I swear, I could swear I saw these stories back in 1992, back in 1993, 1994," Limbaugh said. He cited a report from Rachel Alexander at Townhall.com titled, "Clinton body count or left-wing conspiracy? Three with ties to DNC mysteriously die." Limbaugh said he recalled Ted Koppel, then-anchor of ABC News' "Nightline," routinely having discussions on the issue following the July 20, 1993, death of White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster. In fact, Limbaugh said, he appeared on Koppel's show. "One of the things I said was, 'Who knows what happened here? But let me ask you a question.' I said, 'Ted, how many people do you know in your life who've been murdered? Ted, how many people do you know in your life that have died under suspicious circumstances?' "Of course, the answer is zilch, zero, nada, none, very few," Limbaugh chuckled. "Ask the Clintons that question. And it's a significant number. It's a lot of people that they know who have died, who've been murdered. "And the same question here from Rachel Alexander. It's amazing the cycle that exists with the Clintons. [Citing Townhall]: 'What it
Paul Merrell

Edward Snowden asks for asylum in Ecuador: live updates | World news | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...n-leaves-hong-kong-moscow-live

surveillance state NSA Snowden asylum Ecuador

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The NSA whistleblower left Hong Kong on an Aeroflot flight to Moscow, two days after the US charged him with espionage, before applying for asylum in Ecuador
  • WikiLeaks has released a statement claiming that Snowden is "bound for Ecuador" and is awaiting the processing of his application for asylum:  Mr Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower who exposed evidence of a global surveillance regime conducted by US and UK intelligence agencies, has left Hong Kong legally. He is bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks. Mr Snowden requested that WikiLeaks use its legal expertise and experience to secure his safety. Once Mr Snowden arrives in Ecuador his request will be formally processed. Former Spanish Judge Mr Baltasar Garzon, legal director of Wikileaks and lawyer for Julian Assange has made the following statement: "The WikiLeaks legal team and I are interested in preserving Mr Snowden’s rights and protecting him as a person. What is being done to Mr Snowden and to Mr Julian Assange - for making or facilitating disclosures in the public interest - is an assault against the people".
  • It’s past midnight in Hong Kong and late evening in Moscow, so time for a summary of the events so far on a day of extraordinary drama: • Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor whose revelations to the Guardian about the scale and scope of US spying and hacking activities has prompted global headlines, has fled Hong Kong and is now in Moscow. • His plane arrived in Russia shortly after 5pm local time. Snowden is not believed to have a Russian visa and is thought to be staying overnight at a capsule hotel inside Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport after reportedly being met on the tarmac by diplomatic cars.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • • Snowden was allowed to leave despite the US having filed a request for Hong Kong to arrest him. Hong Kong’s government said the documents sent by Washington did not fully meet legal requirements, the statement added, so Snowden was allowed to leave. It has since been reported that the US revoked Snowden’s passport on Saturday. It is not clear how he was allowed to leave Hong Kong if this happened. • Snowden is reportedly booked on a flight on Monday from Moscow to Havana, after which he is believed to be heading for another Latin American destination, reported variously as Venezuela or Ecuador. • The Ecuadorean ambassador to Russia is at the airport but said he had not met Snowden and was not entirely sure where he is.  • WikiLeaks has claimed in tweets it "assisted Mr Snowden's political asylum in a democratic country" and that its "legal advisers" are with him, including Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks staffer.
  • • There has been an angry reaction in the US to news of Snowden’s departure. Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, called Snowden “an individual who is not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent". • Snowden's departure came on the same day the South China Morning Post carried detailed reports of claims from him about US actions against China, including allegations of the hacking of phone text messages. China has said it is “gravely concerned” about the revelations. The country’s Xinhua news agency called the US “the biggest villain in our age" when it comes to hacking.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Jun 13
     
    My favorite part so far, NSA head Gen. Keith Alexander called Snowden "an individual who is not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent". Let's consider for a moment that as a U.S. Army officer, Gen. Alexander, initially and upon each promotion, was required to "solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God."  http://www.army.mil/values/officers.html So what part of "support and defend the Constitution of the United States" is it that he didn't catch? U.S. military officers are required by law to disobey illegal commands. Can this man seriously believe that his mission does not violate the U.S. Constitution?  The Fourth and Fifth Amendments were direct reactions to the British Army's practice of invading Colonist's homes at will. destroying their privacy and seizing anything in sight including its residents, their papers, their personal effects, and their property without judicial warrant or due process and just compensation. But that is just what Gen. Alexander assists in. He is a usurper of our Constitution. But let's compare the courage of Edward Snowden and Keith Alexander: "Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery.  A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause." - Clarence Darrow   "Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of the colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change." -
Paul Merrell

