Fake News Fake Out

Fake News Fake Out

And the Ohio State (not) shooter

Conspiracy Theorist

By Mark Luedtke

Publication date: 121316

An attacker at Ohio State recently hospitalized eleven people. I wish the victims well. None have died, thank goodness. I’m sure you read the story, but it’s informative to recall every mainstream media outlet reported the term active shooter in its headline. The only problem was the attacker didn’t use a gun. He used a car and knife.

Media apologists will note Ohio State used the term active shooter in its warning, but that misses the point. The tail doesn’t wag the dog. Ohio State used the wrong term because the media has been banging the drums for gun control for decades. The only bad people on campus the media wants us to know about are attackers who use guns. We have no term that includes attackers who don’t use guns. The media doesn’t want us to know they exist because it undermines their push for gun control. If Ohio State had reported an active knifer on campus, the media would have buried the story. As it was, the mis-reporting sparked the usual irresponsible calls for gun control from the usual irresponsible leftists.

Politicization of the media permeates every story. If an attack story can be twisted to promote gun control, run it. If not, bury it. The same is true for every story. Global warming is an obvious example. The avalanche of fake polar bear stories comes to mind.

We saw it all during the election. When Hillary Clinton was exposed for selling government favors in return for contributions to her Clinton Foundation personal slush fund including from foreign governments, the media cared nothing for conflicts of interest. After Trump won, his supposed business conflicts became the biggest story of the post-election. When Clinton was busted for mishandling state secrets to the point of allowing foreign governments access to them, mishandling state secrets was not a problem. Now that Trump is considering appointing Gen. David Petraeus to a cabinet position and he once mishandled state secrets, it’s high treason.

The mis-reporting of news in order to advance a political agenda is done three ways. Sometimes the news is fake, such as stories about Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of chemical weapons and his mobile chemical weapons factories. Sometimes only parts of a story are reported, often exaggerated. Stories about the war in Syria never mention the US is really fighting Syrian forces while aiding and abetting ISIS. Finally, many stories are ignored completely. For example, bureaucrats just enacted a new rule allowing any judge to sign a warrant to spy on any person in the US. Jurisdiction will no longer matter. This will legalize all FBI spying since there’s always a judge somewhere who will sign a warrant. Try finding that story in the news. Mis-reporting is so rampant that cases are easy to miss.

But the American people are waking up. Trust in media recently hit an all time low with only 32 percent of Americans trusting it. Having lost the election, establishment rulers and cronies hang on by their fingernails, and they’re scared. Panicking, they’ve called for help from the big guns to move the spotlight from the fake news they report to censorship of news they don’t like which others report. The New York Times leads the charge.

“Over the last week, two of the world’s biggest internet companies have faced mounting criticism over how fake news on their sites may have influenced the presidential election’s outcome. On Monday, those companies responded by making it clear that they would not tolerate such misinformation by taking pointed aim at fake news sites’ revenue sources,” it reported. “Google kicked off the action on Monday afternoon when the Silicon Valley search giant said it would ban websites that peddle fake news from using its online advertising service. Hours later, Facebook, the social network, updated the language in its Facebook Audience Network policy, which already says it will not display ads in sites that show misleading or illegal content, to include fake news sites.”

This is a good reminder giant corporations, while nominally owned, are ultimately owned by the government. Profits stay private, but government controls them. Rulers ordered Google and Facebook to censor information on their behalf, and in order to keep their government-protected profits, their nominal owners agreed.

In a similar vein, The Washington Post posted a McCarthyite blacklist of websites including the Drudge Report and LewRockwell.com.

The establishment’s censorship effort will backfire, and it will be fun to watch.

Originally published in the Dayton City Paper.

Breaking the Internet

Breaking the Internet

Blame NSA’s Internet of Things

Conspiracy Theorist

By Mark Luedtke

Publication date: 121316

In the year or two leading up to 9/11, anybody who paid attention realized America would soon suffer a devastating terrorist attack. Expert after expert warned us it would happen. Books were written about it. Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor”, which featured an airliner flown into the Capitol, came out in 1994. The chatter, so to speak, was off the charts. Yet the rulers who claim to protect us did nothing, then, after the attacks, they claimed ignorance. They told us nobody could have predicted 9/11 although pretty much every expert had.

Fast forward to today. “Someone is learning how to take down the Internet,” recently wrote internet security guru Bruce Schneier. “Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down.”

The attacks being used are called distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). This means numerous computers are employed at the same time to access an internet server. The server is overwhelmed by the access requests, effectively cutting it off from the internet.

In the old days, a hacker team had to hack thousands of computers to mount an effective DDoS. It was hard and dangerous, so the attacks were rare. But that was before the Internet of Things (IoT).

You’ve probably heard of the IoT. It’s the idiotic concept that every device in your home should be connected to the internet. Your car, refrigerator, microwave, door locks, camera, thermostat, and even light bulbs and tea kettles should all include computers with internet access. This idea has been sold to the unwitting public as good for saving energy and giving consumers remote control over their houses.

That’s not what the IoT is about. It wasn’t dreamed up by a business to make money because turning your car and house over to hackers is a stupid idea. The IoT was dreamed up by the NSA to allow it to spy on every aspect of your life. NSA wants your car connected to the internet so it can not only track you, but it can take control of your car whenever it wants. NSA wants your door locks to be controlled by the internet so it can unlock your doors when it wants. If you’re critical of the government, NSA agents can take control of every aspect of your life. They’ll get away with it by claiming they’re fighting terrorism.

