Reality Dawns

by Bryan

10 comments

1 Badtux { 08.14.14 at 11:37 pm }

Uhm, SWAT police tactics were developed to deal with active shooters. The only shooting being done in Ferguson was by the cops. There’s no such thing as “SWAT tactics” for dealing with peaceful protesters, and any idiot who would spout such nonsense needs to be cashiered as a moron immediately. Sadly, it’s unlikely he will be, because he apparently has the full support of the mayor and city council…

What baffles me, though, is how a town that is 2/3rds black has a white city council, white mayor, and nearly-all-white police force. Now how does that happen, one wonders?

– Badtux the “I smell racism” Penguin

2 Bryan { 08.15.14 at 12:01 am }

Either there are some interesting election district lines, or at-large districts which allow for this situation if there is heavy GOTV in the White community. It is obviously past time for a voter registration drive and changes to the local government.

The SWAT teams in my time were heavily weighted towards scoped bolt action rifles, although they had both M-16s and Uzis in their arsenal. Marksmanship was the key selector for joining. I don’t ever remember seeing either type of automatic weapon out of the truck in photos or TV reporting on SWAT incidents.

3 Kryten42 { 08.15.14 at 8:28 am }

The whole debacle was a massive *FAIL* in so many ways! Those morons would have failed any decent Army’s basic training! Let alone any advanced training! And that’s a fact.

And nothing at all will happen to them. It’s the USA after all… the land of make believe and zero responsibility.

Anyway, here’s something that makes me smile for a change! 😀

Snowden was recently interviewed by WIRED And it’s a hilarious commentary on the uselessness of the NSA.

Snowden: I Left the NSA Clues, But They Couldn’t Find Them
By Andy Greenberg 08.13.14

If the NSA still doesn’t know the full extent of the greatest leak of secrets in its history, it’s not because of Edward Snowden’s attempts to cover his tracks. On the contrary, the NSA’s most prolific whistleblower now claims he purposefully left a trail of digital bread crumbs designed to lead the agency directly to the files he’d copied.

In a WIRED interview published today, the 31-year-old megaleaker has revealed that he planted hints on NSA networks that were intended to show which of its documents he’d smuggled out among the much larger set he accessed or could have accessed. Those hints, he says, were intended to make clear his role as a whistleblower rather than a foreign spy, and to allow the agency time to minimize the national security risks created by the documents’ public release.

The fact that NSA officials have told the press that his haul may have been as large as 1.7 million documents, says Snowden, is a sign that the agency has either purposely inflated the size of his leak or lacks the forensic skills to see the clues he left for its auditors. “I figured they would have a hard time,” Snowden tells WIRED, describing the agency’s attempts to reverse-engineer his leak. “I didn’t figure they would be completely incapable.”
…

Just bloody hilarious! Reminds me so much of ASIO! 😆

Snowden: I Left the NSA Clues, But They Couldn’t Find Them

Also (the above is basically a summary of this, more in depth interview) It raises the near certainty that there is in fact a 2nd whistle-blower/leaker who is probably still at the NSA! Which would show how inept the NSA truly is. It’s an excellent read that fills in a lot of the gaps, and eliminates some of the US falsehoods and outright lies.

The Most Wanted Man in the World

Such as this, which goes to your comment and mine about the way the USA is bound to Israel:

Among the discoveries that most shocked him was learning that the agency was regularly passing raw private communications—content as well as metadata—to Israeli intelligence. Usually information like this would be “minimized,” a process where names and personally identifiable data are removed. But in this case, the NSA did virtually nothing to protect even the communications of people in the US. This included the emails and phone calls of millions of Arab and Palestinian Americans whose relatives in Israel-occupied Palestine could become targets based on the communications. “I think that’s amazing,” Snowden says. “It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen.”

It’s Government sanctioned.

4 Bryan { 08.15.14 at 11:21 am }

NSA, like many government functions, has been converted into a contracting office with all of its normal functions being done by outside contractors of very mixed capabilities and no long term association with those functions. These contracts are normally re-bid every 5 years. I would assume that the panic after Snowden left resulted in the ‘crime scene’ being corrupted before it could be analyzed by forensic analysts who would be the people most likely to find clues, although Snowden’s clues may have been too subtle for the analysts to see. A lot of the senior people left when the decision was made to ignore the Fourth Amendment and the Posse Comitatus Law that restrict the activities of NSA to ‘fight the Global War on Terrorism™’, so a skills gap was created.

This is just another victim of Rumsfeld’s move to privatize the Pentagon, and the overtly political nature that arose in the military. When you add in the Fundamentalist Christian factor that is too dominate, you end up with a dysfunctional mess.

It never ceases to amaze me how absolutely blind the military is to the threat posed by its relationship with the Israelis. How many Israeli spies do we have to arrest before someone wakes up to the fact that they are not our BFF, but only operate in their own best interests, as determined by their whacko and corrupt politicians. It is more of the politicization of the Pentagon, because there is no strategic upside for the US in the relationship.

I have been amused by the people comparing the actions of police in Ferguson with Rambo. They seem to forget that at the end of the movie Rambo blew up the police station.

