Author: TarheelDem

Russians asking for help after swarming drone attacks

Russia is getting blowback on its support of Assad in Syria and on supporting the takedown of ISIS/ISIL/DAESH.  Now Russia is asking for global help in determining the source of the components for the drones.  That is an expensive and probably a wise action giving how this could spin out of control. It is the technological equivalent of model planes dropping cherry bombs. Stopping the availability of of supplies only part of the way of deterring attacks.  There needs to be a nation-state agreement that they will not continue to enhance this technology or continue to supply it to non-state actors.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been developed by the US Air Force since the 1950s and received broader use during the Bush and Obama administrations.  Here i the Wikipedia history:

In 1959, the U.S. Air Force, concerned about losing pilots over hostile territory, began planning for the use of unmanned aircraft.[18] Planning intensified after the Soviet Union shot down a U-2 in 1960. Within days, a highly classified UAV program started under the code name of “Red Wagon”.[19] The August 1964 clash in the Tonkin Gulf between naval units of the U.S. and North Vietnamese Navy initiated America’s highly classified UAVs (Ryan Model 147, Ryan AQM-91 Firefly, Lockheed D-21) into their first combat missions of the Vietnam War. When the Chinese government showed photographs of downed U.S. UAVs via Wide World Photos, the official U.S. response was “no comment”.

The War of Attrition (1967-1970) featured the introduction of UAVs with reconnaissance cameras into combat in the Middle East.

In the 1973 Yom Kippur War Israel used UAVs as decoys to spur opposing forces into wasting expensive anti-aircraft missiles.

In 1973 the U.S. military officially confirmed that they had been using UAVs in Southeast Asia (Vietnam). Over 5,000 U.S. airmen had been killed and over 1,000 more were missing or captured. The USAF 100th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing flew about 3,435 UAV missions during the war at a cost of about 554 UAVs lost to all causes. In the words of USAF General George S. Brown, Commander, Air Force Systems Command, in 1972, “The only reason we need (UAVs) is that we don’t want to needlessly expend the man in the cockpit.” Later that year, General John C. Meyer, Commander in Chief, Strategic Air Command, stated, “we let the drone do the high-risk flying … the loss rate is high, but we are willing to risk more of them … they save lives!”

During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missile batteries in Egypt and Syria caused heavy damage to Israeli fighter jets. As a result, Israel developed the first UAV with real-time surveillance.[28][29][30] The images and radar decoys provided by these UAVs helped Israel to completely neutralize the Syrian air defenses at the start of the 1982 Lebanon War, resulting in no pilots downed.[31] The first time UAVs were used as proof-of-concept of super-agility post-stall controlled flight in combat-flight simulations involved tailless, stealth technology-based, three-dimensional thrust vectoring flight control, jet-steering UAVs in Israel in 1987.

With the maturing and miniaturization of applicable technologies in the 1980s and 1990s, interest in UAVs grew within the higher echelons of the U.S. military. In the 1990s, the U.S. DoD gave a contract to AAI Corporation along with Israeli company Malat. The U.S. Navy bought the AAI Pioneer UAV that AAI and Malat developed jointly. Many of these UAVs saw service in the 1991 Gulf War. UAVs demonstrated the possibility of cheaper, more capable fighting machines, deployable without risk to aircrews. Initial generations primarily involved surveillance aircraft, but some carried armaments, such as the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator, that launched AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles.

CAPECON was a European Union project to develop UAVs, running from 1 May 2002 to 31 December 2005.[

As of 2012, the USAF employed 7,494 UAVs – almost one in three USAF aircraft.[35][36] The Central Intelligence Agency also operated UAVs.

In 2013 at least 50 countries used UAVs. China, Iran, Israel and others designed and built their own varieties

Moreover this is the perfect market niche through which security firms like Blackwater/Xe/Academi, TITAN, DynCorp can create permanent markets in low-level wars that only occasionally blow back to the US.

And if politico/racist conflict increases in the US and Europe, this technology could be the accelerant.

It seems the march of folly is accelerating.  Some sort of concord that sets the rules  of the governments to protect themselves and some rebirth of diplomacy and democratic sensitivities would be a welcome sign of sanity in the midst of America’s meltdown of the will to consensus.

