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Paul Merrell

28 pages of misdirection | Truth and Shadows - 0 views

truthandshadows.wordpress.com/...28-pages-of-misdirection

war & peace 9-11 28-pages misdirection propaganda

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • For years the 9/11 Truth movement has been vainly pleading with mainstream media – and the “alternative” 9/11-Truth-rejecting media (which we’ll include for our purposes as mainstream) to cover any of the endless, obvious problems with any of the Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory (OCT) tales we’ve been told. Now, all of a sudden, these same mainstream media, echoing prestigious players like former US Senator Bob Graham, are on the rampage about a “9/11 cover-up,” and are pushing for the release of 28 redacted pages from the 2002 Joint Congressional Intelligence Committee 9/11 Inquiry’s report! So…let’s all of us 9/11 Truthers jump aboard this fast moving train with both feet, right? The Truth movement has gradually been gaining a foothold with the public; a growing number of people countenance some kind of government role in 9/11 and/or its cover-up. Suspicion has likewise grown about the role played by Bush-administration neocons and their Zionist bedfellows. After 15 years of staunch media refusal to report the flagrantly obvious holes in the various OCT stories we’ve been fed, why is this particular issue suddenly headline news? Why at this particular juncture? And how does it just happen to be spearheaded by one of the major contributors to the initial coverup? Let’s examine the question of why the Deep State might want this story heated up to a fever pitch:
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Jul 16
     
    I'm not the only one who questions why the 28--pages controversy erupts in mainstream media when all other questions about 9-11, for example the evidence of neocons and Israelis still has the MSM blackout. And why can I find no hard information on the Web about who is behind 28pages.org?
Gary Edwards

Obama - Soros Bailout of PIMCO and the Big Banks - 0 views

interfluidity.powerblogs.com/...1237877649.shtml

financial-crisis obama-socialism obama-soros geithner-plan Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Mar 09
     
    Interfluidity has some very "Dark musings" about Treasury Sec Geithner's plan to bailout the big banks with trillions of dollars of taxpayer funds. The plan is "enronic" in that it proposes to use taxpayer funds to create a market for the toxic assets threatening to take down the big banks. The banks need to dump these AAA Fannie-Freddie mortgage securities, but the market has factored in a reality roughly discounting the value by 60% to 70%; Housing values having plummeted across the nation. If the Banks were to take the hit, and sell this GSA crap at true market value, they would not only suffer enormous losses for their high risk gambling, bu they would also be taken out of the lending market. Banks regulations require strict ratios between assets and lending funds.

    So the idea is to have the taxpayers create a toxic asset market enabling banks to dump their crap at above market prices, with taxpayers takign the hit. This hit is masked by a tricky equation; Taxpayers will put up 97% of the funds for the overpriced purchase of crap, with private sector banks, hedge funds, and bond holders contributing 3%. Such a deal!

    Heads the banks and Hedge funds win; tails the taxpayer loses. And loses to the tune of over $10 Trillion. GSA wonderkinds Fannie and Freddie have put $5 Trillion of securitized mortgages into the secondary money markets. Leverage that out at 40 : 1, and you have a $200 Trillion problem. Hummm, $10 Trillion looks cheap. "....I am filled with despair, not because what we are doing cannot "work", but because it is too unjust. This is not my country. The news of today is the Geithner plan. I think this plan might work very well in terms of repairing bank balance sheets...." Of course the whole notion of repairing bank balance sheet is a lie and misdirection. The balance sheets we should want to see repaired are household balance sheets. Banks have failed us profoundly. We want them reorganized, not repair
Gary Edwards

Ron Paul: Blame the Fed for the Financial Crisis - WSJ.com Oct 20, 2011 - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4346104576637290931614006.html

Banksters Federal-Reserve Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel Ron-Paul banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • The manner of thinking of the Federal Reserve now is no different than that of the former Soviet Union, which employed hundreds of thousands of people to perform research and provide calculations in an attempt to mimic the price system of the West's (relatively) free markets. Despite the obvious lesson to be drawn from the Soviet collapse, the U.S. still has not fully absorbed it.
  • The Fed fails to grasp that an interest rate is a price—the price of time—and that attempting to manipulate that price is as destructive as any other government price control. It fails to see that the price of housing was artificially inflated through the Fed's monetary pumping during the early 2000s, and that the only way to restore soundness to the housing sector is to allow prices to return to sustainable market levels.
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Oct 11
     
