 | « on: August 04, 2010, 03:50:51 PM » |  Quote |
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20012583-281.html
Hahahaha...good one...
With all of the CCTVs in the airports, it's not too hard to compare timestamps with the video footage from those cameras.
. . . it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20012583-281.html
never forget Brzezinski's words...
“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. [...] The capacity to assert social and political control over the individual will vastly increase. It will soon be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and to maintain up-to-date, complete files, containing even most personal information about the health or personal behavior of the citizen in addition to more customary data. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”
https://www.mega.nu/ampp/privacy.html
-Zbigniew Brzezinski
WASHINGTON -- Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation's homeland security chief said Friday.
As terrorists increasingly recruit U.S. citizens [This is a lie, the CIA recruits American citizens. Terrorists do not recruit shit, anyone not an American who even sneazes "allah akbar" is tracked 24/7 (also illegally). And if they interact with any American citizen it is because the CIA wants that interaction to occur], the government needs to constantly balance Americans' civil rights and privacy with the need to keep people safe, said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. [THIS IS EXACTLY THE HITLER, BUSH, MAO, STALIN DOCTRINE!]
But finding that balance has become more complex as homegrown terrorists have used the Internet to reach out to extremists abroad for inspiration and training [This is a lie of the highest degree. The top 100 sites used for so called recruiting are run out of Langley, 10 Downing Street, or Tel Aviv. Everybody knows this, is she trying to completely discredit herself?]. Those contacts have spurred a recent rash of U.S.-based terror plots and incidents. [Another lie, just because they initiated Project Northwoods which is so obvious with the Chistmas Underwear Intelligence Op and the Times Square Drill does not mean they can use their own false flag black ops to force us into burning the constitution]
"The First Amendment protects radical opinions, but we need the legal tools to do things like monitor the recruitment of terrorists via the Internet," Napolitano told a gathering of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy. [Has she completely lost her f**king mind? What? What the hell do they have to do with each other? And why has terrorism grown while we have spent over $5 Trillion on exterminating over 1 million so called terrorists while raping another million, maiming many millions, and causing massive exoduses. And all this time causing PTSD and radiation in over a million soldiers, causing over 20,000 dead soldiers through the battlefield or by damaging their minds so much that they end up committing suicide. After all the world gave to this massive undertaking we are supposed to believe that so calld terrorism by random nuts increased? How is this even possible? Do you think maybe there is some other hidden agenda going on? http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2502830637471895940]
Napolitano's comments suggest an effort by the Obama administration to reach out to its more liberal, Democratic constituencies to assuage fears that terrorist worries will lead to the erosion of civil rights.
The administration has faced a number of civil liberties and privacy challenges in recent months as it has tried to increase airport security by adding full-body scanners, or track suspected terrorists traveling into the United States from other countries.
"Her speech is sign of the maturing of the administration on this issue," said Stewart Baker, former undersecretary for policy with the Department of Homeland Security. "They now appreciate the risks and the trade-offs much more clearly than when they first arrived, and to their credit, they've adjusted their preconceptions."
Underscoring her comments are a number of recent terror attacks over the past year where legal U.S. residents such as Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad and accused Fort Hood, Texas, shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan, are believed to have been inspired by the Internet postings of violent Islamic extremists. [So the slave Napolitano was not enough for the banksters, Rothschild ordered AP to add that cherry of a comment. Hey Rothschild, we know that both Fort Hood and Times Square were protected patsies by the Terrorist Industrial Complex and that it is funded by Bilderberg and acts on behalf of Bilderberg. Bilderberg had the largest motive for the Fort Hood massacre and then ran the 24/7 psyops about so called Homegrown Terrorism and the evil Internet. Thanks for confirming this "kill the Internet" motive.]
And the fact that these are U.S. citizens or legal residents raises many legal and constitutional questions.
Napolitano said it is wrong to believe that if security is embraced, liberty is sacrificed.
She added, "We can significantly advance security without having a deleterious impact on individual rights in most instances. At the same time, there are situations where trade-offs are inevitable."
As an example, she noted the struggle to use full-body scanners at airports caused worries that they would invade people's privacy.
