SPECIAL REPORT: Forensic Analysis Finds Venango County, PA E-Voting System 'Remotely Accessed' on 'Multiple Occasions' by Unknown Computer

Battle for independent election investigation rages in rural Republican county, pitting renegade Election Board against County Commission, giant E-Vote firm ES&S...


BradBlog 
Brad Friedman



According to the Initial Report from a landmark independent forensic audit of Venango County, PA's touch-screen voting system --- the same system used in dozens of states across the state and country --- someone used a computer that was not a part of county's election network to remotely access the central election tabulator computer, illegally, "on multiple occasions." Despite the disturbing report, as obtained by The BRAD BLOG and posted in full below, we may never get to learn who did it or why, if Venango's County Commissioners, a local judge, and the nation's largest e-voting company have their way. And that's not all we won't get to find out about.

The battle for election integrity continues in Venango, with the County Commissioners teaming up with e-voting vendor Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) on one side, and the county's renegade interim Republican-majority Board of Elections on the other. The Commissioners and ES&S have been working to spike the independent scientific forensic audit of the county's failed electronic voting machines that was commissioned by the interim Board of Elections. Making matters worse, the Board has now been removed from power by a county judge, a decision they are attempting to appeal as the three-person board and their supporters continue to fight the entrenched establishment for transparency and accountability in the rural Western Pennsylvania county.

The extraordinary battle began when the interim Board was appointed by a county judge to oversee elections in the Republican-leaning PA county last spring. Normally the County Commissioners serve as the Board of Elections. But when they themselves are up for election, as they were this year, the county court judge names a specially appointed Board to over the election and serve until the end of the year, or until they are dismissed by the same court.
When the interim Board of Elections --- comprised of two Republicans and one Democrat --- took power this year in Venango, they unanimously set about commissioning the landmark, independent forensic audit of the county's 100% unverifiable ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting systems, on the heels of sworn testimony from voters about several failed elections over recent years, beginning in 2008.

After months of legal wrangling, with County Commissioners in opposition, the special Election Board's independent study of the County's ES&S iVotronic voting system finally got under way in late September. At that time, a hard drive clone of the computer which runs the ES&S central tabulator system (known as the "Unity Election Reporting Manager") was created and given, along with other data, to two Carnegie Mellon computer science professors who had volunteered to carry out the analysis on behalf of the Board. The Board also announced that the November election this year would be carried out on an optically-scanned paper ballot system, also made by the county's vendor, ES&S, while the reported anomalies from their May 2011 primary election, run on the unverifiable touch-screen systems, were being examined by the scientists.

But now, as documents and letters obtained by The BRAD BLOG reveal, the voting machine company, Omaha-based ES&S, who had issued no objections prior to the start of the study, but who changed their mind quickly after it began (as we detailed in an Exclusive report in late October) has now hardened their position, sending threatening legal letters to both the county and the two computer scientists. The e-voting firm has warned them they are likely to face a lawsuit if they do not agree to complete confidentiality and if results of their analysis are released publicly without their prior review and approval.


Shortly after ES&S' legal threats were issued last month, a county judge released the interim Board from their duties (a move now being appealed by the Board) and the County Commissioners, who had fought tooth and nail against the analysis even being undertaken in the first place, are now back at the helm. According to members of the interim Board, the County Commissioners seem likely to "white wash" and/or quash the entire analysis and a plan for continuing the investigation before it can be completed or even see the light of day.

The BRAD BLOG, however, has obtained a copy of the Initial Draft of one of the forensic studies by the Carnegie Mellon computer scientists. Findings from the report [linked in full below, along with ES&S' threat letters], include a number of disturbing, and so-far unexplained revelations that should raise alarm bells for voters in virtually every corner of the nation as we head into another Presidential election year.

Among those findings: details on unexplained, out-of-sequence activity log entries in the computer tabulation system, indications that the system was mounted several times with a "USB 'flash drive'" device, and, perhaps most troubling, evidence that the system was repeatedly accessed by an unidentified remote computer, for lengthy periods of time, on "multiple occasions".

The entire affair has left members of the interim Board --- which includes the Chair and Treasurer of the local Republican Party, as well as the former Chair of the Democratic Party --- hopping mad. They're asking questions about motivations of both the County Commissioners and ES&S and describing their actions as a "cover up", even as they take legal action to try and complete the work they had begun months ago, after first hearing sworn testimony from voters, describing major failures with e-voting machines at the polling place in recent elections...





