Saturday, April 1, 2017

CIA April Foolery

Wedgied in Hallway,

Wikileaks "Marble" data release: The CIA can put Russian, Chinese, North Korean or Iranian digital fingerprints on any data cache, without leaving any fingerprints of its own, and make it look like there was an imperfect attempt to conceal the false fingerprints. A budget digital forensics analysis would surely blame whoever was the intended patsy.
Why did the FBI exclusively use the outside (low budget) forensics analysis, when it could have done a better job? Why make it public? etc...
"With it now public knowledge that the CIA is capable of making cyber attacks appear as though they originated in another country, will any amount of evidence be sufficient without an admission of guilt by Russia? Despite the issue, the FBI says they are still conducting an investigation into Russian “hacking” of the U.S. election and possible collusion by Trump administration members with Russian officials."

"We could forgive Crowdstrike, but we could not forgive the head of the FBI who said they never got direct access to DNC computers. That is a very poor admission to make", says former CIA officer Ray McGovern... The CIA possesses a tool for disguising the source of its hacks, that's according to the latest release of classified documents from Wikileaks, called "Marble"... At the same time, the agency is also believed to have a program, called UMBRAGE, which allows it to mimic all sorts of hacking techniques, and can leave traces that will point to foreign sources instead of the US.
Ray McGovern: "It is genuine. WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have a 100 percent record on authenticity. That matters. I am an intelligence analyst. This is the kind of unadulterated evidence after which I lust. After which any investigator or newsman should lust. Because Julian Assange doesn’t change anything. It is documentary. And what does that mean? And that means that as an intelligence analyst, I can analyze and interpret it. And there is no way other to interpret this than the poor people from the Crowdstrike, the computer company that the DNC hired to look into who was hacking into their computers, it was beyond its capability to determine who had this virus in there." (Thanks for the McGovern link, other Ray.)

The Washington Post carries water for the CIA, and Stars and Stripes (US military lovingly call "Stars and Lies") copies the story.
The agency responded angrily. “Dictators and terrorists have no better friend in the world than Julian Assange, as theirs is the only privacy he protects,” spokesman Dean Boyd said, without commenting on the authenticity of the release. “The American public should be deeply troubled by any WikiLeaks disclosure designed to damage the intelligence community’s ability to protect America against terrorists and other adversaries,” Boyd said. “Such disclosures not only jeopardize U.S. personnel and operations but also equip our adversaries with tools and information to do us harm.’’

The EU appears ready to take a very reasonable stance on Brexit negotiations, at least according to paper released by EU President, Donald Tusk. They have sounded considerably more rigid and punitive than this looks.

The EU is One Big, Fatal Flaw, says Ilargi. Thanks for the heads-up, Eleni. (I suspect that Brexit is a big enough model for the transition of the EU to something that is more limited, like the common-market was, before common currency.)

The Big Contraction, and interview with Jim Kunstler (by a somewhat clueless interviewer :-)
"The crux of the matter is the falling Energy Return on Investment (EROI). In the 1950s you got 100 barrels of Texas crude for every equivalent barrel of energy you sunk into the project. That’s 100 to 1. Shale oil gives you about 5 to 1. Tar sands are a little worse. The worldwide average EROI these days is 17 to 1 (including Arabian oil, deep water, etc.). We can’t run all the systems of our “advanced” society at those ratios, and that is why we have been running up the debt so dramatically — borrowing from the future to cover the cost of living as we do."  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/big-contraction-interview-james-howard-kunstler-erico-matias-tavares


Solar Powered Vegetarian 
(pictured with son Steve and granddaughter Tyler April Fool's Morning)
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