SCIENTISTS claim the giant atom-smashing Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being jinxed from the future to save the world.
n a bizarre sci-fi theory, Danish physicist Dr Holger Bech Nielsen and Dr Masao Ninomiya from Japan claim the LHC startup has been delayed due to nature trying to prevent it from finding the elusive Higgs boson, or “God particle”.
They say their maths proves that nature will “ripple backward through time” to stop the LHC before it can create the God particle, like a time traveller who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
“One could even almost say that we have a model for God,” Dr Nielsen says in an unpublished essay.
“He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
“While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus,” Dannis Overbye wrote in the New York Times.
“In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus.”
“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr Nielsen told the New York Times.
European science agency CERN designed the world’s biggest particle accelerator to shoot beams around a freezing 27km concrete ring underground near Geneva, smashing atoms together in search of the elusive “God particle” which is believed to have been present at the Big Bang.
The relaunch was pushed back to late 2009 as more parts had to be replaced, and CERN was recently scandalised when a LHC scientist was found to have approached al-Qaeda for work.
The LHC – which features in sci-fi plots such as Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons and the new TV show FlashForward – has been dubbed a “doomsday device” with claims it will open black holes.
Last year, Professor Brian Cox of Manchester University told the UK Telegraph that LHC scientists had received threatening emails and phone calls demanding that the experiment be halted.
But Prof Cox, ex-keyboardist for 1990’s pop group D:REAM, dismissed the hysteria in rock-star style.
“Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a tw–,” he said.
On return to Europe from the 2008 NEXUS Conference in Australia, flying out of Sydney, we stopped off in Thailand to visit a close friend who lives on the island of Koh Samui. Samui is well known as a travelers’ international crossroads, and is also a place where a number of expats of all nationalities have settled.
There we had the good fortune to meet Jake Simpson [an agreed pseudonym]. We spent several days with him and got to know him, and his family, very well. His story, which we heard in great detail, was one of the most important and interesting we have ever heard.
None of the many long conversations we had were recorded, and we hope to capture an audio interview with Jake soon. The following concise summary was compiled upon return to the US, and has been checked for accuracy by Jake himself.
For reasons which will become obvious, we were at first quite unsure whether to release this at all. After a great deal of thought, and further consultation with Jake, we decided to make this information available. Assuming it is true – and we believe that it is – it could hardly be more significant. It dovetails with everything else we know. And in many ways, we wish that it did not.
Much of what follows is barely believable, so this may be its own best defense. Those who choose not to believe this information at all can relax – just a little, and maybe for a little while – with the knowledge that none of it can currently be proved. For the benefit of those whose jobs it is to monitor this information, we do not have any documentation of any kind. We are delighted, however, to consider Jake a close friend. We are absolutely certain that he is exactly who he says he is, and have talked with a number of people who have known him for many years.
In the report that follows, exact written quotes from Jake himself are presented indented and in italics, as in this closing paragraph.
Enhanced abilities
Jake Simpson was in a ‘specialist field’ [his preferred term] working for a nation friendly to the US. His early training, which is still with him, featured an enhancement of his ability to absorb written information. Incredibly, he has a reading speed of between 80,000 and 100,000 words per minute. To graduate from that class, he was given a copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and had three minutes to read it before being tested on every detail. He scored 90%. This was adequate for a pass, but was not the highest score… another student scored 100%.
Jake is a very able psychic intuitive to this day. He is able to perceive when the AI [artificial intelligence] information gathering system was ‘focused’ in his direction and would periodically pick his exact moment to relate something to us. We observed this again and again. While it at all times seemed the same to us, sometimes Jake told us it was safe to talk, while at other times it was not. It took a little while for us to understand exactly what was going on here.
See below for more on this. We have not heard this information anywhere else in the literature, on the internet, or mentioned by any other witness. But I [Bill] had one experience that showed me directly that this was very real indeed.
Approaching Project Camelot
Jake had written to us by way of introduction:
I have spent many years previously working in abstract areas of national security on behalf of the various parties concerned. I have been very impressed by some of your interviewees’ comments. Keep up the outstanding work.
Jake approached Project Camelot after our work had been brought to his attention by a friend. At first, he wasn’t convinced that we were ‘real’. However, his connections enabled him to do the requisite background checks, and he told us that it soon became clear that we passed muster.
He told us he knew everything about us, but that we had “nothing to worry about”. Everyone who had ever tried to do something like we were doing before, apparently, had been killed. He told us he’d watched every one of our videos, admired what we did, and that we had a lot of courage. He assured us that some of what we have reported is very close to the truth, and that we had his respect.
Jake is one of many in military/ intelligence circles who are the ‘white hats’. Idealistically motivated, he made his career choice when young, wanting to work for mankind and play his part in helping Planet Earth become a better place. Despite discovering the true, bewildering complexity of the world he had entered, he retained both his idealism and his job… and many years later decided to approach Project Camelot with a portion of what he now knew.
He told us that we had many of the correct puzzle pieces – and that, furthermore, it was understood that we work with integrity, and that we’re not trying to breach any legitimate national security. He stressed that we were quite liked by a number of the ‘white hats’ who were monitoring us closely, despite our being on a number of ‘watch lists’ of every kind.
Jake helped us understand that if we kept our information general and didn’t try to prove anything (with documentation or by any other means), we would remain safe. He stressed that it was very important not to get too specific on certain sensitive issues, and to be very wary of ever getting hold of any definitive documentation.
Classified technology and the secret space program
Jake emphasized to us that the current state of classified technology was something like 10,000 [ten thousand] years ahead of public sector technology – and was accelerating away from public sector technology at a current rate of 1,000 years per calendar year.
This got our attention.
Jake did not blink when we mentioned time travel, the Mars base, or the advanced fleet of craft which we had been told by Henry Deacon serviced it. Jake told us that some of the advanced craft were capable of traveling from geostationary orbit (22,300 miles) to treetop height in five seconds. (Work it out: that’s about 16 million miles per hour – although Jake made it clear that the craft would not actually be moving through space in the normal sense… and would also never be seen unless this was intended.) Some of the craft were “larger on the inside than outside”.
Had they traveled to the outer reaches of the solar system? Yes. Beyond our solar system? Yes. Are some of them superluminal (i.e. capable of faster-than-light travel)? Yes. Were some of them very large? Yes. By this time, we were no longer surprised by Jake’s answers. The significance of the superluminal craft would be stressed in a subsequent conversation.
The human race had had contact with extraterrestrials since before World War II. Jake told us that it was very probable that Eisenhower’s 1955 heart attack was at least partially induced by the stress of some of the information he had learned from the extraterrestrials who he had personally met a short time before (after several previous set-up meetings with senior military officials).
Taken all together, Jake told us, the ET visitors came from various races, systems and times, and that human DNA “was compatible” with hundreds of different races. All these ET races, in some meaningful sense, could be said to be “human or human-like”.
AI surveillance and access to knowledge
The AI surveillance system, Jake told us, was literally “out of this world”. It operates hyperdimensionally, based on a highly advanced quantum computing model that is basically our development based on acquired alien technology. This system is so advanced that the ETs themselves are unhappy that we have it.
Not only does it enable access to what any given person is saying, or even thinking – if targeted for investigation – it can also transcend time itself and thereby access information about the thoughts and words of historical figures. Whether this system can look into the future – the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, based on a story by the prolific author Philip K. Dick, comes to mind – we omitted to ask.
Jake’s actions in being sensitive to this device (if device is the right word) – by waiting for exactly the right ‘window’ of opportunity to tell us certain things – were not fully understood by us until I (Bill Ryan) had the following experience.
On our last night together, sitting out in the open after a barbecue, at about 2 am, Jake decided to tell me some things he had not previously revealed, surveillance or no surveillance. As he began to speak, he immediately encountered problems, as if trying to force himself through a barrier. Simultaneously, I found I was being put to sleep and could hardly keep my eyes open. We both spotted what was happening, and remarked on it to one another.
Jake forced himself to keep talking, and I made myself keep listening through a spell of overwhelming dopiness. This episode lasted half an hour or maybe more. We were being forcibly stopped, in real time, from communicating effectively, as a direct and immediate response to our intentions.
It’s very important to understand that this was unconnected with electromagnetics, hidden microphones, targeted beams, or anything else of that nature. My own reference point for what happened was a kind of negative radionics (which also works hyperdimensionally, but as a positive health modality).
In the end we concluded our conversation, now pretty tired. The next morning I simply could not recall what Jake had told me – and still can’t. Upon meeting him again and reporting that I couldn’t remember a thing about our conversation except for the weird effects we had both experienced, he replied wryly:
Maybe it’s just as well.
The biggest secret
The international network of deep underground bases, Jake confirmed, had been built in a continuing program since soon after the end of World War II costing trillions of dollars. The issue here was that military leaders had learned through ET contact that a potential catastrophe of huge magnitude, occurring early in the 21st century, was possible. This information was certainly known to Eisenhower, Jake said (and may have been partially responsible for his heart attack), and was very possibly known as early as World War II.
Just as we had presented in our important summary article The Big Picture, the problem is one which involves massive potential Earth changes that could, in extremis, threaten our civilization. The situation had been extensively studied and evaluated and the conclusion had been reached that the public could not be told.
Jake described the threat – metaphorically – as a wave that was heading our way. It was unclear whether this ‘wave’ is a product of an area of space which the solar system is entering – or whether it is the result of a close fly-past by a large rogue celestial body, or even a combination of two or three simultaneous situations or other unusual and impending cosmological events. But when I asked how this is all known, the answer came back that the superluminal craft have gone out to take a good look at what is around, and have returned with the information.
Jake stressed that IT IS NOT KNOWN what the effects of this situation will be, nor precisely when this may occur. The military are preparing for worst case scenarios, which is what they do best. Readers familiar with our work will note the connection with the report from the Norwegian Politician, and also Dan Burisch’s information which culminates in the report on Timeline 1, variant 83 [T1v83].
Of particular interest is the contradiction with the T1v83 information, in which Dan told us that in the latter half of 2007 a highly classified time portal intelligence retrieval project (for lack of any better phrase) had analyzed a number of possible alternative future timelines and concluded that variant 83 – the most probable of the many that had been investigated – demonstrated that the ‘Timeline 2’ catastrophe had been averted and that while civilization would not be under threat, the next few years would bring major problems. These included nuclear exchanges in a prolonged period of global conflict, under an administration in which Hillary Clinton had been elected President of the US.
Since that information was researched – a year ago at the time of writing this article – it has become very clear that that timeline variant has been ‘broken’, and that we are now instead hurtling along on another, uncharted timeline. In Dan’s words to us a few months ago, “All bets are off” – and when we put Dan’s phrase to Jake, he responded:
That’s about right. I wouldn’t disagree with that at all.
Jake’s information is that it had never been certain that the catastrophe had been averted, and he confirmed that the governments of many first-world nations were continuing to make their detailed and extensive preparations. Australia, we were told, was the “Ark of the World”, and had been designated as such many years previously.
Jake confirmed that he had personally seen some of the classified maps showing dramatically altered future coastlines, and also confirmed the possibility of a very advanced high-speed ‘shuttle-like’ system that connected many places, like the US and Australia under the Pacific Ocean – a longstanding but always uncorroborated rumor within the UFO community that had acquired semi-mythological status since the startling reports of John Lear and William Cooper in the late 1980s. Jake told us that
…the acceleration presses you back into your seat for a very long time.
This has all happened before
One of the most startling snippets of information Jake revealed was that in some locations the base construction engineers had broken through into much older facilities that had been there for thousands of years prior – apparently built for an identical defensive purpose. All this, Jake had told us, had happened before: the catastrophic events are cyclic.
Because of what had been learned through breaking into older facilities built by a prior Earth culture, in some locations decisions had been made to increase the depth of the new facilities to as much as 30,000 feet [9000 meters].
The great classified libraries of the world, in the Vatican and elsewhere, all contained detailed accounts of the destruction of prior civilizations. The Flood Myth, as many anthropologists have described, is evident in many dozens of different cultures all over the world. All this is described in our article The Big Picture.
The threat of stealth viruses
These catastrophic events, Jake told us, would happen not in 2012 but several years after that, though the dates were not precisely known. When we put Bob Dean’s date of 2017 to him (in the context of the coming of Nibiru), Jake’s response is that that would be close, as best he knew.
More immediate, said Jake, was the threat of the deliberate release of viruses followed by
…the hideous effects of spontaneous eruptions of new generations of opportunistic bacteria like Necrotizing Fasciitis and more advanced versions of golden staphylococci which would further reduce the world’s population after the initial first line of worldwide disasters had occurred.
This would trigger worldwide infrastructure breakdown, cause chaos, and make populations easier to control.
Jake predicted that it was quite possible that sometime before the end of 2009 – or possibly early 2010 – there would be a sudden and rapid escalation of international reported outbreaks of extremely dangerous viruses (whether manmade or otherwise). He emphasized that announcements of a global pandemic could suddenly emerge from nowhere “within hours”, and that it would be smart to be prepared: he stressed that some countries could quickly become quarantined, or choose to quarantine themselves, with major implications for international travel and port or airport controls.
Coupled with these outbreaks there will be a very real possibility of food shortages. Even more importantly, there will very likely be shortages of quality foods containing all of the necessary levels of active and absorbable vitamins and minerals of the necessary types, and in the right or proportional quantities, to allow for the human body to properly and adequately nourish itself.
These shortfalls and omissions of some of the fundamental basic substances of various foods will prevent people’s immune systems from operating at optimum levels, thus leaving them exposed to these new virulent types of diseases. This will leave literally hundreds of millions of people exposed to disease vectors through 2011-2012 onwards.
Technological access to other dimensions
Finally, Jake told us of research that had unlocked technology surrounding access to other dimensional states of existence.
In these other alternate states of reality sometimes it turns out they can very briefly and spontaneously manifest, very occasionally quite naturally, here on Earth and in any other part of this universe. In very special circumstances, these can spontaneously manifest across not only this universe but indeed into alternative universal realities.
There is a massive amount of research funding being applied to this very obscure part of the broad spectrum of the special access programs of the world’s budgetary allowance for these types of programs. These funds are managed and funneled from every imaginable area of the majority of the world’s countries through an amazing array of abstract instrumentalities and public funding projects.
The research involved with this subject is at the top of the world’s power elite’s priorities. This is why there are very selective sightings of some of the largest scientific programs, currently ongoing across the world.
The geographical location (in three dimensions) is absolutely critical in some special cases. Jake wrote:
The Earth’s specific rotation is also of consideration and its relationship to the sun and the other planetary bodies contained within our solar system – especially the larger ones. There are very many localized effects experienced subtly, here on Earth in the course of a year, in relation to the specific location to other localized celestial bodies, apart from our sun, contained within and without the heliosphere.
