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  • Documents: FBI Spyware Has Been Snaring Extortionists and Hackers for Years

    Wired Threat Level
    Kevin Poulsen

    April 16, 2009 | 12:33:32 AM

    Cipav A sophisticated FBI-produced spyware program has played a crucial behind-the-scenes role in federal investigations into extortion plots, terrorist threats and hacker attacks in cases stretching back at least seven years, newly declassified documents show.

    As first reported by Wired.com, the software, called a “computer and internet protocol address verifier,” or CIPAV, is designed to infiltrate a target’s computer and gather a wide range of information, which it secretly sends to an FBI server in eastern Virginia. The FBI’s use of the spyware surfaced in 2007 when the bureau used it to track e-mailed bomb threats against a Washington state high school to a 15-year-old student.

    But the documents released Thursday under the Freedom of Information Act show the FBI has quietly obtained court authorization to deploy the CIPAV in a wide variety of cases, ranging from major hacker investigations, to someone posing as an FBI agent online. Shortly after its launch, the program became so popular with federal law enforcement that Justice Department lawyers in Washington warned that overuse of the novel technique could result in its electronic evidence being thrown out of court in some cases.

    “While the technique is of indisputable value in certain kinds of cases, we are seeing indications that it is being used needlessly by some agencies, unnecessarily raising difficult legal questions (and a risk of suppression) without any countervailing benefit,” reads a formerly-classified March 7, 2002 memo from the Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section.

    The documents, which are heavily redacted, do not detail the CIPAV’s capabilities, but an FBI affidavit in the 2007 case indicate it gathers and reports a computer’s IP address; MAC address; open ports; a list of running programs; the operating system type, version and serial number; preferred internet browser and version; the computer’s registered owner and registered company name; the current logged-in user name and the last-visited URL.

    After sending the information to the FBI, the CIPAV settles into a silent “pen register” mode, in which it lurks on the target computer and monitors its internet use, logging the IP address of every server to which the machine connects.

    The documents shed some light on how the FBI sneaks the CIPAV onto a target’s machine, hinting that the bureau may be using one or more web browser vulnerabilities. In several of the cases outlined, the FBI hosted the CIPAV on a website, and tricked the target into clicking on a link. That’s what happened in the Washington case, according to a formerly-secret planning document for the 2007 operation. “The CIPAV will be deployed via a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) address posted to the subject’s private chat room on MySpace.com.”

    In a separate February 2007 Cincinnati -based investigation of hackers who’d successfully targeted an unnamed bank, the documents indicate the FBI’s efforts may have been detected. An FBI agent became alarmed when the hacker he was chasing didn’t get infected with the spyware after visiting the CIPAV-loaded website. Instead, the hacker “proceeded to visit the site 29 more times,” according to a summary of the incident. “In these instances, the CIPAV did not deliver its payload because of system incompatibility.”

    The agent phoned the FBI’s Special Technologies Operations Unit for “urgent” help, expressing “the valid concern that the Unsub hackers would be ‘spooked.’” But two days later the hacker, or a different one, visited the site again and “the system was able to deliver a CIPAV and the CIPAV returned data.”

    The software’s primary utility appears to be in tracking down suspects that use proxy servers or anonymizing websites to cover their tracks. That’s illustrated in several cases in the documents, including the 2004 hunt for a saboteur who cut off telephone, cable TV and internet service for thousands of Boston residents. The man’s name is redacted from the documents, but the description of the case matches that of Danny Kelly, an unemployed Massachusetts engineer.

    According to court records, Kelly deliberately cut a total of 18 communications cables belong to Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and others over a three month period. In anonymous extortion letters to Comcast and Verizon, Kelly threatened to increase the sabotage if the companies didn’t begin paying him $10,000-a-month in protection money. He instructed the companies to deposit the cash in a new bank account and post the account information to a webpage he could access anonymously.

    When the FBI tried to track him down from his visits to the webpage, they found he was routing through a German-based anonymizer. The FBI obtained a warrant to use the CIPAV on February 10, 2005, and was apparently successful. Kelly went on to plead guilty to extortion, and was sentenced to five years probation.