'They know there's something wrong'


When the Director of Venango's then Board of Elections, Republican Craig Adams (who also serves as Treasurer of the county's Republican Party) announced the startof the county's landmark analysis in late September, he asked rhetorically at a press conference, in response to queries about the cost of the analysis: "What is a vote worth?" He then answered himself: "If the vote is counted it is priceless. If it is not counted, I don't care what it costs. Let's get it right."

News of the World hired investigators to spy on hacking victims' lawyers

The Guardian
Nick Davies

Exclusive: Investigators followed and filmed lawyers of hacking victims in apparent attempt to gather material on private lives

Mark Lewis, who has represented victims of phone hacking
including the family of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler,
was one of the lawyers targeted.

The News of the World hired a specialist private investigator to run covert surveillance on two of the lawyers representing phone-hacking victims as part of an operation to put pressure on them to stop their work.

The investigator secretly videoed Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris as well as family members and associates. Evidence suggests it was part of an attempt to gather evidence for false smears about their private lives.

The News of the World also took specialist advice in an attempt to injunct Lewis to prevent him representing the victims of hacking and tried to persuade one of his former clients to sue him.
The surveillance of Lewis and Harris occurred during the past 18 months, when Rupert Murdoch's son James was executive chairman of the paper's parent company, News International. He is due to give a second round of evidence to a House of Commons select committee on Thursday, and is likely to face intense questioning about the quality of his leadership.

Neither lawyer would comment but friends say they are furious at what they see as an attempt at "blackmail" and are considering suing the News of the World for breach of privacy. They have previously had to reassure clients that their private lives would not be exposed if they dared to sue the paper.

A News International spokesperson said : "News International's enquiries have led the company to believe that Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris were subject to surveillance. While surveillance is not illegal, it was clearly deeply inappropriate in these circumstances. This action was not condoned by any current executive at the company."

Lewis and Harris have been part of a small group of lawyers who have mounted a series of devastating legal actions against News International. Separately, they represented Gordon Taylor and Max Clifford, the first two victims to sue the company for hacking their phones.

Harris also acts for football agent Sky Andrew, whose case led in January to the resignation of the prime minister's media adviser, Andy Coulson. Lewis also represents the family of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, whose case led to the closure of the News of the World in July.

Emerging evidence suggests the lawyers were targeted on at least two occasions by Derek Webb, an investigator who specialises in physically following people and in making secret videos of their movements. Webb has worked for the News of the World since 2003, following hundreds of targets including members of the royal family and serving cabinet ministers. Emails recovered by Scotland Yard disclose the names of those working for News International who hatched the plans.

Webb was given the job as part of an attempt to prove a false claim that Harris was having an affair with a Manchester solicitor and other false claims about the private life of Harris and her children. It is not yet clear exactly how the News of the World would have used the information if any claim had proved to be true.

In spring 2010, following a hostile report by the Commons media select committee, the News of the World hired Webb to gather evidence on Lewis. For reasons that are not yet clear, he focused on Lewis's former wife and secretly filmed her home in Manchester, following her and taking further video of her and her daughter as they visited local shops and a garden centre.

Remote Personal Computer Surveillance Scandal Hits Germany

Der Spiegal

A German hacker organization claims to have cracked spying software allegedly used by German authorities. The Trojan horse has functions which go way beyond those allowed by German law. The news has sparked a wave of outrage among politicians and media commentators.

Sunday's edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
newspaper devoted five pages to printing part of the
Trojan horse's source code.

It sounds like something out of George Orwell's novel "1984" -- a computer program that can remotely control someone's computer without their knowledge, search its complete contents and use it to conduct audio-visual surveillance via the microphone or webcam.

But the spy software that the famous German hacker organization Chaos Computer Club has obtained is not used by criminals looking to steal credit-card data or send spam e-mails. If the CCC is to be believed, the so-called "Trojan horse" software was used by German authorities. The case has already triggered a political shockwave in the country and could have far-reaching consequences.

