Comments
bttb • July 20, 2018 5:03 PM
“Kristin Davis, the Manhattan Madam who went to prison and was connected to former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, is being subpoenaed in the Robert Mueller investigation … TMZ has learned.
Davis worked for former Trump aide Roger Stone for a decade, and had numerous interactions with Stone and Andrew Miller — who ran Davis’ campaign for Governor and who was subpoenaed by Mueller a month ago.”
https://www.tmz.com/2018/07/20/manhattan-madam-kristin-davis-subpoenaed-robert-mueller-trump/
echo • July 20, 2018 5:45 PM
@bttb
You could make a movie about that.
I did intend to post a comment about issues with both global and UK financial systems misapplying anti-terror and anti money laundering and fraud law in harmful and discriminatory ways but I’ve only just began compiling data for a complaint to the finance processor, and relevant statutory bodies. Since commenting on this blog by coincidence a few hours later The Atlantic covered the same issue from the American perspective. I may be able to put a future comment in a more recognisable security context including how the fear of threat udnermines democratic policy related discourse and has a negative impact which works against the purpose of the legislation.
Bauke Jan Douma • July 20, 2018 5:51 PM
@bttb
American news is so out.
# Old Apple ][ computers to replace modern spookware tech?
I’d be interested in knowing whether or not there is spy ware in the hardware but with things like Contiki you can still push old tech quite far.
With new tech all I hear is crying about back doors, privacy/security issues, what have you.
Old apple computers function great. They may need a little getting used to but they are solid. I’ve yet to encounter some type of segfault, hard lock, or other type of failure. data on old floppy disks remain intact like a precious diamond for years and years, unlike the crappy quality from the PC/MSDOS days.
Other than possible TEMPEST attacks, I’d like to read anything from a researcher proving other attacks (and in addition, comparable to modern systems) against old apple computers.
I don’t mean Macs. No OSX, nothing of the sort.
I mean old Apple computers like Apple ][e.
echo • July 20, 2018 7:06 PM
Does business really need more than an ICL One Per desk updated with new storage media and ports? Almost all routine business level tasks don’t need much more than a 3rd generation GPU. I have no idea what is in your average bloated web/office document when the same tasks years ago would run on what is now low powered hardware and and work for an entire college course would fit on a floppy. Imagine a modern laptop with a high powered smartphone sized motherboard with the rest of the case dedicated to battery.
I wonder if the way to help develop the hardware/software/security issue is introducing a level system. Like high performance software developers might deliberately use/test on a low end platform to properly evaluate performance perhaps a system like this would force developers into a more constrained box which as a by product helps encourage best practices?
Gunter Königsmann • July 20, 2018 7:25 PM
On Heise Forums there was a question what advantages the Intel ME has to the average user as more ways to exploit it from the network emerge from time to time.
I guess power management and startup of all the plls and similar things are more easily done by just running a program that does do the necessary things than by creating a big block of hardware that does them. And as USB ports and wifis effectively are computers and often are embedded in CPUs one will need to provide the CPU with a large blob at startup anyway that might or might not contain spookware. But I would still feel more comfortable if this blob for my computer wouldn’t contain a powerful ME.
Facebook’s Next Chapter after Cambridge Analytica
Facebook Inc. suspended another company that harvested data from its site and said it was investigating whether the analytics firm’s contracts with the U.S. government and a Russian nonprofit tied to the Kremlin violate the platform’s policies.
“We don’t allow developers to build surveillance tools using information from Facebook or Instagram,” Facebook told Engadget
Crimson Hexagon boasts that it can provide “instant access to over ONE TRILLION consumer conversations from social media, forums, blogs (Schneier?), reviews and more.” Along with brands like Samsung, Twitter, Adidas and GM, the Wall Street Journal reports that Crimson Hexagon has held contracts with both US government agencies and a Russian nonprofit group with connections to the Kremlin.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/20/facebook-suspends-crimson-hexagon-data-collection/
Forgiveness over Permission
Questions: How is this Facebooks quality assurance privacy system implemented? Who certifies third parties DON’T data-mine? Is there a audit trail of data transfers? What are the legal, civil and criminal remedies for products? Who owns consumer data transferred? Do consumers need to give explicit permission before their data is transferred and resold?
Allowing developers to siphon millions of netizens’ personal information didn’t work out so well for Facebook, given the Cambridge Analytica affair.
Nonetheless, the misinformation and ads platform has decided to build a data takeout service for account holders, allowing people to download their information in a standardized way and upload it to another platform.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/20/facebook_google_microsoft_twitter_data/
echo • July 20, 2018 8:29 PM
The UK has been rumbled usign child spies. This obviously brings up memories of historical abuse scandals not to mention children being sent up chimneys and down mineshafts and losing arms while cleaning weaving machines.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/20/the-guardian-view-on-police-and-child-spies-ends-dont-always-justify-the-means
The Guardian view on police and child spies: ends don’t always justify the means.
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201719/ldselect/ldsecleg/168/168.pdf
HOUSE OF LORDS
Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee
35th Report of Session 2017–19
Summary: This Order proposes to extend the period for which the use of a person under 18 years of age as a covert human intelligence source (CHIS) can be authorised from one month to four months. We were concerned, from the material presented in the original Explanatory Memorandum, that the change is founded on the premise of administrative convenience. The associated Code of Practice is very vague on how the welfare obligations indicated are to be fulfilled. We were unclear whether the risks to the CHIS would be different over the extended period and how the welfare of the young person in this situation would be protected. We asked the Home Office for a more detailed explanation. The correspondence, published in an appendix to our Report, is helpful but does not fully satisfy our concerns about the extent to which juveniles are being used for covert surveillance nor whether their welfare is sufficiently taken into account in practice.
Trust No. 1 • July 20, 2018 11:03 PM
Cyberattack on Singapore health database steals details of 1.5 million, including PM (emphasis mine)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-cyberattack/cyberattack-on-singapore-health-database-steals-details-of-1-5-million-including-pm-idUSKBN1KA14J
As I described earlier, Australia is in its last stages of rolling out centralised health records for millions after the end of the opt-out period mid-October. So imagine my surprise that in about the same timeframe, MSM publishes a well-reasoned piece on why it is worthwhile considering opting out of “MyHR”, with particular reference to past hacks and mission creep (“at present, doctors can reject these requests and ask for a warrant”).
Why I’m opting out of the government’s digital health record and you should too
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/why-i-m-opting-out-of-the-government-s-digital-health-record-and-you-should-too-20180715-p4zrna.html
I have also read legislation on this and of course there is a section regarding “Law Enforcement use etc.”. Yes it says “etc.”.
I’m not sure how people’s bowel conditions could possibly assist with diagnosing tendencies of interest to law enforcement, but perhaps there is a correlation that I don’t know about, or will be made in the future from the datasets.
Hopefully the Singapore hack will make it to the first part of the news as a timely reminder for people to understand what they are about to sanction by their inaction and indifference.
Weather • July 21, 2018 12:01 AM
Tap and go eftpos cards have a mitm attack.
One person stands at the counter will another stand next to someone with rfid, when the Pos starts the com the person transmitter to the one standing next to the other one, both target and Pos get relayed.
Might need fixing ????
Gunter Königsmann • July 21, 2018 12:29 AM
@Trust Nr. 1: Once a murderer was convicted after reading out his pacemaker. And sometimes (but rarely) traces of medicals are detected at the crime scene. You get height, weight and age infos from the medical records. Perhaps even photographs. You can exclude some suspects from having run away this fast. Bit the “etc.” scares me as it can be filled with new meanings without even having to change a law…
Clive Robinson • July 21, 2018 1:13 AM
@ echo,
Does business really need more than an ICL One Per desk updated with new storage media and ports?
Does business really need desk top computers at all?
Various studies show that the most productive time in business was back in 1973… Since then office productivity has fallen and office staff numbers have actually risen.
Which has caused people to question why administrative staff have risen disproportionately to actuall “front line” or “shop floor” staff….
It turns out that much administrative work is needless and unrelated to business activities or the value added chain. It is simple “makework”, such as “guarding an empty room” or “counting stationary” at one end through to collecting compilling and collating business process figures “required by managment / legislation / government.
It is arguably as to if this is about keeping people off the streets or empire building. Which ever or both the result is upto 1/3 of western / first world administrative jobs are not real jobs just makework jobs…
However that said rather than the B.T. Tonto the more modern pad and cloud is filling the niche that “thin client” computing did that evolved from the idea of the Tonto / ICL etc devices, which were designed to replace the old green screen “glass TTY” terminals…
The trick is to emulate the old “Big Iron” days but with a more friendly user interface. Thus the question of the split up of the three sides to information processing,
1, Communication.
2, Storage.
3, Processing.
The old terminals were all communication with storage and processing carried out on the big iron. This has so many advantages people keep reinventing it. And they always hit on the same problem which is communication bandwidth and speed of light.
Thus if you make processing and storage heavy PCs you don’t have the communications issue but you have a whole load of other issues to do with security in it’s broader sense. However hardware manufacturers want you to go down this route as it’s the least efficient in utilisation and reliability terms which means they sell more systems.
At some point in time you will find the triangle formed by the three sides of information processing gets mangled into a virtualy straight line, before moving in another direction and working towards a different straight line. And it goes on almost continuously, which means like a stopped watch you are ahead of the times or behind the times but very rarely at the correct point in time…
There is however lots of money to be made by hyping up some new asspect of the triangle so we see “XXX as a service” or “Wide area YYY” or “ZZZ architecture” as the latest big business buz. But the money train has slowed and been all but captured by the few in Silicon Valley, with the “You are the product”, “Steal your privacy” systems where the aim is to communicate as much as possible about you to be marketed. But even this is slowing down hence the diversification into “Defence” and other Tax Money Payola systems…
Wael • July 21, 2018 1:25 AM
@bttb,
Where’s …?
Last week: Arizona, New Jersey, Pensylvania, New York. Now: somewhere near the Pacific.
Clive Robinson • July 21, 2018 1:27 AM
@ Weather,
Tap and go eftpos cards have a mitm attack.
Yup the relay attack was known about years before the likes of EVM came up with the dumb idea, as an out growth of “ticketing systems” that were known to have all sorts of security issues.
The UK’s Cambridge Computer Labs has a whole load of research on this disaster and EVM’s head in the sand attitude towards the warnings…
But EVM and the banks don’t care because they have “externalised the risk” onto merchants and users, so the only skin they have in the game is profit not loss.
Clive Robinson • July 21, 2018 2:08 AM
@ Wael,
Nice to hear you are still with us, I hope things are well at your rapidly moving side of the world?
Do I gather with,
Now: somewhere near the Pacific.
You might be getting a little R&R and might just be Squid or other fishing for a byte to eat to chuck on the barbi etc?
Clive Robinson • July 21, 2018 3:16 AM
@ All,
This past week our host @Bruce came in for a bit of a knocking over his views about systems their security and when you should start trusting them.
Likewise others have suggested there is a form of security nihilism with regards the true and oft repeated statment “no system is secure, nor can any system be 100% secure” and the follow on assumption that the safest route as per the film advice is “not to play”.
The point that is often missed on this blog is that the less new members tend to be talking about the level three attackers that once we assumed were “state level” only. Which ment that the discussions were about Mil / Dip level protection.
But things have changed the “states” are now left in the dust by “corporates”. Who are turning everybody into product via telemetry and other data stealing including that of “cloud” storage and software. Yes those like Alphabet, Amazon and other Silicon Valley pirates that rape pillage and plunder through your private lives, package you up and sell you repeatedly to anyone, oh and the wanabees with IoT servers in China that will sell you in the raw to anyone with a as little as a couple of cents in pocket change.
The point is the security threat landscape has changed majorly in the last decade, and it’s sometimes a fingernail tearing ride just trying to hang on in there.
In fact with the likes of Intel’s ME, Microsoft’s telemetry in Windows 10 and Office365 etc, Google’s Chrome and Android persistent “phone home” and more or less forced “cloud” usage the average home user, mom&pop or small business stand no chance against such corporate pirates.
Thus the simple advice is “don’t play” that is do your private stuff “Off-Line” and have an entirely seperate “On-Line” system that is not a wide open window into your private life.
For those who have to function “On-Line” for work or business reasons, it’s minimize your attack surface and patch like crazy and don’t use “On-Line Services” such as “the cloud” or “social networking” judicious use of encryption and a number of other things. But unless you realy are more spartan than the average minimalist they will get you at some level, so limit your activities to that you would not be overly fussed if it was put up on a bill board next door…
These are the realities of the “On-Line World” with the only up side being it’s such s target rich environment they have probably not yet got around to you. Or if you take a little effort you are sufficiently far above the low hanging fruit not to be of interest to the common cyber criminal. However we know the likes of the Chinese State spend a considerable amount of resources on “targeted attacks” and they are most certainly not the only nation state to chase after IP, money and just about anything else that has value that is not nailed down. It’s that they just care less about being caught in the act so tend to be less sophisticated but more production line organised in their attack approach.
We have to accept that COTS ICT systems are insecure in both their hardware and software, often by design for extra profit. It’s up to us to evaluate and mitigate to our needs, bearing in mind that the environment is rapidly changing and thus so must our responses to it. Two rules that almost always help improve your security are,
1, Segregate.
2, Minimalize.
With the time tested,
3, Wait and see.
That says don’t be on the bleeding edge of technology, wait for things to be time tested before you start minimally trusting them.
There are other rules but you need to know what it is you are protecting as a first step. A point made in this blog post,
Wael • July 21, 2018 3:46 AM
@Clive Robinson,
You might be getting a little R&R …
No R&R. Just chores I needed to take care of. I got to see some dark skies, out of all places, in Pensylvania!
fishing for a byte to eat to chuck on the barbi etc?
I only went fishing once or twice in my life. Caught nothing. But cooking fish on a mesquite grill is something I do frequently. Funny you should ask… on my way to the airport (the extremely lousy Newark airport) I stopped by Samakmak – a very unclassy joint, but they had a tasty Sea-Bream fish (Orata on the menu.) I had two; one fried and the other (Bass) grilled. The fried one (Bream) was a lot better! Reminded me of Plaice in the UK.
Alyer Babtu • July 21, 2018 3:52 AM
@echo
developers into a more constrained box … encourage best practices
I’ve seem this. Programming insinuates it is free – the lure of the endless white space of the editor window, limitless resources and all conquering creative mastery etc. Constraints seem a negative, but there are right ones which act as teaching force and promote real creativity, almost like providing building materials and principles of construction.
Clive Robinson • July 21, 2018 4:25 AM
Creepy Crawly sized Drones
DARPA are funding development in insect sized robots, supposadly for “social good”,
However some of us on thos blog remember the 1970’s and 80’s when amongst others DARPA who had trouble getting “weapons developers” of the skill level they needed, created fronts to get technology developrd for other things that they then weaponized.
If you read through the article you can replace the word “robot” with “surveillance drone” without other changes…
This is the sort of stuff Alphabet, Amazon and other big silicon valley corporates are getting into, despite their employees horror and objections at having their work perverted.
Clive Robinson • July 21, 2018 4:37 AM
@ Alyer Babtu,
Constraints seem a negative, but there are right ones which act as teaching force and promote real creativity, almost like providing building materials and principles of construction.
That is the difference between “amateurish artisanal bolt bits on” thinking and real “engineering”.
It’s why I hate the term “software engineer” because the bulk of them havr never used “engineering practice” and never will, that’s why I call them “code cutters”.
The proffession even admits it via the notion of “patterns” which are the same thinking/method less amateurish artisans like wheel wrights used to use…
But real engineering is a thoughtfull and carefull process that is time intensive. Marketing don’t like that as it means bells and whistles would not get to market… Worse product release cycles although being stable and secure would be measured in months not days… Sales people need a sausage machine production of tat to sell, over and over and over…
Alyer Babtu • July 21, 2018 4:42 AM
@Clive Robinson
work or business reasons, it’s … don’t use “On-Line Services”
This may be soon difficult with companies adopting cloud services for their storage and things like “Facebook at Work” for internal communications.
Clive Robinson • July 21, 2018 4:54 AM
@ Wael,
No R&R. Just chores I needed to take care of…
Hey welcom to my world, at this time of year the soft fruit plants need lots of care and attention if you want a good crop for not just summer deserts but freezing and preserve making…
I only went fishing once or twice in my life. Caught nothing.
Ahh, that’s “sports fishing” where you drop your worm in the water and hope to get a nibble. Kind of like “blind speed dating” in terms of results.
I do it a couple of other ways. “long shore tide lines” and long lines off the back of a sail boat. Each has fifty to two hundred baited hooks and you let the fish get on with it whilst you do something more enjoyable. Usually get enough to fill the freezer, to brine and smoke and have a beach barbi with enough for ten or so people as well.
The important thing is speed of processing once out of the water. If a fish smells “fishy” then it’s cat food as far as I’m concerned.
As for batbi, we’ve had a chat about mesquite it’s flavour and high heat making it better for grilling than most “lump wood charcole”.
I have some apple wood drying nicely for the “slow/cold smoker” which is going to meet the meat and cheese as well as some vegtables pluss a side of salmon or four in the near future 😉
Clive Robinson • July 21, 2018 5:18 AM
@ Alyer Babtu,
This may be soon difficult with companies adopting cloud services for their storage and things like “Facebook at Work” for internal communications.
Need I say that from either a security or privacy perspective that is fairly close to “madness”, or am I just being paranoid 😉
Clive Robinson • July 21, 2018 6:06 AM
@ Bruce and the usual suspects,
This paper,
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~raluca/oblix.pdf
Titled, “Oblix: an efficient oblivious search index”
Is a mite technical for some. It has a provable oblivious search of a database index. Previous contenders have proved problematic in the past, and this scheme might also be as it uses “secure enclaves” that under a varient of the Xmas Special on Intel and other chips became a lot less secure.
As with similar papers it takes a while to tune into.
Clive Robinson • July 21, 2018 6:42 AM
@ Bruce and the usual suspects,
From the IEEE IEEE Security and Privacy 2018, the following paper is a kind of “How the heck…” type read,
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_events/1223263/p155407privacyconmislove_1.pdf
Titled, “Privacy risks with Facebook’s PII-based targeting: auditing a data broker’s advertising interface”
From the paper,
- Specifically, we show how the adversary can infer user’s full phone numbers knowing just their email address, determine whether a particular user visited a website, and de-anonymize all the visitors to a website by inferring their phone numbers en masse. These attacks can be conducted without any interaction with the victim(s), cannot be detected by the victim(s), and do not require the adversary to spend money or actually place an ad.
Which I think most would agree is quite a series of claims.
The problem arose because of data de-duplication and approximation of sizes for anonymization of users from a query which after you work out the rules can be exploited. Which is why the papers authors suggested that Facebook changes the way it performs audience de-duplication when reporting audience information. However for reasons not specified Facebook went with something somewhat simpler,
- Facebook has acknowledged the vulnerabilities reported in this paper and has confirmed to us that it has deployed a stricter version of our defense:- no size statistics will be provided for audiences created using multiple PII attributes. Additionally, no size estimates will be provided when combining audiences that were created using different PII attributes.
So whilst the problem is now gone on Facebook as the authors indicate other platforms such as Instagram, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn have similar potential for this sort of attack on analytics, and note,
- … but due to space constraints we leave exploring them to future work.
bttb • July 21, 2018 8:21 AM
@Bauke Jan Douma, RG
“American news is so out.”
1) From https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/11/facebook-fined-for-data-breaches-in-cambridge-analytica-scandal :
“Facebook is to be fined £500,000, the maximum amount possible, for its part in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the information commissioner has announced.
The fine is for two breaches of the Data Protection Act. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) concluded that Facebook failed to safeguard its users’ information and that it failed to be transparent about how that data was harvested by others.”
