WikiLeaks has just released the first part of the largest document dump on an “intelligence agency” in its history. Or in the history of record-keeping. Ever.
The first of many releases
Julian Assange is quoted in The Guardian as saying the release will be far larger than the Snowden Files.
ZeroHedge has a pretty good early take, as they usually do. It has charts, too!
CIA Organizational Chart
This is going to suck all the air out of the news for a while, and I’m predicting it will cause several heads to explode on both “sides” of American politics, let alone the impact it will have on the Deep State bureaucrats who think they are above the law.
Good.
“Fuck ’em, Ethan. Fuck those people. Fuck this whoooole thing.”
Awesome. I’m not sure anything is going to pull the msm off their war on Trump though. They’re obsessed.
Watch them start ‘denying’ they ever said there was a link between Trump and ‘Russian hacks’.
I see a whole buncha hacks and they ain’t Russian lemme tell ya.
Funny that. Saw this in the zerohedge comments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OBg7r9Vgbw
Holy fucking Christ, the smirk and smugness in her tone when she responds with “what news organizations have claimed that?”
Let’s see, are simultaneous contradictory narratives going to be the main order of the day or is it time for a “Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia” complete denial?
OFFS!!
I googled “Vault 7 news” just now and I don’t see any link to the MSM on the first 3 pages other than (Fake Ass) Fox newz . What a shock!
CBS has it as the top story.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikileaks-cia-documents-released-cyber-intelligence
ew, the comments
my favorite?
That PHENOM4 sounds like a real dikc.
I basically assume all internet comments @ major news sites are 90% automated political-bots babbling at each other.
It helps reduce the feeling of contempt for all humankind
I do too, but I think it’s more insidious than that. I suspect the bots are just part of the package. Those are to annoy, discredit, and spread prepared propaganda quickly. If the software scores a commentator as someone who seems to have more than a couple of brain cells to rub together, they get a special care package and are connected to a team of trained propagandists commenting through one or more accounts at a time depending on how likely that person is to convince people. This doesn’t matter much for places without a lot of eyes on the content, but major social media platforms with high exposure are clear targets.
i think there’s a big gulf that lies between actual low-level political-garble spamming and the more-coordinated online political social engineering you seem to want to believe exists.
I know there are in fact some people who wage the sorts of political comment-generating campaigns you describe; but its not remotely sophisticated or particularly ‘smart’.
the fact is that the cost-benefit of doing that sort of stuff is declining so quickly as to make even the auto-comment-generators a waste of time and energy. The perceived value of internet commentary is already seen as negligable; investing all sorts of time and energy into it is self-defeating and basically handing political advantages to the people who still do the old-fashioned “go out and talk to people” stuff.
I think that’s something few people consider = that by focusing on ‘internet’ stuff all the time, it actually makes ‘real world’ stuff less competitive. I think that’s one big reason Hillary’s campaign screwed the pooch – is that she spent too much effort on trying to replicate Obama-esque online-base-rallying, rather than actually going out and pressing the flesh and making physical appearances. iow, “The old-fashioned way”.
If that’s the case, Hillary *was* doomed from the start. Nobody came to her rallies. And she wasn’t strong enough to shake more than 100 hands a day.
Which is what I said.
The vast majority of comment spam is not going to be seen by enough people to matter. But there are definitely platforms with enough exposure that propaganda campaigns are profitable to conduct.
And, contrary to what you just insisted, lots of people do not read articles. This very site is, ironically, an example of that. We are not a target for agitprop, we’re too uninfluential. Most people come here for the comments, as they did at TSTSNBN. Reddit is one of the top sites in the world. It is a target for advertising campaigns. It is a target for political propaganda. And plenty of people routinely betray the simple fact that they never read the fucking articles linked.
Basically.
The democrats have literally 90% of all the media in their pocket, they’ve got 100% of Hollywood, and they’ve got legions on internet-savvy youth plaguing social-media with all sorts of peer-shaming efforts to rally people around their desired goals.
And they couldn’t so much as drag that bag of turds over the finish line in states where they maintained huge spending advantages and major-turnout-efforts.
this is basically why i think people who make a big deal about internet-social-engineering miss the plot. Most media does nothing more than reinforces existing tribal associations. It doesn’t either ‘create them’ or undermine other groups’ existing allegiances. Its very low-value stuff.
What are you referring to
This is demonstrably false. The Reddit community is a dominant force in the social media world precisely because of the discussions. The interface sucks and does not appeal to many people. The voting system is obviously gamed. There really is no redeeming feature for it except that it’s where everyone is.
And you’ve said in the past that Facebook is somehow not also dominant, which is laughable considering that a quarter of the population of the planet still uses it. Twitter still has many millions of people using it constantly. It may be in decline, but it’s by no means down for the count.
95% of the voting population has never used Reddit
i don’t think you understand my point.
I think you misunderstand the difference between merely ‘having an account’ somewhere and something actually being a significant form of influence.
its like you’re saying merely owning a TV and suggesting that therefore proves that West Wing changed a lot of people’s opinions about something. sure lots of people are “on” facebook. A tiny fraction use it for anything more than their baby-pictures. and an even smaller fraction actually give a fuck about political conversations which take place there.
You have a funny idea of what “contrary” means.
Those are two entirely mutually independent issues.
Simply because people “don’t read stories” doesn’t mean “comments” are more therefore significant by default.
All it means is that people scan headlines and form their own conclusions. It says nothing at all about the relative influence of commentary, which is still lower than whale shit.
eople don’t change opinions because of political garble in the sewers of the internet. they simply reinforce views which exist because of all sorts of far more influential real-world effects.
this is basically the same point i made when i told you that Pepe doesn’t mean shit compared to the ‘distrust in media’ created by hosts of other more-significant influences.
And you fail to grasp mine so repeatedly that my palm is becoming melded to my face at this point.