 Al Giordano‏Verified account @AlGiordano

1.Just spoke with a source in the Mobile (AL) County NAACP. Here are some things that are happening today on the ground in Alabama that did not happen in the 2016 election. Thread:
10:58 AM – 12 Dec 2017

2. The state NAACP instructed its local branches to call every registered voter in the state who did not vote in 2016. The Lower Alabama chapter made it through the entire list successfully.
50 replies 1,562 retweets 10,142 likes

3. A dozen paid canvassers have been going door to door in the Mobile area all week. That did not happen in 2016,
4. What was last year an ad hoc effort by “a group of friends” to offer rides to the polls is today more than a dozen organizations doing rides-to-the-polls with resources for drivers.
5. Once the Jones campaign had money it bought billboards in African-American neighborhoods with the election date and a quick blurb about Jones. This was not on highways but in places where one normally sees fast-food or cigarette ads.
6. The Mobile NAACP crunched the numbers and showed local pastoral leadership that whatever they had done in recent years to turn out voters wasn’t working. The pastors then pushed for and got resources to do congregation-wide robo calls and voter reg tables at church events.
7. At school alumni parties the local NAACP handed out several thousand flyers with election dates, registration deadlines, absentee deadlines, voter ID requirements. They also brought these paper reminders door to door in a canvass.
8. Mobile is one of the redder counties in Alabama. Even larger efforts have done many of the same things in Montgomery, Huntsville, Birmingham and the so-called Black Belt since resources arrived in mid-November.
9. Beyond the NAACP, there are many other black voter mobilization groups with boots on the ground in AL communities doing similar, extremely important work. One of them is The Ordinary People Society (TOPS). TOPS registered 5,000 in 22 jails and 10 prisons in the last two weeks!
10. Note: These resources were provided by many of you. We raised $10,000+ here on Twitter in a single evening for the Jones campaign. Many others did the same with their networks. This thread shows how much of it was spent on field organizing.
11. Nothing like these grassroots efforts happened in 2016 in Alabama. The people who have been doing them are feeling good today. They think they have a shot. And they’ll be working hard until polls close to make it so.
12. These reports are also consistent with how the DNC spent money to win special elections in Virginia and other states. More money for field and GOTV. Less for TV ads. This is the @TomPerez era at work. End memo.

——————

How much of this could be planned and started locally with self-funding of resources?

Nothing like this has happened in the South for quite a while.

Having this ready to go made the opportunity of the WaPo article on Roy Moore bear fruit in a way that the Trump primary win didn’t.

This is fascinating because of who Luntz is interviewing – pretty conventional Republicans.  Wonder what that is about?

Nine women came forward with sexual misconduct accusations against Roy Moore. These Alabama voters think they were paid to lie. @FrankLuntz​ spoke to them on VICE News Tonight.

(via @HBO​) pic.twitter.com/dPcb1Ux652

— VICE News (@vicenews) December 9, 2017

Are Jews responsible for the assassination of the Romanov family a hundred years ago?  The Russian church’s plan to develop a martyr cult around the Romanovs is suffering from lack of public interest.  Kirill seeks an new investigation by the Russian Federation courts to prove that Jews were responsible for the assassinations.

John Helmer, who is in Moscow, reports:

John Helmer, Dances with Bears: Torquemada makes a comeback; the Spanish Inquisition has arrived in Moscow

Turns to the right like Russia’s often turn anti-Semitic.  This involves getting the state’s rejiggering of the facts to fit the establishment of a cult.

Our own national security personnel are about to be shadowed by Trumpist praetorian guard because Trump does not trust the “deep state”.

Matthew Cole, Jeremy Schaill: The Intercept: Trump White House Weighing Plans for Private Spies to Counter “Deep State” Enemies

The obvious ones are Clapper, Hayden, and Alexander (all former Flynn colleagues in Iron Bridge, by the way.

And yes, it’s traitor Erik Prince, the Secretary of Education’s brother.

There are better and more effective ways to deal with an out of control deep state.

Declassifying everything except non-national security confidential information would be very salutary to the health of government.

