Posts from — August 2013

Position: 20.7N 37.7W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: West-Northwest [290°] near 12 mph [19 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 35 mph [ 55 kph].
Wind Gusts: 45 mph [ 70 kph].
Minimum central pressure: 1008 mb ↑.

Currently about 955 miles [1535 km] West-Northwest of the Cape Verde Islands.

Erin is a minimal tropical storm that is currently forecast to head into the central Atlantic and fade out over cooler water next week.

At 10PM CDT Erin has again lost power and become a tropical depression.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]

Charlie Pierce’s version is the most readable about the Washington Post release of Edward Snowden’s documents on an internal audit of the surveillance system.

In comments on Lambert’s post that mentioned “typographical errors”, I asked “Like typing in ‘Occupy Wall Street’ when it should have been ‘Omar bin Hassan’?” But Democracy Now notes typing 202 [DC area code] vice 20 [Egypt’s country code].

Abby Ohlheiser of The Atlantic Wire has the money quote from Obama’s Friday press conference:

And if you look at the reports — even the disclosures that Mr. Snowden has put forward — all the stories that have been written, what you’re not reading about is the government actually abusing these programs and listening in on people’s phone calls or inappropriately reading people’s emails. What you’re hearing about is the prospect that these could be abused. Now, part of the reason they’re not abused is because these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC.

[Emphasis in the Atlantic Wire version]

I’m not claiming this was planned, but first you had the introduction of what the government was doing and could do presented in stages, at intervals, and wait for the government to respond. Then when you judge that they have dug a deep enough hole you drop this bomb.

People had to understand how large and intrusive the system is, before they could possibly understand the impact of all of these violations. This stuff was NSA internal, this wasn’t shared with FISA, or Congress, or anyone else. They broke the prime directive of any organization, military or civilian, “Don’t make your boss look bad!” Oh, yes, they also broke rules, directives, policies, laws, and violated the Constitution.

As Charlie Pierce notes, this does settle the question as to whether Edward Snowden is a whistleblower, because this was a very big whistle that was blown.

Position: 18.5N 34.5W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: Northwest [305°] near 16 mph [26 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 40 mph [ 65 kph].
Wind Gusts: 50 mph [ 80 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 70 miles [110 km].
Minimum central pressure: 1006 mb ↓.

Currently about 715 miles [1150 km] West-Northwest of the Cape Verde Islands.

It is back to tropical storm strength at 10PM CDT.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]

The BBC technology reporting is normally much better that this: Washington Post, CNN and Time websites hit by pro-Assad hackers. For a short period of time if you clicked on some of the links at those sites, your would be directed to a web site of the pro-Assad Syrian Electronic Army (SEA).

What SEA did was run an e-mail phishing scam on the employees of Outbrain, a content recommendation service that supplies a plug-in that suggests links related to articles. Using the account and password information supplied by Outbrain employees who weren’t paying attention, the SEA changed the software to redirect people to their site.

It took Outbrain a couple of hours to repair the software and change everyone’s account name and password. Based on past experience, the employees will be cautious for at least the rest of today, and maybe even tomorrow, but by Monday it could happen again.

Froggie Speed Nomming

Nomnomnomnom..

[Editor: Knowing that the others will appear as soon as I leave the area, Froggie works on getting as much of the ‘Mixed Grill’ as possible.]

Friday Ark

I would like to apologize to my readers for getting so upset over the revelations concerning the basis for the closing of all the embassies. I foolishly assumed that there was some truth buried in the leaked information to the media. I should have known better, and realized it was just another shallow public relations stunt on the part of the current administration to deflect attention from its gross abuse of the civil rights of US citizens. I wasn’t cynical enough.

Badtux explains what really happened. That’s right, all of it was based on some al Qaeda press releases in a terrorist wannabe chat room. There are several small consulting businesses who put out subscriber-only newsletters that contain the content of various chat rooms, so you don’t have to sneak in, the consultants are already there.

AQ is still using encrypted thumb drives and ‘Net cafés to communicate, and it is just as secure as it always has been.

This explains why everyone in Yemen knew about the session, they probably all know someone who is a terrorist wannabe who would have told them about it, and it also explains why the Yemeni government thought the US was overreacting, which they were.

You can probably subscribe to all of the newsletters for less than the annual salary of one system administrator.

Position: 15.5N 29.1W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: West-Northwest [295°] near 15 mph [24 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 40 mph [ 65 kph].
Wind Gusts: 50 mph [ 80 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 35 miles [ 55 km].
Minimum central pressure: 1007 mb ↑.

Currently about 340 miles [ 550 km] West of the Cape Verde Islands.

This was a tropical wave that came off the coast of Africa yesterday, and managed to ‘pass the entrance exam for Tropical Storms’ at 4AM CDT this morning.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]

Yesterday Marcy posted The Clapper Review: How to Fire 90% of SysAdmins?

I read it and learned that USCYBERCOM employs 1,000 systems administrators with the same access as Edward Snowden. After I got over the shock, and the speculation as to what they needed a thousand SysAdmins for, I started to think about the cost. Snowden made over $100 thousand/year, so the cost of a thousand Snowdens would be over $100 million/year coming out of our taxes. That is a significant administrative cost. SysAdmins don’t collect intelligence, or analyze it, they just keep the computer networks up for organization.

