Damn thrashing funny

"Years ago in Sweden, Israeli Mossad agents made a similar misidentification and assassinated a man they thought had been one of the Palestinian terrorists involved in the Munich Olympics massacre. This sort of business is like packing parachutes— you always have to be sure. Surveillance and countersurveillance were the meat of the course"

Inside Delta Force by Haney, Eric
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FBFO6Onull

Father Hollywood: Honest Injun?

Father Hollywood: Honest Injun?

Framing the discussion about Jesus, Donald Rumsfeld and Kraftwerk

Donald Rumsfeld doesn't get a lot of play in the philosophical world but Slavoj Zizek doesn't borrow from just anybody. Rumsfeld has an amazing way of assessing a problem which I have discussed in other posts but I will make it more methodical in this post. Rumsfeld's four criteria are known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns and unknown knowns. The last of his four criteria the "'unknown' 'known'" (UK) is critically important not just for organizational leadership but for clear thinking on a personal level.

The UK is an unconscious bias formed by a an 'unknown' piece of information that has been internalized uncritically. For example the Soviet Union has assessed the potential chances for a nuclear first strike by the United States continuously from Hiroshima to the present. There are undoubtedly algorithms which take into account large amounts of hard data: ("'known' 'knowns'") such as the number, condition, location, and readiness states of nuclear delivery systems (missiles, bombers, subs:the triad), newly developed and existing weapons that have been deployed to unknown locations("'known''unknowns'"), unknown weapons deployed to unknown locations ("'unknown' 'unknowns') and finally and most importantly the assumptions inherent to the decision making process which may or may not be correct: the deadly "'unknown' 'knowns'". We all unconsciously use these categories when it comes to music. I 'know' that Kraftwerk's soundtrack of "Tron" is one of my favorite modern albums, this is a 'known' 'known'. I know there is music I don't like aesthetically, this is also a 'known' 'known'. Furthermore I know that Kraftwerk has music I've never heard, this is a known unknown and the fact that there are anonymous artists making music I haven't heard is an unknown unknown.

That leaves the critical question: "what are my unknown knowns?". What criteria am I unconsciously relying on in the decision making process? In the case of aesthetic tastes like music the discussion ends here unless we are going to psychoanalyze my choices and their sources which is beyond the scope of this paper. We all unconsciously use these categories when it comes to music. I 'know' that Kraftwerk's soundtrack of "Tron" is one of my favorite modern albums, this is a 'known' 'known'. I know there is music I don't like aesthetically, this is also a 'known' 'known'. Furthermore I know that Kraftwerk has music I've never heard, this is a known unknown and the fact that there are anonymous artists making music I haven't heard is an unknown unknown.

That leaves the critical question: "what are my unknown knowns?". What criteria am I unconsciously relying on in the decision making process? In the case of aesthetic tastes like music the discussion ends here unless we are going to psychoanalyze my choices and their sources which is beyond the scope of this paper.

But if I'm in "Raid Over Moscow" trying to assess whether the U.S. is going to strike imminently, eventually or not at all the 'unknown' 'knowns' are the most important part of the equation. "The Americans" episode in which Reagan was shot illustrates a great example of 'unknown' 'knowns'. The CPCC decided that Alexander Haig had pulled a coup d'etat and wrested control of the American government from Reagan. Furthermore, the CPSU 'knew' that General Haig was planning to launch a first-strike against the USSR once he'd gained control of the nuclear football. How did the Central Committee reach this conclusion? (the conclusions themselves about General Haig are what Rumsfeld would call 'unknown' 'knowns'. Without realizing that their 'knowledge' of General Haig's plans to usurp power stemmed from the 'unknown' (unaccounted for bias) fact

40 years ago my father was the only server that want to wait on the black tables a year ago that was me why has this not changed? Damn you're good it's a damn you're good

