"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb." -- Marshall McLuhan, 1969
General Memetics, on Tom Ricks's Inbox
Topic: Military Technology
3:57 pm EDT, Jul 28, 2007
Here, in a study published in June 2006 by the military's Joint Special Operations University, two "information warfare" specialists mull over how the US armed forces and intelligence agencies might influence opinion overseas through foreign bloggers:
... [I]t may be easy for foreign audiences to dismiss the US perspective with "Yes, but you aren't one of us, you don't really understand us."
In this regard, information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence already within the target nation, group or community to pass the US message. ... Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the US military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.
An alternative strategy is to "make" a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however. ...
There will also be times when it is thought to be necessary, in the context of an integrated information campaign, to pass false or erroneous information through the media ... in support of military deception activities. ... In these cases, extra care must be taken to ensure plausible deniability and nonattribution, as well as employing a well-thought-out deception operation that minimizes the risks of exposure.
Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. art.cat.ap.jpg
His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means the patient has less than four hours to live.
"He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," Dr. David Dosa said in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
"Many family members take some solace from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one," said Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor of medicine at Brown University.
After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He'd sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.
Dosa said Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof. "This is not a cat that's friendly to people," he said.
Yes, I have made an lolcat photo based on Oscar... Photo is from Reuters.
Yeah, Billy has another toolkit for destroying the web.. Don't be too shocked or anything, there will most likely be another one next week.
This one is branted with more sexual innuendo then the last one though..
DOMinatrix is, well, incredibly awesome. It's a full automated SQL Injection tool written in JavaScript, which will dump out data from MS SQL Server databases (more to come). I'm be demoing DOMinatrix at my Black Hat presentation.
XSS + Web worm + DOMinatrix = oh crap.
In the last 5 months we've seen the development of web scanners and SQL injectors in JavaScript.
These aren't a browser exploits. These aren't buffer overflows. These aren't something that affects only a single browser and only on pages that don't explicitly set a character set.
This is using JavaScript in perfectly valid ways to do extremely malicious things.
There is no way to patch this. End users are pretty much screwed.
does not think we will be seeing a spectacular summer terrorist attack.
By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
The July 17 release of portions of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) titled "The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland" has generated a great deal of comment from Stratfor readers, many of whom contend it is at odds with our assessment published shortly before the contents of the NIE were leaked. In that report, we attempted to clarify what we mean when we refer to "al Qaeda" and we differentiate between the small al Qaeda core organization (what we call "al Qaeda prime"), the somewhat wider array of al Qaeda franchise organizations (such as al Qaeda in Iraq) and the broad assortment of grassroots jihadists who have no actual connection to the core organization. Our assessment also echoed an assertion we have been making for quite some time now -- that al Qaeda lacks the ability to pose a strategic threat to the United States.
It must be understood that al Qaeda and other jihadists still pose a tactical threat to the U.S. homeland. In other words, they can still kill Americans. In fact, in looking at the jihadist shift in operations abroad, attacks against smaller, softer targets have actually caused more fatalities than large-scale strikes against hard targets. However, attacks against low-level soft targets, such as the November 2005 hotel attacks in Amman, Jordan, and the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings in London, do not have the strategic impact of a 9/11-style attack.
A number of tactical and strategic considerations have led us to conclude that al Qaeda does not pose a strategic threat.
Tactical Realities
As long as the ideology of jihadism exists and jihadists embrace the philosophy of attacking the "far enemy," they will pose a threat on U.S. soil. Though the U.S. government has tightened visa and asylum restrictions since 9/11, those processes still contain holes. Furthermore, given that even small, repressive regimes have been unable to control their immigration, it is not surprising that a country as large as the United States, one that must deal with the open nature of U.S. society, cannot hermetically seal it borders to prevent terrorist operatives from entering. Jihadist operatives still can reach the United States illegally, by committing immigration fraud or slipping across the border. Legally, they can obtain visas, use operatives from visa-waiver countries or those who are U.S. citizens. Of course, people residing in the United States who decide to "go jihad" also pose a threat. While some, perhaps even most, of these jihadist operatives will be caught before they can enter, some inevitably will get into the country. There undoubtedly are such people -- both transnational and homegrown operatives -- in the United States right now. That is a tactical reality.