2) iirc under current law, such a scandal might result in more than $1,000M fine. Reference:
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/19/630443485/reporter-shows-the-links-between-the-men-behind-brexit-and-the-trump-campaign ; transcript available, Carole Cadwalladr interview, audio about 37 minutes
3) “Facebook to publish data on Irish abortion referendum ads” from
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/20/facebook-publish-data-irish-abortion-referendum-ad-spending-targeting-voters
On 20 July, Carole Cadwalladr tweeted:
“This just raises even more questions. @DamianCollins & @commonscms committee have been asking for this info for EU referendum for months. And Facebook has refused to hand it over. Why???”
4) Also
Sleep Scientist Warns Against Walking Through Life ‘In An Underslept State’
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/20/630792401/sleep-scientist-warns-against-walking-through-life-in-an-underslept-state
Weather • July 21, 2018 9:08 AM
Energy more specific electricity, batteries are slowly becoming more efficient but there ability to power the future isn’t possible, as the world changes from organic fuels, a new market will open up for geothermal and wind and solar and hydro, for them to keep advanceing society a new energy storage is needed.
RTG radioisotopes thermal generators use isotopes of elements that have been made radioactive through bombardment of protons and neutrons, they release the energy over time, half life, as a energy storage medium it can full the gap.
Radioisotopes have bad publicity due to uriunm 238 which if it with a neutron release two neutrons, and the chain reaction that follows, but there are other decay modes that for example calcium can release two electrons which doesn’t have the ability to do what the above does.
The security of society and any system needs careful protection of knowledge but that also limits its useful.
A 2 cents rant
vas pup • July 21, 2018 10:36 AM
https://www.ted.com/talks/poppy_crum_technology_that_knows_what_you_re_feeling/up-next
I posted article several months ago from BBC, but finally got video (see above and enjoy 12 minutes)
albert • July 21, 2018 10:38 AM
Cyber Warfare as a Career Path:
https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2018/07/cyber-war-training/
It’s as bureaucratic and acronym-laden as any other military program.
Two things for sure:
1. The demand for competent cyber security people can only increase.
2. The career path could extend to civilian employment later.
..
@Clive,
“…It turns out that much administrative work is needless and unrelated to business activities or the value added chain….”
In other words, it’s non-productive labor. What I like to call ‘meaningful employment”. David Graeber, in his book, “Bullshit Jobs”, calls it ‘bullshit jobs’. It’s what happens when you have too many people and not enough jobs, upper- and mid- level ‘managers’ who don’t want to do -any- actual work, and ‘feather bed’ government jobs with unsustainable pension systems. [rant] The Federal Government is, by far, to most wasteful employer in the US[/rant]
.
As I’ve stated previously, I’m a fan of thin-client systems. Todays ‘big iron’ is now a collection of lots of little irons, which is OK, but not if they’re sitting on employees desks! -My- restrictions for employees might seem draconian, but convenience isn’t a primary consideration. Neither is ‘working’ on a laptop at Starbucks.
. .. . .. — ….
vas pup • July 21, 2018 10:42 AM
@all respected bloggers living in UK:
Please clarify the following:
I have three questions:
(1)Do you have in UK indictment by Grand Jury or that is only currently North American tool to place somebody in club fed for up to 18 month for contempt of court which actually is attempt to use your right set in 5th Amendment of US Constitution?
(2)Could MI5/MI6 agents lie to suspect but suspect when can’t lie to agent because it is crime per se?
(3)When (under what circumstances) LEOs could search office of lawyer (solicitor/barrister)?
Highly appreciate
Clive Robinson • July 21, 2018 10:54 AM
@ Weather,
RTG radioisotopes thermal generators use isotopes of elements that have been made radioactive through bombardment of protons and neutrons, they release the energy over time, half life, as a energy storage medium it can full the gap.
The making of RTG’s is a very inefficient process, it also has it’s own problems such as the energy source. IIRC it is also eye wateringly expensive NASA estimates 10-15million USD / kilogram of Pu which is only good for about 5KWe output for fifty to seventy years…
For most purposes you would probably be better off with a small module fourth generation molten salt thorium reactor that have finaly started[0]. The trouble is even though inherently safe[1] they have a bad rep from the likes of Chernobyl and those tsunami hit generation two reactors in Fukushima Daiichi Japan. That although actually shut down had hydrogen explosions due to a form of meltdowm due to the loss of the diesel generators that should have kept water circulating for upto a week after the emergancy shutdown.
Both were identified as level 7 events though neither disaster actually turned out even close to what some predicted[2], but it’s sealed the fate of many nascent reactor plans in Europe and the rest of the world.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
[2] There are no recorded deaths from the Japanese plants. However there were about 1% excess deaths in what turned out to be an unnessasary evacuation of 160,000 people. The deaths were in the elderly who would have had longer lives if not evacuated.
Ismar • July 21, 2018 1:32 PM
@Clive Lots of good vibes this week – nice to see.
I felt that it might be the right time to ask what is most likely to happen to Trump when he’s no longer the president?
justinacolmena • July 21, 2018 1:50 PM
dead squid. No one knows why.
Too much alcohol and drugs. They were partying too hard Friday night on military property. Court isn’t till Monday.
Radioisotopes have bad publicity due to uriunm 238 which if it with a neutron release two neutrons, and the chain reaction that follows, but there are other decay modes that for example calcium can release two electrons which doesn’t have the ability to do what the above does.
The security of society and any system needs careful protection of knowledge but that also limits its useful.
Ahhhhh. No
I think you mean RTG have bad press because of Pu239, or U 235 which can go boom. RTGs are made from Pu238 which doesn’t support a chain reaction.
It is not just the number of neutrons released per fission. If the released neutrons are in a wrong energy range, then they will not split a new atom.
As a general rule, even numbered isotopes can’t support a chain reaction. See U235 vs. U U238.
Pu238 also has other problems why it wouldn’t work well in bombs.
Hmm • July 21, 2018 2:57 PM
“what is most likely to happen to Trump when he’s no longer the president?”
It’s unclear if he’ll be deloused or not, but he’s without doubt getting a small room rent free.
U238 is actually used extensively in modern nuclear weapons as tamper and secondary yield fissionables.
You just don’t want it in your critical mass core. It makes these weapons much, much more efficient.
justinacolmena • July 21, 2018 2:59 PM
@JR
uriunm 238 which if it with a neutron release two neutrons
lol need 2 spell better than that for that kind of clearance….
Hmm • July 21, 2018 4:17 PM
@Gunter
Exactly, they could un-screw themselves by offering the same chips without IME. They choose not to!
That’s a decision they must be making consciously on some level, economic or otherwise.
@All
I guess the “rape” of consentual sex without a condom isn’t in fact actually what they wanted him for?
Like some people have been saying for oh, a decade or so. I’ve been tarred by it.
#here we are in the future, now
Interestingly (to me) Assange has been painted as a Trump supporter. He doesn’t deny it.
But the rationale is the kicker.
He wants to bring it down so it can be rebuilt to its own standards.
Julian Assange isn’t a rapist. He’s not a terrorist. He didn’t sell out any country.
The same cannot be said of the leader of the free world right now, Donald Trump.
On any of those three points. He is credibly accused of all three. With evidence.
Clive Robinson • July 21, 2018 4:51 PM
@ Ismar,
I felt that it might be the right time to ask what is most likely to happen to Trump when he’s no longer the president?
To be honest I had not thought about it. Look at it this way he’s a usefull tool for the GOP and other Republican associates.
I guess things will be clearer after the midterms, till then any guess would be nothong but a throw away bet.
So a question for you and it’s to do with what I’ve been thinking about recently. People have not been looking in “wide view” recently and in many places the Intetnet is clearly dying.
That is blogs and social media got a very server hit on the run up to 2016, when the crazies from both sides crawled out of the wood work. Even though blogs and social media is still there they are clearly dying as more and more diety secrets come to light. Facebook getting the maximum fine possible under UK law is a bit of a wake up call if the GDPR had been in place at the time of the offences and they got the maximum fine possible, we would not be looking at a fine the size ofveight minutes of their earnings but months, certainly enough to push facebook over the edge. We have US MSM refusing EU connections even of those who payed subscriptions. And we have the likes os Alphabet and Amazon running as fast as they can to non PII income, some as reported in the news as US Defence blood money.
Thr Internet as we knew it pre-Snowden ended up with quite major though still background changes. The various election run ups to 2016, Brexit, the UK general election and other general elections in the EU and Latin/South America has let a whole bunch of “secrets” out into the public domain. The result is the Internet is changing especially in the likes of alternative media…
So do you think that Trump will outlive Social media and the Internet as we currently remember it?
Clive Robinson • July 21, 2018 4:59 PM
@ justinacolmena,
lol need 2 spell better than that for that kind of clearance….
Err possibly not.
I suspect English is not Weather’s first language and possibly not even their second. Thus they may have a clearance in a non English speaking country…
Assumptions are increasingly likely “To be the death of us” with people threatening to go kinetic over mainly annoying cyber attacks…
Alyer Babtu • July 21, 2018 5:03 PM
An new opportunity for security to become something built in from scratch
DARPA Plans a Major Remake of U.S. Electronics – IEEE Spectrum
Yet, I feel a certain tension …
Sonos • July 21, 2018 5:19 PM
Anyone else following (a victim of) the Sonos debacle? In this case the company has changed their firmware and now you’re required to register/create an account in order to use the system. For background, Sonos is a wireless speaker company. They’re fairly expensive, a setup could easily be $1000+ USD, so we’re not talking $20 webcams here. Seem pretty much like extortion to me. Are there any instances where consumers have been able to stop this kind of thing?
echo • July 21, 2018 5:25 PM
@Vas pup
I have had discussions with UK lawyers who basically say the legal system doesn’t work as people believe it does. You will need to ask a lawyer for an “offical” answer but follow up by asking them to explain the “Yes, buts…”
1.) The UK doesn’t use the grand jury system.
2.) I think I know what body of US law you are referring to. My honest answer insofar as UK law is concerned is A.) I don’t know and B.) It depends.
From what I can tell is UK security services are arranged with a handler-operative relationship and other work is contracted out to other agencies or specialists, or completely handed over to other agencies to pursue.
3.) I have no idea.
UK lawyer “gets the cops off” and the SRA is accused of a whitewash…
@Hmmm
I’m afraid Julian Assange has admitted sex without a condom without consent. His own lawyer on the record basically confirmed this. This is an offence in the jurisdiction it took place. In the UK sex without a condom without consent may also be an offense under the Sexual Offenses Act. This is just my opinion but I also believe that sex without consent may also fall foul of other criminal law including but not limited to assault. Any other comment regarding this is “political” and has no relevance to a court of law.
Other legal and scientific evidence supports a prosecution. There is Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), various EU directives, and domestic laws including the Human Rights Act and Equality Act. This helps counter “canteen culture” or “lad culture” or “victim blaming” which might otherwise create a prejudicial environment undermining prosecution.
The consequences of “stealthing” may be lasting psychiatric damage to catching a serious life threatening infection not to mention the burden of cooperating with a prosecution and trial which can be a traumatic process in itself.
In some cases women live in legal jurisdictions where abortion is outlawed or requires hoops to jump through which is another burden.
I believe anyone defending rape should consider therapy to address their ego/objectification issues or at least revise their opinion.
Hmm • July 21, 2018 5:32 PM
“I’m afraid Julian Assange has admitted sex without a condom without consent.”
But please refer to it as “rape” or “sexual assault” right? Consentual sex, unconsentually without a condom, provable years and years after the fact while actual rapists and pedos walk free.
Words have power and to choose them carefully is to be careful with power.
They want him for other reasons. To dither THAT point is to ignore the overwhelming evidence.
Hmm • July 21, 2018 5:34 PM
Obviously after my limited statement I don’t want to be accused of supporting rape, infection, etc.
YMMV. I’m not involved in those discussions.
echo • July 21, 2018 5:44 PM
Some progress with new theories may point the way to unification of the forces. As scientists have become constrained by the box of the standard model this encourages not chasing new things but searching deeper into what we have already discovered.
It has also been discovered that the ‘arrow of time’ is irrelevant to quantum computers. In tests they discovered thatquantum computerscould progress data in both directions with equal performance time. Conventional computers experienced lag when running time simulations backwards.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-underpin-physics-20180720/
The Peculiar Math That Could Underlie the Laws of Nature
New findings are fueling an old suspicion that fundamental particles and forces spring from strange eight-part numbers called “octonions.”
https://thenextweb.com/science/2018/07/20/researchers-prove-the-arrow-of-time-is-irrelevant-to-quantum-computers/
An international team of scientists recently published groundbreaking research indicating quantum computers aren’t handicapped by a classical view of time. Grab a cup of coffee, we’ll explain.
If you cannot standing dancing graphics:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-07/cfqt-rca071918.php
Reversing cause and effect is no trouble for quantum computers
Modelling data in reverse offers hints for how the arrow of time emerges
And the original paper:
https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.8.031013
Causal Asymmetry in a Quantum World
Jayne Thompson, Andrew J. P. Garner, John R. Mahoney, James P. Crutchfield, Vlatko Vedral, and Mile Gu
Phys. Rev. X 8, 031013 – Published 18 July 2018
Ismar Duderija • July 21, 2018 6:39 PM
@Clive
The reason I asked about Trump is the postulate that he’s just the effect of the “Chickens Come Home To Roost” effect America is experiencing at the moment. Namely, installing dictators all over the world to serve their economic interest, they are now having one installed by Russia. We all know how dictators (Sadam for example) have ended up so I was wandering if similar destiny awaits Mr Trump?
On the question of social media – from the very beginning I had an inbuilt aversion for the likes of Facebook (was forced once to develop a small integration with Facebook for one of my less scrupulous employees which made me miserable and caused me to leave shortly after). This might be in part due to me associating computers with science more than anything else due to my early computing experiences which did not happen until my mid 20ties.
This is quite opposite to how younger generation experience the computers and Internet now.
If I had to give an opinion then I would say that things like Facebook remind me more of a of a type of popular music like Disco or such which had its peak in the 80s (or thereabouts) and faded soon after but it still pops up from time to time with a song here and there and has a few die-hard followers to this day. I think that this is supported by the recent claims that Facebook has become “parents app” while younger people prefer other social platforms.
So in short, whereas Facebook and Trump might see the end of their public life soon, only Facebook has enough strength to linger a bit longer in our collective consciousness.
After all, how still remembers Sadam’s surname – what was it again ?
Ismar Duderija • July 21, 2018 6:54 PM
@echo
RE: Quantum Time flow you may want to look
up
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
if you’re interested in why we perceive time the way we do
Ratio • July 21, 2018 7:09 PM
@Ismar Duderija,
After all, how still remembers Sadam’s surname – what was it again ?
Al-Tikriti (التكريتي).
echo • July 21, 2018 7:15 PM
@Ismar Duderija
They’re already forgotten in my house. The only reason I am aware of them to any degree is the constant pumping out of media junk which of course invites comment. There is plenty going on in the world of substance which deserves attention.
Anti-terror/anti money laundering laws are being abused by the financial system for political and commercial reasons to deny women their rights in law. As usual it is a case of people misreading the law which results in an overreach of power which breaches the particular act of law and also data protection and other laws they are obligated to adhere to. This results in flawed policy at the administration level and may also expose bad practices. Management and regulatory supervisory staff may also be culpable for failure of standards and failure to conduct due diligence with regard to the context of women’s needs, self autonomy, and harm prevention.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/07/after-abortion-is-illegal/565430/
https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/real-life/buy-abortion-pills-abortion-at-home/
Ratio • July 21, 2018 7:16 PM
@Wael, you accidentally left out your favorite: فِسيخ. 😉 (Spelling?)
Weather • July 21, 2018 7:19 PM
@echo
4032.600098 = 1(g/1000.6642)Ekg)360
g = 9.80665m/sec
Ekg = 9.1093
8064 is the unvisaul gas constant, the 600098 is left over from the sun and planets minus earth, the 1 is distance in meters from centre orbit, the 360 is degrees, based on this I could tell that the neutrino experiment was using what materials for there detector, and I think 147 or457 of higgs matched some other maths of protons or neutrino weight which is E-02 less than electron
Might want to pass it on to your friend.
Wael • July 21, 2018 7:38 PM
@Ratio,
Correct spelling! Never had it, never will. I won’t try this either: Casu marzu — a little more “advanced” than Feseekh. Both are “acquired taste” 😉
echo • July 21, 2018 7:40 PM
Following on from my post about private internet based companies, led originally by VISA, essentially blocking women’s rights in law (and others exercising similar rights) this story on Slashdot raises a similar question about Amazon and Google effectively blocking “domain fronting” which in turn places human rights activists at risk. Amazon also threatened Signal with being banned from Amazon’s cloud services.
Not even UK judges will go as far as this because certain issues are the domain of democratic political discourse. What gives private companies like Amazon, Google, VISA, and others the right to essentially make law without regard to the realities and prejudicial nature of their actions?
Ratio • July 21, 2018 7:54 PM
@Wael, that casu marzu sounds … irresistible. De gustibus …
echo • July 21, 2018 8:01 PM
This is how the UK public sector treat whistleblowers. Been there. I have been threatened by at least two individuals, and menaced and treated dismissively by another. UK police also have a track record of “no criming” or colluding in trying to bury this kind of thing. Complaints of assault and sexual assault also have a tendency to go missing. I can name at least one lawyer who “took a bung” to harass his own client out of a case.
Ms Whitford told The Independent there “has to be some form of enforcement and some form of punishment for public bodies who are brushing things under the carpet and actually shooting the messenger”.
Hmm • July 21, 2018 8:33 PM
Given your penchant for trying to silence others I do not believe you.
Hmm • July 21, 2018 8:57 PM
Some children reporting over 10+ hours of usage per diem. “Harmless”
echo • July 21, 2018 9:28 PM
@Hmm
Could you focus on content not attacking other people please? It is rude and insulting not to mention you are commenting about situations you know nothing about. Basically, if you are taking this kind of attitude you are not the audience. You’re also not involved and of no help so you will have to excuse me not going out of my way to impress you personally.
Ratio • July 21, 2018 9:55 PM
@echo,
Could you focus on content not attacking other people please?
You introduce yourself as a topic (everything before the link) and then you object when someone comments on the subject you yourself just brought up? Pick one.
Ratio • July 21, 2018 10:23 PM
Exclusive: Court documents claim new Arron Banks links with Russia:
Documents filed in a South African court by Arron Banks’ former business partner allege he sought funds from Russians.
[…]
The claims of Russian involvement were included in the affidavit, which was filed in the court in Kimberley on the 28th of February 2018, months before The Sunday Times and others revealed Mr Banks had had more extensive contact with Russians than he had previously admitted.
Damian Collins MP, the Chair of the DCMS Select Committee who called Mr Banks to give evidence to the Committee told Channel 4 News: “I think the allegations throw a completely different light on Arron Banks’s relationship with the Russians.
“The papers suggest that he was actively seeking investment with the Russians. He was actively seeking to do deals to support his mining interests in South Africa.
“This all happened before his famous ‘boozy lunch’ with the Russian ambassador. So the Russians knew that Arron Banks needed money and he was looking to them for it.
[…]
“I think this throws up yet more questions about the nature of his businesses, where the money has come from to pay for Brexit, given that a number of his businesses, by different reports, didn’t seem to be making much money at that time. He has clearly got to go to finance his businesses from outside, so where did the money come from that enabled him to spend so much money on Brexit? And what is the full extent of his contact with the Russians during this time to discuss business opportunities, and what came of them? There is clearly a lot more to this that Arron Banks let on when he came in front of the committee.”
echo • July 21, 2018 10:53 PM
Dominic Raab is proposing to undo centuries of the UK always honouring its debts which, historically, has been very important and a deciding factor in wars. The UK is also home to the “contract” as well as the “company”.
I personally find Dominic Rabb to be divsive and conflicted. What is the point of negotiation when every other partner is left feeling wounded and bruised?
The UK could refuse to pay its £39 billion divorce bill to Brussels if it does not get a trade deal, the Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, has signalled.