It's a nice day for a black wedding

Killian is Lying to you

A secret British spy unit created to mount cyber attacks on Britain's enemies has waged war on the hacktivists of Anonymous and LulzSec, according to documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and obtained by NBC News. ecret British spy unit created to mount cyber attacks on Britain's enemies has waged war on the hacktivists of Anonymous and LulzSec, according to documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and obtained by NBC News. ecret British spy unit created to mount cyber attacks on Britain's enemies has waged war on the hacktivists of Anonymous and LulzSec, according to documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and obtained by NBC News. The blunt instrument the spy unit used to target hackers, however, also interrupted the web communications of political dissidents who did not engage in any illegal hacking. It may also have shut down websites with no connection to Anonymous. According to the documents, a division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a "denial of service" (DDOS) attack - the same technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government websites - making the British government the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack. The documents, from a PowerPoint presentation prepared for a 2012 NSA conference called SIGDEV, show that the unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, boasted of using the DDOS attack - which it dubbed Rolling Thunder -- and other techniques to scare away 80 percent of the users of Anonymous internet chat rooms. The existence of JTRIG has never been previously disclosed publicly. The documents also show that JTRIG infiltrated chat rooms known as IRCs and identified individual hackers who had taken confidential information from websites. In one case JTRIG helped send a hacktivist to prison for stealing data from PayPal, and in another it helped identify hacktivists who attacked government websites. In connection with this report, NBC is publishing documents that Edward Snowden took from the NSA before fleeing the U.S. The documents are being published with minimal redactions. Intelligence sources familiar with the operation say that the British directed the DDOS attack against IRC chat rooms where they believed criminal hackers were concentrated. Other intelligence sources also noted that in 2011, authorities were alarmed by a rash of attacks on government and corporate websites and were scrambling for means to respond. "While there must of course be limitations," said Michael Leiter, the former head of the U.S. government's National Counterterrorism Center and now an NBC News analyst, "law enforcement and intelligence officials must be able to pursue individuals who are going far beyond speech and into the realm of breaking the law: defacing and stealing private property that happens to be online." "No one should be targeted for speech or thoughts, but there is no reason law enforcement officials should unilaterally declare law breakers safe in the online environment," said Leiter. But critics charge the British government with overkill, noting that many of the individuals targeted were teenagers, and that the agency's assault on communications among hacktivists means the agency infringed the free speech of people never charged with any crime. British Spies Can Snoop on Social Media, Documents RevealNIGHTLY NEWS "Targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs," said Gabriella Coleman, an anthropology professor at McGill University and author of an upcoming book about Anonymous. "Some have rallied around the name to engage in digital civil disobedience, but nothing remotely resembling terrorism. The majority of those embrace the idea primarily for ordinary political expression." Coleman estimated that the number of "Anons" engaged in illegal activity was in the dozens, out of a community of thousands. "Targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs." In addition, according to cyber experts, a DDOS attack against the servers hosting Anonymous chat rooms would also have shut down any other websites hosted by the same servers, and any other servers operated by the same Internet Service Provider (ISP), whether or not they had any connection to Anonymous. It is not known whether any of the servers attacked also hosted other websites, or whether other servers were operated by the same ISPs. In 2011, members of the loose global collective called Anonymous organized an online campaign called "Operation Payback" targeting the pay service PayPal and several credit card companies. Some hacktivists also targeted U.S. and British government websites, including the FBI, CIA and GCHQ sites. The hacktivists were protesting the prosecution of Chelsea Manning, who took thousands of classified documents from U.S. government computers, and punishing companies that refused to process donations to WikiLeaks, the website that published the Manning documents. The division of GCHQ known as JTRIG responded to the surge in hacktivism. In another document taken from the NSA by Snowden and obtained by NBC News, a JTRIG official said the unit's mission included computer network attacks, disruption, "Active Covert Internet Operations," and "Covert Technical Operations." Among the methods listed in the document were jamming phones, computers and email accounts and masquerading as an enemy in a "false flag" operation. The same document said GCHQ was increasing its emphasis on using cyber tools to attack adversaries. In the presentation on hacktivism that was prepared for the 2012 SIGDEV conference, one official working for JTRIG described the techniques the unit used to disrupt the communications of Anonymous and identify individual hacktivists, including some involved in Operation Payback. Called "Pushing the Boundaries and Action Against Hacktivism," the presentation lists Anonymous, Lulzsec and the Syrian Cyber Army among "Hacktivist Groups," says the hacktivists' targets include corporations and governments, and says their techniques include DDOS and data theft. Under "Hacktivism: Online Covert Action," the presentation refers to "Effects Operations." According to other Snowden documents obtained by NBC News, "Effects" campaigns are offensive operations intended to "destroy" and "disrupt" adversaries. "Anyone here have access to a website with at least 10,000+ unique traffic per day?" The presentation gives detailed examples of "humint" (human intelligence) collection from hacktivists known by the on-line names G-Zero, Topiary and p0ke, as well as a fourth whose name NBC News has redacted to protect the hacker's identity. The hacktivists were contacted by GCHQ agents posing as fellow hackers in internet chat rooms. The presentation includes transcripts of instant message conversations between the agents and the hackers in 2011. "Anyone here have access to a website with at least 10,000+ unique traffic per day?" asks one hacktivist in a transcript taken from a conversation that began in an Operation Payback chat room. An agent responds and claims to have access to a porn website with 27,000 users per day. "Love it," answers the hacktivist. The hackers ask for access to sites with traffic so they can identify users of the site, secretly take over their computers with malware and then use those computers to mount a DDOS attack against a government or commercial website. A GCHQ agent then has a second conversation with a hacker known as GZero who claims to "work with" the first hacktivist. GZero sends the agent a series of lines of code that are meant to harvest visitors to the agent's site and make their computers part of a "botnet" operation that will attack other computers. The "outcome," says the presentation, was "charges, arrest, conviction." GZero is revealed to be a British hacker in his early 20s named Edward Pearson, who was prosecuted and sentenced to 26 months in prison for stealing 8 million identities and information from 200,000 PayPal accounts between Jan. 1, 2010 and Aug. 30, 2011. He and his girlfriend were convicted of using stolen credit card identities to purchase take-out food and hotel stays. In a transcript taken from a second conversation in an Operation Payback chat room, a hacktivist using the name "p0ke" tells another named "Topiary" that he has a list of emails, phone numbers and names of "700 FBI tards." An agent then begins a conversation with p0ke, asking him about what sites he's accessed. The hacktivist responds that he was able to defeat the security on a U.S. government website, and pulled up credit card information that's attached to congressional and military email addresses. Image: Screen shot of Power Point NBC NEWS Screen shot of Power Point The agent then asks whether p0ke has looked at a BBC News web article called "Who loves the hacktivists?" and sends him a link to the story. "Cool huh?" asks the agent, and pOke responds, "ya." When p0ke clicked on the link, however, JTRIG was able to pull up the IP address of the VPN (virtual private network) the hacktivist was using. The VPN was supposed to protect his identity, but GCHQ either hacked into the network, asked the VPN for the hacker's personal information, or asked law enforcement in the host nation to request the information. A representative of the VPN told NBC News the company had not provided GCHQ with the hacker's information, but indicated that in past instances it has cooperated with local law enforcement. In whatever manner the information was retrieved, GCHQ was able to establish p0ke's real name and address, as shown in the presentation slides. (NBC News has redacted the information). P0ke was never arrested for accessing the government databases, but Topiary, actually an 18-year-old member of Anonymous and LulzSec spokesman from Scotland named Jake Davis, was arrested in July 2011. Davis was arrested soon after LulzSec mounted hack attacks against Congress, the CIA and British law enforcement. Two weeks before his arrest, the Guardian published an interview with Davis in which he described himself as "an internet denizen with a passion for change." Davis later pled guilty to two DDOS attacks and was sentenced to 24 months in a youth detention center, but was released in June 2013 after five weeks because he had worn an electronic ankle tag and been confined to his home without computer access for 21 months after his arrest. Davis declined comment to NBC News. In the concluding portion of the JTRIG presentation, the presenters sum up the unit's "Effects on Hacktivism" as part of "Op[eration] Wealth" in the summer of 2011 and apparently emphasize the unit's success against Anonymous, including the DDOS attack. The listed effects include identifying top targets for law enforcement and "Denial of Service on Key Communications outlets." A slide headlined "DDOS" refers to "initial trial info" from the operation known as "Rolling Thunder." It then quotes from a transcript of a chat room conversation between hacktivists. "Was there any problem with the IRC [chat room] network?" asks one. "I wasn't able to connect the past 30 hours." "Yeah," responds