Tag Archives: NSA

CAIR, Spencer, Narcissism, Universalism

28 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Political Spychology, Psychology

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It is more likely that the NSA has placed everyone under surveillance in order to avoid singling out the Muslim community, so as to avoid appearing “Islamophobic.”

Hamas-linked CAIR staff attorney: Spying and surveillance “disproportionately affecting the Muslim community” : Jihad Watch – 1/27/2014.

In the above cited article, Robert Spencer catalogs criminals, crimes, and attempted crimes, all connected to Islamic Jihad, and he goes on to document incendiary speech by Muslim notables.

Related and highly recommended: The Threat from Within: What Is the Scope of Homegrown Terrorism? – 7/1/2012.  Posted by the ABA Journal, the abstract at the top read, “Gordon Lederman, chief counsel for national security and investigations of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Kate Martin, director of the nonprofit Center for National Security Studies, ponder how we should weigh security against liberty.

Wikipedia’s brief and nonpartisan historic overview of terrorism in the United States: Terrorism in the United States – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

We’ve a long way to go as regards the self-destructive “specialness” in play within at least a part of Islam’s advocacy community in the U.S., not to mention elsewhere militant Islamist organizations — the al-Qaeda affiliates — active in the fields of the Islamic Small Wars from Afghanistan to Somalia, but in the American way, principles developed to address such conflict have to be conceived for universal applicability.

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As an aside, sometimes in unrelated conversation, the matter of having to deal with an aggressive, evil, and large force in life, say, for example, a bullying father or an abusive husband or a sadistic employer, and so on, comes up, and what I suggest goes like this: to the Jew, the Nazi is a problem; however, the character of the Nazi is not the Jew’s problem — it’s the Nazi’s problem.

For Nazi, substitute “asshole”, “bully”, “dictator”, and so on.

What the overbearing asshole (bully, dictator, malignant narcissist) flying under the Jolly Rodger of his kind has for a problem is himself as reinforced and made inescapable by his own bombast accompanied or followed by criminal or malicious and irretrievable, and irreversible action.  Such personalities talk themselves, their admirers, and their cronies into an evil corner, and there they live with their bigotry, contempt, and crimes, including war crimes for those who come to own and drive their own states, until other forces, sadly including natural death, come to dispossess them.

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Quantum, No Solace

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics

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The latest leak from former-NSA-contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, published by The New York Times on Tuesday, revealed that the National Security Agency has been using old-school technology to spy on offline computers.

How The NSA Spies On Offline Computers – NSA Quantum Program Leaked: Edward Snowden Reveals How US Government Spies On Offline Computers – 1/15/2014.

The article contains the link to The New York Times first story.

In the James Bond flick “Skyfall” — I wish it had been “Quantum of Solace” for effect here — the attack on the “green and pleasant land” is remarked as “coming from the shadows” and much by way of extraordinary Internet accessing technologies.  It appears in the real political state-of-affairs that the ability to disrupt or invade computer networks is coming not from the shadows so much as the sun itself: America’s great zoom zoom high-tech military-industrial complex.

One greets this information with perhaps mixed feelings: I’m glad the leadership in the field is on my side!  Wait a minute: what is the leadership in the field doing on my side?

🙂

We all know the Cynic’s Golden Rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules”.

Let the grin disappear from the face as one contemplates the wealth and attendant powers now associated with China (host today of the world’s largest bank, to which we Americans are doubtlessly deeply indebted), master investor, principal, and skimmer Ayatollah Khamenei, and the focused and shrewd player V. Putin with the greatest potential pirate’s lair ever — if that’s what he wants, who knows? — going up in Marbella, a fine location just east of Gibraltar and north of whatever comes by sea from north Africa.

And down to the essence as regards “Truth!  Justice! And the American Way!“: our world is or has become a startlingly and overwhelmingly amoral place, and the only morality in great common force would seem to be the conscience and power of money — and you know what that’s like.

😦

Perhaps it’s that world in which America’s and NATO’s defense and intelligence systems struggle.

We of the west and of Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian intellectual inheritance believe we know the difference between right and wrong and strive to hew to what is right while our enemies in junta and mobs and murderous roving bands have loosed themselves from all of that.

I believe we have the right belief.

Still, the breadth and potency of so many natural political enemies seems to me astounding and daunting.

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NSA Spying Includes Wireless Transmitters To Get Data Off ‘Air Gapped’ Computers | Techdirt – 1/15/2014.

NSA able to target offline computers using radio-waves for surveillance, cyber-attacks — RT USA – 1/16/2014.

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FNS – NSA Senior Executives’ Memo to Obama

08 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Fast News Share, Political Spychology, Politics

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The sadder reality, Mr. President, is that NSA itself had enough information to prevent 9/11, but chose to sit on it rather than share it with the FBI or CIA. We know; we were there. We were witness to the many bureaucratic indignities that made NSA at least as culpable for pre-9/11 failures as are other U.S. intelligence agencies.

NSA Insiders Reveal What Went Wrong | Consortiumnews – 1/7/2014.

Unless and until better informed, I’m inclined to regard the source of this pass-along, Consortium News, as a struggling but credible and well grounded organization steeped in investigative journalism in Washington, D.C.