The scanners are useful in identifying explosives or other nonmetal weapons that ordinary metal-detectors might miss -- such as the explosives that authorities said were successfully brought on board the Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. [THEY HAD THESE RAPE SCANNERS AT THE AIRPORT HE FLEW OUT OF! UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE KENNEDY EXPLAINED IN A LIVE PRESS CONFERENCE THAT HE WAS PUT ON THE PLANE EVEN THOUGH HE WAS NOT AUTHORIZED AND HAD NO PASSPORT BY A US INTELLIGENCE OFFICER!!!! THESE RAPE SCANNERS CANNOT STOP THE CIA FROM CONDUCTING FALSE FLAGS!!!]
He is accused of trying to detonate a bomb hidden in his underwear, but the explosives failed, and only burned Abdulmutallab.
U.S. officials, said Napolitano, have worked to institute a number of restrictions on the scanners' use in order to minimize that. The scans cannot be saved or stored on the machines by the operator, and Transportation Security Agency workers can't have phones or cameras that could capture the scan when near the machine. [These scanners are controlled by NRO, she has no power whatsoever on what they do. What a joke]
Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/01/feds-must-exami/#ixzz0rUmRfZgY
The nation’s top spy, Michael McConnell, thinks the threat of cyberarmageddon! is so great that the U.S. government should have unfettered and warrantless access to U.S. citizens’ Google search histories, private e-mails and file transfers, in order to spot the cyberterrorists in our midst.
That’s according to a sprawling 18-page story on the Director of
National Intelligence by Lawrence Wright in the January 21 edition of the New Yorker. (The story is not online).
In the piece, McConnell returns, in flamboyant style, to his exaggerating ways, hyping threats and statistics to further his bureaucratic aims. For example, McConnell regurgitates the hoary myth that computer crime costs America $100 billion a year. THREAT LEVEL traced down the source of that fake-factoid in September to a former privacy officer for the state of Colorado.
Presumably using unsupported stats like that, in May 2007 McConnell convinced President Bush that a massive cyber-attack on a single U.S. bank would be worse for the economy than than the deadly terrorist attacks of September 11, the article reports. In response, the NSA developed a mind-boggling, but still incomplete, plan to eavesdrop on the internet in order to protect it.
In order for cyberspace to be policed, Internet activity will have to be closely monitored. Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search. "Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation," he said. Giorgio warned me, "We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’"
It says something ominous about McConnell’s priorities if he believes a DDOS attack on Bank of America, or even a computer intrusion that wiped out its database (and magically purged its backup tapes), would be worse than an attack that killed 3,000 Americans.
Still, it’s hardly a surprising plan — given that McConnell was one of the main backers of the Clipper Chip, the government’s failed, early 1990’s proposal to put a backdoor in every encryption product.
McConnell also makes an astounding assertion that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recently crippled the NSA’s overseas signals intelligence collection with a string of soft-on-terror rulings.
McConnell said that federal judges had recently decided, in a series of secret rulings, that any telephone transmission or e-mail that incidentally flowed into U.S. computer systems was potentially subject to judicial oversight. According to McConnell the capacity of the NSA to monitor foreign-based communications had consequently been reduced by seventy per cent.
In other words, McConnell claims the NSA couldn’t intercept a terrorist’s e-mail by tapping a fiber optic cable in Pakistan, if there was a chance the message would pass through a U.S. router or end up in a Hotmail account.
I’m no rich man, but I’ll bet any reader $1,000 that, when and if those rulings are ever released, we’ll see they say no such thing. Send me an e-mail to take me up this bet. U.S. government officials are welcome to participate.
The FISA law that created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court only applies to intercepts that physically happen within the borders of the United States. The NSA has always been free to intercept foreign communications overseas — the mission for which they were created and funded — even if the call passes through a U.S. switch.
So in the case of the now debunked Iraqi kidnappers anecdote that leads off the New Yorker story, the NSA would only have needed to get a court order if its Iraqi targets initiated communications that flowed through U.S. servers or switches and the NSA decided to tap them physically at a United States internet or telecom facility, by burglarizing it, digging up its cables or getting the company to cooperate. (As for why that happens and how common it is, check my story: NSA’s Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became the Switchboard to the World.)
Simply put, the FISA law is intended to prevent the NSA from operating inside the United States.
