GLOBAL BANKING MACHINE The global banking industry is the largest organised crime syndicate in human history – getting away with it because of our ignorance, their forceful control of our governments and almost everything else in our lives.
Courtesy to the activist from Occupy Wall Street who sent a strong message to the world.
All the major banks in the world are owned and controlled by the banking families.
They control the entire process of the creation, the printing, and supply of money around the world.
The three biggest names in this cartel are the Rothschilds; Rockefellers and Morgans, and they ultimately own or control all the banks in the world, together with a small number of other powerful banking families, like Carnegie, Harriman, Schiff, and Warburg.
Collectively they have become known as the “banksters” by those who became aware of their devious activity.
All the major central banks of the world, including the Reserve Bank of South Africa, just like the Federal Reserve Bank in the USA, are privately owned corporations with complete control of the financial markets.
These banking families and central banks are a law unto themselves and do not have to answer to anyone. For example, section 33 of the South African Reserve Bank Act allows them to keep their actions secret.
The global financial system created around the supply of money is so convoluted and complex that only a few people truly understand it. This is always used as an excuse to exclude the involvement of ordinary people.
The deeply complex legal system is used in the same way to manipulate and support this structure, denying the ordinary person access to lawful justice.
Lawful justice cannot exist under the situation where the country is a corporation; the president appoints the judges, therefore the judges work for the corporation and have to uphold the wellbeing of the corporation – not the people. And the courts are mere enforcers of the banking policy.
Banks officially do not work with money. They work with Bills of Exchange, Negotiable Instruments and Promissory Notes.
The word ‘money’ does not even have a definition in the Bank Act of South Africa, neither is the word ‘payment’ defined.
All the major money of the world is ‘FIAT’ money – this basically means that it has no intrinsic value AND it is not supported by any precious metals like gold or silver, as it was a long time ago. FIAT money is created by banks, out of thin air, when you take out a “loan.” There is actually no real loan – nothing physical is exchanged – this is the equivalent of counterfeiting. South Africa’s money supply has quadrupled in the past decade, and yet this increase supply has not seen a parallel increase in gold, silver or other real commodity reserves.
This means that the paper/plastic money we use is completely worthless. They are just fancy pieces of paper with some fancy logos printed on them with no value at all. The ‘value’ is derived purely from the masses of people who have confidence in their currency and keep using it as a method of exchange.
For example, very few people know that a payment / commission / legal bribe is paid to the South African government every time a worn note or coin is returned to the SA Reserve bank. This payment is called seigniorage and allows our government to profit from the exploitation of the people by the paper/plastic money controlled by the Reserve Bank, and ultimately the Bank For International Settlements from whom our Reserve Bank receives their orders.
Yet it is illegal to destroy these worthless pieces of paper, and people who introduce alternative pieces of paper, or copy these pieces of paper are jailed for infringement of its copyright.
The only reason our money has any value, is because we give it value – our perception of value is the only value it has. If the people lose faith in their money, the money will collapse, because nothing supports it. In fact the word ‘credit’ comes from the Latin credere which means “to believe.” Evidence of this is found almost every time a central bank governor opens their mouth. You will hear the word “confidence” uttered over and over and over again because the prime directive of a central bank governor is to maintain confidence in banking at all costs. Erosion in confidence leads to the collapse of the system. This is precisely why they placed Nelson Mandela’s face on the new South African notes – to instil and renew confidence in our money and abuse the man’s commitment to freedom.
Banks create money out of “THIN AIR” by simply creating debits and credit on the accounting computer system. This is called the Matching Principle and is governed by the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). A “loan” is not a loan in the ordinary sense of the word, it is an instruction that you, the customer signs, in the process creating a promissory note, which you “submit” to the bank authority, giving the bank permission to issue one of their promissory notes in return. Their promissory note (which comes in the form of a computer generated bank statement) is designed to look like a loan. So, their promise back to you (in exchange for your promise to them) is the loan you are receiving. So, in essence, you instructed the bank to make money out of thin air. Because you are none the wiser, you agree to the exploitative terms and conditions outlined in the agreement which, of course, the courts will enforce in their favour.
Banks do not have money of their own to lend you as most people believe. No money existed in the system before the so called “loan” was granted to you.
Banks create money on the signatures of their clients and the so-called contracts and loans they make the customer sign. These contracts are sold in a process called securitisation to third parties, who in turn sell it on the global stock markets. This is a highly secretive and well guarded technique in which they profiteer and create undue enrichment. Then they bundle such loans and sell them back to the people via pensions funds and insurance policies. Are you confused yet? You should be – many lawyers and most judges do not understand this and this is why we had to study this ourselves to be able to defend ourselves in the courts against those lawyers who defend the banksters and understand it well. The people have to know.
By selling your signature or ‘promissory note’ or mortgage bond contract, they lose all legal rights to any property that they financed. In legal terms this is called losing ‘locus standi’.
When the bank securitises a loan, they get paid the full capital amount of the loan, plus interest, up front. This means that your loan has actually been pre-settled by a third party who is insured in case you default, while you have no idea that this is going on behind the scenes.
The banks break contract law by claiming to lend what they do not possess – money. They only create money, in most cases cyber-money, after you signed all the documents and they sold your promissory note to the third party who then on-sells it, sometimes many times, to other parties by trading it on the global stock markets. This is why securitisation is a ponzi / pyramid scheme that everyone must become aware of. It is also known as “shadow banking” which is easy to research online.
They do not disclose any of this to their customers, keeping us in the dark. You believed that they actually loaned real money. This is a lie. They never loaned you anything of any value and therefore there was never “equal consideration” where both you and the bank stands to lose something. This flies in the face of basic contract law, never mind common morality among people. But then banks are not people – they are legal fiction corporations.
You created all the value with your own mind and it was your signature that caused the release of money from the third party buyer, which the bank received on your behalf – except they never informed you of that, did they?
The banks act as intermediaries, like estate agents, because they do not lend us THEIR money. Since they do not lend us anything, but only obtain it on the strength of our signatures, from a third party, any interest they charge is pure extortion and fraud. Disclosure must take place for a valid agreement to occur.
The money in South Africa is printed by the South African Mint – also a private company that simply profiteers on the hard work of our people. However, recently this has been outsourced to Sweden which was a disaster, causing huge embarrassment for the Reserve Bank after several billion Rands worth of notes were printed incorrectly with the wrong dimensions and had to be destroyed.
The Reserve Bank, which is a private company, is in charge of printed money, which it sells or loans it to the banks at a fraction of the face value of the bank notes.
When the banks return the used bank notes to the Reserve Bank, they get paid almost the entire full face value of those bank notes, creating enrichment out of thin air for themselves, by creating money out of thin air from shuffling paper.
Banks practice what is called “Fractional Reserve Banking”. This means that they only have to retain a small percentage of any deposit and can lend out the rest many times over to the public, creating a spiral of debt on money that does not even exist.
For example: For every $100 you deposit, the bank lends out about $900 of imaginary fictitious money to their clients. The real fraud is that they charge compounded interest on this non-existent money. This is blatant fraud and anyone else would be jailed for a long time for doing this.
Interest is charged up front. Interest is considered “real money” by the bank, and so they can make more loans, out of thin air, against that interest, that did not exist in the first place.
As it stands today, there is not enough money in the world to pay off all the debt in the world, because of interest. This is exactly the situation the banksters wanted to create. A situation that gives them complete control over property and other assets that can be repossessed by the banks only to re-sell it to another naive person who will most likely end up in the same debt situation.
All this activity is continually supported by the legal system and the ignorant judges who just perpetuate the fraud in the face of clear evidence.
In some countries, hard working people are jailed for not being able to repay their debt. This a blatant crime against humanity for which the bankers should be jailed and the judges should be answerable to the people they serve. But then, they don’t serve the people, they serve the corporation that employs them – THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA and other corporations that masquerade as countries.
The printed notes we call money are really instruments of debt and should be illegal. Money as we know it today can only be issued as debt. In fact, about 40% of the debt of the USA is fictitious / counterfeit debt, owed to the Federal Reserve Bank who initially created it out of nothing and then charged interest on that debt. All the income tax collected in the US is used to pay off just the interest portion of the debt to the Federal Reserve Bank owners.
This is just a small taste of the convoluted web of deception that has been created to keep us ignorant and completely enslaved to the global control of the banksters.
There is no reason why we, the people, cannot create our own new form of money as an alternative to the banks’ tools of enslavement and use this new money as an interim tool to stabilise the economic crisis. A lawful kind of money that serves the people.
Money for the people by the people – Tax-free and Interest-free – no inflation – no levies – no duties – no vat – no debt slavery.
There are 8 Major Threats numerous inherent dangers in our world that can change life as we know it and even threaten our very existence, but many people choose to ignore the warning signs or simply don’t believe anything could happen to them.
Those among us who are more cautious and savvy would rather not take the risk of being unprepared for any eventuality that could put the future of a global power like America into question.
World Economic Forum lists the dangers
A good starting point when trying to assess the potential dangers that the world faces is to take a look at what the World Economic Forum considers to be the biggest dangers that threaten our stability.
The world is smaller than before and global events are increasingly likely to have a major impact on any country, regardless of where the event occurs. So even if it does not actually happen on American soil, it is likely that the impact of such an event will effect change in our lives and create a sense of panic for those that are unprepared for a geopolitical, environmental or any other crisis that might strike.
The World Economic Forum – made up of about 900 experts from around the world – have highlighted no fewer than 28 risks they believe could threaten our stability.
Geopolitical tensions
Number one of 8 Major Threats on their list, and the biggest perceived threat to world stability, is state conflict.
The crisis that is developing in Ukraine and the distinctly uneasy relationship between Russia and its European neighbors and the rest of the world, as well a stand-off between China and Japan, all suggest that there is currently a strategic power battle going on which could spill over into conflict at some point.
This is the first time in the history of the Economic Forum list of threats that geopolitical threats have made their number one spot and, just 25 years after the historic fall of the Berlin Wall, it seems that there is a very real risk of major conflict – a conflict which could drag all major powers into a scenario which could even involve nuclear power.
In search of water
Environmental concerns are rated as the second biggest threat to world stability. A lack of resources has led some commentators to suggest that water is the new oil, meaning that countries that have it will come under threat from an invasion of people who don’t have access to it.
As an estimated five billion people on the planet already have problematic access to clean water, we could easily witness the same tensions around water that we have seen surrounding the control of oil in the past.
Basically, we already need about 70% of the world’s water supply to support the agriculture that feeds the world. When you consider that the World Bank estimates that we need to increase food production by 50% by 2030 to meet the needs of the world population, it is understandable that there could be war over the control of freshwater supplies.
Be prepared
In the event of an emergency situation where your access to normal water supplies is cut off, you will need to be prepared by having a stockpile of bottled water as well as having a long term plan that goes beyond your immediate resources.
There are numerous guides on how to create an emergency water supply and how much water you might need. You might also consider reading a guide on how to create a well for your own personal water supply.
Toxins in water is another consideration. There are toxins in our water supply that present a serious health risk for humans after prolonged exposure. A simple way of combatting this threat of contaminated water is prepare your own super-water which is free of toxins, using an ingredient like Bragg Apple Cider Vinegar which will help to purify the water supply until you again have access to fresh water.
Large-scale terrorism
The terrible events that were witnessed with 9/11 set a new and unwelcome benchmark in terms of large-scale terrorism, but there are fears that further atrocities – even the use of weapons of mass destruction – could take place in the U.S and other parts of the world in the future.
The rise of Islamic State (Isil) highlights in particular how terrorism knows no boundaries. When you consider that Isil managed to grab land and mobilize some 30,000 fighters for their cause in a short space of time, large-scale terrorism is a very real threat that we should be prepared for.
Be prepared
You may be forced to defend your property and your family from a localized attack and the best way to do this is to ensure that you have a suitable cache of weapons to be able to provide the protection you need.
The Prepper Journal lists the top five firearms that you need to get your hands on, including, perhaps not surprisingly, a handgun and a shotgun.
Handguns and shotguns are relatively easy to use and if you are forced into a home defense situation that requires engaging with someone who is threatening your personal security, you can find a model that is quite forgiving if you are not an experienced shot, but still very effective. You may also consider an Aimpoint red dot sight to improve your aim.
A shotgun is also very useful if you need to hunt down small game and even larger animals if you need to go in search of food.
Trigger-happy Putin
The potential of large-scale terrorism by extremist groups like Islamic State to threaten our stability should never be underestimated but a danger that America in particular is facing is more likely to come from Russia and Vladimir Putin.
When you consider America’s history of predicting future threats, it doesn’t really inspire a great deal of confidence that Washington will judge Putin’s moves correctly or timeously.
Past events like Pearl Harbor, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the collapse of South Vietnam in the 1970’s are all major events that America’s policy elite at the time failed to predict and act accordingly.
Imposing damaging economic sanctions on the Russian president would currently appear to hurt the powerhouse based in the Kremlin. Russia has the firepower and resources to threaten America’s survival and the danger that they pose is much larger than the challenges we are currently facing in dealing with threats from ISIS.
President Putin is widely considered to believe that the revolution in Ukraine was a U.S-backed coup aimed at weakening Russia and his government has consistently and repeatedly warned against Western economic and political intervention.
In fact, America and Russia have control of over 90% of the world’s nuclear arsenal but, on the other hand, the Russians are currently struggling to keep up the U.S when it comes to investing in new warfighting technology.
The relevance of this imbalance is that Putin would consider a preemptive nuclear strike to be the best strategy to ensure they gain the upper hand. A senior Russian officer recently stated that 96% of their strategic rocket force could be launched within a matter of minutes, so pushing Putin into a corner could have serious consequences for the United States and its citizens.
Some military commentators believe that the U.S is vulnerable to a nuclear strike from Russia and it is only a matter of time before this happens.
Chemical warfare
In terms of weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons are often perceived to be less of a danger than the one posed by nuclear and biological threats.
This is in stark contrast to the historical record of the use of chemical weapons, which are in fact the most widely used and extensively proliferated weapons of mass destruction. The effect of chemical weapons for the victim of an attack varies from experiencing severe discomfort, physical harm to death, all of which can be achieved with a relatively small amount of chemical weapons.
Many countries have stockpiled and amassed thousands of tons of chemical weapons that date back to the Cold War. The reason for this reliance on chemical weapons is that producing biological or nuclear weapons is more technologically demanding and therefore not within the capabilities of some of the potential aggressors.
There are 188 countries which have joined the Chemical Weapons Convention which means they have agreed not to develop, produce, stockpile or use chemical weapons. However, crucially, there are a number of key countries, mainly in the Middle East, which have not signed up to this treaty.
This means that one of the most volatile regions in the world could witness a rogue nation or terrorists acquiring access to these chemical weapons, which would create a very real threat to the rest of us.
Be prepared
The government has issued a guide to dealing with chemical threats and you need to be aware that these poisonous vapors, liquids or solids have a number of different effects on us, depending on which chemical is involved.
Some chemical agents can be totally odorless or tasteless and they can either affect you immediately or you might suffer a delayed effect which could take anything up to 48 hours to deliver their potentially lethal consequences.
If you have advance warning that an attack is imminent, ensure you have a supply of duct tape and plastic for doors, windows and vents as well as some scissors, so that you can create an emergency sealed shelter with some pre-measured plastic sheeting for each opening.
You should look to choose an internal room for your shelter, preferably one that is on the highest level of the house and without windows.
Cyber attacks
Congress was recently informed by U.S intelligence agencies that cyber attacks pose a greater threat to our national security than terrorism.
The report stated that intelligence had been gathered which showed that Russia, China and North Korea were the leading threats in this regard and that Russia had even set up a cyber command to carry out these attacks.
Whilst a cyber attack might not be targeted directly at you, there is a strong chance that a cyber attack on the global financial system would have far-reaching implications for many of us and could easily create a sense of widespread panic that could lead to civil unrest and a sharp rise in property crime and attacks.
Be prepared
Having a survivalists emergency supply kit will help to get through a food and resources crisis brought about by the collapse of our cyber network.
Natural disasters
Whether you consider yourself to be a prepper or a survivalist might actually be defined by your view on how to cope with a natural disaster. Many preppers like to network with other like-minded people in order to share tips and learn skills that will be useful if and when a natural disaster strikes in your area.
Learning about canning and how to build a fallout shelter are things that will help you to survive a natural disaster and cope in an emergency situation such as as an earthquake or tornado.
Be prepared
In the event of an earthquake, your primary course of action should be to crawl under a sturdy table and cover your head with your arms. If you subsequently become trapped under some debris, cover your mouth with a cloth or shirt and try to attract attention when you hear someone close by tapping against an object like a pipe. Don’t be tempted to shout out, as this will put you at risk for inhaling dangerous levels of dust which could then get into your lungs and cause breathing problems.
If there is a tornado in your area try to get shelter inside and head for the basement, if you have one. If you are outside when the tornado strikes, lie down flat in a ditch in the ground and cover your head with your hands.
If you hear a flash-flood warning, move to higher ground as soon as possible and keep away from downed power lines as they present a serious danger of electrocution.
Zombie invasion
Zombie apocalypse scenarios are very popular at the moment and the fact that there are countless movies that feature this situation only contributes to the conversation on doomsday scenarios of this nature.
Some preppers who make reference to zombies in forums use the term as a metaphor that covers any number of disaster situations and not actually a zombie invasion.
Having said that, there are a number of plausible scientific explanations that make the prospect of a zombie-like situation realistic.
Apparently half of the human population is infected with toxoplasmosis, a parasite which has the ability to turn its victims into mindless zombie-like slaves, or neurotoxins, which slow your body functions down to the point where you are almost dead.
Whether you believe in the plausibility of this particular doomsday scenario or are genuinely concerned about more tangible threats to the future of America or the world as we know it, such as nuclear war and extreme natural disasters, are you prepared?
The Alpha Male, the real man, a man’s man, a warrior, a stand-up guy. It doesn’t matter what you call him, he’s a leader, the guy others look to for motivation, inspiration, and often with a hint of jealousy. He’s the man women want, without the intention of being, the center of attention.
He’s the guy, the man.
Here’s 25 characteristics that make a man, The Alpha Male
1. The alpha male is persistent. There’s no quit in this man. He’s the tortose not the hare. He’s the last man standing.
2. The alpha male can defend himself and his family. He can handle himself with his fists, to put it another way.
3. The alpha male is in peak physical shape. He’s strong and athletic as well as aesthetically pleasing to the opposite sex.
