The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users' stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed.
If the government is able to determine a person's password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user. Obtaining it also would aid in deciphering encrypted devices in situations where passwords are reused.
"I've certainly seen them ask for passwords," said one Internet industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We push back."
A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies "really heavily scrutinize" these requests, the person said. "There's a lot of 'over my dead body.'"
Some of the government orders demand not only a user's password but also the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person familiar with the requests. A salt is a random string of letters or numbers used to make it more difficult to reverse the encryption process and determine the original password. Other orders demand the secret question codes often associated with user accounts. Read more >>
When news broke of a 2 billion dollar trading loss by JP Morgan, much of
the financial world was absolutely stunned. But the truth is that this
is just the beginning. This is just a very small preview of what is
going to happen when we see the collapse of the worldwide derivatives
market.
Most Americans have no idea that we are rapidly approaching a horrific derivatives crisis that is going to make 2008 look like a Sunday picnic.
According to the Comptroller of the Currency, the "too big to fail" banks have exposure to derivatives that is absolutely mind blowing.
Just check out the following numbers from an official U.S. government report:
JPMorgan Chase - $70.1 Trillion
Citibank - $52.1 Trillion
Bank of America - $50.1 Trillion
Goldman Sachs - $44.2 Trillion
So a 2 billion dollar loss for JP Morgan is nothing compared to their total exposure of over 70 trillion dollars.
Overall, the 9 largest U.S. banks have a total of more than 200 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives. That is approximately 3 times the size of the entire global economy. More...
The entire bogus recovery is again being driven by subprime auto loans
being doled out by Ally Financial (85% owned by the U.S. government)
and the other criminal Wall Street banks.
The Federal Reserve and our
government leaders will continue to steer the country on the same
course of encouraging rampant speculation, deterring savings and
investment, rewarding outrageous criminal behavior, purposefully
generating inflation, and lying to the average American. All good Keynesian economists know that consumer spending is always
good for America, no matter how it is achieved. We must be in a
recovery if income and spending are reaching new highs, right?
It will work
until we reach a tipping point. Dr. Krugman thinks another $4 trillion
of debt and a debt to GDP ratio of 130% should get our economy back on
track. When this charade is revealed to be the greatest fraud and theft
in the history of mankind, Ben and Paul better have a backup plan,
because there are going to be a few angry men looking for them. More...
William S. Lind One of the ongoing themes of this column has been gangs and the role they play in a Fourth Generation world. Here in the United States they already serve as an alternative primary loyalty (alternative to the state) for many urban young men. Gangs will likely be a major player in 4GW because gang members are expected to fight. Those who won’t do not remain gang members.
The November 15 Washington Post had a story about gangs in Salinas, California, that deserves close attention from 4GW theorists. Salinas is reportedly overrun with Hispanic gangs. The Post wrote that its homicide rate is three times that of Los Angeles. It quoted a Salinas police officer, Sgt. Mark Lazzarini, on one of the classic results of state breakdown, chaos:
“Only half of our gangs are structured; the Norteños,” he said. “The southerners are completely unstructured. Half of our violence is kids who get into a car and go out and hunt. These kids don’t know their victims. How do you stop that? It’s very chaotic.”
Salinas’s new slogan might be, “Salinas: where even the lettuce has tattoos.”
But what is interesting in the Post’s article is not the gangs themselves. It is a new response to the gangs. Salinas has brought in the U.S. military to apply counter-insurgency doctrine to a situation on American soil. The Post reports that:
Since February combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been advising Salinas police on counterinsurgency doctrine, bringing lessons from the battlefield to the meanest streets in an American city…
“It’s a little laboratory,” said retired Col. Hy Rothstein, the former Army career officer in Special Forces who heads the team of 15 faculty members and students (from the Naval Postgraduate School), mostly naval officers…
Rothstein…notes the “significant overlap with how you deal with insurgencies and how you deal with cities that are under siege from gangs.”…
Leonard A. Ferrari, provost of the naval Postgraduate School, embraced the project from the start, hearing…an opportunity for a school “in transition from just a defense institution to a national homeland and even a human security institution.”…
“The idea was, not just Salinas,” Ferrari said, “but is there a national model for this”
From the perspective of 4GW theory, this is an important development. The Naval Postgraduate School is a DOD institution, part of the U.S. government. Its involvement in Salinas marks the federal government’s formal recognition of Fourth Generation war on American soil, and the need for a “national model” to counteract it. If we must involve the U.S. military to lead counterinsurgency efforts in American cities, then it is difficult to deny that we face something like insurgencies in those same cities. Again, the significance is that this is now formally admitted by the U.S. government, not merely noted by “outside the beltway” observers of 4GW.