In any event, that restriction collapsed this summer with the fear-induced, strong-armed passage of the so-called Protect America Act. That law radically re-architected the nation’s surveillance apparatus.
Now the NSA can turn Gmail’s servers and AT&T’s switches into de facto arms of the surveillance industrial complex without any court oversight.
And though the law ostensibly sunsets in February, any orders in effect at that time will have power for another 12 months. Moreover, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) is reportedly planning to discard legislative attempts to rein in these new powers and will instead simply push to extend the current scheme another 12 months.
In short, McConnell’s politically convenient exaggerations have already worked well for him in winning domestic spying powers, despite their flimsiness under any real scrutiny.
That track record bodes ill for anyone concerned about his new plans to push for sweeping and unnecessary powers to put the NSA in the wires of the internet in order to prevent a computer attacks.
The Wall Street Journal’s intelligence guru Siobhan Gorman’s take is here. Gorman wrote a groundbreaking story on the cyberspace initiative last September while at The Baltimore Sun.
UPDATE: Ex-spook Michael Tanji guest-posting over at Danger Room writes:
It’s bad enough that the Director of National Intelligence is trotting out a bogus threat so the government can snoop on all Internet traffic. What’s worse is that this kind of mass surveillance is a pretty lame way to catch the honest-to-God bad guys.
Of more interest to observers of intelligence activities is the issue of quality vs. quantity and the slow creep towards doom that these efforts foretell. The fact that we are essentially attempting to gill-net bad guys is a fairly strong indicator that the intelligence community has yet to come up with an effective strategy against information-age threats.
[...] Its not a question of listening in to you whispering sweet nothings into the ear to your significant other, it is simply a case of – as the late Sam Kinison joked – going where the food is. That our intelligence agencies can intercept adversary communications is largely a given, they just want to do it from the convenience of the homeland, not some remote switch in the darkest hinterlands.
(Photo: AP/ Cook)
Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/01/feds-must-exami/#ixzz0rUmbXKjz
_________________________________
Cyberwar Doomsayer Lands $34 Million in Government Cyberwar Contracts
By Ryan Singel April 13, 2010 | 6:04 pm
Read More http://webmonkey.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/booz-allen/#ixzz0rUmmg9io
Last month, the former Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell boldly took to the Senate floor and the Washington Post’s editorial page to declare “The United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing.”
Thankfully for the American people, his company — the giant defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton — has now landed the contract to build the Pentagon’s cyberwar control center. For a measly $14.4 million in taxpayer money, the outfit will help build a new cyberwar bunker for the U.S. Cyber Command.
Read More http://webmonkey.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/booz-allen/#ixzz0rUmxlFpw
Additionally, Booz Allen Hamilton won another contract for $20 million to “foster collaboration among telecommunications researchers, University of Maryland faculty members and other academic institutions to improve secure networking and telecommunications and boost information assurance,” Washington Technology reports. While that might sound like a lot of money to set up a mailing list and a wiki, please don’t be cynical. Undoubtedly, McConnell’s crack team of consultants are providing the researchers with around-the-clock bodyguards and state-of-the-art bullet-proof monitors.
Meanwhile, we urge U.S. netizens to refrain from un-patriotic musings that McConnell intentionally uses fear and exaggerated rhetoric to land these kinds of contracts for his company and instead, be vigilant and keep their eyes out for signs of Chinese hackers (one telltale sign is a “Made in China” label on the bottom of your laptop).
Otherwise you might soon find yourself facing a Red Screen of Death (RSOD), making you just one more casualty in this tragic cyberwar we Americans are all bravely enduring as one nation united.
Photo: USAF
Read More http://webmonkey.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/booz-allen/#ixzz0rUn8lKi8
Quote
For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they're viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that "scanned images cannot be stored or recorded."
Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.
Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.
Quote
For its part, the TSA says that body scanning is perfectly constitutional: "The program is designed to respect individual sensibilities regarding privacy, modesty and personal autonomy to the maximum extent possible, while still performing its crucial function of protecting all members of the public from potentially catastrophic events."
Hahahaha...good one...
With all of the CCTVs in the airports, it's not too hard to compare timestamps with the video footage from those cameras.
Feds admit storing checkpoint body scan images
. . . it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20012583-281.html
never forget Brzezinski's words...
