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Paul Merrell

Lavabit To Release Code As Open Source, As It Creates Dark Mail Alliance To Create Even More Secure Email | Techdirt - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...surveillance-proof-email.shtml

surveillance state NSA Dark Mail Alliance NSA-blowback

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • This whole morning, while all these stories of the NSA hacking directly into Google and Yahoo's network have been popping up, I've been at the Inbox Love conference, all about the future of email. The "keynote" that just concluded, was Ladar Levison from Lavabit (with an assist from Mike Janke from Silent Circle), talking about the just announced Dark Mail Alliance, between Lavabit and Silent Circle -- the other "security" focused communications company who shut down its email offering after Lavabit was forced to shut down. Levison joked that they went with "Dark Mail" because "Black Mail" might have negative connotations. Perhaps just as interesting, Levison is going to be releasing the Lavabit source code (and doing a Kickstarter project to support this), with the hope that many others can set up their own secure email using Lavabit's code, combined with the new Dark Mail Alliance secure technology which will be available next year. As noted, the Alliance is working on trying to create truly secure and surveillance-proof email. Of course, nothing is ever 100% surveillance proof -- and both members of the alliance have previously claimed that it was almost impossible to do surveillance-proof email. However, they're claiming they've had a "breakthrough" that will help.
  • The newly developed technology has been designed to look just like ordinary email, with an interface that includes all the usual folders—inbox, sent mail, and drafts. But where it differs is that it will automatically deploy peer-to-peer encryption, so that users of the Dark Mail technology will be able to communicate securely. The encryption, based on a Silent Circle instant messaging protocol called SCIMP, will apply to both content and metadata of the message and attachments. And the secret keys generated to encrypt the communications will be ephemeral, meaning they are deleted after each exchange of messages. For the NSA and similar surveillance agencies across the world, it will sound like a nightmare. The technology will thwart attempts to sift emails directly from Internet cables as part of so-called “upstream” collection programs and limit the ability to collect messages directly from Internet companies through court orders. Covertly monitoring encrypted Dark Mail emails would likely have to be done by deploying Trojan spyware on a targeted user. If every email provider in the world adopted this technology for all their users, it would render dragnet interception of email messages and email metadata virtually impossible.
  • Importantly, they're not asking everyone to just trust them to be secure -- even though both companies have the right pedigree to deserve some level of trust. Instead, they're going to release the source code for public scrutiny and audits, and they're hoping that other email providers will join the alliance. At the conference, Levison recounted much of what's happened over the last few months (with quite a bit of humor), joking about how he tried to be "nice" in giving the feds Lavabit's private keys printed out, by noting that he included line numbers to help (leaving unsaid that this would make OCR'ing the keys even more difficult). He also admitted that giving them the paper version was really just a way to buy time to shut down Lavabit.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Janke came up on stage to talk about the importance of changing the 40-year-old architecture of email, because it's just not designed for secure communications. The hope is that as many other email providers as possible will join the Alliance and that this new setup becomes the de facto standard for end-to-end secure email, which is where Levison's open sourcing of his code gets more interesting. In theory, if it all works out, it could be a lot easier for lots of companies to set up their own "dark mail" email providers. Either way, I would imagine that this development can't make the NSA all that happy.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Oct 13
     
    Oh, Goody!
Paul Merrell

Merkel, other European leaders raise concerns on U.S. surveillance - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html

surveillance state NSA NSA-blowback EU Germany

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • European leaders, describing themselves as stunned by revelations of an extensive U.S. surveillance program that included their citizens, moved Monday to demand more information from the U.S. government and said they would discuss ways to bolster their already stringent privacy laws. And in Britain, where intelligence agencies have long had robust cooperation with their American counterparts, a top official tried Monday to limit potential uproar, telling Parliament that the partnership had not been used to circumvent British laws.
  • The discontent from Europe pointed to the breadth of fallout from the affair and to the potential for fresh strains between the United States and allies wary of American intrusiveness. German Chancellor Angela Merkel vowed to raise the issue when she meets in Berlin with President Obama next week, a spokesman said, and other German officials said they were concerned by the apparent monitoring of their citizens. Top officials of the 27-nation European Union also said they would press the U.S. government on the matter at bilateral meetings this week.
  • The PRISM surveillance program, portions of which were described in recent days by The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper in Britain, makes clear that U.S. intelligence services now have the power to vacuum up data about telecommunications traffic across the world. An apparent snapshot from an NSA Boundless Informant database published on the Guardian’s Web site indicated that in March 2013, foreign intelligence gathering was primarily focused on the Middle East. For that month, more pieces of intelligence were gathered in Germany than anywhere else in Europe.In Germany, where memories of East German Stasi surveillance remain fresh, privacy has powerful defenders. Individual German states have pursued cases against Facebook and Google in recent years, complaining that the companies did not do enough to give users power over their own information. The breadth and ambitions of the U.S. intelligence program far exceed any issues raised previously with private firms.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • When Merkel meets Obama, “you can safely assume that this is an issue that the chancellor will bring up,” Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, told reporters on Monday. Merkel grew up in the East German system, where the government collected vast amounts of information about its citizens.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Jun 13
     
    One of the biggest dangers to the NSA program that I see just over the horizon is that the E.U. has regulatory powers over Google and the other cloud companies involved in the scandal. If the European Commission decides that these companies can not be trusted to protect user's data, it has more than enough legal authority to whop some serious hurt on the companies. 
Paul Merrell

The Handover - An FP Slideshow | Foreign Policy - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...an_soldiers_war_in_afghanistan

war & peace Afghanistan Taliban U.S. negotiations

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Tuesday marked a milestone for the 12-year-old war in Afghanistan, with NATO forces officially handing over responsibility for the country's security to Afghan government forces. Since 2010, when President Barack Obama accelerated training as part of his rapid surge of forces into the country, the Afghan National Army has grown from around 100,000 members to 195,000. But it still faces a number of challenges, including a desertion rate so high that it needs 50,000 new recruits every year to replace those who leave). In December 2012, a Pentagon report determined that only one of the Afghan military's 23 brigades was able to operate effectively without NATO support. Now, Afghan troops will have to do just that; except in rare cases, they will no longer be able to rely on the support of U.S. warplanes, medical evacuation helicopters, or ground troops.
  • Tuesday marked a milestone for the 12-year-old war in Afghanistan, with NATO forces officially handing over responsibility for the country's security to Afghan government forces. Since 2010, when President Barack Obama accelerated training as part of his rapid surge of forces into the country, the Afghan National Army has grown from around 100,000 members to 195,000. But it still faces a number of challenges, including a desertion rate so high that it needs 50,000 new recruits every year to replace those who leave). In December 2012, a Pentagon report determined that only one of the Afghan military's 23 brigades was able to operate effectively without NATO support. Now, Afghan troops will have to do just that; except in rare cases, they will no longer be able to rely on the support of U.S. warplanes, medical evacuation helicopters, or ground troops. Here's a look back at the long preparation for this week's big handover. An Afghan National Army soldier assigned to the Mobile Strike Force Kandak fires an RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher during a live-fire exercise supervised by Marines Team on Camp Shorabak, Helmand province, Afghanistan on May 20, 2013.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Jun 13
     
