Having lived through the ’00s I’ve been exhausted with having to offer defense of a number of people who clearly don’t face any of the supposed self-control problems that have been leveled at them. All of the misgivings that people might launch at adulterers and philanderers have for one reason or another been leveled at a group of people who have sought nothing more than freedom of association. The moral traditions that decry homsexuality on account of its supposedly representing a poor moral choice miss the point entirely. Such moral dictates are blind to the biological realities that bind humans to their very existences, and we have every good reason to shun them. Some individuals’ being born without a definitive gender absolves homosexuals of any aspects of volition or free will, characteristics necessary to define sin in any context.
A Homosexual
The chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts himself, although appointed by the conservative Bush administration, invested part of his own pro bono, professional stake in defending a case called Lawrence vs. Texas, a piece of litigation that granted American humans the humble right to engage in consensual sexual acts with other adults within the confines of their own bedrooms. Lawrence involved a man who had a warrant issued for his cocaine possession. When Texas police officers burst into his home and found him engaged in anal sex, they used that as an excuse to take him into custody. That apprehension eventually made its way up to the land’s highest court, and eventually said court decided that Americans’ sexual lives were no longer the subjects of physical intervention by the federal government. This was the so-called controversy that spawned the Defense of Marriage Act, signed by President Bill Clinton; as well as the larger gay marriage debate that defined national politics, particularly for the first half of the previous decade.
Sin is defined by an individual making a choice he, she or “re” understands to be incorrect. Biological realities mitigate any such considerations about homosexuals. One out of 2,000 live births is hermaphroditic, thereby lacking any specific gender. More explicitly, considerations must lie on individuals who lack any specific gender’s definitive genitalia. Some individuals are born with elongated clitorises; others without total scrotal development, naturally homologous to the development of the labia, without complete testicular development. Stigmatizing these individuals is akin to offering a similar treatment to sufferers of other predispositions, including Down syndrome. To wit, socially conservative American politicians, such as Rick Santorum and Sarah Palin, have built entire careers on the shoulders of the compassion they indeed exhibit toward their differently abled children, a compassion they do not care to show toward the hermaphrodite. Because of their own deeply rooted sexual hang-ups, they have substituted what should be compassion with hatred.
The very existence of hermaphroditism is key to understanding the underlying, vicious evil of homophobia and inevitably all who roundly condemn homosexuals. This physically exterior diversity, common to the human species, must obviously mirror a multitude of internal hormonal landscapes, which naturally must escape the reproach of volition or accusations of “sin.”
Manhattan– The internet police monitored the illicit activities of “hacker” Mir Islam in order to effectively establish undercover agents in his midst. Hilariously, an agent brought him an FBI-issue credit card pre-loaded with OMG DON’T TOUCH THAT MONEY funds. The agent said it was a counterfeit credit card pre-programmed with legitimately stolen credit card numbers. Islam – being a lazy, ignorant bastard – believed what the federal agent told him and was subsequently arrested after he tried to use it. Somehow, the jester is taking credit for this.
Mir Islam, a.k.a. “JoshTheGod,” trafficked in stolen credit card information and possessed information for more than 50,000 credit cards. Islam also held himself out as a member of “UGNazi,” a hacking group that has claimed credit for numerous recent online hacks, and as a founder of “Carders.Org,” a carding forum on the internet.
Last night, Islam met in Manhattan with an individual he believed to be a fellow carder – but who, in fact, was an undercover FBI agent – to accept delivery of what Islam believed were counterfeit credit cards encoded with stolen credit card information. Islam was placed under arrest after he attempted to withdraw illicit proceeds from an ATM using one of the cards.
Today, the FBI seized the web server for UGNazi.com and seized the domain name of Carders.org, taking both sites offline.
Pointless slapfighting ensued and, with the exception of rustling Roseanne Barr’s jimmies, nothing really got accomplished until today, when agents on federal payroll did their jobs proving once again that a college education and eight hour workday are all you really need to protect what’s left of a restless, decaying society.
Cuba's defunct Presidio Modelo, the only "panoptic" prison facility true to the vision of utilitarianism founder Jeremy Bentham
WASHINGTON – Government secrecy faced major public scrutiny this month, as a former National Security Agency mathematician’s claims to all-encompassing government surveillance did not line up with the NSA director’s public statements; and the American Civil Liberties Union found itself embroiled in controversies associated with what it contends are abuses of power by the executive branch, as well as local law enforcement.