4. The alpha male is courageous. He doesn’t lack fear, rather, he accepts that it exists and faces it at every opportunity.
5. The alpha male can entertain. He has a sense of humor and can have a group of people hanging on his every word – he’s a good story teller.
6. The alpha male has stories to tell. He’s lived – and is living– a unique life. He’s made mistakes, but he’s able to find humor in them. He’s had adventures that everyone wants to hear about.
7. The alpha male can laugh at himself. This is an over-looked characteristic of an alpha male, but a necessary one. You can’t make fun of the alpha male because he’ll join in, no one can make fun of him better than he can.
8. The alpha male is humble. Some of this comes from his ability to laugh at himself. No matter what he accomplishes, his head will never balloon, and if it does, he has the ware-with-all to come back down to earth before it gets out of hand.
9. The alpha male is learned, educated. A degree isn’t a prerequisite, but a thirst for knowledge is. He wants to learn, and he does. This helps him relate to people from every social and economic standing. He can converse intelligently with the business man and the preacher. The history buff and the sports nut.
10. The alpha male is a man’s man. He’s a hard guy not to like or want to have a beer with. He’s tough, often quiet, composed, but can joke and shoot the shit with anyone.
11. The alpha male knows the value of every word, he doesn’t talk simply to hear the sound of his own voice. His words are chosen carefully. He respects their power. Whether he’s writing or speaking, he doesn’t speak to be hear, he speaks when he has something of value to say. He’s never the loudest one in the room.
12. The alpha male has a purpose. This may be his most defining trait. Where many wander through life trying to find their Self, the alpha male is too busy creating his Self. Every day he does something to bring himself closer to his goal. He isn’t a wanderer, he’s going places; it’s so obvious that everyone around him can see it.
13. The alpha male is a hard worker. He knows that nothing great is accomplished without hard work and a definite purpose.
14. The alpha male is a warrior not a worrier. He understands that certain things aren’t under his control. He does everything he can to control what he can, but doesn’t worry about what he can’t. He’s not worried about tomorrow, he’s too busy working for today.
15. The alpha male doesn’t pick a fight,but he ends it if he’s in one. He isn’t a bully. He isn’t an emotional wreck that looks for a fight at every corner. But, if the logical thing to do is to fight because the situation calls for it, he will. He’ll also never hit a man when he’s down. He isn’t fighting to destroy, but to defend.
16. The alpha male has style. He takes pride in how he looks and people respect him for that. He also knows how to dress like a man. You’d never call the alpha male a metrosexual.
17. The alpha male knows who he is, his values govern his life. He doesn’t stray from these values, in fact he stands up for them. Even when he stands alone in what he believes is right, he digs his heels in and fights.
18. The alpha male knows how to treat a lady. He respects women, often because he’s had some great one’s in his life. He’s chivalrous. He helps his lady at every chance. He helps her reach her dreams, all-the-while moving closer to attaining his own.
19. The alpha male isn’t a sucker. He isn’t a clinger. He doesn’t go out of his way to please everyone because that’s a futile endeavor. He won’t let a woman run his life. He’s his own man. Though he worships the ground his lady walks on, he knows how to pick ’em. He won’t be with a control-freak or a jealous woman. He has the social intelligence to see that storm before it peeks it’s nasty little head.
20. The alpha male is a man of value. “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.” Einstein knew that success is reached if you’re valuable to others. The alpha male is a man of value and values. He makes the lives of others better by being a part of them.
21. The alpha male helps others, he’s generous. He has his purpose, but he knows that life isn’t merely about accomplishments, but about leaving a legacy. That legacy is how he made others feel, and how he helps others accomplish their dreams.
22. The alpha male is a leader who leads by example. He doesn’t tell people how to live, but lives in the manner he sees as best to live.
23. Alpha males throughout history, [Achilles, William Wallace, and Napoleon], saw opportunity where others saw failure. The alpha male will fail, but he won’t see failure as the end. He’s sees it as a necessary part of the experience, a stepping-stone. Knowing this allows him to try things others won’t, and to work harder when others usually quit.
24. The alpha male is stubborn. When he starts something he’s passionate about, no one can stop him or pull back on the reigns. He’s in it until the end. He’s also open-minded and willing to listen to other points of view. He knows he’s flawed and stubborn, so he gives way and learns from people who are better than him.
25. The alpha male doesn’t try to be an alpha male. That’s where so many fail. He is interested in life, in living. He’s fascinated by the world around him, in becoming the best man he can possibly become. He genuinely cares about people. He passionately works hard. He’s excited by life, by the opportunity that each day presents. He’s genuine in every facet of who he is. Each of the characteristics are possessed by him naturally, or will be as he grows as a man. Bred from curiosity, a genuine kindness, and a warrior’s heart, he is who he is, and all others follow him wherever he will lead them.
For Men
Playlist on YouTube
The Way of The Superior Man Perhaps now more than at any time, men of all ages still “tussle with the challenges of women, work, and sexual desire.” In this unabridged audiobook of the classic guide to masculine spirituality, David Deida encourages men and women to lean into the conversation and offer their most valuable assets to the world – their authentic heart and depth of presence.
More relevant than ever,The Way of the Superior Manoffers a view of a more conscious and embodied masculinity. “It is time to evolve beyond the macho jerk ideal, all spine and no heart”, writes Deida. “It is also time to evolve beyond the sensitive and caring wimp ideal, all heart and no spine.”
Including a new preface written in celebration of the book’s 20th anniversary,The Way of the Superior Manpresents the next generation of with the opportunity to grapple with fear, cultivate trust in the moment, and put forth the best versions of themselves in an ever-changing world.
If you were murdered today, there’s only a 60% chance of police catching the person who did it. That number drops to 3% if you’re raped. 50 years ago, that number was much higher. What happened?
Despite overwhelming disapproval from the public, the war on drugs wages on and we are witnessing the inevitable materialization of a fascist police state before us.
The irony here is that no matter how much money the state steals from us to fund themselves, and no matter how many tanks or AR-15s they acquire, they are solving far fewer crimes than before.
Police aren’t getting any closer to “winning” this ridiculous and immoral war on drugs either.
So, why aren’t police solving crimes?
The answer to that question can be found by looking at where police allocate much of their time and resources.
Civil asset forfeiture pays. Busting low-level drug dealers by the dozen and confiscating their drugs, guns, cars, houses, and money pays. Writing tickets for victimless crime pays. Pulling you over for window tint, seat belts, arbitrary traveling speeds, and expired license plates; these are the things that pay, not solving crimes.
In criminal justice, clearance rates are used as a measure of crimes solved by the police. The clearance rate is calculated by dividing the number of crimes that are “cleared” (a charge being laid) by the total number of crimes recorded.
In the United States, the murder clearance rate in 1965 was more than 90 percent. Since the inception of the war on drugs, the murder clearance rate has plummetted to an average of less than 65 percent per year.
Despite the near complete erosion of the constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure, the clearance rate for murder continued its free fall. This highlights the fact that no matter how many rights are given up or freedoms diminished, police cannot guarantee your safety.
It’s not just murders that police fail to investigate, it’s rapes too.
According to the Department of Justice, there are currently over 400,000 untested rape kits collecting dust in police evidence rooms nationwide, and many other estimates suggest that this number could be as high as one million.
As a result of this horrific negligence, roughly 3% of rape cases in America are actually solved. This is in spite of the fact that many rape kits have a high chance of leading to an arrest since most rapists are career criminals who have their DNA on file.
In some cases, the victims even know who their attackers were, but they can not prosecute these criminals because the evidence has yet to be processed by police.
Arresting rapists and murderers simply falls short in the two areas police are worried about; revenue collection and keeping their inflated drug war budgets flowing.
It’s not that police are incapable of solving these crimes either; they’re just not interested in doing so.
“Take for example, homicides of police officers in the course of their duty,” University of Maryland criminologist Charles Wellfordpoints out. On paper, they’re the kind of homicide that’s hardest to solve — “they’re frequently done in communities that generally have low clearance rates … they’re stranger-to-stranger homicides, they [have] high potential of retaliation [for] witnesses.” And yet, Wellford says, they’re almost always cleared.
This is why people don’t like the police.
This lack of solving crimes coupled with the increase in shakedowns of non-violent citizens has created a rift between the rest of society and police.
“One of the consequences of the war on drugs is people have stopped looking at police as their protectors and more see them as their potential persecutors,” explains Sean Dunagan, Former DEA Senior Intelligence Specialist.
The war on drugs has driven a wedge between citizens and police. If you keep locking up millions of people for victimless crimes, eventually you’ll effect enough lives to vastly tarnish your reputation.
“The police department basically becomes the “other” to the community. Once you have that breakdown, then information stops flowing, so you don’t learn about crimes. And the only crime you become interested in is the one you can solve, which is locking up people up for using drugs,” says Ed Burns, Former Baltimore Narcotics and Homicide Detective.
Locking up drug users has proven to be quite the profitable venture.
It is much easier to walk out on the street corner and shakedown a teenager who may have an illegal plant in his pocket than it is to examine the evidence in a rape or murder case. The so-called “Private” Prisons know this and have subsequently found their niche in this immoral war on drugs.
The term Private Prison is a farce from the get-go.
A truly Private prison would not be solely funded by taxpayer dollars. These Private prisons are nothing more than a fascist mixture of state and corporate, completely dependent upon the extortion factor of the state, i.e., taxation, as a means of their corporate sustenance.
A truly Private prison would have a negative incentive to boost its population for the simple fact that it is particularly expensive to house inmates. On the contrary, these fascist, or more aptly, corporatist prisons contractually require occupancy rates of 95%-100%.
The requirement for a 95% occupancy rate creates a de facto demand for criminals. Think about that for a second; a need or demand for people to commit crimes is created by this corporatist arrangement. The implications associated with demanding people commit crimes are horrifying.
Creating a completely immoral demand for “criminals” leads to the situation in which we find ourselves today. People, who are otherwise entirely innocent, are labeled as criminals for their personal choices and thrown in cages. We are now witnessing a vicious cycle between law enforcement, who must create and arrest criminals, and the corporatist prison system which constantly demands more prisoners.
The police and prison corporations know that without the war on drugs, this windfall of money, cars, and houses — ceases to exist.
If you want to know who profits from ruining lives and throwing marijuana users in cages, we need only look at who bribes (also known as lobbies) the politicians to keep the war on drugs alive.
Below is a list of the top five industries who need you locked in a cage for possessing a plant in order to ensure their job security.
Police Unions: Coming in as the number one contributor to politicians for their votes to lock you in a cage for a plant are the police themselves. They risk taking massive pay cuts and losing all their expensive militarized toys without the war on drugs.
Private Prison Corporations: No surprise here. The corporatist prison lobby is constantly pushing for stricter laws to keep their stream of tax dollars flowing.
Pharmaceutical Corporations: The hypocrisy of marijuana remaining a Schedule 1 drug, “No Medical Use Whatsoever,” seems criminal when considering that pharmaceutical companies reproduce a chemical version of THC and are able to market and sell it as such. Ever hear of Marinol? Big pharma simply uses the force of the state to legislate out their competition; which happens to be nature.
Prison Guard Unions: The prison guard unions are another group, so scared of losing their jobs, that they would rather see thousands of non-violent and morally innocent people thrown into cages, than look for another job.
What does it say about a society who’s resolute in enacting violence against their fellow human so they can have a job to go to in the morning?
The person who wants to ingest a substance for medical or recreational reasons is not the criminal. However, the person that would kidnap, cage, or kill someone because they have a different lifestyle is a villain on many fronts.
When does this vicious cycle end?
The good news is, that the drug war’s days are numbered. Evidence of this is everywhere. States are defying the federal government and refusing to lock people in cages for marijuana. Colorado and Washington state served as a catalyst in a seemingly exponential awakening to the government’s immoral war.
Following suit were Oregon, D.C., and Alaska. Medical marijuana initiatives are becoming a constant part of legislative debates nationwide. We’ve even seen bills that would not only completely legalize marijuana, but unregulate it entirely, like corn.
As more and more states refuse to kidnap and cage marijuana users, the drug war will continue to implode. We must be resilient in this fight.
If doing drugs bothers you, don’t do drugs. When you transition from holding an opinion to using government violence to enforce your personal preference, you become the bad guy.
Palm Beach County, Florida – Journalists at the DC Post were looking through message boards that are frequented by law enforcement officers, when they found a post where one officer was causally talking about planting evidence on “mouthy drivers” and “street lawyers.”
The Post then contacted the officer and conducted an anonymous interview with him where he revealed his disturbing perspective.
The officer revealed the illegal and unethical actions that he is proud of taking on the job. The DC Post has also said that they have verified the officer’s position with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, and they have verified many of the claims that he has made.
The original post was titled “Tricks of the trade – let’s exchange!” and featured the following message:
“I have a method for getting people off the street that should not be there. Mouthy drivers, street lawyers, assholes and just anyone else trying to make my job difficult. Under my floor mat, I keep a small plastic dime baggie with Cocaine in residue. Since it’s just residue, if it is ever found during a search of my car like during an inspection, it’s easy enough to explain. It must have stuck to my foot while walking through San Castle. Anyways, no one’s going to question an empty baggie. The residue is the key because you can fully charge some asshole with possession of cocaine, heroin, or whatever just with the residue. How to get it done? “I asked Mr. DOE for his identification. And he pulled out his wallet, I observed a small plastic baggie fall out of his pocket…” You get the idea. easy, right? Best part is, those baggies can be found lots of places so you can always be ready. Don’t forget to wipe the baggie on the person’s skin after you arrest them because you want their DNA on the bag if they say you planted it or fight it in court.”
Other officers on the board responded by sharing similar stories about how they falsely arrest people who don’t adequately bow to their authority.
Later in the interview, when the officer was asked if planting evidence happened regularly within his department, he responded by saying,
“Um, yes it does, on a regular basis. Probably every day in my shift. I work nights on the Road Patrol in a rough, um, mostly black neighborhood. Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.
Then straight from the horses mouth, the officer said that this crooked behavior was actually encouraged by the drug war. Continuing his discussion about planting evidence, the officer said,
“Yes, all the time. It is something I see a lot of, whether it was from deputies, supervisors or undercovers and even investigators. It’s almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it, they’re going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway; nothing is going to happen to them anyway. One of the consequences of the war on drugs is that police officers are pressured to make large numbers of arrests, and it’s easy for some of the less honest cops to plant evidence on innocent people. The drug war inevitably leads to crooked policing — and quotas further incentivize such practices. It doesn’t help that your higherups all did the same thing when they were on the road. It’s like a neverending cycle. Like how molested children accept that as okay behavior and begin molesting children themselves.”
When asked if he would get in trouble with the police department for framing people, the officer laughed and said that this type of behavior was actually encouraged.
“Our top boss, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, supports this behavior and has for his entire career. As with anything, it depends on who you know in our agency. Last year, we had three deputies on the TAC unit, Kevin Drummond and Jarrod Foster, get caught falsifying information for a warrant. They got a pat on the back for a job well done. Just recently, we had a deputy, I think his name was Booth. He was caught completely lying on a car crash. Back a few more years, our Sheriff was involved a massive coverup of the death of two black deputies. He hid the report for years. This is only the beginning. The Sheriff has been involved in falsification of documents and his underling, Chief Deputy Michael Gauger, has been personally involved in an overtime scandal to steal money from the Sheriff’s Office. Does our Sheriff know about this behavior? Of course he does. We have even had a judge outright accuse my agency of committing fraud upon the court in a public hearing. She was one of the ones who saw through all the lying and covering up our department does to get away with the internal crime committed by deputies on a regular basis,” he said.
Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office is no special police department, and this officer is not just a bad apple. The problems that are discussed in this interview are systematic, and they occur in every town across the country.
Just this week, we exposed a police department in Missouri whose officers were forced to make arrests or faced losing their job. This leads to otherwise innocent people being charged on a regular basis.
Also this week, the Free Thought Project conducted a report to show what happens to cops who try to expose this corruption. Several officers within the Chicago police department were threatened with “going home in a casket” for exposing this same vile practice within their ranks. via FreeThoughtProject
The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.
The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.
Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:
Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
Shackling for prolonged periods.
Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.
At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.
Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.
“Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian on Friday. “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.”
The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown.
Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.
“It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.
Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution.
“This Homan Square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”
Much remains hidden about Homan Square. The Chicago police department did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the facility. But after the Guardian published this story, the department provided a statement insisting, without specifics, that there is nothing untoward taking place at what it called the “sensitive” location, home to undercover units.
“CPD [Chicago police department] abides by all laws, rules and guidelines pertaining to any interviews of suspects or witnesses, at Homan Square or any other CPD facility. If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them. It also houses CPD’s Evidence Recovered Property Section, where the public is able to claim inventoried property,” the statement said, something numerous attorneys and one Homan Square arrestee have denied.
“There are always records of anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is not any different at Homan Square,” it continued.
The Chicago police statement did not address how long into an arrest or detention those records are generated or their availability to the public. A department spokesperson did not respond to a detailed request for clarification.
When a Guardian reporter arrived at the warehouse on Friday, a man at the gatehouse outside refused any entrance and would not answer questions. “This is a secure facility. You’re not even supposed to be standing here,” said the man, who refused to give his name.
A former Chicago police superintendent and a more recently retired detective, both of whom have been inside Homan Square in the last few years in a post-police capacity, said the police department did not operate out of the warehouse until the late 1990s.
But in detailing episodes involving their clients over the past several years, lawyers described mad scrambles that led to the closed doors of Homan Square, a place most had never heard of previously. The facility was even unknown to Rob Warden, the founder of Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, until the Guardian informed him of the allegations of clients who vanish into inherently coercive police custody.
“They just disappear,” said Anthony Hill, a criminal defense attorney, “until they show up at a district for charging or are just released back out on the street.”
‘They were held incommunicado for much longer than I think should be permitted in this country – anywhere – but particularly given the strong constitutional rights afforded to people who are being charged with crimes,” said Sarah Gelsomino, the lawyer for Brian Jacob Church. Photograph: Phil Batta/Guardian
Jacob Church learned about Homan Square the hard way. On May 16 2012, he and 11 others were taken there after police infiltrated their protest against the Nato summit. Church says officers cuffed him to a bench for an estimated 17 hours, intermittently interrogating him without reading his Miranda rights to remain silent. It would take another three hours – and an unusual lawyer visit through a wire cage – before he was finally charged with terrorism-related offenses at the nearby 11th district station, where he was made to sign papers, fingerprinted and photographed.