[…]
The comments appeared at odds with Chancellor Philip Hammond, who in December 2017 said of the divorce payment: “I find it inconceivable that we as a nation would be walking away from an obligation that we recognised as an obligation.
“That is not a credible scenario. That is not the kind of country we are. Frankly it would not make us a credible partner for future international agreements.”
tyr • July 22, 2018 12:33 AM
In 2024,
Trump will be a rich oligarch hanging out
with the rest of them. Poor people will
still be poor.
The conditions which produced him as a
symptom will still be ruining the world.
All the frantic sniping at the figurehead
never changed the course of a ship of
state in the slightest. You can use him
as a cathartic to dump your personal
bile on but it will only ruin your mental
health with no effect on him at all.
If you think this is all different now
you might try some ancient literature to
see that humans are just as dumb now as
they were then and the complaints are
still the same.
@Clive
I never expect anything to be secure once
it is entered into a computer. They are
truly lousy at keeping secrets and when the
loons stuck them on every desk it ground
society to a virtual halt while siphoning
billions into M$ pockets. That corp kept
promising to have something that wasn’t
broken with every new upgrade. Now it is
wasting bandwidth and doing endless spying
on everyone. Not my idea of a fixed system.
Hmm • July 22, 2018 12:40 AM
@echo
I don’t believe that someone being victimized as you describe would go out of their way to silence people.
It seems off motive.
Hmm • July 22, 2018 12:49 AM
@tyr
This isn’t really about Trump’s “personality” or persona. I mean, a referendum on that awaits in Hell… but that’s not really the concern of mere mortals like ourselves. We have to make do with what we deal with, the means of politics – who gets what and why.
It’s all about what can be proven that he said, knew about, and did. Those things will be documented at length but let me preface it to say that we already have evidence in the public milieu that he is guilty of several nontrivial “oversights” to say the least. In an earlier era (not long ago) this would be an impeachable oversight, but who knows now. This is the Versailles Congress and they eat cake every day.
The question is, why is Trump’s style of incompetent lying the favorite among so many?
I just don’t understand how someone so bad at lying becomes a champion of any cause. It seems incongruous.
Ratio • July 22, 2018 1:53 AM
Document: Justice Department Releases Carter Page FISA Application:
Pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the Justice Department has—in a highly unusual move—released a redacted copy of the FISA application seeking a warrant against former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. The application became the subject of political controversy when the Republican majority on the House intelligence committee, on the basis of little evidence, accused the FISA Court and Justice Department of enabling the surveillance of Page for political rather than national security reasons.
From the document (pages 4 and 8):
(S//NF [exed out]) This application targets Carter Page. The FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian Government [… REDACTED …] undermine and influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election in violation of U.S. criminal law. Page is a former foreign policy adviser to a Candidate for U.S. President (Candidate #1). [… REDACTED …]
[…]
(S//NF [exed out]) In or about March 2016, George Papadopoulos2 and Carter Page (the target of this application) were publicly identified by Candidate #1 as part of his/her foreign policy team. [… REDACTED …] the FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with Candidate #1’s campaign [… REDACTED …]
Weather • July 22, 2018 2:00 AM
@hmm, knock it off, just drop it
Hmm • July 22, 2018 2:01 AM
Just so we’re clear, Trump campaign/administration collusion is now directly alleged.
Directly with evidence.
@weather
Good luck.
Hmm • July 22, 2018 2:02 AM
Holy crap I copied and pasted the wrong link, that was bad.
@weather
Still, good luck.
Hmm • July 22, 2018 2:03 AM
#Humorous mistakes of the mainstream media
Wesley Parish • July 22, 2018 3:31 AM
Well, I had hoped never to have to utter/mutter that name again, but, just in case anyone’s still awake and hasn’t had to chew their own legs off to escape:
There Are 3 Main Theories That Explain Trump’s Approach to Putin and Russia—Which One Makes the Most Sense? Time for Occam’s Razor
As Mark Felt (“Deep Throat”) famously said to Bob Woodward: “Follow the money.”
The CIA Had a Rule Against Meeting the KGB Alone. Trump Was Reckless to Ignore It With Putin.
https://theintercept.com/2018/07/16/trump-putin-summit-helsinki/
Makes sense.
What Mueller’s Latest Indictment Reveals About Russian and U.S. Spycraft
https://theintercept.com/2018/07/18/mueller-indictment-russian-hackers/
Russian officers took steps to anonymize their hacking and infrastructure, according to the indictment, trying to leave no trace of their identity as they rented servers, registered internet domain names, and set up accounts for email, Twitter, and other uses. But they didn’t do the best job compartmentalizing this infrastructure. This allowed Mueller’s team to confirm that the same people were behind a number of ostensibly distinct operations: DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0, the spear-phishing campaign, and the hacks of the DCCC and DNC networks.
Finally, some attribution-laden info on the accusations and indictments.
That was cybertracking as it’s meant to be used, to track down any given sets of actions alleged to have been by state actors and attribute them correctly. This following is a set of cybertracking that is counter to the vital interests of a democracy, in stifling lawful protest and – of course: violating non-state property, but as it’s not “private” as in company property, the govts of Canada and the US apparently think it’s all good.
The U.S. and Canada Are Preparing for a New Standing Rock Over the Trans Mountain Tar Sands Pipeline
https://theintercept.com/2018/07/17/trans-mountain-pipeline-tar-sands-canada-us-kinder-morgan/
As with other Indigenous people in British Columbia, the Secwepemc have never relinquished their territory by way of treaty, land sale, or surrender, and they did not consent to the Trans Mountain expansion.
Hmm • July 22, 2018 3:45 AM
“The CIA Had a Rule Against Meeting the KGB Alone.”
Full stop. He ignores the best practices that we’ve established for a reason.
What’s his stated rationale for a 1 on 1 meeting with Putin? WHAT EXACTLY?
That practice is pragmatic and well established, he ignores it – WHY?
As if Putin is going to give him something in private. Or vice versa.
Hmm • July 22, 2018 3:53 AM
https://vault.fbi.gov/d1-release/d1-release/at_download/file
“The FBI believes that Page has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian government,” the application states, adding that “there is probable cause that such activities involve or are about to involve violations of the criminal statutes of the United States.”
The application says that a significant purpose of the request is to “collect foreign intelligence information as part of the FBI’s investigation of this target.”
It does have some information about Page’s activities, which included a July 2016 trip to Russia in which Page was accused in the opposition research dossier of having met with a top Russian energy official, something Page denies.
#TildeTroof
Clive Robinson • July 22, 2018 5:21 AM
@ hmm,
Holy crap I copied and pasted the wrong link, that was bad.
Ho hum we all have slips of the mouse.
But as for your earlier comment,
Just so we’re clear, Trump campaign/administration collusion is now directly alleged.
OK the important word is “alleged” but you go on to say,
Directly with evidence.
So let’s look through the Reuters article you link to,
1, The FBI released 412 mainly redacted pages about surveillance they conducted not on the Doh gnarled but on Carter Page.
2, Carter Page denies any wrong doing and has not been charged with any crimes.
3, It indicates the surveillance started after Carter Page had left the Doh gnarled’s “campaign.
4, It is claimed that the FBI used the Ex MI5 agent payed by the democrats to produce a dossier against the Doh gnarled to get their warrants.
5, It is indicated that the FBI failed to disclose material evidence in their possession that should have been included in the warrant.
6, Importantly it says that “Michael Horowitz, the department’s inspector general” said back a third of a year ago he was looking into both the FBI and DoJ for failing to follow procedures… But does not indicate if the investigation is compleate or not
The rest of the article appears to lack substance and conflates another possibly unrelated story in as “filler” and possibly to distort the readers point of view.
So let’s see what evidence there is that is given,
A, The FBI and DoJ are under investigation for activities that are “fruit of the poisoned vine”.
B, It is indicated that as evidence the FBI used a discredited document from an Ex MI5 agent[1].
C, The document is so heavily redacted it shows no evidence against Mr Page that is of use even to the press (so far).
D, Mr Page is likewise not charhrd and denies the allegations.
E, The FBI used major resources against Mr Page, after, not before he had left the Trump Campaign.
So tell me where in that article is any actuall evidence that you claim is “Directly with evidence” given?
Oh and against whom?
Tell us all what your definition of “evidence” is?
As far as I can see the only thing even remotely close to evidence given in the article, which has led to any kind of action, is potential malfeasance by the FBI / DoJ along with the profligate misuse of public resources…
There is a lot more I could say but I’ll leave it where it is at the moment which is gutter level innuendo, spun up into what appears a “nothing burger” I guess to make a “bad health warning” buffet along with a couple of stale ham sandwichs…
[1] The Steel dossier from what has been said publically by both the US and UK MSM, apparently does not contain very much other than second hand unsupported innuendo, false information and paid for fantasies. Apparently the Republicans payed for it originally, were not impressed[2] the Democrates then picked up paying for it and when they likewise dropped it for similar reasons, Steel used his own money and the resources of a company he jointly owned[3] to carry on his “Windmill tillting”. The FBI and US Secret Service likewise were unimpressed with the dossier and it was only when Mr Steel “outed” himself publically in what many regarded as “career suicide” that the dossier became of vague interest “for another look”. And now it would appear that look has led to it being used to get a warrent under highly questionable circumstances against Mr Page, which has not produced any charges only a 412 page “desk weight of abstract art” so far.
[2] From the time line the Republicsns were so unimpressed by the Steel dossier, they handed it around Washington to ammuse each other, prior to selecting the target of the dossier as their official candidate… Pardon me if I say that it makes the dossier look very weak at best.
[3] Under UK law which applies to the company Mr Steel worked for at the time, missusing a companies resources for personal interests is a quite grave activity in effect it is both fraud and theft. So Mr Steel may have broken the law. We don’t know if the other shareholders in his company agreed to his activities or not (at the time it appeared not). But even if they did there is the question of did he bring the firm “into disrepute” which with the other share holders distancing them selves from Mr Steel indicates they thought he might well have done so. Thus the other share holders unless their is documentry evidence to show their support for Mr Steel’s actions would have sufficient evidence to start legal proceedings against Mr Steel…
Alyer Babtu • July 22, 2018 6:32 AM
@echo
quantum computers aren’t handicapped by classical view of time. Grab a cup of coffee, we’ll explain.
Presumably one would also want to cue up Chicago’s “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? “ ?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=7uy0ldI_1HA
Paraphrasing the articles, the “arrow of time” is a non-problem we created for ourselves by confused physics modeling.
Inquiring minds want to know dept: I wondered if the article would make reference to the multiple states Hilbert space operators aspect of quantum systems, but couldn’t tell if it did. Also is the non-commutativity of operators that in classical physics commute somehow involved ? And finally Carver Mead says it’s simpler to develop parts of physics from quantum starting points; has he said anything about the so-called arrow of time ?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/20/carver_mead_on_the_future_of_science/
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/collective-electrodynamics
The articles seem to conflate time and cause/effect. Time doesn’t have much to do with causality. What is real is motion, and causality relates to that primarily. Time as far as anyone knows is just our comparison of motions, and is less fundamental.
echo • July 22, 2018 6:41 AM
What a surprise… Sarcasm aside UK police don’t always pay attention as best they might at the point they should. This would avoid a lot of later error and clown like behaviour or being slammed into a wall. I have the recording to prove it which cut off atthe point my phone smashed to pieces on the floor. A call to the police to report this straight after went absolutely nowhere.
Scotland Yard’s anti-corruption unit is facing an investigation after claims of “serious corruption and malpractice” within its own ranks.
The police watchdog, the Independent Office of Police Conduct, said the claims relate to the Met’s directorate of professional standards. The claims include interfering in investigations, racism and turning a blind eye to wrongdoing.
Weather • July 22, 2018 7:48 AM
Russia, America, England does anyone have a overview picture of why a political partys need a change with the reason not being political.
easyer getting evendice before a point rather than after that point.
Goals, motivation?
Ergo Sum • July 22, 2018 8:26 AM
@Clive Robinson…
The point that is often missed on this blog is that the less new members tend to be talking about the level three attackers that once we assumed were “state level” only. Which ment that the discussions were about Mil / Dip level protection.
But things have changed the “states” are now left in the dust by “corporates”. Who are turning everybody into product via telemetry and other data stealing including that of “cloud” storage and software.
One could argue that “corporates” should have been assumed from the very beginning and these collections were/are tapped by the “state level” actors. There has been numerous evidence for this order, for example the case of gen. Petraeus. The chances are that older people probably remember other cases as well.
In fact with the likes of Intel’s ME, Microsoft’s telemetry in Windows 10 and Office365 etc, Google’s Chrome and Android persistent “phone home” and more or less forced “cloud” usage the average home user, mom&pop or small business stand no chance against such corporate pirates.
Nowadays, it’s impossible to escape corporate pirates, especially for small businesses. These are the businesses that have no IT resources on staff for managing their computers, networks, etc. In good cases, these businesses hire consultant(s) for their business IT needs and in the worse case scenario, they “do” this work themselves.
The banking industry and government do not help either in the US, the business bank accounts have no FDIC protection. With the “invention” of debit card for the business accounts that you cannot even opt out of, things got even worse. Not many small business owners know that anyone can issue a debit (ACH debit) against their account that completes in 24 hours time frame. Once it’s done, there’s little or no way to reverse the transaction.
As soon as I’ve learned this, I’ve opted for business account “positive pay” protection for a fee, of course. Only authorized payments and/or debitor(s) can issue debit(s) against my business account.
My online personal/business backing is done on a MacBook Pro, that also used for QuicBooks for business. There’s no email accounts, or browsing the internet and the majority of the times, this laptop is dormant. As the matter of fact, once it is turned on, usually there are couple of updates waiting to be applied.
While it may seem that this type of handling of business account does not fall under the “low hanging fruit” category, the chances are that it is by nowadays. There are way too many holes in any of the widely used OSs, with all of their builtin telemetry/spying as you also stated. The chances are that it will not take long for the hackers, state or private, to exploit these processes.
bttb • July 22, 2018 9:07 AM
From emptywheel.net, an earlofhuntingdon comment: “Who is funding Steve Bannon and his exilic Unite the Right European tour?”
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/07/21/three-things-still-active-measures/#comment-743562 , which references:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-bannons-plan-to-hijack-europe-for-the-far-right
Hmm • July 22, 2018 1:29 PM
but you go on to say,
Directly with evidence.
-Yep. Directly with evidence.
That’s exactly what I go on to say.
MarkH • July 22, 2018 1:47 PM
I must salute Clive, for his dogged consistency.
I’ve no doubt that he’s disgusted by Trump, but at the same time he has mirrored pro-Trump talking points for many, many months.
In particular, he refers to the so-called “Steele dossier” as a “discredited document”. Maybe Clive doesn’t know this … but fact-free American Trumpniks recite this as a mantra, almost every day.
- The “dossier” is no such thing, but rather a series of interview reports. The interviews were mostly (if not exclusively) with Russian sources whom Steele has found informative in earlier points of his career.
- The reports are not findings or conclusions, but instead are raw intelligence, along the lines of “this is what source D told me.”
- As far as I am aware, Steele never represented the statements in these raw intelligence reports as conclusive. He is on record as estimating them to be 70 to 90 percent accurate.
- Reportedly, Steele has a good reputation as a reliable intelligence officer among Western intelligence agencies. Whether Clive agrees or not, the FBI assessed him as a good source.
-
To my knowledge, although the Steele reports are practically certain to contain some falsehoods, no factual statement in them has yet been publicly shown to be false.
-
The Steele reports contain many examples of facts that were publicly known at the time they were written, which have since been confirmed by reportage or the fruits of official investigation.
In other words, the track record of verification is (up to this time) pretty good.
For another Trumpnik talking point, we have a reference to the fruit of the poisoned tree. What Trump’s American cheerleaders say, is that the Carter Page surveillance was illegitimate, because it was founded on a “discredited document” which was falsely represented to the FISA court as dependable.
First, the Carter Page warrants were based on an extensive network of evidence, of which the Steele documents form only a part.
Second, the warrants clearly state that those documents were compiled for the purpose of political opposition.
I see no misrepresentation, nor reliance on a single dubious source.
MarkH • July 22, 2018 1:55 PM
More tedious work to do, for the Kremlin’s useful idiots:
New York Times reported that before Trump became President, he was briefed by US intelligence officials about the Russian attack on the 2016 election.
This briefing was not limited to cyber-attack attribution (which, as we are frequently reminded, could in theory be deceived by a ‘false flag operation’), but also included intercepted emails and text messages among officials of the Russian government, and reports from human sources, including one very close to Putin.
This is of course a leak, which will be very difficult to fact-check.
If the NYT report is true, and you live if False Flag Land, then I guess you must suppose that those text messages, emails, and human source reports were all fabricated by CIA conspiracists against Trump.
Anyway, it will be entertaining to see how Putin’s arse-lickers spin this story.
Hmm • July 22, 2018 2:05 PM
“If the NYT report is true, and you live if False Flag Land, then I guess you must suppose that those text messages, emails, and human source reports were all fabricated by CIA conspiracists against Trump.”
I’m sure we’ll have Clive writing out a mini-dissertation on how that’s entirely possible next.
8 guilty pleas of 33+ indictments and more to come, and he’s throwing out “nothing burger” again?
It’s starting to strain credulity that Clive is just “really, really skeptical” and wants us all to proffer up smoking gun evidence sufficient to try the case right here online, with him as Judge no doubt. Because if he’s unwilling to even characterize 8 guilty pleas as anything other than “fake news” or “nothing burgers” then I really don’t see how we’d be able to pretend he’d be some kind of authority of what is real here.
Conspiracy theories versus actual indictments and he’s going with the former, all in.
Do you really think they’d get this far if they didn’t have any hard evidence, really?
Silly.
Hmm • July 22, 2018 2:41 PM
“I had a GREAT meeting with Putin and the Fake News used every bit of their energy to try and disparage it,” Trump tweeted. “So bad for our country!”
You know, “the evil media” made Trump look like a compromised traitor up there in Helsinki.
Not anything HE did or said, surely not! It’s not a lie when the President says it.
Bad media! He misspoke, why can’t we just allow him the benefit of the treason?
What, reversing that one sentence with his double negative didn’t undo his months and months of pandering and lying about his contacts and business dealings with Russia to the American people?
Even Russian state TV accuses Trump of being a Kremlin stooge. Directly verbatim.
It’s unprecedented for a sitting President to side with a foreign dictatorship against his own country.
It’s unprecedented for someone so BAD at lying to try to do it anyway with stakes this high.
We SAW him for the last year fawning over Putin and denying the evidence, lying.
There’s no 2 ways here. Trump is a liar. Trump denied Russia meddled MANY TIMES,
well after he was repeatedly briefed by his administration on the FACTS. There IS no factual dispute. Russia DID meddle, and Trump DID lie about it repeatedly. Full stop.
And yet here we are, fielding “skepticism” from known water bearers about how all of this could be an invented, fabricated, deep-state BS plot because you know, the lying traitor himself alleges it and he’s always been so honest and credible.
That’s why he wanted to shut down the investigation this whole time with his myriad of excuses.
Because he wanted to save taxpayer money, right? Haha. Of course. D’strovia, comrade.
echo • July 22, 2018 3:33 PM
@Alyer Babtu
You had me going here. I’m sorry to many nuisance neighbours in the past ruined listening to music for me. Wind rustling tree leaves is the most I can bear.
I can barely follow quantum mechanics. Like a lot of things with advanced physics the physicists have a problem explaining things and can even confuse each other and themselves which is a known problem.
echo • July 22, 2018 3:43 PM
@Weather
I believe one possibility is law and psychology. The world is so complex nobody even within a legal field or scientific speciality can keep track of all the arguments and things move too fast. Things are so bad in the UK that a decision by government was based around a point being “legally arguable” when more considered opinion said this wasn’t good enough, and this is while at the administrative level the law is not enforced when it comes to standards and citizens rights.