another. "We're being hit by a syn flood. I didn't know whether to quit last night, because of the DDOS." The next slide is titled "Information Operations," and says JTRIG uses Facebook, Twitter, email, instant messenger, and Skype to dissuade hacktivists with the message, "DDOS and hacking is illegal, please cease and desist." The following slide lists the outcome of the operation as "80% of those messaged where (sic) not in the IRC channels 1 month later." Gabriella Coleman, the author and expert on Anonymous, said she believed the U.K. government had punished a large number of people for the actions of a few. "It is hard to put a number on Anonymous," she said, "but at the time of those events, there were thousands of supporters and probably a dozen or two individuals who were breaking the law." Said Coleman, "Punishing thousands of people, who are engaging in their democratic right to protest, because a couple people committed vandalism is … an appalling example of overreacting in order to squash dissent." Jason Healey, a former top White House cyber security official under George W. Bush, called the British government's DDOS attack on Anonymous "silly," and said it was a tactic that should only be used against another nation-state. Jason Healey, a former top White House cyber security official under George W. Bush, called the British government's DDOS attack on Anonymous "silly." He also questioned the time and energy spent chasing teenage hackers. "This is a slippery slope," said Healey. "It's not what you should be doing. It justifies [Anonymous]. Giving them this much attention justifies them and is demeaning to our side." In a statement, a GCHQ spokesperson emphasized that the agency operated within the law. "All of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework," said the statement, "which ensure[s] that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All of our operational processes rigorously support this position." Told by NBC News that his on-line alias appeared in the JTRIG presentation, the hacker known as p0ke, a college student in Scandinavia, said he was confused about why he hadn't been confronted by authorities. (NBC News is withholding his name, age and country of residence.) But p0ke said he had stopped hacking because he'd grown bored with it, and was too busy with his studies. He was never a "hacktivist" anyway, he said. "Politics aren't mah thang," he said in an online interview. "Seriously tho, I had no motive for doing it." He said that hacking had only satisfied an urge to show off. "Fancy the details for a while," he wrote, "then publish em to enlarge my e-penis." A British hacktivist known as T-Flow, who was prosecuted for hacking alongside Topiary, told NBC News he had long suspected that the U.K.'s intelligence agencies had used hacker techniques to catch him, since no evidence of how his identity was discovered ever appeared in court documents. T-Flow, whose real name is Mustafa Al-Bassam, pleaded guilty but did not serve time in an adult facility because he was 16 when he was arrested. "When I was going through the legal process," explained Al-Bassam, "I genuinely felt bad for all those attacks on government organizations I was involved in. But now that I know they partake in the exact same activities, I have no idea what's right and wrong anymore." Journalist Glenn Greenwald was formerly a columnist at Salon and the Guardian. In late 2012 he was contacted by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who later provided him with thousands of sensitive documents, and he was the first to report on Snowden's documents in June 2013 while on the staff of the Guardian. Greenwald has since reported on the documents with multiple media outlets around the world, and has won several journalism awards for his NSA reporting both in the U.S. and abroad. He is now helping launch, and will write for, a new, non-profit media outlet known as First Look Media that will "encourage, support and empower … independent, adversarial journalists." First published February 4th 2014, 6:26 pm byline photo MARK SCHONE Mark Schone is a digital editor with the investigative unit at NBC News. He is also an adjunct professor... Expand Bio The blunt instrument the spy unit used to target hackers, however, also interrupted the web communications of political dissidents who did not engage in any illegal hacking. It may also have shut down websites with no connection to Anonymous. According to the documents, a division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a "denial of service" (DDOS) attack - the same technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government websites - making the British government the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack. The documents, from a PowerPoint presentation prepared for a 2012 NSA conference called SIGDEV, show that the unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, boasted of using the DDOS attack - which it dubbed Rolling Thunder -- and other techniques to scare away 80 percent of the users of Anonymous internet chat rooms. The existence of JTRIG has never been previously disclosed publicly. The documents also show that JTRIG infiltrated chat rooms known as IRCs and identified individual hackers who had taken confidential information from websites. In one case JTRIG helped send a hacktivist to prison for stealing data from PayPal, and in another it helped identify hacktivists who attacked government websites. In connection with this report, NBC is publishing documents that Edward Snowden took from the NSA before fleeing the U.S. The documents are being published with minimal redactions. Intelligence sources familiar with the operation say that the British directed the DDOS attack against IRC chat rooms where they believed criminal hackers were concentrated. Other intelligence sources also noted that in 2011, authorities were alarmed by a rash of attacks on government and corporate websites and were scrambling for means to respond. "While there must of course be limitations," said Michael Leiter, the former head of the U.S. government's National Counterterrorism Center and now an NBC News analyst, "law enforcement and intelligence officials must be able to pursue individuals who are going far beyond speech and into the realm of breaking the law: defacing and stealing private property that happens to be online." "No one should be targeted for speech or thoughts, but there is no reason law enforcement officials should unilaterally declare law breakers safe in the online environment," said Leiter. But critics charge the British government with overkill, noting that many of the individuals targeted were teenagers, and that the agency's assault on communications among hacktivists means the agency infringed the free speech of people never charged with any crime. British Spies Can Snoop on Social Media, Documents RevealNIGHTLY NEWS "Targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs," said Gabriella Coleman, an anthropology professor at McGill University and author of an upcoming book about Anonymous. "Some have rallied around the name to engage in digital civil disobedience, but nothing remotely resembling terrorism. The majority of those embrace the idea primarily for ordinary political expression." Coleman estimated that the number of "Anons" engaged in illegal activity was in the dozens, out of a community of thousands. "Targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs." In addition, according to cyber experts, a DDOS attack against the servers hosting Anonymous chat rooms would also have shut down any other websites hosted by the same servers, and any other servers operated by the same Internet Service Provider (ISP), whether or not they had any connection to Anonymous. It is not known whether any of the servers attacked also hosted other websites, or whether other servers were operated by the same ISPs. In 2011, members of the loose global collective called Anonymous organized an online campaign called "Operation Payback" targeting the pay service PayPal and several credit card companies. Some hacktivists also targeted U.S. and British government websites, including the FBI, CIA and GCHQ sites. The hacktivists were protesting the prosecution of Chelsea Manning, who took thousands of classified documents from U.S. government computers, and punishing companies that refused to process donations to WikiLeaks, the website that published the Manning documents. The division of GCHQ known as JTRIG responded to the surge in hacktivism. In another document taken from the NSA by Snowden and obtained by NBC News, a JTRIG official said the unit's mission included computer network attacks, disruption, "Active Covert Internet Operations," and "Covert Technical Operations." Among the methods listed in the document were jamming phones, computers and email accounts and masquerading as an enemy in a "false flag" operation. The same document said GCHQ was increasing its emphasis on using cyber tools to attack adversaries. In the presentation on hacktivism that was prepared for the 2012 SIGDEV conference, one official working for JTRIG described the techniques the unit used to disrupt the communications of Anonymous and identify individual hacktivists, including some involved in Operation Payback. Called "Pushing the Boundaries and Action Against Hacktivism," the presentation lists Anonymous, Lulzsec and the Syrian Cyber Army among "Hacktivist Groups," says the hacktivists' targets include corporations and governments, and says their techniques include DDOS and data theft. Under "Hacktivism: Online Covert Action," the presentation refers to "Effects Operations." According to other Snowden documents obtained by NBC News, "Effects" campaigns are offensive operations intended to "destroy" and "disrupt" adversaries. "Anyone here have access to a website with at least 10,000+ unique traffic per day?" The presentation gives detailed examples of "humint" (human intelligence) collection from hacktivists known by the on-line names G-Zero, Topiary and p0ke, as well as a fourth whose name NBC News has redacted to protect the hacker's identity. The hacktivists were contacted by GCHQ agents posing as fellow hackers in internet chat rooms. The presentation includes transcripts of instant message conversations between the agents and the hackers in 2011. "Anyone here have access to a website with at least 10,000+ unique traffic per day?" asks one hacktivist in a transcript taken from a conversation that began in an Operation Payback chat room. An agent responds and claims to have access to a porn website with 27,000 users per day. "Love it," answers the hacktivist. The hackers ask for access to sites with traffic so they can identify users of the site, secretly take over their computers with malware and then use those computers to mount a DDOS attack against a government or commercial website. A GCHQ agent then has a second conversation with a hacker known as GZero who claims to "work with" the first hacktivist. GZero sends the agent a series of lines of code that are meant to harvest visitors to the agent's site and make their computers