On a larger scale, the position of our solar system in relation to our galaxy is also of vital importance. Jake’s words again:
Our galaxy’s position, speed and direction relative to several neighboring galaxies is also important. Beyond this is an understanding of a technology that not only allows for absolute universal travel and capitalization of the fantastic power that entails, but provides the ability to move or travel dimensionally.
Jake explained that this knowledge is essential to the next phase in ‘Earth human’ development…
…if we Earth humans are ever to be freed from this particular part of existence and universal / multiversal constraints.
Jake stated that as in every aspect of human history here on Earth, there have been supporters, detractors and outright enemies…
…both on Earth and not from Earth. Nothing much has changed over all these eons of time. The play is still largely the same with all of the same motives and allegiances.
The pursuit by some at the expense of the many seems to always end up to be the ultimate price, along with the loss of the Individual and Eternal Grand Self/ Soul/ Spirit, particularly when the individual sells out all that is sacred to the ongoing existence of our race.
As Jake explained, some of these power elite’s motives constituted
…a viable and sustainable level of a heavily manicured and vastly reduced human population, under the pretence of saving first the planet, and next the vast majority of all of the other diverse range of different species here on Earth.
Jake told us that it had been explained to him:
“You have to break a few eggs in order to create a really great meal. The Destroyer of Worlds [sic] brings with it the promise of massively renewed and clean prolific growth for yet another new direction in Earth Human evolution. Roaches will always be roaches. Someone’s got to keep them under control.”
Jake said that what he had been told was highly disturbing to him, and stressed just how at odds he ultimately was
…with the paramount agenda of a significant element of the absolute power elite.
Jake’s strong personal ethics and morality always prevented him from receiving the rich benefits that he told us he knew could have been his. He told us he was
…happy to remain obscure while still contributing where appropriate to assist humankind in meaningful and positive ways.
We gained the impression that the power elite have largely left Jake alone. It was evident to us that he has an intimate knowledge of their culture and knows how to ensure his and his family’s safety.
We close here with this remarkable man’s own words:
This suggests an even more powerful, off-world group or association that I may have a very special relationship with, that is lending a very discreet helping hand… where possible.
We are hopeful that we might record a voice-disguised audio interview with Jake, and although this has been discussed it has not yet been arranged or agreed. We will post more information as soon as we can.
We thank our friend here for his courage in providing this remarkable testimony. Kerry and I are as certain as we can be that this man is both well-informed and has the highest integrity.
Bill Ryan and Kerry Cassidy
PROJECT CAMELOT
8 January 2009
The world is changing fast–maybe faster than we ever thought. And within five years, science fiction is going to turn into non-fiction. We’ll be able to read each other’s minds, forget all our passwords, and create all our own homes’ energy.
These are just three of the five predictions IBM announced this morning as part of its annual “5 in 5” prognostication project.
The list is meant to promote long-term work being done under Big Blue’s Smarter Planet initiative–and the company says “5 in 5” already has a track record of success. In 2008, IBM says, it suggested that within five years, consumers would talk to the Web–and the Web would respond.
This time, the predictions are perhaps a bit more fanciful:
Mind reading is no longer science fiction.
You will be able to power your home with the energy you create yourself.
You will never need a password again.
The digital divide will cease to exist.
Junk mail will become priority mail.
It would seem the most interesting idea posited by IBM is the one about reading minds. But lest you think that what its scientists are saying is that you’ll be able to glare at a friend–or perhaps more importantly, an enemy–and know what he or she is thinking, that may be more than five years off. Rather, this is about how our brains might someday be synced with computing devices:
If you just need to think about calling someone, it happens. Or you can control the cursor on a computer screen just by thinking about where you want to move it.
Scientists in the field of bioinformatics have designed headsets with advanced sensors to read electrical brain activity that can recognize facial expressions, excitement and concentration levels, and thoughts of a person without them physically taking any actions.
Within five years, we will begin to see early applications of this technology in the gaming and entertainment industry. Furthermore, doctors could use the technology to test brain patterns, possibly even assist in rehabilitation from strokes and to help in understanding brain disorders, such as autism.
Another potentially world-changing development that IBM thinks is less than five years away is that we’re soon going to be able to produce all the energy we need for our home–ourselves. This is a radical idea, and one that could shake up the entire energy industry. But in a world where every new pound of carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere has the potential to help wreak havoc on the planet, this could be a very, very good thing if it turns out to be true.
“Anything that moves or produces heat has the potential to create energy that can be captured,” an IBM “5 in 5” release reads. “Walking. Jogging. Bicycling. The heat from your computer. Even the water flowing through your pipes. Advances in renewable energy technology will allow individuals to collect this kinetic energy, which now goes to waste, and use it to help power our homes, offices and cities.”
That means, IBM believes, that we may be able to generate power with, for example, the help of small widgets we put in the spokes of our bikes.
No more passwords
Another big innovation IBM believes could soon be improving everyday lives is the death of the password. And that, it says, could come within five years due to each human’s unique biological underpinnings. “You will no longer need to create, track or remember multiple passwords for various log-ins,” says IBM. “Imagine you will be able to walk up to an ATM machine to securely withdraw money by simply speaking your name or looking into a tiny sensor that can recognize the unique patterns in the retina of your eye. Or by doing the same, you can check your account balance on your mobile phone or tablet.
This is all because of a set of systems that may well be on their way down the pike known as multifactor biometrics. And as a result of our individual faces, voices, and retinas, we may soon be able to access all the things that today require passwords without having to remember anything.
RSA was hacked in March. This was one of the biggest hacks in history.
The current theory is that a nation-state wanted to break into Lockheed-Martin and Northrop-Grumman to steal military secrets. They couldn’t do it, since these companies were using RSA SecurID tokens for network authentication. So, the hackers broke into RSA with a targeted e-mail attack. They planted a backdoor and eventually were able to gain access to SecurID information that enabled them to go back to their original targets and successfully break in. In the aftermath of the attack, RSA was forced to replace SecurID tokens for their customers around the world.
Already in April, we knew that the attack was launched with a targeted e-mail to EMC employees (EMC owns RSA), and that the e-mail contained an attachment called “2011 Recruitment plan.xls“. RSA disclosed this information in their blog post. Problem was, we didn’t have the file. It seemed like nobody did, and the antivirus researcher mailing lists were buzzing with discussion about where to find the file. Nobody had it, and eventually the discussion quieted down.
This bothered Timo Hirvonen. Timo is an analyst in our labs and he was convinced that he could find this file. Every few weeks since April, Timo would go back to our collections of tens of millions of malware samples and try to mine it to find this one file — with no luck. Until this week.
Timo wrote a data analysis tool that analyzed samples for flash objects. We knew the XLS file in question used a Flash object to take over the system. The new tool located several relevant samples. However, one of them was not an Excel file. It was an Outlook message file (MSG). When Timo opened it up, he knew he was onto something. The message file turned out to be the original e-mail that was sent to RSA on the 3rd of March, complete with the attachment 2011 Recruitment plan.xls.
After five months, we finally had the file.
And not only that, we had the original e-mail. Turns out somebody (most likely an EMC/RSA employee) had uploaded the e-mail and attachment to the Virustotal online scanning service on 19th of March. And, as stated in the Virustotal terms, the uploaded files will be shared to relevant parties in the anti-malware and security industry. So, we all had the file already. We just didn’t know we did, and we couldn’t find it amongst the millions of other samples.
The sample was uploaded on 19th of March as file-1994209_msg
So, what did the e-mail look like? It was an e-mail that was spoofed to look like it was coming from recruiting website Beyond.com. It had the subject “2011 Recruitment plan” and one line of content:
“I forward this file to you for review. Please open and view it“.
The message was sent to one EMC employee and cc’d to three others.
When opened, this is what the XLS attachment looked like:
Here’s a YouTube video that shows in practice what happens when you open the malicious Excel file.
In this video you can see us opening the e-mail to Outlook and launching the attachment. The embedded flash object shows up as a [X] symbol in the spreadsheet. The Flash object is executed by Excel (why the heck does Excel support embedded Flash is a great question). The Flash object then uses the CVE-2011-0609 vulnerability to execute code and to drop a Poison Ivy backdoor to the system. The exploit code then closes Excel and the infection is over.
After this, Poison Ivy connects back to its server at good.mincesur.com. The domain mincesur.com has been used in similar espionage attacks over an extended period of time.
Once the connection is made, the attacker has full remote access to the infected workstation. Even worse, it has full access to network drives that the user can access. Apparently the attackers were able to leverage this vector further until they gained access to the critical SecurID data they were looking for.
The attack e-mail does not look too complicated. In fact, it’s very simple. However, the exploit inside Excel was a zero-day at the time and RSA could not have protected against it by patching their systems.
So, was this an Advanced attack? The e-mail wasn’t advanced. The backdoor they dropped wasn’t advanced. But he exploit was advanced. And the ultimate target of the attacker was advanced. If somebody hacks a security vendor just to gain access to their customers systems, we’d say the attack is advanced, even if some of the interim steps weren’t very complicated.
Timo will be discussing his research on the topic in detail in the T2 Data Security conference in October in his talk titled
“How RSA Was Breached“.
P.S. For those who are still looking for the sample:
MD5 of the MSG file: 1e9777dc70a8c6674342f1796f5f1c49
MD5 of the XLS file: 4031049fe402e8ba587583c08a25221a
Speaking at the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) Congress in Berlin on Tuesday, a pair of researchers demonstrated a start-to-finish means of eavesdropping on encrypted GSM cellphone calls and text messages, using only four sub-$15 telephones as network “sniffers,” a laptop computer, and a variety of open source software.
While such capabilities have long been available to law enforcement with the resources to buy a powerful network-sniffing device for more than $50,000 (remember The Wire?), the pieced-together hack takes advantage of security flaws and shortcuts in the GSM network operators’ technology and operations to put the power within the reach of almost any motivated tech-savvy programmer.
“GSM is insecure, the more so as more is known about GSM,” said Security Research Labs researcher Karsten Nohl. “It’s pretty much like computers on the net in the 1990s, when people didn’t understand security well.”
Several of the individual pieces of this GSM hack have been displayed before. The ability to decrypt GSM’s 64-bit A5/1 encryption was demonstrated last year at this same event, for instance. However, network operators then responded that the difficulty of finding a specific phone, and of picking the correct encrypted radio signal out of the air, made the theoretical decryption danger minimal at best.
Naturally this sounded like a challenge.
Working the audience through each step of the process, Nohl and OsmocomBB project programmer Sylvain Munaut demonstrated the way in which GSM networks exchange subscriber location data, in order to correctly route phone calls and SMSs, allows anyone to determine a subscriber’s current location with a simple Internet query, to the level of city or general rural area.
Once a phone is narrowed down to a specific city, a potential attacker can drive through the area, sending the target phone “silent” or “broken” SMS messages that do not show up on the phone. By sniffing to each bay station’s traffic, listening for the delivery of the message and the response of the target phone at the correct time, the location of the target phone can be more precisely identified.
To create a network sniffer, the researchers replaced the firmware of a simple Motorola GSM phone with their own alternative, which allowed them to retain the raw data received from the cell network, and examine more of the cellphone network space than a single phone ordinarily monitors. Upgrading the USB connection allowed this information to be sent in real time to a computer.
By sniffing the network while sending a target phone an SMS, they were able to determine precisely which random network ID number belonged to the target. This gave them the ability to identify which of the myriad streams of information they wanted to record from the network.
All that was left was decrypting the information. Not a trivial problem, but made possible by the way operator networks exchange system information with their phones.
As part of this background communication, GSM networks send out strings of identifying information, as well as essentially empty “Are you there?” messages. Empty space in these messages is filled with buffer bytes. Although a new GSM standard was put in place several years ago to turn these buffers into random bytes, they in fact remain largely identical today, under a much older standard.
This allows the researchers to predict with a high degree of probability the plain-text content of these encrypted system messages. This, combined with a two-terabyte table of precomputed encryption keys (a so-called rainbow table), allows a cracking program to discover the secret key to the session’s encryption in about 20 seconds.
This is particularly useful, the researchers said, because many if not most GSM operators reuse these session keys for several successive communications, allowing a key extracted from a test SMS to be used again to record the next telephone call.
“There is one key used for communication between the operators and the SIM card that is very well protected, because that protects their monetary interest,” Nohl said. “The other key is less well protected, because it only protects your private data.”
The researchers demonstrated this process, using their software to sniff the headers being used by a phone, extract and crack a session-encryption key, and then use this to decrypt and record a live GSM call between two phones in no more than a few minutes.
Much of this vulnerability could be addressed relatively easily, Nohl said. Operators could make sure that their network routing information was not so simply available through the Internet. They could implement the randomization of padding bytes in the system information exchange, making the encryption harder to break. They could certainly avoid recycling encryption keys between successive calls and SMSs.
Nor is it enough to imagine that modern phones, using 3G networks, are shielded from these problems. Many operators reserve much of their 3G bandwidth for internet traffic, while shunting voice and SMS off to the older GSM network.
Nohl elicited a laugh from the audience of hackers when he called the reprogrammed network-sniffing phones “GSM debugging devices.” But he was serious, he said.
“This is all a 20-year-old infrastructure, with lots of private data and not a lot of security,” he said. “We want you to help phones go through the same kind of evolutionary steps that computers did in the 1990s.”
Holographic disc storage may not have worked out so well for InPhase, but the folks at General Electric are still trying to make HVD work. Their latest breakthrough, shown off today at an IEEE symposium in Hawaii, is a new micro-holographic material which is 100x more sensitive than its predecessor and ups recording speed to that of Blu-ray discs. In the two years since we saw it last some of the hyperbole has apparently been lost — no claims of “two to four years left for Blu-ray” this time around — but manager Peter Lorraine still thinks the DVD-sized discs have a future in archival and consumer systems. That’s getting tougher to imagine in a world with FiOS and Netflix streaming, but if there is ever another disc format you may be looking at it right now.
(NaturalNews) Even as the veggie blame game is now under way across the EU, where a super resistant strain of e.coli is sickening patients and filling hospitals in Germany, virtually no one is talking about how e.coli could have magically become resistant to eight different classes of antibiotic drugs and then suddenly appeared in the food supply.
This particular e.coli variation is a member of the O104 strain, and O104 strains are almost never (normally) resistant to antibiotics. In order for them to acquire this resistance, they must be repeatedly exposed to antibiotics in order to provide the “mutation pressure” that nudges them toward complete drug immunity.
So if you’re curious about the origins of such a strain, you can essentially reverse engineer the genetic code of the e.coli and determine fairly accurately which antibiotics it was exposed to during its development. This step has now been done (see below), and when you look at the genetic decoding of this O104 strain now threatening food consumers across the EU, a fascinating picture emerges of how it must have come into existence.