    Here in one paragraph are a lot of the reasons two of Obama's claims about U.S. plans in Afghanistan cannot both be true: [i] all U.S. -and NATO combat troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2014; and [ii] a fairly large contingent of U.S. non-combat troops will remain on U.S. bases in Afghanistan to advise, train, and support the Karzai government's defense forces.  1. The "surge" didn't work even though Obama sent more troops than the military had requested. Even at the peak of U.S. forces in that country, the U.S. military had been beaten back into enclaves by the Taliban. Nonetheless, Obama has  continued to draw down U.S. forces there. NATO allies have been pulling up their tent pegs too. 2. The Afghan government forces are utterly incapable of holding out against the Taliban without strong NATO backing that Obama says is ending. 3. Therefore, a small non-combatant U.S. force left behind after 2014 would be virtually defenseless if left behind. There seems to be no question that U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is winding down steadily. And Obama isn't dumb enough to have a few thousand U.S. troops stay behind to be slaughtered. So his "stay behind" claims are a bluff. The Taliban can read those tea leaves at least as well as I can. This is Vietnam War Redux, also a repeat of the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan. Obama has no credible stick to wield in negotiations with the Taliban. Therefore, the negotiations are either a sham or Obama has to offer the Taliban a carrot of suitable size. The Taliban has no incentive to participate in a sham; they've won their war and the U.S. departure is imminent. Therefore, we need consider what carrot Obama might offer the Taliban. A better royalty agreement on the sidetracked Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline that would supply India with natural gas? .  That doesn't seem enough.  But a consortium of western investors willing to pay royalties t
Paul Merrell

Poll: Distrust in media hits new high - Political Hotsheet - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...istrust-in-media-hits-new-high

mainstream-media polls public-trust

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • U.S. distrust of the mass media is at an all-time high, according to a new poll from Gallup, which indicates that six in ten Americans have little or no trust in mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The survey, conducted from Sept. 6-9, shows that faith in the media is down in recent years, with 40 percent of Americans saying they have a great deal of or some faith in the media to comprehensively and fairly report the news, and 60 percent expressing the opposite perspective.
Paul Merrell

Security Experts Oppose Government Access to Encrypted Communication - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...o-encrypted-communication.html

encryption government-backdoors expert-report

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • An elite group of security technologists has concluded that the American and British governments cannot demand special access to encrypted communications without putting the world’s most confidential data and critical infrastructure in danger.A new paper from the group, made up of 14 of the world’s pre-eminent cryptographers and computer scientists, is a formidable salvo in a skirmish between intelligence and law enforcement leaders, and technologists and privacy advocates. After Edward J. Snowden’s revelations — with security breaches and awareness of nation-state surveillance at a record high and data moving online at breakneck speeds — encryption has emerged as a major issue in the debate over privacy rights.
  • That has put Silicon Valley at the center of a tug of war. Technology companies including Apple, Microsoft and Google have been moving to encrypt more of their corporate and customer data after learning that the National Security Agency and its counterparts were siphoning off digital communications and hacking into corporate data centers.
  • Yet law enforcement and intelligence agency leaders argue that such efforts thwart their ability to monitor kidnappers, terrorists and other adversaries. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to ban encrypted messages altogether. In the United States, Michael S. Rogers, the director of the N.S.A., proposed that technology companies be required to create a digital key to unlock encrypted data, but to divide the key into pieces and secure it so that no one person or government agency could use it alone.The encryption debate has left both sides bitterly divided and in fighting mode. The group of cryptographers deliberately issued its report a day before James B. Comey Jr., the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Sally Quillian Yates, the deputy attorney general at the Justice Department, are scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the concerns that they and other government agencies have that encryption technologies will prevent them from effectively doing their jobs.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The new paper is the first in-depth technical analysis of government proposals by leading cryptographers and security thinkers, including Whitfield Diffie, a pioneer of public key cryptography, and Ronald L. Rivest, the “R” in the widely used RSA public cryptography algorithm. In the report, the group said any effort to give the government “exceptional access” to encrypted communications was technically unfeasible and would leave confidential data and critical infrastructure like banks and the power grid at risk. Handing governments a key to encrypted communications would also require an extraordinary degree of trust. With government agency breaches now the norm — most recently at the United States Office of Personnel Management, the State Department and the White House — the security specialists said authorities could not be trusted to keep such keys safe from hackers and criminals. They added that if the United States and Britain mandated backdoor keys to communications, China and other governments in foreign markets would be spurred to do the same.
  • “Such access will open doors through which criminals and malicious nation-states can attack the very individuals law enforcement seeks to defend,” the report said. “The costs would be substantial, the damage to innovation severe and the consequences to economic growth hard to predict. The costs to the developed countries’ soft power and to our moral authority would also be considerable.”
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Jul 15
     
    Our system of government does not expect that every criminal will be apprehended and convicted. There are numerous values our society believes are more important. Some examples: [i] a presumption of innocence unless guilt is established beyond any reasonable doubt; [ii] the requirement that government officials convince a neutral magistrate that they have probable cause to believe that a search or seizure will produce evidence of a crime; [iii] many communications cannot be compelled to be disclosed and used in evidence, such as attorney-client communications, spousal communications, and priest-penitent communications; and [iv] etc. Moral of my story: the government needs a much stronger reason to justify interception of communications than saying, "some crooks will escape prosecution if we can't do that." We have a right to whisper to each other, concealing our communicatons from all others. Why does the right to whisper privately disappear if our whisperings are done electronically? The Supreme Court took its first step on a very slippery slope when it permitted wiretapping in Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 48 S. Ct. 564, 72 L. Ed. 944 (1928). https://goo.gl/LaZGHt It's been a long slide ever since. It's past time to revisit Olmstead and recognize that American citizens have the absolute right to communicate privately. "The President … recognizes that U.S. citizens and institutions should have a reasonable expectation of privacy from foreign or domestic intercept when using the public telephone system." - Brent Scowcroft, U.S. National Security Advisor, National Security Decision Memorandum 338 (1 September 1976) (Nixon administration), http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdm-ford/nsdm-338.pdf   
Paul Merrell

