A TOUCH OF OUCH

Saw this at instapundit and it's too good to not post here. If you read the story you'll see that the most senior members of the FBI took it on themselves to send Martin Luther King, Jr, a letter telling him that he should kill himself. If that sounds a little more humane than the FBI we've come to know, it's only because the Supreme Court and the rest of the judicial system now allows anyone with a badge to just shoot anyone without a badge. Things were a little different in the 1960s so the FBI resorted to its famous 'soft power' approach to dealing with uppity citizens.

James Comey posted in his usual sanctimonious style and was thoroughly owned:

FACEBOOK AND ME

I only signed up for an account to keep a channel open to Texas and the West Coast and one particular little person. Today I found this waiting for me when I did my quarterly check to see what insane gibbering and Trump hatred my friends had come up with over the last 3 months:

I was happy to oblige.

They said they would get back to me after they checked it out and meanwhile they were closing my account for my security.

The warm fuzzy from that exchange is only starting to slowly fade away. Thank God that facebook is there to look out for my security. I mean, if you can't trust facebook, who can you trust?

LRAD NOISING OFF IN CUBA

A number of Americans have been evacuated, again, from Cuba. Americans working in our embassy there have been suffering from some sort of acoustic attack directed at both the embassy and specific workers there. The State Department professes profound cluelessness about how their people were deafened or attacked in Cuba.

Here's a clue.

Back when I was working at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in San Diego, I went to LRAD's offices and we got a pretty good demo when they first went  public with their system which they proposed as a form of area denial non-lethal weapon. The sound is projected from the dish and while it is not as focused as a laser beam, it is channelled and remarkably loud at enormous ranges. We were looking at using them later for venue security at the Greek Olympics and set up a couple in our offices in Old Town. It's a pretty cool system and I don't see why it wouldn't work above the audible frequencies we can hear and still create considerable damage to the ear and nervous system.

Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) For Police Crowd Control

DIRECTIONALITY, POWER EFFICIENCY & RANGE

1. Highly intelligible communication up to 3,000 meters
2. Safely communicates beyond standoff distances to determine intent
3. Variable beam width for extended coverage
4. Clear, long range, directional communication
5. Establishes instant acoustic standoff perimeter

SIGNALLING

I was one of those who laughed out loud as I watched the wretched media tear into Trump for his tweet last month that claimed that the Obama administration was using the intelligence community to spy on him and his team during the campaign. Oh how the worthless media all clubbed together to spike that tweet and slam Trump for his fabulism and pathetic world of make-believe. Remember?

That little tweet was 'signalling' in the old style. As you recall, our State Department (mostly Kissinger) and JFK, LBJ and Nixon, all believed in signalling via B52s. Their message sucked, the delivery was rude and the meaning subject to misinterpretation. They sucked at signalling. Trump nails it.

Trump had to do very little follow up as the results are in and they're pretty conclusive. The Obama administration DID spy on him and his friends and fellows and probably all the other rethuglican candidates before they were outstumped by Trump. There's no ifs ands or buts about it. Yes, yes, Rice will take the 5th or find the same convenient inability to remember anything that was first explored by Hillary in her testimony to Congress about the massacre in Benghazi but the smoking gun is still lying there right in the middle of the carpet in the Oval Office.

Signalling With Intent

I think Trump should carry on with his tweets. Any student of civilization will be able to look back in ten years time and point to the signals he sent via the 140 characters allowed by twitter and clearly identify the outcomes of each carefully couched sniper shot into the body politic. Hell, I may even sign up for twitter just so I can follow Trump and see what's coming next.

I listened to the Dark Side this afternoon when I was out picking up Chinese food and they, as usual, carefully selected a guest who loathes Trump, Republicans and mid-westerners and bounced their twitty little questions off him as their reliable sounding board for how all people in the world think about the evil, vicious, no good, dirty rotten scoundrel Trump. The only question/answer I had the patience to hear was about how Trump really pissed off all the Germans by telling them that they need to honor the commitment they made of their own free will to spend 2% of their GDP on defense. To hear the Drooling Orc of Harvard, it appears that only a complete idiot and moron would do something to piss off our dear allies in Das Reich because, allies dontchyaknow.