Secret Patriot Act Interpretations
Last month the American Civil Liberties Union asked for clarification of the meaning of Section 215 of the Patriot Act. DailyKos Blogger Joan McCarter writes: “The provision in question, [Section] 215, allows the government to gain access to records of citizens’ activities being held by a third party. It gives the FBI the power to force doctors, libraries, bookstores, universities and internet service providers, for example, to turn over records on their clients or customers.”
In a March letter to the American Civil Liberties Union, FBI’s special counsel Paul Colborn said, “We have searched the [Office of Legal Counsel's] files and found two documents that are responsive to your request. We are withholding the documents pursuant to [Freedom of Information Act] Exemption Five, 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(5). They are protected by the deliberative process privilege, and they are not appropriate for discretionary release.”
While the Obama administration feels that the public is entitled to an understanding of public law, its Department of Justice has said it does not feel that the public is entitled to a full understanding of its own interpretation of public law it enforces.
Alleged National Security Agency Surveillance of Virtually All Domestic Citizen Communications
A former senior NSA mathematician, William Binney, spoke to Democracy Now! this week and expounded upon claims he made to Wired magazine last month. Mr. Binney told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. He said that “that [secret interpretation of Patriot Act Section 215] gives [the NSA] license to take all the commercially held data about us, which is exceedingly dangerous, because if you take that and put it into forms of graphing, which is building relationships or social networks for everybody, and then you watch it over time, you can build up knowledge about everyone in the country. And having that knowledge then allows them the ability to concoct all kinds of charges, if they want to target you.”
Asked Ms. Goodman, “Do you believe all emails, the government has copies of, in the United States?”
Mr. Binney said, “I would think – I believe they have most of them, yes.”
She said, “And you’re speaking from a position where you would know, considering your position in the National Security Agency.”
He replied, “Right. All they would have to do is put various Narus devices at various points along the network, at choke points or convergent points, where the network converges, and they could basically take down and have copies of most everything on the network.”
Narus is a subsidiary of Boeing that developed the NarusInsight, a computer system whose installation by AT&T in San Francisco generated a class-action lawsuit. The Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges that the telecommunications giant, using the NarusInsight, helped the NSA monitor practically all communication and relayed it to the NSA.
Last month’s Wired article, by James Bamford, relays Mr. Binney speaking of NSA monitoring techniques. “’How do you manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?’ he says. ‘The way we proposed was to distinguish between things you want and things you don’t want.’ Instead, he adds, ‘they’re storing everything they gather.’”
In April of 2006, former AT&T technician Mark Klein, who said he witnessed the application of NarusInsight in San Francisco, wrote in a public statement, “Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of this administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA’s spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA’s charter or with [the Foreign Intelligence Surveilance Act.] And unlike the controversy over targeted wiretaps of individuals’ phone calls, this potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of internet communications of countless citizens.” As Wired acknowledges, the reason that Mr. Binney’s statements to the magazine are so important is because they are the first instance in which we have a statement from inside the NSA confirming Mr. Klein’s suspicions about Internet service provider NSA “black rooms,” the ambiguity of whose existence has become the linchpin for high-profile federal court litigation against the NSA.
An ongoing case against the NSA filed by another former AT&T employee, Carolyn Jewel, elicited one government response implying that stating that Ms. Jewel is not associated with al-Qaeda, or a foreign terrorist organization associated with al-Qaeda, could pose a national security risk. In the brief, the government contends, “As the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) explained in his declaration asserting the state secrets privilege, the privilege extends to key evidence implicated by plaintiffs’ claims, such as whether plaintiffs themselves had been subjected to any surveillance of the type alleged in their complaints. Confirmation or denial of such claims would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.” (In theory only al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda associates can be legally subject to warrantless surveillance of this alleged kind.) The brief asserts that denial of even specifically Ms. Jewel’s being monitored could “reasonably could be expected to harm the national security of the United States.”
Despite Ms. Jewel’s claims that practically every American faces extensive NSA surveillance, the Justice Department contends that the plaintiff’s claims to being almost certainly monitored, even were she correct, do not grant her the requisite standing to file suit, just as similar claims did not justify the first suit, Hepting v. NSA, associated with Mr. Klein’s claims about AT&T’s complicity in alleged illegal NSA activity. That activity, another court decided, was made retroactively legal by the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Added the government brief, Ms. Jewel is alleging “additional activities that go far beyond the acknowledged [Terrorist Surveillance Program] and that have never been confirmed or denied by the government.”