“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. [...] The capacity to assert social and political control over the individual will vastly increase. It will soon be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and to maintain up-to-date, complete files, containing even most personal information about the health or personal behavior of the citizen in addition to more customary data. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”
https://www.mega.nu/ampp/privacy.html
-Zbigniew Brzezinski
Napolitano Bombshell:
"We track every single thing you do on the Internet"
"We track every single thing you do on the Internet"
Napolitano:
Internet Monitoring Needed to Fight Fake Homegrown Terrorism
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/06/18/napolitano-internet-monitoring-needed-fight-homegrown-terrorism/
Published June 18, 2010 | Associated Press
Internet Monitoring Needed to Fight Fake Homegrown Terrorism
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/06/18/napolitano-internet-monitoring-needed-fight-homegrown-terrorism/
Published June 18, 2010 | Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation's homeland security chief said Friday.
As terrorists increasingly recruit U.S. citizens [This is a lie, the CIA recruits American citizens. Terrorists do not recruit shit, anyone not an American who even sneazes "allah akbar" is tracked 24/7 (also illegally). And if they interact with any American citizen it is because the CIA wants that interaction to occur], the government needs to constantly balance Americans' civil rights and privacy with the need to keep people safe, said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. [THIS IS EXACTLY THE HITLER, BUSH, MAO, STALIN DOCTRINE!]
But finding that balance has become more complex as homegrown terrorists have used the Internet to reach out to extremists abroad for inspiration and training [This is a lie of the highest degree. The top 100 sites used for so called recruiting are run out of Langley, 10 Downing Street, or Tel Aviv. Everybody knows this, is she trying to completely discredit herself?]. Those contacts have spurred a recent rash of U.S.-based terror plots and incidents. [Another lie, just because they initiated Project Northwoods which is so obvious with the Chistmas Underwear Intelligence Op and the Times Square Drill does not mean they can use their own false flag black ops to force us into burning the constitution]
"The First Amendment protects radical opinions, but we need the legal tools to do things like monitor the recruitment of terrorists via the Internet," Napolitano told a gathering of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy. [Has she completely lost her f**king mind? What? What the hell do they have to do with each other? And why has terrorism grown while we have spent over $5 Trillion on exterminating over 1 million so called terrorists while raping another million, maiming many millions, and causing massive exoduses. And all this time causing PTSD and radiation in over a million soldiers, causing over 20,000 dead soldiers through the battlefield or by damaging their minds so much that they end up committing suicide. After all the world gave to this massive undertaking we are supposed to believe that so calld terrorism by random nuts increased? How is this even possible? Do you think maybe there is some other hidden agenda going on? http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2502830637471895940]
Napolitano's comments suggest an effort by the Obama administration to reach out to its more liberal, Democratic constituencies to assuage fears that terrorist worries will lead to the erosion of civil rights.
The administration has faced a number of civil liberties and privacy challenges in recent months as it has tried to increase airport security by adding full-body scanners, or track suspected terrorists traveling into the United States from other countries.
"Her speech is sign of the maturing of the administration on this issue," said Stewart Baker, former undersecretary for policy with the Department of Homeland Security. "They now appreciate the risks and the trade-offs much more clearly than when they first arrived, and to their credit, they've adjusted their preconceptions."
Underscoring her comments are a number of recent terror attacks over the past year where legal U.S. residents such as Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad and accused Fort Hood, Texas, shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan, are believed to have been inspired by the Internet postings of violent Islamic extremists. [So the slave Napolitano was not enough for the banksters, Rothschild ordered AP to add that cherry of a comment. Hey Rothschild, we know that both Fort Hood and Times Square were protected patsies by the Terrorist Industrial Complex and that it is funded by Bilderberg and acts on behalf of Bilderberg. Bilderberg had the largest motive for the Fort Hood massacre and then ran the 24/7 psyops about so called Homegrown Terrorism and the evil Internet. Thanks for confirming this "kill the Internet" motive.]
And the fact that these are U.S. citizens or legal residents raises many legal and constitutional questions.
Napolitano said it is wrong to believe that if security is embraced, liberty is sacrificed.
She added, "We can significantly advance security without having a deleterious impact on individual rights in most instances. At the same time, there are situations where trade-offs are inevitable."