Hillary Clinton Goes to Militaristic, Hawkish Think Tank, Gives Militaristic, Hawkish Speech - 0 views

theintercept.com/...es-militaristic-hawkish-speech

Auction 2016 Hillary Israel-lobby pro-war propaganda

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Leading Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton this morning delivered a foreign policy speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington. By itself, the choice of the venue was revealing. Brookings served as Ground Zero for centrist think tank advocacy of the Iraq War, which Clinton (along with potential rival Joe Biden) notoriously and vehemently advocated. Brookings’ two leading “scholar”-stars — Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon — spent all of 2002 and 2003 insisting that invading Iraq was wise and just, and spent the years after that assuring Americans that the “victorious” war and subsequent occupation were going really well (in April 2003, O’Hanlon debated with himself over whether the strategy that led to the “victory” in his beloved war should be deemed “brilliant” or just extremely “clever,” while in June 2003, Pollack assured New York Times readers that Saddam’s WMD would be found).
  • Since then, O’Hanlon in particular has advocated for increased military force in more countries than one can count. That’s not surprising: Brookings is funded in part by one of the Democratic Party’s favorite billionaires, Haim Saban, who is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel and once said of himself: “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.” Pollack advocated for the attack on Iraq while he was “Director of Research of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy.” Saban became the Democratic Party’s largest fundraiser — even paying $7 million for the new DNC building — and is now a very substantial funder of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In exchange, she’s written a personal letter to him publicly “expressing her strong and unequivocal support for Israel in the face of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement.” So the hawkish Brookings is the prism through which Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy worldview can be best understood. The think tank is filled with former advisers to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, and would certainly provide numerous top-level foreign policy officials in any Hillary Clinton administration. As she put it today at the start: “There are a lot of long-time friends and colleagues who perch here at Brookings.” And she proceeded to deliver exactly the speech one would expect, reminding everyone of just how militaristic and hawkish she is.
  • Clinton proclaimed that she “too [is] deeply concerned about Iranian aggression and the need to confront it. It’s a ruthless, brutal regime that has the blood of Americans, many others and including its own people on its hands.” Even worse, she said, “Its political rallies resound with cries of ‘Death to America.’ Its leaders talk about wiping Israel off the face of the map, most recently just yesterday, and foment terror against it. There is absolutely no reason to trust Iran.” She repeated that claim several times for emphasis: “They vow to destroy Israel. And that’s worth saying again. They vow to destroy Israel.” She vowed that in dealing with Iran, she will be tougher and more aggressive than Reagan was with the Soviet Union: “You remember President Reagan’s line about the Soviets: trust but verify? My approach will be distrust and verify.” She also explicitly threatened Iran with war if they fail to comply: “I will not hesitate to take military action if Iran attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon, and I will set up my successor to be able to credibly make the same pledge.” She even depicted the Iran Deal as making a future war with Iran easier and more powerful:
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Should it become necessary in the future having exhausted peaceful alternatives to turn to military force, we will have preserved and in some cases enhanced our capacity to act. And because we have proven our commitment to diplomacy first, the world will more likely join us. As for Israel itself, Clinton eagerly promised to shower it with a long, expensive, and dangerous list of gifts. Here’s just a part of what that country can expect from the second President Clinton: I will deepen America’s unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security, including our long standing tradition of guaranteeing Israel’s qualitative military edge. I’ll increase support for Israeli rocket and missile defenses and for intelligence sharing. I’ll sell Israel the most sophisticated fire aircraft ever developed. The F-35. We’ll work together to develop and implement better tunnel detection technology to prevent arms smuggling and kidnapping as well as the strongest possible missile defense system for Northern Israel, which has been subjected to Hezbollah’s attacks for years.
  • She promised she “will sustain a robust military presence in the [Persian Gulf] region, especially our air and naval forces.” She vowed to “increase security cooperation with our Gulf allies” — by which she means the despotic regimes in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar, among others. She swore she will crack down even further on Hezbollah: “It’s time to eliminate the false distinction that some still make between the supposed political and military wings. If you’re part of Hezbollah, you’re part of a terrorist organization, plain and simple.” Then she took the ultimate pledge: “I would not support this agreement for one second if I thought it put Israel in greater danger.” So even if the deal would benefit the U.S., she would not support it “for one second” if it “put Israel in greater danger.” That’s an unusually blunt vow to subordinate the interests of the U.S. to that foreign nation.
  • But when it comes to gifts to Israel, that’s not all! Echoing the vow of several GOP candidates to call Netanyahu right away after being elected, Clinton promised: “I would invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House during my first month in office to talk about all of these issues and to set us on a course of close, frequent consultation right from the start, because we both rely on each other for support as partners, allies and friends.” She then addressed “the people of Israel,” telling them: “Let me say, you’ll never have to question whether we’re with you. The United States will always be with you.” For good measure, she heaped praise on “my friend Chuck Schumer,” who has led the battle to defeat the Iran Deal, gushing about what an “excellent leader in the Senate” he will make. What’s a little warmongering among friends? Just as was true in her book, she implicitly criticized Obama — who boasts that he has bombed seven predominantly Muslim countries — of being insufficiently militaristic, imperialistic, and violent. She said she wanted more involvement in Syria from the start (though did not call for the U.S. to accept any of its refugees). In a clear rebuke to the current president, she decreed that any criticisms U.S. officials may utter of Israel should be done only in private (“in private and behind, you know, closed doors”), not in public, lest “it open[] the door to everybody else to delegitimize Israel to, you know, pile on in ways that are not good for the — the strength and stability, not just of Israel.” About Russia, she said, “I think we have not done enough” and put herself “in the category of people who wanted us to do more in response to the annexation of Crimea and the continuing destabilization of Ukraine.”
  • Two words that did not come out of Clinton’s mouth during the entire event: “Palestinians” (do they exist?) and “Libya” (that glorious war she supported that was going to be the inspiring template for future “humanitarian interventions” before it predictably destroyed that whole country).
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Sep 15
     
