Smartphone Dystopia

Guardian  |  He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook “likes”, which he describes as “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as hollow as they are seductive. And Rosenstein should know: he was the Facebook engineer who created the “like” button in the first place. 

A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was then called an “awesome” button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.

These refuseniks are rarely founders or chief executives, who have little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are making the world a better place. Instead, they tend to have worked a rung or two down the corporate ladder: designers, engineers and product managers who, like Rosenstein, several years ago put in place the building blocks of a digital world from which they are now trying to disentangle themselves. “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.”

Rosenstein, who also helped create Gchat during a stint at Google, and now leads a San Francisco-based company that improves office productivity, appears most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.

There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”

But those concerns are trivial compared with the devastating impact upon the political system that some of Rosenstein’s peers believe can be attributed to the rise of social media and the attention-based market that drives it.

Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.

Rude Bwois Scaring Children and Old People in California...,

gizmodo |  Many Californians’ regularly scheduled broadcasts were interrupted Thursday morning with strange emergency messages warning of extraterrestrial invasions and the beginning of Armageddon. The bizarre warnings aired on TVs in the Orange County area, affecting Cox and Spectrum cable users, according to the Orange County Register.

One video of the broadcast uploaded to YouTube includes a terrified, breathless voice saying: “The space program made contact with... They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The disasters that are coming—the military—I’m sorry the government knows about them...”

Gizmodo found that the audio comes from a call that Art Bell, the host of the conspiracy theory-themed radio show Coast to Coast AM, received in 1997 from a man claiming to be a former Area 51 employee.

Other videos of the emergency broadcast feature a different voice warning that “extremely violent times will come.” Redditor smittenkitten77 discovered the audio came from the Christian radio program Insight for Living with Chuck Swindoll.

Google Is Not What It Seems

wikileaks |  There was nothing politically hapless about Eric Schmidt. I had been too eager to see a politically unambitious Silicon Valley engineer, a relic of the good old days of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast. But that is not the sort of person who attends the Bilderberg conference four years running, who pays regular visits to the White House, or who delivers “fireside chats” at the World Economic Forum in Davos.43 Schmidt’s emergence as Google’s “foreign minister”—making pomp and ceremony state visits across geopolitical fault lines—had not come out of nowhere; it had been presaged by years of assimilation within US establishment networks of reputation and influence.   

 

On a personal level, Schmidt and Cohen are perfectly likable people. But Google's chairman is a classic “head of industry” player, with all of the ideological baggage that comes with that role.44 Schmidt fits exactly where he is: the point where the centrist, liberal, and imperialist tendencies meet in American political life. By all appearances, Google's bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the “benevolent superpower.” They will tell you that open-mindedness is a virtue, but all perspectives that challenge the exceptionalist drive at the heart of American foreign policy will remain invisible to them. This is the impenetrable banality of “don’t be evil.” They believe that they are doing good. And that is a problem.

Google is "different". Google is "visionary". Google is "the future". Google is "more than just a company". Google "gives back to the community". Google is "a force for good".

Even when Google airs its corporate ambivalence publicly, it does little to dislodge these items of faith.45 The company’s reputation is seemingly unassailable. Google’s colorful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year—an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history.46 Caught red-handed last year making petabytes of personal data available to the US intelligence community through the PRISM program, Google nevertheless continues to coast on the goodwill generated by its “don’t be evil” doublespeak. A few symbolic open letters to the White House later and it seems all is forgiven. Even anti-surveillance campaigners cannot help themselves, at once condemning government spying but trying to alter Google’s invasive surveillance practices using appeasement strategies.47

Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt’s tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of US power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation. But Google has always been comfortable with this proximity. Long before company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Schmidt in 2001, their initial research upon which Google was based had been partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).48 And even as Schmidt’s Google developed an image as the overly friendly giant of global tech, it was building a close relationship with the intelligence community.