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The world was new in 2006 when I began reading the English-language editions of foreign newspapers.

Back then, I wanted to excoriate Greenpeace for failing to address clean-up of the littoral along the Somali coast.  🙂  Little did I know what lay in store by way of becoming caught in the whirlpool of conflict-related news that funnels down to the Islamic Small Wars.

The next stop: Pakistan, where I lingered awhile, virtually.

On the tour in which intellectual adventure and life collide, and another powerful magnet from which no Jew can or should escape: Israel, still virtually, and the middle east conflict.

These days, the majors have caught up with bloggers and news aggregation in general, but along the way some things may have failed to become a part of the the common knowledge base of the field of foreign correspondents who, after all, report the news generally more than analyze events along specialized lines.  Language and political psychology will remain a strong part of the interest here, would that I too could fund scholarship in the area, and, more recently, “political spychology” has become of interest as our “digital communicating” lends itself to computer-driven collection and analysis projects — see, for example, the Defense Advances Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) program description for “Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT)”.

Technology may help us leave worlds behind, and we call that progress, but it may also bring us to worlds in which we may not wish to live and caution — and reportage — may be warranted in areas that may pit engineering prowess and vision against the humanity of humanity and the values we assign to the experience of a preferred natural humanity.

For the romantic, “electronic data processing” has been a nightmare from the first spinning magnetic paint disks and shuffling 80-column card deck (and fondly I recall being among the last to run such a database through a Univac at the University of Maryland); however, Rousseau’s “noble savage” hasn’t borne out well in reality: there’s nothing noble about throwing bakers into their own ovens as appears to have happened in Syria last month.

This blog may see fewer than 5,000 hits annually (as it does, so far), but it’s reach remains pretty good (it got look-sees from more than 100 nations in 2013), and it would seem there’s room on the margins of the news business for responsible reportage about wonky subjects and second looks at topics combed over by Big Media.

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I’ve listed Consortium News in the blog roll and may be watching it a bit.

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FNS – NSA and the Missing Telcos and Other News in Political Spychology

21 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by in Fast News Share, Free Speech, Journalism, Political Spychology

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This broad and unprecedented alliance, united to demand more transparency and accountability around the NSA’s access to our personal data, stood behind me as I delivered my testimony. But do you know who didn’t have my back? Who hasn’t stepped up to support surveillance transparency, much less surveillance reform? Who, despite—or because of—being as deeply involved as anyone can be in the NSA’s dragnet, has had nothing to say other than “no comment”?

The telcos.

The Weekly Wonk | Liberal Brain Freeze & Security Narcissists – 11/21/2013.

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Also in the news this morning:

The crisis — triggered by reports that Australian spies tried to tap the phones of the Indonesian president, his wife and ministers — has pushed ties between Jakarta and Canberra to their lowest level since Australia sent troops to restore order in East Timor in 1999.

Jakarta has recalled its ambassador from Canberra and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono Wednesday ordered cooperation suspended in several areas, including on people-smuggling, military exercises and sharing intelligence.

Indonesia halts Australia drills as protesters call for ‘war’ – The West Australian – 11/21/2013.

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It is one thing for former politicians such as Alexander Downer to turn on the ”left-wing” Guardian for ”shamelessly dribbl[ing] out this material to maximise the pain and embarrassment to the Western alliance”.

It is another for journalists, particularly ones who are vociferous champions of a free press, to fall into line.

Spies, journalists and inconvenient truths – 11/21/2013.

Related

The Daily Dot – How the NSA ranks its international spying partners – 11/5/2013.

ECHELON – “ECHELON is a term associated with a global network of computers that automatically search through millions of intercepted messages for pre-programmed keywords or fax, telex and e-mail addresses. Every word of every message in the frequencies and channels selected at a station is automatically searched” (Federation of American Scientists).

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Edward Snowden Tells on Big Brother

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Poitras, Laura and Glenn Greenwald.  “NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things’.”  Video.  The Guardian, June 9, 2013.

Expect Edward Snowden’s breach of his NSA nondisclosure agreement to burn its way around the world.

What is freedom if it is not the ownership of one’s communications with assumed privacy?

What is security if it is not the state’s ability to operate “listening posts” to detect malice against those it has been charged to defend?

I have said of the Islamic Small Wars, and as much may be said of all organized crime and political terror, that they are wars for poets and detectives, the former because 1) what takes place in the mind takes place in language, and 2) what takes place in real space involves the most private forms of collusion and operational communication.

The recapitulation of international web traffic that starts at the Internet’s trunk lines, the robotic sifting for strings and patterns or known quantities, one might call them .  . . I’m not sure that bothers me so much.

I am more concerned when the FBI ignores or overrides a valid and reliable Russian intelligence tip-off and Boston marathoners and their families and friends lose their lives or legs: what motivated that negligence before the fact?

I’m also annoyed a little bit about the web bots watching my online shopping and pressing me to buy whatever I’ve browsed on every other Facebook or online news page.

In the end, if we don’t like so much electronic snooping, we can, I suppose, resume living locally and hope the bar, the coffee shop, the barber’s chair, and the local park are not infested with bugs that never bite but only listen.

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