Chicago Sun-Times Columnists, Jesse Jackson: JACKSON: To win in Alabama, Jones must create a new coalition”>

Points to note:
How Alabama has changed since the 1960s, starting with the Iron Bowl.

The savviest African-American politician in the state, State Sen. Hank Sanders, warns, “Right now, many African-Americans do not know there is an election on Dec. 12.” The NAACP has begun calling “sometimes voters” to get out the vote. Jones should be campaigning with Sanders and others, and introducing himself to black congregations. Real resources need to go into black newspapers and radio stations.

Listen to Hank Sanders. There are two weeks to work a miracle.  Send some funds to Doug Jones with the quote from Hank Sanders.  Strategically placed radio can be quite inexpensive we found out from Larry Kissell and with the right pitch can self-fund and expand.  If you are or know NAACP members, see if it is appropriate to participate in phone banking to Alabama.

If he fails, Democrats must learn to stop ignoring their core voters between campaigns and start appealing on kitchen table issues across race lines.

Stunning that in 2017, someone must say this.  This has been a 17-year problem at least.  The wrong lesson taken from Al Gore’s loss.

Take the time to watch this piece-of-work all the way through.  It will clue you in to something that’s been running under the surface of the internet that mixes political adverstising (and real defamation) with a commercial cover.  It is pure Bernays. And it works well with people with time on their hands, curiosity about something different, and enough respect in a community to get the message seen in a friendly light.  It is of course straight-up 120-proof  half-truth.  It is also calculated to subtly lead you along.

Will this be CROOKED Hillary’s secret revenge

What is interesting is where it came from.  It came from a Lockerdome ad linked to Washington’s Blog. That points to a human assignment or a matching algorithms as one of the factors in distributing this Bernaysian advetising across the web.  The ad insertion cleverly perverts the flow of logic in the Washington Blog article.  I don’t know how many political blog operators look for this sort of stuff.

Here is the Washington Blog article.  I’m curious to know if this ad is still there for another viewer.

How to Instantly Prove (Or Disprove) Russian Hacking of U.S. Election.

If you’ve never seen one of these slow-unroll long-form ads, take the time to see how this one is constructed.  If you’ve sat through a longer than 10-minute ad (generally for health-related books or health supplements), you can safely skip this one, which pivots off of Hillarycare and uses standard American health care as the argument for Hillary as a killer.

What is strange about this ad is that it is not clear whether an entrepreneur is expressing his political opinionns or is just pitching and identifiable psychographic.

These are the only people identified as affiliated with the Health Sciences Institute:

Meet the HSI Advisory Board

I wonder how many of them know they are associated with this sort of Bernaysian political advertising.

When I closed the window, Firefox asked whether I wanted to save or leave the information on the page.  I would advise evaluating your own risk viewing this long ad despite its helpfulness in identifying a troubling part of the internet.

Could this be the operation of a national covert operations group?  Yes. But it is so inexpensive that it could be attributed to any number of actors.  One would have to have definite provenance information to determine who actually paid the freight.

The so-called “market of ideas”.  And since Edward Bernays, marketing has dominated the rhetoric of the market of ideas.  And marketing depends on “consumer intelligence”, not the intelligence of the consumer but the intelligence about the consumer’s hot buttons.

Scott Ritter reports about the technical information that has been grist for the information war about the election from the beginning.  He also reports on how the marketing strategies of cybersecurity and software firms play in to how the events of 2016 played out.

Scott Ritter, Medium, Homefront  Rising: DUMBSTRUCK: a Homefront report about how America was conned about the DNC hack

Ritter’s point is this: DNC approached cybersecurity as an inhouse operation backed up by an aggresssive cybersecurity analysis, attribution, and response company.  That company was CrowdStrike.  DNC’s inhouse protection failed catastrophically (in political terms). When they brought in CrowdStrike, that company’s skill set seemed to go more toward narrative management than toward skilled attribution of the intruder.  Meanwhile, the self-claimed actor was dismissed as a hoax and the assumption was made that of 30 potential government actors, the alleged government actor was Russia.  Ritter furthermore says that CrowdStrike then and not controls the evidence from the DNC servers that could give other investigators information about attribution but that it (and the DNC) refuses to release that evidence.