    The CIPAV also played a previously-unreported role in an investigation of a prolific computer hacker who made headlines after penetrating thousands of computers at Cisco, various U.S. national laboratories, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2005. The FBI agent leading the case sought approval to plant a CIPAV through an undercover operative posing as a Defense Department contractor “with a computer network connected to JPL’s computer network,” according to one document. The FBI linked the intrusions to known 16-year-old hacker in Sweden.

    And in 2005, FBI agents on the Innocent Images task force hit a wall when trying to track a sexual predator who’d begun threatening the life of a teenage girl he’d met for sex. The man’s IP addresses were “from all over the world” — a sign of web proxy use. The bureau sought and won court approval to use the CIPAV on August 9 2005.

    Other cases are less weighty. In another 2005 case, someone was unwisely using the name of the chief of the FBI’s Buffalo, New York office to harass people online. The FBI got a warrant to use the spyware to track down the fake agent.

    Additional cases include:

    • In March 2006, the FBI investigated a hacker who took over a Hotmail user’s account and acquired personal information. The hacker tried to extort the owner out of $10,000, demanding the victim crete and fund an E-Gold account and e-mail the password to the hacker. The FBI obtained a search warrant allowing them to send the intruder a CIPAV instead, to uncover his or her location.
    • In October, 2005, an undercover agent working a case described as “WMD (bomb & anthrax)” communicated with the suspect via Hotmail, and sought approval from Washington to use a CIPAV to locate the subject’s computer.
    • In December 2005, FBI agents sought to use the spyware to track down another extortionist who sent an e-mail to a casino threatening violence.
    • In June 2005, an intruder deleted a database at an unnamed company and demanded payment to restore it. The FBI prepared a search warrant affidavit and was ready to ask a judge for authorization to deliver the CIPAV through the hacker’s Yahoo e-mail account. They were briefly thwarted when the intruder stopped communicating with the victim, but after a month of silence the hacker reestablished contact and, presumably, got the FBI’s spyware for his trouble.

    The documents appear to settle one of the questions the FBI declined to answer in 2007: whether the bureau obtains search warrants before using the CIPAV, or if it sometimes uses so-called “pen register” warrants that don’t require a showing of probable cause that a crime has been committed. In all the criminal cases described in the documents, the FBI sought search warrants.

    The records also indicate that the FBI obtained court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which covers foreign espionage and terrorism investigations, but the details are redacted.

    The FBI released 152 heavily-redacted pages in response to Threat Level’s FOIA request, and withheld another 623. We’re scanning the documents now, and we’ll add them to this story later Friday.

    Image courtesy ABCNews.com

  • Germany bans Monsanto MON810 GM Corn

    Germany’s Minister of Agriculture, Ilse Aigner announced a decision today to ban the cultivation Monsanto’s MON810 genetically modified Bt maize (corn), due to serious health, agricultural, and ecological concerns.

    4 out of 5 German consumers are opposed to the importation of the maize, and the German BMELF (Federal Minsitry of Food, Agriculture, and Consumer Protection) decision reflects that view.

    MON810, also known as YieldGard, is genetically modified to express an insecticide (Cry1Ab) that naturally in bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt).

    This Bt maize has been approved for human consumption and animal feed in the US, unlabelled, since 1996, [1] and many other countries, despite significant risk to humans and other species.

    A 2007 study by Greenpeace showed inconsistent levels of Bt toxin expressed between plants when grown in non-controlled agricultural settings.  The study found that levels of the toxic protein in some plants were up to 100 times lower than Monsanto claimed, raising questions about both the effectiveness of the plant at controlling pests, and the actual potency of the expressed pesticide. [3]

    A US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) risk assessment study that concluded the maize was safe for human consumption was based on 3 studies in mice, and none in humans.

    Richard Wolfson, PhD points out the recklessness of using the Bt maize in light of wofeul inadequacy of existing research.  There exists a likelyhood of ampicillin (antibiotic) resistant bacteria forming in animals that consume the corn.   The use of Bt corn and other crops will almost certainly selectively breed stronger pests that threaten organic crops, and they have been shown to harmful to beneficial insect species [2].

