Hiding your data transmissions from the NSA

I guess I should start off with a warning here: it's not at all probable that you really can.  However, people have been pinging me, and I don't like any of the suggestions that I've seen so far.  This is a first cut.

The second warning here is that this is not useful for voice or email protection (mostly), and won't help with GPS geolocation tracking.  It's purely a thought experiment on how to transmit decently large quantities of information without NSA being likely to understand the content, or even that information is likely to be transmitted.

That last point is the key.  Traffic Analysis is pretty terrifying, at least to those in the know, and is by far the biggest issue in the whole NSA brouhaha.  I'm not sure that this solves that problem, but it takes some steps in that direction.  Remember, your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, do not remove tag under penalty of law.

The first thing we need to look at is how to hide data in a way that doesn't make people think that there's hidden data.  XKCD captured the problem for the would-be crypto nerd:

This is actually called the Rubber Hose Attack, and is considered generally effective.  So encrypting your hard disk is A Bad Thing, because it tells anyone who looks that the data is encrypted.  More to the point, encrypting your data communications is A Bad Thing for exactly the same reason.

OK, so no encryption.  How do you keep communications confidential from prying NSA eyes, and ideally make traffic analysis less likely?  This is Borepatch, and so that means that we'll start with a history lesson.

People have been trying to keep secrets secret for pretty much as long as there have been people.  Growing up, there was a pretty interesting book in the Borepatch household library, Hidden Images.  It gave a number of historical examples of how people hid images of things that were considered double plus ungood, typically via distorting perspective or some such.

This was a picture of (IIRC) English King Charles I who had been beheaded by Parliament.  It was dangerous for people to have images of the dead King, and so you had to use a reflective cylinder to make the distorted image of the Sovereign comprehensible.  The problem is that you need the cylinder, and you have a pretty suspicious distorted picture.  Either of these if discovered in a search might result in a Rubber Hose Attack.  We'd like to have our data in a normal image (I'll get to how to hide the "cylinder" in a bit).

There's a modern tool available to do this, called Steganography.  It relies on the fact that many of the data formats in comm use today are "lossy" - you can remove a lot of the original data bits without degrading the original message.  Jpeg image format is one example, MP3 is another.  Stego uses this to introduce loss into the picture without degrading the picture (or into an MP3 without degrading the audio).  The "loss" introduced is your secret message, which can be text, image, audio, or whatever you'd like.  I did this once here:

Crash the Wundercat contains a secret message (well, the picture of Crash does; work with me here).  You need a tool that does Stego to embed the message/data, and the person who wants to extract the message/data needs a Stego tool.  I like OpenPuff (even though it's Windows only) which will embed your data in images, audio, video, and Flash.  It will even encrypt the data and add white noise to make it even harder to detect.  It's free and open source.  Steghide is perhaps your best bet for Linux.



And now we have to peel the onion: how do you get your message distributed?  The answer here is to use your regular methods.  I don't like email, as it's pretty direct (you sent it to someone, which is interesting in an of itself).  Social Media is a much bigger haystack to hide in - Facebook, blogs (hello!), Reddit, Flickr - all of these excel as "dead drop" locations for seemingly innocuous pictures of your cat.  The people you want to read your secret message have to know what password you're using in your stego, but there are a lot of ways to do that - for example, everyone has a copy of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and uses the 11th word on the page as the password.  Each day, use the next page.

Sure, NSA will see that people are looking at Reddit, but it's an extra layer of indirection that they're looking at what you posted to Reddit.  It's potentially a very large haystack.

Also, you should see why this isn't any good for voice communications, and why it's not ideal (or likely desirable) for email.  And now to the last layer of the onion - reducing the chance of a rubber hose attack.

Remember the mirrored cylinder that was used to view the picture of King Charles?  That was a give away.  Well, so are steganography tools.  If it comes to an investigation and someone finds that you've, say, installed the Ubuntu version of Steghide, there will likely be a lot of questions.  So how do you hide your stego tools?  I think that the best way is via the Purloined Letter approach - hide them in plain sight.

This is a USB drive.  It will hold a ton of data.  Unfortunately, everyone knows that it's a USB drive, including Mr. Fed.  Should the day come where The Man swoops down to investigate your electronic breadcrumbs, they'll look for stuff like this.  What we want are the electronic guts of the drive, in an innocent looking exterior.  Maybe something like this:

This is a Lego toy.  Actually, it was a Lego toy until someone took a box cutter, dremel, and some manual labor to cut it open and embed a USB drive in it:

You can have a whole Operating System with Stego tools on it.  Boot from it when you need to encode/decode, copy the resulting image/MP3/etc to a different (maybe disposable) USB drive to load onto your regular computer for posting to Reddit/etc.  Just keep it with a bunch of other similar figurines in a bucket of toys in the basement.

Or you could just buy a Lego brick USB drive.  Remember to keep it with your other Lego.

Now it's important to point out here that nothing is foolproof.  NSA will be collecting traffic data showing that you're uploading to Reddit and Facebook.  They will see that other people check Facebook and Reddit.  They will build maps of relationships - who knows who.  Someone might take a look at your facebook page.  If they really want to spend the time with the right people analyzing your pictures (or podcasts, or youtube vids) they might very well sniff something fishy. But they'll have to work a lot harder, and the work will be less automated.

And this will give you a close to "Professional Grade" level of paranoia which is a Very Good Thing.  If I seem that way myself, please remember that I was trained to be that way by the finest minds in the Free World.

Snowden smuggled the classified documents out of NSA on a Flash Drive

Not particularly surprising:

Whistleblower Edward Snowden apparently used a USB thumb-drive to smuggle out hundreds of top-secret documents before he blew the lid off the NSA's web-spying project PRISM. This is despite the Pentagon's clampdown on the gadgets.

...

Computer usage at the National Security Agency is tightly controlled. But Snowden was a systems administrator employed by contractor Booz Allan Hamilton to maintain the spooks' network, and thus had sufficient privileges to use flash drives as part of his job.

This is the intersection of easy-to-conceal and critical-for-system-administration is a Catch-22 that won't go away.  Actually, it's worse than that, because users resist security measures that keep them from doing things they want to.  I wrote about that four and a half years ago in How to hack a classified network (currently top Google result for "hack classified network", out of 3 million results).

A Gun Control "hmmmm"

OK, so the EEOC has just issued a rule that it's illegal for an employer to refuse to hire someone simply because they are convicted felons. They say that policies like this are discriminatory because larger numbers are minorities. The EEOC says that this results in "disparate impact" and is presumed to be discrimination.

This seems ridiculous on its face, but let's consider the Second Amendment implications. Felons are prohibited from possessing firearms.

According to the EEOC, this is presumed to be racial discrimination. It would be interesting to see a class action lawsuit on these grounds.

Power is out

A big storm rolled through and the power is out all over. Lots of trees down - Georgia 400 into Atlanta is blocked by a downed tree. Georgia Power says that 150,000 people don't have power.

Including us. But the storm blew over.