During its Binney segment, Democracy Now! played a clip from a House Armed Service Subcommittee hearing where the head of the NSA, Army General Keith Alexander, says “to conduct [the mass collection of citizen emails, cellphone conversations, Google searches, text messages, Amazon.com orders, and bank records]in the United States, it would have to go through a court order, and the court would have to authorize it. We are not authorized to do it, nor do we do it.”
Gen. Alexander’s statement, which he delivered to Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA), amounts to a denial of any extrajudicial monitoring of communications between citizens inside the United States. Additionally, Gen. Alexander’s denials to Rep. Johnson appear to accomplish what the government’s response in the Jewel case does not seek to, namely to reveal “to foreign adversaries the channels of communication that may or may not be secure.” The testimony to the general public appears to indicate that most lines of communication are secure.
Asking for clarification in the course of Rep. Johnson’s questions, Gen. Alexander asks if a particular inquiry was referencing reporting by James “Bashford [sic].”
Extensive Extrajudicial Cellphone Tracking by Local Law Enforcement
This month the ACLU has reported on the extensive use of cellphone tracking by local police forces, often without judicial review. Telecommunications companies even charge police forces surveillance fees for making use of the extant tracking technology, installed in all modern cellphones, which is based on antenna location and not necessarily GPS.
In the 200 responses they received to their 380-department inquiry on tracking cellphones, the ACLU says, “only a tiny minority reported consistently obtaining a warrant and demonstrating probable cause to do so.”
Two weeks later after the ACLU’s proclamation, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said in a hearing, “Such surveillance is neither limited to terrorist threats, or most importantly, subject to a warrant requirement or judicial review — a little bit too close to big brother for me,” adding a pledge to try to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to mitigate any local abuses.
EAGER, ARIZ. – This tax day, the legacy of tax protesters still lives strong. And perhaps among the most famous Americans in their number was Bill Cooper, who now resides in a cemetery just off of 356 South Papago Street in Springerville, Ariz. Hanging in the area near Mr. Cooper is not much that Google Maps seems to want to comment on – a baseball diamond, a fenced in area to take a stroll – no webcam footage.
All that looks available of the area is a single Flickr user with geotracking on a digital single-lens reflex camera. That there is tax-dodging country.
How Not To Dodge Your Taxes
Here is The Internet Chronicle’s guide to fearing the IRS, who is like Seal Team 6, but more omniscient.
The heat will probably be really hyped up, even if you’re just really just a self-sufficient survivalist. You’re no more in the “militia” than Zimmerman is a “neighborhood watch enthusiast” like the liberal media down at Raw Story said he was.
If it looks like refusing to pay you your taxes will cost you your life, anyway, make sure that you try to frame the feds for murder like that 2009 census worker who died of guilt.
Don’t do as Ed and Elaine Brown did, those 2007 tax protesters who eventually had to peacefully take the fall. Don’t tell your local paper you don’t want to pay school and town property taxes because the “[the school and town] don’t provide me any services,” and so “I’m not going to contribute to them anymore.” This is a negative PR move. The self-interest will be too obvious. You need principles, principles, principles.
When you’re fleeing to get back in your house like Mr. Cooper did, make sure you keep your hands in front of you. Any ambiguity about their placement might be a bad move. Before firing those final, lethal shots, law enforcement authorities said the host of shortwave’s “The Hour of the Time” fired at them, low, with his back to them.
It turns out documentarian Aaron Russo was dead wrong, too, and Title 26 really does mean you have to file and perhaps pay net income taxes.
Most Americans find it difficult to particularly closely associate Freemasonry with Zionism. If you’re going to Be Like Ed Brown and create an alternative historical narrative to support your all-important principle you’ll going to need to really hold out, you’ve got to make sure you can convince people of something not altogether intuitive. And fast. You’ve got to get the public on your side not too long after the feds finally turn off your electricity.
If you want to Be Like Ed Brown, you might say : “The entire American government is fiction. We created it, didn’t we?” This statement might really throw a wrench in the gears of that negotiation scenario, considering that you might as well be arguing with a cartoon character.
No matter how dire negotiations get, calling up Ruby Ridge’s Randy Weaver to add positive spin to your front-yard news conference is just an awful idea. It’s not going to help you hold out any longer or increase your food supplies. Again, it’s attention you just don’t want, no matter what a raw deal the Weavers got. How did Milton keep his job so long in Office Space? By speaking up?
If you believe, as Bill Cooper once did, that the aliens are manipulating secret societies, there is no logical reason to fear the secret societies’ omniscience. Who knows, then, what kind of hair-brained excursions the aliens are actually sending the Freemasons or the Zionists on? And who knows why? Perhaps on your behalf?