The genetic code reveals the history
When scientists at Germany’s Robert Koch Institute decoded the genetic makeup of the O104 strain, they found it to be resistant to all the following classes and combinations of antibiotics:
In addition, this O104 strain posses an ability to produce special enzymes that give it what might be called “bacteria superpowers” known technically as ESBLs:
“Extended-Spectrum Beta-Lactamases (ESBLs) are enzymes that can be produced by bacteria making them resistant to cephalosporins e.g. cefuroxime, cefotaxime and ceftazidime – which are the most widely used antibiotics in many hospitals,” explains the Health Protection Agency in the UK (http://www.hpa.org.uk/Topics/Infect…).
On top of that, this O104 strain possesses two genes — TEM-1 and CTX-M-15 — that “have been making doctors shudder since the 1990s,” reports The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis…). And why do they make doctors shudder? Because they’re so deadly that many people infected with such bacteria experience critical organ failure and simply die.
Bioengineering a deadly superbug
So how, exactly, does a bacterial strain come into existence that’s resistant to over a dozen antibiotics in eight different drug classes and features two deadly gene mutations plus ESBL enzyme capabilities?
There’s really only one way this happens (and only one way) — you have to expose this strain of e.coli to all eight classes of antibiotics drugs. Usually this isn’t done at the same time, of course: You first expose it to penicillin and find the surviving colonies which are resistant to penicillin. You then take those surviving colonies and expose them to tetracycline. The surviving colonies are now resistant to both penicillin and tetracycline. You then expose them to a sulfa drug and collect the surviving colonies from that, and so on. It is a process of genetic selection done in a laboratory with a desired outcome. This is essentially how some bioweapons are engineered by the U.S. Army in its laboratory facility in Ft. Detrick, Maryland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation…).
Although the actual process is more complicated than this, the upshot is that creating a strain of e.coli that’s resistant to eight classes of antibiotics requires repeated, sustained expose to those antibiotics. It is virtually impossible to imagine how this could happen all by itself in the natural world. For example, if this bacteria originated in the food (as we’ve been told), then where did it acquire all this antibiotic resistance given the fact that antibiotics are not used in vegetables?
When considering the genetic evidence that now confronts us, it is difficult to imagine how this could happen “in the wild.” While resistance to a single antibiotic is common, the creation of a strain of e.coli that’s resistant to eight different classes of antibiotics — in combination — simply defies the laws of genetic permutation and combination in the wild. Simply put, this superbug e.coli strain could not have been created in the wild. And that leaves only one explanation for where it really came from: the lab.
Engineered and then released into the wild
The evidence now points to this deadly strain of e.coli being engineered and then either being released into the food supply or somehow escaping from a lab and entering the food supply inadvertently. If you disagree with that conclusion — and you’re certainly welcome to — then you are forced to conclude that this octobiotic superbug (immune to eight classes of antibiotics) developed randomly on its own… and that conclusion is far scarier than the “bioengineered” explanation because it means octobiotic superbugs can simply appear anywhere at any time without cause. That would be quite an exotic theory indeed.
My conclusion actually makes more sense: This strain of e.coli was almost certainly engineered and then released into the food supply for a specific purpose. What would that purpose be? It’s obvious, I hope.
It’s all problem, reaction, solution at work here. First cause a PROBLEM (a deadly strain of e.coli in the food supply). Then wait for the public REACTION (huge outcry as the population is terrorized by e.coli). In response to that, enact your desired SOLUTION (total control over the global food supply and the outlawing of raw sprouts, raw milk and raw vegetables).
That’s what this is all about, of course. The FDA relied on the same phenomenon in the USA when pushing for its recent “Food Safety Modernization Act” which essentially outlaws small family organic farms unless they lick the boots of FDA regulators. The FDA was able to crush farm freedom in America by piggybacking on the widespread fear that followed e.coli outbreaks in the U.S. food supply. When people are afraid, remember, it’s not difficult to get them to agree to almost any level of regulatory tyranny. And making people afraid of their food is a simple matter… a few government press releases emailed to the mainstream media news affiliates is all it takes.
First ban the natural medicine, then attack the food supply
Now, remember: All this is happening on the heels of the EU ban on medicinal herbs and nutritional supplements — a ban that blatantly outlaws nutritional therapies that help keep people healthy and free from disease. Now that all these herbs and supplements are outlawed, the next step is to make people afraid of fresh food, too. That’s because fresh vegetables are medicinal, and as long as the public has the right to buy fresh vegetables, they can always prevent disease.
But if you can make people AFRAID of fresh vegetables — or even outlaw them altogether — then you can force the entire population onto a diet of dead foods and processed foods that promote degenerative disease and bolster the profits of the powerful drug companies.
It’s all part of the same agenda, you see: Keep people sick, deny them access to healing herbs and supplements, then profit from their suffering at the hands of the global drug cartels.
GMOs play a similar role in all this, of course: They’re designed to contaminate the food supply with genetic code that causes widespread infertility among human beings. And those who are somehow able to reproduce after exposure to GMOs still suffer from degenerative disease that enriches the drug companies from “treatment.”
Do you recall which country was targeted in this recent e.coli scare? Spain. Why Spain? You may recall that leaked cables from Wikileaks revealed that Spain resisted the introduction of GMOs into its agricultural system, even as the U.S. government covertly threatened political retaliation for its resistance. This false blaming of Spain for the e.coli deaths is probably retaliation for Spain’s unwillingness to jump on the GMO bandwagon. (http://www.naturalnews.com/030828_G…)
That’s the real story behind the economic devastation of Spain’s vegetable farmers. It’s one of the subplots being pursued alongside this e.coli superbug scheme.
Food as weapons of war – created by Big Pharma?
By the way, the most likely explanation of where this strain of e.coli was bioengineered is that the drug giants came up with it in their own labs. Who else has access to all the antibiotics and equipment needed to manage the targeted mutations of potentially thousands of e.coli colonies? The drug companies are uniquely positioned to both carry out this plot and profit from it. In other words, they have the means and the motive to engage in precisely such actions.
Aside from the drug companies, perhaps only the infectious disease regulators themselves have this kind of laboratory capacity. The CDC, for example, could probably pull this off if they really wanted to.
The proof that somebody bioengineered this e.coli strain is written right in the DNA of the bacteria. That’s forensic evidence, and what it reveals cannot be denied. This strain underwent repeated and prolonged exposure to eight different classes of antibiotics, and then it somehow managed to appear in the food supply. How do you get to that if not through a well-planned scheme carried out by rogue scientists? There is no such thing as “spontaneous mutation” into a strain that is resistant to the top eight classes of brand-name antibiotic drugs being sold by Big Pharma today. Such mutations have to be deliberate.
Once again, if you disagree with this assessment, then what you’re saying is that NO, it wasn’t done deliberately… it happened accidentally! And again, I’m saying that’s even scarier! Because that means the antibiotic contamination of our world is now at such an extreme level of overkill that a strain of e.coli in the wild can be saturated with eight different classes of antibiotics to the point where it naturally develops into its own deadly superbug. If that’s what people believe, then that’s almost a scarier theory than the bioengineering explanation!
A new era has begun: Bioweapons in your food
But in either case — no matter what you believe — the simple truth is that the world is now facing a new era of global superbug strains of bacteria that can’t be treated with any known pharmaceutical. They can all, of course, be readily killed with colloidal silver, which is exactly why the FDA and world health regulators have viciously attacked colloidal silver companies all these years: They can’t have the public getting its hands on natural antibiotics that really work, you see. That would defeat the whole purpose of making everybody sick in the first place.
In fact, these strains of e.coli superbugs can be quite readily treated with a combination of natural full-spectrum antibiotics from plants such as garlic, ginger, onions and medicinal herbs. On top of that, probiotics can help balance the flora of the digestive tract and “crowd out” the deadly e.coli that might happen by. A healthy immune system and well-functioning digestive tract can fight off an e.coli superbug infection, but that’s yet another fact the medical community doesn’t want you to know. They much prefer you to remain a helpless victim lying in the hospital, waiting to die, with no options available to you. That’s “modern medicine” for ya. They cause the problems that they claim to treat, and then they won’t even treat you with anything that works in the first place.
Nearly all the deaths now attributable to this e.coli outbreak are easily and readily avoidable. These are deaths of ignorance. But even more, they may also be deaths from a new era of food-based bioweapons unleashed by either a group of mad scientists or an agenda-driven institution that has declared war on the human population.
Additional developments on this e.coli outbreak
• 22 fatalities have so far been reported, with 2,153 people now sickened and possibly facing kidney failure.
• An agricultural ministry in Germany said that even though they now know the source of the outbreak is a German sprout farm, they are still not lifting their warnings for people to avoid eating tomatoes and lettuce. In other words, keep the people afraid!
• “The German variant of E coli, known as O104, is a hybrid of the strains that can cause bloody diarrhoea and kidney damage called ‘hemolytic uremic syndrome’.” (http://www.independent.ie/world-new…)
• A total of ten European nations have reported outbreaks of this e.coli strain, mostly from people who had visited northern Germany.
• The following story is in German, and it hints that the e.coli outbreak might have been a terrorist attack (http://www.aerztezeitung.de/medizin…). Yeah, a terrorist attack by the drug companies upon innocent people, as usual…
Following up on my story on the FBI’s computer-monitoring malware, the most interesting question unanswered in the FBI affidavit (.pdf) is how the bureau gets its “Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier” onto a target PC.
In the Josh Glazebrook case, the FBI sent its program specifically to Glazebrook’s then-anonymous MySpace profile, Timberlinebombinfo. The attack is described this way:
The CIPAV will be deployed through an electronic messaging program from an account controlled by the FBI. The computers sending and receiving the CIPAV data will be machines controlled by the FBI. The electronic message deploying the CIPAV will only be directed to the administrator(s) of the “Timberinebombinfo” account.
It’s possible that the FBI used social engineering to trick Glazebrook into downloading and executing the malicious code by hand — but given the teen’s hacker proclivities, it seems unlikely he’d fall for a ruse like that. More likely the FBI used a software vulnerability, either a published one that Glazebrook hadn’t patched against, or one that only the FBI knows.
MySpace has an internal instant messaging system, and a web-based stored messaging system. (Contrary to one report, MySpace doesn’t offer e-mail, so we can rule out an executable attachment.) Since there’s no evidence the CIPAV was crafted specifically to target MySpace, my money is on a browser or plug-in hole, activated through the web-based stored messaging system, which allows one MySpace user to send a message to another’s inbox. The message can include HTML and embedded image tags.
There are several such holes to choose from. There’s an old hole — patched early last year — in the way Windows renders WMF (Windows Metafile) images. Cyber crooks are still using it to install keyloggers, adware and spyware on vulnerable machines. Last year it even popped up in an attack on MySpace users delivered through an ad banner.
Roger Thompson, CTO of security vendor Exploit Prevention Labs, says he’d bet on the fresher Windows animated cursor vulnerability, which was discovered being exploited by Chinese hackers last March, “and was quickly picked up by all the blackhats everywhere,” he says.
For a couple weeks, there wasn’t even a patch available for the animated cursor hole — in April, Microsoft rushed one out. But, of course, not everybody jumps on every Windows security update, and this hole remains one of the most popular browser bugs among black hats today, he says.
There are also holes in Apple’s QuickTime browser plug-in — fixing it means downloading and reinstalling QuickTime. Like the animated cursor hole, some of the QuickTime vulns allow an attacker to gain complete control of a machine remotely. “They might have embedded something in a QuickTime movie or something,” says Thompson.
If you have any theories, let me know. (If you know something for certain, there’s THREAT LEVEL’s secure feedback form) .
Update:
Greg Shipley, CTO of security consultancy Neohapsis, says it’s no surprise that anti-virus software didn’t protect Glazebrook (assuming he even ran any). Without a sample of the FBI’s code from which to build a signature, AV software would have a tough time spotting it.
Some of the more “heuristic” techniques that profile application behavior might flag it … maybe. However, IMO one of the most basic signs of good Windows Trojan design is an awareness of installed packages and default browsers, both alluded to in the text. If the trojan is browser-aware (and in turn, potentially proxy-aware) and HTTP is used as the transport protocol, heh, you’re pretty fscked. That’s the makings of a great covert-communications channel, and one that will do quite nicely in 99.9% of the environments out there …
In short, stock AV probably isn’t gonna flag this thing unless they got a copy of it and built a sig, neither of which is likely.
Nuclear Engineer, Mehran Tavakoli Keshe, has came forward as being the developer of the technology being used in Iran’s new “flying saucer.” His technology is claimed to harness magnetism and gravity to allow travel throughout the solar system and beyond.
On March 16th, 2011, the hard-line Iranian news agency Fars issued a press release stating Iran had developed a flying saucer. The unmanned saucer named “Zohal” is stated to be equipped with an auto-pilot system, GPS, and an imaging system. It is claimed the craft can fly indoors and outside. Initially, the press release included a stock photo of a flying saucer that was obviously from an old SCIFI movie. This image was later replaced with a picture of what looks like an ordinary quadrocopter. Such an image would tend to indicate there is nothing exotic about the craft.
Now, nuclear Engineer, Mehran Tavakoli Keshe, who we have interviewed and covered here in our news for a couple of years, has came forward and claimed to be the developer of the gravity manipulating technology being used in the Iranian flying saucer – something he divulged to us in the past, prior to the official Iranian announcement.
Mehran Keshe is the director of the Keshe Foundation. He claims to have developed a special plasma reactor that allows for the manipulation of gravitational and magnetic fields to produce motion. Multiple patent applications have been filed for this reactor, and details of it are explained on his foundation’s many websites. Importantly, in a recent interview with William Alec of Vortex Network News, Keshe specifically states his technology is incorporated in Iran’s new saucer. He also claims to have given the technology to the Iranian government years ago and is actively working with them. This contradicts the idea that the saucer is a kind of multi-turbine helicopter.
Powerful and Affordable Propulsion
This technology sounds too good to be true. It is claimed to allow for both a gravitational and magnetic field to be produced around a craft. The gravitational and magnetic fields are used for propulsion. They work for or against the fields of other bodies in space such as planets, stars, or even galaxies. A device that weighs seven to ten kilograms is claimed to produce many tons of lift. The lifting force is created without the need for any conventional fuels. These devices are very cheap to build. A small reactor costs around one thousand dollars in components.
The benefits of this astounding technology are many fold and address many of the challenges found in space travel. To be blunt, it seems to combine all the best technologies of the fictional Starship Enterprise. For example, the magnetic field produced by the craft protects the occupants from cosmic radiation. Apparently, this field is so intense that small dust particles that would normally destroy a space craft, are simply disassociated on the atomic level. Due to the fact the craft produces its own gravitational field, occupants can walk about normally and will experience the same level of gravity they do on Earth. This would prevent the muscle and bone degradation found when exposed to long periods of zero gravity. Also, the occupants should not feel the inertial effects of sudden acceleration.
