They're not even TRYING to hide it any more

Back in the 1960s, when the spooks killed highly visible people, they came up with elaborate schemes involving red herrings and patsies and controlled investigations and fake documents and big steaming buckets of disinfo. But nowadays, they're not even trying to hide what they're up to. American intel wants the world to get the message loud and clear: "Yeah, it's true. We kill people who annoy us. What are you gonna do about it?"

Case in point: The strange death (at 35) of superhacker Barnaby Jack, the man who made ATMs spew out cash the way Linda Blair spewed pea soup.

A computer hacker who gained cult status across the internet after revealing how to hack cash machines has been found a week before he was due to demonstrate how to kill someone by hacking their pacemaker.

The body of Barnaby Jack was found in San Francisco yesterday. The city's medical examiner's office would not give any further details.

We're talking about a guy who, to judge from his photos, seemed quite young and fit. If a coroner says anything about natural causes or suicide -- well, just remember the case of CIA man John Paisley, who was fished out of Chesapeake Bay in 1978; his body was tied up and he had a bullet hole behind his left ear. The coroner ruled that one a suicide as well -- even though Paisley was right-handed.

Back to Jack:

He was due to appear at the Black Hat hacking convention in San Francisco next week, demonstrating how he could attack heart devices.

He had claimed he had developed techniques for attacking implanted heart devices that could kill a man from 30 feet away.

It should be understood that Jack did not himself seek to kill people. He sought to warn the world that such things were very real.

Here's more, via Reuters:

The New Zealand-born Jack, 35, was found dead on Thursday evening by "a loved one" at an apartment in San Francisco's Nob Hill neighborhood, according to a police spokesman. He would not say what caused Jack's death but said police had ruled out foul play.

Looks like we have another Paisley. Or maybe this one will be more Ferrie-esque, complete with suicide note(s). Here's one final squib, from the San Jose Mercury-News:

Barnaby Jack died on Thursday, although the cause of death is still under investigation, San Francisco Deputy Coroner Kris Barbrich said. Craig Brophy, a spokesman for computer security firm IOActive, Inc., where Jack worked, confirmed his death and said the company would be issuing a statement.

Cynics may suggest that Kris is sending a message to Uncle: "You'll get your suicide verdict just as soon as the checks clear."

Michael Hastings. Barnaby Jack. Barrett Brown. Bradley Manning. Julian Assange. Ed Snowden. The members of Anonymous. 

There's a war going on. It's the cyber version of Prince John's armies versus the men of Sherwood Forest.

Remember what I've always said: Although anyone who loves peace must despise the very idea of revolution, the threat of revolution is the only thing that has ever kept any government honest. Therefore, any technology that makes rebellion impossible also makes tyranny inevitable.

Quite obviously, the government has declared war on anyone who hopes to warn the public that this technology is coming. Is here.

Added note: In a comment, a reader chides me for leaving out Aaron Swartz -- "prosecuted to death." Just so.

Back to Barnaby: Ya think they're going to try to sell the public on an auto-erotic asphixiation narrative? That would allow the Breitbarters to fill the internet with stories about sexaholic Dems...

Side note: If you Google the terms IOActive and NSA, you'll be directed to this IOActive blog entry, which details a Windows vulnerability that allows intelligence agencies to gain elevated privileges on your computer.

I don’t know why Microsoft continues using MD5; it has been banned by Microsoft SDL since 2005 and it seems there has been some component oversight or these components have been built without following SDL guidance. Who knows on what other functionality MD5 continues to be used by Microsoft, allowing abuse by intelligence agencies.

Perhaps Barnaby Jack also planned to talk about that stuff during his "heart stopping" demonstration.

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My questions

A Summers day. Here's Robert Reich on reports that Obama will choose either Larry Summers or Janet Yellen to be the new Federal Reserve Chairman.

So who would be best -- Yellen or Summers? I know both fairly well. Janet Yellen has impeccable credentials. She's now vice-chairman of the Fed, after having been head of the San Francisco branch of the Fed, and before that, an economics professor at Berkeley. In 2007 she was one of the very few voices sounding the alarm about the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Not incidentally, she's also a delightful person. Those who have worked with her tell me she listens carefully to all views, and is respectful of her employees. If selected, she'd be the first woman to head the Fed.

I worked with Larry Summers in the Clinton administration, where he eventually became Treasury Secretary. Under Obama, he ran the National Economic Council. Personally, I like Larry. He's very bright, and able to see the nub of most policy problems very quickly. But he has the tact and personality of a bull in a China shop, and he's been notoriously wrong about a few big things. In the late 1990s, he urged Clinton to sign off on legislation killing off Glass-Steagall, and was also part of the Rubin-Greenspan cabal that rejected the arguments of Brooksley Born, then chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, for why the CFTC should regulate financial derivatives. Summers' subsequent tenure as president of Harvard came to an end after he suggested one reason women were not well-represented in the sciences is they don't have the mind for it. As chair of the National Economic Council under Obama, he and Tim Geithner, then Treasury Secretary, bailed out Wall Street while refusing to impose tough conditions on the banks.