Keith Alexander, On Stage While Story Of NSA Infiltrations Breaks, Tries To Mislead Wit... - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...to-mislead-with-response.shtml

surveillance state NSA Alexander lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • In an interesting bit of timing, just as the Washington Post was breaking the news that the NSA had infiltrated Google and Yahoo's cloud data by hacking into the (stupidly) unencrypted data links between data centers, it turned out that NSA boss Keith Alexander was on stage at a Bloomberg Government Cybersecurity conference. He was asked about the report, and he tried to tap dance around it by claiming the NSA doesn't have access to Yahoo and Google's servers. The Guardian has a brief summary: Alexander, asked about the Post report, denied it. “Not to my knowledge, that’s never happened,” the NSA director said, before reiterating an earlier denial Prism gave the NSA direct access to the servers of its internet service provider partners. “Everything we do with those companies that work with us, they are compelled to work with us,” Alexander said. “These are specific requirements that come from a court order. This is not the NSA breaking into any databases. It would be illegal for us to do that. So I don’t know what the report is, but I can tell you factually: we do not have access to Google servers, Yahoo servers, dot-dot-dot. We go through a court order.” But, of course, in typical Alexander fashion, he's choosing his words carefully -- and thankfully people can more easily see through it at this point, since they're getting so used to it. The report didn't say they were accessing those companies' servers or databases, but rather hacking into the network connection between their data centers. That's like a report breaking of the NSA hijacking armored cars with cash, and Alexander claiming "we didn't break into the bank." Nice try.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Oct 13
     
    Dear Gen. Alexander, The reason the White House has jumped ship on you and your agency is that they don't want to go down with your ship. If you haven't figured that out by now, you probably also do not realize that those who get caught lying repeatedly set fire to the stage they stand on. As said during World War II, "Loose lips sink ships." You'd be far better off if you just stopped making public statements. But thanks for contributing to our entertainment.
Paul Merrell

If GCHQ wants to improve national security it must fix our technology | Technology | th... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...q-national-security-technology