    It is poorly understood whether genes from Bt maize will transfect other corn, permanently affecting gene lines of non-GM crops.

    Unfortunately in many western countries, especially the US, big agribusiness and biotechnology industry has a stranglehold on regulatory agencies.  In the US, produce labeled as organic (indicated by a number 9 before the PLU number) may not be genetically modified.  Any produce not labelled organic may be GMO (genetically modified organisms), and even perpared, mixed foods labeled as organic, may contan GMOs.

    References:

    1. AGBios GM Database
    2. Importation of Ciba-Geigy’s Bt Maize Is Scientifically Indefensible.Richard Wolfson, PhD.
    3. How much Bt toxin do genetically engineered MON810 maize plants actually produce? Bt concentration in field plants from Germany and Spain. Antje Lorch, Cristoph Then.
  • You are being lied to about pirates

    by Johann Hari
    Bay View

    Somali pirate “ships” are small, but the ships they seize are huge. They held one gigantic tanker for months until ransom was paid.

    Somali pirate “ships” are small, but the ships they seize are huge. They held one gigantic tanker for months until ransom was paid.

    Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the U.S. to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth.

    But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as “one of the great menaces of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side.

    Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: Pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t?

    In his book “Villains of All Nations,” the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the cat o’ nine tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

    Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the 18th century.”

    They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy.” This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

    The words of one pirate from that lost age – a young British man called William Scott – should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live.”

    In 1991, the government of Somalia – in the Horn of Africa – collapsed. Its 9 million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

    Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

    Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the U.N. envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: “Nothing. There has been no cleanup, no compensation and no prevention.”

    At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by over-exploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia’s unprotected seas.

    The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.”

    This is the context in which the men we are calling “pirates” have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia – and it’s not hard to see why.

    In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters … We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.” William Scott would understand those words.

    No, this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Program supplies. But the “pirates” have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking – and it found 70 percent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defense of the country’s territorial waters.”

    One of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters … We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.”

    During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America’s founding fathers paid pirates to protect America’s territorial waters, because they had no navy or coast guard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

    Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn’t act on those crimes – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we begin to shriek about “evil.” If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause – our crimes – before we send in the gunboats to root out Somalia’s criminals.

    The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarized by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.”

    Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today – but who is the robber?

    Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. He has reported from Iraq, Israel/ Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the U.S., and his journalism has appeared in publications all over the world. To contact him, email johann@johannhari.com or visit his website at JohannHari.com. This column previously appeared in the Independent and Huffington Post, where the following postscript was added:

    Postscript: Some commentators seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place – wouldn’t this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia’s coastline is vast, stretching 3,300km (over 2,000 miles). Imagine how easy it would be – without any coast guard or army – to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals and stirred-up piracy. There’s no contradiction.

  • Mich Rep Opsommer calls on governor to review “enhanced drivers licenses”

    April 8, 2009 State Representative Paul Opsommer (R-DeWitt) called on Governor Granholm today to use her newly created “Information Privacy Protection Council” to review the federal Memorandum of Agreement that Michigan has entered into regarding computer-chipped Enhanced Drivers Licenses.

    “Michigan entering into a federal agreement to put unencrypted, long range RFID computer chips into our driver’s licenses presents a huge privacy risk with very little benefit”, said Opsommer. “I don’t think we need RFID in our licenses period, but even if we did, there is absolutely no reason it couldn’t be short range and encrypted. The federal government has made some bad technology choices that they now want to cram down the rest of our throats. Canada is totally rethinking this whole program from the ground up, and so should Michigan.”

    Most Canadian Provinces and Territories each have the equivalent to the Governor’s new Chief Privacy Officer, and they have been sounding alarm bells regarding EDLs for quite some time. In Ottawa they recently repatriated one of their databases, and Saskatchewan scrapped the entire EDL program altogether due to cost, changing guidelines, and significant privacy concerns. A Canadian forum last Monday called for a moratorium on the use of EDLs until their Parliament studies and debates the issue.