It doesn’t matter how many people interact directly with some culture for it to have effects on culture overall.
I have never read Twilight. I can still make jokes about fucking glittery vampires that people will instantly recognize. I have never read or watched Harry Potter books/movies, but I recognize every trite reference to the series.
I can import culture from somewhere else and implant it in your head regardless of your willingness to accept it or recognize its origins. We all do this all the time. Culture is viral that way. It’s a well-studied phenomenon that peer groups develop in-language naturally. We do it here. That has a tendency to spread. You may have never met a single true “valley girl” in your life, but you know what one sounds like. You can imitate one trivially. You hang around with anime dweebs here. Even if you recognize none of the series, you can spot a potential “weeb.” In fact, the very word “weeaboo” came from a web comic that made it up as a word with no definition, was given a definition by 4chan, and it lives in your head right now. 4chan reached out from its insular culture and is in Gilmore’s head, whether he knew that or not.
Do you think Robby Soave talks like he does as an invention purely his own, or is he a product of his peer group? If you want to crawl inside someone’s head and live in there, you don’t have to do it directly. You can get to their friends and let peer acceptance strategies do the rest.
Your grand waffling about “viral culture” is all well and good but you seem oblivious to the fact that ‘internet culture’ (as pointed out many many times) is
1) only relevant to a small minority of the population, and
2) not a very important segment of the population, and
3) it changes so fast as to make its effects impossible to control
see again the point i just made re: the impotence of media in general =
They (democrats) will continue to hold a massive advantage in popular culture and the media, and will still find that advantage adds up to very little in real-world terms.
because the real-world stuff trumps this bullshit handwaving about ‘culture’ every time.
And again = please lets not have this discussion a third time.
I keep trying to make points about actual “real world effects” = actual political behavior, etc.
You want to make grand claims about vague cultural forces which have no clear or controllable impact.
Its basically talking across purposes. please don’t bother repeating yourself unless you’re prepared to actually say, “yes, reddit does change people’s votes and here is evidence how __________________”
“Internet culture” sure as hell makes it offline too. Did people stop talking about things?
This is like insisting that reading books doesn’t also cause ideas to live in people’s heads. That George Orwell didn’t make a cultural impact that reverberates.
Have you never heard someone say “lol” out loud instead of actually laughing?
There is no such thing as “internet culture” as some insular thing set aside from all other things. There is culture, and culture spreads if enough people like it.
The ONLY thing I am annoyed with is that the point I have made is being continually distorted. You minimize what I say, mock me for things I did not say, and conflate points together to make them less clear than what I actually did write. That is unnerving.
It does not matter if you learned to tie a flies for fishing from your grandfather as a family tradition or a YouTube video that was made by someone else who learned it from his grandfather as his family tradition. Culture is culture. Knowing how to tie flies is a meme. Memes are everywhere, and we transmit them constantly by any means possible. Full stop.
Every time I read ZSG going on about memes I can’t help but think he’s either Hideo Kojima or got really high and played too much Metal Gear Solid 2.
In fairness, you do have a habit of making lots of sweeping general statements which merit no better response than “So What”?
e.g.
that’s so general as to mean absolutely nothing.
When i say something (e.g. memes) are of “minor relative significance”, you seem to think that by saying, “it has SOME significance”! you have scored a point.
You haven’t. because saying something is of little significance is not claiming it has “none”.
Its saying that in the context of the very specific material things under consideration (e.g. electoral politics) its a fart in the wind.
You can gas on about how i’m denying the existence of memes (or something) all you want – you’re just enlarging the scope of the discussion to meaninglessness.
You can cite all the cultural phenomena you want and it still doesn’t amount to any case that “people jabbering on Reddit” is somehow more important than, say (just for example), “Talk Radio”.
and while i don’t have any data ready to hand to prove the case, i would posit to you that Talk Radio probably has at least 10X (if not 100X) the relative impact on political matters than what some 20-something-kids are gabbing about on the intertubes.
if you wanted to dispute that point, we could go dig up data about it and see. Or not. But what wouldn’t actually advance that discussion at all would be to wax philosophical about memes. If you find that point minimizing or derogatory or whatever, don’t blame me = its just me pointing to what’s actually going on. Its nothing personal.
Anyone else seeing a lot of random “=” symbols in Gilmore’s posts? Its really weird.
my random-punctuation is actually getting far better than it used to be
and by ‘better’, i mean, “less ridiculous”
Still missing the point, so tragically that it has become irritating.
Few adults change each other’s minds about anything at all. Confirmation bias takes care of that on its own.
Kids are much more malleable. They respond to simpler stimuli. We won’t really know how much of an effect anyone is having until Gen Z matures to a voting age. It’s hard to measure how much will “stick.” And given that culture can shift very rapidly, all the effort may be undone in another few years.
Who knows how much damage the “participation trophy” / entitlement generation experienced? Some believe it had a huge effect on behavior, while others insist that it was small effect. But we know what those things mean, and may choose to try something different the next go around to different effects. What we do know is that the entitlement generation really hates being called that, and that small phrase and every bit of meaning it carries could have a profound impact on how they raise their own kids. You don’t have to go far to see someone railing on it, or railing against those railing on it.
It’s hard to measure how much will “stick.”
Yet it has been measured, with the legacy media at least. The answer is that “culture” in the sense of mass-transmitted cultural memes is only good at setting the agenda of discourse. People, even young people are much more affected by their parents, their teachers, and who’s president when they’re 10.
A relevant read (if you can get ahold of the original)
Yes, you’ve made that point before, which i pointed out is effectively making a Butterfly-Wings-creates-Tornadoes argument.