But Sonic is open, so #2 Son has something to eat. Power isn't out everywhere.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Lazy summer evening

Wolfgang rescues a stick from the raging flood.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Vickery Creek, Roswell GA

Photo history of the NSA

I'm surprised that there's this much stuff out there.  And I can neither confirm nor deny this:

A little before my time, but not too much.  And I'd never heard about the "Miss NSA" pageant.

(via)

The Bank of England is staffed by fools

While this sort of thing would certainly be good business for me personally, color me skeptical:

Hacking attacks present a bigger risk to the operation of UK banks than problems caused by the ongoing eurozone crisis, according to a senior Bank of England director.

Andrew Haldane, the BoE's director of financial stability, told parliament's Treasury Select Committee that representatives of Britain's top banks are telling him that cyber attacks have become their biggest threat over recent months.

Hackers can melt down the banking system?  Really?  Instead of this?

And while the vast majority of readers may be left with the impression that JPMorgan's mindboggling $69.5 trillion in gross notional derivative exposure as of Q4 2012 may be the largest in the world, they would be surprised to learn that that is not the case. In fact, the bank with the single largest derivative exposure is not located in the US at all, but in the heart of Europe, and its name, as some may have guessed by now, is Deutsche Bank.

The amount in question? €55,605,039,000,000. Which, converted into USD at the current EURUSD exchange rate amounts to $72,842,601,090,000....  Or roughly $2 trillion more than JPMorgan's.

Emphasis in the original.  From where I sit, it looks like the financial risks of European insolvency are roughly a million times greater than the financial risks from hackers.  And there's a simple solution to that - the financial sector could simply increase the amount that they spend on computer security by $1 B, and they would suddenly be much, much better funded than the Bad Guys.  A Billion is a lot of money, but compared to 70 Trillion it's the change collected from under the cushions.

I wonder what color the sky is, over on Planet BoE.

When memes collide

Awesome.

Yo, NSA Dawg!  Heh.

Corporate reputations are crumbling

Good.

Damn, the NSA spying scandal just got real

I mean, who doesn't?

There's no hiding the decline

2cents emails to point out that Faith is being questioned even in the halls of the New York Times:

The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace.

The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace. The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists.

True, the basic theory that predicts a warming of the planet in response to human emissions does not suggest that warming should be smooth and continuous. To the contrary, in a climate system still dominated by natural variability, there is every reason to think the warming will proceed in fits and starts. But given how much is riding on the scientific forecast, the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on. They admit that they do not, even though some potential mechanisms of the slowdown have been suggested.

This is rank denialism of the worst kind.  Everyone knows that the Science is Settled™.

And so there's a bit of a panic in the Orthodox Science Community.  The models have predicted warming, and we're not seeing it.  The discussion is always around Carbon Dioxide, which quite frankly is there to fool the rubes.  Even the Scientific Establishment will admit that you just don't get much warming from a doubling of CO2.  The real threat, we're told, is from Water Vapor and positive feedbacks: more CO2 gives a little warming, which causes more water vapor, which causes more warming, which causes more water vapor, and so THERMAGEDDON!!!111!eleventy!!

The whole Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming idea is a wet firecracker without this.  The models all include "forcings" due to this positive feedback from water vapor.  It's all very computer source codeish and everything.  Science!

Err, except science is based not on models, but on experiment and especially experiments that validate earlier experiments.  So is there a way to look at water vapor and temperature?  Well, yeah:

If we pick areas of about the same latitude, we can say they are getting about the same sunshine. What varies is how much water vapor is in the arriving air. IMHO, this gives us an “existence proof” of “water vapor feedback”. Looking more north means less sun, more south more sun; so we would expect a “bit north” compared to a “bit south” to give the bias toward a cooler north and warmer south. (That can be seen on the East Coast as a temperature gradient from Main to Florida)

What happens to the dry air when it has sunshine vs the wet air when it gets sunshine? Which one heats up more?

Even a casual inspection of the map shows that the entire dry desert band, from inland Washington state (they have a bit of desert behind their mountains) all the way on down through Nevada ( nice high desert there) and Utah ( I reached 8000 Ft plus elevation at one point) and on into West Texas (known for Mesquite and BBQ using same ;-) are all quite hot. 84 F to 108 F. Now, if “water vapor feedback” is a positive value, we would expect that areas more south, at lower elevations, with even MORE sunshine, would be even hotter.

I can tell you that for most of today in Orlando, the humidity was 100%. It started off very sunny, and was quite hot at noon. A strong tropical (or near tropical) sun. I was out in it. Observing it. Then it clouded up, and began to rain. The formation of tropical thunderstorms is characteristic of hot summer days. They are welcome as they cause a rapid plunge of temperatures. (As I’m typing this, it’s 11 pm and I’m feeling a bit of ‘chill’ from the cool. I’m on the patio again.) Tomorrow morning will be sunny, and then it will get humid and “hot”, and then the rain will come again. Now look at the map.

The midwest is known for humidity, as is Farm Country. Iowa corn puts a lot of water into the air, and I’ve taken a shower in Iowa only to towel off and still be soaking wet as the humidity condenses. Anyone who has been on the Gulf Coast on a sunny day can tell you that 90 F and 99% humidity is brutal. Now look at that map. The high humidity areas are in the 60 F to 70s F range, getting up to 82 F in the far southern tip of Florida. Looking back to the West Coast, it is hot inland where it is dry, but look at the edge of the water. You can see the low and cold coastal temperatures where the cold air comes in from over the water with humidity in it. Then it warms inland where it is dry.

More water vapor makes for colder air temperatures. NOT warmer.

This is quite an interesting post, which basically is an introduction to how water vapor is a conveyor of heat.  The weakness, as the Climate Science Establishment will point out, is that Greenhouse Gas theory says that warming occurs not on the surface, but at high altitude in the Troposphere.  Localized hot (or cold) regions will be all jumbled up together at high altitude, and the heat will then migrate downwards across the whole globe. 

The absorbed energy warms the surface. Simple presentations of the greenhouse effect, such as the idealized greenhouse model, show this heat being lost as thermal radiation. The reality is more complex: the atmosphere near the surface is largely opaque to thermal radiation (with important exceptions for "window" bands), and most heat loss from the surface is by sensible heat and latent heat transport. Radiative energy losses become increasingly important higher in the atmosphere largely because of the decreasing concentration of water vapor, an important greenhouse gas. It is more realistic to think of the greenhouse effect as applying to a "surface" in the mid-troposphere, which is effectively coupled to the surface by a lapse rate.

In other words (they claim), it's Global Warming, not Local Warming.

OK, then.  Here's what it looks like when the goalposts are moved.  A picture is worth a thousand words:

The mass of squiggly lines are the model predictions (73 different models).  The black line is the average of the model predictions.  These show what you've heard over and over - that things are warming up because of CO2 and positive feedback from water vapor.