    Glenn Greenwald tags Hillary pandering to the Chicken Hawk Party
Paul Merrell

Popular Security Software Came Under Relentless NSA and GCHQ Attacks - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...nsa-gchq-targeted-kaspersky

surveillance state NSA GCHQ anti-virus-software

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The National Security Agency and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, have worked to subvert anti-virus and other security software in order to track users and infiltrate networks, according to documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The spy agencies have reverse engineered software products, sometimes under questionable legal authority, and monitored web and email traffic in order to discreetly thwart anti-virus software and obtain intelligence from companies about security software and users of such software. One security software maker repeatedly singled out in the documents is Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, which has a holding registered in the U.K., claims more than 270,000 corporate clients, and says it protects more than 400 million people with its products. British spies aimed to thwart Kaspersky software in part through a technique known as software reverse engineering, or SRE, according to a top-secret warrant renewal request. The NSA has also studied Kaspersky Lab’s software for weaknesses, obtaining sensitive customer information by monitoring communications between the software and Kaspersky servers, according to a draft top-secret report. The U.S. spy agency also appears to have examined emails inbound to security software companies flagging new viruses and vulnerabilities.
  • The efforts to compromise security software were of particular importance because such software is relied upon to defend against an array of digital threats and is typically more trusted by the operating system than other applications, running with elevated privileges that allow more vectors for surveillance and attack. Spy agencies seem to be engaged in a digital game of cat and mouse with anti-virus software companies; the U.S. and U.K. have aggressively probed for weaknesses in software deployed by the companies, which have themselves exposed sophisticated state-sponsored malware.
  • The requested warrant, provided under Section 5 of the U.K.’s 1994 Intelligence Services Act, must be renewed by a government minister every six months. The document published today is a renewal request for a warrant valid from July 7, 2008 until January 7, 2009. The request seeks authorization for GCHQ activities that “involve modifying commercially available software to enable interception, decryption and other related tasks, or ‘reverse engineering’ software.”
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  • The NSA, like GCHQ, has studied Kaspersky Lab’s software for weaknesses. In 2008, an NSA research team discovered that Kaspersky software was transmitting sensitive user information back to the company’s servers, which could easily be intercepted and employed to track users, according to a draft of a top-secret report. The information was embedded in “User-Agent” strings included in the headers of Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, requests. Such headers are typically sent at the beginning of a web request to identify the type of software and computer issuing the request.
  • According to the draft report, NSA researchers found that the strings could be used to uniquely identify the computing devices belonging to Kaspersky customers. They determined that “Kaspersky User-Agent strings contain encoded versions of the Kaspersky serial numbers and that part of the User-Agent string can be used as a machine identifier.” They also noted that the “User-Agent” strings may contain “information about services contracted for or configurations.” Such data could be used to passively track a computer to determine if a target is running Kaspersky software and thus potentially susceptible to a particular attack without risking detection.
  • Another way the NSA targets foreign anti-virus companies appears to be to monitor their email traffic for reports of new vulnerabilities and malware. A 2010 presentation on “Project CAMBERDADA” shows the content of an email flagging a malware file, which was sent to various anti-virus companies by François Picard of the Montréal-based consulting and web hosting company NewRoma. The presentation of the email suggests that the NSA is reading such messages to discover new flaws in anti-virus software. Picard, contacted by The Intercept, was unaware his email had fallen into the hands of the NSA. He said that he regularly sends out notification of new viruses and malware to anti-virus companies, and that he likely sent the email in question to at least two dozen such outfits. He also said he never sends such notifications to government agencies. “It is strange the NSA would show an email like mine in a presentation,” he added.
  • The NSA presentation goes on to state that its signals intelligence yields about 10 new “potentially malicious files per day for malware triage.” This is a tiny fraction of the hostile software that is processed. Kaspersky says it detects 325,000 new malicious files every day, and an internal GCHQ document indicates that its own system “collect[s] around 100,000,000 malware events per day.” After obtaining the files, the NSA analysts “[c]heck Kaspersky AV to see if they continue to let any of these virus files through their Anti-Virus product.” The NSA’s Tailored Access Operations unit “can repurpose the malware,” presumably before the anti-virus software has been updated to defend against the threat.
  • The Project CAMBERDADA presentation lists 23 additional AV companies from all over the world under “More Targets!” Those companies include Check Point software, a pioneering maker of corporate firewalls based Israel, whose government is a U.S. ally. Notably omitted are the American anti-virus brands McAfee and Symantec and the British company Sophos.
  • As government spies have sought to evade anti-virus software, the anti-virus firms themselves have exposed malware created by government spies. Among them, Kaspersky appears to be the sharpest thorn in the side of government hackers. In the past few years, the company has proven to be a prolific hunter of state-sponsored malware, playing a role in the discovery and/or analysis of various pieces of malware reportedly linked to government hackers, including the superviruses Flame, which Kaspersky flagged in 2012; Gauss, also detected in 2012; Stuxnet, discovered by another company in 2010; and Regin, revealed by Symantec. In February, the Russian firm announced its biggest find yet: the “Equation Group,” an organization that has deployed espionage tools widely believed to have been created by the NSA and hidden on hard drives from leading brands, according to Kaspersky. In a report, the company called it “the most advanced threat actor we have seen” and “probably one of the most sophisticated cyber attack groups in the world.”
  • Hacks deployed by the Equation Group operated undetected for as long as 14 to 19 years, burrowing into the hard drive firmware of sensitive computer systems around the world, according to Kaspersky. Governments, militaries, technology companies, nuclear research centers, media outlets and financial institutions in 30 countries were among those reportedly infected. Kaspersky estimates that the Equation Group could have implants in tens of thousands of computers, but documents published last year by The Intercept suggest the NSA was scaling up their implant capabilities to potentially infect millions of computers with malware. Kaspersky’s adversarial relationship with Western intelligence services is sometimes framed in more sinister terms; the firm has been accused of working too closely with the Russian intelligence service FSB. That accusation is partly due to the company’s apparent success in uncovering NSA malware, and partly due to the fact that its founder, Eugene Kaspersky, was educated by a KGB-backed school in the 1980s before working for the Russian military.
  • Kaspersky has repeatedly denied the insinuations and accusations. In a recent blog post, responding to a Bloomberg article, he complained that his company was being subjected to “sensationalist … conspiracy theories,” sarcastically noting that “for some reason they forgot our reports” on an array of malware that trace back to Russian developers. He continued, “It’s very hard for a company with Russian roots to become successful in the U.S., European and other markets. Nobody trusts us — by default.”
  • Documents published with this article: Kaspersky User-Agent Strings — NSA Project CAMBERDADA — NSA NDIST — GCHQ’s Developing Cyber Defence Mission GCHQ Application for Renewal of Warrant GPW/1160 Software Reverse Engineering — GCHQ Reverse Engineering — GCHQ Wiki Malware Analysis & Reverse Engineering — ACNO Skill Levels — GCHQ
Gary Edwards

Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...16teaparty.html

tea-party constitutional-conservatism revolt

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Feb 10
     
    I don't usually read the NY Times because i don't trust them.  They were discredited long ago.  This article however is just excellent.  I wonder how it got through the editorial slant maker?  5 pages.  Good story line. The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny. These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.
Gary Edwards