As an example, she noted the struggle to use full-body scanners at airports caused worries that they would invade people's privacy.
The scanners are useful in identifying explosives or other nonmetal weapons that ordinary metal-detectors might miss -- such as the explosives that authorities said were successfully brought on board the Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. [THEY HAD THESE RAPE SCANNERS AT THE AIRPORT HE FLEW OUT OF! UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE KENNEDY EXPLAINED IN A LIVE PRESS CONFERENCE THAT HE WAS PUT ON THE PLANE EVEN THOUGH HE WAS NOT AUTHORIZED AND HAD NO PASSPORT BY A US INTELLIGENCE OFFICER!!!! THESE RAPE SCANNERS CANNOT STOP THE CIA FROM CONDUCTING FALSE FLAGS!!!]
He is accused of trying to detonate a bomb hidden in his underwear, but the explosives failed, and only burned Abdulmutallab.
U.S. officials, said Napolitano, have worked to institute a number of restrictions on the scanners' use in order to minimize that. The scans cannot be saved or stored on the machines by the operator, and Transportation Security Agency workers can't have phones or cameras that could capture the scan when near the machine. [These scanners are controlled by NRO, she has no power whatsoever on what they do. What a joke]
NSA Must Examine
All Internet Traffic
to Prevent Cyber Nine-Eleven, Top Spy Says
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/01/feds-must-exami/
By Ryan Singel January 15, 2008 | 9:55 am
All Internet Traffic
to Prevent Cyber Nine-Eleven, Top Spy Says
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/01/feds-must-exami/
By Ryan Singel January 15, 2008 | 9:55 am
Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/01/feds-must-exami/#ixzz0rUmRfZgY
The nation’s top spy, Michael McConnell, thinks the threat of cyberarmageddon! is so great that the U.S. government should have unfettered and warrantless access to U.S. citizens’ Google search histories, private e-mails and file transfers, in order to spot the cyberterrorists in our midst.
That’s according to a sprawling 18-page story on the Director of
National Intelligence by Lawrence Wright in the January 21 edition of the New Yorker. (The story is not online).
In the piece, McConnell returns, in flamboyant style, to his exaggerating ways, hyping threats and statistics to further his bureaucratic aims. For example, McConnell regurgitates the hoary myth that computer crime costs America $100 billion a year. THREAT LEVEL traced down the source of that fake-factoid in September to a former privacy officer for the state of Colorado.
Presumably using unsupported stats like that, in May 2007 McConnell convinced President Bush that a massive cyber-attack on a single U.S. bank would be worse for the economy than than the deadly terrorist attacks of September 11, the article reports. In response, the NSA developed a mind-boggling, but still incomplete, plan to eavesdrop on the internet in order to protect it.
In order for cyberspace to be policed, Internet activity will have to be closely monitored. Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search. "Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation," he said. Giorgio warned me, "We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’"
It says something ominous about McConnell’s priorities if he believes a DDOS attack on Bank of America, or even a computer intrusion that wiped out its database (and magically purged its backup tapes), would be worse than an attack that killed 3,000 Americans.
Still, it’s hardly a surprising plan — given that McConnell was one of the main backers of the Clipper Chip, the government’s failed, early 1990’s proposal to put a backdoor in every encryption product.
McConnell also makes an astounding assertion that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recently crippled the NSA’s overseas signals intelligence collection with a string of soft-on-terror rulings.
McConnell said that federal judges had recently decided, in a series of secret rulings, that any telephone transmission or e-mail that incidentally flowed into U.S. computer systems was potentially subject to judicial oversight. According to McConnell the capacity of the NSA to monitor foreign-based communications had consequently been reduced by seventy per cent.
In other words, McConnell claims the NSA couldn’t intercept a terrorist’s e-mail by tapping a fiber optic cable in Pakistan, if there was a chance the message would pass through a U.S. router or end up in a Hotmail account.
I’m no rich man, but I’ll bet any reader $1,000 that, when and if those rulings are ever released, we’ll see they say no such thing. Send me an e-mail to take me up this bet. U.S. government officials are welcome to participate.
The FISA law that created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court only applies to intercepts that physically happen within the borders of the United States. The NSA has always been free to intercept foreign communications overseas — the mission for which they were created and funded — even if the call passes through a U.S. switch.