But look at the blue and green dots.  These are the averages of the satellite and the weather balloon data sets, and these are experimental data recordings, not computer model predictions.  Further, the readings were not taken at ground level, but rather in the Troposphere - you know, that place where Global Warming is supposed be hanging with its homies.  Greenhouse Gas theory needs a "hot" spot in the Troposphere to cycle warming back down to the lower atmosphere, because otherwise it will likely just escape to space and in any case won't effect the climate.

So what does the Climate Establishment say to the newly minted deniers at the NYT?  Their picture looks like this:

Even they're just hanging on my their fingers, but at least they manage to show that the observed data barely within the model projections.  But if you listen, you hear the sound of the goal posts moving:

The period covered in the [second] graph is a decade shorter than that covered by the Spencer-Christy graph and looks suspiciously like cherry-picking.  By starting their graph in 1990, SS can use the Mt. Pinatubo-induced cold period of 1992-93 to tilt the trend to be more positive. The Spencer-Christy graph begins at the start of the satellite record — 1979 — providing a longer and more representative period.

More importantly, SS uses global surface temperature datasets, which do not accurately represent heat content in the bulk atmosphere. In contrast, Spencer and Christy use temperature data from the tropical troposphere — the place where the models project the strongest, least ambiguous, greenhouse warming signal.

If you're going to use surface temperature, why not go back to our original thought experiment that we opened this post with?  Ah, but it's the Troposphere that counts, right?  Then why not show the Troposphere temperatures?

At this point what usually happens is that "rational discourse" breaks out, with accusations of Beastly Denierdom and you're-not-peer-reviewed and the like.  What's interesting is that these "arguments" are not even convincing the New York Times.  It's been quite a rapid change from the monolithic view in the Press to, well, skepticism just in 3 or 4 short years.

If you use Internet Explorer, you need to update

June's Patch Tuesday includes a critical fix for IE that covers all versions of IE on all versions of Windows.  That's just the sort of broad-based vulnerability that the Bad Guys will look for - "write once, pwn everywhere":

The IE update (MS13-047) grapples with 19 vulnerabilities and covers all versions of IE, from IE6 to IE10, on all supported versions of Windows, from XP to RT. It's just the sort of thing that might be latched onto by hackers as part of drive-by-download attacks, based on malicious scripts on compromised websites, and therefore needs to be patched sooner rather than later.

Details are posted on Microsoft's web site.  Microsoft (and I) recommend that you have Windows Update enabled, which will download these automagically each month.

I also recommend (although Microsoft does not) that you look at using Firefox or Chrome browsers.  Internet Explorer's security is a lot better than it used to be, but there's still quite a lot of legacy security fail built into it (*cough* ActiveX *cough*) that isn't in the other browsers.  The Opera browser is also pretty good.

NSA-apalooza

David Brooks is caught admiring the perfectly creased trousers of the NSA:

Edward Snowden isn't the betrayer.  The betrayers are the Bush administration, the Obama administration, the NSA, and the Congress.  For Brooks to claim, with a straight faith, that it is Snowden who betrayed his oaths and the Constitution, that is is Edward Snowden who "betrayed the privacy of us all" when he exposed the NSA's lawless domestic spying program, is to tell a far bigger lie than Joseph Goebbels ever told.

And Charles Krauthammer is an idiot, too.

Lawrence Person fisks Obama's NSA defense.

The NSA has lousy Marketing instincts.  Naming a program "Boundless Informant" sounds both juvenile and creepy, especially when they're spying on us more than they are spying on Russia.

Bruce Schneier: What we don't know about the NSA spying is even scarier than what we do know.

German politician: Boy, this NSA thing sure looks like the Stasi.

FISA Court: You know, this NSA spying is unconstitutional.  NSA: shaddup.

EU Justice Minister to Eric Holder: I thought you wanted to be more like us.  WTF?

The statistics of "You don't have to worry if you have nothing to hide":

One problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it assumes innocent people will be exonerated certainly and effortlessly. That is, it assumes that there are no errors, or if there are, they are resolved quickly and easily.

Suppose the probability of a correctly analyzing an email or phone call is not 100% but 99.99%. In other words, there’s one chance in 10,000 of an innocent message being incriminating. Imagine authorities analyzing one message each from 300,000,000 people, roughly the population of the United States. Then around 30,000 innocent people will have some ‘splaining to do. They will have to interrupt their dinner to answer questions from an agent knocking on their door, or maybe they’ll spend a few weeks in custody. If the legal system is 99.99% reliable, then three of them will go to prison.

Ah, but that assumes that the Government Agency is motivated to catch terrorists, rather than to make sure that next year's budget is bigger.  Those 3 convictions will show that "the system is working".

You know, I sort of feel sorry for all those NSA employees

Someone has to listen in on all those Verizon calls [language warning]:



No wonder they want computers to do this.  It's inhumane.

Two views of the Pacific Theater in World War II

The inevitability of American victory:

In other words, even if it had lost catastrophically at the Battle of Midway, the United States Navy still would have broken even with Japan in carriers and naval air power by about September 1943. Nine months later, by the middle of 1944, the U.S. Navy would have enjoyed a nearly two-to-one superiority in carrier aircraft capacity! Not only that, but with her newer, better aircraft designs, the U.S. Navy would have enjoyed not only a substantial numeric, but also a critical qualitative advantage as well, starting in late 1943. All this is not to say that losing the Battle of Midway would not have been a serious blow to American fortunes! For instance, the war would almost certainly have been protracted if the U.S. had been unable to mount some sort of a credible counter-stroke in the Solomons during the latter half of 1942. Without carrier-based air power of some sort there would not have been much hope of doing so, meaning that we would most likely have lost the Solomons. However, the long-term implications are clear: the United States could afford to make good losses that the Japanese simply could not. Furthermore, this comparison does not reflect the fact that the United States actually slowed down its carrier building program in late 1944, as it became increasingly evident that there was less need for them. Had the U.S. lost at Midway, it seems likely that those additional carriers (3 Midway-class and 6 more Essex-Class CVs, plus the Saipan-class CVLs) would have been brought on line more quickly. In a macro-economic sense, then, the Battle of Midway was really a non-event. There was no need for the U.S. to seek a single, decisive battle which would 'Doom Japan' -- Japan was doomed by its very decision to make war.

There's tons of production data at that link, a lot of which I hadn't known.  For example, we built 11 Million tons of merchant shipping just in 1943.  We built nearly 100,000 aircraft just in 1944.  Ye gods.  (via)

Also, the Atomic Bomb didn't end the war.  The entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific Theater did:

In the three weeks prior to Hiroshima, 26 cities were attacked by the U.S. Army Air Force. Of these, eight — or almost a third — were as completely or more completely destroyed than Hiroshima (in terms of the percentage of the city destroyed). The fact that Japan had 68 cities destroyed in the summer of 1945 poses a serious challenge for people who want to make the bombing of Hiroshima the cause of Japan’s surrender. The question is: If they surrendered because a city was destroyed, why didn’t they surrender when those other 66 cities were destroyed?

...