Rupert Murdoch: Journalism and Freedom - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4107104574570191223415268.html

wsj rupert-murdock news-media

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Dec 09
     
    Excellent editorial taking a clean shot at Google and the many other "aggregators" stealing "news" content.  Rupert also hits the news industry itself for not serving their customers with truth-filled journalism.  He points out that editors have lost the trust of their consumers. excerpt: We are at a time when many news enterprises are shutting down or scaling back. No doubt you will hear some tell you that journalism is in dire shape, and the triumph of digital is to blame. My message is just the opposite. The future of journalism is more promising than ever-limited only by editors and producers unwilling to fight for their readers and viewers, or government using its heavy hand either to overregulate or subsidize us.
Gary Edwards

Obama Goes All Out For Dirty Banker Deal | Rolling Stone Politics | Taibblog | Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy - 0 views

www.rollingstone.com/...for-dirty-banker-deal-20110824

matt-taibbi Banksters Mortgage-Fraud Obama-banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Aug 11
     
    Perhaps the most incredibly audacious power play yet by the Banksters and their boy Obama!  Watch carefully my fellow Americans and see how fragile our liberty really is........ excerpt: A power play is underway in the foreclosure arena, according to the New York Times. On the one side is Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, who is conducting his own investigation into the era of securitizations - the practice of chopping up assets like mortgages and converting them into saleable securities - that led up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008. On the other side is the Obama administration, all the banks, and, now, apparently, all the other state attorneys general. This second camp has all gotten together, put their heads together, and cooked up a deal that would allow the banks to walk away with just a seriously discounted fine from a generation of fraud that led to millions of people losing their homes. The idea behind this federally-guided "settlement" is to concentrate and centralize all the legal exposure accrued by this generation of grotesque banker corruption in one place, put one single price tag on it that everyone can live with, and then stuff the details into a titanium canister before shooting it into deep space. This deal is all about protecting the banks from future enforcement actions on both the civil and criminal sides. The plan is to provide year-after-year, repeat-offending banks like Bank of America with some stability and certainty, so that they know exactly how much they'll have to pay in fines (trust me, it will end up being a tiny fraction of what they made off the fraudulent practices) and will also get to know for sure that there are no more criminal investigations in the pipeline.  
Gary Edwards

The Right Way To Reform Wall Street: Let Stupid Firms Fail! - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/errible-washington-idea-2009-9

financial-crisis financial-oligarchs banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 18 Sep 09
     
    Let stupid firms fail. We need to get back to that. Yes, the fact that the "stupid firms" this time around included most of Wall Street shows that special rules of financial bankruptcy should apply so the whole system doesn't collapse.  But the firms need to be allowed to fail. What should the special rules of financial bankruptcy be? managements should be tossed compensation contracts and other liabilities should be torn up,  bonus pools should be zeroed until the firms return to annual profitability equity and preferred holders should be wiped out, and junior bondholders should get a major haircut through the immediate, forced conversion of debt to equity. All of this should happen not over years in the courts, but overnight--in the manner in which the FDIC seizes failing banks.  In such proceedings, all of Wall Street's idiocy enablers will lose their shirts: The folks who work the at the firms, the folks who lend money to the firms, the folks who invest in the firms and trust the firms' managements to be something other than morons. Losing your shirt generally has a sobering effect on decision-making.  As long as managers, lenders, and shareholders know they will lose their shirts, the next generation of Wall Street enablers will likely be far more careful and demanding than their predecessors, at least for a little while (and don't hallucinate that the Fed's new policy is anything other than temporary). 
Gary Edwards

Who owns the Fed? - 1 views

www.save-a-patriot.org/...whofed.html

Banksters Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel Rothschild-Bank-of-England banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Oct 11 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Oct 11
     
    Complex diagrams tracking the interlocking ownership of the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel. At the top of the list is the House of Rothschild, owners of the Bank of England. Family names include Morgan, Rockefeller, Loeb, Kuhn, Lehman, Schroder, Warburg, Schiff, Baker, Ryan, Pyne, Sterling, Harriman, and Morton. There are many interesting individuals listed also. These people famously served the interlocking Bankster/Corporatist families in many capacities, but notably consistently showing up on the FedRes board of directors. Names like Allen Dulles and the Bechtel crowd that served in the Reagan Administration (Weinberger, Schultz). The most stunning performer though is Sir Gordon Richardson of the Rothschilds Bank of England. There are a number of examples of how the Bankster families interlock with the web of global corporations. The tracks include those that run through David Rockefeller, JP Morgan, and J Henry Schroder (of the Hamburg Von Schroder Banksters). Stunning stuff. The interlocking of family trust funds, Federal Reserve directorship, and global Corporations is also exampled. I'm getting very sick.
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.
Paul Merrell

NSA surveillance reform bill passes House by 303 votes to 121 | World news | theguardian.com - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...l-usa-freedom-act-passes-house

surveillance state NSA legislation NSA-reform

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 May 14 - No Cached
  • The first legislation aimed specifically at curbing US surveillance abuses revealed by Edward Snowden passed the House of Representatives on Thursday, with a majority of both Republicans and Democrats.But last-minute efforts by intelligence community loyalists to weaken key language in the USA Freedom Act led to a larger-than-expected rebellion by members of Congress, with the measure passing by 303 votes to 121.The bill's authors concede it was watered down significantly in recent days, but insist it will still outlaw the practice of bulk collection of US telephone metadata by the NSA first revealed by Snowden.Some members of Congress were worried that the bill will fail to prevent the National Security Agency from continuing to collect large amounts of data on ordinary US citizens.
  • “Perfect is rarely possible in politics, and this bill is no exception,” said Republican Jim Sensenbrenner, who has led efforts on the House judiciary committee to rein in the NSA.“In order to preserve core operations of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the administration insisted on broadening certain authorities and lessening certain restrictions. Some of the changes raise justifiable concerns. I don’t blame people for losing trust in their government, because the government violated their trust.”
  • But the revised language lost the support of several influential members of the judiciary committee who had previously voted for it, including Republicans Darrell Issa, Ted Poe and Raul Labrador and Democrat Zoe Lofgren.Issa also chairs the House oversight committee. Adam Smith, the most senior Democrat on the armed services committee, also voted against the bill.“Regrettably, we have learned that the intelligence community will run a truck through ambiguity,” said Lofgren during an hour and 15 minutes of debate which preceded the vote. No amendments were allowed.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • After the vote, Mark Jaycox, a legislative analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: “The bill is littered with loopholes. The problem right now, especially after multiple revisions, is that it doesn't effectively end mass surveillance.”In a statement, Zeke Johnson, the director of Amnesty International USA's security and human rights program, said the House had “failed to deliver serious surveillance reform”.
  • The size of the rebellion and the seniority of the rebels may support efforts to tighten language in the legislation as it makes its way to the Senate.Senator Patrick Leahy, the chair of the Senate judiciary committee and the lead Democratic author of the Freedom Act, said that the actions of the house in passing it was an “important step towards reforming our nation's surveillance authorities”which “few could have predicted less than a year ago.”However, in a statement issued on Thursday, Leahy expressed disappointment that the bill, which he had introduced jointly with Sensenbrenner in October, had been diluted.
  • Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who has waged an often lonely campaign against NSA surveillance, said he opposed the House bill in the form that passed on Thursday. "I am gravely concerned that the changes that have been made to the House version of this bill have watered it down so far that it fails to protect Americans from suspicionless mass surveillance," he said.He said the Senate version of the bill remained strong, and that he hoped that its provisions could be preserved.
  • The bill was the first vote on a NSA related matter in either the House or Senate since last July, when Republican congressman Justin Amash failed by 205-217 votes to pass an amendment to an appropriations bill that would have stripped funding for bulk surveillance.The revised USA Freedom Act was supported by the White House. Obama had urged for a solution to ending bulk collection of telephone metadata in ways that would not unduly constrain the NSA.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 May 14
     