In preparation for the Nato protest, Church, who is from Florida, had written a phone number for the National Lawyers Guild on his arm as a precautionary measure. Once taken to Homan Square, Church asked explicitly to call his lawyers, and said he was denied.
“Essentially, I wasn’t allowed to make any contact with anybody,” Church told the Guardian, in contradiction of a police guidance on permitting phone calls and legal counsel to arrestees.
Church’s left wrist was cuffed to a bar behind a bench in windowless cinderblock cell, with his ankles cuffed together. He remained in those restraints for about 17 hours.
“I had essentially figured, ‘All right, well, they disappeared us and so we’re probably never going to see the light of day again,’” Church said.
The Disappeared
Brian Church, Jared Chase and Brent Vincent Betterly, known as the ‘Nato Three’
Though the raid attracted major media attention, a team of attorneys could not find Church through 12 hours of “active searching”, Sarah Gelsomino, Church’s lawyer, recalled. No booking record existed. Only after she and others made a “major stink” with contacts in the offices of the corporation counsel and Mayor Rahm Emanuel did they even learn about Homan Square.
They sent another attorney to the facility, where he ultimately gained entry, and talked to Church through a floor-to-ceiling chain-link metal cage. Finally, hours later, police took Church and his two co-defendants to a nearby police station for booking.
After serving two and a half years in prison, Church is currently on parole after he and his co-defendants were found not guilty in 2014 of terrorism-related offenses but guilty of lesser charges of possessing an incendiary device and the misdemeanor of “mob action”.
It’s almost like they throw a black bag over your head and make you disappear for a day or two
-Brian Jacob Church
The access that Nato Three attorneys received to Homan Square was an exception to the rule, even if Jacob Church’s experience there was not.
Three attorneys interviewed by the Guardian report being personally turned away from Homan Square between 2009 and 2013 without being allowed access to their clients. Two more lawyers who hadn’t been physically denied described it as a place where police withheld information about their clients’ whereabouts. Church was the only person who had been detained at the facility who agreed to talk with the Guardian: their lawyers say others fear police retaliation.
One man in January 2013 had his name changed in the Chicago central bookings database and then taken to Homan Square without a record of his transfer being kept, according to Eliza Solowiej of Chicago’s First Defense Legal Aid. (The man, the Guardian understands, wishes to be anonymous; his current attorney declined to confirm Solowiej’s account.) She found out where he was after he was taken to the hospital with a head injury.
“He said that the officers caused his head injuries in an interrogation room at Homan Square. I had been looking for him for six to eight hours, and every department member I talked to said they had never heard of him,” Solowiej said. “He sent me a phone pic of his head injuries because I had seen him in a police station right before he was transferred to Homan Square without any.”
Bartmes, another Chicago attorney, said that in September 2013 she got a call from a mother worried that her 15-year-old son had been picked up by police before dawn. A sympathetic sergeant followed up with the mother to say her son was being questioned at Homan Square in connection to a shooting and would be released soon. When hours passed, Bartmes traveled to Homan Square, only to be refused entry for nearly an hour.
An officer told her, “Well, you can’t just stand here taking notes, this is a secure facility, there are undercover officers, and you’re making people very nervous,” Bartmes recalled. Told to leave, she said she would return in an hour if the boy was not released. He was home, and not charged, after “12, maybe 13” hours in custody.
On February 2, 2013, John Hubbard was taken to Homan Square. Hubbard never walked out. The Chicago Tribune reported that the 44-year old was found “unresponsive inside an interview room”, and pronounced dead. After publication, the Cook County medical examiner told the Guardian that the cause of death was determined to be heroin intoxication.
Homan Square is hardly concerned exclusively with terrorism. Several special units operate outside of it, including the anti-gang and anti-drug forces. If police “want money, guns, drugs”, or information on the flow of any of them onto Chicago’s streets, “they bring them there and use it as a place of interrogation off the books,” Hill said.
‘The real danger in allowing practices like Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,’ criminologist Tracy Siska told the Guardian. Photograph: Chandler West/Guardian
A former Chicago detective and current private investigator, Bill Dorsch, said he had not heard of the police abuses described by Church and lawyers for other suspects who had been taken to Homan Square. He has been permitted access to the facility to visit one of its main features, an evidence locker for the police department. (“I just showed my retirement star and passed through,” Dorsch said.)
Transferring detainees through police custody to deny them access to legal counsel, would be “a career-ender,” Dorsch said. “To move just for the purpose of hiding them, I can’t see that happening,” he told the Guardian.
Richard Brzeczek, Chicago’s police superintendent from 1980 to 1983, who also said he had no first-hand knowledge of abuses at Homan Square, said it was “never justified” to deny access to attorneys.
“Homan Square should be on the same list as every other facility where you can call central booking and say: ‘Can you tell me if this person is in custody and where,’” Brzeczek said.
“If you’re going to be doing this, then you have to include Homan Square on the list of facilities that prisoners are taken into and a record made. It can’t be an exempt facility.”
Indeed, Chicago police guidelines appear to ban the sorts of practices Church and the lawyers said occur at Homan Square.
A directive titled “Processing Persons Under Department Control” instructs that “investigation or interrogation of an arrestee will not delay the booking process,” and arrestees must be allowed “a reasonable number of telephone calls” to attorneys swiftly “after their arrival at the first place of custody.” Another directive, “Arrestee and In-Custody Communications,” says police supervisors must “allow visitation by attorneys.”
Attorney Scott Finger said that the Chicago police tightened the latter directive in 2012 after quiet complaints from lawyers about their lack of access to Homan Square. Without those changes, Church’s attorneys might not have gained entry at all. But that tightening – about a week before Church’s arrest – did not prevent Church’s prolonged detention without a lawyer, nor the later cases where lawyers were unable to enter.
The combination of holding clients for long periods, while concealing their whereabouts and denying access to a lawyer, struck legal experts as a throwback to the worst excesses of Chicago police abuse, with a post-9/11 feel to it.
On a smaller scale, Homan Square is “analogous to the CIA’s black sites,” said Andrea Lyon, a former Chicago public defender and current dean of Valparaiso University Law School. When she practiced law in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, she said, “police used the term ‘shadow site’” to refer to the quasi-disappearances now in place at Homan Square.
I’ve never known any kind of organized, secret place where they go and hold somebody before booking for hours and hours
James Trainum, former detective, Washington DC
“Back when I first started working on torture cases and started representing criminal defendants in the early 1970s, my clients often told me they’d been taken from one police station to another before ending up at Area 2 where they were tortured,” said Taylor, the civil-rights lawyer most associated with pursuing the notoriously abusive Area 2 police commander Jon Burge. “And in that way the police prevent their family and lawyers from seeing them until they could coerce, through torture or other means, confessions from them.”
Police often have off-site facilities to have private conversations with their informants. But a retired Washington DC homicide detective, James Trainum, could not think of another circumstance nationwide where police held people incommunicado for extended periods.
“I’ve never known any kind of organized, secret place where they go and just hold somebody before booking for hours and hours and hours. That scares the hell out of me that that even exists or might exist,” said Trainum, who now studies national policing issues, to include interrogations, for the Innocence Project and the Constitution Project.
Regardless of departmental regulations, police frequently deny or elide access to lawyers even at regular police precincts, said Solowiej of First Defense Legal Aid. But she said the outright denial was exacerbated at Chicago’s secretive interrogation and holding facility: “It’s very, very rare for anyone to experience their constitutional rights in Chicago police custody, and even more so at Homan Square,” Solowiej said.
Church said that one of his more striking memories of Homan Square was the “big, big vehicles” police had inside the complex that “look like very large MRAPs that they use in the Middle East.”
Cook County, home of Chicago, has received some 1,700 pieces of military equipment from a much-criticized Pentagon program transferring military gear to local police. It includes a Humvee, according to a local ABC News report.
Tracy Siska, a criminologist and civil-rights activist with the Chicago Justice Project, said that Homan Square, as well as the unrelated case of ex-Guantánamo interrogator and retired Chicago detective Richard Zuley, showed the lines blurring between domestic law enforcement and overseas military operations.
“The real danger in allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,” Siska said.
“They creep into domestic law enforcement, either with weaponry like with the militarization of police, or interrogation practices. That’s how we ended up with a black site in Chicago.”
When revolutionary rap duo Dead Prez released their classic 2000 opening salvo, Let’s Get Free, the outspoken hip-hop tandem of stic.man and M-1 were lauded and criticized for their two-fisted rebuke of systematic racism in all its forms. Nearly two decades later, Dead Prez is still fighting the good fight: stic is set to release the book The Art of War: Hip-Hop and Social Activism later this year, and M just dropped the track “Sacrifice” in celebration of the prison release of Black Liberation Army member Sekou Odinga. In the polarizing aftermath of the Ferguson, Missouri, grand jury’s decision to not indict a police officer for killing unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown, OZY reached out to the pair to hear their views on a community and city on fire.
“What I think is even more constructive … is an economic strike aimed at some of the pressure points of the system.”
— stic.man
We here at the decryptedmatrix love these guys and their candor and message. We can only hope for more artists of all kinds to embrace the chance to speak truth to those who will listen to them. Model artists like this are what we need more of to inspire the next generation and to create content that we all enjoy. Without more guys like Dead Prez we fear that music industry will continue to be corrupted by the same corporate influences that have so far shaped what is on the radio and the top of the billboard charts.
For-profit prisons have created a “neo-slavery” in the US, according to award-winning journalist Chris Hedges. Inmates work eight hours per day for major corporations such as Chevron, Motorola, Nordstrom’s and Target, yet only have the possibility of making up $1.25 an hour. In addition, companies that provide services like phone calls overcharge prisoners on even the most basic services, making hundreds of millions in profits annually. RT’s Ben Swann speaks to Hedges, who explains how this shadowy system came into existence. This system is now even expanding around the world. First by crossing the boarder down south to make more Neo-Slavery prisons in Mexico and soon expanding this same Neo-Slavery prison system into Canada, Europe and the rest of the world if we are not vigilant and careful of what kind of Neo-Slavery these Slave masters will try to force onto all of us.
Born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin Luther King Jr. His grandfather began the family’s long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.
In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.
In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, “l Have a Dream”, he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.
At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.
On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.
Murder Conspiracy
After four weeks of testimony and over 70 witnesses in a civil trial in Memphis, Tennessee, twelve jurors reached a unanimous verdict on December 8, 1999 after about an hour of deliberations that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.In a press statement held the following day in Atlanta, Mrs. Coretta Scott King welcomed the verdict, saying ,
“There is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. And the civil court’s unanimous verdict has validated our belief. I wholeheartedly applaud the verdict of the jury and I feel that justice has been well served in their deliberations. This verdict is not only a great victory for my family, but also a great victory for America. It is a great victory for truth itself. It is important to know that this was a SWIFT verdict, delivered after about an hour of jury deliberation. The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence that was presented during the trial that, in addition to Mr. Jowers, the conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame. I want to make it clear that my family has no interest in retribution. Instead, our sole concern has been that the full truth of the assassination has been revealed and adjudicated in a court of law… My husband once said, “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” To-day, almost 32 years after my husband and the father of my four children was assassinated, I feel that the jury’s verdict clearly affirms this principle. With this faith, we can begin the 21st century and the new millennium with a new spirit of hope and healing.”
KING FAMILY STATEMENT ON MEDIA REQUESTS REGARDING THE MEMPHIS VERDICT
The King family stands firmly behind the civil trial verdict reached by twelve jurors in the Memphis, Tennessee courtroom on December 8, 1999.
An excerpt from remarks made by Mr. Dexter Scott King, Chairman, President, and CEO of The King Center, during the December 9, 1999 press conference regarding the verdict that may be used in support of this family decision:
“We can say that because of the evidence and information obtained in Memphis we believe that this case is over. This is a period in the chapter. We constantly hear reports, which trouble me, that this verdict creates more questions than answers. That is totally false. Anyone who sat in on almost four weeks of testimony, with over seventy witnesses, credible witnesses I might add, from several judges to other very credible witnesses, would know that the truth is here.”
“The question now is, “What will you do with that?” We as a family have done our part. We have carried this mantle for as long as we can carry it. We know what happened. It is on public record. The transcripts will be available; we will make them available on the Web at some point. Any serious researcher who wants to know what happened can find out.”
The King family feels that the jury’s verdict, the transcripts of the conspiracy trial, and the transcripts of the King family’s press conference following the trial — all of which can be found on The King Center’s website — include everything that that family members have to say about the assassination.
Therefore, the King family shares the conviction that there is nothing more to add to their comments on record and will respectfully decline all further requests for comment.
The United Nations says Animals Eat Psychoactive Plants the drug war’s rationale is to build “a drug-free world — we can do it!” U.S. government officials agree, stressing that “there is no such thing as recreational drug use.” So this isn’t a war to stop addiction, like that in my family, or teenage drug use. It is a war to stop drug use among all humans, everywhere. All these prohibited chemicals need to be rounded up and removed from the earth. That is what we are fighting for.
I began to see this goal differently after I learned the story of the drunk elephants, the stoned water buffalo, and the grieving mongoose. They were all taught to me by a remarkable scientist in Los Angeles named Professor Ronald K. Siegel.
***
The tropical storm in Hawaii had reduced the mongoose’s home to a mess of mud, and lying there, amid the dirt and the water, was the mongoose’s mate — dead. Professor Siegel, a silver-haired official adviser to two U.S. presidents and to the World Health Organization, was watching this scene. The mongoose found the corpse, and it made a decision: it wanted to get out of its mind.
Two months before, the professor had planted a powerful hallucinogen called silver morning glory in the pen. The mongooses had all tried it, but they didn’t seem to like it: they stumbled around disoriented for a few hours and had stayed away from it ever since. But not now. Stricken with grief, the mongoose began to chew. Before long, it had tuned in and dropped out.
It turns out this wasn’t a freak occurrence in the animal kingdom. It is routine. As a young scientific researcher, Siegel had been confidently toldby his supervisor that humans were the only species that seek out drugs to use for their own pleasure. But Siegel had seen cats lunging at catnip — which, he knew, contains chemicals that mimic the pheromones in a male tomcat’s pee —so, he wondered, could his supervisor really be right? Given the number of species in the world, aren’t there others who want to get high, or stoned, or drunk?
This question set him on a path that would take twenty-five years of his life, studying the drug-taking habits of animals from the mongooses of Hawaii to the elephants of South Africa to the grasshoppers of Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia. It was such an implausible mission that in one marijuana field in Hawaii, he was taken hostage by the local drug dealers, because when he told them he was there to see what happened when mongooses ate marijuana, they thought it was the worst police cover story they had ever heard.
What Ronald K. Siegel discovered seems strange at first. He explains in his book Intoxication:
After sampling the numbing nectar of certain orchids, bees drop to the ground in a temporary stupor, then weave back for more. Birds gorge themselves on inebriating berries, then fly with reckless abandon. Cats eagerly sniff aromatic “pleasure” plants, then play with imaginary objects. Cows that browse special range weeds will twitch, shake, and stumble back to the plants for more. Elephants purposely get drunk off fermented fruits. Snacks of “magic mushrooms” cause monkeys to sit with their heads in their hands in a posture reminiscent of Rodin’s Thinker. The pursuit of intoxication by animals seems as purposeless as it is passionate. Many animals engage these plants, or their manufactured allies, despite the danger of toxic or poisonous effects.
Noah’s Ark, he found, would have looked a lot like London on a Saturday night. “In every country, in almost every class of animal,” Siegel explains, “I found examples of not only the accidental but the intentional use of drugs.” In West Bengal, a group of 150 elephants smashed their way into a warehouse and drank a massive amount of moonshine. They got so drunk they went on a rampage and killed five people, as well as demolishing seven concrete buildings. If you give hash to male mice, they become horny and seek out females — but then they find “they can barely crawl over the females, let alone mount them,” so after a little while they yawn and start licking their own penises.
Excerpted from Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Available from Amazon.
In Vietnam, the water buffalo have always shunned the local opium plants. They don’t like them. But when the American bombs started to fall all around them during the war, the buffalo left their normal grazing grounds, broke into the opium fields, and began to chew. They would then look a little dizzy and dulled. When they were traumatized, it seems, they wanted — like the mongoose, like us — to escape from their thoughts.
***
I kept returning to the UN pledge to build a drug-free world. There was one fact, above all others, that I kept placing next to it in my mind. It is a fact that seems at first glance both obvious and instinctively wrong. Only 10 percent of drug users have a problem with their substance. Some 90 percent of people who use a drug—the overwhelming majority—are not harmed by it. This figure comes not from a pro-legalization group, but from the United Nations Office on Drug Control, the global coordinator of the drug war. Even William Bennett, the most aggressive drug czar in U.S. history, admits: “Non-addicted users still comprise the vast bulk of our drug-involved population.”
This is hard to dispute, yet hard to absorb. If we think about people we know, it seems about right—only a small minority of my friends who drink become alcoholics, and only a small minority of the people I know who use drugs on a night out have become addicts.
But if you think about how we are trained to think about drugs, this seems instinctively wrong, even dangerous. All we see in the public sphere are the casualties. The unharmed 90 percent use in private, and we rarely hear about it or see it. The damaged 10 percent, by contrast, are the only people we ever see using drugs out on the streets. The result is that the harmed 10 percent make up 100 percent of the official picture. It is as if our only picture of drinkers were a homeless person lying in a gutter necking neat gin. This impression is then reinforced with the full power of the state. For example, in 1995, the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted a massive scientific study of cocaine and its effects. They discovered that “experimental and occasional use are by far the most common types of use, and compulsive/dysfunctional [use] is far less common.” The U.S. government threatened to cut off funding to the WHO unless they suppressed the report. It has never been published; we know what it says only because it was leaked.
As I write this, I feel uncomfortable. The 10 percent who are harmed are most vivid to me—they are some of the people I love most. And there is another, more complex reason why I feel awkward writing about this. For anybody who suspects that we need to reform the drug laws, there is an easier argument to make, and a harder argument to make.
The easier argument is to say that we all agree drugs are bad — it’s just that drug prohibition is even worse. I have made this argument in debates in the past. Prohibition, I said, doesn’t stop the problem, it simply piles another series of disasters onto the already-existing disaster of drug use. In this argument, we are all antidrug. The only difference is between prohibitionists who believe the tragedy of drug use can be dealt with by more jail cells in California and more military jeeps on the streets of Juárez, and the reformers who believe the tragedy of drug use can be dealt by moving those funds to educate kids and treat addicts.