In 2003 the US National Security Agency (NSA) had already started systematically violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) under its director General Michael Hayden.49 These were the days of the “Total Information Awareness” program.50 Before PRISM was ever dreamed of, under orders from the Bush White House the NSA was already aiming to “collect it all, sniff it all, know it all, process it all, exploit it all.”51 During the same period, Google—whose publicly declared corporate mission is to collect and “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”52—was accepting NSA money to the tune of $2 million to provide the agency with search tools for its rapidly accreting hoard of stolen knowledge.53

In 2004, after taking over Keyhole, a mapping tech startup cofunded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the CIA, Google developed the technology into Google Maps, an enterprise version of which it has since shopped to the Pentagon and associated federal and state agencies on multimillion-dollar contracts.54 In 2008, Google helped launch an NGA spy satellite, the GeoEye-1, into space. Google shares the photographs from the satellite with the US military and intelligence communities.55 In 2010, NGA awarded Google a $27 million contract for “geospatial visualization services.”56

In 2010, after the Chinese government was accused of hacking Google, the company entered into a “formal information-sharing” relationship with the NSA, which was said to allow NSA analysts to “evaluate vulnerabilities” in Google’s hardware and software.57 Although the exact contours of the deal have never been disclosed, the NSA brought in other government agencies to help, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

AI Used to Create Even Faker Obama

ieee |  Artificial intelligence software could generate highly realistic fake videos of former president Barack Obama using existing audio and video clips of him, a new study [PDF] finds.

Such work could one day help generate digital models of a person for virtual reality or augmented reality applications, researchers say.

Computer scientists at the University of Washington previously revealed they could generate digital doppelgängers of anyone by analyzing images of them collected from the Internet, from celebrities such as Tom Hanks and Arnold Schwarzenegger to public figures such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Such work suggested it could one day be relatively easy to create such models of anybody, when there are untold numbers of digital photos of everyone on the Internet.

The researchers chose Obama for their latest work because there were hours of high-definition video of him available online in the public domain. The research team had a neural net analyze millions of frames of video to determine how elements of Obama's face moved as he talked, such as his lips and teeth and wrinkles around his mouth and chin.

In an artificial neural network, components known as artificial neurons are fed data, and work together to solve a problem such as identifying faces or recognizing speech. The neural net can then alter the pattern of connections among those neurons to change the way they interact, and the network tries solving the problem again. Over time, the neural net learns which patterns are best at computing solutions, an AI strategy that mimics the human brain.

In the new study, the neural net learned what mouth shapes were linked to various sounds. The researchers took audio clips and dubbed them over the original sound files of a video. They next took mouth shapes that matched the new audio clips and grafted and blended them onto the video. Essentially, the researchers synthesized videos where Obama lip-synched words he said up to decades beforehand.

The researchers note that similar previous research involved filming people saying sentences over and over again to map what mouth shapes were linked to various sounds, which is expensive, tedious and time-consuming. In contrast, this new work can learn from millions of hours of video that already exist on the Internet or elsewhere.

Once You See The Mechanism Of Political Control, You Can't Unsee It

Tonight: Stephen read through James Comey's pre-written testimony, and found some pretty weird stuff. #LSSC pic.twitter.com/XUWcabcyul

— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) June 8, 2017

dailybeast |  Colbert relished imagining just how President Trump informed Comey that he “had not been involved with hookers in Russia.” As the host joked, “Comey replied, I understand Mr. President, but I just asked what you had for breakfast.”

On their unexpectedly private dinner, which took place a few weeks later, Colbert said, “Oh, c’mon, that’s the oldest trick in the book. You invite your FBI director over for a movie, saying it’s going to be a ‘group thing.’ When he shows up, it’s just the two of you. Can’t make Netflix word so, you know… so you obstruct justice.”

Trump’s “bombshell” at that particular meeting was telling Comey, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” In response, Comey says, “I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed.” “Basically, Comey treated Trump like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park,” Colbert said. “It makes sense, they both have the same sized hands.”

Among the “weird stuff” in Comey’s remarks, Colbert said, was the fact that Trump repeatedly referred to his Russia scandal as “the cloud” over his administration. “Mr. President, that’s not a cloud,” Colbert told Trump. “Meteorologists call that a shitstorm.”

Ransomware "Attack" a Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone

washingtonsblog |  What should we make of the global ransomware attacks which happened today?

We’ve documented that the intelligence services intentionally create digital vulnerabilities, then intentionally leave them open … leaving us exposed and insecure.

Washington’s Blog asked the highest level NSA whistleblower ever* – Bill Binney – what he thinks of the attacks.