@MarkH
I don’t have a problem with the Steele dossier. I also don’t have a problem with people claiming Putin, in his role as Russian president and Russia (“the state”) is not responsible. I am however going along with Clives “wait and see” methodology and his comments about the difficulties of proving attribition, and other well trod comments about the social-economic profile of Russia (not to mention US and to some degree UK neo-cons and politicians with agendas and the wrong kinds of friends and abuse of office and abuse of election law).
Hmm • July 22, 2018 4:05 PM
Denying the provable record and saying “nothing burger” etc is NOT a “wait and see” approach really.
Let’s be clear about that.
Clive Robinson • July 22, 2018 4:38 PM
@ MarkH,
I’ve no doubt that he’s disgusted by Trump, but at the same time he has mirrored pro-Trump talking points for many, many months.
My opinion of Trump I think people can gather by some of the names I refrence him by.
My opinion over many months has been and does not change from “wait for the evidence”. It’s a legaly, morally and ethically justifiable position unlike yours.
@Hmm presented a link and indicated he thought it had some importance with “Directly with evidence.” I read it and reported back on that article as being nothing of the sort that @Hmm appeared to be claiming.
As for the “dossier” that is not my choice of words but is what it was refered to in the article as. So don’t try reading anything into my simply being consistant with the articles words.
As for your comment,
1. The “dossier” is no such thing, but rather a series of interview reports. The interviews were mostly (if not exclusively) with Russian sources whom Steele has found informative in earlier points of his career.
That from what has been reported in the public press is only partially right.
Mr Steel is known to be on a Russian list, so could not go back to Russia to see let alone interview people or his past contacts.
What he did was pay intermediaries and they supposadly asked questions of other people.
This is known to be at best a very unreliable process as I have mentioned before. Generally in intelligence as with investagative journalism you double check your sources and their methods im atleast two ways, preferably more.
It would appear that Mr Steel could not or would not do this. Which throws a big question on it’s reliability. In fact it is more than likely Mr Steel “got played” as he was paying people. The general belief is that such a process will give you what earns the intermediary or informant the most money. It’s known to fail as an intelligence tool repeatedly, which is why it’s avoided or checked in as many ways as possible.
Some of the reports are to be polite somewhat fanciful and todate no other evidence has turned up to in anyway corroborate those reports.
Whilst Mr Steel did have a reputation with the FBI over FIFA, the FBI had the “dossier” for a very long time as did the Secret Service and appart from informing Mr Trump at a much later time did nothing with it untill their hand was forced.
This does sugest the FBI, DoJ or SS gave it any credability what so ever… A point the view point opposed to Trump does not in anyway address especially as like the Republicans they also discredited Mr Steel’s dossier / report.
With quite literally billions of dolars and the future direction of the US for atleast the next four years at stake, if there was anything even remotely usable in Mr Steel’s work you would have expected one or both political parties to use it. But neither did, thus it’s a fair assumption they saw nothing of any use what so ever in the report, just as the FBI / DoJ / SS did not.
As you speak of “fact-free American Trumpniks” why are you not also speaking of “fact-free American Hillaryniks”.
Both your argument and @Hmm’s is predicated on your months of near rabid “for us or against us” comments and claims for which there is no acceptable evidence in the public arena.
For some reason you both appear cognatively incapable of actually considering that there is a third non Trump non Hillary position you can take. That is “neither side has proved a case” nor are they likely to on what is currently publically available information.
Untill you do, you will probably keep throwing garbage statments that defy logic or common sense out, without providing any rational evidence. Which might be fine for “rabble rousing” but not for anything legaly legitimate.
To be frank I am very tired of you @Hmm and Ratio attacking me repeatedly without cause and trying to put words into my mouth or use other failed discrediting techniques. In the past @Moderator has removed your comments and you have received warnings, as other people have reminded you whilst also telling you, you are wrong.
Why the three of you persist in repeating what has failed you all before is known only to you. However it does show that Einstein’s definition of insanity still holds true.
Hmm • July 22, 2018 4:46 PM
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said on Sunday that President Donald Trump’s advisers should consider leaving the White House if Trump continues to publicly disparage the nation’s intelligence community and cast doubt on the evidence that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election.
“The president either needs to rely on the people that he has chosen to advise him, or those advisers need to re-evaluate whether or not they can serve in this administration,” Gowdy said on Fox News Sunday, referring to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley. “But the disconnect cannot continue. The evidence is overwhelming and the president needs to say that and act like it.”
This is a Pro-Trump Republican, Gowdy. There is no denying reality anymore.
Helsinki was the crowning moment. The walkback makes zero sense in context.
Russia meddled, Trump has repeatedly run distraction for and denied it.
Trump is taking massive political heat to defend Vladimir Putin – nobody has ever done this.
Nobody does all of this for no reason.
“Putin’s fine, okay? He’s fine!”
No President ever pretended they’ll release their taxes then later renegs, or pretends they’re ready to talk to investigators then come up with 1000 BS excuses over a year on Twitter like nobody can see them in series, or calls the long-time Republican investigators names in public trying to discredit their findings before they’re released, trying just about every mental gymnastic they can imagine to justify shutting down an investigation that’s producing guilty pleas and indictments and has wide bipartisan support to continue doing so.
These are not the actions of someone who is innocent with nothing to hide, damn obviously.
If nothing else the lying about in-kind campaign hush money is an obvious FELONY.
It’s all been admitted to now, after months of different stories and denials.
Finally the tapes came out and lo and behold, THE PRESIDENT LIED.
The story changes literally every single day.
Still some want to hold out as if none of this is “actually” happening or provable.
That’s not skepticism. That’s denial.
Hmm • July 22, 2018 4:48 PM
“Both your argument and @Hmm’s is predicated on your months of near rabid “for us or against us” comments and claims for which there is no acceptable evidence in the public arena.”
Now, Clive, you have crossed the line into lying.
Provably lying.
Clive Robinson • July 22, 2018 4:55 PM
@ Hmm,
Denying the provable record and saying “nothing burger” etc is NOT a “wait and see” approach really.
Let’s be clear about that.
Yes “let’s be clear about that”, it was you who presented the link and claimed it had “evidence”, not me or anybody else you and you alone.
I simply went through the article, to find evidence within it and report it back.
As I pointed out the only evidence of any relevance was against the FBI amd the DoJ.
So it was a “nothing burger” article and presented nothing of evidence against Mr Page or Mr Trump…
So as you’ve failed to explain what you consider evidence, I guess you must be avoiding answering for some reason. One reason is as I pointed out is it does not provide evidence you appear to think you could pretend it does…
Perhaps you “linked to the wrong article” again?
Hmm • July 22, 2018 5:08 PM
There are ways to debate and make your opinions known without lying.
My argument has never once been “for us or against us” in ANY capacity.
That’s a lie on your part, a deliberate falsehood. Shame on you. That’s beneath you.
8 guilty pleas and 33 indictments are evidence. The Cohen tapes are evidence.
The widespread reporting of Trump’s Russian dealings are evidence despite his denials.
There is an overwhelming plethora of evidence in public already despite YOUR denials.
You really ought to watch what you say lest you be tarred by your own words here.
echo • July 22, 2018 5:10 PM
@Hmm
We await your monograph on epistemology and investigative methods within psycho-social systems.
I suggest you read Clive’s comments on beaurocratic systems in theory and practice. The “provable record” is nothing such. It has as much to do with reality as a companies annual report and military procurement auditing. See also “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” by Jean Baudrillard and “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” by Rene Magritte.
@Clive
Generally in intelligence as with investagative journalism you double check your sources and their methods im atleast two ways, preferably more.
Getting down to the bare rock of matter can take some work hence needing to take some level of care.
This can be very difficult I’m sure but can uncover scandals on one hand and at times even an appeal for information can bring up very little. The Gaurdian alleged that the state sector had been pressuring people for money and appealed for people to come forward with their stories. I haven’t heard anything since but know this does go on. There are also pay demands which are being pushed onto people and historic issues such as deliberately allowing the system to fail or even lose entire archives. Some problems can simply be politicians over-promising and poor follow through.
Hmm • July 22, 2018 5:12 PM
Let me just say this :
What you’re doing right now, lying in defense of a very credibly accused traitor, is unacceptable.
It is not an example of “wait and see” in any way.
You are carrying water for Vladimir Putin’s GRU and pretending they didn’t have a hand in Brexit.
You are refusing to read and pretending what you do not read does not exist.
Shame on you. Do not again attempt to paraphrase my arguments as nationalist nor unfounded.
What you are doing now is unacceptable and unsupportable – not to mention rude as hell.
echo • July 22, 2018 5:17 PM
@Hmm
Oh please stop arguing. If you have something to say on the issue write it up so it’s all in one place and stands and falls on its own merit. The last squid topic doubled in size and was taken up by 100+ arguments about Trump! Who cares!? Other people have their contributions and issues too which don’t get attention because of your Trump obsession!
Hmm • July 22, 2018 5:19 PM
“We await your monograph on epistemology and investigative methods within psycho-social systems.”
What you await is Mueller’s indictment of a sitting President on a host of high crimes.
Trying to satisfy someone who doesn’t want to be satisfied isn’t exactly a good use of time.
I think all I actually have to do is just continue to let you be proven wrong as this is laid out.
So far Clive has claimed Russia “wasn’t really” involved in Brexit, Putin can’t be proven behind any hackings or assassination attempts, and there’s no evidence that Trump broke any laws…
It’s a fools errand to correct someone who wants to be wrong.
And if that person is willing to lie, even more so.
Hmm • July 22, 2018 5:28 PM
@echo
You’ll note *(if honest, literate) that I didn’t bring up or invent this discussion here.
It’s also a major international news item involving 2 of the arguable 3 world superpowers.
You want to shut down a discussion on it, fine. Start one on a more interesting topic.
That’s your means of accomplishing that.
You’ve repeatedly tried to shush people as Clive has provably lied, we’ll have no more of that.
Understood? Good.
echo • July 22, 2018 6:00 PM
@Hmm
Not everyone thinks of themself all the time. How about respecting other people and giving them space to talk about their issues?
Hmm • July 22, 2018 6:08 PM
You’re wasting it right now, in lieu of an interesting topic to try to force a subject change.
Stop trying to silence people you don’t agree with, it’s shameful.
Ismar • July 22, 2018 6:15 PM
@Clive and @Hmmm
Did not mean to kick off one of the longest discussions on the forum ever :-).
We may be all missing the point here arguing about the validity of the evidence.
I think the real question is when Trump stops being useful (remember my Sadam Housain analogy and the evidence of the WMD) and as such needs to be removed from the White House.
I tend to think that is going to happen sooner rather than latter, but then again who could have predicted him becoming the president in the first place.
It may be all to do with the quantum unpredictability after all :-).
echo • July 22, 2018 6:37 PM
While I benagn discussing how the international finance system and laws designed to prevent farud and money laundering by criminals lets women down these are examples where broken systems and breaking the law has a terrible life destroying impact. It is sad that systems meant to protect people can become twisted and harmful. It is also sad that laws meant to protect women are not paid heed by people with power over young women.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jul/22/universal-credit-whistleblowers-heartbreaking-impact-flawed-system-claimants
Universal credit staff: ‘It was more about getting them off the phone’. Whistleblowers tell of the ‘heartbreaking’ impact flawed system has on claimants.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jul/22/universal-credit-it-system-broken-service-centre-whistleblowers-say
Universal credit IT system ‘broken’, whistleblowers say. Service centre staff say glitches having harmful effect on huge number of claimants.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jul/20/10-year-old-girl-death-fgm-female-genital-mutilation-somalia
10-year-old girl bleeds to death after female genital mutilation in Somalia. Case is first fatality linked to the mutilation practice that authorities have admitted to in years, in a country where 98% of women and girls are cut.
@Hmm
I’m not forcing a subject change or silence on anyone. What I am suggesting is making every other post about Trump and multiple posts one after the other and making allegations about other people commenting is unhelpful and destructive of a shared space.
@Ismar
Oh what a world! I have got myself into some scrapes but heck oh mighty. We have got ourselves in a muddle haven’t we?
The US right wing along with Steve Bannon are interfering with UK social policy and funding the criminal appeal of a known racist agitator. This does provoke questions about people like Aaran Banks and neo-con interesting placing their thumbs on election scales. It is entirely and wholly speculation on my part but I have wondered if American neo-con money was behind any Russian interference with the US elections. But like Clive I am waiting on the evidence. It is too early to conclude anything.
China, EU seize control of the world’s cyber agenda
Politico superior article
The weakening American position comes as the European Union, filling a gap left by years of lax U.S. regulations, imposes data privacy requirements that companies like Facebook and Google must follow. At the same time, China is dictating companies’ security practices with mandates that experts say will undermine global cybersecurity — without any significant pushback from the United States.
The result: Beijing and Brussels are effectively writing the rules that may determine the future of the internet. And China’s vision is spreading across the developing world as it influences similar laws in Vietnam, Tanzania and Nigeria.
The lack of U.S. leadership also harms ordinary Americans by letting industry block the adoption of strong protections against cyberattacks, said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of Congress’ leading voices on cybersecurity and technology issues.
“The United States is failing on cybersecurity because our Congress has been captured by corporations who have successfully killed any effort to impose meaningful cyber standards,” he told POLITICO in an email.”
China Gets it Cybersecurity Right
Chinese Communist Party leaders see cybersecurity “as a fundamental part of their governance model,” said Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And President Xi Jinping has taken a personal interest in the topic, beyond how most world leaders engage with the issue.
USA Cybersecurity Priorities
National security adviser John Bolton eliminated the White House cyber coordinator role, the central figure overseeing all U.S. cyber activities, and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson nixed Painter’s top cyber diplomat role.
The EFF/Big-Data Effect
James Lewis, a cyber expert at CSIS, said the U.S. is the only country where extreme distrust of government prevents meaningful cyber regulations. “That’s not how it works in the rest of the world,” he said. “And I say that for both democracies and dictatorships. This overwhelming angst we have about government is not reflected anywhere else on the planet.”
Cyber Leadership
China is making a greater effort than the U.S., and the EU isn’t far behind. “For the first time,” said the former State Department official, “many, many, many countries … rank much higher in influence than the U.S.”
Lewis, reflecting on his recent conversations in Europe and Asia, was pessimistic. “The internet is going to be regulated, and it’ll be regulated from Brussels and Beijing,” he said. “We’re kind of out of it, because we don’t have a good counter (proposal).”
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/22/china-europeglobal-cyber-agenda-us-internet-735083
From my observations the USA has been fed a great delusion where Russia is the only focus of cybersecurity. This especially rings-true of the establishment media. For an example:
FBI director calls China ‘the broadest, most significant’ threat to the US and says its espionage is active in all 50 states
Yet the national news networks ONLY covered his words on Russia. Everyone has an ulterior motive an agenda.
http://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-director-says-china-is-the-broadest-most-significant-threat-to-the-us-2018-7
The Republicans praise American big-data because it was instrumental in winning the 2016 elections. They hope for a repeat.
California’s GDPR only passed theeir Democratic controlled legislator because a brilliant billionaire ‘held a gun to their paid-off heads”.
Otherwise both political parties wage an all-consuming death-match for 2019 control.
Meanwhile the USA has over 5,000 behind-the-scenes corporations running open-loop collecting, buying and selling of citizens personal data. Big-data is our largest industry and an integral corner-stone essential to the American economy. Notably, even Wall St is unable to correct itself.
Addicts Don’t Lead
The American political system and economy is addicted to the present no-laws data-mining.
Developing Cybersecurity regulations is like asking to shoot our foot!
So don’t expect cooperation but rather lots of kicking and screaming. The fastest (but harsh) method is to fight fire with fire. Force the deranged USA enactment of the total threatened coverage 100% of tariffs. Tank the our economy before the fall elections.
Hmm • July 22, 2018 7:14 PM
@Ismar
Ah, we’ve had longer ones I’m sure…
But when the indictment against Trump comes down, and I think we can all probably agree on some level that it IS coming – given that he’s now refusing to meet with Mueller after all those “back and forths” about putting restrictions on questions and time limitations, etc – that’s going to be the point where there is no longer any plausible uncertainty left.
There shouldn’t be much now, but the court of public opinion isn’t a court of law even if the evidence is extremely damning and already as public as much of it is. Mueller is building an evidence-based prosecution for which there is no credible defense possible. Too many people have already been made states evidence. We wouldn’t be here if it had no basis.
That’s why we see flailing attempts to shut down the investigation – it’s finding witches.
Ranking people are cooperating after pleading guilty to felonies. It’s damning stuff.
A bridge of establish fact is being built whether or not Trump testifies under oath.
In the end he may plead the 5th and expect his supporters in Congress to back him on it.
But the prosecution doesn’t require his admission of guilt to be successful.
Ultimately it may come down to a Constitutional crisis decided by the Supreme Court.
Trump’s hopeful appointee Kavanaugh has some very unorthodox opinions about things,
including whether Nixon’s damning tapes should have been admitted in evidence, etc.
Of whether a sitting President can pardon himself, etc. It’s transparently disgusting.
This is the real heart of the matter :
Is the sitting President beholden to the Constitution and the law, or are they above it?
I believe there can be only one outcome there that the American people would accept, there.
There is without question a massive revelation coming, either way.
The infallibility of elected leadership is not an American ideal, it’s a despot’s self canonization. I’m with Assange, I think this will be catharsis for the majority of people and for the country. The tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants. I can think of no case that fits that quote quite as entirely as this one, can you?
Weather • July 22, 2018 7:18 PM
@RG yep, that can link the dots, second post to follow on a rant
Hmm • July 22, 2018 7:28 PM
@JR
“James Lewis, a cyber expert at CSIS, said the U.S. is the only country where extreme distrust of government prevents meaningful cyber regulations. “That’s not how it works in the rest of the world,” he said. “And I say that for both democracies and dictatorships. This overwhelming angst we have about government is not reflected anywhere else on the planet.”
This is not only true, it’s applicable to hundreds of basic things the rest of the world gets right that Americans are manipulated to refuse by moneyed ideologies. “Socialist” health care, to name a prominent example. The same fools drive on the interstate every day without the cognitive dissonance somehow. We’ve got our work cut out…
Weather • July 22, 2018 7:37 PM
Bitcion the inflation is redeclise to be called a currency, it has a point anonymity, the internet was designed for information sharing not businesses, shore you can pass information on business but it needs to be the right way around, it took 400 YEARS to stand on gaint shoulders to get the system we have got, but some time changes are good, take for example global warming and tax credits, global warming is full of shit but the tax system of carbon credits is like Fiji saying I’ve got a new system. A wise man once told me not to talk about religion, sex or politics. We have people based on information spread that can not see everything as a single citizen, but they can project the power to control government, when it was only government that had the most information. That army base was hacked and field manuals and chemistry stooling. Anonymous should be thrown out with the kitchen sink, and no it should be added to the internet based on now government, they said back then it would be the shorest empire, cause effect may be go out of the loop, wait your target was wrong. Words of advice country want to respect the 3 powers, like old people are the only ones who comment on politics.
4 cent rant, don’t nit pick, all the topics or none
Hmm • July 22, 2018 7:52 PM
@RG
“From my observations the USA has been fed a great delusion where Russia is the only focus of cybersecurity.”
Who are you referring to as “the US”? I don’t know anyone who believes that. Do you?
Obviously China still attacks our infrastructure hourly, but the recent focus on Russia’s SUCCESS in attacking our election and in fact manipulating our sitting President into several pro-Russia positions (repealing sanctions, the no-denial denial, etc) really can’t be understated – China doesn’t have our sole executive power captured and doing their bidding, changing our policies from the inside out for its benefit. Hacking can’t really do that by itself. China would LOVE to have had such success in disrupting the US government as Putin has demonstrated. But if it bleeds, it leads. Major coups tend to get more coverage than quasi-attributable hack events, that much is true.