part of a "botnet" operation that will attack other computers. The "outcome," says the presentation, was "charges, arrest, conviction." GZero is revealed to be a British hacker in his early 20s named Edward Pearson, who was prosecuted and sentenced to 26 months in prison for stealing 8 million identities and information from 200,000 PayPal accounts between Jan. 1, 2010 and Aug. 30, 2011. He and his girlfriend were convicted of using stolen credit card identities to purchase take-out food and hotel stays. In a transcript taken from a second conversation in an Operation Payback chat room, a hacktivist using the name "p0ke" tells another named "Topiary" that he has a list of emails, phone numbers and names of "700 FBI tards." An agent then begins a conversation with p0ke, asking him about what sites he's accessed. The hacktivist responds that he was able to defeat the security on a U.S. government website, and pulled up credit card information that's attached to congressional and military email addresses. Image: Screen shot of Power Point NBC NEWS Screen shot of Power Point The agent then asks whether p0ke has looked at a BBC News web article called "Who loves the hacktivists?" and sends him a link to the story. "Cool huh?" asks the agent, and pOke responds, "ya." When p0ke clicked on the link, however, JTRIG was able to pull up the IP address of the VPN (virtual private network) the hacktivist was using. The VPN was supposed to protect his identity, but GCHQ either hacked into the network, asked the VPN for the hacker's personal information, or asked law enforcement in the host nation to request the information. A representative of the VPN told NBC News the company had not provided GCHQ with the hacker's information, but indicated that in past instances it has cooperated with local law enforcement. In whatever manner the information was retrieved, GCHQ was able to establish p0ke's real name and address, as shown in the presentation slides. (NBC News has redacted the information). P0ke was never arrested for accessing the government databases, but Topiary, actually an 18-year-old member of Anonymous and LulzSec spokesman from Scotland named Jake Davis, was arrested in July 2011. Davis was arrested soon after LulzSec mounted hack attacks against Congress, the CIA and British law enforcement. Two weeks before his arrest, the Guardian published an interview with Davis in which he described himself as "an internet denizen with a passion for change." Davis later pled guilty to two DDOS attacks and was sentenced to 24 months in a youth detention center, but was released in June 2013 after five weeks because he had worn an electronic ankle tag and been confined to his home without computer access for 21 months after his arrest. Davis declined comment to NBC News. In the concluding portion of the JTRIG presentation, the presenters sum up the unit's "Effects on Hacktivism" as part of "Op[eration] Wealth" in the summer of 2011 and apparently emphasize the unit's success against Anonymous, including the DDOS attack. The listed effects include identifying top targets for law enforcement and "Denial of Service on Key Communications outlets." A slide headlined "DDOS" refers to "initial trial info" from the operation known as "Rolling Thunder." It then quotes from a transcript of a chat room conversation between hacktivists. "Was there any problem with the IRC [chat room] network?" asks one. "I wasn't able to connect the past 30 hours." "Yeah," responds another. "We're being hit by a syn flood. I didn't know whether to quit last night, because of the DDOS." The next slide is titled "Information Operations," and says JTRIG uses Facebook, Twitter, email, instant messenger, and Skype to dissuade hacktivists with the message, "DDOS and hacking is illegal, please cease and desist." The following slide lists the outcome of the operation as "80% of those messaged where (sic) not in the IRC channels 1 month later." Gabriella Coleman, the author and expert on Anonymous, said she believed the U.K. government had punished a large number of people for the actions of a few. "It is hard to put a number on Anonymous," she said, "but at the time of those events, there were thousands of supporters and probably a dozen or two individuals who were breaking the law." Said Coleman, "Punishing thousands of people, who are engaging in their democratic right to protest, because a couple people committed vandalism is … an appalling example of overreacting in order to squash dissent." Jason Healey, a former top White House cyber security official under George W. Bush, called the British government's DDOS attack on Anonymous "silly," and said it was a tactic that should only be used against another nation-state. Jason Healey, a former top White House cyber security official under George W. Bush, called the British government's DDOS attack on Anonymous "silly." He also questioned the time and energy spent chasing teenage hackers. "This is a slippery slope," said Healey. "It's not what you should be doing. It justifies [Anonymous]. Giving them this much attention justifies them and is demeaning to our side." In a statement, a GCHQ spokesperson emphasized that the agency operated within the law. "All of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework," said the statement, "which ensure[s] that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All of our operational processes rigorously support this position." Told by NBC News that his on-line alias appeared in the JTRIG presentation, the hacker known as p0ke, a college student in Scandinavia, said he was confused about why he hadn't been confronted by authorities. (NBC News is withholding his name, age and country of residence.) But p0ke said he had stopped hacking because he'd grown bored with it, and was too busy with his studies. He was never a "hacktivist" anyway, he said. "Politics aren't mah thang," he said in an online interview. "Seriously tho, I had no motive for doing it." He said that hacking had only satisfied an urge to show off. "Fancy the details for a while," he wrote, "then publish em to enlarge my e-penis." A British hacktivist known as T-Flow, who was prosecuted for hacking alongside Topiary, told NBC News he had long suspected that the U.K.'s intelligence agencies had used hacker techniques to catch him, since no evidence of how his identity was discovered ever appeared in court documents. T-Flow, whose real name is Mustafa Al-Bassam, pleaded guilty but did not serve time in an adult facility because he was 16 when he was arrested. "When I was going through the legal process," explained Al-Bassam, "I genuinely felt bad for all those attacks on government organizations I was involved in. But now that I know they partake in the exact same activities, I have no idea what's right and wrong anymore." Journalist Glenn Greenwald was formerly a columnist at Salon and the Guardian. In late 2012 he was contacted by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who later provided him with thousands of sensitive documents, and he was the first to report on Snowden's documents in June 2013 while on the staff of the Guardian. Greenwald has since reported on the documents with multiple media outlets around the world, and has won several journalism awards for his NSA reporting both in the U.S. and abroad. He is now helping launch, and will write for, a new, non-profit media outlet known as First Look Media that will "encourage, support and empower … independent, adversarial journalists." First published February 4th 2014, 6:26 pm byline photo MARK SCHONE Mark Schone is a digital editor with the investigative unit at NBC News. He is also an adjunct professor... Expand Bio The blunt instrument the spy unit used to target hackers, however, also interrupted the web communications of political dissidents who did not engage in any illegal hacking. It may also have shut down websites with no connection to Anonymous. According to the documents, a division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a "denial of service" (DDOS) attack - the same technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government websites - making the British government the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack. The documents, from a PowerPoint presentation prepared for a 2012 NSA conference called SIGDEV, show that the unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, boasted of using the DDOS attack - which it dubbed Rolling Thunder -- and other techniques to scare away 80 percent of the users of Anonymous internet chat rooms. The existence of JTRIG has never been previously disclosed publicly. The documents also show that JTRIG infiltrated chat rooms known as IRCs and identified individual hackers who had taken confidential information from websites. In one case JTRIG helped send a hacktivist to prison for stealing data from PayPal, and in another it helped identify hacktivists who attacked government websites. In connection with this report, NBC is publishing documents that Edward Snowden took from the NSA before fleeing the U.S. The documents are being published with minimal redactions. Intelligence sources familiar with the operation say that the British directed the DDOS attack against IRC chat rooms where they believed criminal hackers were concentrated. Other intelligence sources also noted that in 2011, authorities were alarmed by a rash of attacks on government and corporate websites and were scrambling for means to respond. "While there must of course be limitations," said Michael Leiter, the former head of the U.S. government's National Counterterrorism Center and now an NBC News analyst, "law enforcement and intelligence officials must be able to pursue individuals who are going far beyond speech and into the realm of breaking the law: defacing and stealing private property that happens to be online." "No one should be targeted for speech or thoughts, but there is no reason law enforcement officials should unilaterally declare law breakers safe in the online environment," said Leiter. But critics charge the British government with overkill, noting that many of the individuals targeted were teenagers, and that the agency's assault on communications among hacktivists means the agency infringed the free speech of people never charged with any crime. British Spies Can Snoop on Social Media, Documents RevealNIGHTLY NEWS "Targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs," said Gabriella Coleman, an anthropology professor at McGill University and author of an upcoming book about Anonymous. "Some have rallied around the name to engage in digital civil disobedience, but nothing remotely resembling terrorism. The majority of those embrace the idea primarily for ordinary political expression." Coleman estimated that the number of "Anons" engaged in illegal activity was in the dozens, out of a community of thousands. "Targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs." In addition, according to cyber experts, a DDOS attack against the servers hosting Anonymous chat rooms would also have shut down any other websites hosted by the same servers, and any other servers operated