Binney told us:

This is what I called short sighted finite thinking on the part of the Intelligence Community managers.
This is also what I called (for some years now) a swindle of the tax payers. First, they find or create weaknesses then they don’t fix these weaknesses so we are all vulnerable to attack.
Then, when attacks occur, they say they need more money for cyber security — a total swindle!!! [Indeed.]
This is only the second swindle of the public. The first was terror efforts by saying we need to collect everything to stop terror — another lie. They said that because to collect everything takes lots and lots of money.
Then, when the terror attack occurs, they say they need more money, people and data to stop terror. Another swindle from the start. [The war on terror is a “self-licking ice cream cone”, because it creates many more terrorists than it stops.]
And, finally, the latest swindle “THE RUSSIANS DID IT.” This is an effort to start a new cold war which means another bigger swindle of US tax payers.

For cyber security, I would suggest the president order NSA, CIA and any others to fix the cyber problems they know about; then, maybe we will start to have some cyber security.

The bottom line is that our intelligence services should start concentrating on actually defending us, rather than focusing their resources on offensive mischief.

Who is to Blame for Compromising Computers with Obsolete Operating Systems?

theduran |  A widespread computer virus attack known as ‘WannaCry’ has been compromising computers with obsolete operating systems across the world. This should be the opening sentence of just about every article on this subject, but unfortunately it is not.

The virus does not attack modern computer operating systems, it is designed to attack the Windows XP operating system that is so old, it was likely used in offices in the World Trade Center prior to September 11 2001, when the buildings collapsed. Windows XP was first released on 25 August, 2001.

Furthermore, early vulnerabilities in modern Windows systems were almost instantly patched up by Microsoft as per the fact that such operating systems are constantly updated.

The obsolete XP system is simply out of the loop.

A child born on the release date of Windows XP is now on the verge of his or her 17th birthday. Feeling old yet?

The fact of the matter is that governments and businesses around the world should not only feel old, they should feel humiliated and disgraced.

With the amount of money governments tax individuals and private entities, it is beyond belief that government organisations ranging from some computers in the Russian Interior Ministry to virtually all computers in Britain’s National Health Service, should be using an operating system so obsolete that its manufacturer, Microsoft, no longer supports it and hasn’t done for some time.

Military-Backed Criminal Superhacking Looks Like....,

arstechnica |  A highly virulent new strain of self-replicating ransomware shut down computers all over the world, in part by appropriating a National Security Agency exploit that was publicly released last month by the mysterious group calling itself Shadow Brokers.

The malware, known as Wanna, Wannacry, or Wcry, has infected at least 75,000 computers, according to antivirus provider Avast. AV provider Kaspersky Lab said organizations in at least 74 countries have been affected, with Russia being disproportionately affected, followed by Ukraine, India, and Taiwan. Infections are also spreading through the United States. The malware is notable for its multi-lingual ransom demands, which support more than two-dozen languages.

Wcry is reportedly causing disruptions at banks, hospitals, telecommunications services, train stations, and other mission-critical organizations in multiple countries, including the UK, Spain, Germany, and Turkey. FedEx, the UK government's National Health Service, and Spanish telecom Telefonica have all been hit. The Spanish CERT has called it a "massive ransomware attack" that is encrypting all the files of entire networks and spreading laterally through organizations.

The virally spreading worm was ultimately stopped when a researcher who uses the Twitter handle MalwareTech and works for security firm Kryptos Logic took control of a domain name that was hard-coded into the self-replicating exploit. The domain registration, which occurred around 6 AM California time, was a major stroke of good luck, because it was possible only because the attackers had failed to obtain the address first.

The address appeared to serve as a sort of kill switch the attackers could use to terminate the campaign. MalwareTech's registration had the effect of ending the attacks that had started earlier Friday morning in other parts of the world. As a result, the number of infection detections plateaued dramatically in the hours following the registration. It had no effect on WCry infections that were initiated through earlier campaigns.

Shadow Brokers Hit NSA a Devastating Lick

Don't forget I told you cats about the NSA creep-tip two years ago, and gave you a concrete specific recommendation for shoring up your end-point game to protect at least a little something...,

FP |  Weaver believes that when the Shadow Brokers published a broad list of the tools in their possession in January, hoping to auction them off, the NSA moved quickly.

The NSA “did clearly, quietly tell Microsoft,” Weaver said, allowing the company to repair the holes before script kiddies and criminal hackers started figuring out the specifics of the exploits.

Microsoft published a massive patch exactly a month before the Shadow Brokers unleashed its trove.

Neither Microsoft nor the NSA immediately responded to a request for comment.

Before Microsoft revealed it had patched most of the holes, the Shadow Brokers’ release reignited the debate about when government agencies should be required to disclose vulnerabilities it finds in such major products as devices and browsers.

