Biggest Threat to an Open Internet: U.S. Intelligence Community

The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net-neutrality ISPs, it’s Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence.

McConnell

McConnell’s not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering. He’s the nice-seeming guy who’s willing and able to use fear-mongering to manipulate the federal bureaucracy for his own ends, while coming off like a straight shooter to those who are not in the know.

When he was head of the country’s national intelligence, he scared President Bush with visions of e-doom, prompting the president to sign a comprehensive secret order that unleashed tens of billions of dollars into the military’s black budget so they could start making firewalls and building malware into military equipment.

And now McConnell is back in civilian life as a vice president at the secretive defense contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton. He’s out in front of Congress and the media, peddling the same Cybaremaggedon! gloom.

And now he says we need to re-engineer the internet.

We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same.

Re-read that sentence. He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded. Or the tech could be useful if a computer got hijacked without your knowledge and used as part of a botnet.

The Washington Post gave McConnell free space to declare that we are losing some sort of cyberwar. He argues that the country needs to get a Cold War strategy, one complete with the online equivalent of ICBMs and Eisenhower-era, secret-codenamed projects. Google’s allegation that Chinese hackers infiltrated its Gmail servers and targeted Chinese dissidents proves the United States is “losing” the cyberwar, according to McConnell.

But that’s not warfare. That’s espionage.

McConnell’s op-ed then pointed to breathless stories in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal about thousands of malware infections from the well-known Zeus virus. He intimated that the nation’s citizens and corporations were under unstoppable attack by this so-called new breed of hacker malware. … Continue Reading

Mossad Agents Fled to U.S. After Assassination

At least two suspected Israeli agents behind the murder of a senior Hamas official fled to the US during their escape, Dubai police now believe.

Police have now cast their net wider in their investigation of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s killing, which officials in the Gulf state are now certain was carried out by Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that one of the suspects carrying a British passport entered the US on February 14, while a second arrived on American soil on January 21, two days after the murder, using an Irish passport.

There are no records of either man leaving the US, but Dubai’s police chief, Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan told a press conference today that he believed all the suspects named in the case are currently in Israel.

“All of them [are in Israel] … These are agents for the Mossad, we know this,” Khalfan told reporters in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. “They travelled to European countries and to the US using the same documents they used to enter here.”

Speaking to The Times yesterday, insiders close to the case confirmed that at least two of the 26 named suspects had been tracked through the US. One of these was Roy Cannon, a British man living in Israel whose identity was apparently stolen by the team behind the killing.

Dubai police have named 12 British passport holders among the suspects. All are now believed to be UK citizens resident in Israel and victims of identity theft.

Dubai police have already traced 13 credit cards issued by the Meta Bank in Iowa and its New York-based distributor. The cards were used to book flights and hotel rooms. The FBI is believed to be investigating.

Al-Mabhouh was killed in his Dubai hotel room on January 19, with his killers fleeing the country within hours of the murder. Police tracked them back to Europe, with several flying via South Africa and Hong Kong. Their movements after this are not clear.

Mr al-Mabhouh’s body was not found by hotel staff until January 20. Results of a toxicology report released by police show that he was injected with a fast-acting sedative before being suffocated.

Khalfan said today that while the agents remained in Israel, they could not be extradited, but that they would be seized if they left the country. Dubai has issued international arrest warrants for the 26 named suspects through Interpol.

The police chief called upon European countries whose citizens have had their identities stolen to continue their full cooperation in the case and stressed that the UAE’s relationship with these nations would not be affected.

“If israel and Mossad mistreated Europeans, we will not. If the Mossad dipped their hand in blood and wiped it on European passports, our treatment of Europeans will not be affected,” he said.

British agents from the SOCA (Serious Organized Crime Agency) are now in Israel to interview the 12 British citizens living in Israel whose passports have been linked with the Dubai assassination.

All U.S. Fish Tested Positive for Mercury

In a new study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), every single fish tested from 291 freshwater streams across the United States was found to be contaminated with mercury.

“This study shows just how widespread mercury pollution has become in our air, watersheds and many of our fish in freshwater streams,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that builds up in the food chain at ever higher concentrations in predators such as large fish and humans. It is especially damaging to the developing nervous systems of fetuses and children, but can have severe effects on adults, as well. The pollutant enters the environment almost wholly as atmospheric emissions from industrial processes, primarily the burning of coal for electricity. It then spreads across the plant and settles back to the surface, eventually concentrating in rivers, lakes and oceans, where it enters the aquatic food chain.

The number one cause of human mercury poisoning in the United States is the consumption of fish and shellfish.