Because by that point (years down the road) the “effect” is unmeasurable and unknowable
You keep telling me i’m missing your point but then immediately diving back into the same sort of general-handwaving i’m repeatedly mocking.
i say, “internet commentary is politically negligible”…
and you counter, “No, its huge!”
and your best-“evidence” is = “20 years from now we will all see how important it is”‘
….
you can see why i’m not really taking you seriously, right?
“3) it changes so fast as to make its effects impossible to control”
This is what makes it important.
Since it is largely uncontrollable the things that get big are the things people actually like/are interested in/ feel something about.
Thus the movements follow human nature rather than politics.
It is important because, the more pervasive it gets, the more people are freed from the opinion makers and the gatekeepers.
Public opinion moves more and more on it’s own, free from the propaganda sources–that’s why those sources are trying to control or kill it.
It will take time because we’re building a mountain from pebbles.
But it’s still a mountain.
and it’s already generated Trump, and a party shift at the state level, and this data dump.
You’re too close. You’re not seeing it.
Just consider this–there are people out thre who think it’s important to refute and ridicule you
cnn.com is all about last week’s news
I noticed this. I went to all the major MSM sites to see if they covered the leaks. They’re burying this one as deep as possible. I imagine they’re scared that it may legitimize Trump’s claim of wiretapping in the eyes of the American public. If this is true, it would delegitimize the MSM…. again.
There’s a reason that SP won’t let anything in the house with voice command or camera capability. All of our laptops have the cameras taped over. People laugh at us for that, but even paranoids sometimes have people plotting to get them.
It’s not paranoia if someone is really out to get you.
Just because someone’s out to get you doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid.
I just hope this subthread ends with Kurt Cobain blowing his brains out.
🙁
Lithium would’ve helped prevent that.
Yes, it helps. It’s almost like Nirvana!
It smells like teen spirit sometimes though.
Nevermind.
Do you think he went to heaven or hell?
Why go there when there is a Love buzz right here?
I’m All Apologies for this sub thread.
Will this do?
Any microphones you have built into laptops or external devices are vulnerable. Since Android and IOS are both affected, your phone may be used to spy on you, camera, mic and GPS. Smart TV manufacturers are also affected.
Essentially, more can be used as an Orwellian telescreen than just the cameras in your laptops.
I thought I was the only one. I’ve got a piece of black electrical tape over my laptop’s camera.
I used the blue tape that was used to pack it.
A sticky note here
A sticky substance here?
But was Jason Bourne involved?
Blackbriar approves!
Much of this was known already if you were paying attention. One interesting thing is the apparent transfer of information/operations from the NSA to the CIA Obama just before he left office.
Unfortunately, I don’t think many people will care. If you have nothing to hide and all…
I’d ask them if they were okay with cameras in their bathroom and bedroom. ‘You got nothing to hide, right?’
I’m proud of my dumps.
Holy shit is right. Just scanning through the wikileaks page, if this is substantiated concrete stuff, good goddamn.
3 juiciest tidbits?
The Samsung TV hack, the smartphone hacks and the CIA espionage in the 2012 French elections.
Of course, that’s after a 20 minute perusal. Of the first dump of many. I’m sure it’s gonna get a lot worse.
This is a fucking shitstorm.
Did it involve DSK case? Many people thought that the false rape accusation was to keep him from running for President of France.
I’m seeing more about them targeting Le Pen and Hollande, but I haven’t gotten back into the details. looks like they were using both SIGINT and HUMINT though, so they can’t just say “we were merely advocating for free trade” in the news. They were using people on the ground to influence what happened.
You know, the kind of stuff Obama and Clinton and every Team Blue retarded fuck has been calling unacceptable since they floated the “Russia hacked our election” balloon.
Doesn’t matter. If Obama did it, then it was to the good, because Obama is good. If Russia did it, then it was bad, because Putin is bad. If Obama were to shoot a man in the middle of the street without provocation, then we should trust that he had a good reason to do so. If Putin performed the same action, then he only did it because he hates human life.
See how that works? Once you buy into the idea that the ends justify the means, then absolutely any means become acceptable as long as you trust the person performing them to have the right ends in mind.
^This
Pretty much.
Everyone knows that CIA has *spied* on everyone’s elections like… forever.
what would be interesting and different is if there were proof that we had actually done what the media has claimed ‘russia’ tried to do – i.e. “Meddle” in order to try to influence the results in a favored direction.
Meaning – just spying on foreign elections is basically a total non-event.
Actually *intervening* to try and sway those elections? Ok, now you’re talking real dirt.
And that would get another-factor-more-serious if it were done with the knowledge and complicity of foreign agencies/political parties.
i.e. we conspired to hurt a competing candidate with the incumbent party in another country.
But if its just ‘snooping’, sans interference, i don’t see much to get excited about.
That US intelligence can hack non-computer devices is sort of … well established. I remember people were making much of that in 2013.
In “Citizen Four” didn’t Snowden directly state that the CIA can hack into office telephones? I think I recall him unplugging the hotel telephone as he talked to Greenwald.
Every major vendor’s phones are surprisingly insecure. They are especially susceptible to the sort of hands-on attacks that this infodump describes.
It’s worse than that. Because individual users are rarely in control of patches on their smart phones, they’re beholden to their carrier rolling out fixes, and the carriers have been notoriously bad at doing so. So even if there are patches available, you probably aren’t getting them.
The same problem exists in your cablemodem. Even with fixes available, if Comcast (or any other) doesn’t want you to have them for whatever reason, you’re not getting them. And they’ll kick you off their networks for patching your cablemodem yourself.
Yeah, I’m talking more about larger VOIP systems that hotels use. I can’t name a few particular names, but “some” vendors are very lax about protecting firmware.
iPhones and decent Android phones are miles ahead in that area.
Something that just occurred to me, and i’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet =
it would be extraordinarily easy for some intel organization to discredit Wikileaks by simply dumping them a bunch of stuff, claiming it was some super secret stash of insider information
… then littering that stuff with lots of phony intel.