The White House’s Vulnerabilities Equities Process, which determines whether those flaws should be shared with the company in order to be repaired, or taken advantage of by intelligence agencies, was reinvigorated in 2014. The process involves several major agencies, which consider the likelihood that other nation states or criminal actors would come across the same flaws.

It’s unclear, however, which agencies are involved in the process and how those decisions are made. The agencies are not required to disclose vulnerabilities purchased or researched through government sponsorship. If the NSA told Microsoft about the tools, it was because the agency knew or suspected the vulnerabilities had been compromised.

Intelligence officials see the latest Shadow Brokers release as part of a larger erosion of capabilities that has been going on since 2013, when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden gave journalists internal NSA documents. Snowden’s leak kicked off a chain of damaging exposures that, while sparking an important worldwide debate about privacy, severely damaged U.S. intelligence capabilities, the former intelligence official argued.

One former TAO employee who spoke with Foreign Policy believes the release is “a bit dated,” because hacking tools to access more current Windows projects and other browsers weren’t included.

“It is a significant leak. … It gets harder to develop tools as defenses improve,” the former TAO employee said. “But it’s still entirely possible. There are many bugs to be found.”

But the intelligence community’s ability to keep those bugs secret for any amount of time continues to be questioned. In this latest leak, detailed NSA notes and work product were included in addition to technical details about the hacking tools — likely indicating deep-level access to TAO troves. “This should be on an NSA computer only,” Weaver told Foreign Policy.

The details the Shadow Brokers revealed are “scary,” the former cyberintelligence employee said, details that must be from internal emails, chat logs, or insider knowledge.

Only a handful of countries could have pilfered such sensitive material from the NSA remotely, the former TAO employee wrote, Russia and Israel the mostly likely among them.

“If it was an inside job like an operator [typically military] walking out with a thumb drive, then who knows,” the former TAO source wrote.

In recent years, the intelligence community has largely failed to detect insider threats and stem leaks from contractors. Thousands of private companies and their employees make up a massive percentage of the intelligence community’s workforce. As of a decade ago, about 70 percent of the intelligence community’s budget was spent on contracts, according to the Congressional Research Service.

NGA - the Literal Eye of Sauron - in St. Louis

antimedia  |  If you’re one of the countless Americans who was distraught to learn of the revelations made by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, the mere idea that there might be yet another agency out there — perhaps just as powerful and much more intrusive —  should give you goosebumps.

Foreign Policy reports that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA, is an obscure spy agency former President Barack Obama had a hard time wrapping his mind around back in 2009. But as the president grew fond of drone warfare, finding a way to launch wars without having to go through Congress for the proper authorization, the NGA also became more relevant. Now, President Donald Trump is expected to further explore the multibillion-dollar surveillance network.

Like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), the NGA is an intelligence agency, but it also serves as a combat support institution that functions under the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).

With headquarters bigger than the CIA’s, the building cost $1.4 billion to be completed in 2011. In 2016, the NGA bought an extra 99 acres in St. Louis, building additional structures that cost taxpayers an extra $1.75 billion.

Enjoying the extra budget Obama threw at them, the NGA became one of the most obscure intelligence agencies precisely because it relies on the work of drones.

As a body of government that has only one task — to analyze images and videos captured by drones in the Middle East — the NGA is mighty powerful. So why haven’t we heard of it before?

Wikileaks Vault 7 Marble Framework

wikileaks | Today, March 31st 2017, WikiLeaks releases Vault 7 "Marble" -- 676 source code files for the CIA's secret anti-forensic Marble Framework. Marble is used to hamper forensic investigators and anti-virus companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to the CIA.

Marble does this by hiding ("obfuscating") text fragments used in CIA malware from visual inspection. This is the digital equivallent of a specalized CIA tool to place covers over the english language text on U.S. produced weapons systems before giving them to insurgents secretly backed by the CIA.

Marble forms part of the CIA's anti-forensics approach and the CIA's Core Library of malware code. It is "[D]esigned to allow for flexible and easy-to-use obfuscation" as "string obfuscation algorithms (especially those that are unique) are often used to link malware to a specific developer or development shop."

The Marble source code also includes a deobfuscator to reverse CIA text obfuscation. Combined with the revealed obfuscation techniques, a pattern or signature emerges which can assist forensic investigators attribute previous hacking attacks and viruses to the CIA. Marble was in use at the CIA during 2016. It reached 1.0 in 2015.