If verified this technology could suddenly leap mankind forward to an age of space exploration beyond that of Star Trek. This technology is claimed to offer not only faster than light travel, but almost instant space travel. Theoretically, a craft could travel to the nearest star system (4.2 light years away) in seconds! Of course this technology offers benefits inside of a planetary atmosphere. A craft utilizing this technology would not come into physical contact with air due to the powerful magnetic field around the craft. This would eliminate drag and prevent sonic booms. It is also claimed that the craft would be able to travel underwater without any drag!
Potentially Game Changing Theory of Gravity
The theory behind the reactor and how it produces such forces is potentially revolutionary. Keshe claims that all matter (including protons and electrons) are composed of anti-matter, dark-matter, and normal matter. Gravity is produced by the magnetic fields of these various types of matter interacting with each other. By turning matter into a plasma these different components can be disentangled from each other. Doing so can allow for powerful magnetic and gravitational fields to be created. Also, the same process can be used to produce an unlimited supply of energy. This can be done by simply adding special coils near the spinning plasma.
It would be easy to dismiss this technology as being fantasy, except for the fact that many specific claims have been made. Apparently, work on the propulsion aspect of the technology is complete. They have small units (less than ten kilograms) that can produce tons of lifting force. The first prototype produced so much lift that he had to jump on top of it to stop it from flying too far upwards! This technology has been shared with various nations including the USA, Iran, and Russia. NASA and other space agencies have been given all the information about the technology. It is claimed the technology is now being scaled up, but Keshe states he cannot talk about the details.
The goal of the Keshe Foundation is to open up a university in which students from around the world would spend six years learning about the technology, building systems, and going back to their home country to teach others. This would make sure all nations have access to the technology. By 2015 the foundation also plans to have a full scale craft that would allow tourists to visit the moon.
There are only three options here. Keshe has produced a breakthrough technolology that holds the potential to change our world, he is an absolute liar, or he is delusional. There is nothing in between these possibilities. Either his claims are true or they are not. Tons of lift from a ten kilogram device cannot be a measurement error.
Beyond the Tech of Star Trek
Please let me be clear about my position on the reality of this technology. I very sincerely hope he is telling the truth. In addition, I have no reason to believe he is lying. But the simple extent of this potential breakthrough is almost unfathomable. This technology would overcome every single obstacle to interstellar space travel plus provide an unlimited source of energy. If he is telling the truth, our civilization could soon advance beyond the 24th century…..
There is practically nothing in the world of Star Trek this technology does not also offer.
The critical issue I see is to get verification that his technology is being used in the Iranian flying saucer. We need some sort of official reference, statement, or document directly linking his technology to the craft. I have emailed Keshe a list of questions about his connection to the saucer. The questions I asked are as follows, along with the answers he provided (in red) on April 07, 2011 12:46 AM Mountain time:
1) I believe I heard you say in a recent interview there is a video of your reactor producing lift, but it has not been made public. When do you think it might be made public? This is the decision of the Iranian government.
2) Is there any reference you can provide that would directly link your technology to the technology used in Iran’s flying saucer?
We have been Publishing this for two years and I have just returned from Iran in January for 7 day visit, which has been documented on my forum. and we said Iran will show space technology on their own time, ask the Canadian government officials who took all my documents in Toronto from me in the air hijacking, they tell you who and where I was developing In Iran. http://www.keshefoundation.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=249
3) Have you personally seen Iran’s flying saucer? If so, where and in what circumstance? I built the initial system for lift and tested for them 2.5 years ago in Iran. Iran up to then was producing rockets and never even talked about spaceship program.
4) Did you supervise the design, construction, and testing of the saucer? If not, who did and how can we get into contact with them?
5) Can you describe the physical and performance characteristics of Iran’s saucer? For example…
– What element does it use to produce plasma? basic elements
– How large is it?
– How much lifting force does it produce? This is not relevant in Magravs positioning systems
– What is it’s range? to any destination, these systems do not have a rang as propulsion system.
– How fast can it fly? speed thousands of times speed of sound in space condition
– Is it easily scalable to a larger size? Your scale is field strength dependent
– Can it travel to Earth orbit or beyond? Plan is for Mars http://www.keshefoundation.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=270
– What does it look like? A disk
6) Do you have any photos of the saucer? Would you be willing to share such an image to be featured on PESN?
7) Is there any additional information about Iran’s saucer you can provide? Watch the Iranian space release. I recon the first landing on Earth display will be in Jerusalem as I have explained before and if you understand the political language of Middel East.
Last Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing focused on law enforcement surveillance of modern Internet services.
Although both the New York Times and CNET have stories on the hearing, I don’t think either publication covered the important details (nor did they take the time to extract and post video clips).
CALEA Hearing: Rep. Johnson asks about the impact of encryption backdoors
Re: Encryption, Warrants And The FBI
CALEA Hearing: FBI GC praises Gmail encryption, still wants users’s private data
Re: Encryption, Warrants And The FBI
FBI GC: Most criminals are dumb and won’t use crypto
~Dreams are like stars…you may never touch them, but if you follow them they will lead you to your destiny.~
Re: Encryption, Warrants And The FBI
What happens next?
Last week’s hearing was just the first step in what will likely be a long battle. There will be more hearings, and eventually, the FBI will return with draft legislation. In the mean time, all the major tech companies in Silicon Valley will no doubt continue to engage in private, high-pressure negotiations with senior FBI officials who will tell them they can avoid new legislation by voluntarily building new surveillance capabilities into their products.
~Dreams are like stars…you may never touch them, but if you follow them they will lead you to your destiny.~
Re: Encryption, Warrants And The FBI
If they can shut down bank accounts for folks who have not even been charged with a crime, any thinking person can see where this is all leading.
~Dreams are like stars…you may never touch them, but if you follow them they will lead you to your destiny.~
One of the demands of the Egyptian revolution was to demolish one of the well-known security services for torture, grave human rights violations and spying on activists which is the State Security Investigations (SSI) and to have its officers set onto trials.
Few weeks ago when authorities didn’t respond immediately to people’s demand, many Egyptians stormed SSI headquarters to protect the evidences against SSI offices (including torture equipments and documents). Among those documents where communications between SSI units related to censorship, monitoring online content, controlling computes/ laptops, as well as shutting down communications services.
Those SSI leaks provides many information that I believe all individuals and entities working on right to privacy and freedom of expression and other relevant fields should understand and be aware of.
Since the first 6 April Strike in Egypt in 2008, security agencies and units decided to pay more attention to activist’s communications online and via their cell phones. The SSI established an Emergency Unit, among its roles to:
Cut-off the internet in a city, governorate or several ones.
Block particulate websites.
Get information about netiznes.
Shutdown mobile services in telecommunication companies.
Shutdown Bulk-SMS services.
Make sure telecommunications companies can quickly respond to requests by security authorities.
The SSI did several meetings in the presence of representatives from Ministry of Interior, General Intelligence, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Mass Communication, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, and the three Telecommunications Companies in Egypt (Vodafone, Mobinil, Etisalat).
In 2009 -and maybe earlier- communications was established from a European-based company with its headquarters in the United Kingdom called Gamma Group International with SSI in Egypt offering them a software that SSI units describe in their internal communications in August 2009 as “high-level security system that have capabilities not provided in other systems, most prominent capabilities is hacking into personal Skype accounts, hacking email accounts associated with Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail, completely control targeted computers” and in another communication in December 2010 “record audio and video chats, record activity taking place around hacked computers with cameras and take copies of its content”.
In those communications between SSI units, the price of the software which is called Finfisher is mentioned to be for 2 million Egyptian pounds.
Here is how Gamma Group International describes itself on their website “provides advanced technical surveillance and monitoring solutions and international consultancy to National and State Intelligence Departments and Law Enforcement Agencies.”
The most recent communication was a report issued on 1 January 2011 by an IT unit in the SSI after trying a free-trial version of the software.
These kinds of programs developed by Gamma International and similar companies are simply enabling governments and security agencies in the ruling regimes to violate anyone’s privacy, monitor anyone’s activity and impose censorship. Consequently, helping the governments to fabricate cases against political activists and human rights defenders on charges like “destabilize order”, “defaming state leaders”, “spreading rumors to overthrow the regime” and many other charges that regimes set to minimize the work of civil societies and activists towards better human rights situations.
The same situation with the Telecommunications companies in Egypt whom cooperated with Mubarak’s regime to provide information about activists and disable services.
You can read and download the SSI leaks addressed in this post through this links:
– State Security Internal Communications About Finfisher – Link [Arabic].
– Commercial Offer from Gamma International to State Security – Link [English]
– State Security Internal Communications on Monitoring SMS – Link [Arabic]
by Grazyna Fosar and Franz Bludorf
Russian DNA Discoveries: Original version
THE HUMAN DNA IS A BIOLOGICAL INTERNET and superior in many aspects to the artificial one. The latest Russian scientific research directly or indirectly explains phenomena such as clairvoyance, intuition, spontaneous and remote acts of healing, self healing, affirmation techniques, unusual light/auras around people (namely spiritual masters), mind’s influence on weather patterns and much more. In addition, there is evidence for a whole new type of medicine in which DNA can be influenced and reprogrammed by words and frequencies WITHOUT cutting out and replacing single genes.
Only 10% of our DNA is being used for building proteins. It is this subset of DNA that is of interest to western researchers and is being examined and categorized. The other 90% are considered “junk DNA.” The Russian researchers, however, convinced that nature was not dumb, joined linguists and geneticists in a venture to explore those 90% of “junk DNA.” Their results, findings and conclusions are simply revolutionary! According to them, our DNA is not only responsible for the construction of our body but also serves as data storage and in communication. The Russian linguists found that the genetic code, especially in the apparently useless 90%, follows the same rules as all our human languages. To this end they compared the rules of syntax (the way in which words are put together to form phrases and sentences), semantics (the study of meaning in language forms) and the basic rules of grammar.
They found that the alkalines of our DNA follow a regular grammar and do have set rules just like our languages. So human languages did not appear coincidentally but are a reflection of our inherent DNA.
The Russian biophysicist and molecular biologist Pjotr Garjajev and his colleagues also explored the vibrational behavior of the DNA. [For the sake of brevity I will give only a summary here. For further exploration please refer to the appendix at the end of this article.] The bottom line was: “Living chromosomes function just like solitonic/holographic computers using the endogenous DNA laser radiation.” This means that they managed for example to modulate certain frequency patterns onto a laser ray and with it influenced the DNA frequency and thus the genetic information itself. Since the basic structure of DNA-alkaline pairs and of language (as explained earlier) are of the same structure, no DNA decoding is necessary.
One can simply use words and sentences of the human language! This, too, was experimentally proven! Living DNA substance (in living tissue, not in vitro) will always react to language-modulated laser rays and even to radio waves, if the proper frequencies are being used.
This finally and scientifically explains why affirmations, autogenous training, hypnosis and the like can have such strong effects on humans and their bodies. It is entirely normal and natural for our DNA to react to language. While western researchers cut single genes from the DNA strands and insert them elsewhere, the Russians enthusiastically worked on devices that can influence the cellular metabolism through suitable modulated radio and light frequencies and thus repair genetic defects.
Garjajev’s research group succeeded in proving that with this method chromosomes damaged by x-rays for example can be repaired. They even captured information patterns of a particular DNA and transmitted it onto another, thus reprogramming cells to another genome. So they successfully transformed, for example, frog embryos to salamander embryos simply by transmitting the DNA information patterns! This way the entire information was transmitted without any of the side effects or disharmonies encountered when cutting out and re-introducing single genes from the DNA. This represents an unbelievable, world-transforming revolution and sensation! All this by simply applying vibration and language instead of the archaic cutting-out procedure! This experiment points to the immense power of wave genetics, which obviously has a greater influence on the formation of organisms than the biochemical processes of alkaline sequences.
Esoteric and spiritual teachers have known for ages that our body is programmable by language, words and thought. This has now been scientifically proven and explained. Of course the frequency has to be correct. And this is why not everybody is equally successful or can do it with always the same strength. The individual person must work on the inner processes and maturity in order to establish a conscious communication with the DNA. The Russian researchers work on a method that is not dependent on these factors but will ALWAYS work, provided one uses the correct frequency.
But the higher developed an individual’s consciousness is, the less need is there for any type of device! One can achieve these results by oneself, and science will finally stop to laugh at such ideas and will confirm and explain the results. And it doesn’t end there. The Russian scientists also found out that our DNA can cause disturbing patterns in the vacuum, thus producing magnetized wormholes! Wormholes are the microscopic equivalents of the so-called Einstein-Rosen bridges in the vicinity of black holes (left by burned-out stars). These are tunnel connections between entirely different areas in the universe through which information can be transmitted outside of space and time. The DNA attracts these bits of information and passes them on to our consciousness. This process of hypercommunication is most effective in a state of relaxation. Stress, worries or a hyperactive intellect prevent successful hypercommunication or the information will be totally distorted and useless.
In nature, hypercommunication has been successfully applied for millions of years. The organized flow of life in insect states proves this dramatically. Modern man knows it only on a much more subtle level as “intuition.” But we, too, can regain full use of it. An example from Nature: When a queen ant is spatially separated from her colony, building still continues fervently and according to plan. If the queen is killed, however, all work in the colony stops. No ant knows what to do. Apparently the queen sends the “building plans” also from far away via the group consciousness of her subjects. She can be as far away as she wants, as long as she is alive. In man hypercommunication is most often encountered when one suddenly gains access to information that is outside one’s knowledge base. Such hypercommunication is then experienced as inspiration or intuition. The Italian composer Giuseppe Tartini for instance dreamt one night that a devil sat at his bedside playing the violin. The next morning Tartini was able to note down the piece exactly from memory, he called it the Devil’s Trill Sonata.
For years, a 42-year old male nurse dreamt of a situation in which he was hooked up to a kind of knowledge CD-ROM. Verifiable knowledge from all imaginable fields was then transmitted to him that he was able to recall in the morning. There was such a flood of information that it seemed a whole encyclopedia was transmitted at night. The majority of facts were outside his personal knowledge base and reached technical details about which he knew absolutely nothing.
When hypercommunication occurs, one can observe in the DNA as well as in the human being special phenomena. The Russian scientists irradiated DNA samples with laser light. On screen a typical wave pattern was formed. When they removed the DNA sample, the wave pattern did not disappear, it remained. Many control experiments showed that the pattern still came from the removed sample, whose energy field apparently remained by itself. This effect is now called phantom DNA effect. It is surmised that energy from outside of space and time still flows through the activated wormholes after the DNA was removed. The side effect encountered most often in hypercommunication also in human beings are inexplicable electromagnetic fields in the vicinity of the persons concerned. Electronic devices like CD players and the like can be irritated and cease to function for hours. When the electromagnetic field slowly dissipates, the devices function normally again. Many healers and psychics know this effect from their work. The better the atmosphere and the energy, the more frustrating it is that the recording device stops functioning and recording exactly at that moment. And repeated switching on and off after the session does not restore function yet, but next morning all is back to normal. Perhaps this is reassuring to read for many, as it has nothing to do with them being technically inept, it means they are good at hypercommunication.