On Saturday, the CCC announced that it had been given hard drives containing a "state spying software" which had allegedly been used by German investigators to carry out surveillance of Internet communication. The organization had analyzed the software and found it to be full of defects. They also found that it transmitted information via a server located in the US. As well as its surveillance functions, it could be used to plant files on an individual's computer. It was also not sufficiently protected, so that third parties with the necessary technical skills could hijack the Trojan horse's functions for their own ends. The software possibly violated German law, the organization said.
So-called Trojan horse software can be surreptitiously delivered by a harmless-looking e-mail and installed on a user's computer without their knowledge, where it can be used to, for example, scan the contents of a hard drive. In 2007, the German Interior Ministry announced it had designed a Trojan horse that could be used to search the hard drives of terror suspects.

Beyond the Limits
 
The hard drives that the CCC analyzed came from at least two different German states. It was unclear whether the software, which is said to be at least three years old, had been used by state-level or national authorities. In a Sunday statement, the Interior Ministry denied that the software had been used by the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), which is similar to the American FBI. The statement did not explicitly rule out the possibility that the software could have been used by state-level police forces.

If the CCC's claims are true, then the software has functions which were expressly forbidden by Germany's highest court, the Federal Constitutional Court, in a landmark 2008 ruling which significantly restricted what was allowed in terms of online surveillance. The court also specified that online spying was only permissible if there was concrete evidence of danger to individuals or society.
German politicians from all sides of the political spectrum have reacted to the news with alarm. Government spokesman Steffen Seibert said that Chancellor Angela Merkel was taking the CCC's allegations very seriously. It needed to be investigated on all levels whether such a Trojan horse had been used, he said, adding that the German government always acted on the basis of law.

"Clearly the limits set by the Federal Constitutional Court have been massively violated," said Claudia Roth, the co-leader of the Green Party. Sebastian Nerz, the leader of Germany's Pirate Party, which campaigns for Internet freedom and civil rights, said that the authorities were "clearly acting outside the limits set by the constitution."

Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger has called for an investigation into the software on both the national and state level. She said the use of such a Trojan horse, if it did exist, was not compatible with German law. "It can not continue in this form," she told the television station ARD.
On Monday, commentators in German newspapers take a look at the allegations.
The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

"Investigators have released programs into electronic networks that wrest control of computers from their users. Private data on laptops, personal computers and networked devices of all kinds can be searched. Remote access allows secret programs or criminal evidence to be deposited on the hijacked computers. And what is even worse: Anyone with the necessary IT skills can use the spying software as a back door to look at the investigators' findings. The door to the machine's unconscious is now wide open."

Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI and NYPD

Gawker
Adrian Chen

The Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on for a month. And it seems the FBI and NYPD have had help tracking protesters' moves thanks to a conservative computer security expert who gained access to one of the group's internal mailing lists, and then handed over information on the group's plans to authorities and corporations targeted by protesters.

Since the Occupy Wall Street protest began on September 17, New York security consultant Thomas Ryan has been waging a campaign to infiltrate and discredit the movement. Ryan says he's done contract work for the U.S. Army and he brags on his blog that he leads "a team called Black Cell, a team of the most-highly trained and capable physical, threat and cyber security professionals in the world." But over the past few weeks, he and his computer security buddies have been spending time covertly attending Occupy Wall Street meetings, monitoring organizers' social media accounts, and hanging out with protesters in Lower Manhattan.

As part of their intelligence-gathering operation, the group gained access to a listserv used by Occupy Wall Street organizers called September17discuss. On September17discuss, organizers hash out tactics and plan events, conduct post-mortems of media appearances, and trade the latest protest gossip. On Friday, Ryan leaked thousands of September17discuss emails to conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who is now using them to try to smear Occupy Wall Street as an anarchist conspiracy to disrupt global markets.

What may much more alarming to Occupy Wall Street organizers is that while Ryan was monitoring September17discuss, he was forwarding interesting email threads to contacts at the NYPD and FBI, including special agent Jordan T. Loyd, a member of the FBI's New York-based cyber security team.

On September 18th, the day after the protest's start, Ryan forwarded an email exchange between Occupy Wall Street organizers to Loyd. The email exchange is harmless: Organizers discuss how they need to increase union participation in the protest. "We need more outreach to workers. The best way to do that is by showing solidarity with them," writes organizer Jackie DiSalvo in the thread. She then lists a group of potential unions to work with.

Security Expert: U.S. 'Leading Force' Behind Stuxnet

WGBH
Tom Gjelten

One year ago, German cyber security expert Ralph Langner announced he had found a computer worm designed to sabotage a nuclear facility in Iran. The Stuxnet worm is now recognized as a cyber super weapon, and it could end up harming those who created it.