The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi. This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion, --- but there are other possibilities, such as hiding fake error messages.

The Marble Framework is used for obfuscation only and does not contain any vulnerabilties or exploits by itself.

Ponzi-X is a Psychotronic Simulation and a PsyOp...,

theverge |  SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is backing a brain-computer interface venture called Neuralink, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company, which is still in the earliest stages of existence and has no public presence whatsoever, is centered on creating devices that can be implanted in the human brain, with the eventual purpose of helping human beings merge with software and keep pace with advancements in artificial intelligence. These enhancements could improve memory or allow for more direct interfacing with computing devices. 

Musk has hinted at the existence of Neuralink a few times over the last six months or so. More recently, Musk told a crowd in Dubai, “Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.” He added that “it's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output." On Twitter, Musk has responded to inquiring fans about his progress on a so-called “neural lace,” which is sci-fi shorthand for a brain-computer interface humans could use to improve themselves.

What IS the Current State of Psychotronic Research?

wired |  The Voice of God weapon — a device that projects voices into your head to make you think God is speaking to you — is the military’s equivalent of an urban myth.  Meaning, it’s mentioned periodically at defense workshops (ironically, I first heard about it at the same defense conference where I first met Noah), and typically someone whispers about it actually being used. Now Steven Corman, writing at the COMOPS journal, describes his own encounter with this urban myth:

At a government workshop some time ago I head someone describe a new tool that was described as the “voice of Allah.” This was said to be a device that would operate at a distance and would deliver a message that only a single person could hear. The story was that it was tested in a conflict situation in Iraq and pointed at one insurgent in a group, who whipped around looking in all directions, and began a heated conversation with his compatriots, who did not hear the message. At the time I greeted this story with some skepticism.

Is there any basis to this technology? Well, Holosonic Research Labs and American Technology Corporation both have versions of directed sound, which can allow a single person to hear a message that others around don’t hear. DARPA appears to be working on its own sonic projector. Intriguingly, Strategy Page reports that troops are using the Long Range Acoustic Device as a modified Voice of God weapon:

It appears that some of the troops in Iraq are using "spoken" (as opposed to "screeching") LRAD to mess with enemy fighters. Islamic terrorists tend to be superstitious and, of course, very religious. LRAD can put the "word of God" into their heads. If God, in the form of a voice that only you can hear, tells you to surrender, or run away, what are you gonna do?

And as Corman also notes, CNET recently wrote about an advertisement in New York for A&E’s TV show Paranormal State, which uses some of this technology. Beyond directed sound, it’s long been known that microwaves at certain frequencies can produce an auditory effect that sounds like it’s coming from within someone’s head (and there’s the nagging question of classified microwave work at Brooks Air Force Base, that the Air Force stubbornly refuses to talk about).

That brings us back to the Voice of God/Allah Weapon. Is it real or bogus? In one version — related to me by another defense reporter — it’s not just Allah’s voice — but an entire holographic image projected above (um, who decides what Allah looks like?). 

Does it exist? I’m not sure, but it’s funny that when you hear it brought up at defense conferences, no one ever asks the obvious question: does anybody think this thing will actually convince people God is speaking to them? I’m thinking, not.

It's Not Just the Eye of Sauron We're Worried About...,

wikipedia |  From January 2002 to August 2003, Poindexter served as the Director of the DARPA Information Awareness Office (IAO). The mission of the IAO was to imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components, and prototype closed-loop information systems. This aimed to counter asymmetric threats (most notably, terrorist threats) by achieving total information awareness and thus aiding preemption; national security warning; and, national security decision making

How U.S. Flooded the World with PsyOps

consortiumnews |  The Psychological Operations Committee took formal shape with a “secret” memo from Reagan’s National Security Advisor John Poindexter on July 31, 1986. Its first meeting was called on Sept. 2, 1986, with an agenda that focused on Central America and “How can other POC agencies support and complement DOD programs in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama.” The POC was also tasked with “Developing National PSYOPS Guidelines” for “formulating and implementing a national PSYOPS program.” (Underlining in original).

Raymond was named a co-chair of the POC along with CIA officer Vincent Cannistraro, who was then Deputy Director for Intelligence Programs on the NSC staff, according to a “secret” memo from Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Craig Alderman Jr. The memo also noted that future POC meetings would be briefed on psyops projects for the Philippines and Nicaragua, with the latter project codenamed “Niagara Falls.” The memo also references a “Project Touchstone,” but it is unclear where that psyops program was targeted.