Srsly, with allies like that, who needs enemies? Come to think of it, we're gonna build a Maginot Line of our own here on our continent and the Wisconsin National Guard could defeat Canada's armed forces in a weekend. We don't really need to keep expeditionary armored units larger than a Marine Expeditionary Unit and we'll just let the good people of Europe explore their sudden urge to speak Russian in the wake of the FYDP they aren't funding for themselves.

I know a lot of the putative armchair naval strategists of our time have been ginning up all kinds of reasons to expand the fleet and increase the number of warships because China but that's kind of a no-brainer since we are still pretty much unable to beat China in China's hemisphere. The last time the West won in that part of the world was the Boxer Rebellion (and Japan but that took nukes). The various countries around China will dance to China's tune because they have no choice. It's not that the Chinese PLA would win a war overnight but they have what's known as infinite depth in manpower, weapons and will and the various countries around China hate and distrust each other even more than they distrust China and could no more form and maintain a mutual defense pact than Greece could ever pay off its debts.

So yes, despite all the best will in the world to never have anything to do with twitter, it looks like it is time to sign up and follow Trump. He is putting up signposts as he blazes a new trail through the wilderness that is international politics and diplomacy and also giving some darned good heads up warnings on where domestic policy is going to go in the future with his tweets.

LAST FULL MEASURE OF INCOMPETENCE

I don't think anything more needs to be said. 147 FBI Agents are investigating Hillary Clinton for her crimes.

I'll say it anyway. If proof nailed itself to their foreheads, do you think the FBI or Justice Department would take notice?

UPDATE:
I haven't watched the news in some time and wonder if Obama has given Hillary one tenth the support he has given Castro, Argentine and Venezuelan socialist rulers in the last week. Is he backing Hillary with the same ruthless enthusiasm he has shown for Assad, Putin, Pol Pot, Ho, Mao and Stalin? I mean, it's not everyday that a Constitutional Law scholar just announces that there is no difference between communism and capitalism.

I think it's kind of funny that neither Hillary nor Obama think they'd be the first decorating the bottom of some nameless well in Michigan when the Revolution does to them what it did to the Romanovs, Bourbons and Ceauescu.

COMPELLED TO ATTACK

The Hoover Institute has an interesting article that nails the spirit of the War on People the government is waging on us in our name.

The difficulty here is that the information that was sought from Farook’s iPhone had not been backed up, so that the government could not conduct a simple search on its own to get it. Instead, it had to attack the encryption systems built into the phone itself.

The United States has a vast agency whose only purpose is to attack the encryption systems and communications of other countries and terrorists everywhere. It's called the National Security Agency and if the government feels compelled to crack Apple's encryption, that's who they should turn to, not the Courts and not to Apple.*

Apple, as the article goes on to state, freely complied with turning over all the data that it had on the phone belonging to the California State agency that owned it, but that isn't enough according to the FBI. They want Apple to create an entryway into their own encryption system that the government can then exploit whenever it feels like. I'll bet they don't feel compelled to pay Apple to do the necessary work either.

Still, I suppose if I was running Apple, I'd do just as the State Department does in complying with the Court and put my best Hillary Clinton type Apple software engineer (Smedley Dewlap) to work on developing a hack into the Apply encryption. I'd have to tell the Court that it might take some time before we can get back to them with the results ordered since Smedley thinks 'wiping a computer' involves using a cloth of some kind. I'd also send them the bill. Smedley's don't work cheap and they eat up a lot of other people's resources.

*I'll bet a donut that the NSA already has an entrance to Apple's encryption and I'll bet another donut, Apple quietly sold it to them last year. I'll bet a third donut that Apple's attorneys are already telling the FBI this.

HILLARY CLINTON MUST GO TO JAIL

Those familiar with the history of World War II and the code breaking era know of the extraordinary damage the allies were able to wreak on our enemies because we read their top secret messages because we were able to break the Enigma and Purple Codes (and a host of others). We were able to predict the Japanese attack on Midway and position what remained of our Pacific Fleet in a position to destroy the Japanese Navy's aircraft carriers and end the Japanese onslaught and begin turning the war into a string of never-ending defeats for Japan.