In their book “Vernetzte Intelligenz” (Networked Intelligence), Grazyna Gosar and Franz Bludorf explain these connections precisely and clearly. The authors also quote sources presuming that in earlier times humanity had been, just like the animals, very strongly connected to the group consciousness and acted as a group. To develop and experience individuality we humans however had to forget hypercommunication almost completely. Now that we are fairly stable in our individual consciousness, we can create a new form of group consciousness, namely one, in which we attain access to all information via our DNA without being forced or remotely controlled about what to do with that information. We now know that just as on the internet our DNA can feed its proper data into the network, can call up data from the network and can establish contact with other participants in the network. Remote healing, telepathy or “remote sensing” about the state of relatives etc. can thus be explained. Some animals know also from afar when their owners plan to return home. That can be freshly interpreted and explained via the concepts of group consciousness and hypercommunication. Any collective consciousness cannot be sensibly used over any period of time without a distinctive individuality. Otherwise we would revert to a primitive herd instinct that is easily manipulated.
Hypercommunication in the new millennium means something quite different: Researchers think that if humans with full individuality would regain group consciousness, they would have a god-like power to create, alter and shape things on Earth! AND humanity is collectively moving toward such a group consciousness of the new kind. Fifty percent of today’s children will be problem children as soon as the go to school. The system lumps everyone together and demands adjustment. But the individuality of today’s children is so strong that that they refuse this adjustment and giving up their idiosyncrasies in the most diverse ways.
At the same time more and more clairvoyant children are born [see the book “China’s Indigo Children” by Paul Dong or the chapter about Indigos in my book “Nutze die taeglichen Wunder” (Make Use of the Daily Wonders)]. Something in those children is striving more and more towards the group consciousness of the new kind, and it will no longer be suppressed. As a rule, weather for example is rather difficult to influence by a single individual. But it may be influenced by a group consciousness (nothing new to some tribes doing it in their rain dances). Weather is strongly influenced by Earth resonance frequencies, the so-called Schumann frequencies. But those same frequencies are also produced in our brains, and when many people synchronize their thinking or individuals (spiritual masters, for instance) focus their thoughts in a laser-like fashion, then it is scientifically speaking not at all surprising if they can thus influence weather.
Researchers in group consciousness have formulated the theory of Type I civilizations. A humanity that developed a group consciousness of the new kind would have neither environmental problems nor scarcity of energy. For if it were to use its mental power as a unified civilization, it would have control of the energies of its home planet as a natural consequence. And that includes all natural catastrophes!!! A theoretical Type II civilization would even be able to control all energies of their home galaxy. In my book “Nutze die taeglichen Wunder,” I have described an example of this: Whenever a great many people focus their attention or consciousness on something similar like Christmas time, football world championship or the funeral of Lady Diana in England then certain random number generators in computers start to deliver ordered numbers instead of the random ones. An ordered group consciousness creates order in its whole surroundings! [http://noosphere.princeton.edu/fristwall2.html] [1] When a great number of people get together very closely, potentials of violence also dissolve. It looks as if here, too, a kind of humanitarian consciousness of all humanity is created.
At the Love Parade, for example, where every year about one million of young people congregate, there has never been any brutal riots as they occur for instance at sports events. The name of the event alone is not seen as the cause here. The result of an analysis indicated rather that the number of people was TOO GREAT to allow a tipping over to violence.
To come back to the DNA: It apparently is also an organic superconductor that can work at normal body temperature. Artificial superconductors require extremely low temperatures of between 200 and 140°C to function. As one recently learned, all superconductors are able to store light and thus information. This is a further explanation of how the DNA can store information. There is another phenomenon linked to DNA and wormholes. Normally, these supersmall wormholes are highly unstable and are maintained only for the tiniest fractions of a second. Under certain conditions (read about it in the Fosar/Bludorf book above) stable wormholes can organize themselves which then form distinctive vacuum domains in which for example gravity can transform into electricity.
Vacuum domains are self-radiant balls of ionized gas that contain considerable amounts of energy. There are regions in Russia where such radiant balls appear very often. Following the ensuing confusion the Russians started massive research programs leading finally to some of the discoveries mentions above. Many people know vacuum domains as shiny balls in the sky. The attentive look at them in wonder and ask themselves, what they could be. I thought once: “Hello up there. If you happen to be a UFO, fly in a triangle.” And suddenly, the light balls moved in a triangle. Or they shot across the sky like ice hockey pucks. They accelerated from zero to crazy speeds while sliding gently across the sky. One is left gawking and I have, as many others, too, thought them to be UFOs. Friendly ones, apparently, as they flew in triangles just to please me. Now the Russians found in the regions, where vacuum domains appear often that sometimes fly as balls of light from the ground upwards into the sky, that these balls can be guided by thought. One has found out since that vacuum domains emit waves of low frequency as they are also produced in our brains.
And because of this similarity of waves they are able to react to our thoughts. To run excitedly into one that is on ground level might not be such a great idea, because those balls of light can contain immense energies and are able to mutate our genes. They can, they don’t necessarily have to, one has to say. For many spiritual teachers also produce such visible balls or columns of light in deep meditation or during energy work which trigger decidedly pleasant feelings and do not cause any harm. Apparently this is also dependent on some inner order and on the quality and provenance of the vacuum domain. There are some spiritual teachers (the young Englishman Ananda, for example) with whom nothing is seen at first, but when one tries to take a photograph while they sit and speak or meditate in hypercommunication, one gets only a picture of a white cloud on a chair. In some Earth healing projects such light effects also appear on photographs. Simply put, these phenomena have to do with gravity and anti-gravity forces that are also exactly described in the book and with ever more stable wormholes and hypercommunication and thus with energies from outside our time and space structure.
Earlier generations that got in contact with such hypercommunication experiences and visible vacuum domains were convinced that an angel had appeared before them. And we cannot be too sure to what forms of consciousness we can get access when using hypercommunication. Not having scientific proof for their actual existence (people having had such experiences do NOT all suffer from hallucinations) does not mean that there is no metaphysical background to it. We have simply made another giant step towards understanding our reality.
Official science also knows of gravity anomalies on Earth (that contribute to the formation of vacuum domains), but only of ones of below one percent. But recently gravity anomalies have been found of between three and four percent. One of these places is Rocca di Papa, south of Rome (exact location in the book “Vernetzte Intelligenz” plus several others). Round objects of all kinds, from balls to full buses, roll uphill. But the stretch in Rocca di Papa is rather short, and defying logic sceptics still flee to the theory of optical illusion (which it cannot be due to several features of the location).
All information is taken from the book “Vernetzte Intelligenz” von Grazyna Fosar und Franz Bludorf, ISBN 3930243237, summarized and commented by Baerbel. The book is unfortunately only available in German so far. You can reach the authors here: www.fosar-bludorf.com
Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2011 20:37:56 -0500
From: Marsh Ray <marsh[at]extendedsubset.com>
To: Discussion of cryptography and related <cryptography[at]randombit.net>
Subject: [cryptography] Another data point on SSL “trusted” root CA reliability (S Korea)
Been seeing Twitter from [at]ralphholz, [at]KevinSMcArthur, and [at]eddy_nigg about some goofy certs surfacing in S Korea with CA=true. via Reddit http://www.reddit.com/tb/kj25j
It’s not entirely clear that a trusted CA cert is being used in this attack, however the article comes to the conclusion that HTTPS application data is being decrypted so it’s the most plausible assumption. Quoting extensively here because I don’t have a sense of how long “The Hankyoreh” keeps their English language text around. – Marsh
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2011 12:11:59 +0200
From: Ralph Holz <holz[at]net.in.tum.de>
To: cryptography[at]randombit.net
Subject: Re: [cryptography] Another data point on SSL “trusted” root CA reliability (S Korea)
True, we found about 80 distinct certificates that had subject “Government of Korea” and CA:TRUE [1].
In our full dataset from April 2011, however, we found about 30k certificates with this property. None of them had valid chains to the NSS root store. The numbers do not seem to change over time: in Nov 2009, it was about 30k, and about the same in Sep 2010. In the EFF dataset of the full IPv4 space, I find 773,512 such certificates. *Distinct* ones – and the EFF dataset has 5.5m distinct certs. It is a wide-spread problem.
For the case of Korea, [at]KevinSMcArthur found that the issuing certificates have a pathlen of 0, which makes it impossible for the end-host cert to operate as a CA *as long as the client actually checks that extension*. I don’t know which ones do, but it would be a question to ask the NSS developers.
As of now, I don’t think these are really attacker certs, also because the overall numbers seem to point more at some CA software that creates certs with the CA flag on by default.
Although your article seems to indicate something bad is going on over there…
If proven, international fallout could occur over insecurity of the HTTP Secure system
By Noh Hyung-woong
It has come to light that the National Intelligence Service has been using a technique known as “packet tapping” to spy on emails sent and received using Gmail, Google’s email service. This is expected to have a significant impact, as it proves that not even Gmail, previously a popular “cyber safe haven” because of its reputation for high levels of security, is safe from tapping.
The NIS itself disclosed that Gmail tapping was taking place in the process of responding to a constitutional appeal filed by 52-year-old former teacher Kim Hyeong-geun, who was the object of packet tapping, in March this year.
As part of written responses submitted recently to the Constitutional Court, the NIS stated, “Mr. Kim was taking measures to avoid detection by investigation agencies, such as using a foreign mail service [Gmail] and mail accounts in his parents’ names, and deleting emails immediately after receiving or sending them. We therefore made the judgment that gathering evidence through a conventional search and seizure would be difficult, and conducted packet tapping.”
The NIS went on to explain, “[Some Korean citizens] systematically attempt so-called ‘cyber asylum,’ in ways such as using foreign mail services (Gmail, Hotmail) that lie beyond the boundaries of Korea‘s investigative authority, making packet tapping an inevitable measure for dealing with this.”
The NIS asserted the need to tap Gmail when applying to a court of law for permission to also use communication restriction measures [packet tapping]. The court, too, accepted the NIS’s request at the time and granted permission for packet tapping.
Unlike normal communication tapping methods, packet tapping is a technology that allows a real-time view of all content coming and going via the Internet. It opens all packets of a designated user that are transmitted via the Internet. This was impossible in the early days of the Internet, but monitoring and vetting of desired information only from among huge amounts of packet information became possible with the development of “deep packet inspection” technology. Deep packet inspection technology is used not only for censorship, but also in marketing such as custom advertising on Gmail and Facebook.
The fact that the NIS taps Gmail, which uses HTTP Secure, a communication protocol with reinforced security, means that it possesses the technology to decrypt data packets transmitted via Internet lines after intercepting them.
“Gmail has been using an encrypted protocol since 2009, when it was revealed that Chinese security services had been tapping it,” said one official from a software security company. “Technologically, decrypting it is known to be almost impossible. If it turns out to be true [that the NIS has been packet tapping], this could turn into an international controversy.”
“The revelation of the possibility that Gmail may have been tapped is truly shocking,” said Jang Yeo-gyeong, an activist at Jinbo.net. “It has shown once again that the secrets of people’s private lives can be totally violated.” Lawyer Lee Gwang-cheol of MINBYUN-Lawyers for a Democratic Society, who has taken on Kim’s case, said, “I think it is surprising, and perhaps even good, that the NIS itself has revealed that it uses packet tapping on Gmail. I hope the Constitutional Court will use this appeal hearing to decide upon legitimate boundaries for investigations, given that the actual circumstances of the NIS’s packet tapping have not been clearly revealed.”
Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani[at]hani.co.kr]
JP Morgan is now able to run risk analysis and price its global credit portfolio in near real-time after implementing application-led, High Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities developed by Maxeler Technologies.
The investment bank worked with HPC solutions provider Maxeler Technologies to develop an application-led, HPC system based on Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology that would allow it to run complex banking algorithms on its credit book faster.
…
“Being able to run the book in 12 seconds end-to-end and get a value on our multi-million dollar book within 12 seconds is a huge commercial advantage for us,” Stephen Weston, global head of the Applied Analytics group in the investment banking division of JP Morgan, said at a recent lecture to Stanford University students.
“If we can compress space, time and energy required to do these calculations then it has hard business values for us. It gives us ultimately a competitive edge, the ability to run our risk more frequently, and extracting more value from our books by understanding more fully is a real commercial advantage for us.”
The faster processing times means that JP Morgan can now respond to changes in its risk position more rapidly, rather than just looking back at the risk profile of the previous day, which was produced by overnight analyses.
The speed also allows the bank to identify potential problems and try to deal with them in advance. For example, JP Morgan can now run potential scenarios to assess its exposure to problems such as the Irish or Greek bank problems, which Weston said “wouldn’t have even been thinkable” before.
…
The project took JP Morgan around three years, and the bank is now looking to push it into other areas of the business, such as high frequency trading.
Crazy Computer I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. via Photobucket
Researchers testing mental illness figured out how to induce schizophrenic symptoms in a computer, causing it to place itself at the center of crazy delusions, such as claiming responsibility for a terrorist bombing. The results bolster a hypothesis that claims faulty information processing can lead to schizophrenic symptoms.
Computer scientists at the University of Texas-Austin built a neural network called DISCERN, which is able to learn natural language. The humans taught it a series of simple stories, teaching it to store information as relationships between words and sentences — much the same way a person would learn a story.
Then they started again, but cranked up DISCERN’s rate of learning — so it was assimilating words at a faster rate, and it was not ignoring as much noise in the data.
Some mental health experts believe schizophrenics cannot forget or ignore as much stimuli as they should, which makes it difficult to synthesize and process the correct information. This “hyperlearning” phenomenon causes schizophrenics to lose connections among individual stories, losing the distinction between reality and illusion. Dopamine is a key factor in the process of understanding and differentiating experiences.
Telling the computer to “forget less” was akin to flooding the system with dopamine, confounding its ability to discern relationships between words, sentences and events, according to a news release from UT.
“DISCERN began putting itself at the center of fantastical, delusional stories that incorporated elements from other stories it had been told to recall,” according to the news release. In one answer, it claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing.
The experiment doesn’t prove the hyperlearning hypothesis, but it does lend it additional credence, according to the researchers, who published their crazed computer findings in the journal Biological Psychiatry. It also shows that neural networks can be a useful analogue for the information-processing centers of the brain, according to graduate student Uli Grasemann, who participated in the research.
“We have so much more control over neural networks than we could ever have over human subjects,” he said. “The hope is that this kind of modeling will help clinical research.”
While the FDA says growing your own food is against your best interests, consuming raw milk is dangerous, and alternative medicines need to be controlled by large pharmaceutical companies, subcutaneous passive microchip implants capable of tracking and logging everything from your medical and financial history to your day-to-day movements around the city are perfectly acceptable:
The Food and Drug Administration said that Applied Digital Solutions of Delray Beach, Fla., could market the VeriChip, an implantable computer chip about the size of a grain of rice, for medical purposes.