    “The law that allowed Michigan to create an EDL was rushed through last year under false pretenses, and it unwisely allowed for the legislature to divest its authority in finalizing the Memorandum of Agreement,” said Opsommer. “If you look at what was in that law, and then you look at the eventual Memorandum that was signed, you can see that our concerns about the need for encryption and protections over Canadian and Mexican data access was completely ignored. The Governor can get us out of this agreement with thirty days notice before a single one of these licenses is issued. I am asking her to do just that so that the entire agreement can be reviewed by her new Chief Privacy Officer and the legislature.”

    The new licenses would contain an unencrypted RFID chip that would contain a new unique citizen ID number that could be wirelessly read through both wallets and walls at distances of 30 feet. Many are concerned that the number could become the new social security number of the 21st Century, and no laws currently exist to prevent people or businesses from wirelessly skimming the numbers and using them for their own purposes or selling them to others to create their own wireless databases.

    “If the federal government is dead-set on Michigan creating Enhanced Driver’s Licenses instead of the State Department just simply reducing the price of traditional passports as the Government Accountability Office has called for, the very least they can do is allow us to create one that doesn’t contain RFID,” said Opsommer. “Michigan should not be content to just roll over for Washington on this one, especially when there are so many unanswered questions about how the information will be shared.”

  • New York Times Parrots Debunked Poplawski Smear

    Says Pittsburgh shooter left comments on Infowars, yet fails to mention that Poplawski criticized Alex Jones’ anti-racist viewpoint

    New York Times Parrots Debunked Poplawski Smear 070409top

    Paul Joseph Watson
    Prison Planet.com
    Tuesday, April 7, 2009

    The New York Times has thrown its weight behind the smear attack attempting to assign blame to Alex Jones for being an influence in the tragic shooting of three Pittsburgh police officers on Saturday, despite the fact that the killer, Richard Poplawski, openly criticized Jones’ anti-racist political viewpoint.

    As we reported yesterday, a major smear attack on Alex Jones and his websites launched by the ADL in the aftermath of the Pittsburgh police shootings which attempted to classify Infowars as an outlet for “hate speech” has been discredited after the ADL’s own website admitted that Richard Poplawski held views that opposed those of the Texas radio talk show host.

    Stories claiming that Poplawski was influenced by Alex Jones, Infowars and Prison Planet originally appeared Sunday in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Raw Story. Neither of these news organizations attempted to speak with us before claiming the link and Raw Story later issued a retraction and removed us from their original piece altogether after we questioned the sloppy nature of their writer Muriel Kane’s hit piece.

    In an article entitled Man Accused in Pittsburgh Killings Voiced Racist Views Online, the New York Times today reports that Poplawski made postings on “Infowars, a Web site affiliated with a radio talk show host, Alex Jones, beginning in late 2007 and continuing until two days before the shootings.”

    However, the Times fails to explain the nature of what Poplawski actually said on the Infowars comment boards. In his comments, the cop killer was actually expressing opposition to Alex Jones’ anti-racist political viewpoint and encouraging others to be suspicious of Jones’ motives in bringing people of all races together to stand up to tyranny and corruption.

    The fact that the Times makes the connection between Poplawski and Jones, while failing to point out that Poplawski disagreed with Jones’ political viewpoint, underscores the fact that this is a baseless smear intended to take what was a tragic domestic dispute completely out of context in order to demonize anti-establishment media outlets and chill free speech.

    As the Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports today, in his postings, “Mr. Poplawski also appears to agree with another poster who criticized Alex Jones, host of a conspiracy theorist radio program and author of an Internet site to which Mr. Poplawski’s friends said he sometimes turned for news.

    The fact that Poplawski occasionally visited Infowars (and left a total of 3 comments, hardly the “regular” fan that the media made him out to be), makes Infowars no more guilty for the murder of three police officers than ESPN would be if Poplawski had gone there to check the football results.

    There is not a shred of evidence that Poplawski was inspired to kill three cops because he thought he was kick-starting some kind of political revolution. Indeed, it was Poplawski’s own mother that called the police to the house as a result of a domestic dispute because of Poplawski’s dog urinating on the floor. Poplawski did not go out tooled up on a radical political mission to kill cops on the back of reading Infowars, and to imply that there is any causative connection is a defamatory smear.