So in the case of the now debunked Iraqi kidnappers anecdote that leads off the New Yorker story, the NSA would only have needed to get a court order if its Iraqi targets initiated communications that flowed through U.S. servers or switches and the NSA decided to tap them physically at a United States internet or telecom facility, by burglarizing it, digging up its cables or getting the company to cooperate. (As for why that happens and how common it is, check my story: NSA’s Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became the Switchboard to the World.)
Simply put, the FISA law is intended to prevent the NSA from operating inside the United States.
In any event, that restriction collapsed this summer with the fear-induced, strong-armed passage of the so-called Protect America Act. That law radically re-architected the nation’s surveillance apparatus.
Now the NSA can turn Gmail’s servers and AT&T’s switches into de facto arms of the surveillance industrial complex without any court oversight.
And though the law ostensibly sunsets in February, any orders in effect at that time will have power for another 12 months. Moreover, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) is reportedly planning to discard legislative attempts to rein in these new powers and will instead simply push to extend the current scheme another 12 months.
In short, McConnell’s politically convenient exaggerations have already worked well for him in winning domestic spying powers, despite their flimsiness under any real scrutiny.
That track record bodes ill for anyone concerned about his new plans to push for sweeping and unnecessary powers to put the NSA in the wires of the internet in order to prevent a computer attacks.
The Wall Street Journal’s intelligence guru Siobhan Gorman’s take is here. Gorman wrote a groundbreaking story on the cyberspace initiative last September while at The Baltimore Sun.
UPDATE: Ex-spook Michael Tanji guest-posting over at Danger Room writes:
It’s bad enough that the Director of National Intelligence is trotting out a bogus threat so the government can snoop on all Internet traffic. What’s worse is that this kind of mass surveillance is a pretty lame way to catch the honest-to-God bad guys.
Of more interest to observers of intelligence activities is the issue of quality vs. quantity and the slow creep towards doom that these efforts foretell. The fact that we are essentially attempting to gill-net bad guys is a fairly strong indicator that the intelligence community has yet to come up with an effective strategy against information-age threats.
[...] Its not a question of listening in to you whispering sweet nothings into the ear to your significant other, it is simply a case of – as the late Sam Kinison joked – going where the food is. That our intelligence agencies can intercept adversary communications is largely a given, they just want to do it from the convenience of the homeland, not some remote switch in the darkest hinterlands.
(Photo: AP/ Cook)
Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/01/feds-must-exami/#ixzz0rUmbXKjz
_________________________________
Cyberwar Doomsayer Lands $34 Million in Government Cyberwar Contracts
By Ryan Singel April 13, 2010 | 6:04 pm
Read More http://webmonkey.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/booz-allen/#ixzz0rUmmg9io
Last month, the former Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell boldly took to the Senate floor and the Washington Post’s editorial page to declare “The United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing.”
Thankfully for the American people, his company — the giant defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton — has now landed the contract to build the Pentagon’s cyberwar control center. For a measly $14.4 million in taxpayer money, the outfit will help build a new cyberwar bunker for the U.S. Cyber Command.
Read More http://webmonkey.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/booz-allen/#ixzz0rUmxlFpw
Additionally, Booz Allen Hamilton won another contract for $20 million to “foster collaboration among telecommunications researchers, University of Maryland faculty members and other academic institutions to improve secure networking and telecommunications and boost information assurance,” Washington Technology reports. While that might sound like a lot of money to set up a mailing list and a wiki, please don’t be cynical. Undoubtedly, McConnell’s crack team of consultants are providing the researchers with around-the-clock bodyguards and state-of-the-art bullet-proof monitors.
Meanwhile, we urge U.S. netizens to refrain from un-patriotic musings that McConnell intentionally uses fear and exaggerated rhetoric to land these kinds of contracts for his company and instead, be vigilant and keep their eyes out for signs of Chinese hackers (one telltale sign is a “Made in China” label on the bottom of your laptop).
Otherwise you might soon find yourself facing a Red Screen of Death (RSOD), making you just one more casualty in this tragic cyberwar we Americans are all bravely enduring as one nation united.
Photo: USAF
Read More http://webmonkey.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/booz-allen/#ixzz0rUn8lKi8
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