Bad Actions Have Terrible Consequences

Bad Actions Have Terrible Consequences

Conspiracy Theorist

by Mark Luedtke

publication date: 012715

There’s no such thing as freedom from consequences of actions. If you poke a stick into a hornets’ nest, you can expect to get stung. If you poke a stick at a rabid dog, you can expect to get bitten. If you oppress and kill thousands of people every year for decades, both directly by dropping bombs on them and instigating coups and indirectly by supplying tyrants with weapons, tear gas and money to beat, torture and kill them, don’t act surprised when some of the survivors fly planes into your buildings.

Speech is also an action. If you ridicule people’s prophet and religion almost daily for years, you can expect radicals to respond violently. It’s not right. Everybody should live by the non-aggression principle. Everybody should live by the adage: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” But terrorists don’t. If you make it your mission to consistently insult, anger and incite all Muslims including terrorists, you can expect jihadists will respond with violence. That’s what happened in Paris.

Government propagandists are already trying to take advantage of the massacre. Economist Robert Wenzel observes, “I see where government opportunists are using the recent hack attack on Sony and the killings in Paris of Charlie Hebdo satirists, as an opportunity to raise national defiance against those who ‘hate our freedoms.’ Puhleeze. The fact of the matter is that both Sony employees and Charlie Hebdo employees pissed people off. This, in itself is not a good or bad thing. When you piss people off, they might come back at you. If you don't want to deal with blowback, then don't do the deed.”

Commentator Becky Akers adds, “Naturally, I do not condone murdering journalists and graphic artists. But let us be very clear that these killings have nothing to do with freedom of speech or expression, regardless of how much Our Rulers and France’s try to cast them that way. Governments are the only ones who can restrict either freedom, and so far reports of this atrocity have not implicated France’s administration regardless of its other crimes.”

It’s a sign of the decline of western civilization the boorish cartoons of Charlie Hebdo found enough audience to keep them in business. A healthy society would have shunned them, not defended them as free speech. Just because you can say something doesn’t mean you should.

Foreign policy expert Eric Margolis suggests blowback from perpetual war as another motive for the attack. “France has emerged as one of the most active interveners in the Muslim world, conducting military operations in Libya, Mali, Chad, Ivory Coast, Central African Republic, Djibouti, Abu Dhabi, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria,” he explained. “Critics accused France of a new era of Mideast and African colonialism.”

The French government is complicit in this massacre because it disarmed the victims. One of the most evil actions governments undertake is disarming the people by threatening them with violence for possessing the best tools of self defense. Gun control is an another sign of the decline of western civilization. Barbarians and brigands disarm their victims. Civilized people arm themselves and defend themselves and others.

The massacre in Paris is another spectacular example of government failure. The Sydney Herald writes, “Long before the French editor and cartoonist Stephane Charbonnier was gunned down by Islamic militants in Paris on Wednesday he had said in response to earlier threats: ‘I would rather die standing than live on my knees’.” That’s a heroic sentiment, but unbacked by effective action, it was reduced to empty bravado. Instead of taking action to keep himself and his co-workers safe, Charbonnier foolishly trusted the French government. The British Broadcasting Company reports, “Charlie Hebdo editor Stephane Charbonnier, 47, had received death threats in the past and was living under police protection.” Government’s police protection for Charbonnier was as effective as you would expect - not at all - for a person who is not a member of the ruling class. French police stopped watching these terrorists six months ago.

But these are exactly the kind of terrorists and the kind of attacks the National Security Agency (NSA) was created to stop. NSA spies on every communication in the world to stop attacks like these, but it failed. NSA ubiquitous spying has never stopped an attack. Republicans who support NSA spying on everyone including Americans used Charlie Hebdo to justify NSA tyranny.  Similarly, the head of Britain’s ineffective MI5 already exploited the attack to demand more power. Only government uses failure to justify its activities and demand more power.

The Sydney Herald continues with the propaganda, “[Charbonnier] died standing. He died for our freedom. Charbonnier and the others murdered on Wednesday died for the cause of freedom and enlightened scepticism. We must all stand up for that cause.”

