Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!
The BBC reports on the latest press release of Al-Qaeda’s current CEO, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Zawarhiri compliments individuals on their local efforts, and urges more ‘lone-wolf’ attacks on US soil and boycotts to harm the US economy.
He should just chill out because Alexander the Geek is destroying swaths of US industry with his benighted tactics in the War on [insert noun here]™.
Having already made US Internet service providers anathema to foreign companies, and made US hardware very undesirable, he is now rampaging through on-line commerce and credit cards.
Badtux has an extremely justified ‘I told you so’ on NSA ‘man-in-the-middle’ intercepts that totally negate the value of the SSL certificate system and the little padlock in your address bar.
Mother Jones, the source of the graphic, reported on the corruption of the Certificate Authority system based of more of the PowerPoint slides from Snowden. [It is bad enough that they did it, but making it part of a presentation is frankly unbalanced.]
Steve Bates notes that NSA is also plundering VISA credit card records.
When you look at all they have done, and what the impact will be on the US tech industry and compare it to the single, verified incident that they can show was discovered by the system [the infamous $9K donation by a cab driver in San Diego] you have to conclude that this is a total disaster for the nation. The tech companies need to march on Washington and force Congress to deal with this out-of-control mess.
4 comments
Google should establish an annual Man in the Muddle [sic] award, presenting the first instance to Alexander…
The man should have had his retirement papers filled out for him as soon as anyone saw the plans for his ‘control center’. I have serious doubts about his connection to reality. We are wasting billions on his ‘mid-life crisis’.
http://what-if.xkcd.com/63/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Based on the numbers, which seem solid and well reasoned to me, to paraphrase Chief Brody – They’re gonna need a bigger server farm. Even 12 Exabytes of storage isn’t nearly enough for what they seem to want to do when you factor in RAID overhead.
Google knows what it’s doing, I don’t think Alexander the Geek really does.