    “If blame is to be laid for the Stanton Heights shootings, Mr. Jones said, it should be placed on the Marine Corps, which Mr. Poplawski’s friends and mother said he had joined only to be thrown out,” reports the Gazette.

    “If anybody should be blamed for this it’s the Marines — they’re the ones who trained him to kill,” Mr. Jones said.”

    The fact that the ADL and the New York Times ganged up to propagate this smear really shows us that we are hurting the establishment with our message of non-violent, non-racist civil disobedience and urging people of all colors and creeds to come together and resist the new world order.

    The desperation of the smear attempt is self-evident and this will only backfire once again to reveal the agenda-driven hatred that the ADL and the decaying establishment media have for the growing liberty movement in America.

  • Do 90 Percent of the Guns Used in Mexican Drug Crimes Really Come From America?

    Friday, April 3rd, 2009
    The Agitator

    From Hillary Clinton to Diane Feinstein to Bob Schieffer to the New York Times, gun control proponents keep repeating the claim that 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico’s drug war were sold in the United States.

    William La Jeunesse and Maxim Lott say it just isn’t true. As it turns out, the 90 percent statistic actually concerns only those guns Mexican authorities sent to the U.S. for tracing. Since the U.S. really has no means of tracing guns not manufactured in the U.S., Mexican authorities don’t bother sending U.S. officials guns that were obviously manufactured elsewhere (generally guns that lack a U.S. serial number, or don’t show signs of once having had one).  So the 90 percent figure isn’t surprising, and it isn’t really alarming. It means that 90 percent of the guns Mexican authorities thought were probably made and sold in the U.S. were indeed made and sold in the U.S.

    But that’s not what gun control proponents have been saying.  They’ve been saying nine of 10 guns used in all Mexican drug crimes came from the U.S. That number, La Jeunesse and Lott report, is closer to 17 percent.

    The report explains that most of the weapons used by Mexico’s drug cartels are actually illegal in the U.S. Even if they weren’t, it makes little sense to suggest drug cartels are going through the hassle of sending thousands of “straw buyers” across the border to legally purchase guns in America when more powerful black market weapons are available from Russia, South America, China, and Guatemala without the bureaucracy and risk of registration. The L.A. Times hinted at as much in an article a couple of weeks ago, but seemed to miss the obvious connection that if the cartels are arming up with black market weapons unavailable in the U.S., the 90 percent figure trumpeted by U.S. politicians probably isn’t correct.

    Here’s the other thing: According to one Mexican official, 150,000 Mexican soldiers have defected in the last year, taking their government-issued M-16s with them. Those guns are ending up in the hands of drug dealers. The U.S. is also continually sending more money and arms to Mexico to support President Calderon’s military crackdown on the drug trade, but we send all of that aid knowing the high rate of defection among both soldiers and Mexican police officers, and the high rate of corruption and high percentage of Mexican officials on the cartels’ payrolls. One firearms expert told LaJeunesse and Lott that some guns…

    “…are legitimately shipped to the government of Mexico, by Colt, for example, in the United States. They are approved by the U.S. government for use by the Mexican military service. The guns end up in Mexico that way — the fully auto versions — they are not smuggled in across the river.”

    In other words, not only are U.S. politicians flat wrong when they say that 90 percent of the guns used in Mexico’s drug war are coming from U.S. gun dealers recklessly selling legal American guns to cartel straw buyers, they’re ignoring the fact that a not-insignificant number of the guns used by the cartels likely came from the U.S. government, in the form of the drug war aid.

    Yet the federal government’s strategy, as outlined by Hillary Clinton last week, is apparently to harass legitimate U.S. gun dealers while sending more weapons and money to the Mexican government. More power for the government, less freedom for the citizenry. Seems about consistent with politicians’ solution to most problems.

  • New “cybersecurity” legislation major threat to free speech

    Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (PDF) – The end of the free Internet, if enacted.

    Yet another in an unrelenting series of  legislative attacks on liberty, this bill threatens to usurp ICANN and private domain registrars’ control of DNS (Domain Naming System) in the US.  DNS is the system that maps IP addresses (eg. 255.255.255.255) against names like mydomain.org.

