tagged w/ Domestic Spying
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The war on terror now exists solely as a war against U.S. citizens.
Recently, the Obama State Department officially declared the "War on Terror" to be over. This should mean that the threat of a terrorist attack against America either at home or abroad has become so miniscule that it poses no further concern for the Federal government. Yet, the Obama Administration was seemingly concerned enough about Terrorism as of 12/11 that the President signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act which gives the US military the power to detain US citizens for indefinite periods, literally shoot anyone who is even suspected of anti-government activity that is uncooperative, and arrest those who have anti-government opinions such as speaking out against the Gestapo-like tactics used by the TSA each time anyone wishes to fly a commercial airline, for example.
President Obama was also seemingly concerned enough about terrorism to use his executive powers to implement the National Defense Resources Preparedness Act into law, March 16, 2012, which gives him the right to seize control over all public and private entities in the country, literally when he deems todo so.
Such fascist laws as the Patriot Act which give the Federal government the right to spy on its own citizens in the form of telephone taps, scrutinizing all bank accounts, the monitoring all internet usage by everyone, recording travel by all and produced the TSA is as alive today as it ever was, shortly after 9-11.
Other freedom killing bills such as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), PIPA (Protect IP Act), ACTA (Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), and CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) that have sprung up of late are all directed at spying on American citizens and keeping tabs on our personal lives.
Today, in every town and municipality in the US, there are cameras at every street corner and most are equipped with microphones while recording every conversation going on by anyone within range of them.
American society today gives new meaning to George Orwell's book 1984 and even goes far beyond the book's big brother scenario.
If the War on Terror is officially over as we are told it is, there shouldn't be a need for any of this but, the Federal government's desire to spy on us and know everything about our every move has drastically increased just since January of this year. Thus, proving that it is the citizens of the US that the Federal Government is interested in and not international terrorists. We have become the enemies of the state in the eyes of the Federal Government.
The US Federal government fears its own citizens, because it is afraid that massive riots and civil unrest will erupt at any given time when the people realize they have been taken for idiots by their own government....
continued at:
http://www.thecypresstimes.com/article/News/Opinion_Editorial/THE_WAR_ON_TERROR_NOW_THE_WAR_ON_UNITED_STATES_CITIZENS/59208The war on terror now exists solely as a war against U.S. citizens.
Recently, the... more
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Dagum
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added this
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1 month ago
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This is weird on several counts.
• In Federal Appeals Court, Twitter is appealing an order from U.S. prosecutors to turn over account information belonging to a member of the Icelandic parliament, a dutch activist and a computer security researcher. Their awful “crime?” They once supported WikiLeaks publicly on Twitter.
• So the prosecutors took their case to a lower court – where U.S. District Court Judge Liam O’Grady ruled that whether the case is under appeal or not, Twitter has to turn over the information. “Litigation of these issues has already denied the government lawful access to potential evidence for more than a year,” said the judge, according to an article in E.week(dot)com.
• Of course, if Twitter turns over the information, the case before the Federal Appeals Court asking that Twitter not be compelled to do so becomes meaningless. And there goes the litigation.
• The case, in which people are investigated for having an opinion on a matter, and a lower court judge jumps in and snatches a case away from a higher court, is being pressed by the Obama administration’s attorney general. So much for Obama’s civil rights credentials. The only person I can imagine doing worse in the White House would be a Republican. Almost any Republican.
Worst of all, if this ruling by a single judge stands, it means that the government can decide, in secret, to in effect hack all your electronic accounts and find out out what you read, to whom you’re writing, and who those people are associated with. And the government doesn’t like what you’re reading or writing, you become, in effect, "a person of interest."
The government has also been pressuring Twitter to shut down the accounts of people and organizations it doesn’t like. As one person quoted in the article said, “If the U.S. were to pressure Twitter to censor tweets by organizations it opposes, even those on the terrorist lists, it would join the ranks of countries like India, Azerbaijan, Syria, Uzbekistan, all of which have censored online speech in th name of ‘national security.”
When the president’s people act like an arm of the Assad government, and judges decide cases by thumbing their noses at higher courts, we’re all screwed. (Note to the G-man reading this post: screw you, too.)
http://thenewyorkcrank.blogspot.com/2012/01/lower-court-judge-overrules-higher.htmlThis is weird on several counts.
• In Federal Appeals Court, Twitter is... more
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In the new emails released by Anonymous we discover that HBGary Inc. may have been working on the development of a new type of Windows rootkit that was undetectable and almost impossible to remove.
Crowdleaks.org cannot confirm how far into development this project went. However we do know by looking at the following email that the Magenta Rootkit proposal was forwarded from Greg Hoglund at HBGary to Ray Owen, President of Farallon Research LLC.