Trust No. 1 • July 22, 2018 7:55 PM
@Gunter Königsmann
Granted, I was being a bit silly on this point.
But alright, these things seem to be reasonable to assess an ongoing investigation. Although only the datasets requested (eg; height) should be released under warrant rather than full reports. Health data is just about as sensitive as it gets, regardless of the Singapore PM’s dismissal that public details of medications issued aren’t a worry.
“My medication data is not something I would ordinarily tell people about, but there is nothing alarming in it,” he said.
Imagine knowing Franklin D Roosevelt’s condition whilst in office, based upon a data breach? All that time and effort wasted on special preparations, which which included a train under a hotel which could take a car from a secret elevator.
Going back to the current Singapore story though, I wonder if @Thoth has anything to contribute considering locality?
echo • July 22, 2018 8:20 PM
What??????????????? What “legally arguable” reason is the UK government using for this?
Britain has secretly abandoned its blanket opposition to the death penalty and Guantanamo Bay to allow two notorious members of the “Beatles” group of Isil terrorists to be sent to America, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.
Documents seen by this newspaper reveal that the UK Government has agreed to hand over intelligence to help prosecute the captured jihadists Alexanda Kotey and Shafee El-Sheikh, who both held British citizenship, in the US courts.
In a letter sent by Sajid Javid to Jeff Sessions, the US Attorney General, the Home Secretary says that Britain will demand no “assurances” that the pair will not be executed in america.
echo • July 22, 2018 8:23 PM
Nobody voted for this.
Women in the UK risk losing hard-won equality and human rights protections, including employment rights and funding for women’s services, when the UK leaves the EU, according to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHCR).
In its largest review of women’s rights in the UK, the EHRC warns that although the government has promised protections in the Equality Act will continue to apply once the UK leaves the bloc, “this political commitment is not included” in the European Union (withdrawal) bill.
According to the report, Brexit could mean future equality and human rights protections under the EU are not binding in UK law and that existing ones may be removed. “Employment rights and funding for women’s services are areas of particular concern,” it states.
PeaceHead • July 22, 2018 8:34 PM
I confirmed that (at least my personal .ISO copy of) PaleMoon and also some of the so-called lightweight “Puppy Linux”‘es are just not lightweight and the PaleMoon’s “about:config” is riddled with scary looking stuff, including what we talked about before.
I think it’s not healthy software and it’s not good for the internet’s health.
Probably the few decent CA’s in the list and the CA related organisations have been getting messed up by what some of these types of browsers have been sending them directly and/or indirectly.
The first time I ran PaleMoon on Linux rather than on M$oft, it seemed like malware in how it handled the installation process. It’s too bad. Because I used to like it.
I feel much the same about the most recent PuppyLinux I used; it was great in the past, but perhaps the author got jaded, or the author’s site got taken over or something.
Sorry I haven’t been around, my system was not how I wanted it, and I’ve been considering doing more offline activities such as organic gardening and studying ecology.
We need to be saving the bees.
My webpage is a bit controversial for now; I understand. It won’t last. But I believe there was a legal justification and an adequate set of legal alibis.
May Peacefulness Prevail Within All Realms of Existence.
Hmm • July 22, 2018 9:45 PM
https://theintercept.com/2018/07/17/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court-cia/
An interesting aside about JFK, FOIA, the CIA, and Brett Kavanaugh.
Hmm • July 22, 2018 10:52 PM
Factual record-keeping time again unfortunately :
https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/22/media/donald-trump-russia-investigation-tweet/index.html
Trump has AGAIN tweeted that “Russia was all a big hoax!” directly contradicting his walk-back!
As of this evening. Yep you read that right, Trump has once again gone to Putin’s side.
This is confusing for good reason, this would be the 4th flip-flop on the issue in under a week now.
So anyone who took seriously the double-negative walk back has now been put upon once more.
Does anyone have any idea how this would even possibly help him? I don’t get it.
justinacolmena • July 22, 2018 11:51 PM
Update.
I’m told the “qualtrics” people are killers. Some stalker app on the phone to “home in” on the mark, whose phone it is. I also heard CPS from Oregon. They are killers, too. “State” from Salem. All female, fancy themselves CIA, out to kill, because they feel the court system is so messed up and they have to save the children. They were pimping out an underage girl in Denver at me, old lady sicced a stereotypical “serial killer” on me right behind the courthouse. Said something about her “grandson.” Alaska Air flew me out of my way to try the same trick, same city, same girl. TSA just sort of hinted ha ha don’t leave the secured area, just get back on your your plane, move on, she’s taken, not interested, not available.
The women’s side of that particular jail is starting to become awfully crowded, and there’s juvy, too…
65535 • July 23, 2018 12:13 AM
@ Vas pup and echo
“I have three questions: (1)Do you have in UK indictment by Grand Jury or that is only currently North American tool to place somebody in club fed for up to 18 month for contempt of court which actually is attempt to use your right set in 5th Amendment of US Constitution? (2)Could MI5/MI6 agents lie to suspect but suspect when can’t lie to agent because it is crime per se? (3)When (under what circumstances) LEOs could search office of lawyer (solicitor/barrister)?” –Vas pup
Those are good questions and deserve a good answer.
“You will need to ask a lawyer for an “offical” answer but follow up by asking them to explain the “Yes, buts…” 1.) The UK doesn’t use the grand jury system. 2.) I think I know what body of US law you are referring to. My honest answer insofar as UK law is concerned is A.) I don’t know and B.) It depends. From what I can tell is UK security services are arranged with a handler-operative relationship and other work is contracted out to other agencies or specialists, or completely handed over to other agencies to pursue. 3.) I have no idea.”-echo
That’s a bit unclear. Are there any other posters who have more exact answers? If so pleas speak up.
@ Clive Robinson
‘Titled, “Privacy risks with Facebook’s PII-based targeting: auditing a data broker’s advertising interface”
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_events/1223263/p155407privacyconmislove_1.pdf
‘Which I think most would agree is quite a series of claims. The problem arose because of data de-duplication and approximation of sizes for anonymization of users from a query which after you work out the rules can be exploited.’ –Clive R.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/07/friday_squid_bl_634.html#c6778499
Yes, those are quite serious claims and correctly state the problem of using FaceCrook.
I believe FaceCrook now has the “collect it all” mentality for monetary reasons and is quite willing to sell out and individual if they can make a dollar off of the transaction – with anybody including the government(s).
@ bttb, Bauke Jan Douma, RG
“American news is so out.”
“Facebook is to be fined £500,000, the maximum amount possible, for its part in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the information commissioner has announced.
The Facebook 500K fine is a start in the right direction. But, not that big for a company that has 41 billion USD in revenues. I would say 500K fine is a slap on the wrist and nothing more. The fine should have be 5 billion to really get Facebooks attention.
@ Ismar, Clive R, and others
Re: Trump and VP Pence
When a US president is successfully impeached and tossed out the Vice President of the USA steps in.
You might want to read up on very the conservative Michael Pence who is VP of the USA and his conservative voting record.
Trump will do things is a fairly predictable, bumbling, conservative fashion but Mick Pence is much more accurate, effective, conservative and well liked. I don’t really think we are better off with Mike Pence.
Once, Pence is elevated to President he has huge Executive powers at his disposal and will certainly use those powers. Further Mike Pence’s political attack surface is smaller than Trumps. We could go from the frying pan directly into the fire. Be careful of what you hope for.
@ Ratio
Document: Justice Department Releases Carter Page FISA Application
https://www.lawfareblog.com/document-justice-department-releases-carter-page-fisa-application
Carter page FISA document
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4614708/Carter-Page-FISA-Application.pdf
This is modestly useful to read.
Sadly, about 45 percent of this document is blacked out which is the average in the USA. Huge chunks of blacked out sentences start around page 71 of the 400+ page document.
The other sad part is only “important people” like Carter Page can afford the legal expense of getting these legal documents. For the average Jane/Joe the legal costs in the USA would bankrupt them or be totally unavailable. That is a travesty.
I did try to read through page 100 or 105 of the document only to find the answers I was looking for were redacted with blocks of black space. In short, I could not determine the important legal points of the document.
If anybody has a way of converting this 400+ pdf document to exclude or minimize the black spaces please let me know. I would then be able to read what little words are available in the document without seeing page after page of black spaces.
Please share with me a way to convert this redacted document to remove the black spaces. Thank you.
Hmm • July 23, 2018 12:22 AM
OCR.
echo • July 23, 2018 12:34 AM
@65535
You need to narrow the question down. I can’t think of any specific law crimimalising lying to police. It’s usually the courts who would deal with the issue and take this into account.
It is an offence to telling the police lies to say a crime has been committed, or lies perverting the course of justice. There are also other offences of fire or bomb hoaxes.
UK law can be a bit foggy and almost all decent legal discussion is locked up behind legal journal paywalls. Little to no legal discussion becoes a topic of discussion in the UK. It’s difficult enough getting the media to provide a link to a court transcript when they are yacking about about a case.
gordo • July 23, 2018 12:40 AM
@ Hmm,
Who knows, but it (the “feud”?) appears to have started here…
https://dailycaller.com/2017/01/03/trump-questions-legitimacy-of-russia-hacking-probe/
On leaks…
TomDispatch
February 16, 2017
At the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald has a superb piece on the leaks of the moment pouring out of the national security state in its “feud” with Donald Trump (& Co.) and the value of leaking more generally. Just one thing, you need to read it through. The initial paragraphs on leaking and the law might lead you to believe it was heading in quite a different direction. (And then, if you want, read the New York Times’ morning piece on how President Trump flip-flopped from a love of leaks during the election campaign to a loathing of them now. Url below.) Tom
https://www.facebook.com/tomdispatch/posts/1219853214766965
Above-referenced links:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/us/politics/leaks-donald-trump.html
Maybe all this come’s to a head if Ecuador withdraws Assange’s asylum.
https://gizmodo.com/these-cryptic-wikileaks-tweets-dont-mean-julian-assange-1787866602 [“dead man’s switch”]
echo • July 23, 2018 1:31 AM
I just read about Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi. Apparently, it’s a spy story where the British Empire has colonised the afterlife. He also wrote Quantum Thief which includes issues like the malleability of memory, extreme longevity and what happens when your exo-memory is stored in ‘the cloud’ and accessible by everyone.
Ratio • July 23, 2018 1:35 AM
@MarkH,
This is the most recent discussion of Steele, on pages 17–20 of the June 2017 renewal (pages 308–311 of the document):
(S//NF [exed out]) According to open source information, in July 2016, Page travelled to Moscow and delivered the commencement address at the New Economic School.9 In addition to giving this address, the FBI learned that Page met with at least two Russian officials during this trip. First, according to information provided by an FBI confidential human source (Source #1),10 [REDACTED] reported that Page had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin, who is the President of Rosneft [a Russian energy company] and a close associate to Russian President Putin.12 [REDACTED] reported that, during the meeting, Page and Sechin discussed future bilateral energy cooperation and the prospects for an associated move to lift Ukraine-related Western sanctions against Russia. [REDACTED]
The tiny one-page footnote 10 dealing with Steele:
10 (TS//NF [exed out]) Source #1 [REDACTED] was opened as an FBI source [REDACTED] Source #1 has been compensated [REDACTED] by the FBI. As discussed below in footnote 22, in or about October 2016, the FBI suspended its relationship with Source #1 due to Source #1’s unauthorized disclosure of information to the press. Subsequently, the FBI closed Source #1 as an FBI source. Nevertheless, the FBI assesses Source #1 to be reliable as previous reporting from Source #1 has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings. Moreover, the FBI notes that the incident that led the FBI to terminate its relationship with Source #1 occurred after Source #1 provided the reporting that is described herein.
(U) (TS//NF [exed out]) Source #1, who now owns a foreign business / financial intelligence firm, was approached by an identified U.S. person to conduct research regarding Candidate #1’s ties to Russia (the identified U.S. person and Source #1 have a long-standing business relationship). The identified U.S. person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified U.S. person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia. The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.
(U)(TS//NF [exed out]) Source #1 tasked his sub-source(s) to collect the requisite information. After Source #1 received information for the sub-source(s) described herein, Source #1 provided the information to the identified U.S. person who had hired Source #1 and to the FBI. [REDACTED]
(TS//NF [exed out]) Notwithstanding Source #1’s reason for conducting the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia, based on Source #1’s previous reporting history with the FBI, whereby Source #1 provided reliable information to the FBI, the FBI believes Source #1’s reporting herein to be credible. [REDACTED]
(TS//NF [exed out]) [REDACTED]
(TS//NF [exed out]) [REDACTED]
(U)(TS//NF [exed out]) [REDACTED]
(Emphasis in the original. I used italics for text that is underlined.)
Footnote 22 on pages 29–30 (pages 320–321 of the PDF) for completeness:
22 (S [exed out]) As discussed above, Source #1 was hired by a business associate to conduct research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia. Source #1 provided the results of his research to the business associate, and the FBI assesses that the business associate likely provided this information to the law firm that hired the business associate in the first place. Source #1 told the FBI that he/she only provided this information to the business associate and the FBI. [REDACTED] The FBI does not believe that Source #1 directly provided this information to the identified news organization that published the September 23rd News Article.
(U) (TS//NF [exed out]) In or about late October 2016, however, after the FBI Director sent a letter to the U.S. Congress, which stated that the FBI had learned of new information that might be pertinent to an investigation that the FBI was conducting of Candidate #2, Source #1 told the FBI that he/she was frustrated with this action and believed it would likely influence the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. In response to Source #1’s concerns, Source #1 independently, and against the prior admonishment from the FBI to only speak with the FBI on this matter, released the reporting discussed herein to an identified news organization. Although the FBI continues to assess Source #1’s reporting to be reliable, as noted above, the FBI closed Source #1 as an active source.
Totally confirms the Nunes memo and totally neutral, “skeptical” comments made right here.
65535 • July 23, 2018 1:51 AM
@ Hmm
“OCR”
Do you have a site where I could upload the Carter Page pdf [all 412 pages] and convert it to OCR?
This may help reduce the huge amount of black spaces and make it more readable.
65535 • July 23, 2018 2:29 AM
I did not find a site to convert the Carter Page pdf [412 pages] to OCR format. Did anybody else?
It is depressing to know that the above document was “delivered” on 10 [blank] 2016 and took two years to get. Note that Carter Page is an important and famous person so he got the document in a highly redacted form.
If the average Jane/Joe tried to get a similar document they would fail for wait 10 years. The USA court system is slanted towards the famous and important people. That is a travesty.
Hmm • July 23, 2018 2:45 AM
@gordo
-Plus now the US leaned on the IMF not to loan Ecuador any more money, so that’s double vig.
@Ratio
“Totally confirms the Nunes memo” – Are you sure about that? Was that sarcasm?
What you just posted says Source 1 is not a “politically motivated” actor nor “questionable” but a reliable source that was hired and did the job. It does not prove Source 1 was the information broker to the news media, that’s untested as alleged.
Moreover, it doesn’t question the veracity of the information he procured.
Unless we’re talking about a different memo, Nunes tried to discredit the dossier by saying that the pedigree was improperly political – something that Steele has never been described as by anyone. Regardless of who was paying for it, his reputation was for reliable information, even after the fact as these documents mention.
(Not to mention it’s not the only source of the investigation as Nunes alleged constantly)
I think it’s more about what is later found provable of the dossier info rather than what is sensational or titillating about any individual claim. The big reveal isn’t the urine-play videotape if it exists, that’s just an overly mentioned sidebar. The real deal is the money laundering of Russian oligarch money in Trump properties. That’s not something you can dismiss away as “overly political” if it’s at all true, and there are strong reasons to believe it is.
After all the talk about “no deals with Russia” repeated so many times with “no collusion”…
You have to wonder if he realizes that’s his tell, repeating things like that.
It’s almost compulsive.
We all know he had “some” deals with Russians by now. The lie is no longer helpful.
He can’t make it under oath, and it appears it may come to that sooner than later.
Hmm • July 23, 2018 2:51 AM
@65535
I’ve always used Acrobat for OCR. Any online services are going to have file size limits.
Weather • July 23, 2018 3:51 AM
The Australian put a snake next to a highway, if the snake did not move or I carried on I would be dead, I am looking at you ????
MarkH • July 23, 2018 3:53 AM
@Ratio:
If there is any logic supporting the conclusion of your preceding comment, I didn’t see it.
As it should have done, the warrant application disclosed to the FISA court that:
- The entity paying Steele sought political opposition material; and
- The FBI considered — and continues to consider — Steele a reliable source on the basis of their history with Steele’s material.
The warrant also states that the FBI breaking off its relationship with Steele, because of a disclosure he made to the press, has no bearing on the reliability of the referenced reports.
A self-proclaimed “skeptic” here claimed that the reports are “discredited.” As I explained above, they appear to be essentially what Steele purported them to be: raw intelligence which is more factual than not.
If “discredited” means that some superannuated engineer doesn’t like them, then discredited they are. However, if “discredited” means that they have been shown to be less accurate than Steele claims, I have yet to see such showing.
In particular, the parts of the Steele reports which have since been verified by public disclosures primarily relate to meetings and discussions, including persons present, times, places etc.
Of the large volume of information in the Steele reports, the little bit referenced in the FISA warrant applications described a meeting in which Carter Page was involved.
I think the best assessment that can be made from public information, is that the information about that meeting is more likely true than false, which is sufficient basis to include it in the application for a search warrant.
MarkH • July 23, 2018 4:27 AM
More on the “fruit of the poisoned tree” …
This is actually a term with a very specific meaning in United States legal practice, though I don’t expect foreigners to get all those details right.
However, it is actually yet another instance of a category mistake which certain persons — whose skepticism seems highly selective — have repeated with a kind of autistic compulsion.
The “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine applies to evidence used in criminal court cases. Evidence that was obtained improperly, may be excluded from such cases.
Now, the category mistake made by aforementioned persons, is to apply rules of criminal court procedure to situations which are not, in point of fact, criminal court proceedings.
As of yet, I am aware of no criminal prosecution in which the Steele reports have been offered as evidence. Nor, as far as I know, is there any criminal prosecution in which evidence was obtained by warrants based on the Steele reports.
Accordingly, the application of “fruit of the poisonous tree” to the present situation is, as a legal matter, wholly improper. In a warrant application, the method by which information in support of the warrant was obtained (poisoned or not) doesn’t matter. The relevant question is whether it forms a basis for probable cause.
Now hypothetically, there might well be a future prosecution based (for example) on information obtained using the FISA warrants for surveillance on Carter Page. If that were to happen, then the defendant(s) will surely make the “fruit of the poisonous tree” argument, which the court will have to decide.
In essence, the US criterion for search warrants is that a prudent person would think it probable that the search consequent to the warrant will disclose evidence of a crime. The information in support of the warrant does not prove the crime — if it did, no warrant would usually be needed!
In order to exclude evidence on this basis, the defense would have to show that:
(a) the Steele reports are so bad that a prudent person should not have inferred a probable crime from them; and
(b) the other information in support of the warrants was not sufficient, if the Steele report is discounted, to form a basis for probable cause.
Because Steele is in fact a reputable source with a good track record, and the warrant applications have quite a lot of information from other sources, this would be a tall hill to climb.
Of course, that won’t stop the lawyers (in our hypothetical prosecution) from trying … after all, they get paid by the hour 🙂
Ratio • July 23, 2018 4:35 AM
@MarkH,
If there is any logic supporting the conclusion of your preceding comment, I didn’t see it.
I used the same logic that allows me to describe a footnote of more than a page in length as tiny. I mean, is there solid evidence showing the judge did not miss this miniscule aside hidden away like that? I’m just asking neutral questions based on a skeptical approach that demands evidence.
(Should I lay it on thicker still?)
echo • July 23, 2018 6:03 AM
I ordered some security products last week. They have all arrived now. One is a dud product I am kicking myself for buying. It’s pretty much all show. The other two products are good and 90% okay. Both have similar design faults which do not match the claimed design ethos and may cause a problem under difficult conditions but otherwise fine in normal use.