One way to gauge whether it was the bombing of Hiroshima or the invasion and declaration of war by the Soviet Union that caused Japan’s surrender is to compare the way in which these two events affected the strategic situation. After Hiroshima was bombed on August 8, both options were still alive. It would still have been possible to ask Stalin to mediate (and Takagi’s diary entries from August 8 show that at least some of Japan’s leaders were still thinking about the effort to get Stalin involved). It would also still have been possible to try to fight one last decisive battle and inflict heavy casualties. The destruction of Hiroshima had done nothing to reduce the preparedness of the troops dug in on the beaches of Japan’s home islands. There was now one fewer city behind them, but they were still dug in, they still had ammunition, and their military strength had not been diminished in any important way. Bombing Hiroshima did not foreclose either of Japan’s strategic options.

The impact of the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria and Sakhalin Island was quite different, however. Once the Soviet Union had declared war, Stalin could no longer act as a mediator — he was now a belligerent. So the diplomatic option was wiped out by the Soviet move. The effect on the military situation was equally dramatic. Most of Japan’s best troops had been shifted to the southern part of the home islands. Japan’s military had correctly guessed that the likely first target of an American invasion would be the southernmost island of Kyushu. The once proud Kwangtung army in Manchuria, for example, was a shell of its former self because its best units had been shifted away to defend Japan itself. When the Russians invaded Manchuria, they sliced through what had once been an elite army and many Russian units only stopped when they ran out of gas.

What's particularly interesting is the conclusion (you'll have to click through to RTWT), but it's very Japanese.  Much face was saved, and not just in Japan.

Putting the Meta in the Metadata

This is kind of cool - the actor who played Hitler in the film that's inspired all the Hitler rant youtube videos, interviewed about what he thinks about all the parodies.



Or said a different way:

And now for a humorous interlude ....

Yes.  Yes, you should eat that bacon.  Because bacon.

Apologies to my gentle readers for my rantiness over that last few days.

Sorry, I guess that I am a True Warrior.  See what bacon will do to you?

Legal bleg

It seems my older brother has"captured" Mom and put her into an assisted living center in Maryland.  My younger brother and I think that this is (ahem) a Very Bad Thing Indeed.  Older Brother  seems to be working on the principle of Adverse Possession - that he has her there, and there she will stay.

Err, yes.  Even though we're (ahem) invited to visit.  I'd call him an SOB, but Mom doesn't deserve that.

My first instinct is to go up and get her, and fly her back to Albuquerque.  Adverse Possession, indeed.  My next thought is to report a kidnapping.  Grrr.  My cooler head suggests that I seek legal counsel - that this is the sort of dispute where the Organs Of The State might side with Adverse Possession.  At least if they are Organs of the Maryland State.

If anyone has the name of a good family practice lawyer who understands the issues of the elderly, please contact me at borepatch at gmail dot com.

Why the TSA is the Totally Stupid Agency, part XCIII

They tried to swipeseize Chewbacca's Light Saber cane.  They were obstinate until he live-tweeted it, then folded like a house of cards:

North Texas resident and "Star Wars" Chewbacca actor Peter Mayhew had a dust-up with Transportation Security Administration agents in Denver when they attempted to confiscate his light saber-shaped cane.

Mayhew was returning to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport from an appearance at Denver ComicCon when TSA agents refused to let Chewie board his plane with his one-of-a-kind cane.

Idiots. Just wait until they're running your health care. They're already reading your email.

Quote of the Day - John Gilmore

For those who aren't tech nerds, John Gilmore established his fame by starting the old Cypherpunks mailing list, and then went on to be one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  The pelt of his Wookie Suit is luxuriant indeed, but he's no idiot.  And he has a lot of perspective, like this:

We know what happened in the case of QWest before 9/11.  [NSA]
contacted the CEO/Chairman asking to wiretap all the customers.  After
he consulted with Legal, he refused.  As a result, NSA canceled a
bunch of unrelated billion dollar contracts that QWest was the top
bidder for.  And then the DoJ targeted him and prosecuted him and put
him in prison for insider trading -- on the theory that he knew of
anticipated income from secret programs that QWest was planning for
the government, while the public didn't because it was classified and
he couldn't legally tell them, and then he bought or sold QWest stock
knowing those things.

This CEO's name is Joseph P. Nacchio and TODAY he's still serving a
trumped-up 6-year federal prison sentence today for quietly refusing
an NSA demand to massively wiretap his customers.

Professor Jacobsen compresses this:

You can’t separate the data mining, the culture of intimidation, and criminalization of daily life.

No, really. It doesn't matter whether they're actually listening

Srlsy:

But with each technological breakthrough comes a break-in to realms previously thought private. “It’s really valuable for law enforcement, but we have to update the wiretap laws,” Landau said.

It was exactly these concerns that motivated the mathematician William Binney, a former N.S.A. official who spoke to me for the Drake story, to retire rather than keep working for an agency he suspected had begun to violate Americans’ fundamental privacy rights. After 9/11, Binney told me, as I reported in the piece, General Michael Hayden, who was then director of the N.S.A., “reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”

Binney, who considered himself a conservative, feared that the N.S.A.’s data-mining program was so extensive that it could help “create an Orwellian state.”

As he told me at the time, wiretap surveillance requires trained human operators, but data mining is an automated process, which means that the entire country can be watched. Conceivably, the government could “monitor the Tea Party, or reporters, whatever group or organization you want to target,” he said.

Back in the day, NSA employed more Russian linguists than anyone.  That costs a ton of money - salary and benefits, plus office space is swankly Tempest-resistant buildings ain't cheap.  A monster data center in Utah, filled with racks of servers costing $1500 each, well that's a lot cheaper.  And the servers hum 24/7, tracing the web of connections.  Unsleeping.



It's an electronic Stasi, watching and monitoring everything for the sign of anything possibly suspicious or undesirable to the Organs Of The State.  And the data is there if someone wants to go back and look later, maybe years later.  If, say, a Director of National Intelligence is acting too independently and needs to be reigned back in - hey, where was he at night, according to the GPS data from his cell phone?  Maybe he has a mistress or something.

If the government were less secretive, it might be different.  If we weren't awash with scandals where the government has been abusing its power, it might be different.  It's not, and it's not.  Professor Jacobsen sums it up in a sentence:

You can’t separate the data mining, the culture of intimidation, and criminalization of daily life.

Listening in on phone calls is for suckers.  They don't need to.

Yeah, I know that we have no privacy, but damn

In 1999, Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy famously said "You have zero privacy anyway.  Get over it."  So how shocking is the revelation that the NSA hoovers up 3 Billion phone calls each day?  Even McNealy is shocked.

We're seeing the collapse of trust in the government.  Quite frankly, the government has brought this on itself, step by step, over the course of the last 20 years.  This has been building since the end of the Cold War when the "End Of History" looked like it might make the Intelligence community superfluous.

Man, I'm cynical today.  Introducing a new post tag, "Eye of Sauron".

What will the reaction be?

Old NFO has a must-read post up about what's going on with Government overreach.  It's impossible to do it justice by excerpting, and not to be missed.