One year ago, German cyber security expert Ralph Langner announced he had found a computer worm designed to sabotage a nuclear facility in Iran. It's called Stuxnet, and it was the most sophisticated worm Langner had ever seen.

In the year since, Stuxnet has been analyzed as a cyber super weapon, one so dangerous it might even harm those who created it.

In the summer of 2010, Langner and his partners went to work analyzing a malicious software program that was turning up in some equipment. Langner Communications is a small firm in Hamburg, Germany, but Langner and the two engineers with whom he works know a lot about industrial control systems. What they found in Stuxnet left them flabbergasted.

"I'm in this business for 20 years, and what we saw in the lab when analyzing Stuxnet was far beyond everything we had ever imagined," Langner says.

It was a worm that could burrow its way into an industrial control system, the kind of system used in power plants, refineries and nuclear stations. Amazingly, it ignored everything it found except the one piece of equipment it was seeking; when the worm reached its target, it would destroy it.

Langner says that the more his team analyzed the Stuxnet worm, the more they knew they were onto something big.

"We were pretty much working around the clock," he says, "because after we had the first impression of the magnitude of this, we were just like on speed or something like that. It was just impossible to go back to sleep."

Langner also realized after analyzing the Stuxnet code that it was designed to disable a particular nuclear facility in Iran. That's serious business, he figured. Some Iranian nuclear scientists, he remembered, had been mysteriously killed. Langner published his findings anyway.

Jamming signals to stop hackers from lethal pacemaker attacks

ComputerWorld
Darlene Storm

While there have been no publicly known murder by hacking insulin pumps or pacemakers cases, the lethal hack and wireless attack has been demonstrated by researchers. Most folks do not want to have surgery to replace a functioning medical implant with a replacement device even if it might be less vulnerable to "passive eavesdropping" and to attackers sending unauthorized radio commands which could reprogram the implantable medical device . . . or as in a DDoS attack to drain the pacemaker battery so boom, victim falls over dead via untraceable assassination.

MIT and University of Massachusetts researchers have developed an anti-hacking jamming device that addresses communication security to protect implantable medical devices. The wearable "shield" device can emit a jamming signal when an active attacker establishes an unauthorized wireless link between a pacemaker and a remote terminal.


Researchers presented "They Can Hear Your Heartbeats: Non-Invasive Security for Implantable Medical Devices" [PDF] at the SIGCOMM communications conference. If all broadcasting radio "noise" on the implant frequency is blocked by a jamming device, it prevents the doctor as well as an attacker from receiving the data signals. The researchers created "the shield" prototype so doctors could still access the data but passive eavesdroppers and active attackers sending radio commands could not.

The innovation radio design device does not jam all signals, but the paper states that a "sophisticated adversary" could "transmit at 100 times the shield's power" and the shield's jamming broadcast would still block communications until the attacker was within five meters of the victim's implant.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee has also taken an interest in protecting wireless enabled medical devices. The committee sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office, asking GAO to "conduct a review of the FCC's actions in regard to wireless medical devices."

Another electronic medical technology leap forward came when University of Illinois researchers presented Electronic Skin which could replace bulky electrodes. It was described on New Idea as:

It is hair-thin, constructed with sensors, antenna, LED and other parts and powered by built-in solar batteries to monitor a person's heartbeat, brain activity, muscle contractions and so on. If you put it besides your throat, the device can even "hear" your words so as to accomplish certain tasks. It can be easily applied to anything, without need for glue. When such amazing things used in the medical field, we bet we humans can benefit more from the advanced technology.

People who find this mixture of medical communication and technology somewhat more creepy than cool may wish to invest in Faraday Cage apparel?

People who find it fascinating may like Ohio State University researchers' idea to embed high-powered antennas into clothing in order to create the next generation of communication systems. Research Associate Professor Chi-Chih Chen said, "Our primary goal is to improve communications reliability and the mobility of the soldiers, but the same technology could work for police officers, fire fighters, astronauts - anybody who needs to keep their hands free for important work." It is believed that such an antenna communication system sewn into a shirt or vest could also aid the elderly or disabled who might need help in case of an emergency.

Phone hacking: News International mass-deleted emails, tech firm says

Guardian
Patrick Wintour

HCL reveals News International's various requests for deletion but tells MPs it knew of nothing untoward

The technology firm HCL has told the home affairs select committee it was aware of the deletion of hundreds of thousands of emails at the request of News International between April 2010 and July 2011, but said it did not know of anything untoward behind the requests to delete them.
HCL has sent the letter to the home affairs select committee chairman, Keith Vaz , revealing it had been involved in nine separate episodes of email deletion.