When they release said stuff to the public? the same intel org feeds the press lists of all the “Fake” stuff to identify.
It would basically make all of their past and future information-dumps suspect in the eyes of the public. Basically it would become impossible to be sure they had done any validation of the information prior to release (and i know they DO try), and consequently you would be forced to assume at least a high percentage of their info was bullshit.
I assume they know this, and that they do put in lots of effort trying to ensure the information they publish is valid. But i am surprised that they haven’t gotten burned before now. Because it would seem the most obvious tactic to use to discredit them.
(*#&$(@& threading.
I keep doing this.
I’m sure they’ve tried. Wikileaks has been floating Vault 7 for weeks now. They probably have done everything in their power to corroborate the evidence and determine its authenticity.
That said, you’re right. A determined adversary could fabricate a large amount of documents like this and release them.
Wikileaks probably has at least some of the actual code used in perpetrating cyber warfare. Disclosure of zero-day exploits is pretty solid corroboration. They said that the code itself is in the many millions of lines, more than what Facebook runs its entire operation with. Generating a bunch of useful weapons and then just giving them away to discredit Wikileaks would be an astonishingly bad move.
It wouldn’t discredit them, as they’re just a clearinghouse for info. They’d just say:
“We’re just dumping what was removed from there by our source. We can attest to the fact that it was removed from the [insert group’s name] but make no claim that it is not deliberately misleading in an attempt to discredit us. Furthermore, if an intel group like [insert group’s name] feels the need to pass disinformation internally for fear that their methods will get revealed to the people, then perhaps [insert group’s name] should reassess their objectives.”
That’s not how the voting public thinks, however. Wikileaks’ primary asset is not what they do but how they do it. Anyone can blindly dump classified documents out on an onion site or via bittorrent. The fact that they’ve evaded this sort of attack for as long as they have is a testament to the quality of their work.
You could say the same thing about the media. Does the recent spread of the idea of “Fake News” not hurt *them* at all? Obviously ‘damaging the credibility of institutions’ matters. Wikileaks is no different.
Disclaimers are nice and all, but if they publish something that makes criminal allegations …
[e.g. take my point above about the difference between merely ‘spying on an election’ and actually intervening to harm a candidate in a foreign country…. and imagine there were “proof” provided for the latter]
… and those allegations prove to be false? you can’t simply say, “but we made disclaimers”. It doesn’t work that way.
The institution would be seen as dangerously irresponsible and would justify media orgs saying, “nothing these people say can be trusted” (which would of course be the point)
As for whether CIA or others would leave ‘fake intel’ just lying around for people to steal internally… that’s taking my basic idea farther than i’d actually suggested, which was limited to simply ‘leaking’ info to WL which had no ready means of validation.
If it’s fake or intentional disinformation that’s a shit ton of time and effort writing fake stuff
if they publish something that makes criminal allegations
Like, say, publishing an article that claims someone confessed to sexual assault?
@Slammer
Good thing nobody seems to give a fuck how much our government will spend on “national security”, huh?
like they have anything else important to do. all the ‘spying’ is done by computers, and the assassinations done by drones.
Based on the auto hack story a really paranoid person – who me? – would drive a very low-tech car.
Well, you’re already dressed for it. But I’m sure they’ll eventually figure out how to put nanites in the guzzoline or something.
Three cheers for my crappy lo-tech Versa!
That’s part of why I am more opposed to self driving cars than most.
We cannot let foreign powers influence free elections.
Unless, of course, its us.
By definition, we are not foreigners…
Q. E. D.
Can’t argue with that, it’s solid logic.
*rises to begin thunderous ovation*
This is going to suck all the air out of the news for a while,
Nah. The DemOp Media has an unlimited ability to ignore information that is contrary to the Narrative. They’ve done it before, they’ll do it again.
Not this time. This is absolutely enormous.
Although a quick scan of Salon, Slate, HuffPo and CNN doesn’t turn the story up on the top of any of those sites.
Too bad for them that more people look at Drudge that their sites combined.
I hope you’re right, but this is the same crew that managed to minimize-to-ignore the very damning DNC wikileaks , right in the middle of a Presidential campaign.
They “minimize-to-ignore”d it all the ay to Trump winning.
Honestly, I didn’t see them being that damning. Everyone already knew that the DNC was a bunch of sleazy political hacks.
Although, I agree an RNC hack would have been on the top of the news.
I thought they were pretty damning. The DNC colluding to throw the primaries, the incestuous bootlicking by the press – yeah, it was stuff some people had already pretty much assumed, but to have it confirmed so conclusively was pretty bad.
No shit. The “major media” might have glossed over it, but enough Bernie Bros read it and never even considered voting for Hillary in the general.
Who knows if it turned the election in Trump’s favor enough to make the difference, but I’m convinced it turned a lot of potential voters from the left away from Clinton for good.
I don’t think anyone knows. I think most of the Bernie Bros lived in counties that Hillary was going to win no matter what. While many of the people who protested after the election did not vote, they were protesting in blue states.
Regardless, releasing true information is hardly as nefarious as “hacking” the election.
Don’t you people work?
I mean, hello.
I mean, you know who else spied on his political opponents?
Seriously, wonder if it’s going to reveal anything about tapping Trump.
Tapping Trump
Sounds like a porno.
/ewwww
If SugarFree writes that up, I am blaming you, LH.
Unless it’s Ivanka. Then all is good. Unless of course it’s with her dad and then we’re back to ewww.
Ivanka, Melania…sure. The Hat and Hair…gah!
Ivanka, Melania, Tundra…
brb.
“My Stepmom Is A Lesbian!” writes itself.
The Trump-tapping would have been after June of last year, unless they were doing it completely extra-legally without even a FISA fig leaf. What’s the timeframe on Vault 7?