Be poor. Own as little as possible before you begin your tax strike. Not only will this delay that initial audit, but since, if poor, you only have a chance of receiving a refund by filing, absolutely no one will care that you broke the law and didn’t file. Because it lacks self-interest, the only protest the public will really care about is your turning down that refund!
Finally off of the credit card grid, you will probably need to hunt for sustenance what you can’t manage to sneak through the standoff, so get a scoped Browning 03-06 to nail womp rats. Make sure you don’t put fancy rails on it because, in Bill Cooper’s case, the film “The Hour of Our Time” says the feds claimed to have confused that humble Browning with an AK-47.
Again, as Ruby Ridge’s Randy Weaver can tell you, there is never a compelling reason to go outside, especially to lead that news conference.
Make plans for a burial on a plot of land somewhere that can take mail. We’re not aware that Cooper’s grave can even take mail. Allowing those cards to rush in will at least allow your final resting place to become a shrine at an exponential rate.
Until the 1913 insurpations of the 16th Amendment and the creation of the Federal Reserve are finally undone, contact the John Birch Society in order to be shielded in an Eric Rudolph-esque underground railroad.
Get a guru. If you’re Ed and Elaine Brown, make it a Crumb-esque Mr. Natural type, like the Browns’ mysterious long-haired, robe-wearing “Sonny.” If you’re Mr. Cooper, and if you can’t settle with the guy who wrote “War Is A Racket,” make it the first secretary of defense, James Forrestal. According to “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb,” a close friend of Mr. Forrestal “found him in his darkened and shuttered house that afternoon whispering of Communist, Zionist and White House conspiracy, floridly paranoid.” The friend “bustled him off to Florida for a rest, but when vacationing [Undersecretary of State and future Defense Secretary] Robert Lovett met his plane, joking about golfing, Forrestal told the Undersecretary of State, ‘Bob, they’re after me.’” Given how many superpatriots like Eugene McCarthy worshiped a guy like that, you’ll gain a lot more sympathy with the law-and-order crowd if you can associate as much as possible with you an ideological leader like that.
As it were, the secretary of the Treasury keeps a list of “frivolous excuses” that they’ll come down harder on you for using because they know that you’re just trying to use the Amnesty International flood-them-with-paperwork tactic. Do not toy with the IRS. They will punish you more for stalling tactics. Yes, they know you weren’t named in all caps.
Speaking of which, when the feds finally come to your door, have ready on your smartphone a copy of that video of Harry Reid saying that paying your income taxes is voluntary. No matter how wrong the majority leader from Nevada was, the feds will be hard-pressed to explicitly shout him down right now, even if he admits he’s wrong. As long as this ex-cop’s at the top of leadership, his erroneous claims may still be of some safe PR administrative stalling value.
Make sure that your employer or employers have your address and zip code written correctly on your W-2s. But you really should have done that a while ago – not that any of this will matter because you’ll be turning in your forms blank.
WASHINGTON – Last month, columnist John Derbyshire talked himself out of his long-held National Review post by pouring napalm on the heated Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman controversy. Despite Mr. Derbyshire’s explicit, nine-year-old professions to racism – in National Review’s own pages, no less – National Review’s editor, Nick Lowry, expressed exasperation in response to Mr. Derbyshire’s claims. Mr. Lowry wrote a column washing his hands of Derbyshire’s last while on the job for NR, another column for Taki’s magazine. The Taki’s magazine blog header appears to fancy itself as worldly, as indicated by its playful cartoon of a debutante grinning, clutching her cigarette holder.
That coffin nail for Mr. Derbyshire’s National Review gig was a column written for his children, warning them to gauge their associations with ethnic groups based on what Mr. Derbyshire says are statistical averages for associated violence. Additionally, Mr. Derbyshire couched his advice to his children and other “nonblack” children in terms of the Murray “Bell Curve” arguments, which have seduced conservative columnists as mainstream as The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan.
Reports nativist website VDARE’s editor, Peter Brimelow, Mr. Derbyshire’s racist readers will soon be able to take in the cancer-stricken author’s tomes on pages other than those of the National Review, such as American Renaissance and VDARE itself. Mr. Brimelow has played a key role in the American conservative movement, invited to speak at 2012′s Conservative Political Action Conference and, in 2007, referred to by the George W. Bush administration’s speechwriter David Frum as “a man of keen intellect, of real courage, and of surprising emotional sensitivity.”