There’s a lot of truth in this argument. It is where my instincts lie. But — as I try to think through this problem — I have to admit it is only a partial truth.
Here, I think, is the harder, more honest argument. Some drug use causes horrible harm, as I know very well, but the overwhelming majority of people who use prohibited drugs do it because they get something good out of it — a fun night out dancing, the ability to meet a deadline, the chance of a good night’s sleep, or insights into parts of their brain they couldn’t get to on their own. For them, it’s a positive experience, one that makes their lives better. That’s why so many of them choose it. They are not suffering from false consciousness, or hubris. They don’t need to be stopped from harming themselves, because they are not harming themselves. As the American writer Nick Gillespie puts it: “Far from our drugs controlling us, by and large we control our drugs; as with alcohol, the primary motivation is to enjoy ourselves, not to destroy ourselves . . . There is such a thing as responsible drug use, and it is the norm, not the exception.”
So, although it is against my instincts, I realized I couldn’t give an honest account of drug use in this book if I talked only about the harm it causes. If I’m serious about this subject, I also have to look at how drug use is deeply widespread — and mostly positive.
***
Professor Siegel’s story of buzzing cows and tripping bees is, he believes, a story about us. We are an animal species. As soon as plants began to be eaten by animals for the first time — way back in prehistory, before the first human took his first steps — the plants evolved chemicals to protect themselves from being devoured and destroyed. But these chemicals could, it soon turned out, produce strange effects. In some cases, instead of poisoning the plant’s predators, they — quite by accident — altered their consciousness. This is when the pleasure of getting wasted enters history. All human children experience the impulse early on: it’s why when you were little you would spin around and around, or hold your breath to get a head rush. You knew it would make you sick, but your desire to change your consciousness a little — to experience a new and unfamiliar rush — outweighed your aversion to nausea.
There has never been a society in which humans didn’t serially seek out these sensations. High in the Andes in 2000 b.c., they were making pipes through which they smoked hallucinogenic herbs. Ovid said drug-induced ecstasy was a divine gift. The Chinese were cultivating opium by a.d. 700. Hallucinogens and chemicals caused by burning cannabis were found in clay pipe fragments from William Shakespeare’s house. George Washington insisted that American soldiers be given whiskey every day as part of their rations.
“The ubiquity of drug use is so striking,” the physician Andrew Weil concludes, that “it must represent a basic human appetite.” Professor Siegel claims the desire to alter our consciousness is “the fourth drive” in all human minds, alongside the desire to eat, drink, and have sex—and it is “biologically inevitable.” It provides us with moments of release and relief.
***
Thousands of people were streaming in to a ten-day festival in September where they were planning — after a long burst of hard work — to find some chemical release, relaxation, and revelry. They found drugs passed around the crowd freely, to anybody who wanted them. Everyone who took them soon felt an incredible surge of ecstasy. Then came the vivid, startling hallucinations. You suddenly felt, as one user put it, something that was “new, astonishing, irrational to rational cognition.”
Some people came back every year because they loved this experience so much. As the crowd thronged and yelled and sang, it became clear it was an extraordinary mix of human beings. There were farmers who had just finished their harvest, and some of the biggest celebrities around. Their names—over the years—included Sophocles, Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero.
The annual ritual in the Temple at Eleusis, eighteen kilometers northwest of Athens, was a drug party on a vast scale. It happened every year for two thousand years, and anybody who spoke the Greek language was free to come. Harry Anslinger said that drug use represents “nothing less than an assault on the foundations of Western civilization,” but here, at the actual foundations of Western civilization, drug use was ritualized and celebrated.
I first discovered this fact by reading the work of the British critic Stuart Walton in a brilliant book called Out of It, and then I followed up with some of his sources, which include the work of Professor R. Gordon Wasson, Professor Carl Ruck, and other writers.
Everyone who attended the Eleusinian mysteries was sworn to secrecy about what happened there, so our knowledge is based on scraps of information that were recorded in its final years, as it was being suppressed. We do know that a special cup containing a mysterious chemical brew of hallucinogens would be passed around the crowd, and a scientific study years later seemed to prove it contained a molecular relative of LSD taken from a fungus that infested cereal crops and caused hallucinations. The chemical contents of this cup were carefully guarded for the rest of the year. The drugs were legal – indeed, this drug use was arranged by public officials – and regulated. You could use them, but only in the designated temple for those ten days. One day in 415 b.c., a partygoing general named Alcibiades smuggled some of the mystery drug out and took it home for his friends to use at their parties. Walton writes: “Caught in possession with intent to supply, he was the first drug criminal.”
But while it was a crime away from the Temple and other confined spaces, it was a glory within it. According to these accounts, it was Studio 54 spliced with St. Peter’s Basilica – revelry with religious reverence.
They believed the drugs brought them closer to the gods, or even made it possible for them to become gods themselves. The classicist Dr. D.C.A.
Hillman wrote that the “founding fathers” of the Western world
were drug users, plain and simple: they grew the stuff, they sold the stuff, and more important, they used the stuff . . . The ancient world didn’t have a Nancy Reagan, it didn’t wage a billion-dollar drug war, it didn’t imprison people who used drugs, and it didn’t embrace sobriety as a virtue. It indulged . . . and from this world in which drugs were a universally accepted part of life sprang art, literature, science, and philosophy . . . The West would not have survived without these so-called junkies and drug dealers.
There was some political grumbling for years that women were behaving too freely during their trances, but this annual festival ended only when the drug party crashed into Christianity. The early Christians wanted there to be one route to ecstasy, and one route only – through prayer to their God. You shouldn’t feel anything that profound or pleasurable except in our ceremonies at our churches. The first tugs towards prohibition were about power, and purity of belief. If you are going to have one God and one Church, you need to stop experiences that make people feel that they can approach God on their own. It is no coincidence that when new drugs come along, humans often use religious words to describe them, like ecstasy. They are often competing for the same brain space – our sense of awe and joy.
So when the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and brought the Empire with him, the rituals at the Temple at Eleusis were doomed. They were branded a cult and shut down by force. The new Christianity would promote wine only in tiny sips. Intoxication had to be sparing. This “forcible repression by Christianity,” Walton explains, “represents the beginning of systematic repression of the intoxication impulse in the lives of Western citizens.”
Yet in every generation after, some humans would try to rebuild their own Temple at Eleusis—in their own minds, and wherever they could clear a space free of local Anslingers.
Harry Anslinger, it turns out, represented a trend running right back to the ancient world.
When Sigmund Freud first suggested that everybody has elaborate sexual fantasies, that it is as natural as breathing, he was dismissed as a pervert and lunatic. People wanted to believe that sexual fantasy was something that happened in other people – filthy people, dirty people. They took the parts of their subconscious that generated these wet dreams and daydreams and projected them onto somebody else, the depraved people Over There, who had to be stopped. Stuart Walton and the philosopher Terence McKenna both write that we are at this stage with our
equally universal desire to seek out altered mental states. McKenna explains: “We are discovering that human beings are creatures of chemical habit with the same horrified disbelief as when the Victorians discovered that humans are creatures of sexual fantasy and obsession.”
Just as we are rescuing the sex drive from our subconscious and from shame, so we need to take the intoxication drive out into the open where it can breathe. Stuart Walton calls for a whole new field of human knowledge called “intoxicology.” He writes: “Intoxication plays, or has played, a part in the lives of virtually everybody who has ever lived . . . To seek to deny it is not only futile; it is a dereliction of an entirely constitutive part of who we are.”
***
After twenty-five years of watching stoned mice, drunken elephants, and tripping mongooses, Ronald K. Siegel tells me he suspects he has learned something about this. “We’re not so different from the other animal life-forms on this planet,” he says.
When he sees people raging against all drug use, he is puzzled. “They’re denying their own chemistry,” he says. “The brain produces endorphins. When does it produce endorphins? In stress, and in pain. What are endorphins? They are morphine-like compounds. It’s a natural occurrence in the brain that makes them feel good . . . People feel euphoric sometimes. These are chemical changes – the same kind of chemical changes, with the same molecular structures, that these plants [we use to make our drugs] are producing . . . We’re all producing the same stuff.”
Indeed, he continues, “the experience you have in orgasm is partially chemical – it’s a drug. So people deny they want this? Come on! . . . It’s fun. It’s enjoyable. And it’s chemical. That’s intoxication.” He seems for a moment to think back over all the animals guzzling drugs he has watched over all these years. “I don’t see,” he says, “any difference in where the chemical came from.”
This is in us. It is in our brains. It is part of who we are.
Johann Hari is a British journalist who has written for the New York Times, Le Monde, the Los Angeles Times, the Independent, the Guardian, Slate, the New Republic, and the Nation. He has reported from many countries, from the Congo to Venezuela. He was twice named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International UK, awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for turning political writing into an art, and later named Journalist of the Year by Stonewall. He can be followed on Twitter: @johannhari101
NSA Spy Program A federal judge ruled in favor of the National Security Agency NSA Spy Program in a key surveillance case on Tuesday, dismissing a challenge which claimed the government’s spying operations were groundless and unconstitutional.
Filed in 2008 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the lawsuit, Jewel v. NSA, aimed to end the agency’s unwarranted surveillance of U.S. citizens, which the consumer advocacy group said violated the 4th Amendment.
The lawsuit also implicated AT&T in the operations, alleging that the phone company “routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA.” That charge was based off of a 2006 document leak by former AT&T technician and whistleblower Mark Klein, who disclosed a collection program between the company and the NSA that sent AT&T user metadata to the intelligence agency.
US District Judge Jeffrey White on Tuesday denied a partial summary judgment motion to the EFF and granted a cross-motion to the government, dismissing the case without a trial. In his order, White said the plaintiff, Carolyn Jewel, an AT&T customer, was unable to prove she was being targeted for surveillance—and that if she could, “any possible defenses would require impermissible disclosure of state secret information.” NSA Spy Program
Offering his interpretation of the decision, EFF senior staff attorney David Greene explained in a blog post:
Agreeing with the government, the court found that the plaintiffs lacked “standing” to challenge the constitutionality of the program because they could not prove that the surveillance occurred as plaintiffs’ alleged. Despite the judge’s finding that he could not adjudicate the standing issue without “risking exceptionally grave damage to national security,” he expressed frustration that he could not fully explain his analysis and reasoning because of the state secrets issue.
The EFF later Tweeted:
NSA Internet surveillance is so secret, the court refused to even consider whether it’s constitutional.
Calling the ruling “frustrating,” Greene said the EFF “disagree[s] with the court’s decision and it will not be the last word on the constitutionality of the government’s mass surveillance of the communications of ordinary Americans.”Jewel v. NSA is the EFF’s longest-running case. Despite the decision, the EFF said it would not back down from its pursuit of justice and was careful to note that the ruling did not mean that the NSA’s operations were legal.
“Judge White’s ruling does not end our case. The judge’s ruling only concerned Upstream Internet surveillance, not the telephone records collection nor other mass surveillance processes that are also at issue in Jewel,” said Kurt Opsahl, deputy legal council at EFF. “We will continue to fight to end NSA mass surveillance.”
The issue is similar to the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Clapper v. Amnesty International, which found that plaintiffs who had reason to believe they were being spied on could not provide substantial proof of surveillance, and thus could not bring their case. NSA Spy Program
Jewel v. NSA stems from the EFF’s 2006 case, Hepting v. AT&T, which was dismissed in 2009 after Congress, including then-Senator Barack Obama, voted to give telecommunications companies immunity from such lawsuits.
“It would be a travesty of justice if our clients are denied their day in court over the ‘secrecy’ of a program that has been front-page news for nearly a decade,” Opsahl added.
DEEP UNDERGROUND MILITARY BASES Unknown to most Americans is a dark secret, and it’s right under our noses. It’s the reality of the existence of DEEP UNDERGROUND MILITARY BASES. These Underground bases get prominent play in dark rumors circulating about captured extraterrestrials and alien technology.
In America alone there are over 120 Deep Underground Military Bases situated under most major cities, US AFBs, US Navy Bases and US Army Bases, as well as underneath FEMA Military Training Camps and DHS control centers. There are also many Deep Underground Military Bases under Canada. Almost all of these bases are over 2 miles underground and have diameters ranging from 10 miles up to 30 miles across!
They have been building these bases day and night, unceasingly, since the 1940s. These bases are basically large cities underground connected by high-speed magneto-levity trains that have speeds up to 1500 MPH. Several books have been written about this activity.
Richard Souder, a Ph.D. architect, risked his life by talking about this. He is the author of the book, ‘Underground Bases and Tunnels: What is the Government Trying to Hide’.
He worked with a number of government agencies on deep underground military bases. The average depth of these bases is over a mile, and they again are basically whole cities underground. They have nuclear powered laser drilling machines that can drill a tunnel seven miles long in one day. (Note: The September, 1983 issue of Omni (Pg. 80) has a color drawing of ‘The Subterrene,’ the Los Alamos nuclear-powered tunnel machine that burrows through the rock, deep underground, by heating whatever stone it encounters into molten rock.)
Murdered for Whistleblowing on his involvement in (being tricked into helping design), Deep Underground Military Bases
Demolition & Structural Engineer
DUMBs Whistleblower Phil Schneider died from suicide, ‘officially’. His own catheter, strangled him, while he was limited to his own wheel chair. Suspicious? Anyone with functional brain would probably think so.
This base is the Geo location ‘Area’ where MH 730 (Malaysian Airliner) went Missing Coincidence?
Hidden in Plain Sight – Hollywood Zombie Thriller RESIDENT EVIL
(2003) If Hollywood is Showing us in the Movies, then they already have it long before they potentially ‘give the enemy ideas’. Interesting position that puts the secret keepers in..
This is BY FAR the Most Accurate ‘Hollywood‘ Depiction of a very real ‘Deep Underground Military Base’. DULCE underground Facililty (well documented) has been presented in a similar way.
Massively Popular – Now Cult Classic Video Game ‘Half Life‘ Plot is Centered around a Secret Underground Government Lab, Where Things Go Awry…
Plot
Physicist Gordon Freeman arrives late for work at the Black Mesa Research Facility. As part of an experiment, he pushes an unusual material into a machine for analysis. The spectrometer explodes, creating a “resonance cascade” that opens a portal to another dimension,Xen. Surviving scientists urge Gordon to head to the surface, where he defends himself against hostile Xen creatures and Marines sent to cover up the incident.
This Topic is Directly Connected to the Occult / UFO / Secret Technology,
and Especially, the Human Trafficking of Woman and Children
In America alone there are over 120 Deep Underground Military Bases situated under most major cities, US AFBs, US Navy Bases and US Army Bases, as well as underneath FEMA Military Training Camps and DHS control centers. There are also many Deep Underground Military Bases under Canada. Almost all of these bases are over 2 miles underground and have diameters ranging from 10 miles up to 30 miles across! They have been building these bases day and night, unceasingly, since the 1940s. These bases are basically large cities underground connected by high-speed magneto-levity trains that have speeds up to 1500 MPH. Several books have been written about this activity. Richard Souder, a Ph.D. architect, risked his life by talking about this. He is the author of the book, ‘Underground Bases and Tunnels: What is the Government Trying to Hide’. He worked with a number of government agencies on deep underground military bases. The average depth of these bases is over a mile, and they again are basically whole cities underground. They have nuclear powered laser drilling machines that can drill a tunnel seven miles long in one day. (Note: The September, 1983 issue of Omni (Pg. 80) has a color drawing of ‘The Subterrene,’ the Los Alamos nuclear-powered tunnel machine that burrows through the rock, deep underground, by heating whatever stone it encounters into molten rock.)
The Black Projects sidestep the authority of Congress, which as we know is illegal. There is much hard evidence out there. Many will react with fear, terror and paranoia, but you must snap out of it and wake up from the brainwashing your media pumps into your heads all day long. Are you going to be a rabbit in the headlights, or are you going to stand up and say enough is enough? The US Government through the NSA, DOD, CIA, DIA, ATF, ONI, US Army, US Marine Corp, FEMA and the DHS has spent in excess of 12 trillion dollars building the massive, covert infrastructure for the coming One World Government and New World Religion over the past 40 years.
There is the Deep Underground Military Base underneath Denver International Airport, which is over 22 miles in diameter and goes down over 8 levels. It’s no coincidence that the CIA relocated the headquarters of its domestic division, which is responsible for operations in the United States, from the CIA’s Langley headquarters to Denver. Constructed in 1995, the government and politicians were hell bent on building this airport in spite of it ending up vastly overbudget. Charges of corruption, constant construction company changes, and mass firings of teams once they had built a section of their work was reported so that no “one” group had any idea what the blueprint of the airport was. Not only did locals not want this airport built nor was it needed, but everything was done to make sure it was built despite that. Masonic symbols and bizarre artwork of dead babies, burning cities and women in coffins comprise an extensive mural as well as a time capsule – none of which is featured in the airport’s web site section detailing the unique artwork throughout the building. DIA serves as a cover for the vast underground facilities that were built there. There are reports of electronic/magnetic vibrations which make some people sick and cause headaches in others. There are acres of fenced-in areas which have barbed wire pointing into the area as if to keep things in, and small concrete stacks that resemble mini-cooling towers rise out of the acres of nowhere to apparently vent underground levels. The underground facility is 88.3 square miles deep. Basically this Underground Base is 8 cities on top of each other! The holding capacity of such leviathanic bases is huge. These city-sized bases can hold millions and millions of people, whether they are mind controlled, enslaved NWO World Army Soldiers or innocent and enslaved surface dwellers from the towns and cities of America and Canada.
There is Dulce Base, in New Mexico. Dulce is a small town in northern New Mexico, located above 7,000 feet on the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation. There is only one major motel and a few stores. It’s not a resort town and it is not bustling with activity. But Dulce has a deep, dark secret. The secret is harbored deep below the brush of Archuleta Mesa. Function: Research of mind related functions, genetic experiments, mind control training and reprograming. There are over 3000 real-time video cameras throughout the complex at high-security locations (entrances and exits). There are over 100 secret exits near and around Dulce. Many around Archuleta Mesa, others to the south around Dulce Lake and even as far east as Lindrith. Deep sections of the complex connect into natural cavern systems. Level 1 – garage for street maintenance. Level 2 – garage for trains, shuttles, tunnel-boring machines and disc maintenance. Level 3 – everyone is weighed, in the nude, then given a jump suit uniform. The weight of the person is put on a computer I.D. card each day. Change in over three dollars requires a physical exam and X-ray. Level 4 – Human research in ‘paranormal’ areas – mental telepathy, mind control, hypnosis, remote viewing, astral traveling – etc. The technology is apparently here to allow them to know how to manipulate the ‘Bioplasmic Body’ Development of a laser weapon that can remotely cause burns and discomfort on it’s target. They can lower your heartbeat with Deep Sleep ‘Delta Waves,’ induce a static shock, then reprogram, Via a Brain- Computer link. Level 5 -security is severe. Armed guards patrol constantly, and in addition to weight sensitive areas there (are) hand print and eye print stations. Here, is the device that powers the transfer of atoms. Level 6 – Level 6 is privately called ‘Nightmare Hall’. It holds the genetic labs. Experiments done on fish, seals, birds, and mice that are vastly altered from their original forms.