Hillary and her enablers in the State Department put us in the position of the Japanese and the Germans by giving away our top secret positions on every single matter of diplomacy and war that fell under the auspices of the U.S. State Department. Those people need to go to jail.

People (albeit dim witted people) wonder how Putin was able to pull off such masterful accomplishments as stealing Crimea back from Ukraine, aiding Syria in pulling off the Syrian chemical weapons scam that bamboozled the ignorant because he knew that Barack was only lying when he talked about a red line and invading Ukraine with impunity and complete assurance because he knew that diplomatically and presidentially nothing would happen to him as a result of invading a foreign sovereign government's country. How did he know all this? He read it in Hillary Clinton's damned email because the Russians had every scrap of data off her server in real time.

People who have no idea how National Security Information works may wonder at the vehemence of those who do know at the calamity that Hillary initiated because she broke the law. Charlie Martin gives an expert and easy to follow example of just what had to happen in order for Top Secret SCI information to get onto Hillary's home server and servers in a bathroom closet in Denver in Hillary's Air Gap Problem.

Hillary Clinton and her aides and even 'real diplomats' who sent Top Secret information to Hillary at her .com address need to go to jail. People who break those laws must be sentenced to prison and not receive presidential pardons if the law is to have any meaning and encourage people to obey the law. Scooter Libby was sentenced to prison for far less and people like Pollard and Manning will spend decades in prison for violating the same exact law.

I've always known that Hillary Clinton was scum but this time she cannot evade responsibility for her actions and neither should any of those who sent her TS SCI information at her email address. There was NO WAY that this could have happened by accident. No way in the world could it happen by accident. Some idiot installer may stupidly and inadvertently connect a SIPRNET server to a NIPRNET connection but there is no way that can happen with this level of information. Somebody pulled it off a stand-alone terminal, stripped the headers and footers and the paragraph markings and knowingly communicated it to an unclassified unprotected server.

Consider all the damage we were able to do to our enemies throughout World War II and much of the Cold War because we could read their diplomatic and military coded messages and communications. There were a lot of times when we weren't bluffing at all because we knew what our enemies would accept if push came to shove and our President and his staff knew they could get away with forcing the enemy that far, if no further. Hillary put us in that position but this time it was our enemies who knew what are diplomatic bottom line was better than anybody on the planet because they read her mail and it included the President's stance on any given topic under active consideration at the State Department.

I'm going to wait patiently for somebody to now leap out of the woodwork and exclaim that "Hillary was a Stalking Horse and she was DELIBERATELY feeding misinformation to our enemies by engaging in this private home based server email system!" She was being used by the Intel Community in a deliberate plan for deceiving our enemies. Wait for it, it will happen soon. Never mind that it seems to have always worked in favor of damaging our national security our credibility  and world peace.

WHAT CHINESE HACKERS KNOW ABOUT ALL OF US

It looks like the major media are lightly stepping over the recent revelation that Chinese hackers have been rooting around in the Office of Personnel Management's files for over a year. For those that don't know what the Office of Personnel Management is, here is a brief summary:

OPM controls thousands of agents who go forth and investigate the background information provided by all employees of the United States who require a National Security Clearance in order to work for the U.S. Government. That includes all military officers and most enlisted personnel. It includes most State Department employees and Foreign Service Officers and it includes almost all of the bureaucrats working in every other job. For instance, CIA, NSA, DIA, Secret Service personnel require security clearances and background investigations as do all FBI agents and all the other agents one can think of.

OPM's databases are online and include completed copies of this form.  Go ahead and look. You know you want to see how bad it is knowing that these are not only compromised but almost certainly include the OPM agent's report of investigation and notes which are used to limit or deny clearances and deny access.

I won't be surprised to learn that all of those who completed the paperwork for Special Background Investigations are clearly denoted and their access described in fuller detail. You know, the people who require Q clearances or access to Restricted or Formerly Restricted Data. It probably even has clues for who was investigated or reinvestigated as access requirements ballooned and moved beyond Top Secret.

The terrible thing about OPM is that they were quick off the ball a decade ago and required all submissions of form SF 86 to be made electronically. ie, all of us squirted our personal information directly into OPM's computers because they refused to accept paper submission of SF 86's after 2005.

