Category: Flotsam-and-Jetsam

Authorities have yet to nail down a motive or culprit for more than a dozen breaches in the Bay Area

here’s a bad problem hitting the internet out west: someone’s been deliberately slicing through the cables that carry data between providers. And after looking into it for months, the FBI still has basically no idea who’s doing the damage or why. While everyone worries about high-tech hack attacks taking down networks, the attacks highlight that all it really takes is one determined person with a couple of cheap tools.

Damage to fiber-optic cables is, on some level, inevitable. Cars and trucks hit poles and take out above-ground wiring from time to time. Construction projects, large and small, put equipment in the wrong place and accidentally dig up a bundle of wires instead of a shovel of dirt. And then there are the squirrels, which seem to have a taste for destruction.

But what’s going on in California isn’t part of that low-level background chaos of being. Instead, it’s some kind of very deliberate series of attacks on heavy-duty cables that have been happening in the Bay area for at least a year.

The FBI has been investigating the acts of sabotage — now over a dozen — for months, but so far is no closer to any useful information, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The cuts have generally happened around midnight, give or take, and so far there are no known eyewitnesses who have seen any of the slicers doing the deed. Experts told the WSJ that all the attackers need is a hacksaw, a manhole lifter, and a rough idea of where to find the cables. Nobody knows how many people are involved. The timing and geography says that it could potentially be a single individual, but that they’d have had “little time to spare” to reach every spot in the same night.

Beyond that, the FBI’s got basically nothing: no motive, no suspects, and no understanding.

John Lightfoot, assistant deputy in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco field office, told the WSJ, “Everyone recognizes that there seems to be a pattern of events here … we really need the assistance of the public to reach out and help solve this one.”

Attacks on Fiber Networks in California Baffle FBI [Wall Street Journal]

translation we receive and publish (original is at contrainfo [pdf]):

Pachuca, Hidalgo, November 13 2014.

With this statement, some groupuscules of “Wild Reaction” (RS), will respond to the text “Some ideas about the present and the future” from “Ediciones Isumatag” (EI), published on their blog on October 6 of this year [2014].

At the same time, with this writing we demonstrate the existing distinction among critics of the industrial-technological system, specifically among those who are bent on and advocate the creation of an “organized movement capable of contributing to the overthrow of such a system”, and those like we who do not seek that, but rather, to attack the development of the systems progress from the present, tending to destabilize it.

With this text, we do not intend at all to open the sterile and impractical debate on future or present strategies which “have to” be taken while facing the industrial-technological system. Everyone decides their own path. What follows is just a quick exposure of our tendency regarding this topic. The intelligent ones who tend towards the wild will know very well how to analyze and criticize this communique.

LINK

The Suffocating Void: Domestication and Pathological Distraction – Kevin Tucker
From Black and Green Review no. 1, Spring 2015.
Read by Ryan Morgan of Paper Crane Audio.

The Suffocating Void is an anarcho-primitivist critique of the role social networking has played in the advancement of civilization through late modernity. An anti-technological look at how the widely unnoticed revolution of the digital/interface age has furthered the domestication process leading us further down the path of distracted dissatisfaction.

For the text with citations, click here: The Suffocating Void at the anarchist library

Special Report Duncan Campbell has spent decades unmasking Britain’s super-secretive GCHQ, its spying programmes, and its cosy relationship with America’s NSA. Today, he retells his life’s work exposing the government’s over-reaching surveillance, and reveals documents from the leaked Snowden files confirming the history of the fearsome ECHELON intercept project. This story is also published simultaneously today by The Intercept, and later today we’ll have video of Duncan describing ECHELON and related surveillance matters.

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Ross McNutt has a superpower — he can zoom in on everyday life, then rewind and fast-forward to solve crimes in a shutter-flash. But should he?

In 2004, when casualties in Iraq were rising due to roadside bombs, Ross McNutt and his team came up with an idea. With a small plane and a 44 mega-pixel camera, they figured out how to watch an entire city all at once, all day long. Whenever a bomb detonated, they could zoom onto that spot and then, because this eye in the sky had been there all along, they could scroll back in time and see – literally see – who planted it. After the war, Ross McNutt retired from the airforce, and brought this technology back home with him. Manoush Zomorodi and Alex Goldmark from the podcast “Note to Self” give us the low-down on Ross’s unique brand of persistent surveillance, from Juarez, Mexico to Dayton, Ohio. Then, once we realize what we can do, we wonder whether we should.

At this point, most Americans have acknowledged — and many have de facto accepted — that the government can access our personal data. And sometimes it takes a personal case to understand just how intimate that snooping can get.

What we haven’t known — and couldn’t quite tell from the 2013 Snowden leak — are the technological details of that surveillance. Nor have we understand how pervasive that technology had become, at even the most local of levels.

Today, we understand quite a bit more thanks to one man in particular. His name is Daniel Rigmaiden, and while he’s not exactly the knight-in-shining-armor type (he’s a convicted felon who spent years building an almost-air-tight tax fraud scheme), he is the one who figured out how the government tracks us using our cell phones, despite their best efforts to keep it hidden: the Stingray.

This week, we’ll tell his story on our show. It’s the first full telling since the drama went down.

Daniel Rigmaiden served more than five years in jail for tax fraud. He spent of that time figuring how, exactly, the government figured out it was him.

(Courtesy of Daniel Rigmaiden)

On a partner episode with Radiolab, we’re telling another, related story from a very different angle: the sky.