Baloney. Charbonnier and his co-workers died because they intentionally, repeatedly, angered fanatical killers, supporting perpetual war against Muslims in the process. Government’s propagandists are painting Charbonnier and his co-workers as heroic martyrs for free speech rights for political gain. They’re not.

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.

Governments Are Packed with Perverts

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden recently told The Guardian reporters that NSA agents pass around naked pictures of people they spy on like you. WebProNews provides the full quote:

“The reality of working in the intelligence community is that you see things that are deeply troubling – all the time. And it’s not just one person, it’s many of them.

“You’ve got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old, they’ve suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records. Now, in the course of their daily work, they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense.

“For example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation but they’re extremely attractive. So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and they show their coworker. And their coworker says ‘oh hey, that’s great – send that to Bill down the way.’

“And then Bill sends it to George, and George sends it to Tom, and sooner or later this person’s whole life has been seen by all of these other people.

“It’s never reported, nobody ever knows about it because the auditing of these systems is incredibly weak. The fact that your private images, records of your private life, records of your intimate moments, have been taken from your private communications from the intended recipient and given to the government without any specific authorization, without any specific need, is itself a violation of your rights.”

Generally being a pro-government propagandist organ, The Guardian calls this claim startling, but there’s nothing startling about it. If we had a dime for every time a politician or bureaucrat is caught using government’s power of coercion for sex, they would have to pay us money instead of stealing ours. It’s not surprising that people who are attracted to using government’s power of coercion over others to advance their personal interests, i.e. everybody in government, do it not only to advance their financial interests but their sexual interests as well. This is the real reason police departments like Dayton’s push so hard for spy cameras in every window and drones in every backyard.

The affinity for prostitutes by US troops and Secret Service agents has been documented to be nearly insatiable, but hiring prostitutes isn’t the problem. The use of coercion by government agents to get their sexual jollies damages their victims.

For example, 30 strippers have filed a lawsuit against San Diego police for abusing their power to license strippers. The Los Angeles Times documents, “The strippers were ‘nearly nude’ when their pictures were taken while officers made ‘arrogant and demeaning remarks’ and intimidated the strippers to keep them from leaving, the lawsuit alleges.”

As bad as this sounds, the response from the police makes it worse. The Times continues “Taking photographs of the employees, including of distinctive tattoos, is a routine part of the inspection process, [police spokesman] Mayer added. Inspections are meant to deter the employees from engaging in illegal acts.

“‘The San Diego code mandates we make these inspections,’ Mayer said. ‘This is not a criminal matter, this is a regulatory matter.’”

The police contend this sexual abuse is legal, and they have a case. It remains to be seen how strong of a case. The Times continues, “[The lawyer for the strippers] said that while the permit process does allow such inspections, police went overboard, detaining the dancers for more than an hour against their will ‘without probable cause’ and making them pose in various positions.”

This highlights the perverted conflicts government creates. In a free society nobody could force these women to pose for photographs against their will. But because the government claims the power of coercion, it legalizes sexual abuse, and the perverted enforcers it hires to carry out the abuse go beyond the law to satisfy their own perverse desires.

The Transportation Security Agency (TSA) is another government bureaucracy that legally sexually assaults victims, and their legalized crimes invite more of the same. CBS reports, “A San Francisco man suspected of having one too many drinks is accused of posing as a Transportation Security Administration agent and groped [sic] two unsuspecting women, both foreigners, in a private booth for security pat downs.”

What’s the difference who employs the molesters or if the victims are foreigners? The women are victims of molestation regardless. The TSA is a haven for molesters because it allows them to get their jollies legally, and this guy just short-circuited the hiring process. This incident shows TSA has nothing to do with security, only oppression. Agents, probably drunk themselves, can’t protect travelers from a guy in their midst, let alone a determined terrorist. TSA agents have never stopped a terrorist attack, and they constantly fail to detect weapons during tests, but they molest travelers with glee.

It’s sad how people promote government power out of fear from sexual assailants and other criminals, but they’re empowering criminals to commit their crimes without consequence as government agents.