2013-2016
The best part is that they’re doing Agile.
They hacked Agile’s Cybernetics?!
They sprinted the whole scrum!
“Hey, I’ve got this great idea to get the devs to work 80 hours a week for the same salary. We’ll tell them they committed themselves to it.”
Wow. Motherfuckers. I’m stealing a line- “DRAIN THE SWAMP!”
So, is there any way to really live in the modern world without being spied on? You can cover cameras, but can you permanently disable internal microphones, protect your windows and apple computers, never buy a car with advanced electronics for the rest of your life, etc?
You could become Amish.
Ugh. Overalls. I guess i’m going to have to learn to accept All-Seeing Big Brother.
I now want a ‘Gilmore’s Eye for the Amish Guy’ series.
Do = Corncob pipes
Don’t = Institutionalized Wife beating
Their food products are the bomb. Apple butter. Pickled veggies. Jams. I’m still waiting for their Amish hand rolled blunts.
I’ve been doing a lot of lacto-fermentation lately. It beats the hell out of standard vinegar-pickling.
Never heard of that. Thank you, I love learning new things, you made my day.
It replaces the need for taking a probiotic. And it does seriously help your gut health. I notice a huge difference.
Start with making your own kraut and pickled veggies (celery, carrots, cauliflower and jalapeños). And just eat a few bites a day of one. Not only do they taste great, they’re just plain good for you.
Could you suggest a how-to resource?
Sloopy, you should do a whole blog on it.
Here’s an easy start.
For the sauerkraut.
And for the veggies.
Perfect. Any special equipment, or do you just use mason jars?
Just mason jars or any old pickle jar, kraut jar, jam jar, whatever you’ve got. Just make sure you have something to push everything below the water surface. I use mason jars and pickle jars with pint glasses to push the food under the surface for the necessary anaerobic atmosphere.
Thanks! I’m gonna give it a shot.
Thank you. I love me some pork butt and sauerkraut cooked in a crock pot.
I now tremble in fear of HM swooping in and linking to some bizarre japanese fetish-video
True…. however, unless you’re doing a lot of strenuous physical labor like the Amish, you’re going to get fat as hell.
I prithee friend, wouldst thou have a bullet-point?
What if you’re a really good Bowler? Does it help if you’re Amish?
Would you happen to be missing a hand?
…no one tell him about the satellites.
So, is there any way to really live in the modern world without being spied on?
I don’t know, but I’m going long on aluminum foil stocks.
Aluminum AMPLIFIES the signals.
Tin blocks them.
Common rookie mistake.
Copper netting, you tyro.
Anonymity through ordinariness. There are 320M people in this country alone. Fading into the background is the only way to avoid it.
You’re not hiding with a cool avatar like that. I bet you have Secret secret admirers.
I think this one will be next up when I get bored of the current one.
If I may make a suggestion.
I’ll make one too.
Winner winner chicken dinner
Just in case Heroic Mulatto shows up.
Orany of our other friends with yellow fever.
Me likee.
Says the guy who is on at least a dozen watch lists already 😉
I’m Prepared!
1. Encourage everyone you know to become a bit more paranoid,even though they have nothing to hide
2. Show them how to obfuscate information, even though they have nothing to hide
3. Encourage them to use a VPN and address hop regularly, even though they have nothing to hide
Destroy the NSA’s ability to just hoover up actionable data and metadata. There are finite limits to just how many people they can surveil *and* act against.
Good advice. The garbage aficionado is right about avoiding the cross hairs by being thoroughly mundane. The scary part is what happens after you’re targeted for whatever reason.
Well, if you drive a smart connected car, I expect that you will lose control of it someday.
Everyone has something to hide.
This isn’t very comforting.
Data storage is cheap. If you ever aspire to public office and have anything that even looks shady without context in your history, they can trot it out to blackmail you with it. If you say something they don’t like and they need something to burn you with, they use these tools to put child porn on your computer and then call one of the other agencies to report it “anonymously.”
This puts the “deep state” up our assholes too, not just those of the ruling class. It makes it pretty clear just who is in control.
They don’t even have to go that far. They just have to pull up your viewing history and leak that somebody likes to surf porn sites in their spare time or read no less than 20 articles on the latest Emma Watson photo shoot and the would be contender will end their campaign.
Quantum computing might help with this, since we may be able to more easily tell if a 3rd party is eavesdropping on a communication due to quantum particle-wave properties. I’m not smart enough to understand this, unfortunately. 🙁
This just just a warm-up with part 1. Let’s hope the next parts cover the CF and Pedogate.
Damn phone!
Seriously? THAT is the problem?
WTF Washington Post?!
Democracy Dies In Darkness.
And apparently critical thinking at the WP.
It’s crickets at HnR, but I suspect someone there must be on the case.
Once they can figure out how to connect it to Trump.
In keeping with the progressive love for all things Big Brother, the problem isn’t that those tools are being used against Americans, it’s that *someone else* could use them, too.
WaPo is run and staffed by boot-licking sycophants? Who knew?
Better than CNN and MSNBC, neither of which have this anywhere on their front pages.
I’m sure that’s just an oversight though.
They’re just really digging into it. Its a long article, give em time.
I heard this on the radio earlier on the way back to the office. That was their take, that this harms our nation’s intelligence gathering capabilities.
A very big fucking deal.
The CIA are using stolen malware and leaving “fingerprints” behind so it can be attributed to the Russians and other state actors.
That can’t be overemphasized; its a VBFD indeed.
Yep, digital fingerprints just became essentially useless at pointing to any culprits, state actors or otherwise.
To clarify: I don’t mean hashing algorithms. I mean activity logs.
I feel like this was a plot point in S1 of Mr. Robot.