In a call this month for funds for Mr. Derbyshire, Mr. Brimelow expressed surprise that the self-described “racist” was accused of racism. Captioning a picture of Mr. Derbyshire appearing on C-SPAN’s BookTV, even after his explicit 2003 self-identification in the pages of the National Review, Mr. Brimelow has written, “John Derbyshire, Interviewed By C-Span [sic] —Which Must Now Be ‘Racist!!!!’Too.”
Mr. Brimelow’s fundraising requests describe the way in which the editor says that advertisers on xenophobic and nativist websites face pressure. “Yes, the internet [sic; Internet] has made possible an alternative guerilla media—of which VDARE.com is very proud to be a part,” said the editor. “But, at the same time, it’s obviously enabled Leftist activists in the MSM to create and co-ordinate [sic] their propaganda campaigns—to unprecedented effect.”
Now, as Rick Santorum’s bid for the presidency has withered away, Mr. Santorum campaign’s stringent misogyny was a coded call to America’s anti-Mormonism, especially within the Republican Party’s die-hard evangelical Christian base.
Journalist Patrick Cleburne said, “Obviously the GOP Congressional leadership chose Rubio for this high-profile speaking slot – and very probably encouraged him to speak Spanish. He has previously been cautious about demonstrating ethnic particularism.”
And in accusing Senator Rubio of “particularlism,” authors such as VDARE’s Mr. Cleburne explain the use of the Spanish language as a form of ethnic identity or endorsement, such as in this March 29 write-up on the senator’s statements on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. Inappropriately hyphenating the nonmodifying form of “40-years-old,” the possible British infiltrator reporter, Mr. Cleburne, writes, “[Senator Rubio] is only 40-years-old and doesn’t particularly appear to be a quick learner, either.”
WASHINGTON – The saga of former LulzSec hacker Hector Monsegur, also known as “Sabu,” is long and receiving widespread attention in the blogosphere. Civilian security authorities at Backtrace Security claim that they had so accurately fingered the LulzSec group in March of 2011, that the FBI requested that they mute and extract from the World Wide Web a list of likely culprits in the hacking spree, which haunted entities corporate and governmental alike.
In their interest of salvaging their own countercutural credentials, justifiable or not, the story of Mr. Monsegur has left aspiring members of hacker group of Anonymous to backpedal and equivocate. For 10 months, the Federal Bureau of Investigation used Mr. Monsegur’s connections within the hacker world and substantial public podium to carry out an elaborate public sting and psychological operation, one on a scale unprecedented in agency history.
Professional hackers who, in a relatively low-key fashion, had publicly fingered Mr. Monsegur, would account to the Internet Chronicle their conviction that the FBI’s sting operation was neither entrapment nor incitement to illegal action. Jennifer Emick, a representative of Backtrace Security said, “The issue is not whether or not he talked about it because all of them incite [illegal behavior,]” adding, “Saying, ‘wow, man, that’s a great hack; tell me all about it:’ It’s not incitement.”
Backtrace would deduce Mr. Monsegur’s identity using an advertisement for a car sale referenced by one of the links the hacker provided in an IRC venue. From the link to the sale of the sedan, Backtrace would discover a Facebook page, which revealed for the first known time, “Sabu’s” real identity. Mr. Monsegur’s Twitter account, briefly hidden after the disclosure of suspect cooperation – both its modes of free operation and ulterior motivation – has become the subject of wide speculation.
The Real Sabu @anonymouSabu
@WalkingstickMtn I speak opinion. I dont do propaganda. I have no agenda other than giving oppressed peoples a voice. Potty mouth? grow up.
In the days just before the FBI announced Mr. Monsegur’s informant status, the unemployed New York man’s tweets began to border on the ironic – and, one could speculate, even the intentionally hinting – to his more than 44,000 followers. Mr. Monsegur translated, and then retweeted, a Portuguese communique from AnonymousIRC Brasil (@AnonIRC), even as the information he had been giving was likely resulting in the arrests of his fellow Anonymous hackers, the 4chan-birthed outlaws who have for years perpetrated denial-of-service attacks against their ideological foes – notably, recently, the FBI in its undermining of the long-time copyright infingers, Megaupload.
The Real Sabu @anonymouSabu
Hackers of the world: Interpol has declared war on hackers. Organizing arrests in South America and Europe. Time to strike back. Infiltrate.