5 Kryten42 { 08.15.14 at 9:16 pm }

Yep. The US loves to gloss over Snowden’s actual credentials to make the USA seem less incompetent. But that interview blows that away. Snowden started as a Special Forces recruit until he broke both legs. Then spent time in the CIA in some very secure positions, especially in Europe. Then the NSA contracting for Dell in the USA and Japan, then Booze Allen, where he was one of the very few who held two of the highest clearances possible. So either the US intelligence community it amazingly inept (I mean, even more so than I think they are), or Snowden isn’t the worthless looser they are trying to paint him as. Also, in each case, he was recruited! He didn’t wrangle his way in. 🙂

Interestingly, his older sister, Jessica, is a lawyer at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington. His mother, Wendy, worked for the US District Court in Baltimore, while his father was a WO in the US Coast Guard. Not really a family the US Gov would want to take on I’d think. 🙂

I don’t understand the Military’s attitude either. *shrug*

LOL That was part of the reason for my comment that those cop’s think they are Rambo. I love irony! 😀

Here’s anothr interesting piece from the Snowden interview:

Much of Snowden’s focus while working for Booz Allen was analyzing potential cyberattacks from China. His targets included institutions normally considered outside the military’s purview. He thought the work was overstepping the intelligence agency’s mandate. “It’s no secret that we hack China very aggressively,” he says. “But we’ve crossed lines. We’re hacking universities and hospitals and wholly civilian infrastructure rather than actual government targets and military targets. And that’s a real concern.”

The last straw for Snowden was a secret program he discovered while getting up to speed on the capabilities of the NSA’s enormous and highly secret data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah. Potentially capable of holding upwards of a yottabyte of data, some 500 quintillion pages of text, the 1 million-square-foot building is known within the NSA as the Mission Data Repository. (According to Snowden, the original name was Massive Data Repository, but it was changed after some staffers thought it sounded too creepy—and accurate.) Billions of phone calls, faxes, emails, computer-to-computer data transfers, and text messages from around the world flow through the MDR every hour. Some flow right through, some are kept briefly, and some are held forever.

The massive surveillance effort was bad enough, but Snowden was even more disturbed to discover a new, Strangelovian cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind. The program, disclosed here for the first time, would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. Software would constantly be on the lookout for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. When it detected an attack, MonsterMind would automatically block it from entering the country—a “kill” in cyber terminology.

Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability: Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. That’s a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. “These attacks can be spoofed,” he says. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”

In addition to the possibility of accidentally starting a war, Snowden views MonsterMind as the ultimate threat to privacy because, in order for the system to work, the NSA first would have to secretly get access to virtually all private communications coming in from overseas to people in the US.

MonsterMind is a very bad and stupid idea! It’s a disaster waiting to happen! It’s the kind of insane thing Nth. Korea would do, if they could.

6 Kryten42 { 08.15.14 at 10:22 pm }

LOL Just for fun! 😛 😀

Ed Snowden with former CIA and NSA chief General Michael Hayden at a gala event in 2011.

7 Bryan { 08.15.14 at 10:39 pm }

So, instead of my ISP changing the permissions on a file on my site that was being used to launch denial of service attacks on other sites, the government would take down my host. Most of the computers used in these attacks are bystanders who have been hacked, not cyber-terrorists stealing movies and music, but they must be nuked to protect the corporations who don’t want to pay to secure their systems.

This brings to mind WarGames, since we are making old movie allusions. No matter how often you tell people that computers can’t think and are no better than the algorithms used to program them, which is written by coders, not geo-political analysts, they still continue to believe that computer systems are the ‘Holy Grail’ that will solve all problems.

They have these massive collections of data that they have no good way of analyzing, but they expect to find the answer to all their problems by doing something with it. They are delusional.

8 Kryten42 { 08.15.14 at 10:48 pm }

Here’s some more fun for you! 😀 😉

Rick Perry Indicted After Cutting the Funding for a State Corruption Investigation

This is a copy of the actual Grand Jury indictment for 2 counts. 🙂 Hopefully they will stick and that will be one less crooked moron to cause trouble. 🙂

And here By Phil Plait (old gold):
Did Rick Perry just admit to violating the US Constitution?

The GOP are running out of candidates! LOL

9 Kryten42 { 08.16.14 at 4:11 am }

Sorry, missed your post Bryan.

Yeah, I think you are correct about the Corporations. It sounds to me like they are behind a lot of this crap. Why else would CIA/NSA be targeting civilian infrastructure now? Even in wartime, that’s a no-no!

Regarding the debacle in Ferguson, I found a good illustrated timeline of events on Buzzfeed:

A Timeline Of The Crisis In Ferguson Since The Death Of Michael Brown

And this:

A Witness To The Police Shooting Of Michael Brown Live-Tweeted The Entire Event

When another Twitter user asked about the photo, @TheePharoah said police shot Brown seven times, including twice in the back.
—-

@TheePharoah from behind ?

@SLIKK_DARKO the first two was, the next 5 werent, he turned around

10 Bryan { 08.16.14 at 12:06 pm }

The initial reason for the police officer stopping Brown was jaywalking. Apparently he and another person were in the road. I assume they were trying to sell something to drivers, which is a common enough occurrence in the US and Baja. There are several charities down here that regularly walk the road at stop lights looking for donations from drivers and priests in the villages of Baja do the same thing.

In a lot of cities people will try to sell you all kinds of things, some legal, some not, while you’re waiting in traffic. Roses were a common thing in San Diego for some reason.

Getting shot for jaywalking is pretty damn unbelievable, but it happens too often here since they started militarizing the police.