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.

To Ticket or Not to Ticket

The people hate red light and speeding cameras, but our rulers love them. Citizens to Abolish Red Light Cameras claims, “Since 1991, there have been a total of 35 election contests in Arizona, California, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas, Washington. With few exceptions, automated ticketing has failed by as much as 86 percent. One city did embrace the use of cameras after uniformed police officers were dispatched to go door-to-door to "encourage" citizens to keep the ticketing system in place.” If you really thought we had a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” the red light camera issue should disabuse you of that mistake.

As if reading from a script, Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl communicated our rulers’ perspective to The Dayton Daily News. “‘The purpose of using red light and speed enforcement cameras is to prevent accidents and save lives,’ Biehl said. ‘The very presence of the cameras has been proven to change people’s dangerous driving habits. Since the red light cameras were installed in 2003, we have seen a noticeable reduction in light-running accidents at intersections where the cameras are in place, and a similar reduction in accidents citywide. We expect to see further reductions.’”

Even if Biehl was telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which he’s not, his argument would still be illegitimate. It presupposes that mundane adults - those who don’t work for government - are children who must be controlled by morally and intellectually superior rulers. This is obviously untrue. People who work for the government have no moral or intellectual superiority over people who don’t. Adults are not children who must be looked after by a paternalistic government for their own good.

Even if Biehl’s claim was true, he fails to mention the trade-offs which the people overwhelmingly reject. The DDN reports, “The number of speeding tickets issued in Dayton increased nearly 1,400 percent to 58,325 since the city added speed cameras to some of its busiest streets two years ago. A Dayton Daily News investigation found at a rate of 152 a day, or more than six per hour, the city’s 14 traffic cameras issued 55,676 speeding tickets in 2012.” Clearly the people do not find Biehl’s supposed benefit worth this outrageous cost.

Furthermore, Biehl is not telling anywhere near the whole truth. A number of independent studies show red light cameras increase accidents and risk to safety, contrary to Biehl’s claim.

Biehl also fails to mention the cameras open the door to significant corruption. Since the people receiving the tickets have no recourse in a criminal court to challenge the evidence against them, there’s no way to know if the camera actually caught the person speeding or running a red light. Many victims claim they didn’t break the law. Many districts shortened yellow lights in order to catch more people.

But the elephant in the room Biehl fails to address is the financial motive behind the cameras. The DDN discovered, “[Dayton] records show speed camera citations generated $2.38 million between April and December 2012.” That’s a lot of other people’s money stolen using these cameras. If everybody paid, that number would have jumped to $4.52 million. Tickets in the region cost car owners $5.6 million in 2012. Al Capone would consider this racket dirty. That’s why a Hamilton County judge banned the cameras. A Florida legislator called them a tax on poor people. That’s why most of Dayton’s cameras are located in poor neighborhoods. There are none around the University of Dayton, Miami Valley Hospital or downtown. Rulers don’t steal money from their cronies; they steal it from others and give it to them.

A suburb of Cleveland called Maple Heights illustrates stealing money, not safety, is the motive behind the cameras. The mayor of Maple Heights told the Associated Press, “‘[Opponents of the cameras] really didn't win anything,’ Lansky said. ‘They bankrupted the city is what they did.’” The oppressed people of Maple Heights can only hope.

Voters also banned the cameras in Cleveland, cutting $5 million from their rulers’ stolen haul. That’s $5 million their rulers can’t use to oppress them, so that’s a double victory. Cleveland’s rulers will have to make do with the millions more they steal in other ways.

All Ohioans may soon breathe a sigh of relief since the Ohio Senate recently passed a bill that would require all tickets to be issued by a police officer. As commonsensical as that sounds, it’s going to take an act of Congress, well, the legislature, to make it reality.

But the legislature isn’t doing this because it’s the right thing to do. They’re doing it because 65 percent of the money collected goes to an out-of-state manufacturer. If this ban passes, some crony will begin producing red light cameras in Ohio and get that ban overturned. Then we’ll be right back where we are today but with no hope for a legislative remedy.

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.