by the same Internet Service Provider (ISP), whether or not they had any connection to Anonymous. It is not known whether any of the servers attacked also hosted other websites, or whether other servers were operated by the same ISPs. In 2011, members of the loose global collective called Anonymous organized an online campaign called "Operation Payback" targeting the pay service PayPal and several credit card companies. Some hacktivists also targeted U.S. and British government websites, including the FBI, CIA and GCHQ sites. The hacktivists were protesting the prosecution of Chelsea Manning, who took thousands of classified documents from U.S. government computers, and punishing companies that refused to process donations to WikiLeaks, the website that published the Manning documents. The division of GCHQ known as JTRIG responded to the surge in hacktivism. In another document taken from the NSA by Snowden and obtained by NBC News, a JTRIG official said the unit's mission included computer network attacks, disruption, "Active Covert Internet Operations," and "Covert Technical Operations." Among the methods listed in the document were jamming phones, computers and email accounts and masquerading as an enemy in a "false flag" operation. The same document said GCHQ was increasing its emphasis on using cyber tools to attack adversaries. In the presentation on hacktivism that was prepared for the 2012 SIGDEV conference, one official working for JTRIG described the techniques the unit used to disrupt the communications of Anonymous and identify individual hacktivists, including some involved in Operation Payback. Called "Pushing the Boundaries and Action Against Hacktivism," the presentation lists Anonymous, Lulzsec and the Syrian Cyber Army among "Hacktivist Groups," says the hacktivists' targets include corporations and governments, and says their techniques include DDOS and data theft. Under "Hacktivism: Online Covert Action," the presentation refers to "Effects Operations." According to other Snowden documents obtained by NBC News, "Effects" campaigns are offensive operations intended to "destroy" and "disrupt" adversaries. "Anyone here have access to a website with at least 10,000+ unique traffic per day?" The presentation gives detailed examples of "humint" (human intelligence) collection from hacktivists known by the on-line names G-Zero, Topiary and p0ke, as well as a fourth whose name NBC News has redacted to protect the hacker's identity. The hacktivists were contacted by GCHQ agents posing as fellow hackers in internet chat rooms. The presentation includes transcripts of instant message conversations between the agents and the hackers in 2011. "Anyone here have access to a website with at least 10,000+ unique traffic per day?" asks one hacktivist in a transcript taken from a conversation that began in an Operation Payback chat room. An agent responds and claims to have access to a porn website with 27,000 users per day. "Love it," answers the hacktivist. The hackers ask for access to sites with traffic so they can identify users of the site, secretly take over their computers with malware and then use those computers to mount a DDOS attack against a government or commercial website. A GCHQ agent then has a second conversation with a hacker known as GZero who claims to "work with" the first hacktivist. GZero sends the agent a series of lines of code that are meant to harvest visitors to the agent's site and make their computers part of a "botnet" operation that will attack other computers. The "outcome," says the presentation, was "charges, arrest, conviction." GZero is revealed to be a British hacker in his early 20s named Edward Pearson, who was prosecuted and sentenced to 26 months in prison for stealing 8 million identities and information from 200,000 PayPal accounts between Jan. 1, 2010 and Aug. 30, 2011. He and his girlfriend were convicted of using stolen credit card identities to purchase take-out food and hotel stays. In a transcript taken from a second conversation in an Operation Payback chat room, a hacktivist using the name "p0ke" tells another named "Topiary" that he has a list of emails, phone numbers and names of "700 FBI tards." An agent then begins a conversation with p0ke, asking him about what sites he's accessed. The hacktivist responds that he was able to defeat the security on a U.S. government website, and pulled up credit card information that's attached to congressional and military email addresses. Image: Screen shot of Power Point NBC NEWS Screen shot of Power Point The agent then asks whether p0ke has looked at a BBC News web article called "Who loves the hacktivists?" and sends him a link to the story. "Cool huh?" asks the agent, and pOke responds, "ya." When p0ke clicked on the link, however, JTRIG was able to pull up the IP address of the VPN (virtual private network) the hacktivist was using. The VPN was supposed to protect his identity, but GCHQ either hacked into the network, asked the VPN for the hacker's personal information, or asked law enforcement in the host nation to request the information. A representative of the VPN told NBC News the company had not provided GCHQ with the hacker's information, but indicated that in past instances it has cooperated with local law enforcement. In whatever manner the information was retrieved, GCHQ was able to establish p0ke's real name and address, as shown in the presentation slides. (NBC News has redacted the information). P0ke was never arrested for accessing the government databases, but Topiary, actually an 18-year-old member of Anonymous and LulzSec spokesman from Scotland named Jake Davis, was arrested in July 2011. Davis was arrested soon after LulzSec mounted hack attacks against Congress, the CIA and British law enforcement. Two weeks before his arrest, the Guardian published an interview with Davis in which he described himself as "an internet denizen with a passion for change." Davis later pled guilty to two DDOS attacks and was sentenced to 24 months in a youth detention center, but was released in June 2013 after five weeks because he had worn an electronic ankle tag and been confined to his home without computer access for 21 months after his arrest. Davis declined comment to NBC News. In the concluding portion of the JTRIG presentation, the presenters sum up the unit's "Effects on Hacktivism" as part of "Op[eration] Wealth" in the summer of 2011 and apparently emphasize the unit's success against Anonymous, including the DDOS attack. The listed effects include identifying top targets for law enforcement and "Denial of Service on Key Communications outlets." A slide headlined "DDOS" refers to "initial trial info" from the operation known as "Rolling Thunder." It then quotes from a transcript of a chat room conversation between hacktivists. "Was there any problem with the IRC [chat room] network?" asks one. "I wasn't able to connect the past 30 hours." "Yeah," responds another. "We're being hit by a syn flood. I didn't know whether to quit last night, because of the DDOS." The next slide is titled "Information Operations," and says JTRIG uses Facebook, Twitter, email, instant messenger, and Skype to dissuade hacktivists with the message, "DDOS and hacking is illegal, please cease and desist." The following slide lists the outcome of the operation as "80% of those messaged where (sic) not in the IRC channels 1 month later." Gabriella Coleman, the author and expert on Anonymous, said she believed the U.K. government had punished a large number of people for the actions of a few. "It is hard to put a number on Anonymous," she said, "but at the time of those events, there were thousands of supporters and probably a dozen or two individuals who were breaking the law." Said Coleman, "Punishing thousands of people, who are engaging in their democratic right to protest, because a couple people committed vandalism is … an appalling example of overreacting in order to squash dissent." Jason Healey, a former top White House cyber security official under George W. Bush, called the British government's DDOS attack on Anonymous "silly," and said it was a tactic that should only be used against another nation-state. Jason Healey, a former top White House cyber security official under George W. Bush, called the British government's DDOS attack on Anonymous "silly." He also questioned the time and energy spent chasing teenage hackers. "This is a slippery slope," said Healey. "It's not what you should be doing. It justifies [Anonymous]. Giving them this much attention justifies them and is demeaning to our side." In a statement, a GCHQ spokesperson emphasized that the agency operated within the law. "All of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework," said the statement, "which ensure[s] that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All of our operational processes rigorously support this position." Told by NBC News that his on-line alias appeared in the JTRIG presentation, the hacker known as p0ke, a college student in Scandinavia, said he was confused about why he hadn't been confronted by authorities. (NBC News is withholding his name, age and country of residence.) But p0ke said he had stopped hacking because he'd grown bored with it, and was too busy with his studies. He was never a "hacktivist" anyway, he said. "Politics aren't mah thang," he said in an online interview. "Seriously tho, I had no motive for doing it." He said that hacking had only satisfied an urge to show off. "Fancy the details for a while," he wrote, "then publish em to enlarge my e-penis." A British hacktivist known as T-Flow, who was prosecuted for hacking alongside Topiary, told NBC News he had long suspected that the U.K.'s intelligence agencies had used hacker techniques to catch him, since no evidence of how his identity was discovered ever appeared in court documents. T-Flow, whose real name is Mustafa Al-Bassam, pleaded guilty but did not serve time in an adult facility because he was 16 when he was arrested. "When I was going through the legal process," explained Al-Bassam, "I genuinely felt bad for all those attacks on government organizations I was involved in. But now that I know they partake in the exact same activities, I have no idea what's right and wrong anymore." Journalist Glenn Greenwald was formerly a columnist at Salon and the Guardian. In late 2012 he was contacted by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who later provided him with thousands of sensitive documents, and he was the first to report on Snowden's documents in June 2013 while on the staff of the Guardian. Greenwald has since reported on the documents with multiple media outlets around the world, and has won several journalism awards for his NSA reporting both in the U.S. and abroad. He is now helping launch, and will write for, a new, non-profit media outlet known as First Look Media that will "encourage, support and empower … independent, adversarial journalists." First published February 4th 2014, 6:26 pm byline photo MARK SCHONE Mark Schone is a digital editor with the investigative unit at NBC News. He is also an adjunct professor... Expand Bio