I dunno, I watched some of the episodes, and while I liked that they were closer to a real representation of hackers and hacker culture, they still presented a character with mental deficiencies that would cripple his ability to function as a hacker. Also, the actor was fucking annoying, and every time I saw his stupid haircut I wanted to hit him.
Amen. My stepson likes that show. But, the lead actor is such an annoying limp noodle, I couldn’t watch more than 10 minutes. His acting is not only very one-note, is appears like he has mental problems.
Plus, that annoying “style” of shooting with negative space in the opposite side of the frame during conversations – “oooh, you’re SO unconventional!” No, it’s just distracting and pretentious.
But if the leaks are from 2013-16 how can these be used to build a case for impeaching Trump?
Verdict: FAKE NEWS
No reason they can’t impeach Trump for stuff he did before he was elected. The impeachment clause does not apply only to his actions as President.
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High crimes and Misdemeanors.
Based on the use of false flag malware, there is now an equal case to be made for either (a) Russians or (b) the CIA doing any hacking.
One of our tech-savvy Glibbers might profitably (well, in the non-monetary sense) do an article on maintaining as much privacy as you can. I know some of the VPNs are suspected of being intel honeypots; which are good ones? I saw one VPN selling a router that automatically put all your traffic over their VPN – good idea or not? That kind of thing.
In a general sense, you want to route primarily thru’ a country that hates America, but failing that one who is harder for the US to ‘lean on’.
Unseen.IS in iceland is somewhat useful, it’s one of the systems I’ve used. Their encrypted P2P messaging was originally designed to let Falun Gong communicate under the radar. Cyberghost is another potential piece in the jigsaw. Both of them encourage you to keep your own crypto keys, but ultimately, there’s no stone-cold certainty with anyone – not that there ever was.
Uncle Sam has a long arm, and a heavy cudgel.
I second this. I thought running linux at home would help. Looks like linux is compromised also.
Day-um…that is also bad news.
Lots of people apparently believe the “many eyes” FOSS myth about increasing security.
Since anyone can contribute to FOSS, it stands to reason that deliberately injecting extremely subtle bugs is the perfect vector for attack because it has solid plausible deniability. People care more about features than security anyway, and intelligence agencies have all the incentives to do this. Besides, why not improve the software but fix all the security vulnerabilities so they can be used internally too? That means they can value-add their own organizations by improving FOSS and attack adversaries at the same time. Money well spent.
Your computer runs binary blobs for hardware interfaces both within the firmware and the hardware itself. If those are compromised, and there is no way to know if they are without a deep investigation into them, then there’s literally nothing you can do to protect yourself.
On the upside, that ethernet interface and the USB device you just plugged in were designed and fabricated by the CHICOMs so in a spirit of fairness, your data is going to everyone.
It’s not that Linux is compromised. It’s that they have malware that can compromise a target Linux machine.
Unless you are running compiling your own operating system or have a computer utterly disconnected from the Internet, they can compromise your machine. You might get away with or are running an OS off of a CD-ROM, but that’s a speedbump, they have a firmware compromise that injects malware into the processes launched by CR-Rom based operating systems.
There are, however, workarounds. The hardest to defeat is to have a work machine and a communications machine that are utterly segregated. The work machine has no network connection. And you can port data into it via printed papers, OCR and a scanner. OR use a manual typewriter and paper.
BUT… that’s extreme and destroys your productivity. Far better to balance the security you have with the risk you face. For a guy like me (Internet blowhard who mocks the government while coding away at a backwater travel company – with no secret army ready to leap into actions nor with an increasing supply of prefabricated boats perfectly suited for holding a man in the calm waters of the DC reflecting pool) a lower degree of security is OK. Sure they could inject child porn into my computer – or even better pretend they did – but to what purpose?!?
We drive on roads patrolled by cops who have been conditioned to shoot first and ask questions later. We go to doctors who are acting like little spies for HHS’s latest push on gun control, child control, mental health control etc. We send our kids to schools that teach state approved curricula that often push the stupidest propaganda, lie about the past and utterly miseducate our children. We store our savings in banks that spy on us on behalf of the treasury dept and occasionally sic the cops on us if we look like we are engaging in “structuring”.
This is yet another risk added to the hundreds we swim in daily. It’s an outrage, to be sure, but we are already in the habit of coping with similar or worse outrages.
Trump is the leader of the government! The buck stops with him!
No Hillary post election video? Meh.
seriously tho, this looks bad.
Clapper is a traitorous bastard.
A bunch of elderly gentlemen in Berlin are currently weeping with envy.
I remember during L’ affair Snowden Der Spiegel asked a former DDR Stasi officer that very question. If I recall the quote “he sighed and said he wished they had that capability” as it was they could only have a few dozen people under a close watch because of how manpower intensive it was.
‘Merica, beating the commies again!
I am interested in how this latest data dump will be handled by the MSM since Wikileaks (Now Bad) but St Obama (PBUH) is all good.
I am a bit reminded of that time tbh, without wanting to sound hyperbolic. What killed East Germany was that the population stopped buying what the government was selling. One of the most glorious sights of my life was the look on the face of Stasi officers on November 9th. The ‘shield and sword’ of the party suddenly powerless, an object of ridicule and even pity.
Something similar is happening now, or so I hope. The ability of the MSM to run interference diminishes with every screeching lie and half truth.
Then again, I am often wrong.
Let’s quote another East German on that:
Crocodile tears from a unrepentant stalinist. Fuck B.B.
Fun fact: one of my great-aunts was a secretary at his publisher. According to her, he never washed and stunk to high heaven. Still, several more talented women basically begged him to steal their manuscripts. Did I mention that my opinion of the guy is less than stellar?
I remember that interview. I believe the Stasi guy said that they could monitor only forty phone lines at the same time.
I like to click on google news. First off, the only link on the main is to Fox news(blatant spin so people will discount it). I then put wikileaks in the search bar and guess how many articles popped up with “alleged” and “claims”?