Big Victory Against the Police State in Dayton

Daytonians dodged a bullet. The people of Los Angeles suburb of Compton learned in late April they had been secretly monitored by air surveillance. The Los Angeles Times reports, “For nine days in early 2012, a small Cessna plane recorded low-resolution images of every corner of the 10.1-square-mile city and beamed them to the local Sheriff’s Department station, where deputies observed incidents including fender benders, a string of necklace snatchings and a shooting.” That’s not all they observed. These Peeping Toms observed everything that happened in Compton during those flights.

The Times documents the Dayton connection, “Ross T. McNutt, president of Persistent Surveillance Systems, which operated the aerial program, said the images beamed back by the cameras were so sweeping that each individual appears as a single pixel -- not nearly discerning enough to detect race, sex and other distinguishing characteristics. And only images tied to known crime scenes received close scrutiny, he said.” Right.

Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS) is the local TechTown company which Dayton’s rulers planned to contract to monitor everybody in Dayton. Fortunately, after heavy criticism, they temporarily killed the plan, but promised to reconsider after critics became distracted by other issues.

The Compton report casts doubt on the veracity of the claims about the aerial Peeping Tom. For example, if people appear only as a pixel, it would impossible for the camera to resolve a necklace snatching , a shooting, or any action. That’s not very useful. Everything claimed about this spy scheme is fishy. Aerial spy cameras in the 1960s could read license plates. It defies logic that police would choose a lower resolution camera when they could employ one that reads license plates, recognizes facial features, and enables them to stalk your daughter.

Also, the way the system was used in Compton contradicts the Dayton plan. The Dayton Daily News documented, “The city has released a draft policy statement on how it would use the airplane cameras, saying they would only be deployed in a handful of circumstances — to disrupt Part I (felony) crime patterns, to assist in weather emergencies or natural disasters, to monitor illegal dumping, to support tactical operations (SWAT, hostage cases), and to monitor major events or large-scale disturbances.”

That isn’t how the system was used in Compton. It was used for general surveillance because the system is most effective in that role. Government always uses spy systems to their maximum capability. Local rulers’ claims about restricting the use of this spy system are no more credible than the National Security Agency’s claims it doesn’t spy on Americans. Rulers make claims like this to mislead people, then once the program starts, perverts use it to the full extent possible for their own purposes.

The DDN reported another discrepancy, “[Dayton Police Chief Richard] Biehl said the Boston Marathon bombings made a case in favor of the cameras — a major event where surveillance would occur, and images might show a perpetrator coming or going.” This claim contradicts the report that people show up as individual pixels. It would be impossible to track an individual pixel in a crowd of pixels, and it defies logic that Biehl would want to employ such a low-resolution camera when he could employ a modern, high-resolution camera that really could track a person through a crowd. If the plane really doesn’t have a high-resolution camera now, it would get one as soon as Dayton’s rulers signed a contract.

The targeting of Compton highlights the bad intentions behind this technology and validates critics. One Compton resident cut to the heart of the matter, “‘Why are we the target?’ asked Ellen Harris, 67, as she unloaded a cart full of groceries into her car. ‘As citizens we deserve [to know]. We are not all criminals.... It’s an invasion of privacy.’”

If PSS had flown their Peeping Tom plane over Hollywood for nine days, everybody in the world would be up in arms. Twitter would burn up. The Kardashians would sue. Alec Baldwin would go on a homophobic rant. George Clooney would interrupt President Obama and demand McNutt’s head on a platter for peeping in on the backyard activities of Hollywood royalty. And Obama would deliver it. But nobody cares about Ellen Harris, or anybody else, in Compton.

Critics correctly recognize this technology will be used primarily to exploit poor people and minorities. The rich and powerful have the resources to keep it away from them. And no phony government policy will change this.

Biehl justifies his desire to employ the Peeping Tom on dwindling police resources, but the data tell a different story. As the number of police in Dayton is reduced, crime rates have fallen. This happens everywhere. Because we were brainwashed by government schools and government-controlled media, Americans believe police reduce crime. The opposite is true. A Cato study discovered more police leads to more crime. Biehl is trying to justify his bureaucratic fiefdom and his exorbitant salary stolen from taxpayers. Our rulers’ desire for Peeping Tom technology isn’t going away, so we have to stay vigilant.