    On to the Senate. No meaningful reform from the House. That the measure passed was supported by Obama tells the story of its effectiveness. It will "constrain the NSA."
Paul Merrell

US military denied treatment to soldiers exposed to chemical weapons in Iraq (+video) - CSMonitor.com - 0 views

www.csmonitor.com/...chemical-weapons-in-Iraq-video

war & peace Iraq U.S.-WMD U.S.-foreign-policy veterans

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The New York Times's C.J. Chivers has dropped a bombshell of a scoop that details 17 US troops and seven Iraqi policemen who were exposed to old chemical weapons in Iraq, some of whom were declined appropriate medical care and service awards on the grounds of secrecy.If Mr. Chivers' reporting holds up – and there's little reason to doubt his deeply-reported piece – this is a scandal that eclipses long waits and poor funding at VA hospitals in the US. Sure, far fewer people were affected by exposure to mustard agents or sarin in Iraq, but these allegations represent enormous callousness and a direct breach of trust with soldiers.
  • Jarrod L. Taylor, a former Army sergeant on hand for the destruction of mustard shells that burned two soldiers in his infantry company, joked of “wounds that never happened” from “that stuff that didn’t exist.” The public, he said, was misled for a decade. “I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq,’” he said. “There were plenty.” That chemical weapons from before the first Gulf War remained in Iraq was an operating assumption at the time the US invaded the country in 2003 and was established fact by the end of that year. But, while the US made the search for evidence of ongoing chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons programs a priority (it failed to find any), disposing of whatever they did find apparently was not.
  • The American government withheld word about its discoveries even from troops it sent into harm’s way and from military doctors. The government’s secrecy, victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the war’s most dangerous jobs from receiving proper medical care and official recognition of their wounds. “I felt more like a guinea pig than a wounded soldier,” said a former Army sergeant who suffered mustard burns in 2007 and was denied hospital treatment and medical evacuation to the United States despite requests from his commander. Congress, too, was only partly informed, while troops and officers were instructed to be silent or give deceptive accounts of what they had found. “ 'Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say,” said Jarrod Lampier, a recently retired Army major who was present for the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war: more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • That's the central issue in Chivers' piece, which is hard to read in full without mounting anger. But the following four graphs contain the nut of the scandal here, as I see it (emphasis mine): 
  • In the first year of the US-led war, the military didn't have the manpower to secure all of the hundreds of conventional weapons bunkers that littered the country. The shells, RPGs, and rifles that were looted from these bunkers were put to use by the then-growing Iraqi insurgency to attack both foreign soldiers and the new government in Baghdad.Chivers' story details how as late as 2008, US soldiers were involved in the secret destruction of chemical weapons in ways that violate the protocols set out in the United Nations's Convention on Chemical Weapons. The lax US approach appears to have led to the exposure of the soldiers – and it left behind an unknown quantity of old chemical weapons, some possibly in the hands of anti-government insurgents like the so-called Islamic State. The US knew it was leaving old chemical weapons behind when soldiers withdrew from the country at the end of 2011. Neither the Bush nor the Obama administrations had ever made their destruction a priority. 
  • Much of the reaction to the story has missed the central point, distracted by partisan finger pointing. Fox News predictably frames the story as "There were chemical weapons in Iraq after all." No. This is not news – and the possible existence of old sarin and mustard agent shells inside the country was not the reason that the Bush administration presented for going to war. Folks on the left have focused on the fact that these old chemical weapons were US "designed." That isn't really news either (nor that the US was notably silent about Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war).The story is an enormous breach of trust between the US and its own soldiers. It starts with the officers and the members of the Bush administration involved, whose names the story doesn't give.
Paul Merrell

In U.S., New Record 43% Are Political Independents - 0 views

www.gallup.com/...rd-political-independents.aspx

polls independents Republicans Democrats

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • An average 43% of Americans identified politically as independents in 2014, establishing a new high in Gallup telephone poll trends back to 1988. In terms of national identification with the two major parties, Democrats continued to hold a modest edge over Republicans, 30% to 26%.
  • Since 2008, the percentage of political independents -- those who identify as such before their leanings to the two major parties are taken into account -- has steadily climbed from 35% to the current 43%, exceeding 40% each of the last four years. Prior to 2011, the high in independent identification was 39% in 1995 and 1999. The recent rise in political independence has come at the expense of both parties, but more among Democrats than among Republicans. Over the last six years, Democratic identification has fallen from 36% -- the highest in the last 25 years -- to 30%. Meanwhile, Republican identification is down from 28% in 2008 to 26% last year.
  • These changes have left both parties at or near low points in the percentage who identify themselves as core supporters of the party. Although the party identification data compiled in telephone polls since 1988 are not directly comparable to the in-person polling Gallup collected before then, the percentages identifying as Democrats prior to 1988 were so high that it is safe to say the average 30% identifying as Democrats last year is the lowest since at least the 1950s. Republican identification, at 26%, is a shade higher than the 25% in 2013. Not since 1983, the year before Ronald Reagan's landslide re-election victory, have fewer Americans identified as Republicans. The decline in identification with both parties in recent years comes as dissatisfaction with government has emerged as one of the most important problems facing the country, according to Americans. This is likely due to the partisan gridlock that has come from divided party control of the federal government. Trust in the government to handle problems more generally is the lowest Gallup has measured to date, and Americans' favorable ratings of both parties are at or near historical lows. Thus, the rise in U.S. political independence likely flows from the high level of frustration with the government and the political parties that control it.
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 15
     