HCL says it is not the company responsible for emails on the News International system that are older than a couple of weeks. It says another unnamed vendor is responsible, but confirms it has co-operated with this vendor in deleting material.

Through a letter from HCL's solicitors Stuart Benson, the firm says: "My client is aware of nothing which appeared abnormal, untoward or inconsistent with its contractual role." It adds: "It is entirely for News International, the police and your committee as to whether there was any other agenda or subtext when issues of deletion arose and that is a matter on which my client cannot comment and something you will no doubt wish to explore direct with News International."

It stressed that since it was not the company that stored News International's data "any suggestion or allegation that it has deleted material held on behalf of News International is without foundation".
HCL identified three sets of email deletions in April 2010, including a deletion of a public folder of a live email system that "was owned by a user who no longer needed the emails".

A further 200,000 emails stuck in an outbox were deleted in May 2010 to restore email functionality. In September 2010 a further pruning of historic emails occurred to help stabilise the email archival system, which had been having "frequent outages" since November 2009.

In January 2011 HCL was asked about its ability to truncate a particular database in the email archival systems. HCL "answered in the negative and suggested assistance from the third party vendor". HCL stated no reason as to why it was unable to assist.

In February 2011 emails were deleted in an older version of Microsoft. Finally, in July 2011 HCL helped delete emails from the live system as relocation errors had occurred during migration from one system to the other.

HCL said it did not have the resources to review every set of deletions.

Separately, a firm of solicitors drawn into the News International phone-hacking scandal is expected to reply shortly to the home affairs select committee as to how it came to write a key letter to the newspaper group that was then used by the company to contend that phone hacking had not been widespread.

ECHELON: The Global Eavesdropping Scheme Dwarfs Murdoch's "News of the World"

Global Research
Sherwood Ross

As eavesdroppers go, next to Uncle Sam and John Bull, Rupert Murdoch, the moral force behind Fox News, is an amateur.

That's because a global eavesdropping scheme being run today by the United States and Great Britain dwarfs anything that Rupert Murdoch's editors at The News of The World (TNTW) ever dared attempt.

British Prime Minister David Cameron may well deny he knew TNTW was tapping the phones of members of UK's Royal household or those of American 9/11 victims. But he can't claim he doesn't know his country is a partner in ECHELON, which, according to Washington journalist Bill Blum, is a “network of massive, highly automated interception stations” that is eavesdropping on the entire world.

"Like a mammoth vacuum cleaner in the sky, the National Security Agency (NSA) sucks it all up: home phone, office phone, cellular phone, email, fax, telex...satellite transmissions, fiber-optic communications traffic, microwave links, voice, text images (that are) captured by satellites continuously orbiting the earth and then processed by high-powered computers," Blum writes in his book "Rogue State" (Common Courage Press).

Calling it the greatest invasion of privacy ever, Blum says the ceaseless, illegal spy system sucks up perhaps billions of messages daily, including those of prime ministers, the Secretary-General of the UN, the pope, embassies, Amnesty International, Christian Aid, and transnational corporations and that "if God has a phone, it's being monitored."

Blum also said that during the countdown to its invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. listened in on the conversations of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, "and all the members of the UN Security Council...when they were deliberating about what action to take in Iraq."

Launched in the 1970s to spy on Soviet satellite communications, the NSA and its junior partners in Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand operate ECHELON, which is a network of massive, highly automated interception stations covering the globe at the expense of American taxpayers.

Today, Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour opposition, is blasting PM Cameron on grounds that, according to The New York Times of July 19, “the recent scandals in British life were caused by a lack of accountability among those in high places.” Across Britain, Miliband said, “there is a yearning for a more decent, responsible, principled country.”

What makes the British public recoil is the sort of conduct by former TNTW reporter Clive Goodman, who pleaded guilty in Jan., 2007, to hacking the voice mails of aides to the royal family.

Pardon me, but how does that crime begin to compare with ECHELON, an organ of the U.S. Government, spying on the Secretary-General of the United Nations or the Pope? Or stealing, as it has, confidential business information and passing it along to favored firms?

CIA Web site attack linked to WikiLeaks

UPI

LANGLEY, Va., June 16 (UPI) -- A computer hacker group that claims to have shut down the U.S. CIA Web site backs the whistle-blowing WikiLeaks group, a WikiLeaks online post said.