Vladimir Putin, 50 Cent and Barak Obama

my drug Sasha once told me of an incident in which a discussion of political theory in a graduate studies sminar turned violent. One student shoved another student as a means of expressing the raw brutality of physical power in the political equation. Since we are in Ohio and not bitches the discussion continued but i'm sure if I would have played football at Penn and done the very same thing to Paris Gellar her rabbi would have had me arrested, charged with a hate crim and attempted sexual assault and expelled so i'm glad no one paid attention to my Penn applicaton and my philosophical sparring partners are also able to slap me around a litlle bit and take a shot to he face with out crying like a hoe.

Fiddy understands this, as does Putin, as does bama but Obama got himself a high dollar way of expresing his respect for Machiavelli and Von Klausewitz's basic rules of forwign and domestic policy.

One: Be consistent, your subjects should see that the level of respect you have form children in the Kashmir when they run screaming from their mothers embraces as the drones rain down fire and death is the same basic respect you have for any of your own citizens that dares to cross you. Fuck you fascist, come and get me. Some poor slob that deserted from the armu thirty yers ago and had been living in Sweden was just haueled back to the U.S. to stand trial. And let that be a lesson to the rest of you sheeple that are thinking of raising a peep against your chosen leader. And just incase some libertarian douche is reading this thinking the next sentence is oing to be how wonderful life would be under Ayn Rand Paul you can exhale.

This motherfucjer goes on national news to say that vaccinations shoud be a matter of choice. Uh, yeah I agree IF YOU'RE AMISH and not even like my regular Amish homeys that have the furniture store up the street but the super fucked over Amish from that movie where they keep everybody thinking it's still the 18th century and an evil monster will get them if they transgress any sacred boundaries but Morpheus can wake them up and oh wait that's not a movie it's our life.

The Ideology of Right

"I was feeling a bit shagged, and fagged, and fashed it having been an evening of no small energy expenditure". "this space will all be needed for political prisoners" "neurosurgeons don't have to study logic" Obama is a Muslim" Critique of pure reason, ideology, phenomenology of right. What is a man, Mr. Lebowski? Qui bono? Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich.

The speaker for the dead writes with two conflicting voices. The last starfighter scenario, FPV games, Zork, there is a tree, look in the tree, nay climb the tree, there is a nest, look in the nest, there is an egg...it took me forever to find that egg. Me too if by forever you mean one minute but if your balls are in a vice one minute can be forever and if you are waiting to fill some curvacious ass then forever indeed Judy Blume is a mighty long time for Wifey to wait for ralph to ...Obi Wan Obama you're our only hope. Mark Fletcher is a community activist like action Jackson, Jackson John and the Jackson Five. Alexei and Shura, matfak and brain surgery. Are you aware that Sam Harris's book promotes torture. Please stand when answering questions so that it's easier for the police to identify you if an arrest is necessary. Praque homey plays the cello because after the long climb up the stairs spreading knees is easier. Jack Nicholson pointed out that Susan Sarandon's bowing sucked and then he bang, bang he shot me down, Rammstein he hit the ground, Russian mobsters no match for American horsepower in Prague but who's fooling who? Red Notice boy can't travel in Europe or really anywhere on planet earth other than the shitty island he was born on because he crossed swords with the wrong bull. Spike Lee, Edward Norton's monologue, cousin Ritchie's Earlham McGowan math major, need to FACebook Rose, Chad and other McGowan so the Marilyn Manson can advocate for my philosophical, nay, ideological cause. If Elliot and Eric Michael Dyson are going to carry Laila's water into the films of Mikhailkov then we won't reach Akira Kurosowa without Tom Cruise as the Last Samurai and The Last Nigga on Earth starring Tom Hanks. Your welcome. War is the only ideology, Von Clausewitz was not so blunt but Abraham DeLacey was not quite Shakespeare. Putin has internalized both Machiavelli and Katsumoto, be Kevin Spacey in "house of cards" while appearing as Kevin Costner in "dances with wolves". Ideologically "Cable Guy"'s Freudian analysis of the main character anticipates "V for Vendetta"'s Adam Sutler vs. terrorist V because mama didn't love Leonard Smalls in "Raising Arizona" but it didn't prevent H.I. McDon't Know from violatng a fundamental moral presise society since Malinowski banged trobriander children namely "over teh line, I'm sorry Donny you were over the line, this isn't 'Nam Donny there are rules" Let's not throw the baby out with the cliches of defending bowling rules with lethal force in a state which villifies individual rights of self-defense but retro active abortions anr ideologically as sound as gay marriage in Sharia households Orthodoxy of hate is the only Orthodoxy we accept as Mickey Knox and Cable Guy both learned from their celluloid babysitters the values we internalize appproaching Ender's Starfighter 300 style "Soldier" with Kurt Russel lets Gary Bucey make the argument more clearlly because his daddy was in maintenance and the KPSS, the GOP, the Central Committee, Chavez and Castro, Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh. From Dien Bin Fuh to fuck you Occupy the minds and hearts of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden what can Jesus say about ISIS when ISIL appropriates the ideology of Orthodoxy and belief in the divine revelatory power of the Book of the Law. Do what thy will shall be the whole of the law, and what is thy will, to eat and to drink, love is the law, love under will fall to the orgy amen to the orgy all hail the cock. I believe in the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's beck Kevin Costner's ideological Water World with Wolves Last Samurai Isaac Hayes in Southpark and Aretha on the streets of Boston to American idol. Rush Limbaugh's newsletter for governors Kasich and Deukmajian breeding ideological warfare without apparent conflict between capital punishment and opposition to the D&C or teh DBC for that matter what shall we oppose for what shall we be willing to die? American Idol and the right to carry an AK-47 on our bike and pick up McDonald's drive through. W Who do you want to see you in the limo at the drive thru window in the five star hotel leaving on a jet plane to Terry Gilliam a French classic teh tenets of Buddhism thjat life is suffering and to embrace tha suffering by mouth fucking the dog that offers it is to see that life is not only elswhere but St. Elsewher and St. Vitus dance is to Zizek's child pornography analogy as St. Paul's control of Shakesperean education is to Laurelai Gilmore adhering to teh notion thaat if she cn raise a single daughter in abstentia of her parents wealth and senf that daughter to yale the mecca of the islam of the west that she will redeem the libidinal mistake of banging her high shcool boyfrien in the bed her fateer had reserve fo incestuous sheets of hamelet fo spell check will not turn me in when the secret police come lookng for th assange hamlet that is obama and putin froced to read thei Machiavelli and do what is politically expedient but morally repugnant. Guantanomo is open the VP of Russia was gunned down in the streets tRussians in Afghanistan indeed been and goe as the Americans British India Alexander rth egreat and Persi befor e him have traveeled to Dan Akroyd's grave yard of empires as spiritualis m ains doen id africa and the holy spirit takes form in the vineyard David Platte appropriates ordinary radical and how can eve and anecdote about neils bohr and hi beloved horseshoe even make sense when zizek teels an ignornat audience of Dennis Miller fans who wouldn't get "the racial draft" skit on the chappelle show if the wu tan g lan was there to personlaaly explain the references to Col Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. Martin sheen cashed in hes fame chips for ideology chips and talks on the BBC from his Sydney opera house-australia-like home off Rahn road about the moral repugnance of the Bush regime while drones rain fire on the people he purports to care about is this not ideology at its finest . Thje project for a new americna century was founded on th ebelire that th missing ideologicl police force would be necessary to effct a coup in the american way of life nat of thinking for their project ill conceived in the years of the wilderness nietzscg elike came down from the zarathustra mountain saying not , as anders brevik, that god was dead nay, that god was alive and weell and speaking to our representative in the lobby who will be happy to escort you to your cell by tfirst we mus ask you to remove all jewelry that is not specifically of a religous nature and by the way it is the prison guards who wil indiividuall make determinations as to what is jewelry with rleigious significanc and a shiny maltese cross wih a red stone does not make the cut. nor once inside will our theology department approve is you attempt to attend religuous servvices on Saturday, Sunday and Friday we must as k you to swaer allegance to a flag so we wil know which lway to direct your fury when brad pitt stabs the nazi officer like he wsas back at the jazz festival in 1997. Indeed.

