Category Archives: Journal

Old “King Code” – A Note on The Long War for Cybercrimefighters

09 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Journal

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Start with the good guys’ white hats —

http://surveillance.rsf.org/en/hacking-team/ – n.d.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/07/hacking-team-leaks-reveal-spyware-industrys-growth — 7/8/2015.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/07/08/hacking-team-iphone-android-malware/ – “Hacking Team’s $175,000 Apple Store And Google Play Surveillance Apps Flirt With Illegality” – 7/8/2015.

And let’s got on to the bad guys’ black hats (who could be the same guys or white-hat guys who have had their ideas / methods / products / processes stolen) —

According to the documents, 400GB of which have been published, Hacking Team has also been working with numerous repressive governments – something it has previously explicitly denied doing. It has not been possible to independently verify the veracity of the documents.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/06/hacking-team-hacked-firm-sold-spying-tools-to-repressive-regimes-documents-claim — 7/6/2015.

As with other tools, like axes and guns, software has itself has neither consciousness nor conscience.  It doesn’t know who’s using it or how or for what noble or ignoble purpose, and the sawing will go this way: “Software doesn’t destroy, shield, or steal digital assets: programmers and end-users do.”

And now return to the good guys — so I freely presume the avatars of the lawful to be themselves lawful — and another electronic-communicating aspect of their problem with the bad guys of the certifiable kind:

The director of the FBI has warned that criminals and terrorists will be able to talk ‘with impunity’ if encryption goes too far.

James Comey said that anti-surveillance measures being deployed by the likes of Apple and Google will ‘inexorably affect my ability to do that job’ if they continue to expand.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3152226/Is-web-security-putting-DANGER-Criminals-terrorists-communicate-impunity-encryption-sophisticated-FBI-warns.html#ixzz3fP58ZMC5 – 7/7/2015.

Related: FBI – Cybercrime Page: “We are building our lives around our wired and wireless networks. The question is, are we ready to work together to defend them?”

  • What is being hidden from whom?
  • What would be exploited by whom were it not kept safe?
  • Where is the war?

One of my distant correspondents noted of a small community project beneath his wing that he dared not display too much of physical improvements online for there were those in his village that might want a cut just because.

Those guys.

Wiseguys.

Greedy, jealous, suspicious.

Thugs.

Scale it up:

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 – 11/11/2013.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-cables-russia-mafia-kleptocracy – 12/1/2010.

Or scale it back down:

On May 1, 2014, a grand jury in the Western District of Pennsylvania indicted five members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for 31 criminal counts, including: conspiring to commit computer fraud; accessing a computer without authorization for the purpose of commercial advantage and private financial gain; damaging computers through the transmission of code and commands; aggravated identity theft; economic espionage; and theft of trade secrets.

First paragraph description of one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Cybercriminals (as viewed in July 2015).

It appears that not so many decades ago, technologists went to work on eliminating space as an impediment to forming basic social relationships while migrating the digitally empowered away from paper-based banking, gasoline-enabled shopping, and family-room television: mission accomplished.

In the process of eliminating so much work while producing incalculable savings, the same have done away with troves of evidence of physical bother: who needs cash, or even a courier, when numbers shuttled between computers move wealth?

Who needs a theater and ticket counter when the talented — whatever the talent — may put on a show, flash mob or flash bang, with the distribution of a signal from a cell phone?

What army is needed where one gunman — recruited online, minimally “handled” — can walk a weapon into some space and inside of a few minutes commit mass murder, damage a state’s tourist industry, or destroy a community’s sense of security in relation to racial or religious harmony?

For the west and geopolitical space integrating with the western mind (of the lawful), all of the traffic, however massive, ultimately educates, informs, or entertains while facilitating either comparatively healthy private and social behavior or behavior not yet codified.

A few of quite another mind — feudal, malignantly narcissistic, plainly malign by normative standards — diverge to disagree in expression and action.