I think every single person involved in this fiasco at OPM must be fired and horsewhipped and then deported to Iran. Where was their Information Vulnerability Assessment? Where was their cyber security? Why wasn't the data encrypted given how insanely valuable it could be to an up and coming superpower? This catastrophe ranks up there with Hanssen, Ames and Walker for the damage it has caused and will cause going downstream.

This won't be solved by firing the #1 bureaucrat. This requires the wholesale demotion and firing of every person involved in safeguarding the information they acquired and retained in the leaky sieve laughingly known as the security database.

SQUARELY ON THE HEAD

Nails it.

I worked with our country teams in the Middle East a long time and think that the article nails the FSO's to the wall with their own pointed barbed words. One has to see to believe how meaningless the State Department has made Ambassadors and our Embassies.

In my lifetime, an Ambassador was his country's voice abroad.

SONY POND SCUM, THE STORY

Sony has been gutted by the seizure and abuse of its personal and private data. The data was stripped off their networks without any alarms or flags popping up and then the organization that stole the data used it punish Sony executives and share holders. I find it amusing that the other motion picture studios are holding their breath waiting to see what slime floats to the surface when their private files are leaked. I'm OK with whatever comes next. You see, these guys deserve it.

The entertainment industry calls for:
spyware on your computer that detects and deletes infringing materials;
mandatory censorware on all Internet connections to interdict transfers of infringing material;
border searches of personal media players, laptops and thumb-drives;
international bullying to force other countries to implement the same policies;
and free copyright enforcement provided by Fed cops and agencies (including the Department of Homeland Security!).

Remember who started the cyberwar. It was SONY.

The Sony BMG CD copy protection rootkit scandal of 2005–2007 concerns deceptive, illegal, and potentially harmful copy protection measures implemented by Sony BMG on about 22 million CDs. When inserted into a computer, the CDs installed one of two pieces of software which provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Both programs could not be easily uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. Sony claims this was unintentional. One of the programs installed even if the user refused its EULA, and it "phoned home" with reports on the user's private listening habits; the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all, contained code from several pieces of open-source software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software's existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.

Sony BMG initially denied that the rootkits were harmful. It then released, for one of the programs, an "uninstaller" that only un-hid the program, installed additional software which could not be easily removed, collected an email address from the user, and introduced further security vulnerabilities.

Following public outcry, government investigations, and class-action lawsuits in 2005 and 2006, Sony BMG partially addressed the scandal with consumer settlements, a recall of about 10% of the affected CDs, and the suspension of CD copy protection efforts in early 2007.

The details are graphic and well worth a quick read. Sony deliberately, with malice aforethought, attacked 22 million computers in America and loaded them up with spyware.

WHERE ARE YOUR IDENTITY PAPERS

Meet the people who want to bar code you or tattoo a permanent ID on your wrist. Yeah, you just thought it was the national socialists. They're everywhere these days and they don't even see the fiendish irony.

They always think reducing humans to marked easily identifiable property is the best course of action, for the safety that's in it.

The latest socialists want to use whatever method it takes including mandatory biometrics to make every computer user distinguishable to police investigators diligently searching the cyberspaces for crimes.

ENDS JUSTIFY THE MEANS

Doesn't it always look like this when the law moves?

But Frank Montoya Jr., the special agent in charge of the FBI in Seattle during the case, defended the investigation techniques, which led to the arrest and conviction of a 15-year-old student.

“Every effort we made in this investigation had the goal of preventing a tragic event like what happened at Marysville and Seattle Pacific University,” Montoya said. “We identified a specific subject of an investigation and used a technique that we deemed would be effective in preventing a possible act of violence in a school setting.”

“Use of that type of technique happens in very rare circumstances and only when there is sufficient reason to believe it could be successful in resolving a threat.”

It's kind of like Assassination; nobody would do it if there was any alternative.

WHAT THE NSA DOES

An interesting and informative summary of all of the revelations about NSA spying revealed by Snowden.  Remember the days of long ago when people laughed out loud at paranoiacs who raved about ECHELON and OMNIVORE? The funny thing to me is that people still don't believe that the NSA spies on everybody.