Cold War Cube

Intelligence vs. Courage

 Intelligence isn't rare, courage is rare.  The Nazis had lots of smart people.  Fear is contagious but so is courage.  Courageous thinking allows you to think past your fears,  Platos dialogues distinguish between rashness, and fearlessness.

West suggests using memory 

Military occupation of cyberspace

Espionage Act has been invoked 9 times since 1917, 6 during this administration.  

The mass surveillance state is harvesting information, Wikleaks is pulling information down from the powerful, the lateral transfer of information from activists to each other is the greatest education in history.  Husbands and wives communicate via smart phone, e-mail, etc.  the U.S. MILITARY has inserted itself into this intimacy.

Corera in Ecuador was reelected after decided to give Assange asylum.

Assange and West in London

Google announced that 1 million android smart phones a day are being registered.  How do they know that? Eric Schmidt the CEO and Jared Cohen have made a stategic decision to embed themselves with the U.S. govt.  they're new book features the endorsements of Madeline Albright but not Cornel West.

It's just cheaper to do surveillance 

On everyone,  "Orwell on steroids".

All phone calls in the US are being recorded by the NSA.  So what? Algorithms have been generated which automatically generate groups, who calls who.  Martin Luther King Jr. Was cited in a case against the NSA  because he was a target of the FBI.

Hannah Arendt's the roots of totslitari

Cybil Wilkes

The Invisible Man banned in North Carolina school district 2013.  Cornel West at Morehouse, 2015.  Dr. West with Studs Turkel 1995, Leonardo Davinci Sketchup of leeches.  Leeches dropped into a cauliflower ear, like " Star Trek"

Hunter S. Thompson writing on 9/11/01

ils:

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper."

...

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.

2 Cellos Hysteria

This track is they cover of a toxicity track, -system of a down. The system of a down album was released in 1994, the year that the golden age of hip-hop ended.  The reparations that we can make to the African-American community are as follows: all descendants of African-American slaves are not subject to intellectual property laws. That means you can sample freely all audio and video content produced in the United States. Maybe that'll make a dent.

I was thinking about the two cellos playing Michael Jackson smooth criminal, hysteria is the title of the track they gave to the system of a down cover from the album toxicity. They have found a way to circumvent the very intellectual property laws that landed two live crew in so much hot water back when they were on Tipper Gore's list of most wanted banned artists in 1986.

Hannity is a Marxist

Marxism has been falsely equated with Communism.  In an Orwellian Newspeak manner Marxism was preempted from serious academic discussion at my dinner table by virtue of my father's and grandfather's profession as U.S. military pilots.  Although we were learning dialectical materialism in church on Sunday it was forbidden to speak of it on Monday.

Pastors, priests, rabbis and imams are Marxists and despite 40 years of Catholic suppression of liberation theology it extends to Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam as a whole.

Marx simply extended Hegelian dialectics into political theory.  But Marx did not question the underlying premise of Hegelian dialectics which, I claim, are nothing more than a modernization of Judaeo-Christo-Islamic ethics.

The brutality of ISIS has brought us once again face to face with the postmodernist critique of dialectical culture.  If, as Hannity, the Ayatollahs, and the cold warriors (both Marxist and Capitalist) assert, there are clearly defined rights and wrongs then ISIS, Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism and Imperialism are not only inevitable they are to be expected.

Tito began to chip away at the authoritarian regime in Zizek's Yugoslavia by rejecting the Hegelian/Marxist/Freudian dialectic and pursuing the third way.  A closet capitalist and the father of the Yugo, Tito cracked the Soviet stranglehold on Eastern Europe long before Prague Spring and Solidarity.

As Malcolm X was embracing Marxist ideology in the United States

null

Banned in the USSR

I was just perusing the content rules of the Google blogger website.  A couple years ago I opened my blog and found that an adult content warning had been posted on it.  My visceral reaction was anger and I resented the notion that my blog was being censored in the sense that potential leaders were being warned that they were going to see adult content and ask to make a decision about whether or not they wanted to proceed.  Now we all know that the basis of e-commerce is the lack of decision-making.  As soon as you force me to make a decision I'm just going to navigate elsewhere.

I realize that the  billionaires who are controlling Google have to walk a fine line between what is appropriate and censorship.  And this brings me to a very important part of our democracy. In ancient Greece matters of state, philosophy, medicine, and what is and is not appropriate for children were openly debated in the polis.

Indeed Socrates was sentenced to death for transgressing social norms of the corruption of youth as regarded traditional Greek religion.  I certainly don't wish to suggest that the United States of America has anything approaching the level of democracy of ancient Greece but I would like to aspire to such a level.

My undergraduate history advisor gave us a book called _Imagined Communities_ which was of the sub altern studies approach to history.  The basic premise underlying subaltern studies is that historical research , law, commerce, and government are all controlled by the upper classes.

Even as we peruse the available text of any given historical period we must take into account that the very documents we seek to examine for information are themselves colored by the prejudices of those who had access to academia in that period.