The U.S. military officers advising Salinas on how to wage an anti-gang counterinsurgency are doing so as volunteers, according to the Post, to avoid Constitutional issues. But the camel’s nose is obviously inside the tent. Many wars have begun by sending “volunteers.” If, as likely, the volunteers prove insufficient, regular troops will follow.
As someone who believes in a strictly limited federal government, the government envisioned by our Founders, I find this troubling. But from a 4GW perspective, I also know it is inevitable. As I have said time and again, the main Fourth Generation threat we will face will be on our own soil, not halfway around the world, where we are currently pouring our strength out into the sand. We will come to regret that waste bitterly.
Objectively, what the Washington Post has reported is a milestone, to be neither praised nor regretted but merely noted. It denotes another step toward 4GW here at home. It is a step we cannot avoid. As both imported and domestically-generated Fourth Generation entities ramp up their warfare on American soil, the U.S. military will be drawn in. As is the case in 4GW overseas, it will probably fail. Old Uncle Karl was right: the state will wither away. But what follows will not be communism. It will be chaos.
Note: Regrettably, the d-n-i website, which had become the worldwide “go to” forum on 4GW, is shutting down. It is a major loss. Fortunately, John Robb has agreed to carry all my columns on his website, Global Guerrillas. All my archived columns will also be moved there from d-n-i, as will the important K.u.K Austro-Hungarian field manuals on Fourth Generation war.
Famed investor Jim Rogers is "quite sure gold will go over $2000 per ounce during this bull market."
Rogers' confidence gold will continue to rally stems from a view the U.S. dollar is on its way to losing status as the world's reserve currency.
"Is it going to happen? Yes," Rogers says. "I don't like saying it [and] I'm extremely worried about it but we have to deal with the facts. America is not getting better [and] the dollar is going to be replaced just like pound sterling [was]."
Rogers didn't offer a timetable, and it's likely gold would exceed $2000 per ounce if the dollar were to lose its reserve status.
Still, "I wouldn't buy gold today," Rogers says. "I think I'll make more money in other commodities, which are cheaper," as discussed in more detail here.
Among many others, Rogers is "worried about the fact the U.S. government is printing huge amounts, spending gigantic amounts of money it doesn't have," the investor and author says. "People are very worried [and] skeptical about paper money [and] looking for places to protect themselves. The best way is to buy real assets. [That] has always protected one during currency turmoil, and it will again."
Last June, Italian authorities seized more than $134 billion in U.S. treasuries found in a false bottom suitcase carried by two Japanese travelers attempting to cross into Switzerland. The two men somehow disappeared and the case is allegedly still under investigation. In June, a U.S. Treasury spokesman claimed the treasuries were fake.
How does it happen that two Japanese travelers caught with more than $134 billion worth of phony treasuries just disappear? But it doesn't end there.
Yesterday Bloomberg reported the Secret Service is examining more than $100 billion of U.S. government bonds confiscated in northern Italy in August, just two months after the $134 billion of allegedly fake securities were seized.
The Secret Service is analyzing whether the bonds taken in August may be counterfeit, said a spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy in Rome. Italy’s financial police in Varese, north of Milan, arrested two individuals carrying the securities in a briefcase, according to a person involved in the case.
The two men currently are in custody as prosecutors in the town of Busto Arsizio carry out their investigation. The seized notes include securities with face values of $500 million and $1 billion.
In June, Gregory Dail noted the following inconsistencies regarding the first $134 billion:
1. Although the smugglers have been identified in the press as “Japanese nationals”, there has yet to be any third party confirmations, formal charges made or a release of the culprit’s identities. Asian and Japanese press outlets are reporting the suspects were released shortly after they were detained.
2. A Bloomberg article regarding this story, the seized bearer bonds allegedly were dated as of 1934. Since bearer bonds in denominations of $500 million did not exist in 1934, the bonds were deduced as fake. The police are still waiting for a declaration regarding the bonds’ authenticity from the SEC, and the populous is speculation how to spend their 40% windfall.
Something smells about this declaration. How can the quality of the forged bearer bonds be so meticulous that they “are indistinguishable from the real ones”, yet the counterfeiters are so ill-informed as to not date the bearer bonds appropriately?
3. Bloomberg reported that there is no known existence of the alleged Billion-dollar Kennedy bonds. This defies any logical explanation. The expert counterfeiters would have made more of the $500 million denomination, indistinguishable from the real thing, instead of making 10 bonds in denominations of $1 billion a piece in a bearer bond that never existed.