All?
Most, there have to be exceptions to the rule.
I just checked, whew. So they are just allegedly CIA documents, what a relief. I was worried there would be a shitstorm.
*confetti*
Looks more like tubgirl than a confetti explosion.
*gags*
WHY MAN WHY
I read some of the documents and have to ask. Who is User #71473?
Who does #2 work for????
Ahem.
Patrick McGoohan?
You tell him.
Playa,
I responded to your request in the Thursday afternoon links.
Refresh my memory?
Dave Nott of Reason(no cat butt please) Foundation email thread.
Ah, yeah. Thanks. I saw that. I’m collecting those. A lot of people have written them.
If you want me to forward the original to you hit me up on Reasonoids.
Fire Shihka?
Please.
o/t question – why do lefties think that the word “Drumpf” is funny?
You’d have to ask Block Yomama. He’d know.
Ahem….that’s Block INSANE Yomamma to you, bub.
Bushitler has a sad for being left out of this.
Hitlery too.
The same kind of people who insist on calling the British royal family “The Saxe-Coburgs”.
And who smugly deploy terms like “Rethugkkkliklans/Kochtopus” in facebook rants as if they are supremely clever.
They’re all out of power. Weak jokes and insinuations are all they have left. Hell, even Jon Stewart is making fun of them, and he’s been on their side as a potent weapon of leftist memetics.
why do lefties think that the word “Drumpf” is funny
Because they are emotionally stunted?
It’s one of those things that requires knowledge of one superficial fact, so they can claim intellectual superiority while acting like 5 year olds.
It’s not meant to be funny, it’s a social identifier, meant to indicate what your group is.
Saying ‘Drumpf’ indicates that you watch John Oliver’s show, or are at least within the general sub-culture of the American left. It signals your inclusion in the group, that you’re a ‘right thinking’ person because you call your opponent by a mocking name. It doesn’t matter if it’s funny or not, it signifies group status and your desire to self-identify as part of said group. It’s more about ego stroking and group cohesion than anything else. And admittedly, it’s not like it’s just them (‘Prime Minister Zoolander’ has become the anti-Trudeau name for a reason).
This is why PB on the Other Site constantly throws out the shitty names like ‘Breitfart’. It’s just desperate, sad signalling to indicate that he’s not one of ‘those people’.
And it’s not like this is just a Trump-era thing. The amount of stupid people who made constant ‘Bush is stupid’ jokes should give you an indicator of how pervasive and constant this phenomena is.
The thing is, the PM Zoolander moniker is particularly apt, while Drumpf elides the difference between legal and illegal immigration in its “Trump’s forebears were immigrants too” flailing.
I think there is a difference between calling Trump Drumpf and calling Trudeau PM Zoolander. The first is a reference to his ancestor’s name. I guess they are trying to link it to the fact that most Americans are migrants, or to Hitler in some sort of weird way. I don’t see what is funny about that, and yes, it serves mostly as a sort of social signaling as it doesn’t say much about Trump himself, or at least, I don’t see it.
Calling Justin Trudeau PM Zoolander is actually a reflection on his character : Trudeau and Zoolander are both perceived as narcissistic dim-witted fashion models. Same goes as when Ezra Levant calls him the Shiny Pony. Sure, there is a bit of social signaling there, but everyone knows what you mean when you say someone is a Zoolander or a Shiny Pony, even outside of the social group.
But if you say someone is a Drumpf? No idea what that means and I don’t think lefties know it either; they just know it’s something that you are supposed to agree to and that it is to be made fun of.
lol
i’ve been wondering that since they first latched onto it.
while on one level its purely the juvenile “block yomomma” type thing that Sloopy et al point out.
On another, i think they like it because its consistent with their “he’s literally hitler” memes. It sounds german.
So, Trump is descended from immigrant stock?
OMFG!! He’s such a hypocrite! He should deport himself!
To Mexico
Name “puns” must be among the lowest forms of political humor / attack
Kindly shut your mouth
Because John Oliver told them it was funny.
Tick, tick, boom.
Although I suspect with the media it will be a snap, crackle, look at the squirrel…
WaPo is run and staffed by boot-licking sycophants? Who knew?
It’s a company paper in a company town. What else would you expect?
Now the question is WHY ISN’T WIKILEAKS HACKING RUSSIA?????? and all that jazz.
Maybe Russia’s intel agencies aren’t utterly incompetent when it comes to opsec and info security?
Maybe Russian intel staff has been credibly threatened with death if they leak to Wiki?
Maybe Russia’s intel agencies ponied up the Bitcoins.
Or an ex-KGB officer might be more willing to notice security holes and plug them then a former community organizer would.
As for current Russian spies, it’s not like Russia has a history of civil liberties so that spying on citizens doesn’t trigger a sense of “This is not who we are.” If some Russian intel guy released proof that the government was spying on them, the average Russian’s attitude could be summed up as, ‘No shit Sherlock.’
oh I’m sure they’ll trot out the Assange-is-Putin’s-lapdog any minute now, that was one of their attacks before, after all. and since Putin’s such a supervillain, no doubt this is just his attempt to make our brave sons at the CIA to look bad when they’re just doing their patriotic duty of spying on everyone else’s robodogs and servers. never Amercians, don’t be silly, why Clapper himself said that Never Ever Happens.
There’s a reason the Russians use typewriters and paper for significant intelligence information.
Van Eck Phreaking is very real. Sometimes old tricks really are the best tricks.
Basically, this is a wakeup call to anyone who wants to oppose the state directly. The same labor saving devices that make us more productive make our oppressors more productive.
With that having been said, these tools are pretty useless taking on people who oppose the state indirectly. They only have so many men to sit and monitor the telescreens. And they are often helpless to know what to do with the information coming off the telescreen.