From: Greg Hoglund To: Ray.owen@farallon-research.com Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2011 14:29:25 -0800 Subject: Fwd: Magenta Rootkit (for Ray)
Full headers
—–
mime-version: 1.0
received: by 10.147.181.12 with HTTP; Fri, 7 Jan 2011 14:29:25 -0800 (PST)
in-reply-to:
references:
date: Fri, 7 Jan 2011 14:29:25 -0800
delivered-to: greg@hbgary.com
message-id:
subject: Fwd: Magenta Rootkit (for Ray)
from: Greg Hoglund
to: Ray.owen@farallon-research.com
content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary=000e0cd3ea788d10dc0499492677
Attachments: MAGENTA.docx (13878 bytes)
Farallon Research LLC is privately held government contractor based in Gatos, CA. Their website offers no insight into who they are or what they do other than an “About Us” page which simply states: “The mission of Farallon Research LLC is to connect advanced commercial technologies and the companies that develop them with the requirements of the U.S. government.”
In the following message we can see that Shawn Bracken, Principal Research Scientist at HBGary, attached and sent the initial Magenta Rootkit proposal to Greg Hoglund.
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Shawn Bracken
Date: Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 11:07 AM
Subject: Magenta Rootkit (for Ray)
To: Greg Hoglund
G,
Attached is the requested rootkit proposal � let me know what you think.
Cheers,
-SB
Shawn Bracken
Principal Research Scientist
HBGary, Inc.
(916) 459-4727 x 106
shawn@hbgary.com
In the attached word document (MAGENTA.docx) we find:
Description: Magenta would be a new breed of windows based rootkit, which HBGary refers to as a multi-context rootkit. Magenta is a 100% pure assembly language implemented rootkit. The magenta rootkit body is injected into kernel memory via the DriverEntry() partial-load technique. Once loaded into kernel memory, Magenta would automatically identify an active process/thread context to inject itself into via an APC (Asynchronous Procedure Call). Once the APC fires in the new process context, the body of the rootkit will be executed. Finally, At the completion of each APC activation, magenta will move itself to a new location in memory and automatically identify one or more new activation PROCESS/THREAD combination’s to queue one or more additional activation APC’s into.
When Activated, the Magenta rootkit will be capable of searching for and executing imbedded command and control messages by finding them wherever they may exist in physical memory on the compromised host. This is ideal because it’s trivial to remotely seed C&C messages into any networked windows host – even if the host in question has full windows firewalling enabled. The Magenta payload will also contain imbedded capabilities for injecting these C&C payloads directly into user-mode processes. This will allow injectable C&C payloads to be written to perform user-mode tasks on the compromised host.
Key Features:
New breed of rootkit – There isn’t anything like this publicly
Extremely small memory footprint – (4k or less)
Almost impossible to remove from a live running system
o Once the injected Magenta rootkit body is loaded into kernel memory, it will be fire-and-forget. You can delete the original .sys file used to load it if you wish.
o Any physical memory based tools that would allow you to see the current location of Magenta body would only be of limited use since by the time the responder tried to verify his results Magenta will have already moved to a new location & context
Elegant/powerful C&C message system. There is a near endless amount of ways to get a small seeded C&C message into the physical memory of a networked computer even with zero credentials.
Invisible to kernel mode defense components that rely on the PsSetLoadImageNotifyRoutine() notification routine to detect/analyze/block drivers.
o HINT: PsSetLoadImageNotify() callbacks only get called for drivers who returned TRUE in their DriverEntry()
Project Development Phases:
HBGary recommends using at least a two phase project to build out Magenta. In Phase-1 HBGary would build a fully functional prototype for Windows XP – Service Pack 3 (X86). This would allow an end-to-end proof of concept prototype to be developed and demonstrated. Phase-2 would purely consist of porting the Magenta rootkit to all current flavors of Microsoft Windows (x86 & x64)
Crowdleaks.org cannot confirm that the Magenta Rootkit proposal was even accepted but given HBGary’s involvement in Stuxnet research, it’s a chilling proposal that was likely taken seriously by HBgary INC. and probably not the first of its kind.
GO TO STORY:
http://crowdleaks.org/hbgary-inc-working-on-secret-rootkit-project-codename-magenta/In the new emails released by Anonymous we discover that HBGary Inc. may have been... more
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For at least a year, the Homeland Security Department detoured hundreds of requests for federal records to senior political advisers for highly unusual scrutiny, probing for information about the requesters and delaying disclosures deemed too politically sensitive, according to nearly 1,000 pages of internal e-mails obtained by The Associated Press.
The Freedom of Information Act (commonly known by its acronym FOIA), the main tool forcing the government to be more open, is designed to be insulated from political considerations. Anyone who seeks information through the law is supposed to get it unless disclosure would hurt national security, violate personal privacy or expose confidential decision-making in certain areas.