    Maybe the best statement to date as to why we, the people, need to take back control of the Federal Reserve.  Ron Paul has noticeably tempered down his close the Fed rhetoric, moving to a audit-control the Fed position.   excerpt: The Federal Reserve has caused every single boom and bust that has occurred in this country since the bank's creation in 1913. It pumps new money into the financial system to lower interest rates and spur the economy. Adding new money increases the supply of money, making the price of money over time-the interest rate-lower than the market would make it. These lower interest rates affect the allocation of resources, causing capital to be malinvested throughout the economy. So certain projects and ventures that appear profitable when funded at artificially low interest rates are not in fact the best use of those resources. Eventually, the economic boom created by the Fed's actions is found to be unsustainable, and the bust ensues as this malinvested capital manifests itself in a surplus of capital goods, inventory overhangs, etc. Until these misdirected resources are put to a more productive use-the uses the free market actually desires-the economy stagnates. Enlarge Image Bloomberg Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke The great contribution of the Austrian school of economics to economic theory was in its description of this business cycle: the process of booms and busts, and their origins in monetary intervention by the government in cooperation with the banking system. Yet policy makers at the Federal Reserve still fail to understand the causes of our most recent financial crisis. So they find themselves unable to come up with an adequate solution.
Paul Merrell

NSA lexicon: How James Clapper and other U.S. officials mislead the American public wit... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...ials_mislead_the_american.html

surveillance state NSA Obama Clapper lies lexicon

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has been harshly criticized for having misled Congress earlier this year about the scope of the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities. The criticism is entirely justified. An equally insidious threat to the integrity of our national debate, however, comes not from officials’ outright lies but from the language they use to tell the truth. When it comes to discussing government surveillance, U.S. intelligence officials have been using a vocabulary of misdirection—a language that allows them to say one thing while meaning quite another. The assignment of unconventional meanings to conventional words allows officials to imply that the NSA’s activities are narrow and closely supervised, though neither of those things is true. What follows is a lexicon for decoding the true meaning of what NSA officials say.
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Sep 13
     
    So obviously we need web browser extensions that highlight the abused words and link each to a mouse-over pop-out definition.  I'm reminded that several years ago, U.S. District Court Judge James  Redden ruled that a federal agency environmental impact was invalid because it was not written in plain language. Unfortunately, the federal regulation establishing that requirement applies only to environmental impact statements. http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/40/1502.8  
Paul Merrell

Bangkok Blast: Confronting the West's "Pundit Investigation" | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...the-wests-pundit-investigation

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Thailand bombings Shinawatra Carlyle-Group

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • The investigation continues into a powerful bomb that tore through downtown Bangkok Monday, killing 20 and injuring over 100 more. The attack was timed as the current government reshuffled top positions, the new national charter prepared to move forward, and ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra faced the loss of his police rank.
  • The investigation faces many technical challenges but as the government, police, and military attempt to carry it out, the Western media  has attempted to “take over” and begin its own investigation, carried out by unqualified pundits and subjected to public opinion rather than actual fact. The objective of the Western media is not truth, but rather to undermine the current government while attempting to exonerate Thaksin Shinawatra - leader of an ousted client regime groomed by and in the service of Western interests since as early as the 1990’s. To confront this intentional, politically motivated manipulation, it may be useful to examine several key questions facing any investigation and answer them with what real evidence now stands.
  • In reality, such a conflict is not possible. Shinawatra does not, nor did he ever have, the support or the operational capacity to lead such a war. However, wide scale terrorism dressed up by a complicit Western media was not only a very real possibility, it was the only possibility left for Shinawatra and his foreign backers.
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  • With the Western media attempting  – just as the bombers themselves did – to undermine the current Thai government, the truth is slowly being buried under a mountain of lies, spin, and intentional misdirection. The Western media is attempting to sow enough mistrust and confusion that no matter how conclusive Thailand’s final investigation is, the West will be able to claim “reasonable doubt.” However, looking at the above evidence, as it stands, it is difficult to imagine Shinawatra was not involved. He had the means, the motive, an opportunity, and a history of violence including the use of bombs almost identical to the ones used in the most recent attacks. His violent political and militant fronts have openly threatened to carry out large scale violence. And now that violence has been realized.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Aug 15
     