Our Representatives were supposed to keep on eye on the spies in our name

APPEARANCES CAN BE DECEIVING

Genius is relative. You don't know.

Snowden fooled the NSA totally and completely? They lay back and spread their legs and opened up all the sources and methods they want you to know about....And now the bad guys know that keeping the Drones off them is really not going to happen. Fuck with US and die. That's a worthy goal and it cost us nothing. The sources and methods here can no longer be compromised. They are ubiquitous. There is no way around them.....yet.

Was the private lost in Afghanistan an ultra deep cover operative working for the NSA who tagged all those losers and in a couple of months we'll be reading about how the micro-sweat he left in their dank worlds serves as a homing beacon for Tomahawks?

Can't you see it? American pee as a fire control system for our Drones. The new NSA motto, "We know where Americans have been!"

OBL and his fellow muslim terrorists should be afraid.

WHAT NEW INNOVATIONS

I'm curious. Here the brainiacs of American Policy slammed the door on THE MAN who owns our access to space and still, Popular Mechanics suggests that we need to fear Russia's ignorance of space stuff and science. We could just use our space launch stuff and conclusively demonstrate our superior understanding of rocketry and space science, right?

Soviet powered rocket at Cape Canaveral 2011

What exactly has come out of our long fondue party in space over the last 30 years? There was Tang. Anything recently?

Maybe NASA ought to try a new ad campaign to demonstrate all the myriad reasons for our space superiority because other than spy satellites I'm not really seeing any ROI, and why do we need Russian engines to power all of our rockets anyway? What idiot thought that was a good idea?

I  never laughed as we fell out of orbit. I know what we lost and what we gave away.

UPDATED: This posted without warning and before intended.

TRON DIES HORRIBLY ON THE WIRE IN CYBERWAR

Iranian muslims were surfing the Navy Marine Corps Internet for over 4 months that we know about. They made their way into the unclassified network in the usual way of hackers and other cyber ne'er-do-wells and had a fine time examining all the content they could suck through their cyber hookahs. The ugly little secret is that once you're in to the NMCI network you can pretty much roam at will through the largest intra-net in the world. Once you're in and attach the data vacuum all you have to do is suck, a lot. The code breakers and other hackers will get you into the password protected sites and files and you can read them at your leisure.

Nothing happens without a reason. I hope the Iranians enjoyed reading the public mail. Sometimes one has to remember that the Soviets didn't suddenly come to the realization that they were competing so far out of their league it wasn't even a contest. Somebody had to help them to see for themselves just how disparate was the correlation of forces. There's enough on the unclassified networks to make it pretty clear that the US could do a complete take down of the Iranian forces and impose a regime change in less than a week. If it wanted to. It doesn't hurt anybody to let them know that before they make it necessary.

SERVICE TO THE STATE

A parable for our times:

A man goes into a bar and orders a beer. It happens that the bar owner is serving up the drinks. The man points out that the bar owner's employees are all in the back stealing the booze and pilfering the petty cash.

When the owner rushes to the back of the bar and finds that his employers really are stealing everything, he is justifiably angry and returns to the bar to find that the man who told him about the thieves was gone.

Without paying for his beer.

That vicious low down unprincipled son of a bitch!

At this point, the more I read about the NSA and the Government, the less impressed I am with anything they have to say for themselves. I think the law provides punishment for those aiding and abetting law-breakers and also for those conspiring to commit crimes. It's pretty obvious that the NSA and government have been breaking the law. If the NSA had a single argument with merit, it might be the old one used by the CIA for those who ratted out American spies abroad and thus put their lives in danger. But these are American spies, spying on Americans in America. Who's going to punish them for violating American Law?

Get impeached for covering up breaking into the Democratic Party offices to rummage around for their secrets in Watergate. Break into every office and home in the land to steal secrets: who's doing the covering up now?

It was domestic beer anyway.

FROM THE NSA FILES

Ace investigators of INS have turned up the NSA files on a previously unsuspected group of insurgents. Below are the notes on these unsuspected national security hooligans.

The NSA. It's like they know everything. It does make me wonder why they were spying on Angela Merkel though. Outside of being an East German apparatchik, what did she ever do?