"WikiLeaks supporters, LulzSec, take down CIA ... who has task force into WikiLeaks," the WikiLeaks post on the Twitter social-networking and microblogging service said late Wednesday.
The post was monitored by United Press International.

"That we did. And that we do. <3," a follow-up post identified as coming from the hacker group Lulz Security said. "<3" is online shorthand for a heart.

A later post attributed to LulzSec said: "Goodnight twitter. The CIA anti-lizards will probably rise from the packet sea while we rest our shining-yet-saturated power field." The hacker group claims to be leading a "lizard rebellion."

The CIA said its Web site had malfunctioned Wednesday but would say nothing more about the incident, other than, "We're looking into the matter," The Wall Street Journal reported.
The site was back up early Thursday, a UPI review indicated.

There was no evidence sensitive data in the agency's internal computer network had been compromised, International Business Times reported.

WikiLeaks became the focus of a global debate over its role in the release of thousands of confidential messages about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the conduct of U.S. diplomacy around the world.
The once-fringe, non-profit organization, which seeks to expose secret information about governments and corporations, was founded in 2006 by Australian activist-journalist Julian Assange, along with a group of like-minded activists and computer experts.

The purported attack on the CIA's public information site was the latest in a spree of high-profile attacks by LulzSec, including on an FBI affiliate site and the site of the Public Broadcasting Service.
LulzSec also claimed to have attacked Japanese technology giant Sony Corp. and some videogame companies.

It posted information this week from the U.S. Senate's public Web site, along with a comment, "Is this an act of war, gentlemen?"

LulzSec draws its name from the neologism "Lulz" -- from the Internet slang "LOLs," or "laughing out loud" -- and "Sec," short for "Security."

CIA, Mossad and Soros behind Wikileaks

From the Wayne Madsen Report in Pakistan Daily, July 29, 2010:

WMR has learned from Asian intelligence sources that there is a strong belief in some Asian countries, particularly China and Thailand, that the website Wikileaks, which purports to publish classified and sensitive documents while guaranteeing anonymity to the providers, is linked to U.S. cyber-warfare and computer espionage operations, as well as to Mossad’s own cyber-warfare activities...

Our Asian intelligence sources report the following: “Wikileaks is running a disinformation campaign, crying persecution by U.S. intelligence -- when it is U.S. intelligence itself. Its [Wikileaks'] activities in Iceland are totally suspect.” Wikileaks claims it is the victim of a new COINTELPRO [Counter Intelligence Program] operation directed by the Pentagon and various U.S. intelligence agencies. WMR’s sources believe that it is Wikileaks that is part and parcel of a cyber-COINTELPRO campaign, such as that proposed by President Obama’s “information czar,” Dr. Cass Sunstein...

See also Kev Boyle's blog entry of July 27, 2010 - WIKILEAKS/WIKIPEDIA: TRUTH serving LIES (with CIA/MOSSAD oversight) in which he writes:

All this ‘whistleblowing’ does little other than serve the interests of the US possibly expanding their war. No establishment figure is seriously compromised by these ‘leaks’, nor is policy undermined in any new way. The war is wicked? The people who care already know that and this ‘new’ information makes little difference to that perception one way or the other.

Btw, in January 2007, John Young, who runs cryptome.org, a site that publishes a wealth of sensitive and classified information, left Wikileaks, claiming the operation was a CIA front.

You don't say?

Another False Flag Promo Piece?

"60 Minutes" airs a feature confirming the vulnerabilities of crucial U.S. infrastructure and defense computer networks.

This is a strange news story. There’s no denying the tendency to construct a network without the imagination to foresee how vulnerable that network is – it reminds us of genetically modified foods and the unknown elements behind the dangerous effects truly realized.

From another perspective, think of what a perfect excuse a cyber attack could be to invade another country. All you have to do is shut down a power grid for a couple weeks, bring reporters in to show the resulting casualties, then proclaim the discovery that one particular country hacked the U.S. power grid.

Or, you could say that the Department of Defense just happened to launch a couple nukes towards Bolivia, but only because some hacker got into the the U.S. Defense network. Voila!

This news story is strange because an open public admission of the vulnerabilities of the U.S. Department of Defense gives birth to worlds of hacker wannabees with new ambitions to invade the U.S. Defense system. Why do that?


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