    Increasing apathy, increasing dissatisfaction with both parties, or both? It's an interesting chart to study. 
Paul Merrell

Breakthrough hopes dented as Ukraine accuses Russia of new incursion | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...e-crisis-idUSKBN0GQ0RF20140827

war & peace Ukraine Russia OSCE

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Late-night talks in the Belarussian capital Minsk had appeared to yield some progress towards ending a war in which more than 2,200 people have been killed, according to the U.N. -- a toll that excludes the 298 who died when a Malaysian airliner was shot down over rebel-held territory in July.Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he would work on an urgent 'road map' towards a ceasefire with the rebels. Russia's Vladimir Putin said it would be for Ukrainians to work out ceasefire terms, but Moscow would "contribute to create a situation of trust".
  • The next step would be for a 'Contact Group', comprising representatives of Russia, Ukraine, the rebels and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, to meet in Minsk, he said without giving a time frame.But Ukrainian foreign policy adviser Valery Chaly told reporters in Kiev that Poroshenko's declaration on a ceasefire road map did not mean an immediate end to the government’s military offensive against the rebels."If there are attacks from the terrorists and mercenaries, then our army has the duty to defend the people," he said.A crowd of several hundred gathered outside the presidential administration building in Kiev to demand reinforcement for Ukrainian forces in Ilovaysk, a town in Donetsk region, where government troops have been encircled by rebel units.
  • A rebel leader, Oleg Tsaryov, wrote on Facebook that he welcomed the outcome of the Minsk talks, but the separatists would not stop short of full independence for the regions of eastern Ukraine they call Novorossiya (New Russia).He said he saw "a real breakthrough" in Putin's offer to contribute to the peace process.But he added: "It must be understood that a genuine settlement of the situation is only possible with the participation of representatives of Novorossiya. We will not allow our fate to be decided behind our back..."Now we are demanding independence. We don't trust the Ukrainian leadership and don't consider ourselves part of Ukraine. The guarantee of our security is our own armed forces. We will decide our own fate."Further underlining Kiev's distrust of Moscow, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said his country needed "practical help" and "momentous decisions" from NATO at an alliance summit next month.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Aug 14
     
    Highlighted statements are scattered and buried deep in an article mostly about new accusations against Russia. Coup government President Poroshenko's statement that he is working toward a peace roadmap represents an abrupt departure from that government's stance since it began its invasion of separatist-held territory in eastern Ukraine, that only the unconditional surrender of the separatists could halt the coup government's attack. Lying behind that statement (from other reports) is the fact that the tide of battle has turned sharply; the coup government's mostly-conscript army forces are variously surrounded or retreating as the separatists gain the upper hand. Moreover, nearly all of the coup government attack airplanes and helicopters have been destroyed by separatist MANPAD shoulder-fired ground-to-air missiles.  On coup government Prime Minister Yatseniuk's expressed need for "'practical help' and 'momentous decisions' from NATO at an alliance summit next month," I'd love to be a fly on wall during that meeting if the coup government's military situation continues to deteriorate. The U.S. is the only NATO member that wants further confrontation in Ukraine. Notwithstanding U.S. rhetoric threatening military action against Russia, it's doubtful that any military officers holding the rank needed to attend that NATO meeting would support NATO action against Russia so close to its own backyard. Russia has nukes aplenty, so it comes down to the ability to win a conventional war against Russia in Russia and the Ukraine. Far easier said than done, as both Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolph Hitler learned the hard way. Russia remains the nation with the second post powerful military in the world and would be playing on the home court with the ferocity of the Russian Bear. The U.S. would bring the most powerful force, both augmented and semi-crippled by taking the lead among reluctant NATO nation military forces. All to protect the U.S. dollar's dwindling purchasing powe
Paul Merrell

If West cannot live with Islamic State it must do all that's needed to defeat it on the ground - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...o-defeat-it-on-the-ground.html

war & peace AEI boots-on-the-ground ISIL

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • The Islamic State is a determined, skilful, and lethal enemy. Defeating it again will require hard fighting and strong diplomacy. It will be a massive undertaking, both militarily and politically. It will certainly require a dramatic expansion of air strikes throughout Iraq and Syria. It will also require the deployment of thousands of American forces - primarily Special Forces - to engage directly with moderate Sunnis in both countries and train the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and the Syrian moderate opposition. Effective trainers must fight alongside those they are training in order to sustain their respect and trust. Americans must work directly with local tribes to help them survive against the lethal threat that the Islamic State poses. In Syria, the US must help moderate Sunnis fight Bashar al-Assad while strengthening them against other violent Islamist forces as well. In Iraq we must once again help rebuild trust between the central government and the tribes. None of these tasks can be accomplished from 30,000 feet.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Aug 14
     
    American Enterprise Institute, a prominent neocon think tank, advocating for American boots on the ground in both Iraq and Syria. Why am I not surprised? 
Paul Merrell