One of the biggest tells that Mr. Monsegur was an informant came January 9th 2011, when “Sabu” retweeted a call for finances from TeaMp0isoN (Team Poison), who had in fact made repeated attempts to out Mr. Monsegur. There was no apparent reason why a hacker would help fundraise for a group that had been so dedicated to his undoing.
n0threat @NotaThreat2u
RT! Plz help @phantom4life of #TeaMp0isoN. If you ever supported #TeaMp0isoN & the work they do plz help – wepay.com/donations/bail…
Retweeted by The Real Sabu
Ms. Emick speculated upon Mr. Monsegur’s respective amnesia or forgiveness. She said, “When [TeaMp0isoN] stopped getting attention for going after Sabu, they joined Anonymous,” adding, “Skids’ [script kiddies] want attention, right?”
In order to appeal to the Internet activist community, the FBI promulgated anti-Israeli and anti-copyright viewpoints, as evidenced by these retweets.
Chris Ho @Vangelus
The paraphrasing of “Megaupload was shut down by the FBI due to an estimation by the MPAA” is tremendously unsettling. Keyword: estimation
Retweeted by The Real Sabu
Freiheitskämpfer @ripNSA
There is a joke in the intel community that NSA means Never Say Anything. To us it is: No Secrets Anymore. #antisec #fuckfbi #fuckisrael
Retweeted by The Real Sabu
Sabu claimed to be a post-colonialist, even after his co-opting by the FBI, making Said-esque points sympathetic to the indigenous populations of the Americas and greater Israel/Palestine prior to 1948.
On March 9, The New York Times would account: “On Twitter, both before and after [Mr. Monsegur] was helping the authorities catch his compatriots, he was prone to grand declarations: ‘Give us liberty or give us death — and there’s billions of us around the world. You can’t stop us. Because without us you won’t exist.’”
In 2010, Mr. Monsegur said (in what New Scientist falsely advertises as the first-ever interview with a key LulzSec member) he was drawn to Anonymous, what he said was a leaderless, anti-authoritarian movement that has taken up a variety of political causes. His catalyst, he said, was his outrage over the arrest of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, the famous whistle-blower website.
Within the broader Anonyous movement, Mr. Monsegur for a time became a leader of Anonymous splinter group Lulz Security, or LulzSec, which claimed to attack computer security companies for laughs, or “lulz,” rather than for financial gain. Describing himself, he said in the New Scientist interview, “I’m not some cape-wearing hero, nor am I some supervillain trying to bring down the good guys. I’m just doing what I know how to do, and that is counter abuse.”
At an August 5th, 2011 court hearing, we would learn later, Assistant U.S. Attorney James Pastore told U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska, “The defendant has literally worked around the clock with federal agents. He has been staying up sometimes all night engaging in conversations with co-conspirators that are helping the government to build cases against those co-conspirators,”
“As far as I know, he tried to run off.” said Ms. Emick. “When he gets to court, I think you’ll see that he’s not going to be offered any protections. And I think that the real reason they were alluding to in the phone call, you know, with [the United Kingdom's Scotland Yard law enforcement agency], “I think they were putting off those hearings so that they could hear the revelation about Sabu and what Sabu’s been up to before.”
Added Emick, “[Jake Davis, also known by the handle 'Topiary' is]17 years old and vulnerable and whatever. And you know, he’s really loyal because he’s a kid, and you know, kids are idealistic.” This naivete, said Emick, made him particularly vulnerable to trusting Mr. Monsegur too much.
Both Backtrace Security’s Emick and “Hubris,” who spoke under the condition of anonymity, said Sabu tended to retweet more than directly tweet after his arrest. “It used to be [LulzSec] were kind of insular and they retweeted each other,” said “Hubris.”
Backtrace Security, who say they specialize in social engineering and psychological operations, said, “When we were starting out, we had a very specific plan. And we had some cohorts who, you know, like – I don’t know – emo’ed out and didn’t fulfill their end, which would have been funny. But the idea
was to cause them to panic.”
In response to Backtrace’s provocations, which attracted FBI scrutiny, Ms. Emick said “[LulzSec hacker] Ryan [Cleary], you know, leveled the place,” exposing his compatriots. “You know,” she said, it would have been a perfect time to pop up with a replacement, and they all would have hopped on as long as they got to keep their ops [operations] because that was all they ever cared about, which is stupid privilege and status.”
Asked about any irony of Sabu’s tweet talking about people being taken down because they’re trying to be leaders in Anonymous, Ms. Emick said, “I think Sabu still really thought he could be both characters: you know, that he could be the good law enforcement guy and, you know, the leader of the hacker revolution.”