We think these podcasts will change the way you look at your phone, whether you’re an incredibly savvy tax fraudster or someone who just happens to notice when your phone mysteriously drops to the 2G network in the middle of a big city.

Jump to documents

In the biggest public release of documents from the DOD’s propaganda office I recently received over 1500 pages of new material.  Just under 1400 pages come from the US Army’s Entertainment Liaison Office: regular activity reports covering January 2010 to April 2015.  Another over 100 pages of reports come from the US Air Force’s office, covering 2013.

Article

TYLER’S REAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

1. We live in an age with no central creed. A world without a unifying vision.

2. The technology we currently use to communicate with unprecedented ease-it is already beginning to shape rather than merely deliver our messages. Currently, this technology refuses to recognize certain words. Soon it will refuse to record or transmit those words. Soon after, technology will replace our words with language it deems an improvement. As the written word goes, so will go speech and thought.

3. Without expression through other avenues, impulses will find release through violent, destructive acts.

4. Future social engineering will be instantly and easily instituted through communication technology. Our crimes will report themselves. Each crime will serve as its own confession.

5. At that point all messages will become the same mes­sage. Nothing new will ever be said. Power will become fixed in society.

6. A leader will emerge because no one wants to live as his or her own master. Everyone wishes for a mentor, a stern accounting which will hold us to a higher standard than any of us dare to hold ourselves. For left to our own reasonable aspirations, we will evolve to fulfill the paltry dreams of a child. The tepid dreams instilled within us by those already in power. Our ideal leader will push us beyond our own timid goals. That leader will drive each person to attain a power of his or her own.

7. People consist of those who hold back, day after day, waiting for the perfect idea to execute-to risk devoting their time and energy to depicting. Versus those who are always ready and watching for the next opportunity to develop their skill at communicating with others. The first group might eventually find that perfect idea, but when the opportunity arrives their skills will be weak, forgotten, or never acquired. For those who wait, their perfect idea will die unborn.

8. Inspiration comes to those who show themselves ready to act upon it. The people who daily use every invitation to express, to communicate-they will become lightning rods which both attract ideas and conduct them for useful purpose.

9. Self-expression has become our largest consumable commodity: greeting cards, flowers, jewelry, music, all gifts. A dozen heavily marketed events dictate when we exchange these symbols and when we express predetermined emotions. A host of products are always waiting to demonstrate our love, gratitude, congratulations, sympathy, best wishes. Always justifiable purchases. Failure to exchange symbols accordingly constitutes an antisocial act.

10. Thus power lies in expressing what others no longer have the ability to express. Greater than monetary power, the fully expressed, skillful communicator will not be limited to the forms of expression available in the marketplace.The skillful communicator must bring to public attention until-now-unrecognized feelings, shared by many but voiced by none. Such an artist will articulate the hearts of people and become their voice.

11. Nerve plays as large a role as skill in creativity. Nerve and awareness both. The suppressed deny their feelings, or fear expressing them, or lack the skills to do so. Therefore all three of those traits must the creative person cultivate: awareness, nerve, and skill.

12. With the skill to organize and present ideas-with such effectiveness that they occur fully intact in the minds of others-with that skill comes the ability to conceive of increasingly greater ideas and to also transmit those in a way that makes them useful and appealing.

13. No idea will be yours unless it visits you first. No idea you initially see on television will be your idea. No idea you discover in a film will be yours.

14. Only the most unrefined sources will yield the raw material for new ideas. You must train yourself as someone ready to record.You must trust your own judgment to keep or discard. Be able to retrieve fragments if they relate to some new detail of information. Identify patterns, even though their elements might occur years apart. Piece together these fragments until they convey an unmistakable message.

15. Fight Club is the battle of the fully expressed person, Tyler, against the fully suppressed Sebastian. How you are in executing this homework assignment predicts how you perform in life. Will you be someone who merely consumes the narrative or someone who actively expands and participates in it? Do you express yourself fully and effectively, or do you purchase a surrogate means of expression made by some machine, a commoditized gesture which reduces your most intimate human interactions to empty rituals?

16. The creators applaud those people whose work you see in this section.They are the ones who boldly seize this opportunity to practice and prove their ability.

Tyler Durden, signing off

Internal memo from secretive British spy unit exposes how GCHQ and NSA used human psychological research to create sophisticated online propaganda tools

With never-before-seen documents accompanied by new reporting on Monday, The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman are offering a more in-depth look than ever into how a secretive unit of the UK’s GCHQ surveillance agency used a host of psychological methods and online subterfuge in order to manipulate the behavior of individuals and groups through the internet and other digital forms of communication.

According to the reporting, the latest documents, which were leaked to journalists by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden,

demonstrate how the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), a unit of the signals intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), is involved in efforts against political groups it considers “extremist,” Islamist activity in schools, the drug trade, online fraud, and financial scams.

Though its existence was secret until last year, JTRIG quickly developed a distinctive profile in the public understanding, after documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the unit had engaged in “dirty tricks” like deploying sexual “honey traps” designed to discredit targets, launching denial-of-service attacks to shut down internet chat rooms, pushing veiled propaganda onto social networks, and generally warping discourse online.

Among the most troubling revelations is a 42-page internal JTRIG memo that describes in detail how the elite unit developed, maintained, and apparently sought to expand its “scientific and psychological research into how human thinking and behavior can be influenced” in order to increase its ability to “manipulate public opinion” via online tools like email, social media, video, discussion forums, and other platforms.

Read the rest here