It makes me wonder just how far people and institutions in this country will allow this to go.  Some people in government are, as Old NFO says, drunk with power.  They are enamored by what Christopher Hitchens referred to as the "pornography of power".

But not all are.  Even the New York Times' editorial board flinched, if only briefly.  The Huffington Post and even Daily Kos are muttering with discomfort.  The dynamic has yet to play out.

Because a dynamic it is.  Even the Roman Emperors refused to take the title Rex (King).  Obama is a teflon President, with scandal (so far) not yet to stick.  But he has no heir apparent.  Many people in Progressive institutions will be wondering what the Country's reaction will be.  While the core are drunk with power, we see that many are already questioning the path that we're on.  The future of the Progressive movement is being cast in question.

I don't see how this plays out, but play out it must.

Sunday afternoon

#1 Son is up in New England visiting his friends and sends this picture of his afternoon.

Why the "They're not listening to your calls" argument is entirely irrelevant

There's a huge amount of information that can be gleaned from observing the pattern of unreadable communications.  Whether the call is unreadable because it's encrypted, or whether it's unreadable because of the lack of a court warrant doesn't matter.  Traffic Analysis is a well understood and amazingly powerful technique that excels at identifying organizational relationships.

In the Pleistocene Age of this blog I posted about how the Allies fooled the Germans on the location of the D-Day invasion, using George Patton and the mythical First US Army Group (FUSAG) and a bunch of radios to sucker the German traffic analysis:

Armies used radio extensively to coordinate movements. Orders were sent via radio (encrypted, or coded) from FUSAG HQ to several make believe "Corps HQ" in Southeast England, whence more messages would be sent from each Corps HQ to several phantom "Division HQ", and on down the chain. A small army of radio technicians spent their days sending completely made up messages back and forth to each other.

The Germans, of course, were listening, and using the patterns of signal, reply, etc to build an org chart of Patton's Army Group. To verify that all this activity was legit, the Luftwaffe made repeated recon sorties over Kent, photographing inflated tanks and empty tent encampments which made the whole thing look real.

 NSA understands traffic analysis, which is why they want the phone "meta data" (actually, the Call Detail Records).  The CDRs provide pretty much everything that the NSA computers need to start building calling trees - who knows whom.  Mapping terror watch list suspects into this tree makes other potential terrorists pop out.  I have absolutely no idea whether they've caught anyone via this - it's all deeply classified, as it should be - but suspect that this is been perhaps the primary weapon in the Global War On Terror.

But here's where it gets creepy.  Add in data from Google and the other high tech companies and you take this to a whole other level.  Look at Apple: the iPhone has been known for years to poorly anonymize GPS data, allowing someone (hello, NSA) to track the physical movements of a person of interest.  Now add in tracking the physical movements of another person in this traffic analysis calling tree, and they could tell that you met up in a park, even if you never called, emailed, or texted.

And that's just one form of electronic data; credit card transactions are also caught up in this dragnet.  The rabbit hole goes deep indeed.  And remember - none of this involves listening in on phone conversations.

Where things turn ugly is when you think on the IRS scrutiny of Tea Party organizations.  This was done enthusiastically by most of the IRS personnel.  It was done to thwart a particular form of political activity that was considered antithetical to the mission of the IRS - after all, if taxes are reduced, as the Tea Parties hoped - what do you need an IRS for?  Or at least, as big an IRS?

And so to NSA - which domestic political activity would be seen as hindering the activity of that Agency?  Could, say, the Electronic Frontier Foundation become a target of interest?  How would we know?

There's an old saying that while there are friendly foreign governments, there are no friendly foreign Intelligence Agencies.  I'm starting to wonder if you can change that to "domestic".

Albéric Magnard - Symphony No. 4

Image via Wikipedia

1914 saw the German invasion of France.  September saw the bosche approach the estate of one of France's most renown composers.  Albéric Magnard shot at them, killing one.  They returned fire, paying him the same attention.  In the fire that destroyed the house both Magnard and a number of incomplete compositions went up in flames.

Today is Magnard's birthday.  His was a less lyrical and more exciting musical style, often compared to Anton Bruckner.  His 4th Symphony offered here was written the year before his death, at the height of his compositional career.  The son of privilege (his father was the editor of the newspaper Le Figaro), he was determined to make it on his own.  He was largely successful at that.

But it was his end that made him a national hero.  That same determination to succeed by his own efforts showed a stubbornness that the German soldiers were to feel.  That spirit of defiance endeared him to his fellow countrymen.  Looking back, it shows how different the world was back then, when prominent intellectuals were men of action.

The Quebe Sisters Band - Shame On You

The Andrews Sisters meets Country & Western.

The "Summer of the Shark" and the NSA monitoring campaign

2001 saw the "Summer of the Shark", where the media went hysterical about shark attacks with breathless, wall-to-wall coverage.  Do you know how many people in the US died from shark attacks in 2001?

Two.

We tend to have very bad "gut feel" reactions to events, which makes it hard to analyze risk.  For example, one person was killed by a shark in 2012 but 22 were killed by cattle (numbers for US only, but the risks are similar across the world).

And yet people fear shark attack.

We're told that the NSA's monitoring program stopped one attack.  That's one shark attack foiled.  We also know that the IRS screwed over hundreds of the Administration's opponents, and illegally released the donor list of another.  Donors were threatened and intimidated.  That's the cattle stompings.

My starting point is that there's far more risk from the monitoring than from the terror attacks.  There are far more opportunities for Agencies and politicians to increase their power using terror attacks.  Perhaps I'm wrong, but with the utter lack of transparency from this Administration (and indeed, previous Administrations), compounded by the Media's subservient excuse making for this Administration, combined with the institutional lack of transparency of the Intelligence Agencies ("NSA" stands for "Never Say Anything"), I simply don't expect to be persuaded differently.

Said differently, I personally am adopting NSA's unofficial motto for use when dealing with all governmental requests for power: In God we trust; all others we monitor.

The smart money is more afraid of cows than sharks.

Juxtapose

Item the first:

Microsoft has finally confirmed that Xbox fans' worst fears are at least partially true: Although the new Xbox One gaming console won't need an always-on internet connection, that connection had better be on pretty often or you can forget about gaming. And don't assume you'll be able to sell or trade your old games, either.

"With Xbox One, we are planning for a connected future," the Xbox team explained in a blog post on Thursday.

What that means is that while offline gaming is technically possible with the Xbox One – as an earlier leaked memo suggested it would be – it will only actually work as long as the console is able to phone home at least once per day.

And what data is exchanged on that phone home?  The world wonders.

Item the second:

It has been a rough 24 hours for the US National Security Agency. First a leaked court order (and the political reaction) showed that the agency routinely harvests US mobile-use data, and now a new document has been uncovered that claims to show the larger internet companies do the same thing.

A 41-page presentation, given in April this year and obtained by the Washington Post, details the PRISM project, a system described as being the largest single source of information for NSA analytic reports. PRISM apparently gives the NSA access to email, chat logs, any stored data, VoIP traffic, files transfers, social networking data, and the ominously named "Special Projects".