    Tony Cartalluci continues to pull together the evidence that the recent bombing in Bangkok was engineered by deposed prime minister in hiding Thaksan Shinawatra, a puppet of the Carlyle Group, which is deeply invested in the U.S. defense industry. Shinawatra "red shirts" have been committing widespread acts of violence in Thailand since Shinawatra -- forced out of office by a corruption conviction -- was succeeded by his sister, who was then ousted by military coup in 2014. During the sister's reign, she repeatedly and openly admitted that her brother was actually making the decisions. It is a situation where American attempts to overthrow a foreign government have been at the zenith of visibility. 
Paul Merrell

Why the Sony hack is unlikely to be the work of North Korea. | Marc's Security Ramblings - 0 views

marcrogers.org/...-to-be-the-work-of-north-korea

Sony-hack North-Korea false-flag FBI Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Everyone seems to be eager to pin the blame for the Sony hack on North Korea. However, I think it’s unlikely. Here’s why:1. The broken English looks deliberately bad and doesn’t exhibit any of the classic comprehension mistakes you actually expect to see in “Konglish”. i.e it reads to me like an English speaker pretending to be bad at writing English. 2. The fact that the code was written on a PC with Korean locale & language actually makes it less likely to be North Korea. Not least because they don’t speak traditional “Korean” in North Korea, they speak their own dialect and traditional Korean is forbidden. This is one of the key things that has made communication with North Korean refugees difficult. I would find the presence of Chinese far more plausible.
  • 3. It’s clear from the hard-coded paths and passwords in the malware that whoever wrote it had extensive knowledge of Sony’s internal architecture and access to key passwords. While it’s plausible that an attacker could have built up this knowledge over time and then used it to make the malware, Occam’s razor suggests the simpler explanation of an insider. It also fits with the pure revenge tact that this started out as. 4. Whoever did this is in it for revenge. The info and access they had could have easily been used to cash out, yet, instead, they are making every effort to burn Sony down. Just think what they could have done with passwords to all of Sony’s financial accounts? With the competitive intelligence in their business documents? From simple theft, to the sale of intellectual property, or even extortion – the attackers had many ways to become rich. Yet, instead, they chose to dump the data, rendering it useless. Likewise, I find it hard to believe that a “Nation State” which lives by propaganda would be so willing to just throw away such an unprecedented level of access to the beating heart of Hollywood itself.
  • 5. The attackers only latched onto “The Interview” after the media did – the film was never mentioned by GOP right at the start of their campaign. It was only after a few people started speculating in the media that this and the communication from DPRK “might be linked” that suddenly it became linked. I think the attackers both saw this as an opportunity for “lulz” and as a way to misdirect everyone into thinking it was a nation state. After all, if everyone believes it’s a nation state, then the criminal investigation will likely die.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • 6. Whoever is doing this is VERY net and social media savvy. That, and the sophistication of the operation, do not match with the profile of DPRK up until now. Grugq did an excellent analysis of this aspect his findings are here – http://0paste.com/6875#md 7. Finally, blaming North Korea is the easy way out for a number of folks, including the security vendors and Sony management who are under the microscope for this. Let’s face it – most of today’s so-called “cutting edge” security defenses are either so specific, or so brittle, that they really don’t offer much meaningful protection against a sophisticated attacker or group of attackers.
  • 8. It probably also suits a number of political agendas to have something that justifies sabre-rattling at North Korea, which is why I’m not that surprised to see politicians starting to point their fingers at the DPRK also. 9. It’s clear from the leaked data that Sony has a culture which doesn’t take security very seriously. From plaintext password files, to using “password” as the password in business critical certificates, through to just the shear volume of aging unclassified yet highly sensitive data left out in the open. This isn’t a simple slip-up or a “weak link in the chain” – this is a serious organization-wide failure to implement anything like a reasonable security architecture.
  • The reality is, as things stand, Sony has little choice but to burn everything down and start again. Every password, every key, every certificate is tainted now and that’s a terrifying place for an organization to find itself. This hack should be used as the definitive lesson in why security matters and just how bad things can get if you don’t take it seriously. 10. Who do I think is behind this? My money is on a disgruntled (possibly ex) employee of Sony.
  • EDIT: This appears (at least in part) to be substantiated by a conversation the Verge had with one of the alleged hackers – http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/25/7281097/sony-pictures-hackers-say-they-want-equality-worked-with-staff-to-break-in Finally for an EXCELLENT blow by blow analysis of the breach and the events that followed, read the following post by my friends from Risk Based Security – https://www.riskbasedsecurity.com/2014/12/a-breakdown-and-analysis-of-the-december-2014-sony-hack EDIT: Also make sure you read my good friend Krypt3ia’s post on the hack – http://krypt3ia.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/sony-hack-winners-and-losers/
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Dec 14
     