With the pinch of a syringe, the microchip is inserted under the skin in a procedure that takes less than 20 minutes and leaves no stitches. Silently and invisibly, the dormant chip stores a code that releases patient-specific information when a scanner passes over it.
Think UPC code. The identifier, emblazoned on a food item, brings up its name and price on the cashier’s screen.
…
The microchips have already been implanted in 1 million pets. But the chip’s possible dual use for tracking people’s movements — as well as speeding delivery of their medical information to emergency rooms — has raised alarm.
Source: MSNBC
We can fully expect the new human tracking chips to be progressively integrated into our society over the next decade. Americans have already implanted the chips into one million of their pets. And what are we as citizens if not pets of the government? As such, we’ll be treated much the same way.
First they’ll start with voluntary programs for those on government sponsored healthcare plans. Membership will have its benefits, and those with the chip will be able to see their doctor quicker than the unchipped. This may even be expanded to include quicker security screenings at airports and other TSA checkpoints.
Then, the Department of Homeland Security will order tens of millions of chips to have on standby in case of a major disaster or emergency. In fact, the Israeli military did just that in October of 2011:
PositiveID Corporation Receives VeriChip Order for Use With Israeli Military
PositiveID Corporation, a developer of medical technologies for diabetes management, clinical diagnostics and bio-threat detection, announced today that it has received an order for its VeriChip™ microchip to be used for disaster preparedness and emergency management in Israel by an integration partner.
The Company’s integration partner intends to provide the microchips to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the State of Israel’s military force.
Marc Poulshock, PositiveID’s Vice President of Business Development, said, “We believe there are many important applications for the VeriChip and our associated intellectual property including next-generation identification and bio-sensing capabilities. Our partner is looking to help healthcare organizations, militaries including the IDF, and governments with their disaster preparedness and emergency response needs.”
What that basically means is that in an emergency situation, such as a declaration of martial law, chipping stations will be immediately deployed. It will be for you and your family, and will ensure that you’ll receive emergency rations and other services in the event of a serious catastrophe.
Next, they’ll require all government healthcare recipients to be chipped in order to prevent rampant fraud. An off-shoot may be to implement nationwide chipping programs for those receiving any government benefits including social security, Medicaid, Medicare, and Supplemental Nutritional Assistance.
Prisoners and even detainees will be part of the first adopter groups. What better way to keep tabs on criminals and parolees?
Once the benefits have been visually and linguistically programmed via Walmart shopping counter promotional TV messages and the people have been desensitized to the privacy threat (kind of like cell phone cameras and microphones in every pant pocket or purse in the country), and success stories are touted by mainstream media, we’ll move to full implementation across the entire domestic population of the United States.
School safety and protecting the children is always the easiest first step, thus chip scanning stations will join metal detector security screenings at your local public education institutions.
Don’t want to chip you child? No problem! That just means they can’t go to school, which means that you are an abusive parent and Child Protective Services will be coming over for a home wellness visit.
Around the same time we’ll begin to see chip scanning stations deployed (much like TSA checkpoints popping up all over the country today) across public venues that include city urban centers, sporting events and public transportation systems.
In fact, you probably won’t be allowed to ride on a public transit vehicle without a chip – because it’s just too dangerous.
Eventually, the chip will need to be implanted into every American. It’s a safety and anti-terrorist thing – you know how it is. We’ve got to do it!
This information is written to the best of my knowledge using publicly available resources. No security was bypassed to obtain anything marked confidential, and Carrier IQ made no effort to protect said documents.
You can take the Carrier IQ training yourself here – https://dis1.water.carrieriq.com/dis/training.jsp
I have made a mirror of all materials referenced here for download for the sole purpose of allowing others to understand and verify my security research on Carrier IQ.
Carrier IQ (CIQ) sells rootkit software included on many US handsets sold on Sprint, Verizon and more. Devices supported include android phones, Blackberries, Nokias, Tablet devices and more.
Carrier IQ is the market leader in Mobile Service Intelligence solutions that have revolutionized the way mobile operators and device vendors gather and manage information from end users.
Recognizing the phone as an integral part of a mobile service delivery, and using the device to measure key parameters of service quality and usage, the Carrier IQ solution gives you the unique ability to analyze in detail usage scenarios and fault conditions by type, location, application and network performance while providing you with a detailed insight into the mobile experience as delivered at the handset rather than simply the state of the network components carrying it.
Carrier IQ is used to understand what problems customers are having with our network or devices so we can take action to improve service quality.
It collects enough information to understand the customer experience with devices on our network and how to devise solutions to use and connection problems. We do not and cannot look at the contents of messages, photos, videos, etc., using this tool
Great! Less dropped calls, better network experience. It sounds good on the surface. I was also able to obtain a stock copy of carrier IQ before it gets modified by third parties, and it has surveys users can fill out if they get a dropped call, browser ends unexpectedly, etc. It makes its presence known by putting a checkmark in the status bar. This could potentially be pretty useful information from a network administration standpoint, and is made clear to users its running. Unfortunately this is not always the real world case, it can be modified to be completely hidden.
What does CarrierIQ do?
Carrier IQ is able to query any metric from a device. A metric can be a dropped call because of lack of service. The scope of the word metric is very broad though, including device type, such as manufacturer and model, available memory and battery life, the type of applications resident on the device, the geographical location of the device, the end user’s pressing of keys on the device, usage history of the device, including those that characterize a user’s interaction with a device. (From http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20110106942)
Carrier IQ software, which consists of embedded software on mobile devices and server-side analytics applications, enables mobile operators and device OEMs to understand in detail a wide range of performance and usage characteristics of mobile services and devices. These include both network-facing services such as core voice and data offerings, as well as non-network-facing capabilities such as music players, cameras and other side loaded media, in order to assist with product and service development and roll-out. (From http://www.carrieriq.com/company/PR.CIQ-SeriesC.2009-01-27.pdf )
When is information logged?
Gathering information from the training videos, we see everything is broken down into two categories – Metrics and Triggers.
Metrics appears to be what data to log/send when a trigger is encountered. From the functions we have found already on our devices we knew the list was big, but even the below list only begins to scratch the surface.
Triggers appear to be when to collect metrics. For example when a user installs or opens an app any given metric can be called getting information. When a user browses a webpage HTTP header information can be grabbed along with detailed information on the page, or CarrierIQ can log keypresses made on what webpage. When location is changed the phone can report in. When a call is placed or data is started any metrics can be queried. There is alot more, these are just what was shown in public documents. These triggers seem to be menu items shown in the hidden Carrier IQ Test UI.
Known triggers found on HTC Phones:
Key in HTCDialer Pressed or Keyboard Keys pressed:
Intent – com.htc.android.iqagent.action.ui01
App Opened –
Intent – com.htc.android.iqagent.action.ui15
Sms Received –
Intent – com.htc.android.iqagent.action.smsnotify
Screen Off/On –
Intent – com.htc.android.iqagent.action.ui02
Call Received –
Intent – com.htc.android.iqagent.action.ui15
Media Statistics –
Intent – com.htc.android.iqagent.action.mp03
Location Statistics –
Intent – com.htc.android.iqagent.action.lc30
UI01: screen tapped in any location, or InputMethod (any soft keyboard) key pressed.
NT10: HTTP request read.
NT0F: HTTP request send.
UI11: unknown, located in the View class, which has its own IQClientThreadRunnable subclass.
AL34: loading started in a browser frame – URL.
AL35: loading started in a browser frame – data receive begin and end, page render begin and end.
AL36: data length. (The above two are also found in LoadListener and WebViewCore classes. Web metrics are not found on the Skyrocket, but are on the Epic 4G and Epic 4G Touch.)
HW03: battery status changed. (Also not found on Skyrocket.)
How does Carrier IQ work?
As mentioned before, Carrier IQ is rootkit software. It listens on the phones for commands contained in “tasking profiles” sent a number of ways and returns whatever “metric” was asked for.
Profile transmission can occur in a variety of ways, including “pushing” the data collection profile to the target device, sending a message, such as an SMS, to the target device prompting it to retrieve the data collection profile, and preparing the data collection profile for download the next time the target device contacts SQP 201 such as when it uploads a metrics package. Such profile transmission to the SQC 402 residing on the target device(s) may be achieved using any of a variety of transport mechanisms and standards including Short Message Service (“SMS”), Hypertext Transport Protocol (“HTTP”), Hypertext Transport Protocol Secure (“HTTPS”), Wireless Application Protocol (“WAP”) Push, IP-based Over-the-Air (IOTA) protocol, OMA/DM, or other protocols that are known in the art or that may be developed in the future. From (http://www.patents.com/us-7609650.html)
From training documents found we get an insight to the Carrier IQ Portal. Devices are displayed to the portal operator by individual phone Equipment ID and Subscriber IDs. The “portal administrator” can put devices into categories and see devices in California that have dropped calls at 5pm.
The down side to all of this is the “portal administrator” is also able to “task” a single phone with a profile containing any combinations of metric and trigger. From leaked training documents we can see that portal operators can view and task metrics by equipment ID, subscriber ID, and more. So instead of seeing dropped calls in California, they now know “Joe Anyone’s” location at any given time, what he is running on his device, keys being pressed, applications being used.
Why do you keep calling CarrierIQ a rootkit?
The definition of rootkit from wikipedia is exactly what CarrierIQ is.
A rootkit is software that enables continued privileged access to a computer while actively hiding its presence from administrators by subverting standard operating system functionality or other applications. The term rootkit is a concatenation of “root” (the traditional name of the privileged account on Unix operating systems) and the word “kit” (which refers to the software components that implement the tool)
CarrierIQ as seen in real world usage (HTC Devices especially) is nothing like the stock copies shown on the first page. All menus have been stripped, hiding it from users presence without advanced knowledge. The service also runs as user Root in ramdisk. It checks in to a server (or receives commands through other various access) with commands to allow someone undetected access.
Who is using this data?
Verizon has publicly came forward with a statement regarding their usage on Carrier IQ statistics and give users a way to stop them from selling the information outside of Verizon
Verizon Wireless will use the following categories of information:
Mobile Usage Information:
Addresses of websites you visit when using our wireless service. These data strings (or URLs) may include search terms you have used
Location of your device (“Location Information”)
App and device feature usage
Consumer Information:
Information about your use of Verizon products and services (such as data and calling features, device type, and amount of use)
Demographic and interest categories provided to us by other companies, such as gender, age range, sports fan, frequent diner, or pet owner (“Demographics”)
Sprint is known to collect carrier IQ data because users have the application running reporting to them, but have no privacy policy, retention policy, or public information on what they use the data for.
Do we have to Opt-In to this collection? Can it be stopped?
Devices are automatically entered into using Carrier IQ. Samsung android devices have an on off switch, but it is not easily accessible or made known to users that it’s even there. HTC android devices have no such off switch. Even if you purchase a phone on eBay completely off of sprint, use it on wifi only, Sprint will still be enabled to task your device with metrics because of no available off switch and Carrier IQs aggressive reporting nature across multiple protocols.
It also should be noted all the surveys and user facing dialogs have been stripped besides the below screenshots which require advanced skills to access.
Samsung screenshots thanks to k0nane on XDA See the full post where he removed carrier IQ here
Detection / Removal:
There are a few advanced methods that can be used to detect Carrier IQ. Logging Test App scanner will detect it in the kernel (use Check Props Feature), as well files used in the regular Loggers scan. This will detect Carrier IQ regardless if you are rooted or not. You can also use this app to bring out hidden menus for known versions of CIQ clients.
The only way to remove Carrier IQ is with advanced skills. If you choose to void your warranty and unlock your bootloader you can (mostly) remove Carrier IQ. Logging Test App can identify files used in logging and you can manually patch or use Pro version to automatically remove.
Brazilian police will use futuristic ‘Robocop-style’ glasses fitted with facial recognition equipment to identify and root out troublemakers at the 2014 World Cup.
Military Police officials from Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have been given demonstrations of how the device works Photo: AFP/GETTY
A small camera fitted to the glasses can capture 400 facial images per second and send them to a central computer database storing up to 13 million faces.
The system can compare biometric data at 46,000 points on a face and will immediately signal any matches to known criminals or people wanted by police.
If there is a match a red signal will appear on a small screen connected to the glasses, alerting the police officer of the need to take further action or make an arrest.
The devices will soon be tested at football matches and concerts and police inBrazil, South America’s biggest country, are already planning to use them during the next World Cup.
The camera will generally be used to scan faces in crowds up to 50 metres (164ft) away but can be adjusted, if searching for a specific target, to recognise faces as far as 12 miles away.
Military Police officials from Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which will both host key games in the World Cup, have been given demonstrations of how the device works.
Major Leandro Pavani Agostini, of Sao Paulo’s Military Police, said: “It’s something discreet because you do not question the person or ask for documents. The computer does it.
“To the naked eye two people may appear identical but with 46,000 points compared, the data will not be beaten.”
He said the device will be useful to police trying to monitor many different locations and events, ranging from airports and bus terminals to concerts and football matches.
“I can insert into the database a supporter who was involved in a brawl on the field and even with the old images, he can be located in the future,” added the Major.
Robocop, the American film of 1987, told the story of a police officer who was killed by criminals but re-created as a cyborg with an array of weaponry and built-in zoom vision.
On November 16, 2009, Greg Hoglund, a cofounder of computer security firm HBGary, sent an e-mail to two colleagues. The message came with an attachment, a Microsoft Word file called AL_QAEDA.doc, which had been further compressed and password protected for safety. Its contents were dangerous.
“I got this word doc linked off a dangler site for Al Qaeda peeps,” wrote Hoglund. “I think it has a US govvy payload buried inside. Would be neat to [analyze] it and see what it’s about. DONT open it unless in a [virtual machine] obviously… DONT let it FONE HOME unless you want black suits landing on your front acre. :-)”
The attached document, which is in English, begins: “LESSON SIXTEEN: ASSASSINATIONS USING POISONS AND COLD STEEL (UK/BM-154 TRANSLATION).”
It purports to be an Al-Qaeda document on dispatching one’s enemies with knives (try “the area directly above the genitals”), with ropes (“Choking… there is no other area besides the neck”), with blunt objects (“Top of the stomach, with the end of the stick.”), and with hands (“Poking the fingers into one or both eyes and gouging them.”).
But the poison recipes, for ricin and other assorted horrific bioweapons, are the main draw. One, purposefully made from a specific combination of spoiled food, requires “about two spoonfuls of fresh excrement.” The document praises the effectiveness of the resulting poison: “During the time of the destroyer, Jamal Abdul Nasser, someone who was being severely tortured in prison (he had no connection with Islam), ate some feces after losing sanity from the severity of the torture. A few hours after he ate the feces, he was found dead.”