Researchers tested the water, sediment and fish of the 291 streams between 1998 and 2005. Fish tested were mostly larger species near the top of the food chain, such as largemouth bass.

All fish were contaminated with mercury, more than 66 percent of them at levels higher than those set by the Environmental Protection agency as a “level of concern for fish-eating mammals,” according to Reuters. More than 25 percent of the fish were contaminated at levels higher than those set as the threshold for human consumption.

The study is the first to focus on mercury contamination of streams, rather than lakes, reservoirs, wetlands or oceans. The researchers found the highest mercury concentrations in fish from the coastal blackwater streams of the Southeast. Apparently the combination of pine forests and wooded wetlands found in these regions transforms mercury very effectively into its more toxic organic form (methylmercury). Mercury concentrations were also high in streams fed from areas with a history of mining.

Pentagon, DHS Turn Up Media Hype

Napolitano On Issues of Domestic Terrorism and Cyber Security we have seen a rash of blatant over the top Pentagon fed news pieces and headlines into the main stream media with in this last week. For example on Monday Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Janet Napolitano said that  “She is afraid of Americans” announcing that Domestic Terrorism is the Homelands Chief threat to the security of the United States. Every major news outlet and the local networks in the nation ran unthinkingly with the Headline: Homeland Chief: Domestic extremism is top concern See headline search results: “The government is just starting to confront this reality and does not have a good handle on how to prevent someone from becoming a violent extremist, she said. In the last year, Napolitano said, she’s witnessed a movement from international extremism to domestic extremism – cases in which Americans radicalized and decided to plot attacks against the country. “What really is it that draws a young person being raised in the United States to want to go and be at a camp in Yemen and then come back to the United States with the idea of committing harm within the United States?” Napolitano asked without citing specific cases. “Where in that person’s formulation is there an opportunity to break that cycle?” The DHS head embarrassingly cites the accused “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who according to witnesses was lead onto the plan by a sharply dressed accomplice who turned out to be an intelligence operative part of a larger operation according to a Detroit Newspaper. “Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, said Abdulmutallab’s visa wasn’t taken away because intelligence officials asked his agency not to deny a visa to the suspected terrorist over concerns that a denial would’ve foiled a larger investigation into Al-Qaeda threats against the United States. “Revocation action would’ve disclosed what they were doing,” Kennedy said in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, “rather than simply knocking out one solider in that effort.” Underwear Bomber Yet despite this statement on record from Mr. Kennedy before the House Committee on Homeland Security, DHS upgrades their threat assessment on the American public over that of the international threat of Al-Qaeda. It shows that DHS is intent on demonizing Americans in a fear campaign rather than a fact campaign, and the headlines reflect it. Most Americans are to busy working 2-3 jobs and have their hands around the remote control of their T.V. rather than a finger on an AR-15 or a detonator. The obvious incident to cite would be the airplane Joe Stack piloted  into the IRS building in Austin, Texas this last week. This is strangely absent from Napolitano’s list of examples during this meeting even after Mr. Stack’s own daughter called him a Hero, for this desperate act that  caused his death and one other. Maybe they foresee Joe 6-pack angrily getting off the couch due to economic fall out in the near future is the real cause for DHS alarm. CNN Fakes Media Cyber-War Another example of the Pentagon take over of the media, would be the fake cyber-terror broadcast done by CNN recently in which they acted out the scenario of hackers taking down the entire electrical grid of the nation on live television. It has been reported that bloggers and media pieces have been purchased by the U.S. government to help shape our perspectives in regards to domestic terrorism. This time taking it one step further they simply bought out an entire network news broadcast from CNN to fear-monger the Nation with. Amusingly enough it turns out it is ‘fear and hype’ that even the Pope seemingly has had a hard time buying into by criticizing the use of body scanners recently.

Where is All the Money

“The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.” — Noam Chomsky

As a record amount of U.S. citizens are struggling to get by, many of the largest corporations are experiencing record-breaking profits, and CEOs are receiving record-breaking bonuses. How could this be happening, how did we get to this point?

The Economic Elite have escalated their attack on U.S. workers over the past few years; however, this attack began to build intensity in the 1970s. In 1970, CEOs made $25 for every $1 the average worker made. Due to technological advancements, production and profit levels exploded from 1970 – 2000. With the lion’s share of increased profits going to the CEO’s, this pay ratio dramatically rose to $90 for CEOs to $1 for the average worker.

As ridiculous as that seems, an in-depth study in 2004 on the explosion of CEO pay revealed that, including stock options and other benefits, CEO pay is more accurately $500 to $1.
… Continue Reading