But in July 2009, Homeland Security introduced a directive requiring a wide range of information to be vetted by political appointees for "awareness purposes," no matter who requested it.For at least a year, the Homeland Security Department detoured hundreds of requests... more
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The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come.The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the... more
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The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to an intelligence or terrorism investigation.The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies... more
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The Washington Post published the results of a major two-year investigation this past week. It revealed that the top-secret world the government created in response to the events on Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.The Washington Post published the results of a major two-year investigation this past... more
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A 22-year-old anti-war activist from Evergreen State College will get $169,000 as part of a settlement with the WState Patrol and two other law-enforcement agencies over allegations that their officers engaged in political spying and harassment on behalf of the U.S. military.A 22-year-old anti-war activist from Evergreen State College will get $169,000 as part... more
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News outlet The Examiner reports that despite assurances by a key member of the Obama administration, Pakistani passengers flying in or out of the U.S. will be subjected to enhanced screening, including full-body pat-downs, a physical inspection of personal property, or screening by one of the 40 advanced-imaging machines located in 19 U.S. airports.News outlet The Examiner reports that despite assurances by a key member of the Obama... more
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President Barack Obama has signed a one-year extension of several provisions of the controversial counterterrorism statute, the USA PATRIOT Act. Provisions in the measure would have expired this past week without Obama’s signature.
The act, which was adopted in the weeks after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, expands the government's ability to spy on Americans in the name of national security.President Barack Obama has signed a one-year extension of several provisions of the... more
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From the Associated Press: Members of a Washington anti-war group are suing an Army intelligence analyst, as well as the city of Olympia and several of its police officials, claiming their organization was illegally infiltrated and that the information gathered was used to make wrongful arrests.From the Associated Press: Members of a Washington anti-war group are suing an Army... more
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"KPRC news in Houston recently filmed a secret experiment by law enforcement agencies including the Dept. of Homeland Security of a drone intended to spy on Americans.
The drone uncovered during this investigation are not like the large, expensive models used by the military for targeted strikes on militants half a world away. These are manufactured by Insitu out of Bingen, Washington (corporate offices located in Australia), only weigh about 40 pounds (18.1 kg) before monitoring equipment is installed. This model has the capacity to stay airborne for up to a day.
The Houston Police Department responded with the following statement, “Potential public safety applications include mobility, evacuations, homeland security, search and rescue, as well as tactical.”
Such benign excuses were also used during the passage of draconian bills such as FISA and the Patriot Act before it was revealed the much more insidious and rampant applications of those tools.""KPRC news in Houston recently filmed a secret experiment by law enforcement... more
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A federal appeals court in New York has ruled that US government agencies may now refuse to confirm or deny the existence of records when faced with a Freedom of Information Act request that might disclose sensitive intelligence activities, sources, or methods.A federal appeals court in New York has ruled that US government agencies may now... more
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WHACKO-TV adds this new reality mystery suspense cop-detective show to its line-up right before the holidays. It's SNARKY, a private detective that works for the rich folks who need to keep up with the Jones and know who their spouses are sleeping with. This is a tough job for SNARKY. Catch it live.WHACKO-TV adds this new reality mystery suspense cop-detective show to its line-up... more
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Privacy advocates are asking lawmakers to investigate the Department of Homeland Security office in charge of protecting Americans' privacy, saying it has shown an extraordinary disregard for its duty.Privacy advocates are asking lawmakers to investigate the Department of Homeland... more
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Attorney General Eric Holder says a lawsuit in San Francisco over warrantless wiretapping threatens to expose ongoing intelligence work and must be thrown out.Attorney General Eric Holder says a lawsuit in San Francisco over warrantless... more
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Everything I read about Fusion Centers makes them seem less and less of a good idea.
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I can tell you all about the domestic 'President's Surveillance Program' (and I shouldn't be able to because I'm not a terrorist). I need a lawyer.I can tell you all about the domestic 'President's Surveillance... more
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The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported today, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they’re still too secret to reveal.
The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to “unprecedented collection activities” by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks.
Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be “carefully monitored.”
The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it. They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years, the report says.
(more at link)The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in... more
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Open ID is now being used by Facebook, Yahoo, Flickr, Paypal, Google, Microsoft, AOL, MySpace, IBM, LiveJournal and VeriSign, among many others.
OpenID is a distributed single sign on solution that allows people to sign into different services with the same login credentials.
Simply put, one cracked OpenID site (by hackers, the government, parents, etc) could result in total profile information access and/or one's identity being abused over several other OpenID sites.
The creator of OpenID currently works at Google.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID#Security_and_phishingOpen ID is now being used by Facebook, Yahoo, Flickr, Paypal, Google, Microsoft, AOL,... more
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