Given free expression (short of direct conspiracy or incitement to crime), conflict between the lawful and the lawless has now long been moved to an electronic boundary between publically empowered and trusted investigators and privately enfranchised criminals, and along that boundary on both sides, software — code is king wherever it “wins” and for as long as it works — has become shield and sword.

Those of us who spend a fair part of our day online reading, writing, shopping, and watching YouTube videos, are going to be witness to and monitors of this challenge to the lawful control of information for some time to come.

Related on BackChannels: “FTAC — On the Opposition of the Lawless to the Influence of Israel” (June 19, 2015).

Related in the News: Reuters.  “FBI says thwarted Islamic State-inspired attacks on July 4.”  July 9, 2015.

Update – Reference – July 10, 2015

Levine, Mike and Jack Date.  “22 Million Affected by OPM Hack, Officials Say.”  ABC News, July 9, 2015.

Waddell, Kaveh and Dustin Volz.  “OPM Announces More Than 21 Million Affected by Second Data Breach.”  National Journal, June 9, 2015.

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FTAC – Twitter Choice

08 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Journal, Middle East, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Yemen

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Following, for a while. As with so many others incapable of rejecting a sect (in its entirety) within a religion of which one is not a part and over a conflict that is distant and — and I will assign blame to Khamenei and others of feudal mind and ambition — archaic, I don’t want to weigh on the scales. I’ve found the same divide in Shiite and other circles where claim is made about being “the Jews of islam” (and persecuted by Sunni Muslims). Nonetheless, one understands: where this kind of conflict is hot — the bullets are flying and the bombs are going off and lives are being ended, shattered, or threatened in the most direct ways — polarization is as unavoidable as it is destructive and seemingly impossible to repair.

The place where the bullets are flying: Yemen.

The drift of sympathy: against the Houthis as representative of Ayatollah Khamenei’s War by Proxy that in turn defends feudal absolutism and seeks to expand the regime’s power against Sunni interests.

In another and now increasingly distant age — even 25 or 50 years ago may now seem like centuries — the Yemeni part of the Islamic Small Wars would been played as a clipping in the back of the “A” section of the newspapers, a remote tribal war to be overlooked by western indifference.

Those days are gone.

Our Facebook friends are either there or have family and friends who are close to live fire — not only in Yemen but everywhere being razed and ruined by these forces — and we’re watching without recourse to choosing a good and bad side except against the “al-Qaeda Typicals” and the “Hezbollah Virus”, i.e., operations with military wings so awful that the good of the planet would seek to shut down regardless of other disagreements stemming from nominal affiliations and associated cultural, political, and religious self-concept.

Instead, some of us seem to be standing by friends on both sides and hoping the theme of “The Medieval vs The Modern” will catch on before the medieval world, which some are working hard to sustain, swallows the modern.  That outcome may not be possible across continents, but it seems to be proving possible in both the Middle East and Eastern Europe (with Putin-Khamenei as the hub from which so much chaos, destruction, and political confusion emanate).

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FTAC – On Global Conflict’s Edge

19 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Journal, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

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https://www.facebook.com/pages/Yuri-Bezmenov/46501554141 Sign on. 🙂 Not quite everyone’s on Facebook, especially if they’re wanted (by INTERPOL) or popular in some heavy (as in the 1960’s “heavy, dude”) way, in which case they may be found at their university or think-tank address.

What’s interesting here, perhaps, is watching this edge in conflict surface, a conflict between the criminally deluded and utterly dishonest and the victims and targets of that form in political delusion and dishonesty.

Related: Yuri Bezmenov – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; (1) Yuri Bezmenov (Facebook).

Video one-of-nine about control of political language:

Soviet Subversion of the Free World Press 1/9 – YouTube – 1/5/2009.

From the above-cited personality page for Yuri Bezmenov:

Yuri Alexandrovitch Bezmenov (1939 – 1993) is a former KGB propagandist who was assigned to New Dehli, India, defected to the West in 1970, and was interviewed by Edward Griffin in 1985. Bezmenov explains his background, some of his training, and exactly how Soviet propaganda is spread in other countries in order to subvert their teachers, politicians, and other policy makers to a mindset receptive to the Soviet ideology.