    Seems that the FBI overlooked a few clues before it told Obama to go ahead and declare war against North Korea. 
Paul Merrell

FBI Director: Sony's 'Sloppy' North Korean Hackers Revealed Their IP Addresses | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...s-failed-use-proxies-sony-hack

war & peace cyberwar North-Korea Sony-hack FBI Comey

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration has been tightlipped about its controversial naming of the North Korean government as the definitive source of the hack that eviscerated Sony Pictures Entertainment late last year. But FBI director James Comey is standing by the bureau’s conclusion, and has offered up a few tiny breadcrumbs of the evidence that led to it. Those crumbs include the claim that Sony hackers sometimes failed to use the proxy servers that masked the origin of their attack, revealing IP addresses that the FBI says were used exclusively by North Korea. Speaking at a Fordham Law School cybersecurity conference Wednesday, Comey said that he has “very high confidence” in the FBI’s attribution of the attack to North Korea. And he named several of the sources of his evidence, including a “behavioral analysis unit” of FBI experts trained to psychologically analyze foes based on their writings and actions. He also said that the FBI compared the Sony attack with their own “red team” simulations to determine how the attack could have occurred. And perhaps most importantly, Comey now says that the hackers in the attack failed on multiple occasions to use the proxy servers that bounce their Internet connection through an obfuscating computer somewhere else in the world, revealing IP addresses that tied them to North Koreans.
  • “In nearly every case, [the Sony hackers known as the Guardians of Peace] used proxy servers to disguise where they were coming from in sending these emails and posting these statements. But several times they got sloppy,” Comey said. “Several times, either because they forgot or because of a technical problem, they connected directly and we could see that the IPs they were using…were exclusively used by the North Koreans.” “They shut it off very quickly once they saw the mistake,” he added. “But not before we saw where it was coming from.” Comey’s brief and cryptic remarks—with no opportunity for followup questions from reporters—respond to skepticism and calls for more evidence from cybersecurity experts unsatisfied with the FBI’s vague statements tying the hack to North Korean government. In a previous public announcement the FBI had said only that it found “similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks,” as well as IP addresses that matched prior attacks it knows to have originated in North Korea. At that time, the FBI also said it had further evidence matching the tools used in the attack to a North Korean hacking attack that hit South Korean banks and media outlets.
  • Following those elliptical statements, the cybersecurity community demanded more information be released to prove North Korea’s involvement. Some have even signed a petition on the White House website calling for more transparency in the investigation. Well-known security blogger and author Bruce Schneier has compared the FBI’s “trust us” mentality to the claims of the Bush administration about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War. Without more information, security experts themselves have remained deeply divided in their conclusions about who hacked Sony.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • That pseudo-explanation will likely do little to quell the security community’s doubts. Even if the hackers appeared to fail to use proxies on some occasions, it could still be very difficult to be sure those “real” IP addresses weren’t proxies themselves designed to serve as further misdirection. And a nagging loose thread remains that the Guardians of Peace hackers in their initial statements to Sony tried to extort money from the company before making any political demands. Sony’s Kim Jong-un assassination comedy “The Interview,” the suppression of which is believed by many to be the North Korean government’s motive in the hack, wasn’t even mentioned by the hackers until long after the intrusion was underway. Comey didn’t address that plot hole in the North Korean explanation in his speech.
Paul Merrell