The purported Al-Qaeda document
According to Hoglund, the recipes came with a side dish, a specially crafted piece of malware meant to infect Al-Qaeda computers. Is the US government in the position of deploying the hacker’s darkest tools—rootkits, computer viruses, trojan horses, and the like? Of course it is, and Hoglund was well-positioned to know just how common the practice had become. Indeed, he and his company helped to develop these electronic weapons.
In 2009, HBGary had partnered with the Advanced Information Systems group of defense contractor General Dynamics to work on a project euphemistically known as “Task B.” The team had a simple mission: slip a piece of stealth software onto a target laptop without the owner’s knowledge.
HBGary white paper on exploiting software
They focused on ports—a laptop’s interfaces to the world around it—including the familiar USB port, the less-common PCMCIA Type II card slot, the smaller ExpressCard slot, WiFi, and Firewire. No laptop would have all of these, but most recent machines would have at least two.
The HBGary engineering team broke this list down into three categories. First came the “direct access” ports that provided “uninhibited electronic direct memory access.” PCMCIA, ExpressCard, and Firewire all allowed external devices—say a custom piece of hardware delivered by a field operative—to interact directly with the laptop with a minimum amount of fuss. The direct memory access provided by the controllers for these ports mean that devices in them can write directly to the computer’s memory without intervention from the main CPU and with little restriction from the operating system. If you want to overwrite key parts of the operating system to sneak in a bit of your own code, this is the easiest way to go.
The second and third categories, ports that needed “trust relationships” or relied on “buffer overflows,” included USB and wireless networking. These required more work to access, especially if one wanted to do so without alerting a user; Windows in particular is notorious for the number of prompts it throws when USB devices are inserted or removed. A cheerful note about “Searching for device driver for NSA_keylogger_rootkit_tango” had to be avoided.
So HBGary wanted to go the direct access route, characterizing it as the “low hanging fruit” with the lowest risk. General Dynamics wanted HBGary to investigate the USB route as well (the ports are more common, but an attack has to trick the operating system into doing its bidding somehow, commonly through a buffer overflow).
The team had two spy movie scenarios in which its work might be used, scenarios drafted to help the team think through its approach:
1) Man leaves laptop locked while quickly going to the bathroom. A
device can then be inserted and then removed without touching the laptop
itself except at the target port. (i.e. one can't touch the mouse,
keyboard, insert a CD, etc.)
2) Woman shuts down her laptop and goes home. One then can insert a
device into the target port and assume she will not see it when she
returns the next day. One can then remove the device at a later time
after she boots up the machine.
Why would the unnamed client for Task B—which a later e-mail makes clear was for a government agency—want such a tool? Imagine you want access to the computer network used in a foreign government ministry, or in a nuclear lab. Such a facility can be tough to crack over the Internet; indeed, the most secure facilities would have no such external access. And getting an agent inside the facility to work mischief is very risky—if it’s even possible at all.
But say a scientist from the facility uses a memory stick to carry data home at night, and that he plugs the memory stick into his laptop on occasion. You can now get a piece of custom spyware into the facility by putting a copy on the memory stick—if you can first get access to the laptop. So you tail the scientist and follow him from his home one day to a local coffee shop. He steps away to order another drink, to go to the bathroom, or to talk on his cell phone, and the tail walks past his table and sticks an all-but-undetectable bit of hardware in his laptop’s ExpressCard slot. Suddenly, you have a vector that points all the way from a local coffee shop to the interior of a secure government facility.
The software exploit code actually delivered onto the laptop was not HBGary’s concern; it needed only to provide a route through the computer’s front door. But it had some constraints. First, the laptop owner should still be able to use the port so as not to draw attention to the inserted hardware. This is quite obviously tricky, but one could imagine a tiny ExpressCard device that slid down into the slot but could in turn accept another ExpressCard device on its exterior-facing side. This sort of parallel plugging might well go unnoticed by a user with no reason to suspect it.
HBGary’s computer infiltration code then had to avoid the computer’s own electronic defenses. The code should “not be detectable” by virus scanners or operating system port scans, and it should clean up after itself to eliminate all traces of entry.
Greg Hoglund was confident that he could deliver at least two laptop-access techniques in less than a kilobyte of memory each. As the author of books like Exploiting Software: How to Break Code, Rootkits: Subverting the Windows Kernel, and Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems, he knew his way around the deepest recesses of Windows in particular.
Hoglund’s special interest was in all-but-undetectable computer “rootkits,” programs that provide privileged access to a computer’s innermost workings while cloaking themselves even from standard operating system functions. A good rootkit can be almost impossible to remove from a running machine—if you could even find it in the first place.
A month ago I heard folks talking online about a virtual currency called bitcoin that is untraceable and un-hackable. Folks were using it to buy and sell drugs online, support content they liked and worst of all — gasp! — play poker.Bitcoin is a P2P currency that could topple governments, destabilize economies and create uncontrollable global bazaars for contraband.
I sent the 30 or so producers of my show This Week in Startups out to research the top players, and we did a show on Bitcoin on May 10. Since that time the number of bitcoin stories has surged.
After month of research and discovery, we’ve learned the following:
1. Bitcoin is a technologically sound project.
2. Bitcoin is unstoppable without end-user prosecution.
3. Bitcoin is the most dangerous open-source project ever created.
4. Bitcoin may be the most dangerous technological project since the internet itself.
5. Bitcoin is a political statement by technotarians (technological libertarians).*
6. Bitcoins will change the world unless governments ban them with harsh penalties.
What Are Bitcoins?
Bitcoins are virtual coins in the form of a file that is stored on your device. These coins can be sent to and from users three ways:
1. Direct with peer-to-peer software downloaded at bitcoin.org
2. Via an escrow service like ClearCoin
3. Via a bitcoin currency exchange
Each owner transfers the coin to the next by digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner and adding these to the end of the coin. A payee can verify the signatures to verify the chain of ownership.
The benefits of a currency like this:
a) Your coins can’t be frozen (like a Paypal account can be)
b) Your coins can’t be tracked
c) Your coins can’t be taxed
d) Transaction costs are extremely low (sorry credit card companies)
You can watch a simple video here: http://jc.is/jlcte0
Where Do Bitcoins Come From?
Bitcoins are created by a complex algorithm. Only 21M can be made by the year 2140. Your desktop bitcoin software can make bitcoins, but at this point the electricity and time it would take to produce a bitcoin is larger than the actual value of a bitcoin (your laptop might take five years to make one, and they currently trade at $6.70 per bitcoin [ see https://mtgox.com/trade/buy for the latest exchange rate ].
Bitcoin miners use super cheap GPUs (not CPUs) to create the coins, but as more people come online to make them, the algorithm adjusts so that one block can only be made every 10 minutes.
Who Invented Bitcoins?
An individual with the name — or perhaps handle — of Satoshi Nakamoto first wrote about bitcoins in a paper called Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. This person has stepped back from the project and trusted Gavin Andresen to take charge as the project’s technical lead.
How Does One Buy and Sell Bitcoin?
Currently Paypal and credit card companies are making it illegal to sell bitcoins. Why? Simple: PayPal’s terms of service prohibit “currency exchange.”
Given that you can’t whip out your Paypal account and buy them, and that it will become harder and harder to get them, bitcoins will be bartered for services in the real world.
For example, a Hacker News community member named Nicholas Carlson just boasted that he is being paid for a programming project in bitcoins.
Bitcoins in Real Life
In the next year you’ll hear about people in casinos in Vegas buying and sell bitcoins for cash and casino chips.
Imagine a bachelor party comes to Vegas and STNY (someone that’s not you) gives $550 to a guy at a bar and he takes out his laptop or tablet and ships 100 bitcoins to STNY’s phone. STNY then goes to Craigslist and ships some bitcoins to an escort and a drug dealer, who then show up in person to provide goods and services.
The Drug Underground and Bitcoin
Last month folks were buzzing about an online drug marketplace called SilkRoadMarket, which was reportedly trading in, well, all kinds of drugs: marijuana, mushrooms, LSD, ecstasy and DMT.
Of course, since bitcoin transactions are untraceable, you would have zero recourse if you sent a dozen bitcoins to someone for a couple of tabs of LSD. Just like you might lose your $10 if you gave it to a kid in the school yard for a dime bag and he never came back.
Let’s Make Some Predictions
We are 100% certain that governments will start banning bitcoins in the next 12 to 18 months. Additionally, we’re certain bitcoins will soar in value and a crush of folks will flood the system and start using them.
Currently there are 6M coins at $6.70 each for a total economy of about $40M. Bitcoin speculation and hoarding will also cause a massive spike in bitcoin value. For example, if 10M people find out about bitcoins in the next year and want to buy $100 worth, $1B will be infused into the bitcoin economy.
Finally, there will be massive breakage in bitcoins. If your laptop crashes and you didn’t back up your bitcoins, well, you’re SOL. If someone steals you laptop that has 10,000 bitcoins on it you won on Bitcoin Poker, you’re SOL. Lost your USB drive with 500 bitcoins on it after a night out on the town? You’re SOL.
Sites like 99designs, eLance and oDesk will start accepting bitcoins for payment. If they don’t, they will face competition from folks who do.
Bottom line: The world is going to be turned over by bitcoins unless governments step in and ban them by prosecuting individuals.
This is about to get really interesting, everyone.
* We made this term up to describe the “good people” of the internet who believe in the fundamental rights of individuals to be free, have free speech, fight hypocrisy and stand behind logic, technology and science over religion, political structure and tradition. These are the people who build and support things like Wikileaks, Anonymous, Linux and Wikipedia. They think that people can, and should, govern themselves. They are against external forms of control such as DRM, laws that are bought and sold by lobbyists, and religions like Scientology. They include splinter groups that enforce these ideals in the form of hacktivism, such as the takedown of the Sony Playstation Network after Sony tried to prosecute a hacker for unlocking its console.
—————–
July 19th was a big day in hacker news. First, the Department of Justice announced the arrests of sixteen individuals thought to be associated with Anonymous and LulzSec, the loosely affiliated hacker groups that have been romping through corporate networks (and consumer data) this summer. Second, Reddit founder Aaron Swartz was arrested and charged with mass download of academic articles from JSTOR, a non-profit that contracts with universities to make such research materials available for free to affiliated students and scholars.
[Disclaimer: I’ve known Aaron since he was about 16 years old and was helping my former boss Larry Lessig with some projects. He is now 23.]
Anonymous
As for the Anonymous arrests, one of the cases is against multiple individuals and was filed in my home court, the Northern District of California. Anonymous had called for an attack on online payment service PayPal in retaliation for its decision to stop processing donations to the anti-secrecy group Wikileaks. The attacks were ultimately successful in bringing the site down. The indictment is pretty bare bones and doesn’t reveal much about how the FBI identified these individuals as having participated. However, it appears that everyone included in the case was using a program called LOIC to participate in a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) against the online payment service PayPal. In a DDoS, multiple attackers band together to send so much traffic to a target machine that it can’t handle the load and shuts down. LOIC stands for Low Orbit Ion Cannon and is a network stress testing tool that individuals can also use to add their computer’s power to a DDoS attack. Essentially, these people voluntarily joined their home computers to a botnet attack on PayPal, probably out of some political sympathy with Wikileaks.
Forensics in the case may not be particularly interesting. The FBI has long been able to trace internet traffic sent straight from your home computer. On the other hand, it’s possible that these people may have been made scapegoats by more skilled Anonymous members who compromised their machines and used them in the attack to hide the true attackers’ identities.
The DOJ also alleges a conspiracy, and that means they’ll have to show that these people agreed with each other and/or Anonymous to bring down PayPal. Certainly, the very act of voluntarily downloading LOIC and using it to target PayPal is part of the conspiracy, but it will be interesting to see if the government can develop any other connection between these individuals and AnonOps, the core group of people who allegedly “run” Anonymous, to the extent that Anonymous is a coherent group that anyone operates. (If so, the government may try to flip these lower level participants into cooperating witnesses who give up what they know about the ringleaders for more lenient sentences). It will also be interesting to see whether and how the government uses any statements these people may have made about sympathy for the Wikileaks cause, a political point of view that many share, as evidence of criminal intent.
The other two cases were filed against individuals, one of whom was an AT&T outside contractor who obtained and leaked some of the company’s corporate documents, which were later distributed by LulzSec. The other found a bug in the configuration of InfraGard Tampa’s website which allowed him to upload a couple of files. These indictments show their work, giving an interesting portrait of the FBI’s cybercrime investigative techniques.
The AT&T complaint details an AT&T investigation of their network which showed that the defendant’s contractor account was connected to the corporate network at the time confidential information was taken, that that account was used to search for file storage sites on which such documents could be hosted and that the defendant’s user name accessed the file hosting site on which the document was posted, all on the same day. LulzSec claimed it had access to the document a few months later, but the defendant appears to have no connection to LulzSec.
The Infragard case appears to have been more straightforward. Apparently, after uploading his files, the defendant tweeted about it using his Twitter account, and a search on Wikipedia for that nickname also provided the defendant’s real name, webpage (where he also took credit for the hack) and a photograph. The IP address trace simply confirmed everything.
The charge, however, is under 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(5)(A) which prohibits:
“knowingly caus[ing] the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally caus[ing] damage without authorization, to a protected computer.”
Damage is defined as any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information. 18 U.S.C. 1030(e)(8).
I would have thought uploading files more accurately an unauthorized access, not a transmission of harmful code. Apparently on review the FBI agent spotted the same problem because in the affidavit filed in support of the criminal complaint, the FBI agent hand wrote in “The three files uploaded by [the defendant] caused damage to the server by impairing the integrity of the server.” Interesting theory. I’ll be curious to see the briefing on that.
Aaron Swartz
That brings us to the Swartz case. According to the indictment, Aaron hooked his laptop up in a computer closet at MIT and began automated download of journal articles offered to MIT affiliates at no cost. When MIT tried to block the automated downloads by blocking the computer’s IP address, Swartz obtained a new IP address (maybe by shutting it off and turning it on again?). MIT then blocked the hardware device number associated with the laptop (MAC address, which has nothing to do with Apple versus PC), and Swartz then changed that number. For those of you who think that you are entitled to anonymity in connection with your internet use, you’ll be particularly interested in this line from the indictment: “Although a MAC address is intended to be a permanent and globally unique identification, a user with the right knowledge can change the MAC address, an action referred to as MAC address spoofing…”
Allegedly, the automated downloads impaired JSTORs ability to service other client requests, and the investigation into who was making the downloads caused JSTOR to stop serving MIT all together for a couple of days. Swartz allegedly took a number of acts to hide his identity and the existence of the laptop, including covering his face with a bicycle helmet when he visited the closet in which the laptop was secreted. But the sum and substance of the case is that he defrauded JSTOR by accessing the JSTOR archive without authorization and making copies of articles that students at MIT (and at Harvard, where Swartz was a Fellow) could obtain for free.
