Public Intelligence Blog

DefDog

Example of the state of USGOV systems….

Anonymous gain access to FBI and Scotland Yard hacking call

BBC news, 3 February 2012

Hacking network Anonymous has released a recording of a conference call between the FBI and UK police in which they discuss efforts against hacking.

The call, said to have taken place last month, covers the tracking of Anonymous and similar groups, dates of planned arrests and evidence details.

Anonymous also published an email, apparently from the FBI, showing the email addresses of call participants.

The FBI confirmed the intercept and said it was hunting those responsible.

The loose collective Anonymous have targeted a number of big institutions in recent years

“The information was intended for law enforcement officers only and was illegally obtained. A criminal investigation is under way to identify and hold accountable those responsible,” it said in a statement.

London’s Metropolitan Police’s central e-crime unit said the matter was being investigated but that no operational risks had been identified.

A comment on one of the Twitter accounts linked to Anonymous, AnonymousIRC, said: “The FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now.”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  This is too funny for words.  Hackers and Phi Beta Iota have been very clear for over 20 years that most law enforcement systems are easy to hack into, especially now that they are all digital and controlled by a server where no one has had the brains to change the factory installed root password.  What is really happening now is that government incomtence in security is being “outed.”  CIA has worked overseas for decades, pretending to be clandestine when in fact all case officers have been known to local liaison.  Similarly, government “security” is an oxymoron.  On the one hand, it does not exist, and on the other we are spending tens of billions on the well-intentioned but ignorant threatics of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) and the world’s most expensive coffee klatch, the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC).  This is what you end up with when a government of arrogant “experts” and even more arrogant politicians refuse to listen to both insider iconoclasts and outsider “loyal opposition” minds that actually know what they are talking about and see these things 20 years before the “leaders” at the top, who are really nothing more than clerks fighting for budget share, without a strategic bone in their bodies.

1994 Sounding the Alarm on Cyber-Security

See Also:

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Josh Kilbourn

Twitter Users Beware: Homeland Security Isn’t Laughing

Two British tourists were detained after tweeting a joke about Marilyn Monroe. Is Homeland Security monitoring social media too closely?

Mathew Ingram

Bloomberg/Businessweek, 30 January 2012

Planning to make a joke on Twitter about bombing something? You might want to reconsider: According to a report from Britain, two tourists were detained and denied entry into the U.S. recently after they joked about destroying America and digging up Marilyn Monroe. That the Homeland Security Dept. and other authorities—including the FBI—are monitoring such social media as Twitter and Facebook isn’t surprising. That these authorities are willing to detain people based on what is clearly a harmless joke, however, raises questions about what the impact of all that monitoring will be.

Leigh Van Bryan, a 26-year-old bar manager from Coventry, told The Sun that he and friend Emily Bunting were stopped by border guards when they arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and were questioned for five hours about messages Van Bryan had tweeted saying he planned to “destroy America.” After the questioning, during which Homeland Security agents threatened the two, said Van Bryan, they were put into a van and taken—along with a few illegal immigrants—to a holding cell and held overnight. The next morning, they said, Van Bryan and Bunting were forced to take a plane back to England.

According to a report in the Daily Mail, the officers gave Van Bryan a document that detailed why he was refused admission into the U.S. The document reads like a bad joke itself, saying:

“He had posted on his Tweeter [sic] website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe. … Also on his tweeter [sic] account Mr. Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.”

Van Bryan told the newspaper he tried to explain to Homeland Security officials that the term “destroy” was British slang referring to a party and that his comments about “digging up Marilyn Monroe” were an attempt at humor, but the officers didn’t listen. The authorities even searched the two tourists’ luggage for shovels and other tools, he said.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Good news is that our experiences with TSA do not bear out the many horror stories in the media.  Bad news is that DHS may be retarded beyond all expectations.

Robert Capps

Why Black Market Entrepreneurs Matter to the World Economy

Robert Capps

WIRED, 16 December 2011

Not many people think of shantytowns, illegal street vendors, and unlicensed roadside hawkers as major economic players. But according to journalist Robert Neuwirth, that’s exactly what they’ve become. In his new book, Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, Neuwirth points out that small, illegal, off-the-books businesses collectively account for trillions of dollars in commerce and employ fully half the world’s workers.

Amazon Page

Further, he says, these enterprises are critical sources of entrepreneurialism, innovation, and self-reliance. And the globe’s gray and black markets have grown during the international recession, adding jobs, increasing sales, and improving the lives of hundreds of millions. It’s time, Neuwirth says, for the developed world to wake up to what those who are working in the shadows of globalization have to offer. We asked him how these tiny enterprises got to be such big business.

Wired: You refer to the untaxed, unlicensed, and unregulated economies of the world as System D. What does that mean?