My question: Why is Reich even asking? Yellen is obviously the better choice. Thus, you can bet the rent money that Obama will pick Summers.

2. Holder and Snowden. AG Eric Holder has written a letter to Russian Minister of Justice Alexander Konovalov, assuring the Russians that the United States will happily issue a passport allowing Ed Snowden to go home. Moreover,

Mr. Snowden will not be tortured. Torture is unlawful in the United States.

My questions: Doesn't the fact that Holder feels obligated to offer this assurance say a lot about how low this country has fallen? Holder's letter reminds me of that old Monty Python routine: "And I can assure you that there is no cannibalism in the modern British Navy!" Or maybe I'm thinking of that old movie (I forget the title) in which John Candy, proffering his services as babysitter, assures the anxious parents that there will be no Satanism "or anything like that"...

Would Bradley Manning agree with Holder's "no torture" assessment?

Will Holder's creepy we-promise-not-to-hurt-him letter -- a letter best read aloud while doing an imitation of Wednesday Addams -- finally make the "Snowden's secretly working for Obama" conspiracy theorists shut the eff up?

3. NSA's big oops. The NSA gave a cybersecurity award to for the Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper of 2012 to Dr. Joseph Bonneau of the University of Cambridge. Bonneau's response:

In accepting the award I don’t condone the NSA’s surveillance. Simply put, I don’t think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form.

In an interview, Bonneau took the gloves off. Question:

"You’ve been pretty vocal in your criticism of the NSA after winning the award. On Twitter you said you “want it abolished.” Is that true?"

The answer:

I’d rather have it abolished than persist in its current form. I think there’s a question about whether it’s possible to reform the NSA into something that’s more reasonable.

I don’t really do politics for my day job. I don’t feel like I follow the situation as closely as a lot of people who are writing about what kinds of reforms are needed, or how things might need to change. But my feeling based on what I’ve read is that I don’t want to live in a country with an organization like the NSA is right now.

My question: Is this how the NSA's cyber-totalitarianism will end -- with the refusal of the wonks to participate in the system?

Another question: The average citizens and the congressfolk who defend the NSA's practices -- do they really think that they know more about the situation than Bonneau does?

Yet another question: It's all well and good to propose dismantling the NSA, but how do we bell that cat?

Still another question: Isn't this Eric Holder's cue to write Bonneau a letter reminding him that the U.S. does not practice torture and therefore he has nothing to worry about? Nothing at all. Sleep tight, Professor...

I just thought of another movie that Holder's letter brings to mind: Mars Attacks. Remember that one? The Martian armies -- even as they were laying waste to cities -- would broadcast this message: "Don't run! We are your friends!"

4. Man of Steel. As I recall, the old Superman comics presented Krypton as a planet with technology not much more advanced than that of Earth in the 1950s. We saw scenes of suburban Kryptonians mowing the lawns and so forth. But the new movie depicts a Krypton filled with incredibly advanced technology -- plus some really cool flying monsters.

My question: If Krypton has all of this groovy ultra-advanced tech, why don't Jor-El, Lara and the kid all hop into a spaceship? Or why don't they send themselves into the Phantom Zone and leave the kid instructions on how to de-Phantomize them?

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Once again -- the Hastings accident

The second video contains an interview with an ignored witness. Unfortunately, you have to wade through a great deal of other stuff -- including selections from the Inception soundtrack -- before you get to that part.

In a previous post on this subject, I indicated (in a comment) that I did not want to involve this blog in a debate over the accident details. For me, it was enough to know that a man with a rep for driving like someone's grandma was suddenly speeding nearly a hundred miles an hour down a busy street that no-one in his right mind would confuse with a raceway.

The incident occurred on a lovely stretch of Highland Blvd. just south of Melrose. As I recall, there are lots of fancy-schmancy homes on that block. It's usually busy, busy, busy.

At first, I presumed that Hastings hit the gas pedal because he thought he was being chased. Then I saw a video featuring a DARPA expert who warned her colleagues about the possibility of outsiders commandeering a vehicle's computer controls.

That video -- coupled with the established fact that Hastings told associates that he was in fearful of the FBI and about to take a lower profile -- was all I needed. Ever since, I have operated under the presumption that this "accident" was probably not an accident.