So, if you are plotting to take over the U.S. and to decorate the reflecting pool in Washington DC with DEA agents in the boats, to sterilize and then send every EPA worker to live in Idaho with only sustainable power and organic food sources until the cold and disease return them to their Goddess, I advise doing your plotting naked, in a room that has no funiture or anything more complicated than cheap pens and paper bought for cash from Staples prior to entering your conspiracy. Also take the batteries out of your cell phones.
On the other hand, if you are a developer working on something that will make a high school degree worthless, maintain a boring life, and by the time they figure out you are threatening their hegemony, it’s too late, the cat is out of the bag, and discrediting you or spying on you is worthless.
You seem like a man with a clear plan. Newsletter?
I ran out of mimeograph ink.
I
ran out ofhuffed all of the mimeograph ink.So, if you are plotting to take over the U.S. and to decorate the reflecting pool in Washington DC with DEA agents in the boats, to sterilize and then send every EPA worker to live in Idaho with only sustainable power and organic food sources until the cold and disease return them to their Goddess
Goddammit man ixnay on the an-play.
What?
Why do you like child pornography so much, tarran? Why do you have it on your computer and your smartphone?
Oh, you don’t, you say? *taps at a keyboard* Now you do. *Issues command for tools to destroy evidence of their existence.* *Automatically contacts the FBI to report you anonymously through an outside shill account.*
You know how they treat pedophiles in prison, tarran? Well you’re about to find out.
This shit makes that scenario trivially easy. If you are a dissident who poses enough of a threat, you go to prison.
Why send them to Idaho? What did Idaho ever do to deserve that? Send them out to the eastern section of California and let them live the California Dream.
Given the state of the world something tells me nothing will come of this. A couple of weeks time we will have moved on to the next bunch of news.
Personally, I’m anticipating a bunch of calls from some rather motivated recruiters, but hey, what can you do?
InfoWars is gonna be a blast tonight. I can’t wait!
Between you and Mr. Lizard I’m starting to suspect that libertarians are secretly all Reptilians.
cheap pens and paper bought for cash from Staples
Are you nuts? Staples has cameras. I buy my untraceable pencils and paper from a stocker at the grocery store, out back by the cardboard recycling bin.
Shhhhhh.
The problem with retail pencils is that you have no way of knowing exactly how many people were involved in their manufacture – the raw materials come from all around the world, in some cases from countries we cannot trust. It’s far better to make your own
Nice Leonard Read reference.
Finger painting with your own feces?
I’ve noticed that lots of social media sites have quickly gone into overdrive with comments minimizing this. Very frequently, the most quickly asserted and (if voting is available) liked/upvoted tend to be “Wikileaks is a mouthpiece for Russian intelligence.”
Tell a big enough lie and you might actually get away with it. Disinformation campaign is now full-throttle.
Minimizing it kinda Maximizes it
wait, Clinton didn’t win?
This is the CIA we’re talking about here. Damage control is what they do, and they’re not always good at it. That’s the problem when you get a bunch of brilliant people from Ivy League schools who love the smell of their own assholes. They believe they can do anything, have anything, control anything.
The comforting thing is that this is actually the character of many other national outward-facing intelligence agencies too. It’s as though 50% of their budgets are dedicated to spreading rumors about how deadly and invisible their deadly, invisible ninjas are.
The issue is *more* the budgets of the inward-facing intelligence agencies and their COMINT/SIGINT capabilities, because they hide among their prey.
If you must wade into social media on this topic, it might be handy to have this at the ready:
Seven Profoundly Stupid Things That People Say About WikiLeaks
A prog friend’s reaction to this news
I can’t even.
the hypocrisy gets ever more stunning:
Hillbots: “Fascism!!” “Democracy dies in darkness!!!”
*documents about the CIA’s ability to create/alter and deploy malware anywhere in the world, with the result that malware is then in the wild and can be used by anyone else*
response: WE LOVE DEMOCRACY DYING IN DARKNESS AFTER ALL
Having looked through some of the documents, the picture I come away with is that, at least in this (software-related) respect, the CIA is essentially a make-work program for hackers. It’s just a bunch of dorks in a playground, figuring out how to hack stuff. In other words, what many of us would do at work all day, if we didn’t actually have to accomplish anything useful.
Which is a common theme, come to think of it — there was this TSA guy administering random extra screenings on the last flight I boarded, who was waaay too into his work. Don’t know what he’d be doing if he didn’t have that job, but I doubt it would involve making anyone’s day a little nicer.
Yahoo is really zeroing in on what’s important – nary a mention on their homepage about this, but a big headline story about……National Park Service photos at long last definitively refuting Trump’s claims about inauguration crowd sizes!
Seriously.
That’s a joke, but not the funny kind.
I ran out of mimeograph ink.
You never heard this from me, but… have you tried blueberries?
just in time to make sure that any investigation into corruption or russia ties can be refuted to the base.
Wheeeeeeee!
*really contemplating digging a bunker, not just snarking*
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Bill Kristol
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Trump in fight with intelligence community? Wikileaks (Russia) to the rescue.
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Let me run it through my Kristol to English translator: “MMM-mmm. This dick sure is tasty. If I swallow the whole load, you guys will keep leaking to me, right?”
I hate that smug motherfucker with a burning passion. Sorry you vaguely effeminate hack, you aren’t getting your war with Russia.
What a scumbag.
Most of the Twitter discussion is about the GOP alternative to the ACA, for what it’s worth.
So, I’ve read some of the wikileaks. The CIA was irresponsible as all hell, and now their tool kit is in the wild.
It’s full of jaw dropping stuff.
Maybe put some sort of warning before the link to Wikileaks? I hovered before I clicked, thankfully, because it’s been made pretty clear that accessing Wikileaks is grounds for losing one’s security clearance. Doubly thankfully because I happen to be reading this at work.