Then there is the Greenbrier Facility, in White Sulfer Springs, West Virginia under the Greenbriar Resort. The Continuity of Government facility intended since 1962 to house the United States Congress, code-named Casper, is located on the grounds of the prestigious Greenbrier resort. The bunker is beneath the West Virginia wing, which includes a complete medical clinic. Construction of the facility, which began in 1959, required 2.5 years and 50,000 tons of concrete. The steel-reinforced concrete walls of the bunker, which is 20 feet below ground, are 2 feet thick. The facility includes separate chambers for the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as a larger room for joint sessions. These are located in the “Exhibit Hall” of the West Virginia Wing, which includes vehicular and pedestrian entrances which can be quickly sealed by blast doors. They don’t even hide this one, and it’s even a tourist attraction. The Underground vault was built to meet the needs of a Congress-in-hiding – in fact the hotel is a replica of the White House. The underground area has a chamber for the Senate, a chamber for the House and a massive hall for joint sessions. Although the hotel says it gives tours of the 112,000 square area daily, the installation still stands at the ready, its operators still working under cover at the hotel. The secrecy that has surrounded the site has shielded it both from public scrutiny and official reassessment.
Most Americans will not believe that an American Holocaust will happen until they see it happening with their own eyes. Till then, it is just another strange conspiracy theory for them to laugh at. This is no laughing matter. When it happens, it will be to late to stop it. The US Government has been involved covertly in the creation of an army of loyal, brainwashed soldiers of the future. They will have cybernetic and microchip implants and will fight anywhere in the world, without question, with total loyalty and without hesitation or fear. These soldiers were created at Brookhaven National Laboratories BNL, the National Ordinance Laboratories NOL and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology MIT, and covertly transferred under DOD and NSA control and planning. Many of these soldiers are stationed in the Deep Underground Military Bases like the one under Denver International Airport. All of this information has been researched, and it has taken much effort to fit it together properly. There are many mag-lev subterraenean train networks that stretch from the these complexes and go out to other underground bases. All soldiers working in these bases are microchipped and under total Psychotronic Mind Control. Of the missing “Milk Carton People” that the FBI used to post on milk cartons, some were taken to these underground bases for genetic experimentation, microchipping, psychotronic mind control and cybernetic implantations for future use as brainwashed soldiers of the NWO. Every year in America hundreds of thousands of people go missing. The creation of a total Global Fascist Police State by the Illuminati will happen if we do not all wake up and see what is happening. I find it amazing that so many Americans, Scandanavians and Western Europeans refuse to believe that there are millions of UNISF and UNMNTF Troops in America. Under the Partnerships For Peace Program PFPP set up by President Bill Clinton in early 1993, thousands of troops a month have been coming into America. These Fascist criminals parade as our friends and leaders, while stripping away democratic rights that will be replaced with a Corporatist and Fascist dictatorship, unless people, and especially Americans, wake up now. Here are the locations of some Deep Underground Military Bases in America:
ALASKA 1. Brooks Range, Alaska 2. Delta Junction, Alaska 2a. Fort Greeley, Alaska. In the same Delta Junction area.
ARIZONA 1. Arizona (Mountains) (not on map) Function: Genetic work. Multiple levels 2. Fort Huachuca, Arizona (also reported detainment camp) Function: NSA Facility 2. Luke Air Force Base 3. Page, Arizona Tunnels to: Area 51, Nevada Dulce base, New Mexico 4. Sedona, Arizona (also reported detainment camp) Notes: Located under the Enchantment Resort in Boynton Canyon. There have been many reports by people in recent years of “increased military presence and activity” in the area.5. Wikieup, Arizona Tunnels to: Area 51 6. Yucca (Mtns.), Arizona
CALIFORNIA 1: 29 Palms, California Tunnels to: Chocolate Mts., Fort Irwin, California (possibly one more site due west a few miles) 2: Benicia, California 3. Catalina Island, California Tunnels to: I was told by someone who worked at the Port Hueneme Naval Weapons Division Base in Oxnard that they have heard and it is ‘common rumor’ that there is a tunnel from the base to this Island, and also to Edwards Air Force Base, possibly utilizing old mines. . 4. China Lake Naval Weapons Testing Center 5. Chocolate Mountains, California Tunnels to: Fort Irwin, California 6. Death Valley,California Function: The entrance to the Death Valley Tunnel is in the Panamint Mountains down on the lower edge of the range near Wingate Pass, in the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft. The bottom of the shaft opens into an extensive tunnel system 7. Deep Springs, California Tunnels to: Death Valley, Mercury, NV, Salt Lake City 8. Edwards AFB, California Function: Aircraft Development – antigravity research and vehicle development Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: Catalina Island Fort Irwin, California Vandenburg AFB, California Notes: Delta Hanger – North Base, Edwards AFB, Ca. Haystack Buttte – Edwards, AFB, Ca. 9. Fort Irwin, California (also reported detainment camp) Tunnels to: 29 Palms, California Area 51, Nevada Edwards AFB. California Mt. Shasta, California 10. Helendale, California Function: Special Aircraft Facility Helendale has an extensive railway/shipping system through it from the Union Pacific days which runs in from Salt Lake City, Denver, Omaha, Los Angeles and Chicago 11. Lancaster, California Function: New Aircraft design, anti-gravity engineering, Stealth craft and testing Levels: 42 Tunnels To: Edwards A.F.B., Palmdale 12. Lawrence-Livermore International Labs, California The lab has a Human Genome Mapping project on chromosome #19 and a newly built $1.2 billion laser facility 13. Moreno Valley, California Function unknown 14. Mt. Lassen, California Tunnels to: Probably connects to the Mt. Shasta main tunnel. 15. Mt. Shasta. Function: Genetic experiments, magnetic advance, space and beam weaponry. Levels: 5 Tunnels to: Ft. Irwin, California North 16. Napa, California Functions: Direct Satellite Communications, Laser Communications. Continuation of Government site. Levels: Multi-level Tunnels to: Unknown Notes: Located on Oakville Grade, Napa County, Ca. 87 Acres 17. Needles, California Function unknown 18. Palmdale, California Function: New Aircraft Design, anit-gravity research 19. Tehachapi Facility (Northrop, California – Tejon Ranch Function: Levels: 42 Tunnels to: Edwards, Llona and other local areas Notes: 25 miles NW of Lancaster California, in the Tehachapi mountains. 20. Ukiah, California Function unknown
COLORADO 1. Near Boulder, Co. in the mountains Function unknown 2. Cheyenne Mountain -Norad -Colorado Springs, Colorado Function: Early Warning systems – missile defense systems – Space tracking Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: Colorado Springs, Function: Early warning systems, military strategy, satellite operations Levels: Multiple NORAD is a massive self-sustaining ‘city’ built inside the mountain Tunnels to: Creede, Denver, Dulce Base, Kinsley. 3. Creede, Colorado Function unknown Tunnels to: Colorado Springs, Colorado – Delta, Colorado – Dulce Base, New Mexico 4. Delta, Colorado Function unknown Tunnels to: Creede Salt Lake, Utah 5. Denver International Airport (also a detainment camp) Function: Military research, construction, detainment camp facilities Levels: 7 reported Tunnels to: Denver proper, Colorado and Rocky Mountain “safehousing”, Colorado Springs, Colorado (Cheyenne Mtn.)
6. Falcon Air Force Base, Falcon, Colorado Function: SDI, Satellite Control Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: Colorado Springs, possibly more. 7. Fort Collins, Colorado Function: Suspect high precision equipment manufacturing for space. 8. Grand Mesa, Colorado Function unknown 9. Gore Range Near Lake, west of Denver, Co. Function: Library and Central Data Bank 10. San Juan Valley, Colorado Hidden beneath and in an operating Buffalo Ranch Function unknown 11. Telluride, Colorado Function unknown 12. University of Denver, Co (Boulder area) Function: Genetics, geology/mining as related to tunneling and underground construction. 13. Warden Valley West of Fort Collins, CO Function Unknown Tunnels to: Montana
GEORGIA Dobbins Air Force Base, Marrietta GA Function: test site for plasma and antigravity air craft, experimental crafts and weapons
INDIANA Kokomo, Indiana Function Unknown Notes: for years people in that area have reported a “hum” that has been so constant that some have been forced to move and it has made many others sick. It seems to come from underground, and “research” has turned up nothing although it was suggested by someone that massive underground tunneling and excavating is going on, using naturally occurring caverns, to make an underground containment and storage facility.
KANSAS 1. Hutchinson, Kansas Function unknown Tunnels to: Kinsley, Nebraska. Note: I recieved this report concerning this base: “I can vouch for the underground base in Hutchinson, Ks. The entrance to the tunnel is underneath Hutchinson Hospital and is huge. I was walking down that tunnel when I was a kid and at the end of this tunnel is a rock face wall with a 90 degree turn to the right. I stopped and refused to go any further down the tunnel, my instincts told me to stop. I distinctly remember hearing screams coming from there. These were not just cries for help, but more like blood curtailing horrifying screams like someone had just been murdered. I really want to know what was and probably still is going on down there. You are free to report the story, but please keep my name anonymous.” 2. Kansas City, Kansas Function unknown Notes: Entrance near Worlds of Fun 3. Kinsley, Kansas Function unknown Tunnels to: Colorado Springs, Colorado; Hutchinson, Kansas; Tulsa Kokoweef Peak, SW California Notes: Gold stored in huge cavern, blasted shut. Known as the “midway city” because it’s located halfway between New York and San Francisco.
MASSACHUSETTS Maynard MA, FEMA regional center. Wackenhut is here too.
MONTANA Bozeman, Mont. Function: Genetics
NEVADA Area 51 – Groom Lake – Dreamland – Nellis Air Force Base Area 51 was said to exist only in our imaginations until Russian satellite photos were leaked to US sources and it’s amazing how you can get photos all over of it now, even posters. They’ve been busy little bees building this base up. Function: Stealth and cloaking Aircraft research & development. ‘Dreamland (Data Repository Establishment and Maintenance Land) Elmint (Electromagnetic Intelligence), Biological weapons research and genetic manipulation/warfare storage, Cold Empire, EVA, Program HIS (Hybrid Intelligence System),BW/CW; IRIS (Infrared Intruder Systems), Security: Above ground cameras, underground pressure sensors, ground and air patrol 2. Blue Diamond, Nevada Function unknown 3. Fallon Air Force Base area (the flats, near Reno) “American City” restricted military sites southwest of Fallon 4. Mercury, Nevada Function unknown 5. Tonopah, Nevada Function unknown 69: San Gabriel (mountains) On Western side of Mojave Desert Function unknown Notes: Heavy vibrations coming from under the forest floor which sounds like geared machinery. These vibrations and sounds are the same as heard in Kokomo, Indiana and are suspected underground building/tunneling operations.
NEW MEXICO 1. Albuquerque, New Mexico (AFB) Function unknown Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: Carlsbad, New Mexico Los Alamos, New Mexico Possible connections to Datil, and other points. 2. Carlsbad, New Mexico Functions: Underground Nuclear Testing Tunnels to: Fort Stockton, Texas. Roswell 3. Cordova, New Mexico Function unknown 4. Datil, New Mexico Function unknown Tunnels to: Dulce Base
5: Dulce Base, New Mexico. Tunnels to: Colorado Springs, Colorado Creed, Colorado Datil, N.M. Los Alamos. Page, Arizona Sandia Base Taos, NM
6. Los Alamos, New Mexico Functions: Psychotronic Research, Psychotronic Weapons Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: ALB AFB, New Mexico Dulce, New Mexico Connections to Datil,Taos 7. Sandia Base, New Mexico Functions: Research in Electrical/magnetic Phenomena Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: Dulce Base Notes: Related Projects are studied at Sandia Base by ‘The Jason Group’ (of 55 Scientists). They have secretly harnessed the ‘Dark Side of Technology’ and hidden the beneficial technology from the public. 8. Sunspot, NM Function unknown 9. Taos, New Mexico Function unknown Tunnels to: Dulce, New Mexico; Cog, Colorado Notes: Several other sidelines to area where Uranium is mined or processed. 10. White Sands, NM Function: Missile testing/design Levels: Seven known
NEW HAMPSHIRE There may be as many as three underground installations in New Hampshire’s hills, according to reports.
NEW YORK New York, New York Function unknown Tunnels to: Capitol Building, D.C.
OHIO Wright-Patterson Air Force Base – Dayton, Ohio Function: Air Force Repository. Rumored to house stealth technology and prototype craft
OREGON 1. Cave Junction, Oregon Function: Suspected Underground UFO Base Levels: At least one Notes: Suspected location is in or near Hope Mountain. Near Applegate Lake, Oregon, just over into California. Multiple shafts, access areas to over 1500 feet depth. Built using abandoned mine with over 36 known miles of tunnels, shafts. 2. Crater Lake, Oregon Tunnels: possible to Cave Junction 3. Klamath Falls, Oregon 4. Wimer, Oregon (Ashland Mt. area) Function: Underground Chemical Storage Levels: At least one
PENNSYLVANIA Raven Rock, Pa (near Ligonier) Function: working back up underground Pentagon – sister site of Mt. Weather Notes: 650′ below summit, 4 entrances.
TEXAS 1. Calvert, Texas Function unknown 2. Fort Hood, Texas (also reported detainment camp) Levels: Multiple 3. Fort Stockton, Texas Function: Unknown Tunnels to: Carlsbad, New Mexico UTAH 1. Dugway, Utah Function: Chemical Storage, Radiation storage. 2. Salt Lake City Mormon Caverns Function: Religions archives storage. Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: Delta, Colorado & Riverton, Wyoming
VIRGINIA Mount Poney – Near Culpepper, Virginia Function unknown
WASHINGTON 1. Mt. Rainier, Washington Function unknown. Levels: Multiple Tunnels to: Unknown Yakima Indian Reservation Function unknown Notes: Southeast of Tacoma Washington, on the Reservation, in an area 40 by 70 miles. Unusual sounds from underground (Toppenish Ridge). Low flying Silver Cigar shaped craft seen to disappear into the Middle fork area of Toppenish creek.
Washington DC: The Function: Part of a massive underground relocation system to house select government and military personnel in the event of cataclysmic event. Tunnels to: New York City; Mt. Weather.
WEST VIRGINIA: Greenbrier Facility, White Sulfer Springs, West Virginia under the Greenbriar Resort.
WYOMING: Riverton, Wyoming Function unknown Tunnels to: Salt Lake, Utah Denver, Colorado.
Huey Percy Newton was an African-American political and urban activist who, along with Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. Many well educated activists would argue this group was ultimately undermined by FBI tactics and COINTELPRO, to destroy their image decrease effectiveness within the community.
Newton earned a Ph.D. in history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980. His doctoral dissertation was entitled War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America.
Later, Newton’s widow, Frederika Newton, would discuss her husband’s often-ignored academic leanings on C-SPAN‘s “American Perspectives” program on February 18, 2006.
On August 22, 1989, Newton was fatally shot on Center Street in the Lower Bottoms neighborhood of West Oakland by 24-year-old BGF member and drug dealer Tyrone Robinson, in what some say was a ‘setup’ involving the FBI.
Newton’s last words, as he stood facing his killer, were, “You can kill my body, and you can take my life but you can never kill my soul. My soul will live forever!”
Huey Percy Newton was an African-American political and urban activist who, along with Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. Many well educated activists would argue this group was ultimately undermined by FBI tactics and COINTELPRO, to destroy their image decrease effectiveness within the community.
Newton earned a Ph.D. in history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980. His doctoral dissertation was entitled War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America.
Later, Newton’s widow, Frederika Newton, would discuss her husband’s often-ignored academic leanings on C-SPAN‘s “American Perspectives” program on February 18, 2006.
On August 22, 1989, Newton was fatally shot on Center Street in the Lower Bottoms neighborhood of West Oakland by 24-year-old BGF member and drug dealer Tyrone Robinson, in what some say was a ‘setup’ involving the FBI.
Newton’s last words, as he stood facing his killer, were, “You can kill my body, and you can take my life but you can never kill my soul. My soul will live forever!”
Huey Percy Newton was an African-American political and urban activist who, along with Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. Many well educated activists would argue this group was ultimately undermined by FBI tactics and COINTELPRO, to destroy their image decrease effectiveness within the community.
Newton earned a Ph.D. in history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980. His doctoral dissertation was entitled War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America.
Later, Newton’s widow, Frederika Newton, would discuss her husband’s often-ignored academic leanings on C-SPAN‘s “American Perspectives” program on February 18, 2006.
On August 22, 1989, Newton was fatally shot on Center Street in the Lower Bottoms neighborhood of West Oakland by 24-year-old BGF member and drug dealer Tyrone Robinson, in what some say was a ‘setup’ involving the FBI.
Newton’s last words, as he stood facing his killer, were, “You can kill my body, and you can take my life but you can never kill my soul. My soul will live forever!”
Barrett Brown is an American journalist, essayist and satirist. He is often referred to as an unofficial spokesperson for the hacktivist collective Anonymous, a label he disputes. He is credited with the creation of Project PM, a research outfit and information collective determined to expose agents of the corporate military spying apparatus. Brown’s large vocabulary and quick wit often make his thoughts a joy to read.
The seven guys with whom I recently spent two months living in a small room at the Kaufman County Jail while awaiting transfer were in the distressing habit of compulsively watching local TV news, which is the lowest form of news. They would even watch more than one network’s evening news program in succession, presumably so as to get differing perspectives on the day’s suburban house fires and rush-hour lane closings rather than having to view these events through a single ideological prism.
One day, there was a report about a spate of bank robberies by a fellow the media was dubbing the Lunch Money Bandit after his habit of always striking around noon, when tellers were breaking for lunch. Later that week, there was another report on the suspect, accompanied by surveillance footage — and then, shortly afterward, he was actually brought in to our cell, having just been captured when the cops received a tip from a former accomplice who’d been picked up on unrelated charges.