Even so, my first instinct was not to mire this blog in the gritty, gruesome details of how car crashes occur and what we should and should not expect to see after such an event. Lots of other blogs went down that trail -- and some of those blogs cater to the Paultards and Alex Jonesians. I don't like to link to those guys. The analysis here is more...

Hm. I was going to say "up my alley," but that phrase may be inappropriate.

What intrigues me is not so much the CSI stuff but the links between Hastings and the mysterious tech firm called Endgame. (Similarly, while doing JFK research, I got bored with the forensics of Dealey Plaza, preferring to concentrate on Oswald's history and associations.) We'll have another Endgame post soon.

This post exists to prove that rules are meant to be broken. Let's play the CSI game, just this once.

Not long ago, a reader who knows a lot about cars sent me his take on what happened. On the same day, another reader in my beloved L.A. sent me photos from the accident scene.

Reader "Dan" supplied the words, while reader "Hal" supplied the images that pepper this post (except for the first one, which came from here).

Here's Dan:

MH was in the car, so the car did did not have to be steered remotely.

At 100 mph he would either be panicked to the point of inaction, or doing his best to keep it between the ditches.

In other words, all "they" had to do was take over 4 systems at most: the fly-by-wire gas pedal, the Start/Off button, the brakes, and the transmission.

They would then accelerate the car and let speed, time, and the odd all engulfing fire, IMO, do the rest.

I've run Slaloms, wheel to wheel, and driven like a maniac on the street for years. (But only late at night so I could see cars coming from a long ways off and in blind curves, and only way out in the country on isolated roads I knew like the back of my hand. Damn, is one sign of getting old feeling the need to apologize for stupid stuff I did years ago?) I know that it doesn't matter where you are, or who you are -- if your car starts to accelerate, and you can't turn it off, can't stop it, and can't knock it out of gear, you will eventually crash at a high rate of speed.

MH appeared to be going 50 to 60 mph when he ran the red light.

The street MH went down at what they guess to be 100 mph had a bump in it which would cause a car going that fast to lose grip. At 100 mph it doesn't take much to upset a vehicle's suspension, the bump alone could cause an out of control situation.

Any driver input into the steering wheel in a loose condition, such as after a bump, could result in losing the backend, and due to the confined space the car would most likely slam nose first into the nearest object.

If the driver was a world class driver, he would most likely slam one side of the car flat into the nearest object because he would have corrected the slide, but he would still hit the "wall".

Anyone who works on modern cars knows computers control these type of systems, and more I can't think of:

Ignition; Starting the car; Making it run; Turning it off; Timing; Lifters - am I a V8 or a V4?; Cam timing; AC and heating systems; Air Bags; Brakes; Throttle; Air/Fuel ratio; Automatic transmission shift points and overdrive; Steering if the car has a self-parking app; Stereo volume as related to speed; Automatic headlight dimmers; Door locks; Seatbelt tensioners; Warning buzzers of all kinds

All this is done through pulsed square waves, low voltage signals, and other double E mumbo jumbo I don't understand, and these waves tells one of your car's computers to turn on the Peltire thermoelectric seat modules to heat, or cool.. start your car, make it accelerate, etc...

Most all computers can be hacked because most computers are dumb, and the dumb ones always do what exactly they are told to do.

Computers: Every Authoritarian's dream...thing.

Okay, I know that computers run everything in new-ish cars. But what nobody (not even that nice lady from DARPA) has yet explained to me is why the system allows outsider access. I happen to have have a small, antiquated netbook: If the internet on that device has been disabled and the USB ports are empty, the only way to get into the thing is through the keyboard. And the computers in cars don't have keyboards. Why on earth do they have to put Bluetooth technology into a freakin' car?

A simple piece of legislation could solve this problem once and for all.

The video below was produced by Mark Dice. I really hate to promote this guy's work, because he believes in the existence of a secret society called the Illuminati, which is pure myth -- "a scarecrow to frighten the gullible," as researcher Morris Kominski once put it. But -- dammit, there really is some good stuff in this one:

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Twelve bucks an hour: What would happen?

We know that Walmart gets away with paying its employees so little because Uncle Sam picks up the slack. Taxpayers pay for the workers' health care (via the emergency room, usually) and for food stamps. Basically, your money is being used to make the Walton family rich. What would happen if Walmart workers received enough money to make it on their own?

Twelve bucks an hour should do it. That's a living wage.

Now, a new study by UC Berkeley has proven that, if they were to implement a $12 minimum wage and passed on the entire cost to customers, it would only cost them a measly extra $.46 per trip. Would YOU be willing to pay an extra 46 cents if it meant that America’s largest employer would finally pay their employees enough to live a dignified life?