The problem isn’t that they want to cut the number of SysAdmins, it’s that they have such a mess that they feel they need a thousand SysAdmins to keep it working.

Via Alfa Zog at Corrente, a long piece in the New York Times Magazine by Peter Maass: How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets.

In addition to explaining the process by which Edward Snowden arranged the release of the documents he had, there is a profile of the documentary film maker in the second year of her MacArthur Fellowship [the Genius Award] which provides her with $100,000/year for 5 years to create whatever she wants. One of her films won a Peabody Award, another was nominated for an Emmy, and a third for an Oscar.

She spent years dealing with the TSA’s ‘Special Screening’ line when returning to the US, so she has personal experience with the security state that the US has become.

After a few years, with the right people in charge, this is basis for a really good movie, better than Three Days of the Condor. Glenn Greenwald is playing a supporting role; Ms Poitras is the interesting person.

Update: You can’t get there from here. The New York Times is experiencing a major DDOS [distributed denial of service] attack and their servers are not reachable. I’m sure USCYBERCOM has leaped to its defense reports that it suffered a self-inflicted wound as the result of a system software update.

CBS has a Snowden Deflect today: Tech tycoon Larry Ellison on NSA surveillance.

Charlie Rose interviewing Oracle CEO Larry Ellison:

ROSE: Let me just hear you clearly. You were saying whatever the NSA’s doing is okay with me?

ELLISON: It’s great. I wish, you know, it’s great. It’s essential. By the way, President Obama thinks it’s essential.

It’s essential if we want to minimize the kind of strikes that we just had in Boston. It’s absolutely essential.

First off, I don’t see where it was mentioned how much money Oracle makes from the military/industrial complex in software, training, and consulting [millions of dollars] and secondly, the system, as intrusive as it is, didn’t find the Tsarnaev brothers despite multiple red flags, including one from Russia’s FSB. I realize that someone who sells Oracle database software will have a hard time accepting this concept, but – it can’t be essential if it doesn’t work!

Jay Rosen has a nice piece on The Snowden Effect, a term coined by Charlie Pierce.

The Snowden Effect covers actions and reactions that are a result of the information that Edward Snowden made available through the Guardian and the Washington Post. Examples cover the ‘debate’ that is now taking place over the balance between government information gathering and the civil rights of US citizens.

There is another series of things going on that I will call The Snowden Deflect. these are actions that are designed to deflect attention from what Snowden revealed, and focus attention on Edward Snowden. ‘Noz has an example of the celebrity type of coverage, while Digby covers the attack version.

John Kiriakou’s open letter to Snowden details exactly what the government is going to attempt to do if Snowden returns.

Edward Snowden will be kept incommunicado if he returns to the US. The government will maintain that everything is classified, so Snowden won’t be able to mount a real defense of his actions. People who claim that he exaggerated his danger when he revealed himself forget that he knows what the government has been doing, so he knows what they are willing to do. People may not want to accept it. but we are not nice people when anything can be excused by a claim of ‘national security’.

You really should read his Wikipedia entry for a nice overview of the man, who was a classmate of David Patraeus at West Point. Of real interest to me was the report that as the Brigadier General in command of the Army’s component of NSA, he is the individual that decided that the military should begin hoovering up the data of US citizens after 9/11, a policy that was adopted by Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, the then Director of the National Security Agency. That makes me believe that he might be more than slightly invested in defending the process.

Apparently he didn’t feel that his horizons were broad enough at NSA, so he pushed for the creation of US CYBER COMMAND [fanfare]: The command is charged with pulling together existing cyberspace resources, creating synergy and synchronizing war-fighting effects to defend the information security environment. [That is from the Cyber Command wiki, and is sourced to its official brochure.]

The thing that people need to understand about Alexander the Geek, is that he is a West Pointer. and he knows that NSA is only worth three stars, while his new ‘venture’ [yes, he has an MBA] is a four-star position, so he is going to favor CyberCom over NSA if there is a conflict, because USCYBERCOM is the FUTURE OF WARFARE!!!!!

Digby noted that Marcy Wheeler is already hinting that the War on Cyber-terrorists™ seems to be receiving more prominence than that stodgy old War on Terror™ [that is so ‘last decade’].

Badtux alerted me to a new post by Marcy that demonstrates how serious Zero is about that ‘debate on government spying’: he appointed DNI James ‘Joe Isuzu’ Clapper to handle the review. And the man wonders why people don’t trust him …

I’m trying a plug-in that is supposed to permit you to do comment editing after you have pressed Publish.

If it gives you any problems, let me know.

If it works, I will be removing the Preview button, as it doesn’t seem to be serving its purpose.

That concept got a lot of people killed and was an underlying cause of the Russian Revolution. To hear a variation coming from someone like Dr Juan Cole is just jarring.

Edward Snowden learned the lesson of Father Gapon and delivered his message to “the Tsar” from another country on a different continent. He wanted to be able to participate in the debate over what the government was doing, and not be ‘disappeared’ like Bradley Manning.

As I was never an Obama fan, I can see the sarcasm in “For Barack is an honorable man; So are they all, all honorable men.” He disenfranchised Democratic voters in Florida and Michigan to win the nomination because he wanted to win at any cost. He has never done anything that is even remotely liberal or progressive.

Given the way his Department of Justice charges whistleblowers with Espionage, trying to give a message to this Tsar, is every bit as potentially life-threatening as presenting one to Nicholas II.