What emerges in this reporting is how vulnerable we are because the US government (for us), cybersecurity firms (for their clients), and all of the organizations that handle sensitive data can neither secure their servers from a determined attack, reliably attribute an attack, or work to shut down the source of an attack once identified.  Nor have they devoted sufficient resources to figure out how reduce the ability to carry out an attack.  Indeed, the US National Security Agency is more interested in carrying out attacks on other organization’s assets than on protecting US assets.

That last reality is why the intelligence community has not been able itself to provide reliable attribution in the absence of political motivation.  They too are reactive; moreover they are politically constrained by their sources of funding.

It is a vulnerability that was introduced when the internet became a real-time communication tool instead of just an interface for lookup in the equivalent of what Internet Archive aspires to be — a global public library.

The story now reduces to the marketing spin of the various actors involved or alleged to be involved.

CrowdStrike has a motto: “You don’t have a Malware Problem, You Have an Adversary Problem.”

The only clear beneficiary of the DNC leak was the Trump campaign and even then just barely.

They would be the most obvious adversary.

The assumption that only the Russians could have done such a wide-ranging cyberattack has shielded direct action by the Trump campaign from scrutiny.  It as also shieded hackers friendly with Julian Assange, who might have a grudge against how the Clinton State Department made him a man without a country.  What other adversaries would have a motive and a means?

The DNC legitimately is worried that an investigation of their server materials in CrowdStrike hands could expose other confidential transactions.  This impasse is completely predictable.

Would an additional direction in Mueller’s investigation include what is known about the leak and the Trump campaign’s knowledge (if any) of the leak or the contents of the leaks, or coordination.  Testimony about the more easily discovered meeting coordinating with Russia during the campaign could lead to clarity about the cyberintrusions.  After all the subjects and topics of the leaks were reminiscent of Nixon’s Watergate operation.

What is clear is that the crapification of the internet is more and more obvious and at some point draws away internet traffic as network operation turn the revenue screws.

The implications of this caper are very clarifying for politics, international relations, technology, and information consumption.

Marcy Wheeler on the challenge that Breitbart poses to the American political system only because he intends on being competitive with Rupert Murdoch.

Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel: How the “Fake News” Panic Fed Breitbart

That’s the conclusion drawn by a report released by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center last week. The report showed that the key dynamic behind Trump’s win came from the asymmetric polarization of our media sphere, embodied most dramatically in the way that Breitbart not only created a bubble for conservatives, but affected the overall agenda of the press, particularly with immigration (a conclusion that is all the more important given Steve Bannon’s return to Breitbart just as white supremacist protests gather in intensity). …

Fake news is a problem — as is the increasing collapse in confidence in US ideology generally. But it’s not a bigger problem than Breitbart. And as Bannon returns to his natural lair, the left needs to turn its attention to the far harder, but far more important, challenge of Breitbart.

The left has not created the asymmetric news bubble; it exists to demonize and delegitimize the left.  There is no left-wing counterpart to the mass media-driven right-wing bubble.  And those outlets that were thought to begin to provide that counterweight have turned to policing the opinions of their commenters so that the there will not be a reaction to the left.  The right seems not to have that sort of policing function to its right, only to its left.

That dynamic is the challenge that zombie conservatism and the Breitbart attempt at revival poses.

No one is telling the truth that the conservative movement has failed to make lives better for its working class acolytes and middle class proselytizers.

Conservatives can no longer win the argument on freedom after bowing down to Trump’s authoritarianism.

That goes double for libertarians.

Will we have an opposition party or will they self-censor?

Corey Doctorow, BoingBoing: After DEFCON, the FBI arrested the UK national who stopped Wannacry

Was the FBI not aware of his reputation and his role?  Or did he disrupt somebody’s sting?  Or somebody’s cyberattack?

The worst part of it is that it could be either, and we continue to consider ourselves a democratic society.

The first requires explanation to people who respect him.

The second is a hazard of stings.

The third is probably a situation that governments would not have to admit.

Brave new world, just because someone asked what malevolent can I do with programming.  Yet another technology to ask nations to forgo for the sake of normal life.