Nine companies are currently part of PRISM. Microsoft was the first firm to sign up on Sept 11, 2007, with Yahoo! coming in the following year, the presentation states. Google and Facebook joined in 2009, the following year YouTube got on board, followed by Skype (before Redmond took it over) and AOL in 2011.

Take a look at that list of corporations: Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook.  Now consider the long history of regulatory capture, and ponder what happens when NSA is captured by Silicon Valley.

When a shiver runs up your spine, you will know that you understand me precisely.

How would the Media be covering these scandals if Mitt Romney had won?

I expect that they would be more focused on the enemy in the White House than on the scandals, and would be playing them down.

Even more importantly, Mitt would be focused on his agenda he would want to implement, and would force everyone to shut up about the scandals.  After all, he'd need Democrat support for his agenda, and wouldn't want to antagonize them.

And so the scandal most likely to make your typical voter think that the government is out of control (the weaponizing of the IRS) would get swept under the rug.  The scandal most likely to make your typical reporter think that the government is out of control (the secret search warrant against the AP) would get swept under the rug.

This is not to say that either of these crises will lead to needed change.  However, there is a world of difference between fighting tactical battles and fighting strategic ones, even if you don't win.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

Heaven was needing 6000 Heroes

At 2:30 AM EDT (0630 British Double Summer Time) somebody just like you hit the beach at Omaha.

It was the beginning of the end for the tausendjähriges Reich, and good damn riddance.  This photograph from Life Magazine is justly famous: that's what Our Boys had to wade through, on their way to the fight.  What wasn't shown to the folks Back Home is what it looked like from the other side.

Image via Wikipedia

This is what I remember, looking back through the glass darkly from those long ago days of 1991.  I remember standing at this very spot and thinking to myself:

My God, how could they possibly have done this?

I almost made the first sea wall  
When my friends turned and saw me fall ...

What they did was was simply impossible.  They did it anyway.  They still do.



Sweet Mother Mary, we're so tired ...

If you're reading this, say a prayer for those who did the impossible, and who sacrificed everything these seventy years ago.  Pinch yourself.  That pain you feel is what they would have felt if their last sacrifice had been but a pinch.

Just remember this
I'm in a better place.
Where Soldiers rest in peace
and Angels sing Amazing Grace.

The entire core of my being wants to believe this.  It may even be true.  So let it be written, so let it be done. 



Remember: when Heaven needed 6000 heroes as a down payment, they knew who to call.  They knew who would pick up the phone when it rang.  They still do. The Longest Day seems not to end.

Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceatis eis.  Amen.  After all these years, amen.

Britain. It used to be Great.

A couple years ago I posted about one of Her Majesty's soldiers who lost a leg in action in Afghanistan and who was turned down for a handicapped parking decal because his amputated leg "might get better".

I'm dumbfounded that the Council could be so clueless as to tell him that his leg might grow back. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Grow back? Note to all Boston area lefties: observe your Philosopher Kings in action.

I normally leave the post at this point, with a sneer both at the sheer incompetence on offer in the UK, and the intellectual incompetence of an American Left that thinks we should import it to our shores. Not this time. There's no mistaking the malice on display: turned down not once, but three times; the suggestion that his leg might grow back.

Malice. Running the bureaucracy. This is what lampposts and rope were invented to handle.

LCpl Lee, it seems, is an inspiration to the Realm and to amputees everywhere, having through sheer determination taken up mountain climbing not only in his native land, but scaling Mt. Kilimanjaro to raise money for a charity for the handicapped:

On February 23^rd, twenty seven men volunteered to climb Mount Kilimanjaro- the highest peak in Africa. And these were no ordinary men- four of them were ex-military and single leg amputees from Pilgrim Bandits.

The volunteers, including Lance Corp. Johno Lee, Corporal Ricky Hatton, Rifleman Chris Parks and former REME John Sandford Hart, not only sponsored their own trip, but raised additional funds for the charity as well. The Pilgrim Bandits Kilimanjaro challenge may have raised up to $15,830, with another similar event planned for later this year.

Oorah, Squaddie.

Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods loved him because men hated him.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

But the UK bureaucracy is relentless and seems to have gone feral:

On February 23^rd, twenty seven men volunteered to climb Mount Kilimanjaro- the highest peak in Africa. And these were no ordinary men- four of them were ex-military and single leg amputees from Pilgrim Bandits.

The volunteers, including Lance Corp. Johno Lee, Corporal Ricky Hatton, Rifleman Chris Parks and former REME John Sandford Hart, not only sponsored their own trip, but raised additional funds for the charity as well. The Pilgrim Bandits Kilimanjaro challenge may have raised up to $15,830, with another similar event planned for later this year.

This young hero cannot be described using words other than "hero" - not just for his service to Crown and Country, but as an inspiration to other amputees.  And the UK.Gov seems fit to chew on him like a bulldog on a sock.

Unlike LCpl Lee who deserves nothing but our approbation, the UK.Gov is seemingly a wretched hive of villainy and scum.  This is what lampposts and rope were invented to handle.

No man government likes to live under the eye of perpetual disapprobation.

- Dr. Johnson

The UK.Gov is well advised to get used to it.  This is Britain.  It's in the place where Great Britain used to be.

Twitter gets Rickrolled

No, really.  Epic Rick Roll is Epic.

Source code isn't Swiss Cheese, it's a target rich environment.  But this may be the greatest Rick Roll ever:

This is the most important thing you will watch this month

Or maybe this quarter, or this year.  I don't know what else to add, other than that these people will need computer and network security BIG TIME, and you can get in on it.  People are already desperate for it, and if this is right (very likely indeed), they will only get more so.

Damn.  Every time I read Kevin Baker, I gain IQ points.

Just how stupid is the IRS?

It's pretty stupid to target the enemies of the current Administration, to be sure, but that's not what I'm getting at.  It's stupider - so, so stupider - to get caught:

You'll remember that Californians who donated to help pass Proposition 8 were boycotted.

The IRS gave NOM's chief political rival its donor list. I believe so that a similar boycott could be had.

This was, of course, illegal. And making it worse is proof of consciousness of guilt -- whoever leaked the document took pains to redact the internal stamps and markings that would show it was leaked from the IRS.

But NOM was able to go to an expert to "see under" the black bars of redaction.

What do we know from this? We know that the IRS doesn't have anyone who knows the first thing about computer security, because there's a long, long history of people recovering "redacted" information from PDF documents.  The reason is that people who don't know what they're doing simply put black boxes over the text to be redacted.  If you have two brain cells to rub together, you simply remove the black boxes and voila! - there's the incriminating text in all its glory.

Everyone who's been to a computer security rodeo or two knows this.  The Justice Department knows this.  El Wik goes rather on and on about it.  Heck, Adobe (the creators of PDF, hello) blogs about it.

I guess that the IRS is too busy grilling non-profit organizations about what's in the prayers at their meetings or something.  But don't feel bad, IRS - the TSA doesn't get it, either.  That should make you feel better, that you're as smart as the Totally Stupid Agency.