* * *

Not so oddly, I spent the morning watching Gene Hackman and Will Smith in Enemy of the State. Then after brunch this cold rainy day turned to Facebook where I had a message waiting from a correspondent in South America noting the Far Out Left’s desire to destroy Israel. My response to that:

Far Left: thieves.

I’m a liberal socialist.  Correa and I would probably understand one another.

These guys of the Far Out Left seem descended from the 1970s. Time Warped. Everyone’s a Carlos wannabee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_the_Jackal

If he / they didn’t have a convenient political lingo, he / they would be — and have proven so — dumb criminals.

The world faces stark choices as regards the political kleptocrats (sometimes, when I’m feeling jazzy, I call them “kleptocats!”) we have come to know and sometimes love — for being too easily charmed — as dictators, but when you watch what they do to constitutions, courts, and laws, then to men — old ones too, and women and children — in their unbridled ambition for absolute control over others, you know that the war “over there”, or perhaps the one you’re in, is no longer a lonely war but rather a war — sub-state, transnational, global — neither contained nor isolated.

* * *

Often for revolutionaries there are two wars: one rages outside of the person, the other rages within.

* * *

My South American correspondent acknowledged (and here I quote with light editing for style), “many studied in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union with scholarships.”

Such would be at least in their 40s — it has been more than 22 years — and in the prime of their programming.

Others, say the first to rifle through abandoned STASI offices in defunct East Germany, may be in the prime of their counter-programming program, and I should think them today an unknown quantity in the former Soviet empire.  Perhaps they too will surface in the coming days, weeks, and months.

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Odds ‘N’ Ends 130916-1422ET

16 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in Journal, Library

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In Washington, D.C. — WASHINGTON: As many as 3 gunmen attack Navy Yard, 6 dead – Politics Wires – MiamiHerald.com

From Cairo — Tarek and John are on hunger strike | Justin Podur — Two Canadians detained by Egypt’s interim government (ever the optimist, I am putting off the day when I may be forced by time to call it a “ruling junta”) have gone on a hunger strike.

Rather than cover the second-hand news for the rest of the afternoon (unless someone really wants me chatyping and doing the social network pass-along furiously (and offers sponsorship to do it), I’m inclined to continue reading Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin: Ben Judah: 9780300181210: Amazon.com: Books.  As the numbers on this blog climb, I feel it incumbent upon myself to read as if in the ivory tower — with concentration and patience enough to better see what I feel I have been seeing.

Related: Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin by Ben Judah – review | Books | The Guardian 6/27/2013.  The author, Luke Harding, has had a young career as a Kremlinologist and has gotten a couple of books out of it: Expelled: A Journalist’s Descent into the Russian Mafia State, which is due here quite soon, and Mafia State: How one reporter became the enemy of the brutal new Russia.

Never mind autocrats: any conflict involving integrity and power also involves a lot of thinking about the management of surface, sub-surface, and compartmented information.  Neither countries nor persons may wish to “let it all hang out” (God forbid) but the development beyond copyright, patent, and basic proprietary business concerns of extended secrets-keeping societies bodes ill for humanity.  The dignity of man, if there is to be any, demands to know the substance of true states of affairs.

The cuckoo and two peacocks, one in the brig, another in Ecuador, the last in Russia may have been a bit screwed up about the relationship between their empowerment, their observation, and their views, but taken together and with a continuously emerging global intelligentsia, the idea that mankind will live like a happy idiot in a cave managed and fought over by supertechnologists has a particularly enslaved and hideous aspect to it.

Related and also cued around this place: Brazil and 12 Monkeys.

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A Quiet 9/11 for BackChannels

11 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by in Journal, Library

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Weather: mid-Atlantic, late summer, sunny and hot.