Robert Neuwirth:There’s a French word for someone who’s self-reliant or ingenious: débrouillard. This got sort of mutated in the postcolonial areas of Africa and the Caribbean to refer to the street economy, which is called l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy, if you will. I decided to use this term myself—shortening it to System D—because it’s a less pejorative way of referring to what has traditionally been called the informal economy or black market or even underground economy. I’m basically using the term to refer to all the economic activity that flies under the radar of government. So, unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, but not outright criminal—I don’t include gun-running, drugs, human trafficking, or things like that.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Wired: Certainly the people who make their living from illegal street stalls don’t see themselves as criminals.

Neuwirth: Not at all. They see themselves as supporting their family, hiring people, and putting their relatives through school—all without any help from the government or aid networks.

Wired: The sheer scale of System D is mind-blowing.

Neuwirth: Yeah. If you think of System D as having a collective GDP, it would be on the order of $10 trillion a year. That’s a very rough calculation, which is almost certainly on the low side. If System D were a country, it would have the second-largest economy on earth, after the United States.

Read a SUPERB interview.

Tip of the Hat to Berto Jongman.

Phi Beta Iota:  System D is completely separate from straight forward black crime (organized crime) or white crime (Goldman Sachs et al).  What this really means is that governments have lost all legitimacy and two thirds of the global economy now considers governments to be at best a meddling (and costly) nuisance and at worst the enemy to be defeated by any means necessary.   Governments brought this on themselves.

See Also:

Critical Choices. The United Nations, Networks, and the Future of Global Governance

Global Public Policy: Governing Without Government?

High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them

Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy

Intelligence for Earth: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability

The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust

Who, Me?

Read this at least three times.  This is a talking points memorandum for the Empire cabal, which is now ready to take on the white guys (including the white guys with guns).  They believe blacks and hispanics are cowed, “weed and seed” has been a success story (in their view).  This is a subtle hit job that sets the stage for treating white guys as failures who lost their cultural compass and must now be treated with the same federalization of state and local force and ultimate incarceration that has been used so extensively on blacks.

The Rodney King riots were the beginning of the breakdown of US Government legitimacy in the eyes of its own public.  The economy is being juiced and the Republicans are playing along with the fiction that the economy is getting better.  It is not.  Unemployment is at 22.4% and 2013 is going to be catastrophic.  Now imagine the Rodney King riots, this time with while guys who are armed to the teeth and very very pissed off, with nothing to lose and everything to gain from a populist revolution.

The New American Divide

The ideal of an ‘American way of life’ is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what’s cleaving America, and why.

Charles Murray

Wall Street Journal, 21 January 2012

EXTRACT

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.

. . . . . . .

As I’ve argued in much of my previous work, I think that the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration. Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of.

. . . . . . .

Meanwhile, the formation of the new upper class has been driven by forces that are nobody’s fault and resist manipulation. The economic value of brains in the marketplace will continue to increase no matter what, and the most successful of each generation will tend to marry each other no matter what. As a result, the most successful Americans will continue to trend toward consolidation and isolation as a class. Changes in marginal tax rates on the wealthy won’t make a difference. Increasing scholarships for working-class children won’t make a difference.

Read full article.

Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010″ (Crown Forum) will be published on Jan. 31.

Phi Beta Iota:  The eight stages of genocide established by Dr. Greg Stanton are as follows:  1) Classification (us versus them); 2) Symbolization (codewords–e.g bums); 3) Dehumanization (equated with animals, eugenics applies); 4) Organization (federalization of state and local police, opening of the Halliburton-build civil disturbance camps now ready for use); 5) Polarization (attack all independent and centrist movements and leaders); 6) Preparation (use NDAA to incarcerate without due process those who object to the nazification of the USA); 7) Extermination (through a mix of precision kills and “accidental” epidemics, gut the white middle class now diving into poverty); Denial (already taking place at Davos 2012 – capitalism failed, not the elite).

Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Pentagon Transfers War on Drugs to Private Mercenaries Including Blackwater

Eric Blair
Activist Post

Since the drug war has become so unpopular with the electorate, instead of politicians actually changing the drug laws, the Department of Defense seeks to reduce and conceal the real costs by transferring the “dirty work” to private contractors to do what “U.S. military forces are not allowed or not encouraged to do.

The BBC (in Spanish) is reporting that the U.S. Department of Defense is delegating the war on drugs to private mercenary companies. Of those companies, the increasingly infamous organization previously known as Blackwater is said to have received several multimillion-dollar government contracts for “providing advice, training and conducting operations in drug producing countries and those with links to so-called “narco-terrorism” including Latin America.”
The “no bid” contracts, issued under the Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office’s $15 billion dollar budget, are described as “non-specific” and are said to be “juicy” for the private contractors. The Pentagon says “the details of each cost in very general contracts do not go through bidding processes.”

An unnamed analyst says “the responsibility of the public and national security changing from a state’s duty to be a private business…has become the trend of the future.”