I also ordered another product which can be used for security evaluation. I’m not sure on visual inspection whether it is US or European specification. Other than this everything seems to be as expected. If anything goes wrong it will likely be user error. It’s possible I can also make my own which will both be more visually appealing and portable under a wider variety of conditions. Outside of spy novels this would almost certainly likely solely be for entertainment purposes.
@MarkH
Thanks for your technical explanation. The UK isn’t anywhere near as specific due in large part to having a different dominant instititional culture and legal structure. (The US is a hybrid legal system of Civil law and common law, the mainland Europe is Civil Law, and UK is common law with limited elements of Civil Law.) This makes discussion difficult at times especially as almost all public discussion either never touches the subject or it’s too foggily defined to get traction.
The problem with PACEs that although it tightened up malpractice identified after the Scarman report it also extended police powers. This is somewhat typical of UK politicians “never wasting a good crisis”.
echo • July 23, 2018 6:11 AM
Here is a comment in Vanity Fair describing Steve Bannons’s neo-con/far right sympathies. Tie this in with the Brexit act throwing women’s rights under the bus and the whole thing begins to whiff a bit. It may also help to explain the incel-racism and Transatlanticist connection.
CNN Interviews James Clapper 7-18-2018
Clapper: “One point I’d like to make, Anderson, that I don’t think has come up very much before, and I’m alluding now to the President’s criticism of President Obama for all that he did or didn’t do before he left office with respect to the Russian meddling.
If it weren’t for President Obama, we might not have done the intelligence community assessment that we did that set off a whole sequence of events which are still unfolding today, notably, special counsel Mueller’s investigation. [1]
President Obama is responsible for that, and it was he who tasked us to do that intelligence community assess in the first place. And they got the important point when it comes to critiquing President Obama.” http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1807/18/acd.01.html
Comment:
After all these years of deception Mr Clapper is suddenly coming clean.
What is an intelligence community assessment?
Why was this tool instigated against the opposition campaign during a heated presidential election? To stay in power and preserve careers?
Completely unrelated, the president of CNN news is on leave with a serious heart-condition.
In any event thank you CNN and especially new parent AT&T.
[1] With this testimony its highly probable the 17 USA Intelligence agencies were misused to investigate the Trump campaign for political purposes. The subsequent phony Democratic Party funded Steel Dossier is still being argued (above) ad nauseam. Guys,with this origin big-bang revelation who cares? (Other than the fact the FISA court judges were duped).
Clive Robinson • July 23, 2018 8:48 AM
@ bttb,
“Who is funding Steve Bannon and his exilic Unite the Right European tour?”
It’s a good question and the answer may be “Russian Oligarchs” or “Arab Royalty”. Possibly “washed” through hedge funds and similar.
It’s likely to be the same group of people who are keeping various US property empires afloat atleast one of which should have an “absentee owner”, but the owner is not letting go as much as they are supppsed to.
@ Ismar,
As I’ve pointed out he is a very usefull idiot to certain interests. His hate of the previous office holder means he is instinctively doing what certain neos want whilst giving the neos full deniability. Replacing him with the next in line would in no way be as advantageous to the neos concerned.
It’s one of the reasons I made my prediction he would still be in post come mid terms.
It’s what happens post mid terms that is going to be difficult to predict. Getting him out of the chair requires concensuss in the house. Post mid term that concensuss may go one of three ways.
At I guess a rough one in four chance he may still be sitting in the chair post 2020.
The US public for some reason are more likely to side with the underdog as we saw with Bill as long as a sympathetic view is open for them.
As we can see some keep claiming “Traitor” which has little or no chance of actually being proved due to the way the US law is wtitten. Also whilst he’s in tje chair it would be almost impossible to make the case to the required level anyway.
@ All,
I’ve given one technical reason abpve that the “Steel Dossier” or what ever you care to call it is “discredited”. You need to remember that “discredited” in an intel setting has a different meaning to what you might think.
Saying “because it’s starting to be verified” is way more than a country mile from saying that it is “verified”.
An old technique that intel services have used for years is to hide one important lie in a thousand truths. Worse is to use the truth to hide a real truth. That is everything may be verifiable in it’s own way but “the pictute it paints” is a false one.
We already know that when a US intel agency tried to verify how certain of their tools had become public knowledge, they ran into a problem. Which was that the “Trump Tape” was pushed first softly then harder untill it became apparent it was the real payload the Russian’s wanted the IC agency to swallow, in some way, for some reason. In effect the Russian’s either over played it or wanted the IC to conclude that it was being over played. The questions that arise are “Why?” and in “Which way?”
It is because the “Trump Tape” was pushed first in the Steel dossier in a very soft way, that effectively puts a big fat question mark over the “Steel Dossier” and the interviewed participents or the intermediary questioners. It is this in part that makes the dossier considered “discredited” untill the tape issue and other unknown aspects can effectively be resolved.
The one question you rarely hear asked is “Does Trump care about the Tape?” and the answer might surprise people when they work it out. The point is that it does more harm “in limbo” than it will do if it ever actually becomes public. It might not actually exist, irespective of if the alledged activities actually happened. The problem is that it’s non availability/existance leaves on heck of a lot open to peoples immagination, and it’s that not any actual acts that might or might not have happened that are doing the harm. If the tape does exist and is put into public availability then the imagination buble collapses and ir all becomes mundane thus of little or no interest to the American Public any longer. In effect the boil gets lanced and drys up.
The problem with the FBI rating the dossier is the assumption of if a bit is correct the rest probably is… That’s an LEO and Joe Public way of looking at the world not an IC or investigative journalists way of looking at the world.
The fact that the FBI has played the Steel card even in such a low level way is a silly one for them to have done. Because if there is a “one lie” hidden in it they have in effect swallowed the bait and given it the veneer of legitamacy… Likewise if they FBI are now “seeing the wrong picture”…
I suspect there are a bunch of very happy Russian’s over that report/dossier. The question thus moves on to the next step in their little smoke and mirrors game.
By the way this sort of thing is “fairly standard fare” for 1800 pre Communist Russia era right through to current intelligence games. It’s the old “Enigma wrapped in a riddle” observation that people realy should take on board.
Likewise they realy should take on board what is happening with those behind certain very right wing US backers of various organisations. As has been noted by one or two journalists, there is a very great deal of right wing money at stake, most tied in to what were once US and are now Global corporates. It is these people who are considerably more of a threat to US citizens and the citizens of other Nations than the Russian’s are… Which might be the reason in part that the likes of Rupert “The Bear faced lier” Murdoch are shoving Russia down the throat of US citizens, and some are falling for it…
echo • July 23, 2018 8:48 AM
Margaraet Hodge is standing by her comment that Corbyn is antisemitic.
echo • July 23, 2018 9:00 AM
@Clive
To be fair anyone who has read up on philosophy whill be aware of the issues and caveats you mention. I certainly won’t say people are too stupid or ignorant to grasp things but certainly unfamiliar and unpracticed. another problem is even if aware enough to be competant how to do you deal with this? It can be a real problem sifting data and persuading people and building a coherent provable narrative. I’m wrestling with this myself now.
In the UK cops are pretty dim on average but most cops jobs are more desk clearance and shovelling drunks off the pavement so they don’t have the leisure time to absorb these things. Institutionally they are changing slowly and recruitment practices as some complex issues, especially women’s issues, become a thing.
I do tend to suspect neo-con/hardliner money and influence behind all this. Law enforcement is also aware how right wing movements have infiltrated the legitimate sphere. The question is proving it…
It’s not made easier when the UK is held to hostage by the DUP propping up a minority governent also in hock to a minority of hardline millionaire daydreamers.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/23/theresa-may-dup-stormont-powersharing-tory
Clive Robinson • July 23, 2018 9:10 AM
@ Hmm,
What you’re doing right now, lying in defense of a very credibly accused traitor, is unacceptable.
There you go again with your drum beat. You claim Trump is a traitor yet have not ever pointed to anything that in any way verifies your claim.
You would probably have droped into more of your “with us or against us” rhetoric, but now I’ve said it you will probably change tack from previous attacks.
Me I’m going to do what I’ve consistently said “wait and see on the evidence”. That is of course if he is ever brought up on charges of treason let alone stand in the dock, be convicted, or do time for it. The way things are going with the information currently in the public arena there is not a snowballs chance in hell…
But you keep banging the drum, waving the flag and attacking those who don’t fall in line with your opinion, you will atleast be consistant. You never know though, you might win the national lottery and thus get yourself some campaign money to go tilt at windmills. After all it Trump can do it as an inferior person to you, surely you must be capable of swaying the nation if not the world?
echo • July 23, 2018 9:22 AM
Vanity Fair has an article on kompromat and something a little different called “sistema”.
https://www.newyorker.com/news-desk/swamp-chronicles/a-theory-of-trump-kompromat
Alena Ledeneva, a professor of politics at University College London and an expert on Russia’s political and business practices, describes kompromat as being more than a single powerful figure weaponizing damning evidence to blackmail a target. She explained that to make sense of kompromat it is essential to understand the weakness of formal legal institutions in Russia and other former Soviet states. Ledeneva argued that wealth and power are distributed through networks of political figures and businesspeople who follow unspoken rules, in an informal hierarchy that she calls sistema, or system. Sistema has a few clear rules—do not defy Putin being the most obvious one—and a toolkit for controlling potentially errant members. It is primarily a system of ambiguity. Each person in sistema wonders where he stands and monitors the relative positions of friends and rivals.
echo • July 23, 2018 10:46 AM
The UK government is declining to share its legal advice on Javids death penalty decision. The PM agrees which given her positions on earlier issues is a familiar disappointment. I’m lost for words with this unaccountable authoritarianism. This really is becoming the most evil and sinister government in living memory.
Labour’s Stella Creasy asks if the government will publish its legal advice on this? And she ask if the prime minister agrees with the decision.
Wallace says the government does not publish its legal advice. He says the prime minister was made aware of the decision and “agrees” with it.
Wallace says Theresa May “agrees” with the decision. Earlier Downing Street refused to say this directly.
Hmm • July 23, 2018 12:09 PM
Software fixes for HW flaws… now taking bets.
MarkH • July 23, 2018 2:21 PM
Another example, of fundamental misunderstanding:
“Generally in intelligence … you double check your sources and their methods in at least two ways, preferably more.”
That is absolutely correct, with respect to intelligence analysis and findings.
The Steele reports are RAW INTELLIGENCE DATA. In raw intelligence, NOTHING has yet been filtered through checking or corroboration.
Once again, a category mistake …
Why is this so difficult to understand?
Yet one more example, of fundamental misunderstanding:
“The problem with the FBI rating the dossier is the assumption of if a bit is correct the rest probably is…”
No, no, no, no, NO, NO, NO, a thousand times NO!
The reports are raw interview reports. Their contents are essentially gossip and hearsay, from people who have all sorts of motivations.
Everybody who understands this, including the FBI, knows that some of the contents are surely false. Only a drooling idiot would infer that verification of one (or several) claims proves that all the rest are necessarily accurate.
Steele himself is on record that somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of the content of his Trump/Russia reports is wrong.
With absolutely no EVIDENCE, the above quote creates a straw-man: it fabricates a false story of why the FBI assessed the reports to be reliable, and then critiques that self-created fantasy.
Getting back to the Reality-Based WorldTM, why does the FBI consider the Steele reports more reliable than not? I suggest:
• Steele is an experienced intelligence operative trained in collecting information with a significant likelihood of accuracy and relevance
• the FBI has a working history with Steele, in which information he furnished has proven useful
• Steele has long experience monitoring internal affairs in the Russian Federation, and a whole catalog of contacts/informants
• Steele not only knows the positions and access of his sources, but also has enough experience with them to assess their reliability — he’s worked with them before and knows their track record
• Steele has the kind of good reputation in intelligence circles which would not attach to someone with a history of bias, partiality, distortion or fabrication
By the by, Clive seems to attach quite a lot of importance to the alleged salacious tape. Steele himself has little confidence in that story, saying it’s as likely false as true.
Although the sensational claim of a “pee tape” garnered quite a lot of press coverage, it’s not at all clear to me that it has had significance to the investigative process.
People who have studied Trump’s career will assure you that if Putin does have blackmail material to use as compulsion against Trump, the strongest weapons in that arsenal will surely be data about Trump’s financial dealings, not his disgusting bedroom antics.
All of these discussions overlook a certain Elephant in the Room, which must be blindingly obvious to anyone aware of how national intelligence works.
The US intelligence community has an enormous collection of communication intercepts, independent source reports, and even surveillance data relevant to many of the claims in the Steele reports.
They undoubtedly have already verified many claims in the Steele reports, and disproven many others. They already have an assessment of the reliability of each source-report, and some rational basis for estimating the reliability of those claims they haven’t yet been able to test.
To our frustration, all of this information lies hidden behind the barrier of state secrecy.
But the FBI has access to these assessments … as does the Mueller investigation.
MarkH • July 23, 2018 2:29 PM
@Ratio:
Apologies, I left my irony out in the rain and it’s a bit rusty …
Moderator • July 23, 2018 2:41 PM
@Hmm: No more political rants. No more calling other guests “liars” and throwing down gauntlets. No more caps-lock. No more posting on this thread. Your combative manner is creating a toxic environment for discussion.
Hmm • July 23, 2018 3:37 PM
@moderator
I will abide your rules – and so might we all be made to.
I have made zero comments along the lines of “us or them” nor made unsubstantiated claims.
For someone to continue to insist that without quotation is dishonest – when repeated a lie.
When repeated again after that still without quotation, a double lie.
The initial comment on this topic was not me, nor will I be the last to mention it on your blog.
I do think it’s a shame we can’t even discuss this without someone fabricating in plain sight.
But I’ll certainly abide your ongoing restrictions.
Clive Robinson • July 23, 2018 3:49 PM
@ RG,
From my observations the USA has been fed a great delusion where Russia is the only focus of cybersecurity. This especially rings-true of the establishment media. For an example:
FBI director calls China ‘the broadest, most significant’ threat to the US and says its espionage is active in all 50 states
Yet the national news networks ONLY covered his words on Russia.
It’s a point I’ve mentioned before. Back in the forst Obama administration “China” was made the first target for approbation. Which bearing in mind their lack of covertness is not suprising.
However the US went on to name four nations as it’s cyber-existential-threat, China, Iran, North Korea and Russia (in alphabetical order).
The odd thing is “there was only ever one at a time” and they get “chopped and changed” or atleast they did untill recently… That is for some reason the US appears to think in some almost Orwellian way that the Citizens of the US can only deal with one such cyber “national threat” at any one time…
If this surprises you I would not be surprised, I actually went back and checked it…
It’s why I keep urging people to go beyond the US boarder for their ICTsec news and in essence ignore what is comming out of US MSM (especially that of the Murdoch empire).
But it gets worse, you also find that various US “cyber-security” organisations paid to investigate corporate cyber break-ins also “follow the administration lead” on who to point a finger at…
I tend to find this quite disconcerting, that such a coincidence should occure. It raises significant questions…
Especially as other countries tend not to do this especially their “cyber-security” organisations…
My view point is “keep your head up” and “your eyes open” and “build your own situational awareness” from as many international media outlets as you can.
Even listening/watching an outlet you have reason to believe is biased helps you gain an overall picture.
The big problem however is a lot of nations IC entities are now into cyber-espionage. So many infact it is difficult “to see the wood for the trees”.
The thing is that some (the UK for instance) are fairly good at what they do, as well as getting “news blackouts” (via DORA etc).
There is also the question of proof. Take Russia for instance they have a system of patronage and nepotism in place. Thus things are done on a nod etc, which means evidence may be very hard to come by. Worse criminal types get “co-opted / coerced” in various ways such as “blind eyes” and “protectionism”.
Which means even if your “methods” get you CCTV / webcam data on the grass level operatives, you still need to use “sources” for verification at the higher levels. as you are not likely to get much from such video footage that tells you anything above that operational level.
Canard • July 23, 2018 4:00 PM
“The odd thing is “there was only ever one at a time” ”
Citation needed.
Weather • July 23, 2018 4:00 PM
I don’t need IC databases, show me the video
vas pup • July 23, 2018 4:05 PM
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180723-the-commas-that-cost-companies-millions
Related to all privacy term usage which are long and vague as well. very informative article!
Hmm • July 23, 2018 5:13 PM
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-government-sponsored-cyber-militia-cookbook/
Nothing groundbreaking but some interesting bits.
I hope this isn’t “too political” right?
echo • July 23, 2018 9:03 PM
Further to my pursuing complaints against international finance organisations both abusing and misusing the law one company I need to deal with has offices in Australia. I now need to explain what the UK legal position for the UK office is to an Austraila based compliance team. I hadn’t yet read up on the Austrlian leagl position to better understand what their points of view may be so this article is pretty useful.
Australia has a reputation of being hugely sexist. This does rather put the demands of international finance law and human rights at odds with each other which from my point of view means a lot of men especially are missing the point.
This is all getting a bit lex posterior derogat priori.
On the topic of data protection, AccessNow said that despite Australians highlighting their concerns over who has access to their information, Australia has “never established a legal right to privacy”.
“Moreover, while most Australian states and territories have their own data protection laws, the patchwork is inadequate to ensure that personal data is actually protected,” the report says. “Some additional protections exist in state and federal laws in specific sectors, but their applications are fairly narrow. The Privacy Act 1988 affords some protections to privacy and data in the form of the ‘Australian Privacy Principles’, but these, too, fall short because they fail to provide affirmative rights or obligations.”
As a result, AccessNow has asked for the establishment of clear rights to privacy and data protection in Australian law or within a Bill of Rights, including statutory avenues for seeking remedy and redress.
It also wants Australia to pursue a federal data protection law that provides clear, affirmative rights for individuals and obligations for all entities that process data.
Ratio • July 23, 2018 10:11 PM
Whatever happened to Seymour Hersh?
Example #636948:
[The London Review of Books’s long-serving editor Mary-Kay] Wilmers was right to be nervous. The story she passed on, which was published in the German newspaper Die Welt, is the most controversial. In it, Hersh states that the most recent chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun was not, as the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) claimed, a sarin attack carried out by the Syrian government. It was, instead, a conventional bombing raid that happened to hit a warehouse of “fertilisers, disinfectants and other goods.” This caused “effects similar to those of sarin.”
Chemical weapons experts say this is impossible. Laboratory tests proved that sarin had indeed been used. Hersh disagrees. “Why am I doing this?” he asks at one point. “I don’t feel like explaining this,” he says later.
Example #636949:
In his defence Hersh likes to cite the work of Ted Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. I point out that Postol has appeared on a podcast run by a Holocaust denier, where he spoke about how he relies for his work on Syria on a pro-Assad blogger, Maram Susli, who goes by the name Syrian Girl. Hersh gets angry. “He talked to her once on one thing,” he says, waving his arm in frustration. “My god, he talked to her once.” Postol’s work is often discussed on Infowars, the conspiracy theory channel run by Alex Jones—a man who once claimed the Sandy Hook school massacre, where 20 children under the age of eight were killed, was a hoax. “What’s Infowars?” Hersh asks. It’s run by Alex Jones. “Oh, he’s crazy. Alex Jones is a nut. I can’t be responsible for what he runs.”
Later that evening, I search “Infowars” + “Seymour Hersh.” It turns out Hersh should know what Infowars is. Up pops an interview he did with Jones on his show in December 2015.
Example #636950:
In between explanations of his reporting, Hersh seeks to diminish his critics by claiming they are part of a “propaganda organisation.” In doing so, he repeats a lie created by pro-Assad propagandists to cast aspersions on his victims. “Too many times we’ve seen the same child in photographs year after year always covered in dust,” he says. He’s referring to an 11-year-old child, often called “CNN girl” by Assad’s online supporters. The closely cropped photos do indeed show the same girl covered in dust being carried by three different men.