surveillance state cyberwar vulnerabilities secure-computing Doctorow

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • In a recent column, security expert Bruce Schneier proposed breaking up the NSA – handing its offensive capabilities work to US Cyber Command and its law enforcement work to the FBI, and terminating its programme of attacking internet security. In place of this, Schneier proposed that “instead of working to deliberately weaken security for everyone, the NSA should work to improve security for everyone.” This is a profoundly good idea for reasons that may not be obvious at first blush.People who worry about security and freedom on the internet have long struggled with the problem of communicating the urgent stakes to the wider public. We speak in jargon that’s a jumble of mixed metaphors – viruses, malware, trojans, zero days, exploits, vulnerabilities, RATs – that are the striated fossil remains of successive efforts to come to grips with the issue. When we do manage to make people alarmed about the stakes, we have very little comfort to offer them, because Internet security isn’t something individuals can solve.
  • I remember well the day this all hit home for me. It was nearly exactly a year ago, and I was out on tour with my novel Homeland, which tells the story of a group of young people who come into possession of a large trove of government leaks that detail a series of illegal programmes through which supposedly democratic governments spy on people by compromising their computers.
  • I explained the book’s premise, and then talked about how this stuff works in the real world. I laid out a parade of awfuls, including a demonstrated attack that hijacked implanted defibrillators from 10 metres’ distance and caused them to compromise other defibrillators that came into range, implanting an instruction to deliver lethal shocks at a certain time in the future. I talked about Cassidy Wolf, the reigning Miss Teen USA, whose computer had been taken over by a “sextortionist” who captured nude photos of her and then threatened to release them if she didn’t perform live sex shows for him. I talked about the future of self-driving cars, smart buildings, implanted hearing aids and robotic limbs, and explained that the world is made out of computers that we put our bodies into, and that we put inside our bodies.These computers are badly secured. What’s more, governments and their intelligence agencies are actively working to undermine the security of our computers and networks. This was before the Snowden revelations, but we already knew that governments were buying “zero-day vulnerabilities” from security researchers. These are critical bugs that can be leveraged to compromise entire systems. Until recently, the normal response to the discovery of one of these “vulns” was to report them to the vendor so they could be repaired.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • But spy-agencies and law-enforcement have created a bustling marketplace for “zero-days,” which are weaponised for the purpose of attacking the computers and networks of “bad guys”. The incentives have shifted, and now a newly discovered bug had a good chance of remaining unpatched and live in the field because governments wanted to be able to use it to hack their enemies.
  • Last year, when I finished that talk in Seattle, a talk about all the ways that insecure computers put us all at risk, a woman in the audience put up her hand and said, “Well, you’ve scared the hell out of me. Now what do I do? How do I make my computers secure?”And I had to answer: “You can’t. No one of us can. I was a systems administrator 15 years ago. That means that I’m barely qualified to plug in a WiFi router today. I can’t make my devices secure and neither can you. Not when our governments are buying up information about flaws in our computers and weaponising them as part of their crime-fighting and anti-terrorism strategies. Not when it is illegal to tell people if there are flaws in their computers, where such a disclosure might compromise someone’s anti-copying strategy.But: If I had just stood here and spent an hour telling you about water-borne parasites; if I had told you about how inadequate water-treatment would put you and everyone you love at risk of horrifying illness and terrible, painful death; if I had explained that our very civilisation was at risk because the intelligence services were pursuing a strategy of keeping information about pathogens secret so they can weaponise them, knowing that no one is working on a cure; you would not ask me ‘How can I purify the water coming out of my tap?’”
  • Because when it comes to public health, individual action only gets you so far. It doesn’t matter how good your water is, if your neighbour’s water gives him cholera, there’s a good chance you’ll get cholera, too. And even if you stay healthy, you’re not going to have a very good time of it when everyone else in your country is striken and has taken to their beds.If you discovered that your government was hoarding information about water-borne parasites instead of trying to eradicate them; if you discovered that they were more interested in weaponising typhus than they were in curing it, you would demand that your government treat your water-supply with the gravitas and seriousness that it is due.The public health analogy is suprisingly apt here. The public health threat-model is in a state of continuous flux, because our well-being is under continuous, deliberate attack from pathogens for whom we are, at best, host organisms, and at worst, dinner. Evolution drives these organisms to a continuously shifting array of tactics to slide past our defenses.Public health isn’t just about pathogens, either – its thorniest problems are about human behaviour and social policy. HIV is a blood-borne disease, but disrupting its spread requires changes to our attitudes about sex, pharmaceutical patents, drugs policy and harm minimisation. Almost everything interesting about HIV is too big to fit on a microscope slide.
  • And so it is for security: crypto is awesome maths, but it’s just maths. Security requires good password choice, good password management, good laws about compelled crypto disclosure, transparency into corporate security practices, and, of course, an end to the governmental practice of spending $250M/year on anti-security sabotage through the NSA/GCHQ programmes Bullrun and Edgehill.
  • But for me, the most important parallel between public health and internet security is their significance to our societal wellbeing. Everything we do today involves the internet. Everything we do tomorrow will require the internet. If you live near a nuclear power plant, fly in airplanes, ride in cars or trains, have an implanted pacemaker, keep money in the bank, or carry a phone, your safety and well-being depend on a robust, evolving, practice of network security.This is the most alarming part of the Snowden revelations: not just that spies are spying on all of us – that they are actively sabotaging all of our technical infrastructure to ensure that they can continue to spy on us.There is no way to weaken security in a way that makes it possible to spy on “bad guys” without making all of us vulnerable to bad guys, too. The goal of national security is totally incompatible with the tactic of weakening the nation’s information security.
  • “Virus” has been a term of art in the security world for decades, and with good reason. It’s a term that resonates with people, even people with only a cursory grasp of technology. As we strive to make the public and our elected representatives understand what’s at stake, let’s expand that pathogen/epidemiology metaphor. We’d never allow MI5 to suppress information on curing typhus so they could attack terrorists by infecting them with it. We need to stop allowing the NSA and GCHQ to suppress information on fixing bugs in our computers, phones, cars, houses, planes, and bodies.If GCHQ wants to improve the national security of the United Kingdom – if the NSA want to impove the American national security – they should be fixing our technology, not breaking it. The technology of Britons and Americans is under continuous, deadly attack from criminals, from foreign spies, and from creeps. Our security is better served by armouring us against these threats than it is by undermining security so that cops and spies have an easier time attacking “bad guys.”
1 - 6 of 6
Showing 20▼ items per page