Swartz could have downloaded the articles one by one without violating the law. Is it a crime, therefore, that he used an automated process to do so? Or does it only become a crime after JSTOR and MIT tried to block him? Or is it because the technique slowed the system down, and if so, wouldn’t the defendant have had to intend that damage under longstanding principles of criminal due process? In multiple contexts, we are confronting the question of whether automating and thereby enhancing human ability converts otherwise lawful conduct into something improper. For example, we have the same issue in cases like U.S. v. Lowson, where the defendants were prosecuted for automating purchases of concert tickets, inFacebook v. Power, where the defendant was sued for providing Facebook users with an automated tool to aggregate their social network content, and in surveillance litigation like U.S. v. Jones, which is currently before the Supreme Court to decide the issue of whether GPS tracking of vehicles violates the Fourth Amendment. In Jones, the government is arguing that it is of no constitutional importance that GPS tracking technology is far more powerful, efficient and revealing than physical surveillance, including that aided by a bumper beeper. Since officers are allowed to follow you on a public street, the thinking goes, they should be allowed to use GPS to remotely track you in those same places.
Courts are struggling to answer the question of whether there is a point at which there is a difference in effectiveness that should require the law regulate the use of a particular technology and Swartz’s case will be one of those occasions. It’s an abject shame that a man who has done so much good in his 23 years is forced to bear the weight of our social struggle to find the right answer.
All these pictures are from the book ‘ Microcosmos’, created by Brandon Brill from London. This book includes many scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of insects, human body parts and household items.
These are the most amazing images of what is too small to see with the naked eye.
01 – A wood or heathland Ant, Formica fusca, holding a microchip
02 – The surface of an Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory silicon microchip
03 – Eyelash hairs growing from the surface of human skin
04 – The surface of a strawberry
05 – Bacteria on the surface of a human tongue
06 – Human sperm (spermatozoa), the male sex cells
07 – The nylon hooks and loops of velcro
08 – Household dust which includes long hairs such as cat fur, twisted synthetic and woolen fibers, serrated insect scales, a pollen grain, plant and insect remains
09 -The weave of a nylon stocking
10 – The end of the tongue (proboscis) of a hummingbird hawkmoth
11 – The head of a mosquito
12 – A human head louse clinging to a hair
13 – The eight eyes (two groups of four) on the head of a Mexican red-kneed tarantula
14 – Cut hairs and shaving foam between two razor blades
15 – Cigarette paper
16 – The corroded surface of a rusty metal nail
17 – The head of a Romanesco cauliflower
18 – The fungus Aspergillus fumigatus
19 – Mushrooms spores
20 – A clutch of unidentified butterfly eggs on a raspberry plant
Hacked emails from security contractor HBGary Federal reveal a disturbing public-private partnership to spy on web users
In February 2011, the hackers’ collective Anonymous released 70,000 emails from security contractor HBGary Federal, which revealed that CEO Aaron Barr had offered the firm’s services to mount cyber-attacks against WikiLeaks and others on behalf of corporate clients. Photograph: Getty Images
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Sixty years later, the military-industrial complex has been joined by another unprecedented centre of what has increasingly proven to be “misplaced power”: the dozens of secretive firms known collectively as the intelligence contracting industry.
Last February, three of these firms – HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico, known collectively as Team Themis – were discovered to have conspired to hire out their information war capabilities to corporations which hoped to strike back at perceived enemies, including US activist groups, WikiLeaks and journalist Glenn Greenwald. That such a dangerous new dynamic was now in play was only revealed due to a raid by hackers associated with the Anonymous collective, resulting in the dissemination of more than 70,000 emails to and from executives at HBGary Federal and affiliated company HBGary.
After having spent several months studying those emails and otherwise investigating the industry depicted therein, I have revealed my summary of a classified US intelligence programme known as Romas/COIN, as well as its upcoming replacement, known as Odyssey. The programme appears to allow for the large-scale monitoring of social networks by way of such things as natural language processing, semantic analysis, latent semantic indexing and IT intrusion. At the same time, it also entails the dissemination of some unknown degree of information to a given population through a variety of means – without any hint that the actual source is US intelligence. Scattered discussions of Arab translation services may indicate that the programme targets the Middle East.
Despite the details I have provided in the document – which is also now in the possession of several major news outlets and which may be published in whole or in part by any party that cares to do so – there remains a great deal that is unclear about Romas/COIN and the capabilities it comprises. The information with which I’ve worked consists almost entirely of email correspondence between executives of several firms that together sought to win the contract to provide the programme’s technical requirements, and because many of the discussions occurred in meetings and phone conversations, the information remaining deals largely with prospective partners, the utility of one capability over another, and other clues spread out over hundreds of email exchanges between a large number of participants.
The significance of this programme to the public is not limited to its potential for abuse by facets of the US intelligence community, which has long been proverbial for misusing other of its capabilities. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect is the fact that the partnership of contracting firms and other corporate entities that worked to obtain the contract was put into motion in large part by Aaron Barr, the disgraced former CEO of HBGary Federal who was at the centre of Team Themis’s conspiracy to put high-end intelligence capabilities at the disposal of private institutions. As I explain further in the linked report, this fact alone should prompt increased investigation into the manner in which this industry operates and the threats it represents to democratic institutions.
Altogether, the existence and nature of Romas/COIN should confirm what many had already come to realise over the past few years, in particular: the US and other states have no intention of allowing populations to conduct their affairs without scrutiny. Such states ought not complain when they find themselves subjected to similar scrutiny – as will increasingly become the case over the next several years.
• Editor’s note: The headline and photo caption in this article originally alluded to HBGary. HBGary Federal is the company in question, which is a distinct entity from HBGary Inc. The article has been amended to make that clarification at 9am (BST) on 23 June 2011
What corporate-driven “science” has in mind for the future of humanity is far different from the dreamy utopian landscape that’s been portrayed by the mainstream media. To hear the corporate-run media tell it, science is always “good” for humanity. Scientific achievements are always called “advances” and not “setbacks,” even though many of them have proven to be disastrous for humanity (atomic bombs, for example, or GMOs).
While pure science is, indeed, a necessary component of any civilization which seeks to expand its understanding of the universe, what we see dominating the landscape today isn’t pure science butcorporate-driven “science”that only seeks to accelerate corporate profits, not human understanding. And with that corporate-slanted science comes a whole new era of truly terrifying technologies that we may soon see become reality in our world.
Here, I’ve compiled a list of ten future technologies that might be used to strip away your freedoms and enslave you to the corporate globalist masters, all under the label of “science.”
#1) Organ harvesting from genetically modified, patented pigs
Need a replacement heart or lung? No worries, mate! Monsanto will grow you a new one using a genetically modified, trans-species pig (patent pending) that was raised on GMO animal feed and subjected to organ harvesting while it was still alive in order to keep the organs “fresh.”
Your government-approved, Medicare-funded transplant will be handled by one of the top U.S. hospitals, which are, even today, deeply engaged in black market organ trafficking and illegal transplantations.
#2) “Behavioral vaccines” that rewire your brain to eliminate dissent
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Disobedience is a disease! And the “cure” for disobedience (or Oppositional Defiance Disorder, as they call it) will be a new “vaccine” that biologically rewires your brain to make you more socially acceptable to the controllers.
It will be called a “behavioral vaccine” even though, in reality, it’s just a chemical lobotomy. This technology will be a cornerstone of the global police state, which will have no tolerance for independent thinking or critical thought of any kind, especially against the state.
#3) Centralized, remote monitoring of all your health statistics and vital signs by the police state
Think your medical records are really private? Think again: Even now, the U.S. government maintains a secret centralized bank of blood taken from children at birth. In the near future, citizens will be implanted with biometric monitoring chips that relay information back to the government about your pulse, respiration, and the presence of either illegal drugs or legalized pharmaceuticals (which are often the very same chemicals as illegal drugs, just re-branded as a medication).
These chips will be used by the government to enforce people taking their medications. They will also be used to locate and arrest those who smoke a little pot or take addictive substances without a prescription.
But most importantly, these chips will be used to monitor nutritional levels and make sure no one attains a high level of vitamin D, for example, which promotes clear thinking and strong cognitive function (http://www.naturalnews.com/029190_v…). Under scientific dictatorship, the sheeple must be kept in a state ofchronic nutritional deficiencyin order to be easily controlled. This will all be sold to the public as a way for the government to monitor their “safety” because, the government will claim, “Too much vitamin D can be dangerous!” So they will set the upper safety limits to the lower threshold of cognitive awakening, making sure that everyone remains in a mental stupor as they live out their state-run lives.
#4) The total secrecy of all food ingredients, sources and places of origin
As the food industry is increasingly invaded by junk science (GMOs, anyone?), efforts will increase tohide all the chemical ingredientsin food products and rename dangerous-sounding chemicals into nice-sounding chemicals.
The Corn Refiners Association is already trying to rename “High Fructose Corn Syrup” to “corn sugar.” (http://www.naturalnews.com/029748_h…)Aspartame is now going to be called “AminoSweet,” and MSG has been renamed things like “yeast extract” or “Torula yeast powder.”
But it’s going to get far worse as fraudulent science accelerates food industry deceptions. Expect to see preservatives like “sodium benzoate” renamed as things like, “Freshiness crystals.” Or “artificial colors” might be described as “Fortified with pretty colors.”
Above all, the food industry wants to hidewhereits foods come from,howthey are made, andwhat’sin them, because all three of those categories are bad news for your health.
#5) The complete criminalization of home-produced foods and medicines, forcing total reliance on factory food production
Speaking of food, corrupt “scientists” will soon insist that growing your own food is extremely dangerous because you might grow e.coli in your garden! With such absurd justifications, home gardening will be completely outlawed in many towns, and those who try to secretly grow tomatoes will be arrested and imprisoned as if they were heroin smugglers.
The idea of all this is to make the population completely dependent on centralized factory food production, in the same way the population is currently dependent on centralized electricity and centralized fossil fuels. This will all be justified with the help of “scientists” who claim that factory-produced food is safer for you because it’s all pasteurized, irradiated and fumigated.
#6) The unleashing of a global bioweapon pandemic through seasonal flu shots
Whereas vaccines were once intended to prevent disease, they are now being increasinglyweaponizedand engineered to spread disease, which is why most of the people who get the flu each winter are the very same people who routinely take flu shots.
In the near future, as the globalists decide the world population has reached its upper tolerable limit, a live “population control” virus will be engineered right into the vaccines, followed by an aggressive vaccine push that even offers to pay people to receive flu shots. (Get a flu shot, earn $25!)
The whole scheme, of course, is nothing more than a population control measure designed to eliminate all the lower-IQ people on the planet who are stupid enough to allow themselves to be injected with biological weapons packaged and sold as vaccines. Effectively, it’s really a eugenics program that the globalists believe will save the human race from the rise of stupidity (no matter what the cost in human suffering).
#7) Total government control over your reproduction and the genetic code of your “offspring”
Copulating with the person of your choice and producing your own “random” offspring will no longer be allowed under the scientific police state. Reproduction must be carefully controlled through licensing and regulation to make sure that no unexpected results occur.
Before having children, parents will need to apply to the government forpermissionto reproduce, at which point they will be genetically and cognitively profiled, then granted a reproduction classification status that must be strictly followed to avoid imprisonment.
People who show rebellious tendencies and speak out against the state will be denied reproduction “privileges.” Only the most obedient, white-skinned, do-gooder mind slaves will be granted reproduction privileges, and they will gladly copulate and raise yet more babies to be sacrificed to the state as the next generation of mind slaves.
#8) Wireless brain implants that can be remotely activated by law enforcement to make entire crowds of people passive
The future of “science” involves all sorts of electronics implanted into the human body. One of the most convenient ones will be the “pacification chip” that will be forced upon citizens along with “money chips” that they use to pay for everything (cash will be outlawed, and using cash will be seen as a terrorist activity).
The pacification chip can be remotely activated by the government through cell tower bursts — or through hand-held units issued to police and law enforcement commanders — to instantly pacify large crowds of protesters or rioters. Are the students protesting about free speech again? Activate the pacification chip, and they’ll all lay down on the lawn and daydream for a while.
Are revolutionaries marching on the capitol and trying to overthrow the government? Activate the pacification chip, and your tyrannical dictatorship is safe!
Such chips may also be used to “excite” the brain at times when it is also politically useful. For example, when another terrorist attack is staged on U.S. soil, the “excitation chips” can be activated across the population to get people riled up and calling for war! (And that’s the whole point of false flag attacks, of course.)
#9) The genetic engineering and breeding of obedient super soldiers
In the far future, battlefield soldiers will actually be humanoid-shaped robots equipped with firearms and body armor. Think “Terminator” model T-1000. That’s still a ways off, of course, given the incredible complexity of mobile power, robotic actuation technologies, vision recognition systems and artificial intelligence.
In the mean time, the most powerful nations of the world will pour R&D money intogrowing genetically modified super soldiers who are secretly birthed, raised and trained to be as robotic as possible. These super soldiers will be genetically engineered with peak performance attributes (high blood oxygenation, large body frames, etc.) combined with small brains that can only process enough information to follow ordersbut neverquestionthem.
They will also be outfitted with numerous electronic implants, making them more cyborg than human. They will have vision implants attached to their retinas, for example, GPS chips wired to their brains, comm equipment wired into their ears, and built-in pain medication dispensers that flood their bodies with stimulant chemicals so they can keep fighting even after an arm gets blown off, for example.
#10) The electromagnetic activation of metals and nano-crystals injected into you through vaccines
Here’s a new one most people haven’t thought about: In addition to vaccines being used to spread infectious disease, they can also be used to inject humans with nano-crystals that are sized and tuned to resonate at certain frequencies, much like a radio crystal tunes in to a specific radio band.
Such nano-crystals may lie dormant in the bodies of the general public for years or even decades, but at some point the government can take over the radio towers with an “emergency” national transmission that broadcasts an activation signal at precisely the right wavelength to excite the nano-crystals already in peoples’ bodies. The results could be anything frommass insanityto massive outbreaks of violence (rioting, etc.) or just tens of millions of people instantly dropping dead. Any of those outcomes could then be exploited by the government to sell a cover story of a “terrorist attack” that requires even more government control over the population.
It could all be done in the name of “science”
Remember, this collection of 10 points is about possible future technologies that exemplify theabuse of scienceto empower tyrannical governments and corrupt industries. Thankfully, these ten examples have not come true yet, but several are well on their way to become reality in just the next few years.
Real science has an important role to play in any society, but I believe that science should serve the interests of the People, not the self-serving controllers who run globalist corporations and national governments. When science is used to dominate and enslave people rather than setting them free, it is a violation of one of the most fundamental truths throughout the universe: only through freedom (the freedom of ideas, freedom of questioning, freedom of discussion) can true understanding of our universe be achieved.
NaturalNews salutes the real scientists out there who pursue the betterment of human civilizationwithoutpunching a clock for all the evil corporations which abuse science for their own nefarious purposes.