    SEC. 9. SECURE DOMAIN NAME ADDRESSING SYSTEM.

    (a) IN GENERAL.—Within 3 years after the date of enactment of this Act, the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information shall develop a strategy to implement a secure domain name addressing system. The Assistant Secretary shall publish notice of the system requirements in the Federal Register together with an implementation schedule for Federal agencies and information systems or networks designated by the President, or the President’s designee, as critical infrastructure information systems or networks.

    b) COMPLIANCE REQUIRED.—The President shall ensure that each Federal agency and each such system or network implements the secure domain name addressing system in accordance with the schedule published by the Assistant Secretary.

    If the feds take control of DNS, they can set their own terms of service and force all hosts onto subdomains, deciding who can and can’t have a web site, blog, email or IM server, etc.  But one thing controlling the DNS will not do is protect networks against hackers.  Almost any type of network connection (except DNS itself) can be made by IP address, bypassing DNS entirely.

    I wonder who the president’s “designee” will be.  Perhaps Senator Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens?

    If  these incompetent boobs can’t even secure their own networks now, what makes them think they can do a better job than private industry?  I haven’t been hacked since about ’97 when I ditched Windows NT.  I don’t need their help to secure my DNS servers.  Hey feds- If you want secure systems, start by ditching Windows.  If you can’t even get that thru your heads, how do you expect to take over DNS for the entire friggin Internet?  Who are you going to award the no-bid contract to, Microsoft?

    This is about one thing: eliminating the networks that independent citizens use to inform each other and exercise free political speech.  They can’t stand the fact that you have access to real journalism on the web instead of being spoon-fed CNNBCBS propagada on TV.

    SEC. 18. CYBERSECURITY RESPONSIBILITIES AND AUTHORITY

    The President—
    . . .
    (2) may declare a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic to and from any compromised Federal government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network
    . . .
    (6) may order the disconnection of any Federal government or United States critical infrastructure information systems or networks in the interest of national security

    So the president or his designee can simply shut down “critical infrastructure” every time they freak out and decide something is an emergency?  What exactly is critical infrastructure?

    SEC. 23. DEFINITIONS.

    (3)   FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND UNITED STATES CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND NETWORKS.—

    The  term ‘‘Federal government and United States critical infrastructure in formation systems and networks’’ includes—

    (B) State, local, and nongovernmental information systems and networks in the United States designated by the President as critical infrastructure information systems and networks.

    Its whatever they say it is.  No measures, standards, or criteria.

    This is not a misguided effort to protect our network infrastructure.  Its a deliberate attack on free speech, and the feds know exactly what they’re doing. According to Reuters, the previous head of the National Cyber Security Center Rod Beckstrom resigned in protest of the over-reaching role the NSA is playing in cyber security.

    What is the first objective of a military when attacking any enemy?  Shut down their communications. We are the enemy and this is an attack on the ability of free individuals to communicate with each other.  Please write your congress critters immediately.  If you don’t care about politics, at least think of your 4chan and bittorrent downloads!

  • It’s not the New World Order you’re expecting

    Contrary to what you may have heard in the corporate media, the world government that the elite are selling us is not the world government we’re going to get.  The bankers and the royalty have other plans for their cattle.

    In all of history, have the bankers and royalty ever been known to rule over their subjects in a fair and just manner, and distribute wealth equally?  Have they ever allowed populations to be free and raise their children in peace?  What makes you think they’re going to start now? Shall we turn over all the remaining power to them by allowing them to form a world government, run by and for the international banking elite and royal families?

    Next time you hear any of the financial or political elite refer to a “New World Order,” or as Obama puts it “the kind of World Order I think we’d all like to see” Please remember this anti-Nazi (albeit racist) Walt Disney WW2 propaganda cartoon.  Notice the part about “We bring the world new order.”

    Prescott Bush (Union Banking Co) was one of the top 5 financiers of the Nazi party during WW2.  He was charged with “trading with the enemy” and attempted to stage a military coup in the US, but somehow avoided prosecution.  Do we think its a coincidence that his descendants are always going on about a New World Order and constantly bombing the crap out of one nation or another?   Do you really think Obama’s “World Order” is anything different?