By the way: If you go to the story on the other end of that link, you'll see an interesting dialog about unions. One reader opined that unions were the reason why the American auto industry (almost) went under. The response:

sorry to burst your bubble your living in, but the auto makers problems were caused by executive greed and mismanagement. Working in the auto industry for 35 years I have seen the mismanagement first hand. and after the union didn't take raises for 12 years did you see the price of the vehicles come down? nope. but you did see fired CEO's get millions in bonuses.

The Randroids simply cannot argue away the fact that America's most prosperous years occurred when unions thrived. Why? Because well-paid workers buy things, and the buying of things keeps the economic engine humming. Walmart is starting to struggle because underpaid American workers can't even afford to buy the cheap crap made by underpaid Chinese workers.

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"We don't need no education..."

State Senator Aaron Osmond wants to end compulsory education in Utah.

Some parents completely disengage themselves from their obligation to oversee and ensure the successful education of their children. Some parents act as if the responsibility to educate, and even care for their child, is primarily the responsibility of the public school system. As a result, our teachers and schools have been forced to become surrogate parents, expected to do everything from behavioral counseling, to providing adequate nutrition, to teaching sex education, as well as ensuring full college and career readiness.

The first sentence of this paragraph contains a split infinitive; "to oversee and to ensure" is preferable. The second sentence contains another split infinitive ("and even to care" is preferable) and two wrongly-placed commas. The third sentence contains an awkward attempt at parallelism. Suggested revision: "...everything from behavioral counseling to providing adequate nutrition, as well as..."

Later, we get this remarkable sentence:

Instead of requiring that teachers and students must be in class for 990 hours a year, lets enable our local school boards to determine the best use of a teacher’s time and focus student and parent expectations on educational outcomes such as completing assignments and passage of exams as the measurement of success for the opportunity to progress in public school.

The word "must" is not necessary. The contraction "let's" is missing an apostrophe. Because the sentence structure is so clumsy, the reader cannot determine which noun goes with the verb "focus." Does the writer mean "let's focus" or does he mean "let's enable our school boards to focus"? The rest is so problematic, I'm not sure how to proceed. Does the phrase "as the measurement of success for the opportunity to progress" mean anything?

Based on Mr. Osmond's performance, I would say that compulsory education remains desirable. However, I do agree with Osmond on one point: Some students may need to repeat grades.

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Congress vs. NSA

It's starting. Representatives Justin Amish and John Conyers are fixin' to offer an amendment to defund the NSA's outrageous domestic surveillance state. Here's how to support their efforts.

From the Politico story:

“The Limiting Internet and Blanket Electronic Review of Telecommunications and Email Act” or LIBERT-E Act, the legislation also requires the secret court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make opinions available to Congress as well as summaries of those decisions to the public.

“We accept that free countries must engage in secret operations from time to time to protect their citizens. Free countries must not, however, operate under secret laws. Secret court opinions obscure the law. They prevent public debate on critical policy issues and they stop Congress from fulfilling its duty to enact sound laws and fix broken ones,” Amash and Conyers said in a joint statement.

And they have some support in the Senate. Here's an op-ed by Al Franken:

I'm working on legislation that will require the federal government to annually report how it uses key authorities under the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, including the authorities underlying the phone metadata and the PRISM electronic surveillance programs that recently came to light. For each of these authorities, the government must disclose how many Americans' information is being collected and how many Americans' information is being queried and actually seen by federal officers or agents.

My legislation would also allow companies to publicly report on how many Patriot and FISA orders they're getting and how many of their customers these orders affect. There's a way to do this that protects national security.

Do these efforts go far enough? Probably not. Franken's approach is far too squishy. I would prefer something along the lines of a bill that would direct Obama to blow up that new NSA data collection center in Utah.

And I don't see anything here about legislation that would force cell phone providers to give consumers the option to turn off GPS.

But before you sneer, let me ask you: When was the last time defeatism solved anything? Getting halfway there is better than not starting out -- unless your last name is Wallenda.

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Bella update

Enough with the NSA stories and the royal birth; let's discuss a matter of true significance.

My dog Bella had surgery yesterday to remove two growths -- one large, one small -- and I'm overjoyed to report that she is doing fine and sleeping here at home. (The shot to your left was snapped just minutes ago.) Even her appetite has returned.

However, she did piddle on my bedding no less than three times. As any James Bond fan can tell you, three times is enemy action. No doubt this was her way of warning me never to make her go through something so traumatic again.

The scars are massive and hideous, but they will heal. A biopsy will reveal whether the growths were malignant. Frankly, if malignancy is found, I'm not sure what further steps are available. I understand that some people have put together gluten-free canine diets which supposedly fight cancer. Heretofore, I've mostly fed her either chicken or ground beef, mixed with rice and oatmeal.

I owe my readers more than words can express.

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