Another “secret” memo dated Oct. 1, 1986, co-authored by Raymond, reported on the POC’s first meeting on Sept. 10, 1986, and noted that “The POC will, at each meeting, focus on an area of operations (e.g., Central America, Afghanistan, Philippines).”

The POC’s second meeting on Oct. 24, 1986, concentrated on the Philippines, according to a Nov. 4, 1986 memo also co-authored by Raymond. “The next step will be a tightly drafted outline for a PSYOPS Plan which we will send to that Embassy for its comment,” the memo said. The plan “largely focused on a range of civic actions supportive of the overall effort to overcome the insurgency,” an addendum noted. “There is considerable concern about the sensitivities of any type of a PSYOPS program given the political situation in the Philippines today.”

Earlier in 1986, the Philippines had undergone the so-called “People Power Revolution,” which drove longtime dictator Ferdinand Marcos into exile, and the Reagan administration, which belatedly pulled its support from Marcos, was trying to stabilize the political situation to prevent more populist elements from gaining the upper hand.

But the Reagan administration’s primary attention continued to go back to Central America, including “Project Niagara Falls,” the psyops program aimed at Nicaragua. A “secret” Pentagon memo from Deputy Under Secretary Alderman on Nov. 20, 1986, outlined the work of the 4^th Psychological Operations Group on this psyops plan “to help bring about democratization of Nicaragua,” by which the Reagan administration meant a “regime change.” The precise details of “Project Niagara Falls” were not disclosed in the declassified documents but the choice of codename suggested a cascade of psyops.

Other documents from Raymond’s NSC file shed light on who other key operatives in the psyops and propaganda programs were. For instance, in undated notes on efforts to influence the Socialist International, including securing support for U.S. foreign policies from Socialist and Social Democratic parties in Europe, Raymond cited the efforts of “Ledeen, Gershman,” a reference to neoconservative operative Michael Ledeen and Carl Gershman, another neocon who has served as president of the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), from 1983 to the present. (Underlining in original.)

Although NED is technically independent of the U.S. government, it receives the bulk of its funding (now about $100 million a year) from Congress. Documents from the Reagan archives also make clear that NED was organized as a way to replace some of the CIA’s political and propaganda covert operations, which had fallen into disrepute in the 1970s. Earlier released documents from Raymond’s file show CIA Director William Casey pushing for NED’s creation and Raymond, Casey’s handpicked man on the NSC, giving frequent advice and direction to Gershman. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “CIA’s Hidden Hand in ‘Democracy’ Groups.”]

Another figure in Raymond’s constellation of propaganda assets was media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who was viewed as both a key political ally of President Reagan and a valuable source of funding for private groups that were coordinating with White House propaganda operations. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Rupert Murdoch: Propaganda Recruit.”]

Errbody and They Cousin a Russian Agent Doing Putin's Bidding...,

theverge |  As part of a probe into Russian influence on the 2016 election, an FBI-led investigation is seeking more information on social media bots that spammed “millions” of pro-Trump posts from far-right news organizations, according to a report published this week by McClatchy.

The bots sent out stories from controversial conservative sources such as Breitbart and Infowars, as well as the Russia-backed outlet RT. According to McClatchy, many of the stories contained false or misleading information. As part of the effort, which included Facebook and Twitter posts, the bots also shared WikiLeaks links to stolen DNC and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta emails that ended up damaging the Democratic nominee’s campaign. 

The investigation is also looking into what role the news sites themselves may have played in the social media campaign, although as McClatchy notes, the bots could well have been pushing the stories without the involvement of the sites themselves. 

Earlier this year, the US intelligence community released a report on Russia’s influence on the 2016 election that alluded to several similar tactics, including the use of Russian trolls for spreading propaganda. Earlier this week, FBI director James Comey confirmed that the agency was investigating whether members of the Trump campaign had any coordination with Russian operatives during the election.

According to McClatchy, the investigation into bots is still in its early stages.

Deep State Diving in Deep DooDoo Without Its Shit-Suit Properly Sealed

oftwominds |  I highly recommend reading Wikileak's summary of Vault 7: Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed.