This is proof, apparently, that the girl is an actor, used in videos and photographs staged by rebels to falsely show the barbarity of Assad’s bombing campaign. You would expect any reporter to verify such a claim before repeating it on television. Anyone with a computer would find that all three images were taken on the same day and show the girl being passed from one rescuer to another, and then on to her father. She is not an actor, she is a child who has survived a bombing and been turned into a propaganda tool for the dictator who tried to kill her.
How ’bout that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism, huh? Did you guys know Sy here once won a Pulitzer? Let’s have you back on soon! swoon
frown When we come back after the break, we’ll discuss the disturbing, inexplicable spread of crackpot conspiracy theories and disinformation…
echo • July 23, 2018 10:29 PM
@Ratio
Robrt Fisk is usually very good. He maintains a balance of being circumspect of Western positions but not letting dictators of the hook.
Randolph Hearse • July 23, 2018 11:51 PM
It’s not crackpot if I assert it with flowery enough prose though, then it’s a folk tale!
It was a dark and stormy night, FDR was sharpening his cane for mortal combat. Again.
Yes, little known fact he walked with a sharpened cane, not like the silly Americans now…
Sources you say? Whatever for?
Clive Robinson • July 24, 2018 1:00 AM
@ echo,
The UK government is declining to share its legal advice on Javids death penalty decision. The PM agrees which given her positions on earlier issues is a familiar disappointment.
Looks like we are back to the bad old “rendition flights” days with MI6 officers sitting in on tourture sessions in foreign countries where human rights abuses are so common they are considered normal behaviour.
One of the reasons the UK was reluctant in the extream to bring home people falsely accussed of terrorist sympathies etc was what would happen / come out in court (as had happened in previous cases).
When the current British Prime Minister Mrs May was Home Office Minister she had a similar “keep them at arms length” / “Don’t get our hands dirty” policy. But we can look back to the time of the first woman British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, to see what “political expediency” nearly did to the directors of the Matrix Churchill company in the UK…
The rules on extradition and the death penalty appear quite clear to the British Judiciary, so why it should be an issue for certain politicians I will leave to others to think about.
I’ll stick with the basic premise that as the UK does not have a death penalty, it should not extradite people to any place or alow any person to be moved to a place where they may face the death penalty, and it would be wrong for any person to try to ignore or break that basic premise
echo • July 24, 2018 1:50 AM
This is a new development as far as popular discussion in the public sphere is concerned. The underlying psycho-social theory is well established so the problems and solutions are not going to be rocket science. This definately needs driving at a policy and priority level and women must play a strong leadership role in this as must society.
Number of women and children who joined Isis ‘significantly underestimated’. Report says women returning from fighting in Syria and Iraq pose specific security threat
Wesley Parish • July 24, 2018 4:51 AM
@echo
Margaraet Hodge is standing by her comment that Corbyn is antisemitic.
So far she hasn’t come through with proof, just “fill in the missing blanks”, which while it is a possible debating technique, is hardly legal proof.
One thing I do find disturbing with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism is it starts to get too close to identifying anti-Zi9onism with anti-Semitism. Perform the useful little mathematical trick of crossing out the negatives and you wind up with Zionism equals the Jewish people.
Which I think a fair number of Jewish people would disagree with, and at least one person with Jewish ancestry (as well as English, Scottish and Welsh), namely me. The Jewish family in Krakow I descend in part from, were ethnically cleansed in the 1940s. Israel was formed on the basis of ethnic cleansing. I would feel I was disrespecting that part of my family if I were to grant carte blanche to Israel’s ethnic cleansing policies.
Israel exists, it can’t be undone, but it can change its ethnic cleansing policies. (It’s got a lot to do with power, and one might argue that the Jewish Bible, minus its definite religious purposes, is in large part a meditation on power and its many abuses – at least, that’s one major point of the Prophets.)
Clive Robinson • July 24, 2018 3:31 PM
@ Wesley Parish,
Which I think a fair number of Jewish people would disagree with…
I know several families the members of all adult ages who would agree with you.
Some of the younger ones unsuprisibgly view the IHRA motives as being political in the extream.
Examining “the list” shows items that not so long ago would have been considered treasonous (in fact the UK used to hang draw and quater Catholics for such behaviour and just scant years ago there were laws still applying to prevent “Popish Plots”).
Whilst the Labour party has taken some of “the list” it has not taken it all with seemingly good reason.
Thus Margaret Hodge casting her oppinions –for that is all they appear to be so far– in such a manner does it’s self raise questions about “politics” within the Labour party.
The labour party is still bitterly divided over the current party leader and how he got the post. Thus you have the rank and file membership supporting the leader, refered to as “Corbinites” and others still loyal to the discredited policies of previous leader and Prime Minister Tony Blair, called “Blairites”. Blairites are fighting a very very bitter rear guard action against the wishes of the rank and file members, with more dirty tricks than most could imagine.
Margaret Hodge, is known to be very much a believer in Tony Blairs discredited policies and in effect holds her current position as a result of those beliefs.
I guess the real question over this is just how squalid is the whole thing going to become.
echo • July 25, 2018 12:31 AM
Aaran Banks is being accused of bribary. Interestingly, he’s hiding behind the defence it wasn’t to the minister responsible for mining rights but a minister responsible for women’s rights. The current Brexit bill makes no provision for retaining women’s rights after Brexit. It is odd that Aaaran Banks is so quiet on this when so super keen to give money to a minister of a country where he is after something. To my eyes his lack of consistency is very suspect.
In an interview with the BBC, Banks acknowledged making payments to Masirebane. Asked if that was appropriate, he said: “Yes, we were doing a specific job.” He said doing so was “not corruption at all”. Banks said Masirebane was the “minister for women’s equality”, adding he did not “quite see how you link” mining and the minister’s portfolio.
Clive Robinson • July 25, 2018 1:01 AM
@ echo,
Number of women and children who joined Isis ‘significantly underestimated’. Report says women returning from fighting in Syria and Iraq pose specific security threat
Unfortunately in part that is the nature of “total war” where everyone is expected to commit entirely without question every thing the have and are to the leaderships will.
Of course the ledership and their familes “are to important” for that which should tell people something, as with any “cast system”.
The real question though is “why can people be radicalized” in the first place.
The answers are complicated but in part it’s fundemental to upbringing. We see it with other belief groups with very strong matriarchal home lives that support a patriarchal society.
In fact quite a few religions deliberatly encorage such behaviours to ensure future generations of devotees. The emphasis is placed on training the very young into life long paterns that will bind then to the religion. That is they indoctrinate the young before the young have any ability to understand let alone defend themselves.
Part of this is that their morals are not their own but enforced on them. Thus they do not develop in a normal way and the individual is more malleable than if they had developed their own moral code as part of the growing up process.
In short they are taught to be authoritarian followers driven by a belief that certain types of leaders can do no wrong and thus must be obayed without question.
The result is that parents who try to bring up their children to develop a moral code are seen as being weak.
The lack of real morals shows in other ways, for instance the forming of tight frequently male social groups that are in effect “gangs” with a “group view”. Such groups are often found in the center of all serious anti-social behaviour. Thus it’s not surprising to find fanatics and authoritarian followers involved with serious crime.
Thus the question arises as to how you build micro-societies that are usefull without them becoming authoritarian hierarchies that can and sometimes do become very dangerous.
echo • July 25, 2018 1:50 AM
@Clive
This is one reason why I don’t like bureaucracies, or organised religions or cliques. I’m nto able to do this subject justice however a new study suggests that less inward looking and dogmatic aprpoaches can improve things.
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-secular-countries-future-economic-growth.html
New research measuring the importance of religion in 109 countries spanning the entire 20th century has reignited an age-old debate around the link between secularisation and economic growth. The study, published in Science Advances, has shown that a decline in religion influences a country’s future economic prosperity.
D'strovia • July 25, 2018 3:06 AM
While the specific method of accessing these messages is not public information, techniques for gathering encrypted data have been revealed in other cases. For example, Paul Manafort’s recent issues with witness tampering reveal a much more obvious source of information leakage – some of the recipients of his messages shared them with law enforcement. Perhaps he should have sent them with Snapchat, although the security guarantees of Snapchat are more circumspect than his platforms of choice (Telegram and WhatsApp). Manafort’s information leakage reveals the value of data expiration – forever is a long time, and our data is increasingly persistent as the cost and availability of storage plummets.
In other cases, the flow of information through the complex web of technologies supporting our devices has taken on more significance. For example, it appears that some of Mr. Manafort’s WhatsApp messages were recovered from an iCloud backup. WhatsApp has an option to allow backups, so Mr. Manafort could have, but did not, disable backups. Backups are a form of information leak in that they open a new frontier for compromising encrypted data. It appears that investigators simply issued Apple a subpoena for his iCloud backup. Users are not always aware of how information flows, particularly as device providers like Apple and Google increasingly surround devices with an ecosystem of cloud-based technology that operates seamlessly from a single account.
65535 • July 25, 2018 3:28 AM
@ Clive Robinson and others
“first in the Steel dossier in a very soft way, that effectively puts a big fat question mark over the “Steel Dossier” and the interviewed participents or the intermediary questioners. It is this in part that makes the dossier considered “discredited” untill the tape issue and other unknown aspects can effectively be resolved…”The fact that the FBI has played the Steel card even in such a low level way is a silly one for them to have done. Because if there is a “one lie” hidden in it they have in effect swallowed the bait and given it the veneer of legitamacy… Likewise if they FBI are now “seeing the wrong picture…”- Clive R
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/07/friday_squid_bl_634.html#c6778644
“There you go again with your drum beat. You claim Trump is a traitor yet have not ever pointed to anything that in any way verifies your claim. You would probably have droped into more of your “with us or against us” rhetoric, but now I’ve said it you will probably change tack from previous attacks. Me I’m going to do what I’ve consistently said “wait and see on the evidence”. That is of course if he is ever brought up on charges of treason let alone stand in the dock, be convicted, or do time for it. The way things are going with the information currently in the public arena there is not a snowballs chance in hell…”- Clive R
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/07/friday_squid_bl_634.html#c6778648
I have to agree with Clive R. on this topic. I disagree with Hmm. The reasons are many but the main reason is Clive R. has consistently laid out his case in a logical, succinct fashion and it seems correct.
Second, the Steel dossier played both sides of the street. First it was sold one party and when that failed it was sold to the opposing party. I think that behavior is self-serving, inconsistent and dirty. Further, as Clive has pointed out there are too many “un-named” sources will little or no verification.
I don’t trust people who work both sides of K street. There is a lot of money to be made in war be it geopolitical war or internal political war. But, there is more money and good will in turning a foe into a friend.
It’s a guess that both the FBI, CIA, and possibly other intelligence agencies will lose a foe that they are paid handsomely to attack if Trump manages to make peace between Russia and the USA. In short, the FBI and CIA will have a lot less to spy upon and possibly less budget money should Russia and the USA somehow become more friendly.
I am not a Trump supporter but I am certainly for better geopolitical relations with reduce death, war, costly spying, flogging of USA citizen who happen to have friends in Russia. It could make the world more peaceful. Give peace a chance. I say lets calm down, regain composure and as Clive R. says wait to see more evidence before jumping to a conclusion or jumping off a cliff.
End of my political discussion for length of time.
Clive Robinson • July 25, 2018 3:38 AM
@ D’strovia,
As you might know I’ve been pointing out the failings of these “secure apps” for some time, and there is a whole host of failure modes / trust issues / implementation issues at all levels. The article only mentions some of them.
There are some known solutions but they are “old school” OpSec which is “not convenient” for the modern user.
Thus the user very much plays into the hands of others which again shows that the “Going Dark” issue is in effect “fake news” from the FBI etc.
echo • July 25, 2018 5:16 AM
@65535
I tend to agree on the building partners point. Without discussing the faults and failures of every country and trading block better relations with Russia would be a plus. The US captures a lot of headlines but the EU has a perspective too which does get forgotten as does the EU and Russia being neighbours.
I mention by way of penance for my Morcambe and Wise joke the Washington Post has an article on the Trump-Putin relationship which is worth reading.
echo • July 25, 2018 7:51 AM
An extremely wierd coincidence happened today. Following my citing the Vanity Fair article on “kompromat and sistema” today I managed to donate a violin to “Sistema”, the charity created by Andrew Llyod Webber, after a relative of a member of staff kindly agreed to collect it.
bttb • July 25, 2018 9:04 AM
Regarding the recent Putin-Trump press conference in Helsinki, from https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/trump-putin-press-conference-transcript/565385/ :
“The White House Transcript Is Missing the Most Explosive Part of the Trump–Putin Press Conference
It’s not clear whether the omission was intended, but the meaning of a key exchange is dramatically altered as a result.
It was perhaps the most explosive exchange in an incendiary press conference: Russian President Vladimir Putin appearing to frankly admit to a motive for, and maybe even to the act of, meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, despite repeatedly denying Russian interference in American politics during the rest of his appearance with Donald Trump in Finland on Monday.
But the exchange doesn’t appear in full in the White House’s live-stream or transcript of the press conference, and it’s missing entirely from the Kremlin’s transcript of the event. The White House did not immediately provide an explanation for the discrepancy.
Understanding what Putin said depends on what you watch or where you look. If you watch the video of the news conference provided by the Russian government, or by news outlets such as PBS and the Associated Press, you will hear the Reuters reporter Jeff Mason ask a bombshell of a question: “President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?”
Putin then responds with a bombshell of an answer, according to the English translation of his remarks that was broadcast during the press conference: “Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.”…”
bttb • July 25, 2018 9:10 AM
“As Trump’s legal teams shift their efforts to stall Mueller’s investigation, the press is shifting their problematic reporting on what legal exposure Trump has. As part of its report that Trump’s legal team has made a “counteroffer” to have Trump sit for an interview covering just collusion, the WSJ repeats Rudy Giuliani’s bullshit that Trump’s obstruction only covers the Comey firing.
[…]
Here’s the list of questions Jay Sekulow understood Mueller wanting to ask sometime in March, as presented by the NYT. I’ve bolded what I consider collusion questions (including the June 9 statement, as abundant evidence suggests that reflects direct collusion with Putin on the framing of their quid pro quo). I’ve italicized the questions that exclusive address Comey.
[44 questions]
By my count there are:
Comey obstruction: 17
Other obstruction: 13
Collusion: 14
There aren’t quite 20 Comey questions, but it’s close.
By getting a journalist to uncritically parrot Rudy’s claim that all the obstruction questions pertain to Comey, the White House has buried some of the more egregious examples of obstruction, including (offering pre-emptive pardons to Flynn and Manafort, and whoever else) the gross abuse of the pardon power, and threatening the Attorney General. It also obscures the obstruction for which there are now cooperating witnesses (including, but not limited to, Flynn).
Probably, Trump is trying this ploy because a range of things — Manafort’s imminent trial, Cohen’s likely imminent cooperation, Mueller’s acute focus on Stone, and whatever else Putin told him — give him an incentive to have an up-to-date understanding of the current status of the collusion investigation. If he can do that in a way that makes it harder to charge some of the egregious obstruction Trump has been engaged in, all the better.
Whatever it is, it is malpractice to credulously repeat Rudy’s claim that Trump is only on the hook for obstruction for firing Comey.”
bttb • July 25, 2018 9:18 AM
From a Trip comment in the above emptywheel post, https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/07/24/twenty-comey-questions-do-not-eliminate-trumps-obstruction-exposure/#comment-743897 :
“Rudy and Trump were successful in making the Cohen tape usurp news that 1. Trump bowed down to Putin in Helsinki after creating animus with allies, 2. wouldn’t allow anyone from his own administration in on the meeting, 3. hasn’t informed the US people what he agreed to, 4. that the GOP immediately signed into law cover for dark money (to shield the NRA from exposure to dirty Russian cash), 5. that Trump was willing to bargain away an ex-diplomat’s skin for Putin’s approval and 6. that Trump, without informing his top security guy, invited Putin to the WH after giving away the store once already in Helsinki.
Eyes on the ball, FFS. The tape is a shiny object. …”
echo • July 25, 2018 9:19 AM
@bttb
This is now old news badly reported. I thought wow omg why isn’t anyone talking about this and read around things more and discovered it wasn’t anything special which is why I never posted it. Therewas enough Trump-Putin hysterics sucking up the oxygen as it was. Putin basically said he preferred Donald Trump instead of Hilary Clinton. I understand what he said was translated badly by some media becuase there wasn’t a direct Russian to English translation. Putin doesn’t say anything shocking and doesn’t admit doing anything wrong. He ecertainly doesn’t admit meddling in elections.
From what I understand there is no big mysterious Nixon style hiding of material. The report I read mentioned something about the wrong/not updated material or something like this being distributed.
This material will only keep Trumpologists/Ufologists busy.
echo • July 25, 2018 9:22 AM
@bttb
that the GOP immediately signed into law cover for dark money (to shield the NRA from exposure to dirty Russian cash
No mention of GOP/Neo-Con dark money poking its nose into Brexit?
MarkH • July 25, 2018 10:21 AM
@echo, who wrote “@bttb This is now old news badly reported.”
Apologies in advance if I’ve misinterpreted, because bttb made several comments in a row and perhaps I incorrectly understood which of them you were responding to.
If “old news badly reported” is about the Kremlin and the White House deleting the same content at the same time … that is a startling perspective.
If this suppression (howsoever gross and clumsy) seems insignificant to you, please look up what Winston Smith’s job was at the Ministry of Truth.
Many months ago now, a certain Kremlin apologist who often comments here voiced his “skepticism” that the Russian Federation would prefer Trump over Clinton.
I patiently explained to him why the basis for this preference was blindingly obvious … and with his usual “skepticism” (which is a perhaps ironic name for ultra-intense confirmation bias), he dismissed it.
For such “skeptics,” that Putin a few days ago plainly and clearly stated his preference for Trump in the 2016 election ought to be of some import.
And it was important enough to the Kremlin, and to the West Wing (by that I mean the West Wing of the Kremlin in Washington DC) that they deleted the crucial content from video streams and transcripts.
The default for a posting a video feed of a press conference is to show the whole thing in real time. Barring some extraordinarily “lucky” technical fault, both sides of Trump-Russia circuit needed a focused effort in order to delete the crucial content.
When it comes to investigations of human affairs, what people choose to conceal is often more important than what they choose to reveal.
That both of these authoritarians are clownish (I don’t subscribe to the ‘Putin as chess master’ mythos) doesn’t make their clumsy concealment less essential.
bttb • July 25, 2018 10:41 AM
For those who prefer video, regarding the “recent Putin-Trump press conference in Helsinki” post from above, from Rachel Maddow:
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/trump-white-house-edits-putin-support-for-trump-out-of-transcript-1284716611545?playlist=associated&cid=sm_npd_ms_tw_ma ; about 22 minutes
bttb • July 25, 2018 10:52 AM
Oops forgot to delete some tracking stuff. Try this link instead, if it’s not to late.
Does anyone knows what posters’ should try to delete from links, besides ? and following stuff. For example,
?playlist=associated&cid=sm_npd_ms_tw_ma above. For example, amp, elsewhere?
Clive Robinson • July 25, 2018 12:26 PM
@ echo,
a new study suggests that less inward looking and dogmatic aprpoaches can improve things
It’s basically the difference between being an authoritarian follower and a person who can actually think for themselves and thus be much more self reliant.
Which means they see more possabilities thus opportunities…
echo • July 25, 2018 12:27 PM
Oh leave me out of it. When I was watching a Youtube on superyachts I saw one I liked at the Monoco yacht fair and wondered where’s a Russian oligarch when I need one?
Has it crossed anyone’s mind it would be daft to try and cover up a statement made in front of the worlds press including Reuters?