Reading: Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin: Ben Judah: 9780300181210: Amazon.com: Books

Seen on Facebook Before 8:30 a.m.

http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/i-believe-a-911-tribute 9/11/2013

9/11: America’s Unfinished Business – Michelle Malkin – Page 1 9/11/2013

2 Millions Bikers to DC (Facebook Page)

Around the Web

CNN.com – September 11 Memorial

Explosion damages Libya’s Foreign Ministry on anniversary of 9/11 attack on U.S. Consulate – NY Daily News

Opinion: Jihadist terrorism in America since 9/11 – CNN.com

12 years later, horrors of 9/11 shaping American opinion on Syria, Middle East – Indian Express 9/11/2013

Honor September 11th: National Day of Service and Remembrance | The White House 9/11/2013

Column: 10 changes since 9/11 : Opinion 9/11/2013

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You can surf the web too?

How about that!

And that’s good reason for me to take it easy on the chatyping all around — blogs, correspondence, Facebook — and immerse in a good book.

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BackChannels – New Feature – Frequently Cited or Recommended Reading

11 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by in Journal

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We’ll see how the new section crowds up, but it will be a relief to me to have one page to which to link when I mention, say, Dan Everett and why he matters in the realm of “conflict, culture, language, and psychology.”

Also added this morning:

“Lee Smith’s Comment on ‘Media Warfare” in the Middle East”

“On Being a War Journalist — Francesca Borri in Syria – 7/1/2013”

I also got the content of “Coins and Terms” on to separate pages, the better to introduce more of the same, but different.

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Abbas Zaidi’s Wicked Humor and Magical Realism

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Books, Journal, Library

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Zaidi, Abbas.  Two And A Half Words And Other Stories.  Gowanus Books, 2012.

What might it like to live in an atmosphere rife with bigotry, fear, and hypocrisy accompanied by the author’s and reader’s own cackling laughter?

Slip your mind into Abbas Zaidi’s slim and thoroughly delightful, also wondrously transgressive, first volume of short stories inspired by the south Asian Muslim experience and find out.

Truly, Zaidi’s Two And A Half Words And Other Stories comes off a wickedly good trip from the first mention of “Blessed Companions of the Prophet Street” (“The Shadows”) to the pitch perfect near ending wrap-up, “On that rainy evening, the four minarets of the Shahi Mosque were standing tall in the distance surrounded by the dimly-lit alleys where the ladies of the night, their pimps, and customers were getting ready for business.  I lit a cigarette . . . .”  (“Passions of Khalifa Hakeem”).

From the title story of the collection:

What I remember them saying was that the jhalli kuri in Number 3 had lost her mind after remaining silent and refusing to eat for days.  These words had no meaning for me.  But one night I woke up screaming.  I dreamed that the jhalli kuri was standing over me.

A “mad girl”, a troubled apartment, mysteries . . . .

As this blog swims around in the area of language and politics, I may mention that the volume is not bereft of the latter but for western readers may be uncomfortably startling in its depictions.  At one point, for example, a general notes, “if the Americans want to isolate Iran, courting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda is not a bad idea” and a reporter similarly struck with grand conspiracy theorizing chimes back, “Don’t be surprised if one day a Taliban squad is found blowing up bridges in Beijing in the name of Islam but actually serving American . . . .”

Wealth may be needed to preserve the conditions in which the literary experience of the 19th Century thrived, either that or equal tolerance for impoverishment, for even reading through the dozen expertly crafted short stories contained in Zaidi’s first collection requires time away from the web and time unencumbered by other concerns — call the proper condition “leisured time”: the experience of such work becomes that of a thin but notable and latent powerful new intelligentsia.  For that set — and if you’re here, I hope you’re a part of it — such stories provide both a critique of and a map to the spirit of the world in which the author has lived.

We may never have a perfect world — God forbid it — but in Abbas Zaidi, a part of it may have given the gift of a perfect and perfectly scathing reflector and entertainer.