Information Warfare: Automated Propaganda and Social Media Bots | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5438304

automated-propaganda social-media-bots

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • NATO has announced that it is launching an “information war” against Russia. The UK publicly announced a battalion of keyboard warriors to spread disinformation. It’s well-documented that the West has long used false propaganda to sway public opinion. Western military and intelligence services manipulate social media to counter criticism of Western policies. Such manipulation includes flooding social media with comments supporting the government and large corporations, using armies of sock puppets, i.e. fake social media identities. See this, this, this, this and this. In 2013, the American Congress repealed the formal ban against the deployment of propaganda against U.S. citizens living on American soil. So there’s even less to constrain propaganda than before.
  • Information warfare for propaganda purposes also includes: The Pentagon, Federal Reserve and other government entities using software to track discussion of political issues … to try to nip dissent in the bud before it goes viral “Controlling, infiltrating, manipulating and warping” online discourse Use of artificial intelligence programs to try to predict how people will react to propaganda
  • Some of the propaganda is spread by software programs. We pointed out 6 years ago that people were writing scripts to censor hard-hitting information from social media. One of America’s top cyber-propagandists – former high-level military information officer Joel Harding – wrote in December: I was in a discussion today about information being used in social media as a possible weapon.  The people I was talking with have a tool which scrapes social media sites, gauges their sentiment and gives the user the opportunity to automatically generate a persuasive response. Their tool is called a “Social Networking Influence Engine”. *** The implications seem to be profound for the information environment. *** The people who own this tool are in the civilian world and don’t even remotely touch the defense sector, so getting approval from the US Department of State might not even occur to them.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • How Can This Real? Gizmodo reported in 2010: Software developer Nigel Leck got tired rehashing the same 140-character arguments against climate change deniers, so he programmed a bot that does the work for him. With citations! Leck’s bot, @AI_AGW, doesn’t just respond to arguments directed at Leck himself, it goes out and picks fights. Every five minutes it trawls Twitter for terms and phrases that commonly crop up in Tweets that refute human-caused climate change. It then searches its database of hundreds to find a counter-argument best suited for that tweet—usually a quick statement and a link to a scientific source. As can be the case with these sorts of things, many of the deniers don’t know they’ve been targeted by a robot and engage AI_AGW in debate. The bot will continue to fire back canned responses that best fit the interlocutor’s line of debate—Leck says this goes on for days, in some cases—and the bot’s been outfitted with a number of responses on the topic of religion, where the arguments unsurprisingly often end up. Technology has come a long way in the past 5 years. So if a lone programmer could do this 5 years ago, imagine what he could do now. And the big players have a lot more resources at their disposal than a lone climate activist/software developer does.  For example, a government expert told the Washington Post that the government “quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type” (and see this).  So if the lone programmer is doing it, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the big boys are widely doing it.
  • How Effective Are Automated Comments? Unfortunately, this is more effective than you might assume … Specifically, scientists have shown that name-calling and swearing breaks down people’s ability to think rationally … and intentionally sowing discord and posting junk comments to push down insightful comments  are common propaganda techniques. Indeed, an automated program need not even be that sophisticated … it can copy a couple of words from the main post or a comment, and then spew back one or more radioactive labels such as “terrorist”, “commie”, “Russia-lover”, “wimp”, “fascist”, “loser”, “traitor”, “conspiratard”, etc. Given that Harding and his compadres consider anyone who questions any U.S. policies as an enemy of the state  – as does the Obama administration (and see this) – many honest, patriotic writers and commenters may be targeted for automated propaganda comments.
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