The history of the Indian subcontinent was not written by the untouchable class nor was the history of the Russian Revolution written by serfs, most of whom were illiterate, nor was African-American history written by slaves.

Indeed when I studied African-American history at the University of Cincinnati in 1992 the course was not taught by an African-American.   But I digress.

The polis no longer exists. We don't have a town square where we debate issues of finance, economics and politics. The new polis is the Internet and the closest thing we have to democratic expression of ideas are free blogging sites which are accessible to anyone with access to the Internet.

Now I don't intend to imply that Internet access is universally available worldwide.  But for those of us who do you have access to the Internet and the time and ability to create a blog it seems to me a huge problem with democracy that a third-party may arbitrarily decide that one of our blogs contains "adult content".

Orwell addressed this issue in 1984. In which the over arching State/Corporation of Europa controlled all references in all forms of media to certain events and geographic locations.  Winston Smith's occupation was to scour news items and remove references to this or that state being an ally or an enemy in order to maintain the illusion that the current state of political affairs had existed ad infinitum backwards in time.

If Europa decided to form an alliance with Oceana then Oceana would always be an ally and any reference to the Oceana being an enemy would be eradicated.

Of course the level of media control this related in this dystopian future seemed impossible in 1948 when the book was released but is not Google the Europa of _1984_?

Indeed Google is Europa in the sense that it is a western corporation protected by the world's most powerful democratic government.  Their reach extends worldwide.

If Google decides to classify this blog as "adult content" that affects every single person on the planet who may or may not read it based on that classification.  That level of control is unacceptable.

The rules are below.

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American Indians are smart

The Vanishing Newspaper.  The Fuck Shop. Copyright law, 1994 and the end of the golden age of hip-hop.  When Luke Skywalker decided to sample "Sweet Child of Mine" and "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" on "The Fuck Shop" it created a legal quagmire which brought the golden age of hip-hip to an end.

I used to hear that African-American history was irrelevant unless one was black and ironically the people who said this were aware of 2LiveCrew and the legal uproar they created.

So I was looking at Barak Obama's FB page and I noticed that the biggest number of likes for him is in New Delhi, India (45 million).  Now I hate to profile but based on the Indians in my high school class, my undergraduate history thesis advisor, and the woman who delivered my 4 childrens I feel comfortable drawing the conclusion that American Indians are pretty smart.  On the other hand Ivy League professors overwhelmingly support Obama and they aren't exactly bright.  

Nas and the end of the golden age of hip hop. Tied to copyright law, Victor Hugo and the U.S. holding out on the Berne Copyright convention for over a century.

Critique of Pure Ideology

The lingua franca of our time is English. When Hamlet was written the Danish princes were studying at Wittenberg so one may assume the lingua franca of that time was German. Paul's missions to the Greeks were possible because, as an educated Pharisee, he was fluent in the lingua franca of his time. Through Latin and German the ancient Greek of the world of the Semitic patriarchs transmogrified into the latest Germanic language to hold the title: American English.

The Chinese millionare and the Arab Sheikh, Slavoj Zizek and Angela Merkel, Michael Eric Dyson and the ISIS recruiters they all have this in common: if they want to reach the widest possible audience with their ideological arguments they must do so in American English. Whether the language is a tool to open a factory in the rust belt, recruit a new commander, explain the relationship of hip-hop to Marxism or bemoan the latest exploits of Vladimir Putin, American English is the HTML code of the Netflix world.

There is an artist called Brysci who makes videos on his YouTube channel using "Call of Duty". After the fashion of our time the video game footage is mixed with Brysci's original raps. Brysci's ideology also depends on his grasp of American English. In one of his videos (my personal favorite) he used the phrase "snatchin' dog tags" as a heavily armed soldier does just that. My seven year old son asked me if that was true, if soldiers did snatch dog tags off their fallen victims.

I'm reading "Nuremberg" published in 1994 and it's got me wondering about

The mind conditioning of children's programming: A Zizekian Deconstruction of Skydancers

So I'm watching Skydancer with Xander and I'm thinking about all the stereotypes that it reinforces: one the Russian guy is the bad guy. He's the ballet dancer with the fragile ego that the enemy uses to get to the Skydancers. Two: He turns out being an effeminate weirdo , and three he is marginalized because he's a ballet dancer and is Russia I am for the other thing something else I'm thinking about the whole mind control aspect of children's programming this would've been out when I was maybe a little but ordered them Prever demographic but close enough that I could've watched it been subtly conditioned by it

DAWN.COM | World | Walking with the Comrades

DAWN.COM | World | Walking with the Comrades: "‘Maoist-infested.’ These are not careless words. ‘Infest/infestation’ implies disease/pests. Diseases must be cured. Pests must be exterminated. Maoists must be wiped out. In these creeping, innocuous ways the language of genocide has entered our vocabulary.
�"

his backpack said Charlie Brown — Not your ordinary blockhead. He said his name was Mangtu. I soon learned that Dandakaranya, the forest I was about to enter, was full of people who had many names and fluid identities. It was like balm to me, that idea. How lovely not to be stuck with yourself, to become someone else for a while.

Every village has a family of tamarind trees watching over it, like a clutch of huge, benevolent, gods. Sweet, Bastar tamarind

Significant wars are often fought in unlikely places. Free Market Capitalism defeated Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan. Here in the forests of Dantewara a battle rages for the soul of India. Plenty has been said about the deepening crisis in Indian democracy and the collusion between big corporations, major political parties and the security establishment. If any body wants to do a quick spot check, Dantewara is the place to go.

I found out that he’s one of a group of ten kids who are part of the first batch of the Young Communists Mobile School, who are being taught to read and write, and tutored in basic communist principles. ("Indoctrination of young minds!" our corporate media howls. The TV advertisements that brainwash children before they can even think, are not seen as a form of indoctrination.) The young communists are not allowed to carry guns or wear uniforms. But they trail the PLGA squads, with stars in their eyes, like groupies of a rock band.

But can we, should we let apprehensions about the future, immobilize us in the present?

think of what Comrade Venu said to me: They want to crush us, not only because of the minerals, but because we are offering the world an alternative model.

It’s not an Alternative yet, this idea of Gram Swaraj with a Gun. There is too much hunger, too much sickness here. But it has certainly created the possibilities for an alternative. Not for the whole world, not for Alaska, or New Delhi, nor even perhaps for the whole of Chhattisgarh, but for itself. For Dandakaranya. Its the world’s best kept secret. It has laid the foundations for an alternative to its own annihilation. It has defied history. Against the greatest odds it has forged a blueprint for its own survival. It needs help and imagination, it needs doctors, teachers, farmers.

It does not need war.

But if war is all it gets, it will fight back.

The Bodhghat dam was shelved in 1984 after local people protested. Who will stop it now? Who will prevent the foundation stone from being laid? Who will stop the Indravati from being stolen? Someone must.



Anribam Gupta Nigam:

two tropes underpin Roy’s rhetoric throughout: the constant equation of weaponry with beauty and joy, and the repeated emphasis – if without much insight – on the militarisation of daily life. Both seem to suggest to her, the epitome of revolutionary spirit – the one we have learnt India needs right now. But this affinity of death with beauty harks back to another – perhaps more accurate – tradition that Susan Sontag spoke of in her 1975 essay ‘Fascinating Fascism.’ National Socialism, she wrote, stood for values which at the time she was writing, were deeply cherished by ‘open societies.’ Among these were “the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community.”