Maroons.

Granddaddy's Gun

Aaron Lewis performing at the NRA Museum.



I know what he's singing about.

Is the US military Officer Corps institutionally incompetent?

Isegoria finds a quite damning analysis:

Almost never do our military schools, academies, and colleges put students in situations where they have to think through how to fight a battle or a campaign, then get critiqued not on their answer but the way they think. Nor does American military training offer much free play, where the enemy can do whatever he wants and critique draws out why one side won and the other lost. Instead, training exercises are scripted as if we are training an opera company. The schools teach a combination of staff process and sophomore-level college courses in government and international relations. No one is taught how to be a commander in combat. One Army lieutenant colonel recently wrote me that he got angry when he figured out that nothing he needs to know to command would be taught to him in any Army school.

The promotion system reinforces professional ignorance. Above the company grades, military ability does not count in determining who gets promoted. At the rank of major, officers are supposed to accept that the “real world” is the internal world of budget and promotion politics, not war. Those who “don’t get it” have ever smaller chances of making general. This represents corruption of the worst kind, corruption of institutional purpose. Its result is generals and admirals who are in effect Soviet industrial managers in ever worse-looking suits. They know little and care less about their intended product, military victory. Their expertise is in acquiring resources and playing the military courtier.

If this is true (and I sure hope it isn't, but it has a certain ring of truth to it), a likely explanation is 70 years of Cold War budget battles selecting for flag officers who can get appropriations out of Congress.

A Fanboi and his money are soon parted

Gratuitous dig at Apple fanbois because this can only be purchased through the Apple store.  This contains weapons grade frivolity:

The Philips Hue lightbulbs are the Internet of Things made real: multicoloured light bulbs with network connectivity and cloud control, with only the outrageous price preventing world domination.

The bulbs come beautifully packaged in a three-light starter pack, along with a controlling hub. The bulbs fit into a standard screw socket and connect wirelessly to the Ethernet-connected hub – and even each other.

A smartphone app (for Android and iOS) gets you up and running within a few minutes, but it’s the documented programming interfaces and social network interconnection that may justify the £179.95 price tag.

£60 light bulbs.  That's $100.  Each.

[blink] [blink]



It's bread and circuses, all the way down.

Err, eggs and skillet sold separately

Bacon soda.

Because bacon.

Dude!

That's one heck of a red pill ...

Or tweeting.  Damn kids.

"Secure voting" via credit card?

HAHAHAHAHA:

Former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s political party, already enfeebled by a chaotic national leadership election last year, faces further ridicule in a Paris town hall primary election which ends tonight.

An “online-primary”, claimed as “fraud-proof” and “ultra secure”, has turned out to be vulnerable to multiple and fake voting.

...


What was already shaping up as a tense and close election was thrown into utter confusion at the weekend. Journalists from the news site Metronews proved that it was easy to breach the allegedly strict security of the election and vote several times using different names.

To register their vote on-line, Parisians were supposed to make a credit-card payment of €3 and give the name and address of someone on the city’s electoral roll. Metronews said that one of its journalists had managed to vote five times, paying with the same credit card, using names, including that of Nicolas Sarkozy.

...

The narrowly defeated candidate,  the former Prime Minister, François Fillon, accused the winner, the party secretary general, Jean-Francois Copé of “fraud on an industrial scale”.

Man, that's one locked tight security system.  A veritable electronic Maginot line, even.

Why and how to teach yourself security

Reader James emails to ask:

I'd love to get a recording of your son's conversation with the consultant.  I almost went Cisco myself, got distracted, and now I just teach, but still a gear head, as clearly you are too.

He was referring, of course, to last Friday's meeting with one of my security consultant buddies.  It was not only fun to catch up with Chad, but seems pretty helpful to motivate #1 Son.

Let me start with why you might consider studying towards a certification in this field: Chad said that right now in Atlanta, the unemployment rate for Internet Security types is about 1% (and as he put it, rightly so - these are the people everyone knows are jerks).  So having this skill set more or less lets you pick where you want to live, and even starting salaries will be comfortable.  This had #1 Son's attention from the get-go.

Chad's recommendation was the same as mine as a starting point for certification: Cisco's CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) is widely valued and gives you a recognized entry.  You can pick up a study book at Barnes & Noble, but Chad recommended that you do hands on configuration of routers and switches.  You can pick up old Cisco 2500 routers for small money on eBay, but the code will be old.  Chad recommended using the Bosun NetSim router simulator which mimics all the Cisco gear and lets you work through the labs.  It's not very expensive, especially compared with College tuition.

They it's a couple hundred bucks to take the CCNA exam which is given all over the place.  Cisco has a bunch of self-study materials for free download.

Chad recommended thinking about looking at Microsoft certification, to see which is more interesting to you.  I'm an old packet pusher (meaning I can just about spell Operating System).  I'd recommend the MCSA certification for servers because it will be more valuable to most organizations than desktop.

But back to security.  These certifications are just the starting point, and while they won't cost too much ($400 or $500) and will open some doors, they will still be entry level.  The next step is playing with some of the security tools.  Chad likes Backtrack which is a complete Linux distribution that includes a huge number of security tools.  You can boot it from a thumbdrive, which makes it pretty handy.  They have online training at their web site.

Chad also recommended getting together with other guys who do security.  There are a bunch of DEFCON local groups which are associated with the DEFCON security conference.  Atlanta has a DEFCON 404 group, for example.

Ultimately you'll want to get Cisco ASA certified, but this is the sort of thing you can study for over a couple years, learning the prerequisites while you have an IT networking day job.  You get to this point and you'll be in the rarefied atmosphere of security pros, and paid commensurately.

I (and Chad) are pushing Cisco because betting against this over the next 20 years or so is basically betting against the Internet.  The security situation is getting worse, there's more of a need for people with this skill set, and it looks like you can use free or low cost tools and materials to put yourself in the driver's seat.

Why the IRS scandal won't go away, even in the "educated class"

Peggy Noonan may have brought the RINO outrage (yeah, yeah, yeah), bit Mencius told this tale of an idiot five years ago in a way that even Progressive "Intellectuals" will get it:

As a progressive, you regard the fields of public policy as more or less scientific. The 20th century is the century of scientific public policy. And just as there is no German physics or Catholic mathematics, there is no German public policy or Catholic public policy. There is only public policy. There is no "who." There is no rule. There is no world domination. There is only global governance.

So we see why it's inappropriate for George W. Bush to "politicize" the Justice Department. It is because the Justice Department is staffed with legal scholars. Is George W. Bush a legal scholar? Is a boar hog an F-16? When politics intrudes on the realm of science, it's more than just a violation. It's a kind of rape. One is instantly reminded of the Nazi stormtroopers, dancing around their flaming piles of books. One, if one is an American, is also reminded of the mindless jockery that ruled one's high-school years. Do you, dear progressive, have any hesitation about picking a side in this dispute? Of course not.