Backtrace had sockpuppets, they said, fake personalities operated and orchestrated by the former 4chan enthusiasts, “that would come to me and tell [them] stuff like, you know, ‘Oh, leave Sabu alone. He’s secretly an operator with the CIA.’ He puppeted all over trying to get everybody to – he’s got a really
big ego, and I think that’s all that really mattered. He just wanted to be hot stuff.”
In a phone interview with the Soviet Internet Chronicle, Ms. Emick would repeatedly characterize arrogance as having been LulzSec’s Achilles’ heel.
When asked about the manner in which Sabu was caught, Backtrace Security could not make heads or tails of the claims that Sabu was caught by the FBI because he forgot to turn on Tor when he entered an IRC client. “Hubris” said he suspects that such reports are misinformation, adding, “we would have seen [Mr. Monsegur's IP address had he logged on without Tor.]” However, Sabu, they concede, made other types of mistakes. The Backtrace team says one of their members, “Le Researcheur,” spotted an IP [address] that leaked once where he “was bouncing out of somebody else’s house.”
The U.S. Attorneys Office, in releasing the details of Mr. Monsegur’s bond hearing, revealed that at least some of the twitterers with whom Monsegur was corresponding were indeed suspects themselves. And despite an ongoing investigation, Backtrace said that a lot of the suspects are apparent because “they’re gone [from Twitter].” Ms. Emick said the Twitter users that are “weird” are the ones that are still exclaiming, in her own paraphrase, “’No, hey, guys. It’s all good. I knew all this time that he was bad, yeah.”
Those claims to prior knowledge, hinted Ms. Emick, are the really possible indicators of further, as-yet-to-be-disclosed undercover law enforcement involvement.
Last week, several very large newspapers — including The Des Moines Register, The Oregonian and The Indianapolis Star — declined to run Doonesbury’s strips on abortion.
Commenters, please do let us know if your paper backed off.
Finally, we have ignited Helter Skelter. Our inflammatory and hateful divisive attacks on black celebrities have brought about a race war of trolling never seen even on 4chan. Welcome to a NEW LOW, Internet! And each day, hundreds of thousands of you fools swarm upon the simulated death of your beloved AKON, LIL WAYNE, or WHITNEY HOUSTON, but NEVER Kanye West. We MAKE SO MUCH DAMN MONEY DOING THIS! Thems Chronicle boys’ a’paid by the government, I tells ya!’”
Yes, we knew it would come to this from the very first day the Internet Chronicle was founded. HELTER SKELTER! FINALLY!!!!
Charles Masnon was just another LULZ extremist just like us. Lulz! LUzl1! WE gonna hack your brains n’ control you litle fuxors ta DDoS teh Government!!!!
I wrote a letter to Charles Manson and asked him the best way to control people, and he said “It’s the Internet, dummy,” so I fed the internet a continuous dose of LSD. And lies.
Now the entire Internet is eating out of my hands, scrambling desperately for my sweet nectar of explanation. None of this makes sense, Anonymous is just destroying human rights. The 9/11 truthers are killing my GOD DAMN anti-war movement with their POISONOUS double false flag conspiracy.
American hacker group Anonymous is facing increasing scrutiny from The Wall Street Journal, as well as the director of the National Security Agency, Keith Alexander. Via “people familiar with the gatherings,” the Journal accounts that Alexander, the U.S. Army general commanding CYBERCOM, has been attending private, high-level White House meetings warning about the potential for the hacker group Anonymous to bring about a “limited” power outage.
So writes the Journal, “An attack on a network would be consistent with recent public claims and threats by the group. Last week, for instance, Anonymous announced a plan to shut down the Internet on March 31, which it calls Operation Global Blackout.”
And this description to a large extent agreed with the “we are legion” slogan-loving of Anonymous. Insofar that the activists lack a demonym – like “Anonymouses” – Journal reporter Siobhan Gorman projects onto the group a real sense of solidarity and pretense of inevitability to the group’s motivations, as if this were some clear cut culture war.
But as the Journal also emphasized, Anonymous is only a loose pattern or collective. If the global Internet ever did go down, there would be widespread denial of having carried it out by people calling themselves “Anonymous.” Talking about precise motives for this group, as one might an individual, is an only slightly less tricky business than assigning writ large machinations to any entire nation.
Cautionary tales by the NSA themselves appear to be at least partially the result of early-February posting on Pastebin, giving instructions on how to disable the Internet’s “13 DNS servers.” The preamble to this large public threat to put the Internet in a coma was: “To protest [the Stop Online Piracy Act], Wallstreet [sic], our irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of sheer sadistic fun, On March 31, anonymous will shut the Internet down.” Robert David Graham put together a widely circulated rundown of why the proposed attack on the Internet would be ineffective.