Although parts of the drug war have been privatized for years, the BBC reports this “transfer” of responsibilities is an attempt to placate those looking for Pentagon budget cuts in an election year.

Read full article.

This web site honors Dr. Martin Luther King by pointing to specific links beginning with the first in isolation: he was assassinated by his own government. Truth & Reconciliation are the order of the day, but the reconciliation cannot begin until the truth is known to the full public.

Review: An Act of State–The Execution of Martin Luther King, New and Updated Edition

Review: Al On America

Review: Improper behavior–when misconduct is good for society

Review: Nobodies–Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy

Review: Public Philosophy–Essays on Morality in Politics

Review: Teaching to Transgress–Education as the Practice of Freedom

Review: The Power of the Powerless–Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe

Robert Steele: Citizen in Search of Integrity (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

See Also:

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Creating Lifelong Customers: The School-To-Prison Pipeline And The Private Prison Industry

As if the United States did not have a bloated enough prison population – which I think nearly every single American realizes is a painful truth – our school systems are being transformed into yet another way to funnel people into the private prison system.

School systems around the country, but especially Texas, have begun criminalizing what would otherwise be normal childish behavior.

One example given by the British Guardian in a recent fantastic article covering this issue, an overweight and unpopular girl was charged with a criminal misdemeanor after spraying perfume because children in the classroom were teasing her and saying she smelled bad.

That’s right; a 12-year-old girl was arrested for “disrupting class” simply for attempting to appease cruel students.

Read full article.

300 Million Talons...

Indefinite detention: Instrument of tyranny

By By ALLEN S. KELLER AND YANG-YANG ZHOU

McClatchy, 13 January 2012

When President Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act on New Year’s Eve, he codified policies of arbitrary and indefinite detention for terror suspects including possibly U.S. citizens. Alexander Hamilton referred to such policies as the “favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.” Based on our experience in evaluating and caring for victims of torture and human rights abuses from all over the world, Hamilton was right.

Regardless of the law’s applicability to U.S. citizens, indefinite detention in a military facility without charge can be tantamount to torture, causing profound health consequences.

Read full article.

Marcus Aurelius

Shades of RADM John  Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness, two press items follow on new Federal surveillance initiatives:

DARPA to start checking your email for threats

Tweeting the word ‘drill’ could mean your Twitter account is read by U.S. government spies

Europe:  Updates. In an interview with a French daily on 25 December, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde stressed that Europe’s financial crisis is turning into “a crisis of confidence in public debt and the solidity of the financial system.

Greece: According to an IMF source involved in discussions with Greece, the situation in Athens is “deteriorating” and “a further 10-15 billion euros ($13.1-19.6 billion) still needs to be found.” Banks may be asked to agree to write off 65 % instead of 50% of Greece’s debt.

France: The French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) said on 26 December that there were 29,000 new job seekers “without any occupation” in November, up 1.1% over October. The year-on-year increase reached 5.2%. In total, 2,844,800 people did not have any occupation, the highest such figure since November 1999.

An economist at the French Observatory of Economic Conditions speculated that France’s unemployment rate — which currently stands at 9.3% — will reach 10.7% by the end of 2012, and predicted that Paris will not succeed in bringing the deficit down to 3% of GDP by 2013.

Spain: At a news conference on 26 December, Spanish Economy Minister Luis De Guindos said that the Spanish economy had suffered a “relapse” and would record negative growth in the fourth quarter of 2011. De Guindos warned that “the next two months are not going to be easy, neither from a growth nor a jobs point of view.”

Comment: According to the Financial Times and multiple economists the fate of the euro depends on what happens in Italy. This week Italy intends to auction bonds worth Euros 20 billion. The market reaction to the auction will be an important indicator of whether the central bankers have found a way to stabilize the financial crisis, or have just made it worse.

All analysts of European economics predict a recession in 2012. They differ only about how severe it will be. In an integrated global economy, the ripple effects from Europe will drag the US and the Chinese economies, among all others.

Phi Beta Iota:  Christine Lagarde, perhaps because she is a woman with a smaller ego and larger intuition than most men, appears to be the first Epoch A leader to “get” that we are all calling into question the very existence of the Western financial system that is rooted in fraud, waste, and abuse.  When she begins to point to Iceland as an example, and to demand that Western countries arrest and try Goldman Sachs, Morgan, Citi-Bank, Bank of America, and other officials for high crimes against the public, the healing can begin.  Until then, the West is avoiding the fundamentals.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

See Also:

Mini-Me: Iceland Breaks the Back of Western Banking

Chuck Spinney: Financial Coups Destroying Europe

Michel Bauwens: Human Evolution – Who Are We Becoming?

Mini-Me: European-US Banking–Tangled Web — Tell Me Again, Why Shouldn’t We Default and Let the Banks Fry? + Financial Terrorism RECAP