Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Are We in a 'Cold Civil War'?

"Instead of acknowledging and addressing the fundamental flaws within themselves, [establishment factions] are devoting their energies to demonizing the victims of their corruption, all in order to delegitimize those grievances and thus relieve themselves of responsibility to meaningfully address them. That reaction only serves to bolster, if not vindicate, the animating perceptions that these elite institutions are hopelessly self-interested, toxic, and destructive and thus cannot be reformed but rather must be destroyed. That, in turn, only ensures there will be many more Brexits, and Trumps, in our collective future."
~ Via SMS from Ironic Banksky 

i dont believe in war banksy robbo The Banksy vs Robbo War in Pictures
In late September, the veteran reporter Carl Bernstein said on CNN: “… we are in a cold civil war in this country. These two events, both the Mueller investigation and the Kavanaugh nomination, are almost the Gettysburg and Antietam, the absolute central battles of this cold civil war.”

Are We in a 'Cold Civil War'?

Image for The Chaser Project Advertising Onto The Opera House & Other Sydney Landmarks


FBI’s smoking gun: Redactions protected political embarrassment, not ‘national security’ The Hill 


Anti-corruption blogger who exposed Malta's Panama Papers link ...

Killer of blogger released after just two years in jail

Deep Bloggers are are also sharing other odd stories tonight





The  comedy group The Chasers projected the words “ADVERTISE HERE Call Allen” in huge letters over one of the sails to mock the NSW government and did the same for the Art Gallery of NSW ..  Jorn Utzon would have approved .


Rattled: China’s Hardware Hack Rayne, emptywheel 

Hackers expose frailty of robots Financial Times



Rare white tiger kills zookeper in Japan  BBC

Are dark kitchens the satanic mills of our era? Guardian

  FCW.com: GAO hacks DOD weapons systems, calls out weak cyber
Weapon Systems Cybersecurity: DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities. GAO-19-128: Published: Oct 9, 2018. Publicly Released: Oct 9, 2018. “DOD’s weapons are more computerized and networked than ever before, so it’s no surprise that there are more opportunities for attacks. Yet until relatively recently, DOD did not make weapon cybersecurity a priority. Over the past few years, DOD has taken steps towards improvement, like updating policies and increasing testing. Federal information security—another term for cybersecurity—has been on our list of High Risk issues since 1997. Today’s weapon systems are heavily computerized, which opens more attack opportunities for adversaries (represented below in a fictitious weapon system for classification reasons).”





Watt4Bob
I have a colleague who was military trained in cyber security.
I asked him today, what he thought of the China hardware-hack story?
“You know why, right?”
No…
“It’s because Dell and HP have been shipping all their computers through the government for back-door installation.” 
Long story short, it’s a tit-for-tat move, probably designed as a shot across the bow of our security services. 
The empire has gotten to the point in its decay where the military has been experiencing a massive brain-drain that has now come to negatively effect our intelligence services.
The stupid, greedy, and amoral have crowded out the folks, upon whom we the people have traditionally relied, those with both intelligence, and a moral compass.
The dummies at the top of America’s intelligence services seem bent on making profits of different sorts off of cyber-warfare. 
I’m talking about Gen. Keith Alexander, Adm. James Clapper, and Gen. Michael Hayden, all cyber-hawks, of the “bring-it-on” school.
Cyber-warfare entails way too much collateral damage, so it’s stupid to even pretend to want ‘total-spectrum-dominance’ in the cyber realm because the cyber-arms-race that then ensues is in no way less impactful than the nuclear arms race has been, and continues to be.
The smart and moral have abandoned the ship of fools that is our military, and left the stupid and amoral to rise to the ranks of General Staff, and now our presidents are naming them to positions they are in no way qualified to administer.
“Our guys” decided to back-door every PC made in America, and so, China decided that they too could play that game.
All that CPU power, and all that RAM is busy servicing spies of all sort, Facebook, Google, Amazon, the NSA, CIA, the FBI, and the Chinese.
It’s spies all the way down, and on our part at least, stupid, greedy spies.