Lunch Money was an affable twentysomething guy from New Orleans who’d lost his two front teeth fighting off a couple of assailants who’d tried to rob his family’s motel room after Katrina and had already done four years in federal prison for other bank robberies. He would have gladly taken a real job if he’d been able to find one, he said. Still, he conceded, “I just love robbing banks.” I couldn’t imagine what there is to love about such a career; this isn’t the old days when a bank robbery entailed brandishing a Tommy gun, dynamiting a safe, and tearing off in a stolen Model T roadster with your hard-drinking flapper girlfriend and a dozen cloth sacks adorned with dollar sign symbols. These guys today just sort of walk up to the teller and hand over a note to the effect that they have a gun (which they don’t — going armed carries a more serious charge, and there’s no point in bringing a gun to a bank that’s federally insured, even in Texas).
Drug dealers find bank robbers to be fascinating eccentrics and tend to pepper them with questions. One cocaine entrepreneur asked Lunch Money, “What if, like, when you handed her the note, the bitch just laughed in your face?”
“Man, that’d be fucked up,” he replied thoughtfully, visibly shaken by this potential revolution in human affairs.
One night, as we all lay in our bunks discussing the wicked world, Lunch Money proclaimed that Magic Johnson had never actually had HIV and that the whole thing had merely been a plot by the CIA, which had paid him handsomely to fake it so that he could later pretend to “recover” and the U.S. medical establishment could take credit for having developed such effective HIV treatments. As evidence, he noted that Johnson was inexplicably worth over a billion dollars. I debated with him about this for an hour. I’m not too bothered by my five-year prison sentence, as it will be neat to get out when it’s over and see to what extent video game graphics have improved while I was away, but I sure would like to get back the hour I spent arguing about Magic Johnson’s HIV status with the fucking Lunch Money Bandit.
***
The other day I was woken up at 4:30 am, escorted to a small, bare room, strip-searched, put in handcuffs and leg shackles, had a heavy chain wrapped around my midsection, and placed in the back of a dark and cage-lined van that looked like something from one of those Saw movies. But this was good news. It meant that, having recently gotten my ludicrous sentence, I’d now been “designated.” A crack team of specially trained federal prison picker-outers had chosen a facility for me. I was now to begin the multi-stage pilgrimage to the particular compound where I’ll be spending the next one to two years, depending on whether I get into any further trouble (so, two years).
For the majority of federal defendants, this Prisoner’s Progress, as I’m pleased to call it, entails “catching chain,” or being put on the weekly prison bus and taken to the federal inmate processing facility in Oklahoma, where the federal government has been sending its victims since the Trail of Tears. They’ll spend a week or so there before being shipped in turn to their designated prison. Prisons being far more humane than the amusingly horrid little detention centers where most inmates facing charges are kept until they inevitably give in and plea to a crime, this journey is viewed with fond anticipation by federal prisoners, who thus constitute the only population in human history among which it is common to be excited about the prospect of going to Oklahoma.
As for me, I’d rather rip off my own balls and mail them to Stratfor as restitution than set foot in a third-rate state like Oklahoma, regardless of what wonders may lie at the end of that particular rainbow, so it’s a fine thing that I was just going down the road to the Fort Worth Federal Correctional Institution, which will be my home for the next, er, two years. I know little of Fort Worth other than that it’s a lawless haven for half-caste Indian fighters and shiftless part-time cowhands looking to blow their greenbacks and Comanche scalps at one of the town’s countless Chinese-run opium dens, nor am I bothered by the possibility that what little I do know about the town may be 130 years out of date and racist. But I specifically requested that I be sent to this benighted city’s federal prison. For one thing, I’d already “toured the campus,” as it were, shortly after my arrest, when I spent two months at FCI Fort Worth’s jail unit so that the resident psychologists could subject me to a competency evaluation. (Based on their report, Judge Sam Lindsay declared me competent to participate in a trial, which is more than I can say for Judge Sam Lindsay.)
Fort Worth is also the only federal prison aside from FCI Seagoville that’s located near Dallas, and I’m pretty sure I’m still banned from that one, as noted in a prior column, and naturally I want to be close to my parents so that they can visit me with some regularity. My mom, a writer and editor and former flight attendant and South Texas beauty queen who once took me on a vacation to see a swimming pig at a place called Aquarena Springs, is a valuable fountainhead of media gossip, including which outlets are currently going down in flames (The New Republic, as it turns out), and always makes sure to let me know whether and to what extent my haircut is inadequate. Sometimes, if I happen to have a pimple, she insists on popping it right then and there in the visiting room, right in front of the other criminals. Note that I am 33 years old and, arguably, a hardened convict.
Likewise, my dad is my chief source of information regarding plot developments in what I gather to be a popular television program called The Blacklist, new episodes of which he details to me at great length at every opportunity, although I have never asked him for these reports or expressed any interest in the show whatsoever. Incidentally, when I was a kid, he took me on five different occasions to see a film called Hard Target in which the protagonist, ably portrayed by Jean Claude van Damme, finds himself hunted for sport by a wealthy fellow and his mercenary squad of professional trackers, all of whom he ends up killing in turn. My dad also gave me a promotional poster for this movie and, for years afterward, would turn to me and solemnly proclaim the film’s tagline, “Don’t hunt what you can’t kill,” which I suppose is as good advice as any.
Last time he came for a visit, he began to relate to me, apropos of nothing, the nature and potential killing power of some sort of subterranean supervolcano located at Yellowstone and the general circumstances under which it will someday explode and kill a great majority of North Americans, an event which he prophesied with obvious relish. It’s not that he’s one of those ecological mystics who despise humanity and long to see Mother Earth fight back against the ravages of industrial sentience or some such irritating thing. Quite the contrary. In my younger days, he would often drag me around East Texas and command me to assassinate deer and wild boars with rifles he would supply for the purpose, even though I had no ideological differences with any of these animals, and one time, when I was 17, he took me to East Africa to help him exploit the resident natural resources alongside a group of ex-military adventurers with whom we had somehow managed to attach ourselves (this expedition failed rather spectacularly), and lately he seems to have gotten involved in fracking. So he’s certainly no partisan of Nature. It’s just that he’s fond of power in its rawest forms, and if he smiles at the prospect of 400 million deaths, it is only because he feels that man is insufficiently reverent of this particular supervolcano, this god-made-manifest, which therefore has no choice but to lash out against us as punishment. He’s also a longtime pillar of the Dallas Safari Club and on at least one occasion of which I am aware was literally almost eaten by a lion. I could go on and on. Thankfully my parents are divorced, and so I usually only have to deal with these hyperactive Southern Gothic archetypes one at a time these days. Occasionally, though, they set aside their differences in order to come harass me together, and I eventually emerge from the visitation room looking haunted.
I wasn’t taken straight to Fort Worth from Kaufman County, as that would be too quick and easy and cost effective, the prison being less than a half-hour’s drive away; rather, I was taken to the federal courthouse in downtown Dallas to wait for another ride to the Mansfield jail, where I’d already spent much of 2013, and from which I’d eventually be taken to Fort Worth next time a U.S. Marshal happened to be going in that general direction. At the end of the day’s no doubt majestic federal court proceedings, I was placed back in the chew-your-arm-off-and-only-then-shall-I-give-you-the-key van for the ride over to Mansfield. In the rusty cage next to mine were two girls, shackled like I was, who had been to court that afternoon. One had been crying; she’d just been sentenced to eight years for conspiracy to distribute marijuana despite having originally been given reason to expect considerably less time, as she’d cooperated with the FBI. The agents had clearly found her testimony helpful, as they’d met with her a second time, but nonetheless they’d neglected to ask the judge for the sentence reduction they’d promised her in exchange. Like most drug dealers, this girl was in the habit of making and keeping bargains on the strength of her word and expected others to do likewise, but then she’d never dealt with the FBI before.
Just as she finished sobbing out her story, something rather incredible happened: the U.S. Marshal who was driving us back to the jail, having been listening to this account, apparently decided that he was sick of serving as another cog in a fascist system that literally places females in chains and ruins their lives over consensual non-crimes like selling marijuana, because he pulled over, stepped out of the van, came around the back, unlocked the girl’s cage, removed her chains and leg irons and handcuffs, gave her all the cash he had on him, kissed her on the forehead, and advised her to hitchhike to Mexico and then catch a flight to Europe, where she’d have another chance at life, far away from the all-seeing state that had sought to deprive her of her youth and freedom.
Just kidding. Actually he drove us to the jail while the girl cried in her cage.
***
Quote of the Day:
“Truth does not often escape from palaces.” —William Durant
***
Editor’s note: Barrett Brown has been incarcerated since September 2012. Go here to read earlier installments of “The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail.” If you’d like to send him a book, here’s his Amazon wish list.
Barrett Brown #45047-177 FCI Fort Worth P.O. Box 15330 Fort Worth, TX 76119
John Young Architect, Cryptologist, Leak Facilitator, Cryptome.org Founder
John Young is a wise, seasoned, and ‘angry’ citizen determined to expose corruption and abhorrent secrecy. He is currently living in New York, doing architectural work for some of the most powerful members of the political establishment that he has sworn to attack. “It’s an easy way to make money in New York, to do corrupt work,” he says with a shrug.
Young on .gov tactics:
“Assassination Politics,” is what Young described as “an imaginative and sophisticated prospective for improving governmental accountability by way of a scheme for anonymous, untraceable political assassination.”
Interesting, Young disclosed the fact on Cryptome in 2000:
“My father-in-law was a longtime career officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, one of its earliest members, and chief of station in several countries…. He’s not talking to Cryptome, and that’s regrettable, for I believe such knowledgeable persons should disclose everything they know about the global culture of secret intelligence and its profound effects – to better inform citizens on the true way their governments function.”
Kerry Cassidy In 2006 Kerry ran across Bill Ryan, a dude with a nice line in broad-brimmed hats, and they shacked up for a while at the Camelot Castle Hotel in Tintagel. Project Camelot grew out of their post-coital conversations, conceived as an open-ended series of video interviews with woo-doctors and whistleblowers.
In 2006 Kerry ran across Bill Ryan, a dude with a nice line in broad-brimmed hats, and they shacked up for a while at the Camelot Castle Hotel in Tintagel. Project Camelot grew out of their post-coital conversations, conceived as an open-ended series of video interviews with woo-doctors and whistleblowers.
In 2006 Kerry ran across Bill Ryan, a dude with a nice line in broad-brimmed hats, and they shacked up for a while at the Camelot Castle Hotel in Tintagel. Project Camelot grew out of their post-coital conversations, conceived as an open-ended series of video interviews with woo-doctors and whistleblowers.
Kerry Cassidy In 2006 Kerry ran across Bill Ryan, a dude with a nice line in broad-brimmed hats, and they shacked up for a while at the Camelot Castle Hotel in Tintagel. Project Camelot grew out of their post-coital conversations, conceived as an open-ended series of video interviews with woo-doctors and whistleblowers.
In 2006 Kerry ran across Bill Ryan, a dude with a nice line in broad-brimmed hats, and they shacked up for a while at the Camelot Castle Hotel in Tintagel. Project Camelot grew out of their post-coital conversations, conceived as an open-ended series of video interviews with woo-doctors and whistleblowers.
In 2006 Kerry ran across Bill Ryan, a dude with a nice line in broad-brimmed hats, and they shacked up for a while at the Camelot Castle Hotel in Tintagel. Project Camelot grew out of their post-coital conversations, conceived as an open-ended series of video interviews with woo-doctors and whistleblowers.
Julian Assange Julian Paul Assange is an Australian publisher and journalist. He is known as the editor-in-chief of the website WikiLeaks, which he co-founded in 2006 after an earlier career in hacking and programming.Julian Paul Assange is an Australian publisher and journalist. He is known as the editor-in-chief of the website WikiLeaks, which he co-founded in 2006 after an earlier career in hacking and programming.Julian Paul Assange is an Australian publisher and journalist. He is known as the editor-in-chief of the website WikiLeaks, which he co-founded in 2006 after an earlier career in hacking and programming.Julian Assange Julian Paul Assange is an Australian publisher and journalist. He is known as the editor-in-chief of the website WikiLeaks, which he co-founded in 2006 after an earlier career in hacking and programming.Julian Paul Assange is an Australian publisher and journalist. He is known as the editor-in-chief of the website WikiLeaks, which he co-founded in 2006 after an earlier career in hacking and programming.Julian Paul Assange is an Australian publisher and journalist. He is known as the editor-in-chief of the website WikiLeaks, which he co-founded in 2006 after an earlier career in hacking and programming.Julian Assange Julian Paul Assange is an Australian publisher and journalist. He is known as the editor-in-chief of the website WikiLeaks, which he co-founded in 2006 after an earlier career in hacking and programming.Julian Paul Assange is an Australian publisher and journalist. He is known as the editor-in-chief of the website WikiLeaks, which he co-founded in 2006 after an earlier career in hacking and programming.Julian Paul Assange is an Australian publisher and journalist. He is known as the editor-in-chief of the website WikiLeaks, which he co-founded in 2006 after an earlier career in hacking and programming.
Robert David Steele Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.Robert David Steele Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.
Robert David Steele Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.Robert David Steele Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.
Robert David Steele Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.Robert David Steele Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.Vivas is an American activist and a former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine services case officer known for his promotion of open source intelligence.
“I don’t believe it was bin Laden today. I don’t believe it was ever him…I’m sorry, I’m from the projects, I know danger. I don’t feel danger from that sh*t…Highly-educated people in all areas of science have spoken on the fishiness around the whole 9/11 theory…I’m a New Yorker, and it just doesn’t feel right.”
Rapper, Actor, Activist
“I don’t believe it was bin Laden today. I don’t believe it was ever him…I’m sorry, I’m from the projects, I know danger. I don’t feel danger from that sh*t…Highly-educated people in all areas of science have spoken on the fishiness around the whole 9/11 theory…I’m a New Yorker, and it just doesn’t feel right.”
Rapper, Actor, Activist
“I don’t believe it was bin Laden today. I don’t believe it was ever him…I’m sorry, I’m from the projects, I know danger. I don’t feel danger from that sh*t…Highly-educated people in all areas of science have spoken on the fishiness around the whole 9/11 theory…I’m a New Yorker, and it just doesn’t feel right.”
Mos Def Dante Terrell Smith
Rapper, Actor, Activist
“I don’t believe it was bin Laden today. I don’t believe it was ever him…I’m sorry, I’m from the projects, I know danger. I don’t feel danger from that sh*t…Highly-educated people in all areas of science have spoken on the fishiness around the whole 9/11 theory…I’m a New Yorker, and it just doesn’t feel right.”
Rapper, Actor, Activist
“I don’t believe it was bin Laden today. I don’t believe it was ever him…I’m sorry, I’m from the projects, I know danger. I don’t feel danger from that sh*t…Highly-educated people in all areas of science have spoken on the fishiness around the whole 9/11 theory…I’m a New Yorker, and it just doesn’t feel right.”
Rapper, Actor, Activist
“I don’t believe it was bin Laden today. I don’t believe it was ever him…I’m sorry, I’m from the projects, I know danger. I don’t feel danger from that sh*t…Highly-educated people in all areas of science have spoken on the fishiness around the whole 9/11 theory…I’m a New Yorker, and it just doesn’t feel right.”
Propaganda in the United States is propaganda spread by government and media entities within the United States. Propaganda is information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to influence opinions. Propaganda is not only in advertising; it is also in radio, newspaper, posters, books, and anything else that might be sent out to the widespread public.
“Crisis actors” are professional actors ostensibly deployed by government agencies and/or the mainstream media to delude the public with portrayals of trauma and suffering: specifically, to act as victims or witnesses in staged school shootings or hoax terrorist attacks.
The FBI began COINTELPRO—short for Counterintelligence Program—in 1956 to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party of the United States. In the 1960s, it was expanded to include a number of other domestic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. All COINTELPRO operations were ended in 1971. Although limited in scope (about two-tenths of one percent of the FBI’s workload over a 15-year period), COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons.
I have been observing the hacker and hacktivist communities, at times very
closely, for many years. The exact definition of “hacker” and “hacktivist”
varies from author to author, so I shall make my interpretation of these words
very clear. Let us define a “hacker” as someone who utilizes their knowledge of
computers and of computer networks to make money via illegitimate means. Let us
define a “hacktivist” as someone who utilizes their knowledge of computers and
of computer networks to do justice when justice is not done by the state. I
have found that these two communities are inextricably linked, yet remain
completely separate entities. Many hackers double as hacktivists in their spare
time, although most hacktivists do not fancy themselves hackers.
Although hackers turned hacktivists have the very best of intentions, and their
input and expertise is of great value to the hacktivist community, they have
inadvertently suppressed the potential of the very community they are trying to
aid. The get-in-get-the-goods-get-out methodology of the stolen credit card
driven hacker community that has been transfered to the hacktivist community
via ideological osmosis has tragically affixed blinders to it. It has caused
the hacktivist community to think linearly and strive to do nothing more than
to blindly infiltrate target organizations and immediately leak whatever data
they happen to stumble across. This must change. Stealing and leaking data
makes a point, but it is sometimes necessary to do more than just make a point,
to inflict real, measurable damage. In certain, extreme cases an organization’s
disregard for human rights warrants its immediate and complete obliteration.
In this essay, I will discuss a multitude of ideological, operational, and
technical changes that ought to be made to the hacktivist community. These
proposed changes have been derived from my personal observations. Some will
find the ideas contained within this document to be the product of common
sense. I have found these people to be few in number. If the community accepts
my suggestions it will not only become more effective, but the risks associated
with participating in it will be drastically lowered. My intent in writing this
is not to aid criminals, but rather to aid people who wish to do battle with
governments and corporations that have become criminals. If freedom is to
remain on this earth, its people must be willing and able to take arms to
defend it, both physical and digital.
Personal Security
Sound operational security is the foundation from which all effective
cyber-offensives are launched. You should, at all times, put your own, personal
security above the success of your operations and interests. The security
precautions taken by most hacktivists I have met are mediocre at best, and
needlessly so. Maintaining sound personal security is by no means difficult. It
requires much caution but very little skill. I have devised a series of
security precautions that hactivists should take and divided them up into six
main categories: environmental, hardware, software, mental, pattern related,
and archaeological. We shall examine each individually.
(1) Environmental:
There are but two places you can work: at home or in public. Some people insist
that working at home is best and others insist that working in public is best.