So far the public hasn’t caught on because they like seeing Kristen Bell talk about her refrigerator that has cameras inside.

There is no security on IoT devices by design. Slashdot explains, “The state of security around IoT, the chip or sensor-equipped devices connected to each other over the Internet, is deeply concerning. Just in the past few months, we have seen several instances of these devices getting hacked. We have also seen things such as Shodan, a search engine for the Internet of Things that can allow someone to browse vulnerable webcams. Many people continue to overlook the significance and potential consequences of their ‘smart’ devices getting compromised. Someone recently asked, ‘So what if my coffee maker gets hacked? What are criminals going to do? Burn my coffee?’ They can do a lot more than burn your coffee. You see these devices are connected to your Wi-Fi network, which gives them the ability to interact with other gadgets connected to the same network. When attackers manage to access one of these devices, it's only a matter of time before they own your entire network.”

The NSA made it simple for hackers to take control of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of IoT computers, and that code was recently leaked to the public. The result has been a series of bigger and nastier DDoS attacks.

Some might wonder why the government doesn’t do something to stop this. For the same reason it didn’t do anything to stop 9/11. Our rulers benefit from terrorist attacks. Bureaucrats get bigger budgets. The military-industrial complex gets perpetual war. Rulers and their cronies get richer.

After the coming devastating DDoS attack, the governments will take over the national internets, NSA will gain more power and money, and our rulers and their cronies will get even richer again.

Originally published in the Dayton City Paper.

Google and Apple Won’t Save You

NSA spying is old news. A year ago people were up in arms and congressmen demanded reform. It was all a smokescreen intended to soothe angry people until they got distracted by other stories like Obama starting a third war in Iraq.

It worked. The National Journal reports, “The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved the Justice Department's request for another 90-day extension of the National Security Agency's controversial mass-surveillance program, exposed publicly last summer by Edward Snowden and authorized under Section 215 of the post-9/11 Patriot Act. The spying authority is next set to expire on Dec. 5.” There’s no outrage at this rubber stamp.

But recent announcements by Apple and Google claiming they would encrypt all information on their phones by default gave some commentators hope. Don’t fall for it. Apple and Google are so thoroughly protected and controlled by government, they’re effectively government agencies. They wouldn’t do anything to bite the hand that feeds them.

Google and Apple, Goopple, are trying to recover from the public relations nightmare that resulted when NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked information showing these companies gleefully participated in NSA spying on their customers. Government’s giant corporate agents scrambled to make it appear they were being forced to spy against their will, but they never resisted until their complicity was made public. They aren’t sorry they spied for the government. They’re just sorry they got caught.

While the plutocrats from Goopple huddled in the world’s most outrageously expensive resorts with NSA bureaucrats trying to figure out how to recover from this PR debacle, small, nimble organizations like Silent Circle and Redphone implemented strong encryption protocols on mobile devices. Silent Circle is a security company, and Redphone is an open source project, so both have a genuine interest in securing your communications. Making encryption cheap - free in the case of Redphone - and easy for the masses created a new problem for NSA spies because it takes them years to defeat strong encryption. The more widespread encryption becomes, the more likely NSA won’t have the resources to defeat every encrypted communication. They might miss seeing some naked pictures of teenagers, and they can’t tolerate that. Their only hope was to outlaw such encryption, but those small companies don’t have enough customers to justify Congress targeting them with a law.

Those products also created problems for Goopple because they drew customers, especially foreign, away. So big business and big government - one in the same really - jointly conceived a solution: Goopple would encrypt all its data too, forcing Congress to outlaw it, protecting both NSA and Goopple.

As if orchestrated, because it was, Google and Apple announced their plans the same day. FBI howled in outrage the next. The Washington Post reported, “FBI Director James B. Comey sharply criticized Apple and Google on Thursday for developing forms of smartphone encryption so secure that law enforcement officials cannot easily gain access to information stored on the devices — even when they have valid search warrants.”

His comments were the most forceful yet from a top government official but echo a chorus of denunciation from law enforcement officials nationwide. Police have said that the ability to search photos, messages and Web histories on smartphones is essential to solving a range of serious crimes, including murder, child pornography and attempted terrorist attacks.”

In other words, NSA’s institutionalized, legalized perverts and therefore other hackers must be able to secretly ogle your children’s sexts supposedly to protect your children from other perverts who might ogle them. Cops want you to believe they were never able to solve a crime until they gained the power to hack cellphones. That’s ridiculous. The only hinderance to law enforcement this encryption creates is forcing them to obey the Constitution by obtaining a warrant.

The real problem with default, strong encryption is it forces NSA to obey the Constitution too. It blocks bulk spying on a huge segment of people worldwide. The phony complaints by law enforcement gives politicians in both parties the pretense they need to demonize Goopple and pass a law banning this encryption “to protect the children” right after the election. As always, the plutocrats, politicians and spies win. The people lose.

Journalist Tom Engelhardt describes the futility of ubiquitous spying. “It’s quite an achievement, especially when you consider its one downside: it has a terrible record of getting anything right in a timely way,” he writes. “Never have so many had access to so much information about our world and yet been so unprepared for whatever happens in it.”

While the NSA spies monitors social media of high school students for personal titillation, they’re unable to find a top al Qaeda recruiter operating in Britain, and they allowed an American jihadist to come and go freely between the US and Syria before he set off a suicide bomb in Syria. The FBI says it has no way to stop ISIS jihadists with American passports from re-entering the country and attacking Americans.

That’s because our rulers consider us, not terrorists, their real enemies.