Do you, dear progressive, have any intellectual hesitation about picking a side in this dispute?  Of course, you will certainly run across many who care for nothing but a cheap tribalism.  And this is where you put the intellectual stiletto in betwixt the intellectual ribs, making them justify how what George W. Bush did was ZOMG it was so bad we'll never recover EVAH and why Barack Obama has a perfect crease in his trousers.

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules

- Saul Alinsky, Rules For Radicals

Molson Labe, suckers!

I stand with my Turkish brothers and sisters.  You can have this beer when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.  In all seriousness, the beer bottle is an icon in the former Caliphate.  Its image represents the modern and secular.  Good luck to the protesters across Turkey.

[stands]

[Salute!]

Cheers, Tayyip!

If the Tea Party were as racist and angry as the left claims it is ...

... then America would look like this:

Members and supporters of Golden Dawn chant the national anthem in front of the
Greek parliament. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Racially motivated violence has soared to such a degree that European officials blasted Greece for failing to take adequate action. Nils Muižnieks, the European commissioner for human rights, recently felt moved to point out that democracy was at risk in the birthplace of democracy because of "the upsurge in hate crime and a weak state response". It was vital, he said, that domestic and international anti-racism laws were enforced to crack down on violence that had been "linked to members or supporters, including parliamentarians, of the neo-Nazi political party Golden Dawn".

The irony of some unelected EU apparatchik calling something "anti-democratic", in the same paragraph of the mention of the mooting of laws to explicitly outlaw political parties - that irony seems to be wasted on the Guardian writer.  To the point raised in the title of this post, I'm keen to know if there has ever been a photograph like the one shown here taken at a Tea Party rally.

The Greek police and justice systems – both of which have been accused of colluding with the extremists – also had to be reformed, he said.

Indicative of the far right's growing political grip, the conservatives fear that legislation proposed by their leftwing partners will further alienate traditional voters who have migrated to Golden Dawn in disgust at the political establishment blamed for the country's crisis. The party's spectacular rise has been attributed, in part, to defections from the Greek orthodox church and the army.

Gee, ya think?  Maybe an increasing number of people see the same old Political Elites as bereft of ideas and legitimacy?  That they're seen as fiddling while Athens burns?  And it's not just Greece:

On 22 February 2013, a large crowd of 800,000 people attended the final rally of Beppe Grillo before the general election, in Piazza San Giovanni in Rome.^[52] On 24 and 25 February 2013, [MoVimento 5 Stelle, M5S] contested all Italian constituencies: Beppe Grillo was listed as head of the coalition, although he was not an electoral candidate.

The vote for M5S in the Chamber of Deputies reached 25.55% of the vote in Italy and 9.67% for overseas voters, for a total of 8,784,499 votes, making it the second most voted list after the Democratic Party (which acquired 25.42% of the votes in Italy and 29.9% abroad, or 8,932,615 votes), obtaining 108 deputies. The M5S vote for the Senate was 23.79% in Italy and 10% abroad, for a total of 7,375,412 votes, second only to the PD (which garnered 8,674,893 votes), obtaining 54 Senators. This was a successful election for M5S as the party gained a higher share of the vote than was expected by any of the opinion polls. The M5S won 25.6% of the vote for the Chamber of Deputies, more than any other single party.

The M5S is a very interesting juxtaposition with Golden Dawn.  While Golden Dawn is explicitly fascist (nationalist and socialist)  in word and deed, M5S is pretty libertarian.  But both are joined in a success fueled by the collapse of the legitimacy of the current European political Elite.  And quite frankly the Tea Party shares that same impetus.

The rage and fear on the left is not that the Tea Party is racist and angry, it's that it's out of patience with the American political "Elite" that is seen as fiddling while the Republic slowly collapses.  The good news for these shores is that while jack boots seem to be already echoing from the walls of the Herodes Atticus Odeon, things have not progressed nearly so far down that road here.  We shall see how that changes if there is not a real reckoning at the IRS.

(via)

Sometimes the contrarian perspective is just silly

I'm not arguing against being contrarian, since I do that a fair amount here.  I's saying that if you're going to do it, you need to carefully lay out your case.  Otherwise, you'll look silly, like the folks at PC Magazine saying that the Chinese weren't spying on the US Defense establishment:

The knee-jerk interpretation to this disclosure (and others) is that China is a powerhouse of cyber espionage capable of stealing whatever secrets they want and that the U.S. is powerless to stop them. This seems very unlikely.


Last week, the New York Times ran a piece which delved into China's hacker culture, revealing a disparate band of private contractors and not a team of highly trained hackers operating in lock-step with the government.

"Another former hacker said the monolithic notion of insidious, state-sponsored hacking now discussed in the West was absurd," wrote Edward Wong for the Times. "The presence of the state throughout the economy means hackers often end up doing work for the government at some point, even if it is through something as small-scale as a contract with a local government office."

Some of these pilfered secrets have made their way back to the central Chinese government, but it's just as likely that they were taken by individuals or companies and then sold to someone else. As is the case with other forms of cybercrime, the hackers are generally trying to make money off the information, not use it themselves.

This is just silly.  Who does the author thinks will pay money for the stolen information - the designs of the F-35, the Littoral warship, the anti-missile defenses?  Hello?  Bueller?

Just because you don't have a Ministry Of Cyber Espionage with a tony building in downtown Beijing, does anyone think that it's remotely plausible that there isn't a market for that sort of information?  Or that the People's Liberation Army isn't the top buyer for that sort of information?  Who does he think is paying for it - Anonymous?

And so the entire article is silly.  It makes a distinction that lacks a difference.  Of course the Chinese government is behind this.  It makes no difference whatsoever whether it was directly via the Ministry of H4X0rz or by  a revenue trail leading to chinese h4x0rz.  Macht nichts.

And please no whinging that the Red Chinese are not our enemies, and is actually a friendly government.  Again, that's a distinction without a difference.  The old saying is true here: there are friendly foreign governments, but there are no friendly foreign Intelligence Agencies.

Alice Tegnér - Violin Sonata

The late 19th Century was very different than today.  One example is the career options available to women, which were limited to occupations like teacher or governess (nanny).  But things had been changing for over a century, and the daughters of prosperous families were - in Europe and America at least - well educated in the classics.  Indeed, music was a core of their curriculum.

Some, like Alice Tegnér (neé Sandström) were accomplished musicians.  Tegnér also wrote poetry and then began writing children's songs.  They became quite popular, and she published many books of children's songs.

But she was also a quite credible classical composer, as we hear in her violin sonata (four parts due to Youtube's 10 minute limit).









But she's best known today for this, Mors lilla Olle about a boy who meets a bear in the woods.  His mother screams, scaring the bear off and the boy asks if the "dog" will come back again sometime.  This song is so popular in Sweden that it was actually hard to find a traditional version, as opposed to electronica reinterpretations.

The ice cream will be a little late

Late meetings yesterday (dudes, on Friday?), then shopping, then frying chickens for #1 Son's friends, now dropping him off at the airport. Oh, and a Saturday morning conference call.

Back later when things are sane.