The proper working environment debate has been raging on in the hacker
community for quite some time now, and has great relevance to the hacktivist
community, as most governments view hackers and hacktivists as one in the same.
Proponents of the “work in public” argument claim that by always working at a
different public location, you significantly lower your chances of being
apprehended. They argue that even if the authorities are able to trace many of
the cyber-attacks you took part in back to the public places where you took
part in them from, that does not bring them any closer to finding you. Most
retail stores and coffee shops do not keep surveillance footage for more than a
year at the most, and even if the authorities are able to get a photo of you
from some security camera, that does not necessarily lead them directly to your
front door, especially if you wore a hoody the entire time you where working
and the camera never got a clear shot of your face. On the other hand,
proponents of the “work at home” argument argue that the risk of being seen and
reported, or merely recorded while working in a public place far outweighs the
benefits of the significantly large increase in anonymity that working in
public provides. Both sides have legitimate points, and I urge you to consider
both of them.
If you decide to work in public, the number one threat you face is other
people. Numerous large criminal investigations have been solved using the
observations of average everyday citizens who just happened to remember seeing
something suspicious. If people sense that you are trying to hide something,
they will watch you more closely than they would otherwise. It is important to
always “keep your cool” as the old saying goes. Always try to sit in such a way
that your screen is facing away from the majority of the people in the room you
are sitting in. Corners are your friend. Try to blend in with the crowd. Dress
in plain cloths. Draw no attention. If you are in a coffee shop, sip some
coffee while you work. If you are in a burger joint, buy a burger. If you are
in a library or book store, set a few books beside your laptop. Also, be very
aware of security cameras, both inside the establishment you are working in as
well as on the street near it. Being captured on film is alright as long as the
camera can not see what is on your screen. Some store cameras are watched by
actual people who will undoubtedly report you if they find out what you are
doing. More and more governments are starting to place very high quality CCTV
cameras on their streets to monitor their citizens, and these devices can be a
problem if they are peering over your shoulder through a window you are sitting
beside. When working in public, it is possible that you may have to confront a
law enforcement officer face to face. Law enforcement officers can smell
uneasiness from a mile away, and if you look like you are up to no good it is
possible that a cop will come and talk to you. Always have some sort of cover
story made up before you leave home to explain why you are where you are. If
you are forced to confront a law enforcement officer you should be able to talk
your way out of the situation.
If you decide to work at home, the number one threat you face is your own ego.
Just because you are at home does not mean that your working environment is
secure. Be aware of windows in close proximity to your computer as well as your
security-illiterate or gossipy family members. Security issues in relation to
network configuration begin to come into play when you work at home. If your
computer were to somehow get compromised while you are working at home,
perhaps by your government, it would be nearly impossible for the person or
group of people rummaging around inside of your system to get your actual IP
address (provided that you adhere to the software security guidelines that we
will discuss later). However, if your wi-fi password (or the name of your
printer, or the name of another computer on the network) contains your actual
last name and part of your address, tracking you down becomes very easy. A lot
of people name their network devices and structure their network passwords in
this way.
It is also possible that if an attacker that has infiltrated your computer
notices other machines on your network they can pivot to them (infect them with
malware using your computer as a spring board of sorts) and use them to get
your IP address. A lot of Internet enabled household devices have cameras on
them (your smart TV, your Xbox, and your high tech baby monitor to name a few)
and said cameras can potentially be leveraged against you. It is in your best
interest to not have any other machines running on your home network while you
are working. Also, change your wi-fi password every once in awhile and make
sure that the password on the administrative interface of your router is
something other than the out-of-the-box default. If your computer gets
compromised, logging into your router using username “admin” and password
“admin” is elementary for a moderately skilled attacker. Most modern routers
list their WAN IP address on their control panels.
Regardless of where you decide to work, be aware of mirrors and glass picture
frames near your workplace. In the right light, both of these items have the
potential to reflect crystal clear images of your screen to onlookers across
the room. In addition to this, understand that modern cell phones are your
worst enemy. Not only are they always going to be the weakest link in your
security setup, but if they are somehow compromised they are equipped with a
camera and microphone. Recent studies suggest that it is possible for smart
phones to listen to the high pitched noise your CPU makes and deduce your PGP
private key. Furthermore, the metadata collected by your phone coupled with
pattern analysis techniques could potentially allow your government to link
your real life and online personas together after some time. We will discuss
this in depth later. Leave your phones at home and if possible keep all phones,
yours or otherwise, far away from your computer. Other portable devices such as
iPods and tablets potentially pose the same risk that phones do and should be
treated the same.
(2) Hardware:
Modern computers come equipped with microphones, speakers (which can be used as
microphones under the right circumstances), and cameras. All of these features
can potentially be leveraged to identify you if your computer is compromised.
To mitigate these risks, these features should be physically removed. Your
computer’s microphone and speakers should be ripped out of it, but you should
not rip out your web cam, as it will alter the outward appearance of your
computer and potentially draw attention to you. Instead, open your computer’s
screen and snip the wires that connect to your web cam. Wrap the ends of the
wires in electrical tape so sparks do not jump in between them. If you must
listen to an audio file while working, use headphones. Only keep your
headphones plugged into your computer when you are using them. The computer you
use for your hacktivist activities also should not contain a hard drive, as
they are unnecessary for our purposes.
(3) Software:
Always use a TOR enabled Linux live system when working. At the present moment,
Tails (The Amnesiac Incognito Live System) is by far the best live distribution
for your purposes. You can read more about TOR at www.torproject.org and you
can read more about acquiring, setting up, and using Tails at tails.boum.org.
The Tails operating system lives on a USB flash drive. Every time you start up
your computer, you must first insert your Tails flash drive into it. The Tails
website will guide you through making said flash drive. Tails will
automatically direct all of your outgoing traffic into the TOR network in an
effort to hide your IP address. If you use Tails you will be completely
anonymous and be able to work with impunity provided that:
* You keep your Tails USB up to date. New versions of the Tails
operating system are released every few months.
* You do not login into your “real world” accounts while using Tails.
Do not check your Twitter feed while you are working.
* You do not use Tails to create an account with an alias that you have
used before. If you have been “0pwn” for the past seven years, now
is a good time to stop being 0pwn.
* You do not alter Tails’ default security settings. They are the way
they are for a reason.
* You do not use Tails to create an online account with a password that
you have used before. Doing this only makes deanonymizing you easier.
* You do not install and use random packages that “look cool”; they
could be miscellaneous. Only use packages and scripts that you trust.
Tails is not bullet proof.
* If you decide to set a sudo password when starting up Tails, make
sure that it is very strong.
* You stay conscious of metadata analysis techniques. We will discuss
these later.
* You switch exit nodes every ten to fifteen minutes. This can be done
by double clicking the little green onion in the upper right hand
corner of your Tails desktop and hitting the “Use a New Identity”
button.
* You follow the communication guidelines laid out later in this
document.
More information can be found on the Tails warning page: https://tails.boum.org/
doc/about/warning/index.en.html. Be aware that it is very easy for your ISP
(which is probably working closely with your government) to tell that you are
using both TOR and Tails. It is probably in your best interest to use something
called “TOR bridge mode”. You can read more about how to configure Tails to
use TOR bridges here: https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/startup_options/
bridge_mode/index.en.html.
Tails is unique in that it has a special feature that wipes your computer’s
memory before it shuts down. This is done in order to mitigate risks associated
with the dreaded “cold boot attack” (a forensics method in which a suspects RAM
is ripped out of his or her computer and then thrown into a vat of liquid
nitrogen to preserve its contents for later analysis). This feature is also
triggered if you pull your Tails flash drive out of your computer while you are
working. If while you are working you ever feel that the authorities are about
to move in on you, even if you have a seemingly irrational gut feeling, yank
your Tails flash drive out of your computer. Tails also has a feature that
allows it to disguises itself as a Windows desktop. Using this feature in
public will reduce your risk of capture significantly.
(4) Mental:
A skilled attacker is well disciplined and knows that he must keep his actions
and skills a secret in order to remain safe from harm. Do not flaunt the fact
that you are dissatisfied with your government, a foreign government, or a
particular corporation. Do not attend protests. Do not publicly advertise the
fact that you have an above average aptitude for computer security offensive or
otherwise. And whatever you do, do not tell anyone, even someone you think you
can trust, that you are planning to launch an organized cyber-attack on any
organization, big or small. If you draw attention to yourself no amount of
security precautions will keep you safe. Keep your “real” life mentally
isolated from your “hacktivist” life. One lapse in operational security could
end you.
Be alert and focused. Remain mentally strong. Come to terms with the illegality
of your actions and what will happen to you if you are apprehended. As a wise
man once said, “A warrior considers himself already dead, so there is nothing
to lose. The worst has already happened to him, therefore he’s clear and calm;
judging him by his acts or by his words, one would never suspect that he has
witnessed everything.” It is perfectly acceptable to be paranoid, but do not
let that paranoia consume you and slow your work. Even if you are extremely
cautious and follow this document’s advice to the letter, you still may be
hunted down and incarcerated, tortured, or killed. Some countries do not take
kindly to hacktivists. It is best that you be honest with yourself from the
beginning. In order to operate effectively you must be able to think clearly
and see the world as it actually is.
(5) Pattern Related:
When your online persona is active your real life persona ceases to exist, and
an observant adversary can use this to their advantage. If your ISP, bank, and
mobile phone provider are “cooperating” with your government and allowing them
to browse through all of their records (a fair assumption in this day and age)
then, eventually, they will be able to deduce your real identity by comparing
everyone’s data to information about your online persona. If the government
looks backs on all of the records they have collected in the past year and
notice that you never make a credit card purchase, watch Netflix, go on your
Facebook, Google, or Twitter account, or change your physical location while
1337Hax0r64 is online on some anti-government forum on the deep web, they will
assume that you are 1337Hax0r64. Even information about your home network’s
bandwidth usage can give away your real identity.
Luckily, performing the type of metadata analysis attack described above takes
time, usually many months. It is very important that you change aliases often,
preferably every three or four months. Shed your old names like a snake sheds
its skin. When you do change your online name, make sure your new identity
can not be tied back to your old one.
DO NOT not launch cyber-attacks from your own computer. Launch attacks only
from hacked servers, servers purchased with washed bitcoins, or free shell
accounts. Certain types of cyber-attacks produce a large amount of traffic over
a short amount of time. If the bandwidth usage of your home network spikes at
the same instant that a government or corporate server is attacked, the time it
takes to deanonymize you is reduced significantly. This is especially true if
you launch multiple attacks on multiple occasions. Launching attacks in this
way can be mentally exhausting. Configuring a new attack server with your tool
set every time your old attack server is banned (an inevitable occurrence) can
be a tedious task indeed. I personally recommend creating a bash script to
automatically install your favorite tools to make this transition process
easier. Most hackers and offensive security professionals use under thirty
non-standard tools to do their job, so configuring a new server with everything
you need should not take very long if you know what you are doing. Consider
equipping your server with TOR and a VNC server (for tools that require GUIs
such as most popular intercepting proxies) as well.
(6) Archaeological:
You must insure that there is no forensics evidence of your actions, digital or
otherwise. If the government breaks into your house and rummages through your
things, they should find nothing interesting. Make sure that you never make any
physical notes pertaining to your hacktivist activities. Never keep any
computer files pertaining to your hacktivist activities in your home. Keep all
of your compromising files, notes, scripts, and unusual attack tools (the ones
that can not be installed with apt-get or the like), and stolen information in
the cloud. It is recommended that you keep all of your files backed up on
multiple free cloud storage providers so that in the event that one of the
providers bans your account you still have all of your data. Do not name your
cloud accounts in such a way that they can be connected back to your online
persona. Never, under any circumstances, mention the names or locations of your
cloud accounts to the people you work with. Always hit the “Use New Identity”
button on your TOR control panel after accessing your cloud storage solutions.
Every time you shed your old alias, shed your old cloud accounts.
Security of Communications
The majority of hacktivists I have met communicate via public IRC. Using IRC is
fine for meeting other hacktivists, but as soon as you muster a team of other
hacktivists who wish to attack the same target as you, move to another more
secure form of communication. Some means of communication are more secure than
others, but completely secure communication does not exist. The following
guidelines are meant to work in conjunction with the personal security
guidelines that where discussed in the previous section. If proper personal
security measures are implemented effectively, compromised communication will
result in operational failure at worst and not complete deanonymization. Since
operational failure may very well set you and your cause back several months,
it is in your best interest to attempt to communicate securely:
* Remember that any of the people you meet on the clearnet, deep web,
or public IRC channels who claim to be on your side could actually
be government agents trying to sabotage your operations.
* If possible, communicate mainly via privacy friendly email accounts
(not Gmail, Yahoo, AT&T, etc.) and encrypt all of your messages with
PGP. When a cyber-attack is being carried out it is often necessary
to be able to communicate with your accomplices instantaneously.
Since encrypting, sending, receiving, and decrypting messages by hand
takes time, using PGP in time sensitive situations like this is not
feasible. If you have to confer in an IM environment, use a program
like TorChat that uses its own form of asymmetric encryption to send
and receive messages instantly.
* Use strong passwords for all of your online accounts. The best way to
make a strong password is to pick eight or nine random words and
string them together. Passwords like this are easy to remember but
hard to guess.
* Never give away any personal information (such as country, interests,
hobbies, health, etc.) or give insight into your feelings or
emotions. Your fellow hacktivists are not your friends and should
never be talked to as such. Giving away this sort of information will
make tracking you easier.
* When you receive messages, do not retain them, even if they are
encrypted. Read them, make note of any hard to remember details
(like long server passwords for example), and then delete them.
Having a mile long digital paper trail can not lead to anything good.
In some cases deleted messages on email serves can be recovered via
computer forensics, but deleting messages quickly may reduce the odds
that they can be.
* When typing messages, do so in a word processor on your computer.
Never write your message inside of a communication program (such as
an online email client, forum PM box, etc.). People have been known
to accidentally send unencrypted messages before. The effects of such
an error can be devastating.
* If you find yourself writing large swaths of text intended for public
release (like essays or manifestos) use a tool like Anonymouth to
obscure your writing style. Your writing style is as unique as a
finger print and can be used to identify you.
* Never, under any circumstances, execute a file on your computer or on
your server that has been given to you by a fellow hacktivist. You
should never run into a situation where doing this is necessary.
* Do not disclose information about your involvement in previous
hacktivist operations to people who where not also part of the same
operation.
* If one of the people that you are working with gets captured, assume
that the people who have captured them know everything that they do.
Philosophy of Attacking
The hacktivist community, like every community, has its own unique set of
philosophical musings, taboos, and dogmas. While I do not advocate the severe
alteration of the principles and philosophies on which the community was built,
I do wish to point out a number of flaws in certain aspects of their
composition. These flaws serve only to hold back the community and should be
openly discussed.
(1) When hacktivists target an organization, their goal is more often than not
to force said organization to stop functioning permanently, or at least for the
longest time possible, in an effort to stall unjust actions from being carried
out or to seek retribution for unjust actions done in the past. Leaking
databases, DoXing influential individuals, defacing websites, and launching
massive DDoS campaigns, four of the modern hacktivist community’s favorite
activities, accomplish this goal – to an extent. Infiltrating a target
organization and sowing discord within its ranks is magnitudes more effective
than leaking credit card numbers or putting a CEO’s social security number on
Pastebin, yet it is rarely, if ever, considered to be a viable course of
action. Subtly and silently fostering suspicion and distrust inside of your
target will have a longer lasting impact than simply pointing out that its
security policy has some weak points.
(2) Hacktivists crave publicity, yet they are the most effective when they
operate undetected. Stay hidden. Although it may seem tempting at times, do not
destroy large amounts of information on your target’s computers or servers.
Doing so will announce your arrival inside of your target’s network rather
loudly. Flashy, public displays of power have no place in the hacktivist
community. Just because you are hiding behind TOR does not mean that you should
not make an effort to cover your tracks. Conceal your attack not to mask your
identity, but to convince your target that no attack was carried out in the
first place.
(3) Once your hacktivist collective has decided to attack an organization,
strike fast and strike hard. Overwhelm your target. A well disciplined and well
organized team of attackers can penetrate most networks within a few hours.
Far too often I have seen hacktivist collectives declare all out war on someone
and then attack them slowly and gain entry into their network days, sometimes
even weeks later. By attacking slowly, you give your target time to react and
strengthen their defenses. Detecting an attack from a large hacktivist
collective is a trivial task, but as history has shown detecting the presence
of one inside of a network, especially a large network, can be tricky.
(4) Cyber-attacks seldom go as planned. If you are attempting to do anything
that involves the coordination of more than two people, keep this in mind. It
is not uncommon for tools to stop working in the middle of an attack. It is not
uncommon for reverse shells to die unexpectedly. It is not uncommon for
seemingly simple actions to take hours to perform. You must be ready to think
on your feet and quickly adjust your attack plan to accommodate the ever
changing conditions within the network you are attacking. Predefined
contingency plans are mostly useless.
(5) Remember that no system is impenetrable. On more than one occasion I have
seen hacktivists give up on trying to infiltrate a target network because their
Nessus scan did not yield any useful results. As a hacktivist, you are not
bound by the typical constraints of a pentester. If you can not successfully
attack a website, try attacking its hosting provider. Try attacking the
administrator’s email account. Try going after random social accounts belonging
to the administrator’s family. Try planting iframes in websites you suspect the
administrator frequents in an effort to infect him. If you cause extensive
collateral damage, who cares? It is not your problem. Sometimes the ends
justify the means. Be creative.
(6) Many hacktivists possess unrealistic, self-constructed mental images of the
ideal cyber-attack. In the majority of these movie-induced delusions, the ideal
attack utilizes numerous 0days, an arsenal of home made tools, and highly
advanced, unimaginably complex network intrusion techniques. In reality, this
type of thinking is incredibly dangerous and causes some hacktivists to attempt
to perform convoluted, elaborate attacks to gain the respect of their peers.
When breaking into highly secured networks, such attacks only draw unnecessary
attention. The best attacks are the ones that work. They are usually simple and
take little time to execute. Using sqlmap to spawn a shell on your target’s
server by exploiting a flaw in their website’s search feature is a viable if
not ideal attack. It allows you to access the inside of your target’s network.