Did Al Qaeda Cash in on the 9/11 Attacks? | 911Blogger.com - 0 views

911blogger.com/...did-al-qaeda-cash-911-attacks

war & peace 9-11 insider-trading CIA

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • In chapter one Rickards’ otherwise clear vision fails him. The author is absolutely correct that pre-9/11 insider trading did occur. Rickards also correctly notes that “every transaction has two parties,” meaning that every put and call option leaves a paper trail. But Rickards insults our intelligence when he tells us that associates of Osama bin Laden were responsible for the insider trading. Rickards would have us believe, for example, that the terrorists were behind the 600% spike in call options for the military contractor Raytheon, whose stock surged 37% in the weeks after 9/11. Other big winners were L-3 Communications, Northrop Grumman, and Allied Techsystems. According to Paul Zarembka, professor of econometrics at SUNY Buffalo, the put/call options were exercised, meaning that whoever purchased them later collected the profits, blood money. But is it believable that the very same terrorists who sought to destroy America got away with profiting from the subsequent vast expansion of the US war machine? Catching those responsible certainly was the intent of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which led the probe into allegations of insider trading in the weeks after 9/11. At the time, SEC chairman Harvey Pitt told the press “We will do everything in our power to track those [guilty] people down and bring them to justice.” Everyone took it for granted that the paper trail would lead to al Qaeda.
  • Yet, weeks later, the SEC quietly and inexplicably tabled its investigation. Why? Instead of issuing indictments, the SEC took the unprecedented step of deputizing everyone associated with its probe. This totaled hundreds, possibly thousands, of people. Why did the SEC do this? The answer was transparently obvious to former LAPD narcotics investigator Mike Ruppert, who pointed out that the SEC deputized its investigators to effectively gag them, no doubt, to prevent leakage of its actual findings. And what were those findings? Well, probably the inconvenient truth that the paper trail led not to bin Laden but back to Wall Street. As we know, there was leakage despite the SEC’s best efforts to keep a lid on things. The Independent (UK) reported that “to the embarrassment of investigators, it has emerged that the firm used to buy the put options on United Airlines was headed until 1998 by Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, now executive director of the CIA.” George Tenet had personally recruited Krongard, probably to serve as his liaison with Wall Street.
  • The firm in question was America’s oldest investment bank, A.B. Brown, which merged with Bankers Trust in 1997. In 1999, when B.T. - Alex Brown pled guilty to criminal conspiracy charges, after it was revealed that top-level executives had created a $20 million slush fund out of unclaimed funds, B.T. - Alex Brown was on the verge of being closed down when Deutsche Bank scooped it up. Krongard’s former associate at Alex Brown, Mayo Shattuck III, who helped engineer the merger with Bankers Trust, went on to assume Krongard’s former duties as private banker to the firm’s wealthiest clients, personally arranging confidential transactions and transfers. According to the New York Times, in January 2001, Shattuck was named “co-head of investment banking….overseeing Deutsche Bank’s 400 brokers who cater to wealthy clients.” Shattuck’s sudden resignation on September 12, 2001 must therefor be viewed as highly suspicious. Shattuck retired without a word of explanation even though he reportedly had three years remaining on his contract.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • All of the above is conspicuously absent from Rickards’ discussion about insider trading. One may draw his/her own conclusions -- I have drawn mine. Even as we teeter on the brink of a financial meltdown of historic proportions, the insider-writer who would explain all of this cannot bring himself to acknowledge the true extent of Wall Street corruption and criminality, especially regarding 9/11, the fulcrum event that produced the world as we know it.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Jul 14
     
    The mentioned article by The Independent is no longer on that newspaper's web site. But it survives on the Wayback Machine. http://goo.gl/j4nJVX
Paul Merrell

Newly declassified documents reveal how U.S. agreed to Israel's nuclear program - Diplomacy and DefenseIsrael News - Haaretz Israeli News source - 0 views

www.haaretz.com/....premium-1.613221

war & peace U.S. Israel-nukes declassify Samson-option Johnson Meir

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration this week declassified papers, after 45 years of top-secret status, documenting contacts between Jerusalem and Washington over American agreement to the existence of an Israeli nuclear option. The Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP), which is in charge of approving declassification, had for decades consistently refused to declassify these secrets of the Israeli nuclear program. The documents outline how the American administration worked ahead of the meeting between President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Golda Meir at the White House in September 1969, as officials came to terms with a three-part Israeli refusal – to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty; to agree to American inspection of the Dimona nuclear facility; and to condition delivery of fighter jets on Israel’s agreement to give up nuclear weaponry in exchange for strategic ground-to-ground Jericho missiles “capable of reaching the Arab capitals” although “not all the Arab capitals.”
  • The officials – cabinet secretaries and senior advisers who wrote the documents – withdrew step after step from an ambitious plan to block Israeli nuclearization, until they finally acceded, in internal correspondence – the content of the conversation between Nixon and Meir is still classified – to recognition of Israel as a threshold nuclear state. In fact, according to the American documents, the Nixon administration defined a double threshold for Israel’s move from a “technical option” to a “possessor” of nuclear weapons. The first threshold was the possession of “the components of nuclear weapons that will explode,” and making them a part of the Israel Defense Forces operational inventory.
  • The second threshold was public confirmation of suspicions internationally, and in Arab countries in particular, of the existence of nuclear weapons in Israel, by means of testing and “making public the fact of the possession of nuclear weapons.” Officials under Nixon proposed to him, on the eve of his conversation with Meir, to show restraint with regard to the Israeli nuclear program, and to abandon efforts to get Israel to cease acquiring 500-kilometer-range missiles with one-ton warheads developed in the Marcel Dassault factory in France, if it could reach an agreement with Israel on these points.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Johnson and Nixon administrations concluded that, in talks with Rabin, it had been stated in a manner both “explicit and implicit” that “Israel wants nuclear weapons, for two reasons: First, to deter the Arabs from striking Israel; and second, if deterrence fails and Israel were about to be overrun, to destroy the Arabs in a nuclear Armageddon.”
  • According to the documents, the Nixon administration believed that Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would spur the Arab countries to acquire their own such weapons within 10 years, through private contracts with scientists and engineers in Europe. Moreover, “deeply rooted in the Arab psyche is the concept that a settlement will be possible only when there is some parity in strength with Israel. A ‘kamikaze’ strike at the Dimona facilities cannot be ruled out,” the document states.
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Sep 14
     
    "The Johnson and Nixon administrations concluded that, in talks with Rabin, it had been stated in a manner both 'explicit and implicit' that 'Israel wants nuclear weapons, for two reasons: First, to deter the Arabs from striking Israel; and second, if deterrence fails and Israel were about to be overrun, to destroy the Arabs in a nuclear Armageddon.'" Which just goes to show that Israel's leadership was very bit as looney-tunes as the U.S. leadership was with its "MAD" Mutually Assured Destruction strategy. What is there about democracy that permits psychopaths to acquire the power they so insanely crave? Humanity would have far better odds of surviving the next 100 years if all members of Congress now chosen by voting were instead chosen from the general population at random and limited to a single term. Then let Congress choose the President and Vice President from five people also randomly chosen. That would also result in a Congress far more representative of the People's interests. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of Statistics could prove that mathematically. To boot, that would take care of the campaign finance issues, since there wouldn't be any elections for federal office. Give me 24 hours notice and I'll have the necessary constitutional amendments written. Let's call them the No More Lunatics Running This Asylum Amendments. Or with a bit more thought we could have a name with an acronym that's more descriptive, something like the SANE Amendments. Let's see: the Save America from Nutjobs Evermore Amendments, or ....   Never mind for now. You do the political organizing to get the Amendments adopted and let me know when. I'll crank out the wordsmith work product for the Amendments.  Sheesh! As I've said for years, if it be true that Man was was created in the image of the Creator, that is irrefutable proof that the Creator is as dumb as a doornail and insane to boot. "[I]t it is not really possible to deter Arab leaders when they themse
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