We now know that the CIA maintained a special program (UMBRAGE) to mimic Russia-based hackers and create false trails back to fictitious "Russian hackers." A number of highly experienced analysts who reviewed the supposed "Russian hacks" had suggested the "evidence" smelled of false trails-- not just bread crumbs, but bread crumbs heavy-handedly stenciled "this is Russian malware."

The body count from Vault 7 has not yet been tallied, but it wouldn't surprise me if former President Obama and his team eventually end up as political casualties. Non-partisan observers are noting all this over-reach occurred on Obama's watch, and it hasn't gone unnoticed that one of Obama's last executive orders stripped away the last shreds of oversight of what could be "shared" (or invented) between the Security Agencies.

Indeed, the entire leadership of the Democratic Party seems to have placed all their chips on the increasingly unviable claim that the CIA is the squeaky clean defender of America.

Vault 7 is not just political theater--it highlights the core questions facing the nation: what is left to defend if civil liberties and democratically elected oversight have been reduced to Potemkin-village travesties?

If there are no limits on CIA powers and surveillance, then what is left of civil liberties and democracy? Answer: nothing.

The battle raging in the Deep State isn't just a bureaucratic battle--it's a war for the soul, identity and direction of the nation. Citizens who define America's interests as civil liberties and democracy should be deeply troubled by the Establishment's surrender of these in favor of a National Security State with essentially no limits.

Americans tasked with defending America's "interests" globally should be asking if a CIA/NSA et al. with unlimited power is detrimental to America's soft and hard power globally, and toxic to its influence.

The answer is obvious: a CIA with unlimited power and the backing of a corrupt Establishment and media is more than detrimental to America's soft and hard power globally--it is disastrous and potentially fatal to America's interests, standing and influence.

Intelligence Agencies DID Spy on Trump

washingtonsblog |  Washington’s Blog asked the highest-level NSA whistleblower in history – Bill Binney – whether he thought Trump had been bugged.

Binney is the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees.

He was a 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker.

Binney also mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”).

Binney told Washington’s Blog:

NSA has all the data through the Upstream programs (Fairview/Stormbrew/Blarney)  [background] and backed up by second and some third party country collection.

Plus the FBI and CIA plus others, as of the last month of the Obama administration, have direct access to all the NSA collection (metadata and content on phones,email and banking/credit cards etc.) with no attempt at oversight by anybody [background]. This is all done under Executive Order 12333 [the order which allows unlimited spying no matter what intelligence officials claim] ….
FBI would only ask for a warrant if they wanted to be able to take it into court at some point given they have something meaningful as evidence. This is clearly true given the fact the President Trump’s phone conversations with other country leaders were leaked to the mainstream media.

In other words, Binney is saying that Trumps phones were bugged by the NSA without a warrant – remember, top NSA whistleblowers have previously explained that the NSA is spying on virtually all of the digital communications of Americans. – and the NSA shared the raw data with the CIA, FBI and other agencies.

If the FBI obtained a warrant to tap Trump’s phone, it was a “parallel construction” to “launder” improperly-gained evidence through acceptable channels.

Music as a Means of Social Control

PenelopeGouk |  Ancient models: Plato and Aristotle

Anyone thinking about music and social control in the early modern period would tend to look for precedents in antiquity, the most significant authors in this regard being Plato and Aristotle. The two crucial texts by Plato are his Republic and the Laws, both of which are concerned with the nature of the best form of political organisation and the proper kind of education for individuals that lead to a stable and harmonious community.

Education of the republic's citizens includes early training in both gymnastics and mousike, which Andrew Barker defines as 'primarily an exposure to poetry and to the music that is its key vehicle.' (For the rest of this discussion I will simply refer to 'music' but will be using it in the broader sense of poetry set to musical accompaniment.) The crucial point is that within Plato's ideal society the kinds of 'music' that are performed must be firmly controlled by the law givers, the argument being that freedom of choice in music and novelty in its forms will inevitably lead to corruption and a breakdown of society. 

Plato's distrust of musical innovation is made concrete in his Laws where he describes what he thinks actually happened once in Greek society, namely that the masses had the effrontery to suppose they were capable of judging music themselves, the result being that 'from a starting point in music, everyone came to believe in their own wisdom about everything, and to reject the law, and liberty followed immediately'. (To Plato liberty is anathema since some people have much greater understanding and knowledge than others.) 