Kremlin and the White House deleting the same content at the same time
You mean the stuff RT was blasting out over the airwaves? Yes, we’ll get rid of it by broadcasting it over television because nobody under the age of 60 watches it now hah hah. That deleting?
echo • July 25, 2018 12:43 PM
@Clive
I have found UK beaurocracies a little on the shut down side…
Round two with international finance today and another complaint because they made their decision before we had the discussion. (I have come across this before.) So off to the FCA we trot for another call. I will also need to follow up with ICO and the financial ombudsman too. This is turning into a right runaround.
The media have also began telling scare stories again. Legally, this is fairly clear and I have actually covered this in my submissions which touched on the judiciary and parliament and now EU competition law. Seriously, the media need to do their research and pick on the right target because they’re missing the real story.
I’m finding this to be a good exercise in getting my head straight. I’m learning as I go along and it’s fun in its own way.
Sorry if this doesn’t make sense!
Clive Robinson • July 25, 2018 12:51 PM
@ echo,
Has it crossed anyone’s mind it would be daft to try and cover up a statement made in front of the worlds press including Reuters?
It would be interrsting to see the people who have said/agreed with it to present evidence of their claims/belief, because they rarely if ever do, and when you follow the links and critically apraise them they start throwing all sorts out of their prams…
You might have noticed that some of the earkier comments by one has been silently deleated, I hopr they take note of that warning…
Weather • July 25, 2018 3:39 PM
@mod handle, your new post are good, what’s the reason you were not like to start with
MarkH • July 25, 2018 3:48 PM
@echo:
“You mean the stuff RT was blasting out over the airwaves?”
No, I mean the Russian Federation official website kremlin.ru
There, the relevant question and answer are completely omitted from the transcript. I haven’t reviewed their video — I avoid online videos.
“Has it crossed anyone’s mind it would be daft to try and cover up a statement made in front of the worlds press including Reuters?”
Of course it has!
I commend to your study, the techniques of authoritarian leaders. These include patterns of behavior which, to the literal-logical minds of career geeks like me, may seem almost comically daft.
My reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four didn’t infer that even a single person would suddenly forget that an arrested man had been a prominent official in the Party, simply because Winston Smith threw photos and text down the memory hole.
Rather, the editing executed by the Ministry of Truth was:
• a signal that from now on, to signal party loyalty you must never refer to that man
• a “correction” of official archives, so that anyone citing them or searching through them would conform to the “alternative facts”
• an assertion of an almost cosmic scale of state power: the State not only defines Truth, but arbitrarily redefines it at any time
The powerful notoriously wield their disregard for truth as a political tool. Those exceptions to this among heads of state are so few, as to be rendered conspicuously odd.
However, what Trump and his “maxi-me” Putin routinely do, goes well beyond what is typical for the political traditions of the West.
Both men, without apology, explanation, or even the slightest display of embarrassment, have repeatedly made public statements which
A) can quickly be proven false by reference to readily accessible objective evidence;
B) are absolutely contrary to and irreconcilable with public statements they had made a short time before;
C) are on their face absurd and implausible;
or any combination of the three.
Does that seem daft to you? I certainly does to me. Yet they persist in doing so, and do so for a serious purpose.
In the tradition of liberal democracies, politicians have tried to avoid the kind of daft talk I just enumerated. When they did it anyway, it was sometimes because of ignorance or simple error, and when caught at it they would usually try to explain it away or otherwise finesse the mess they had made.
Trump/Putin NEVER apologize or explain their deliberate falsehoods. Their enunciation of them is an authoritarian technique.
While this technique does not deceive any person who is alive to their deceit, it says to their faithful: “I alone am the strong man. I have the power to create Truth itself, and to forge Truth into the shape of my choosing.”
Yes, it’s daft.
Yes, they do it.
Their “daftness” is intentional and deliberate.
It is no joke. It is not harmless.
Reality • July 25, 2018 7:21 PM
@Clive
We hope you learn to be more honest in your political rants also.
echo • July 25, 2018 7:56 PM
@Clive
I have other things on my mind and tasks which need to be done which are a higher priority for personal reasons. They also involve work. Research and complaints and phone calls don’t happen by themselves. I wish they did!
Further to your mentioning Matrix-Churchill…
More than 700 government files, some classified top secret, were released to the public this week at the National Archives in Kew. Selecting what is opened up in this biannual event (documents are held secret under what is known as the “30-year rule”, although that is gradually being reduced to 20 years), however, seems to be entirely random. Apart, that is, from obvious efforts by the Cabinet Office to get some easy headlines.
@MarkH
I have aleady given my reasons why I never thought it worth mentioning this particular story. At the moment I have other things on my mind and Trump-Putin are as far away from this as it is possible to get. If I thought it was a “killer blow” I would have posted it when the story first broke.
Clive Robinson • July 26, 2018 10:09 AM
Hmm,
Chiding Sock-Puppets appear to be multiplying…
Honest comment appears to be drying…
Is this the way we want to go?
Some would say “Hell No”
Clive Robinson • July 26, 2018 11:53 AM
@ Bruce and the usual suspects,
This might be of interest,
http://s3.eurecom.fr/docs/ccs18_camurati_preprint.pdf
It’s more on hardware side channels.
Clive Robinson • July 26, 2018 2:16 PM
@ Canard,
When finding that you disagree rather than try to silence me…
Aren’t you presumptuous… Ascribing powers to me I do not have…
Though you appear to think you are a sock-puppet for some reason, why would that be?
I had to look back for your comment, it was not addressed to me, which is a silly thing to do if you are expecting a response. Here as in other blogs you would put the persons name prefaced by an “@” symbol. If you’ld have been a reader or commenter here for some time you would have known or realised that.
On the other hand perhaps you did and thought you would try and slip one in/over. But then I guess only people of ill manner would do that, eouldn’t they?
As for you using the over worked “Citation needed”, I guess you don’t unserstand the way academic publications work.
There is a primary problem with demanding a citation for an original work, in that it can not give any other than to it’s self… That is not untill others make observations / publish work on the same subject…
So as it’s an original work there won’t be a “citation” will there, other than to my own previous comment’s and whilst I can do that, it would seem oddly self serving.
However there is nothing to stop you getting up and stop being lazy and demanding others do what you should be doing yourself, and simply going through the various political outpourings of the last three administrations and the houses and find your own “refrences” rather than trying to make others do the work you should be doing.
I’ve already had this argument in the past you could look up “brush up your Shakespeare” to find it, if you don’t already know about it.
But do yourself a favour or two, use a recognized handle and stick with it @Moderator can point you to the site rules. Further if you are going to make a “citation” request, first do some research and produce refrences etc to show why you think they are required. Because if you don’t people will either ignore you or treat you as a troll or similar. It’s your choice, to make, and others to judge you by, not mine.
So you’ve something to think about, who knows what may come of it…
But as you have self identified as a sock-puppet I will be ignoring the rather silly “canard” handle from now on.
PeaceHead • July 26, 2018 5:59 PM
The report about all the dead and/or dying squid brought tears to my eyes.
So much seems to be disturbing the natural world, and yet so many minds are misdirected towards the inane and the insane.
On the plus side, there’s still good works that can be done to bolster the Earth’s strengths.
We really ought to STOP MOWING, STOP USING PESTICIDES, STOP USING HERBICIDES, (they are all toxic, and the mowing kills the ecosystems of food-pollinating species).
I will be eventually relocating, during which time I hope to transition away from overinvestment in technology towards recycling/refurbishing/repurposing/reusing and indoor organic gardening/botanicals and maybe eventually beekeeping.
We have a limited amount of time until the next threshold.
Peaceful coexistence is an unalienable entitlement of all sentient beings.
Maxwell's Daemon • July 27, 2018 1:12 AM
@Clive Robertson
My rule of thumb has always been that so long as there energy leakage out of the system, or elements, a potential side channel attack exists. Given the laws of thermodynamics, that’s pretty much a givven. How much resources are expended by either in this arena determines whether a usable side-channel is found.
Here, when I’m designing systems, I hunt down any signal leakage for the simple fact that it’ll make my life a bit easier in the future on support. Unfortunately, should I still work in engineering, I wouldn’t be afforded that luxury as I’ve found in dozens of encountering other field engineers.
“Now get off my lawn!”
Clive Robinson • July 27, 2018 3:39 AM
@ Maxwell’s Daemo,
I guess this is for me 😉
My rule of thumb has always been that so long as there energy leakage out of the system, or elements, a potential side channel attack exists
If you look back far enough on theis blog you will find I have given a whole bunch of rules for TEMPEST/EmSec design (much to the anoyance of some) when talking with @Nick P and others.
The point I make “oh so often” is about the laws of physics as we currently understand them alowing information to be impressed/modulated onto Shannon Channels. Which is give or take the same reason you give.
The ultimate form of Polution is in fact “heat” where energy has gone from the organised to disorganised state, usually as part of that process it gets purtabated in what we consider random way, which is why we get thermal noise.
If you do a TEMPEST Technician course they tend to whitter on about two basic things “-174dBm signals” and “1.5 meter red/green seperation”. The idea being that any signal at or below the -174dBm level will be masked by noise…
The only problem is that is not realy true for signals below a 1Hz bandwidth or for higher frequency signals that can be repeatedly averaged to remove the random effects of noise…
But there are other issues such as time jitter on digital signals it’s why as design engineers there are other rules to consider such as “clock the inputs clock the outputs”.
But people also forget an important fact whilst TEMPEST attacks are generally considered “passive” or “receive only” there are EmSec attacs that are “active” that involve the use of transmitted signals. These active attacks add a whole bunch of new issues for engineers to consider, however TEMPEST techs generally only get told about a limmited number of crossmodulation issues that some call “hijack” attacks.
I’ve mentioned how I independently discovered active EmSec attacks in the 1980’s and my anoyance that over a decade later the supposed inventor of “differential power analyssis” pattented most forms of active EmSec ideas in the US (the only place you could patent such a thing). However he did not realy go into active EM attacks and certainly did not look at Active EM attacks with modulated and synchronised signals, which I did back in the 1980s (as did I’ve subsequently found did one or two other switched on RF and device designers).
Anyway any regular reader here over the past few years will know that despite it’s length there is nothing in the paper that has not been discussed in some depth here years ago (search for my name RobertT Nick P and wael and more lately Thoth for “the usuall suspects”).
Wesley Parish • July 27, 2018 5:25 AM
ElReg comes through with some doozies, as always:
How to (slowly) steal secrets over the network from chip security holes: NetSpectre summoned
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/26/netspectre_network_leak/
“We show that Spectre attacks do not require local code execution but can also be mounted remotely,” said Michael Schwartz, one of the NetSpectre researchers, in an email to The Register. “Moreover, with the new covert channel, we show that Spectre does not necessarily require the cache to leak values.”
Spectre, the gift the keeps on taking …
Politicians fume after Amazon’s face-recog AI fingers dozens of them as suspected crooks
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/26/amazon_face_recogition_sucks/
Now if the American Civil Liberties Union could do us all a favour and run the same tests on the Amazon CxOs and senior management … what is the loudest senior management will scream? How many decibels can an outraged manager produce? Does it exceed the noise safety limit? Has anybody actually lost their hearing due to being subjected to angry senior management emitting noise far beyond what is safe? Do senior managers come with volume controls?
Alyer Babtu • July 27, 2018 6:00 AM
@Clive Robinson
@ Maxwell’s Daemo,
I guess this …
“Maxwell’s Daemo”, ie Demo ?
That is quite a concept !
bttb • July 27, 2018 7:20 AM
Noam Chomsky live for the hour, on now, at: https://www.democracynow.org/ . Transcript will be available soon.
Clive Robinson • July 27, 2018 11:27 AM
@ Alyer Babtu,
Maxwell’s Daemo”, ie Demo ?
I think it should be Maxwell’s “finite being” as that is what he called it in his thought experiment as a way around entropy. It was Lord Kelvin who renamed it “Maxwell’s Demon” in a letter to “Nature” some years later.
Demon’s by the way are not connected these days with “daemons”. The latter being lesser deities / guiding spirits / messengers from the gods the former being savants of evil intent or purpose some believe come from the devil[1].
People new to Unix SysAdmin / programing or Information Theory tend to get them muddled up, much to the gentle amusment of old guru’s in either area and unfortunately much agitated gesticulation by those who have certain characteristics akin to those who were once called “politically correct”…
In otherwords another lost cause such as the hacker / cracker debate, that the likes of US DoJ / FBI types and some District attorneys try to conflate to confuse juries.
[1] In fact both words come from the original Greek word “daimon” which did not carry such negative connotations untill middle easten and early judeo Christian thinking (see superssesion that in effect removes the Jewish faith from the time line).
Alyer Babtu • July 27, 2018 12:02 PM
@Clive Robinson
When I saw it, I was struck with the image of Maxwell’s Daemon giving a demo (Demo) of his patented thermodynamics process 🙂
Alyer Babtu • July 27, 2018 4:13 PM
@Clive Robinson
“finite being”
I should have added that I agree, it is certainly the case that demos are pretty finite.
Speak x to y • July 27, 2018 9:14 PM
“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner
bttb • July 28, 2018 11:45 AM
@MarkH, echo
Regarding official White House or official Kremlin transcripts or videos, I ran across this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/07/25/no-the-white-house-didnt-intentionally-edit-a-question-to-putin-out-of-a-video ; w/ “update” footnote
I don’t know if any “official” sources have been updated.
Regardless, it might be time to read Orwell’s 1984, again.
bttb • July 28, 2018 12:26 PM
@Clive Robinson
On 21 July earlofhuntingdon (EoH) wrote: “Who is funding Steve Bannon and his exilic Unite the Right European tour?”
Regarding that quote, you wrote:
“It’s a good question and the answer may be “Russian Oligarchs” or “Arab Royalty”. Possibly “washed” through hedge funds and similar.”
Of course, USA billionaires or campaign contributors like Adelson, Kochs, Mercers, etc., may chip in funding.
Regardless, regarding EoH’s question above, starting here, https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/07/21/three-things-still-active-measures/#comment-743564 are some responses (without relevant indentation):
“Rayne says:
July 21, 2018 at 1:53 pm
That is an excellent question and I don’t know that any entity has adequate oversight authority to find out.
[…]
earlofhuntingdon says:
July 21, 2018 at 2:17 pm
Execrable he is, but he must have patrons at least as terrible. His tour highlights what others here have said for some time. The neofascist-cum-disaster capitalist renaissance is organized, well-funded, and programmatic.
Footloose global capital may be, but it still needs territorial bases from which to sally forth and in which to protect capital. Especially with the growing and informed attacks on secrecy jurisdictions, and tax and money laundering havens. However feeble, they are a threat.
Like Trump and Brexit, Unite the Right appears to be an outgrowth of capital’s having cast off national loyalty for opportunistic loyalty. Whoever provides the most subsidies and most secure haven for capital receives support and the right to bid to be the second global headquarters. Instead of just one overgrown digital retailer, it is a fight for global capital itself. That would make Bannon’s efforts a kind of terraforming, establishing national bolt holes for wealth.
Bannon’s efforts might also represent a kind of genetic mutation. International corporatist treaties, like the TPP, are useful. But they still depend on nation states.
The latter are subject to recurrent bouts of progressivism, never more so than when capital succeeds in tearing down state social safety nets. Acquiring whole states, or at least control of the state apparatus most useful to footloose capital, is a way to survive a setback in any one state.
Charlie says:
July 21, 2018 at 7:21 pm
Have been looking into Steve Bannon’s new ventures in Europe. The movement he’s starting is, unsurprisingly, called The Movement. Think it’s likely that millionaire Aaron Banks (who backed the Brexit campaign) will be one of those involved in funding. There’s also likely to be Russian money as they already have form having backed Le Pen’s Front National in the French elections.
EU is already fighting a rearguard action with Orban in Hungary and the Law and Order Party in Poland not to mention what’s happening in Italy, Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia, The Netherlands and even Germany with AfD. According to Bannon, its aim is to rival George Soros’s Open Society. There are European parliamentary elections next year and he plans to have loads of right wing populists elected. Think that the EU is already on its last legs and this could be the coup de grace. Funny, not, that these groups often like to have Freedom or True in their party name.
All this, of course, ties in with so called populist/authoritarian/neoliberal governments all over the world:- Duterte in The Philippines, Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, JinPing in China, Kim in N Korea, Putin in Russia and then there’s Africa. No won’t even go there.
Rayne says:
July 21, 2018 at 8:03 pm
I think we are looking at a secondary reason why Russia has been fueling the drive to nationalism: create friction before China’s Belt-and-Road initiative makes trading with China very easy across the western part of the Eurasian continent. If trade with EU and Middle East becomes nearly frictionless with a country of +1B people, what need is there for Russia which may be more corrupt in its business dealings?"
Wesley Parish • July 29, 2018 2:30 AM
@Clive Robinsom
re: UK Labour Party, anti-Semitism, etc
I just came across this article:
I’m a bit bemused to notice that 2) Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis; is regarded as anti-Semitism. I thought it was proof of an understanding of history.
Nobody blinks an eye at comparing the Nazi policies with various policies of Christian Europe – like the Expulsion of the Sephardim from Spain in 1492, or various massacres in various European cities over the millennia. (For what it’s worth, there is a resemblance between the Yishuv’s expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 and the expulsion of the Sephardim in 1492, with a remnant remaining, subjected to hostility and discrimination, in order to build a [Christian Spain| Jewish Israel]. The resemblance is not pleasant.)
Zionism as it happens bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the various nationalisms of Europe around the late 1800s and the early 1900s. If one wishes to be accurate, Zionism should be viewed not as something unique – which of course Zionists view it as – but as a part of Europe’s toxic “nationalism” of that time.
When I was in high school, a book I found on Jewish history – not very complete, I’m afraid: it left out most of the Sephardic achievements in Al Andalus, and only hinted at the Jewish presence in Baghdad and Cairo – made the point that the establishment of Israel was so that Jews would be treated as ordinary people. Not as anything extraordinary. And I submit that that is exactly what I and many another are trying to do – hold Israel to the same standard that we held South Africa, Jim Crow, the Soviet Union, to, etc.
Clive Robinson • July 29, 2018 8:03 AM
@ Wesley Parish,
<
blockquote>I thought it was proof of an understanding of history.
It is the understanding of history that some do not want understood.
You may have noticed that even on this blog saying anything that zionists and worse do not agree with being known draws down trollish behaviour. As an example the fact that Israel’s IC was caught practicing industrial espionage against other countries industries caused a slew of comments implying accusations against jewish people in general, which it clearly and without doubt was not.
When I pointed out sailient facts from primary sources from the UK’s national archive at Kew, one commenter repeatedly promissed a magnus opas refuting it all. Unsuprisingly it was never forth comming, no full stop let alone a refutation of a single point.
There is evidence enough for the political nature of Israel, they have after all committed primary acts of war against various countries, all whilst claiming they were defending them selves. It includes an unprovoked attack on a US ship sailing in the near vicinity of Israel. The fact that any of the mainly unarmed US service people aboard only survived by pure luck as Israeli gunboats tried to sink the ship got covered up, not by the Israeli Government but the US Government speaks volumes.
Again the political lies to the UN when the Israli Defence Force quite deliberately shelled a UN humanitarian aid compound with white phosphorus to try and destroy the stocks of food etc, says volumes.
Whilst the list against the political and military of Israeli is not endless it increases in length daily at such a rate that in human terms it might as well be endless.
As has been pointed out a number of times Israel was founded on terrorist activity, and it’s political leaders were terrorists and in some cases proudly boastful of it. Thus Israel with the assistance of the US is the first terrorist organisation with nuclear weapons. Further it is Israeli politics that is responsible for the lack of stability and peace in that part of the world and untill it changes peace is unlikely to happen only death and destruction at a cost subsidized illegaly by the US and other nations such as the UK.
Having stated these facts I am obviously not alowed to be a member of the UK Labour party because of the idiocy of their NEC and a few agitators seeking their own political advancement at the expense of the truth as shown in the historical record. I guess George Orwell would recognise it for what it is.
Subscribe to comments on this entry
Leave a comment
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
bttb • July 20, 2018 4:54 PM
Where’s Wael?