Exploiting a vulnerable FTP daemon on one of your target’s servers using public
exploit code is a viable if not ideal attack. It allows you to access the
inside of your target’s network. Using Metasploit in conjunction with a fresh
Gmail account to launch a phishing campaign against your target’s employees is
a viable if not ideal attack. It allows you to access the inside of your
target’s network. The media hates it when hacktivists use open source software
to do their work. Whenever a hacker or hacktivist is arrested for doing
something that involved using “someone else’s” tools, they are publicly
shammed. “Anyone could have done that” they say. “He’s just an unskilled script
kiddie” they say. Claiming that someone is less of a hacker solely because they
partially depend on someone else’s code borders on absurd. It amounts to
claiming that Picasso is a bad artist because he did not carve his own brushes,
synthesize his own paints, and weave his own canvas. Do not shy away from using
open source tools and publicly available information to accomplish your goals.
Hacking is an art, and nmap is your brush.
Organization and Formation
Most of the hacker and hacktivist groups I have observed are unorganized and
undisciplined. They claim to perform actions as a collective, yet when it comes
time to actually launch an attack they attempt to infiltrate their targets as
individuals, each member launching attacks of their own without making the
faintest attempt to coordinate their actions with others. Here I shall describe
a schema that could be easily adopted by any hacktivist collective to allow it
to facilitate highly coordinated attacks involving large numbers of attackers
with great ease. It will be presented as a series of steps.
Step One: Organize yourselves into multiple small groups. These groups shall be
referred to as strike teams. The ideal strike team is composed of three parts
attack specialists, two parts social engineering specialists. Attack
specialists should at least be able to identify and competently exploit
potential vulnerabilities in websites and be able to exploit vulnerable or
misconfigured services. Social engineering specialists should have at least
some real world experience before participating in a strike team. Attack
specialists should only concern themselves with launching attacks and social
engineering specialists should only concern themselves with social engineering.
Well-defined roles are the key to a strike team’s success. This configuration
will often create an abundance of social engineering specialists, and that is
perfectly acceptable. Having the capability to immediately launch multiple well
planned social engineering campaigns is crucial. The size of a strike team
will be determined by the skill of its members. Highly skilled individuals
should work in very small strike teams (five member teams are acceptable)
whereas unskilled individuals should work in larger strike teams (up to a few
dozen). The organization of strike teams should be coordinated as a collective.
No one person should be given the authority to sort people themselves. Strike
teams should function as “sub collectives” and be autonomous. Hacktivist
collectives are composed of people around the world, most of whom can not be
online all the time. This means that all strike teams should set themselves up
knowing that their members will pop on and offline and that it is possible new
members will have to be annexed at a later time.
Step Two: Within each strike team, agree upon a stratagem; a broad, realistic,
nonspecific plan of action that aims to accomplishes one, very specific goal.
Strike teams should only execute one stratagem at a time. Multiple strike teams
within the same hacktivist collective can execute different stratagems at the
same time in an effort to accomplish some sort of final goal (perhaps to
destabilize an organization or to acquire trade secrets). The next section of
this essay is devoted solely to exploring the concept of stratagems and how to
best form and use them. Strike teams should be allowed to do what they want,
but their initial stratagem should be approved by the collective so that no two
strike teams attempt to do the same thing at the same time.
Step Three: As a strike team, map your target’s attack surface. If multiple
strike teams are all attacking the same network, they should share information
very closely in this step. It is very possible that multiple strike teams
working together to accomplish the same goal could actually be attacking
different networks, in which case mapping should be done within individual
strike teams. Each member of a given strike team should attempt to map the
target network themselves, and then members should compare information. It is
very unlikely that anything will be overlooked by every single member of the
team.
Step Four: Divide your target network up into manageable chunks and assign
certain individuals within your team to each one of those chunks. Efficient
devision of labor is key to launching speedy attacks. Here is an example
involving a network composed of four servers (two SQL servers, a DNS server,
and a web server hosting a feature rich corporate site) and a strike team
composed of six attack specialists and four social engineering specialists:
* Have one attack specialist attack the SQL and DNS servers.
* Have one attack specialist attack the website’s multistage user
registration mechanism and login mechanism.
* Have one attack specialist attack the contact and session management
mechanism.
* Have one attack specialist attack any forms not assigned to other
attack specialists as well as any other potentially exploitable
scripts, pages, or mechanisms.
* Have one attack specialist and two social engineering specialists
attempt to launch some sort of phishing champaign against the
company’s employees.
* Have one attack specialist and two social engineering specialists
attempt to convince the company’s hosting provider that they are the
rightful owners of the company’s four servers and have been locked
out of their email account.
Step Five: Drill yourselves. This step is optional but highly recommended.
Procure a server with a large amount of RAM and multiple processors. Have one
member of your strike team set up a virtual network on it that, to the best of
your knowledge, mimics the network you are planning to attack. This one team
member should not participate in the drills themselves, and they should not
give other team members details pertaining to the virtual network. If you are
planning on attacking a large cooperation, set up the virtual network like a
large cooperate network with a labyrinth of firewalls, routers, switches, and
domain controllers. If you are planning on attacking a small cooperation or
home business, set up your network accordingly. You should never have to
visualize more than 12 workstations, even if your team is doing a complex
pivoting exercise. As a group, attempt to break into your virtual network and
execute your stratagem. The virtual network should be deliberately
misconfigured so that there is a way for your team to infiltrate it and
accomplish their simulated goal, but the misconfigurations should be extremely
subtle. The team should have to work very hard to find them. Run multiple
drills. After each drill, the misconfigurations in the network, and potentially
the layout of the network itself, should be altered to force your team to
attack it in a different way or to exercise a different skill. The purpose of
these drills are two fold. Firstly, they allow your team members to get
accustomed to working together. Secondly, they will prepare your team for the
day when they actually go up against your real target network.
Step Six: Execute your stratagem on your target network. Your strike team
should attack methodically and silently. Every member should know what they
need to do and how they need to do it. No mistakes should be made. Every tool
you use should be well honed and function flawlessly. Not a second should be
wasted. Use time to your advantage. Your target organization will be the most
unprepared for an attack in the middle of the night when all of its IT staff
are at home sound asleep. If your stratagem calls for being embedded in your
target network for a long period of time, tread very lightly once you
infiltrate it.
Interlocking Stratagems in Theory
In this section I will give multiple examples of stratagems that an actual
strike team could make use of. You should combine multiple stratagems to
accomplish your ultimate goal. Individual stratagems are like pieces of a
jigsaw puzzle, and are intended to be pieced together. A strike team should
execute multiple stratagems in succession, possibly in cooperation with other
strike teams in an effort to accomplish a common goal. This section is not
intended to be a play book. I encourage you to build off of my stratagems or,
better yet, devise your own. Some stratagems are:
(1) Collect information on individuals within the target organization. Mount a
phishing campaign against the organization and gain access to as many
workstations as possible. Once you have breached its network, do not pivot.
Attempt to locate any useful information on the workstations you have
compromised, and then remain in the network for as long as possible doing
nothing more than idly gathering intelligence.
(2) Take complete or partial control over the target organization’s main means
of communication (usually email). Review a few of their messages and learn how
they are structured and formatted. Then, send a number of blatantly false
messages to one or more members of the organization using the credentials of
another member of the organization. Multiple false messages should be sent over
some period of time. When members of the organization begin to receive false
messages from their colleagues, distrust will begin to take root.
(3) Take complete or partial control over the target organization’s main means
of communication (usually email). Review a few of their messages and learn how
they are structured and formatted. Then, devise some way to intercept and
inspect or modify messages in transit within the target organization
(essentially, perform a man in the middle attack). Every once in awhile, alter
a message in a subtle but disruptive way. Perhaps change a date or a time so
certain individuals do not arrive at their meetings on time or do not arrive at
all. Once you have reason to believe that your modifications have taken their
toll (i.e. the person you targeted missed their meeting), undo the changes you
made to the message you intercepted so upon audit it appears as though the
message was never tampered with. Doing this is usually hard to detect and will
slowly cause the target organization to destabilize itself as tensions between
individuals within it begin to rise and their employees begin to question their
own sanity.
(4) Take complete or partial control over the target organization’s main means
of communication (usually email). Review a few of their messages and learn how
they are structured and formatted. Use the credentials of a high ranking
individual within the target organization to distribute a message that appears
to be from them that claims a terrible tragedy has occurred that warrants an
immediate, brash, resource intensive response from the rest of the
organization. You will most likely not be able to pull this off more than once.
This stratagem works especially well against militant groups with poorly
defined command structures but has other applications as well.
(5) Once inside of the target organization’s network, acquire a small amount of
classified data intended for the eyes of high ranking personnel only.
Strategically plant the data on the computer of one or more lower ranking
individuals. Make it look like an espionage attempt. If many key individuals
within the target organization are accused of trying to siphon out its secrets,
it will be forced to suspend a large portion of its operations while an
investigation is done.
(6) Use a DDoS attack to disrupt the target organization’s communications for a
short period of time when they are most in need of it. For a corporation, this
could be during an important international Skype call. For a government, this
could be immediately following a devastating attack from an insurgency group.
Doing this will cause panic, which will make the target organization
temporarily more susceptible to other kinds of attacks.
(7) Pose as a legitimate company selling legitimate software and befriend the
target organization. Create a piece of software with a very hard to detect
security flaw in it and sell it to them. The flaw could be as simple as a
poorly implemented encryption library or as complex as an insecure multistage
parsing algorithm. It must be incredibly subtle. So subtle that if it is
detected you will be able to write it off as unintentional. It should be
plausibly deniable. Once the target organization installs the vulnerable
software on their machines, leverage it to perform targeted attacks on key
individuals within it. Do not use it to infect entire subnets, as that will
draw to much attention.
(8) Locate a small software provider your target organization already does
business with and infiltrate their network by using other stratagems. Modify
their source code slightly so that their software becomes vulnerable to remote
attack. Do not modify just any code you come across, study the software
provider’s development process and target code that has already been checked
for bugs and is days away from being released to customers. When the target
organization installs the latest version of software from the company that you
have infiltrated, they will become vulnerable. Leverage this vulnerability to
perform targeted attacks on key individuals within the target organization. Do
not use it to infect entire subnets, as that will draw to much attention.
(9) Locate a small software provider your target organization already does
business with and infiltrate their network by using other stratagems. Most
software companies offer rewards to security researchers who find
vulnerabilities in their products. Determine how reported vulnerabilities are
managed by the company you have infiltrated and devise a way to monitor them
in real time. As soon as a security researcher reports a major vulnerability
in a product your target organization uses, use it to perform targeted attacks
on key individuals within it. Do not use it to infect entire subnets, as that
will draw to much attention.
(10) Using other stratagems, infiltrate the computers of a number of influential
individuals within the target organization. Monitor their activity constantly
and closely. If possible, listen to them through their computer’s microphone.
When you believe that one of them has left their computer, undo things they
have just done. Delete the last sentence they wrote. Hit the back button on
their web browser. Close the program they just opened. Over time, this will
lead them to question their sanity.
(11) Using other stratagems, infiltrate the computers of a number of influential
individuals within the target organization. Most modern governments and
corporations are at least partially corrupt. Find evidence of this corruption
and use it to compel one or more of these influential individuals to aid your
cause. If you are unable to find any evidence of corruption, do not be afraid
to bluff. If you make a mysterious window pop up on, say, a CFO’s computer that
alludes to some sort of dirty secret, it is very possible that the CFO will
assume that the hacker who caused the widow to appear knows something about
them that they actually do not. A lot of powerful people have skeletons in the
closet. The media has instilled a fear of hackers into the general populace,
and this fear can be used to your advantage. Most normal people, upon being
confronted by a hacker that has gained complete control of their computer, will
be inclined to believe plausible sounding white lies. Having an “inside man”
within your target organization can be extremely useful.
Interlocking Stratagems in Practice
In this section I shell present an example of a plausible situation that could
warrant the involvement of hacktivists and a corresponding attack loosely built
upon the stratagems from the last section. I have tried to make the situation
realistic, but it is very likely that if you use my writing to plan and execute
your own attack it will play out nothing like the attack depicted below. Most
actual attacks are far more complex than the one presented here. The purpose
of this example is to demonstrate the way in which multiple strike teams should
work together. Notice how at all times each team has one or more specific
goals.
Situation: A hacktivist collective has decided to attack the terrorist
organization Bina Al-ar-mal after they captured and executed a tourist in
Syria. Bina Al-ar-mal is believed to consist of over 40,000 people, has
hundreds of public Twitter feeds and Facebook accounts, and runs a small
terrorist news site hosted on a Russian server. It has three known leaders, who
we shall refer to as Head Terrorist 1, Head Terrorist 2, and Head Terrorist 3.
Twenty-seven hacktivists have joined the effort. They have been split into
three teams: team 1 consists of five of the most highly skilled hacktivists,
team 2 consists of seven moderately skilled hacktivists, and team 3 consists of
fifteen amateur hacktivists.
Time Line:
(Day 1, Hour 1) Team 1 is initially tasked by the collective with infiltrating
as many terrorist Twitter and Facebook accounts as possible. The team starts
enumerating the accounts immediately. They decide that no drill will be
executed, as breaking into Facebook and Twitter accounts is a trivial task.
(Day 1, Hour 1) Team 2 is initially tasked by the collective with infiltrating
the web hosting provider hosting the terrorist group’s website. They begin
reconnaissance.
(Day 1, Hour 1) Team 3 is initially tasked by the collective with attacking
Bina Al-ar-mal’s website directly. They begin to map the website.
(Day 1, Hour 2) Team 1 finishes enumerating the terrorist Facebook and Twitter
accounts. They begin attempting to break into them.
(Day 1, Hour 2) Team 3 finishes mapping Bina Al-ar-mal’s website and begins to
attack.
(Day 1, Hour 3) Team 1 has breached a few terrorist Facebook and Twitter
accounts. After examining their contents they determine that the terrorists
are using SpookyMail email service to communicate off of social media. A few
terrorist email accounts are identified and the team begins to try to break
into those as well.
(Day 1, Hour 3) Team 3 gains read/write access to a limited portion of the
server Bina Al-ar-mal’s website is hosted on. The other teams are alerted.
They set up a simple php based IP logger script to capture the IP addresses of
Bina Al-ar-mal members attempting to check their organization’s news feed.
(Day 1, Hour 6) Team 2’s reconnaissance ends. They have located the web hosting
provider and gathered information on said provider’s website and servers. They
begin attacking them.
(Day 1, Hour 7) Team 1 breaches their first few terrorist email accounts.
(Day 1, Hour 9) Team 2 locates a vulnerability in the the terrorist’s web
hosting provider’s website. They are not able to fully compromise any of their
servers, but they are able to get a list of customer names, domain names, and
billing addresses by exploiting a flaw in the website’s shopping cart feature.
Upon inspecting the list, they discover that the person paying Bina Al-ar-mal’s
hosting bill has a British billing address. The other teams are alerted and
Scotland Yard is notified of the terrorist threat immediately.
(Day 1, Hour 23) Team 1 is able to get Head Terrorist 1’s email address off of
the “contact” pane of one of the hacked terrorist email accounts. They make
ready for a spear phishing attack against him, but decide to wait some time to
launch it, as it is currently the middle of the night where Head Terrorist 1 is
believed to be.
(Day 2, Hour 3) Team 3 has gathered over seven thousand IP addresses of people
viewing Bina Al-ar-mal’s news feed and tries to attack them all using known
router vulnerabilities. When all is said and done they have infected
thirty-seven routers and forty-six workstations. They determine that
thirty-four of these work stations belong to active members of Bina Al-ar-mal.
They observe these workstations passively, hoping to gather information. The
other two teams are briefed on their success.
(Day 2, Hour 8) Team 1 launched a spear phishing attack against Head Terrorist
1 using the hacked email account of another terrorist.
(Day 2, Hour 9) Team 1’s spear phishing attack against Head Terrorist 1 is a
success. They now have full control over his Windows XP laptop and inform the
other two teams of their success. After searching the laptop’s hard drive and
downloading a half gigabyte of confidential documents and IM logs, the team
decides to plant a PDF of the Christian Bible on it along with some real
looking fake papers from the CIA. After gleaning Head Terrorist 2’s and Head
Terrorist 3’s email addresses from the stolen IM logs, the team sends them both
emails from the hacked email account of a lower level terrorist claiming that
Head Terrorist 1 is dirty.
(Day 2, Hour 9) Team 3 decides to take the sensitive information stolen from
Head Terrorist 1’s computer stolen by Team 1 along with other fake CIA
documents and place it on all thirty-four of the terrorist workstations they
control. They use a hacked email account belonging to an uninvolved terrorist
to inform Head Terrorist 2 and Head Terrorist 3 that Head Terrorist 1 is a
traitor an he has at least thirty-four moles inside of their organization, all
of whom they mention by name.
(Day 2, Hour 10) Head Terrorist 1’s laptop is searched by security forces under
the control of Terrorist 2. Head Terrorist 1 is determined to be part of the
CIA and is placed into a cell to be used as leverage against the United States.
(Day 2, Hour 17) Head Terrorist 2 and Head Terrorist 3 raid all thirty-four of
the suspected moles and find the planted documents. They begin to interrogate
all thirty-four of them in order to find out how deep the CIA has penetrated
their organization. None of them know anything but most of them make up real
sounding false information to make the interrogations end.
(Day 3, Hour 3) Team 1 determines that most remaining Facebook and Twitter
accounts can not be breached. Several team members leave and a few stick around
to try and finish off the remaining accounts.
(Day 6, Hour 17) Scotland Yard arrests the person allegedly paying for Bina
Al-ar-mal’s web hosting. It is later determined that the person is actually
part of a London-based Bina Al-ar-mal cell.
(Day 6, hour 20) Team 2 destroys Bina Al-ar-mal’s web site after catching word
of the Scotland Yard raid.
End Result: One of three head terrorists is being held by their own
organization as a traitor and thirty-four unrelated terrorists are being held
by their own organization and brutally interrogated about actions they did not
commit. One terrorist is in the custody of the Scotland Yard, and a British
terror cell has been exposed. Bina Al-ar-mal’s entire communication network is
compromised (but they do not know that yet), and their website has been taken
offline permanently. All members of Bina Al-ar-mal are now becoming
increasingly suspicious of their fellow members and the hacktivist collective
is now in a position to launch further attacks on Bina Al-ar-mal (using the
compromised email and social media accounts) at a later time. This has all been
accomplished in under a week.
________________________________________________________________________________
Disclaimer: All information provided in this document is for educational
purposes only. The ideas presented here are solely academic and should never be
acted upon or put into practice. The author of this document will not be held
responsible in the event any criminal or civil charges be brought against any
individuals misusing the information in this document to break the law.