This close association between the laws of music and laws of the state exists because according to Plato music imitates character, and has a direct effect on the soul which itself is a harmonia, the consequence being that bad music results in bad citizens. To achieve a good state some form of regulation must take place, the assumption being that if the right musical rules are correctly followed this will result in citizens of good character. It is fascinating to discover that Plato looks to Egypt with approval for its drastic control of music in society, claiming that its forms had remained unchanged for ten thousand years because of strict regulation that 'dedicated all dancing and all melodies to religion'. To prescribe melodies that possessed a 'natural correctness' he thinks 'would be a task for a god, or a godlike man, just as in Egypt they say that the melodies that have been preserved for this great period of time were the compositions of Isis.' (In fact as we shall see there were similar arguments made for the divine origins of sacred music in the Hebrew tradition.) 

Perhaps thinking himself to be a 'godlike man', Plato lays down a series of strict rules governing musical composition and performance, a prescription that if correctly followed would ensure the virtue of citizens and the stability of the state, as well as the banishment of most professional musicians from society. First, Plato wants to limit the kind of poetry that is set to music at all because songs have such a direct and powerful effect on people's morals. Thus any poems that portray wickedness, immorality, mourning or weakness of any kind must be banned, leaving only music that encourages good and courageous behaviour among citizens. The next thing to be curtailed is the range of musical styles allowed in the city, which Plato would confine to the Dorian and the Phrygian 'harmoniai', a technical term for organisations of musical pitch that for the purposes of this paper need not be discussed in any more detail. Between them these two 'harmoniai' appropriately 'imitate the sounds of the self-restrained and the brave man, each of them both in good fortune and bad.' Thirdly, as well as controlling the words to be sung and the manner in which they are performed, Plato would also regulate the kinds of instrument used for accompaniment, the two most important being the lyra and the kithara. Those that are forbidden include the aulos as well as a range of multi-stringed instruments capable of playing in a variety of different modes. Finally, Plato is emphatic in stating that the metrical foot and the melody must follow the words properly for the right effect to be achieved, rather than the other way around. 

Of course these rules are intrinsically interesting, since they tell us about what Plato thought was wrong with music of his own time. However, for my purposes they are also interesting because they seem to have had a discernable influence on would-be reformers of music and society in the early modern period (that is, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries) which I will come to further on in my paper.

Whatever Happened with the Awan Brothers?

frontpagemag |  Last year, eight members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued a demand that their staffers be granted access to top secret classified information.

The signatories to the letter were Andre Carson, Luis Guiterez, Jim Himes, Terri Sewell, Jackie Speier, Mike Quigley, Eric Swalwell and Patrick Murphy. All the signatories were Democrats. Some had a history of attempting to undermine national security.

Two of them have been linked to an emerging security breach.

The office of Andre Carson, the second Muslim in Congress, had employed Imran Awan. As did the offices of Jackie Speier and Debbie Wasserman Schultz; to whom the letter had been addressed.

Imran Awan and his two brothers, Jamal and Abid, are at the center of an investigation that deals with, among other things, allegations of illegal access.  They have been barred from the House of Representatives network.

A member of Congress expressed concern that, “they may have stolen data from us.”

All three of the Pakistani brothers had been employed by Democrats. The offices that employed them included HPSCI minority members Speier, Carson and Joaquín Castro. Congressman Castro, who also sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, utilized the services of Jamal Moiz Awan. Speier and Carson’s offices utilized Imran Awan.

Abid A. Awan was employed by Lois Frankel and Ted Lieu: members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Also on the committee is Castro. As is Robin Kelly whose office employed Jamal Awan.  Lieu also sits on the subcommittees on National Security and Information Technology of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Tammy Duckworth’s office had also employed Abid. Before Duckworth successfully played on the sympathy of voters to become Senator Tammy Duckworth, she had been on the Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces of the Armed Services Committee.

Gwen Graham, who had also been on the Armed Services Committee and on the Tactical Air and Land Forces subcommittee, had employed Jamal Awan. Jamal was also employed by Cedric Richmond’s office. Richmond sits on the Committee on Homeland Security and on its Terrorism and Cybersecurity subcommittee. He is a ranking member of the latter subcommittee. Also employing Jamal was Mark Takano of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Imran had worked for the office of John Sarbanes who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee that oversees, among other things, the nuclear industry. Other members of the Committee employing the brothers included Yvette Clarke, who also sits on the Bipartisan Encryption Working Group, Diana DeGette, Dave Loebsack and Tony Cardenas.

But finally there’s Andre Carson.