Another tactical reality is that the U.S. governmen... [ Read More (1.4k in body) ]
The Blotter: FBI Proposes Building Network of U.S. Informants
Topic: Politics and Law
8:32 pm EDT, Jul 25, 2007
The FBI is taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort to boost its intelligence capabilities.
According to a recent unclassified report to Congress, the FBI expects its informants to provide secrets about possible terrorists and foreign spies, although some may also be expected to aid with criminal investigations, in the tradition of law enforcement confidential informants. The FBI did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
The bureau has arranged to use elements of CIA training to teach FBI agents about "Source Targeting and Development," the report states. The courses will train FBI special agents on the "comprehensive tradecraft" needed to identify, recruit and manage these "confidential human sources." According to January testimony by FBI Deputy Director John S. Pistole, the CIA has been working with the bureau on the course.
The bureau apparently mulled whether to adopt entire training courses from the CIA or from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which like the CIA recruits spies overseas. But the FBI ultimately determined "the courses offered by those agencies would not meet the needs of the FBI's unique law enforcement." The FBI report said it would also give agents "legal and policy" training, noting that its domestic intelligence efforts are "constitutionally sensitive."
"It's probably a good sign they are not adopting CIA recruitment techniques wholesale," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, an expert on classified programs. U.S. intelligence officers abroad can use bribery, extortion, and other patently illegal acts to corral sources into working for them, Aftergood noted. "You're not supposed to do that in the United States," he said.
FOX News July 22, 2007 10 MB 4-minute segment on "Fox and Friends", about the upcoming NOVAscienceNOW show
Here's an archive of my appearance on FOX News this morning.
It's such a surreal experience, being interviewed remotely on live TV. The show was broadcast from New York, but I was in St. Louis. They'd rented out a local PBS studio in downtown St. Louis, to do the live feed. I was a "talking head."
So there I am in the St. Louis studio, at 6:45 a.m. on a Sunday morning, trying to look perky even though I'd been up since 3:30 a.m. to get ready. There were two technicians in the studio, wearing headsets and outside of my vision. So I'm perched on a stool, looking into a blank camera, listening to the audio feed via an earplug. I had no visual feedback whatsoever as to whether or not I was on the air -- no red light, no monitor. For a sense of what this feels like, go sit in front a blank wall, stare at it, and try to keep your face smiling and engaged, even though you have no idea of whether or not you're even being looked at.
I also had some panic before the segment... I was supposed to meet with a makeup artist at 4:30 who was going to do my hair and makeup, but they were a no-show. So I rummaged for some makeup from my purse, brushed my hair, and went on camera "as-is". So if I look a bit windswept, well, now you know why. ;)
Looking forward to the actual Kryptos segment on PBS NOVAscienceNOW this Tuesday...
Community Structure in the United States House of Representatives
Topic: Politics and Law
12:06 am EDT, Jul 21, 2007
We investigate the networks of committee and subcommittee assignments in the United States House of Representatives from the 101st--108th Congresses, with the committees connected by ``interlocks'' or common membership. We examine the community structure in these networks using several methods, revealing strong links between certain committees as well as an intrinsic hierarchical structure in the House as a whole. We identify structural changes, including additional hierarchical levels and higher modularity, resulting from the 1994 election, in which the Republican party earned majority status in the House for the first time in more than forty years. We also combine our network approach with analysis of roll call votes using singular value decomposition to uncover correlations between the political and organizational structure of House committees.
This is the Take Two on something that's been recommended before...
This rocks. some Australian guys build a Trojan Horse full of people dressed like Greek solders, and then try to get it past security into various places in Sydney. The only place that denies them access is the Turkish Consulate.