”Most denial of service attacks aren’t proceeded by a warning,” said Dan Kaminsky, who helped fix a major flaw in DNS in 2008, speaking to Forbes’ Andy Greenberg. “I’ve talked to various network engineers who are responsible for keeping these servers up, and they’re aware of the threat. They have resources already in place. Anyway, [Anonymous'] disclosure is appreciated.” Kaminsky’s facetious expression of gratitude agrees exactly with his interviewer, Greenberg who, only four days after the Pastebin posting, headlined with, “We’re Being Trolled.”
But the line between mockery and hysteria may prove very thin, indeed, with one report at Consternation Security positing that, in the wake events such as the Iranian army overriding and capturing an RQ-170 drone, Anonymous might be able to hijack the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP. It is with HAARP, Consternation claims to report seriously under a shimmering photo of an aurora, that hackers could, after inciting bouts of “headaches, dizziness, confusion, and even insanity,” “quite literally cook the President while he sleeps.”
As Agence France-Presse mentioned, the website of the Central Intelligence Agency was inaccessible the 11th of February after someone in Anonymous claimed they had taken it down. At @YourAnonNews after the takedown, someone tweeted “CIA Tango down,” which, as AFP, explains, “is an expression used by the U.S. Special Forces when they have eliminated an enemy.” However, the use of the phrase in this context is most specifically a reference to 2010 hack by The Jester (@th3j35t3r), apparently disabling the WikiLeaks website.
In its timeline of Anonymous’s taking down websites and compromising information, the Journal didn’t mention that the name of the website for whom the Justice Department website was destabilized in retaliation, MegaUpload. And its name and mission figured heavily into the hacktivist scene surrounding the attempts to discourage smaller web developers interested in user-generated content.
MegaUpload is the now-downed file-sharing website run by a notorious German embezzler who calls himself Kim Dotcom. Significant percentages of the World Wide Web had used his website to view films sometimes not strictly within respective domestic, if not international, licensing laws. The question between activists and IP control enforcers was: How much was the impetus on the administrator of a site to filter for copyrighted material within a certain volume of content?
Previous enforcement pushes and national legislation, such as with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, placed the responsibility to point out offending content on copyright holders, as opposed to the filtering mandates introduced by intellectual property special interests, such as the Recording Industry Association of America. It’s important to understand the intellectual property issues in order to understand what motivates the activists the NSA worries about.
Eduoard Kovacs, news editor for Softpedia, has opined of what he says is the “plausibility” of HAARP hacker assassinations, with such precedents as recent insecurity in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA). Meanwhile, at least some of those public anxieties, it seems, have turned out to be overblown. A release from the Department of Homeland Security claimed that in fact there was no computer infiltration of an Illinois water system SCADA.
Ask Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI, and he’ll tell you government agencies need to change their organizational structure “in the same ways we changed to address terrorism.”
Mueller then said intelligence agencies “have to share information” just as “we had to share intelligence in the wake of September 11th…we have to build up the collective addressing of that threat, in the same way that we did so and broke down the walls in the wake of September 11th.”
In retaliation for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, indefinite detentions became commonplace as American leaders ordered outright assassination of American citizens. In other cases, innocent people are still being held against their will on mere suspicion. So what will the undoubtedly heavy handed response be to the forthcoming “9/11 of the Internet?” And will it, too, be a false flag operation committed by the Jews to make people believe it was an inside job?
I really want to help Robert Mueller make everyone safer. My only wish is that he could have taken our freedoms before we ever had them. But there is only 200 years of law obstructing true justice, and hell, we’ve overturned older civil rights laws than that!
EDITOR’S NOTE (WTF EDITION):
CBS “News” bragged in an article about CBS Justice and Homeland Security Correspondent (in other words, Staff Propagandist) Bob Orr’s Christmas day “prediction” that problems relating to cybersecurity will match the severity of “terrorism,” and that we’re “long overdue” for an act of cyberterrorism against infrastructure. The fact that “cyberterrorism” can only occur through infrastructure notwithstanding, why is CBS patting themselves on the back for predicting changes they played a role in creating?
“We’re CBS Fucking News! We either set the agenda, or report the plans already beset by the Overlord. You decide!”
UPDATE: And why do you need to rearrange the FBI when your current practices are catching the “cyberterrorists” just fine?
SHITPOSTS