4. On March 30, 2009, the US Treasury Department announced that USD $134.5 billion remained in its Troubled Asset Relief Program [TARP]. The same amount as the seized bearer bonds was $134.5 billion.
5. The two well-dressed Japanese men traveled a well known financial smuggling route where they would stick out like sore thumbs, defies logic.
6. Then we have this June 18 article from the Financial Times, that questions whether the men are really Japanese, as their passports declared, and may be the work of the Mafia.
7. Officials in Tokyo were nonplussed. Takeshi Akamatsu, a Japanese foreign ministry press secretary, said Italian authorities had confirmed that two men carrying Japanese passports had been questioned in the bond case but Tokyo had not been informed of their names or whereabouts.
“We don’t know where they are now,” Mr. Akamatsu said.
Kyodo News reported on June 19 that the two Japanese men had been released. The Japanese consulate general in Milan said...it has confirmed that the two men who were briefly detained by Italian police after attempting to enter Switzerland with $134 billion worth of U.S. bonds were Japanese citizens. The men were released later that day after an Italian lawyer provided fidelity guarantee for them.
The Italian authorities continue to probe how the two obtained the bonds and why they were trying to take the fake securities to Switzerland.
8. The Italians are now saying the forged bonds appeared shoddy and some of them had face values that were nonexistent. The Italian authorities said they wonder why the securities were produced because the bonds cannot be used even for fraud in view of their poor quality. In pictures the bonds appear new, crisp and clean!
They were first described as being “meticulous” work and “indistinguishable” from real ones but we are also to believe that they now “appeared shoddy.”
Turner Radio Network (TRN) announced June 20 that it had confirmed information the two Japanese nationals are “employees of the Finance Ministry of Japan.”
TRN has now confirmed the two men arrested were trying to secretly dump Bonds as ordered by the government of Japan because the Japanese government feared that the U.S. government would be unable to repay its debts. Despite the assurances from Japanese Finance Minister Kaoru Yosano that Japan has complete confidence in the U.S. Treasury has confirmed the upon the serial numbers of the Bonds, part of the $686 billion of U.S. debt officially held by Japan.
The last couple of days the Italian press was abuzz with suggestions on how to spend their forty-billion dollar windfall despite the claims [of the treasuries] being counterfeit.
Under Italian law Italy gets to keep forty percent (40%) of the smuggled bonds. Now TRN reports that the US and Japan are trying to negotiate with Italy for return of the Bonds but because of the astonishing amount of money involved and Italy is refusing to negotiate.
If all of this holds true Americans should know clearly that Japan is still capable of a Pearl Harbor, financial style, and that our Government is incapable of telling the truth. U.S. officials apparently lied to Italy, numerous news outlets, [and] the American People....
From the World’s perspective the U.S.A. can’t even identify its own bonds, has very nervous creditors, and U.S. mainstream media is unable to perform impartial journalism and are worthless as an honest and viable news source.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Agency will conduct National Level Exercises related specifically to "terrorism prevention and protection" on U.S. soil from July 27 thru July 31, 2009. The exercises will cover the Washington D.C. area, and the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. The exercises will also involve troops from Australia, Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
According to Media Monarchy, "Northrop Grumman [ a corrupt government contractor akin to Halliburton] will conduct and evaluate the 2009 Tier 1 National Level Exercise, which is the largest and most complex national disaster drill conducted by FEMA’s National Exercise Division"
Source Watch claims: "Northrop Grumman is the third largest arms manufacturer in the world. The US company generates $18.7bn in revenue from its defense operations. Products areas include defense electronics, warships, radar and missile systems and space systems. Specific products include the B-2 Stealth Bomber and the Global Hawk Unarmed Aerial Vehicle. The company employs approximately 120,000 people worldwide, serving U.S. and international military, government and commercial customers.
"The company spent $16,729,865 for lobbying in 2006. Of this total, $1,336,995 went to 17 outside lobbying firms or individual lobbyists including The Livingston Group and Morris Amitay.
"In December 2001, CommonDreams.org wrote about Northrop Grumman's lobbying, "It doesn't hurt that Northrop Grumman has friends in high places, like Secretary of the Air Force James Roche, former Northrop Grumman Electronics Systems chief. Since September 11th, Roche has emphasized the need for more spending on intelligence systems, specifically mentioning Northrop Grumman's AWACS plane. Not content to rest on its laurels, the company is lobbying Congress for a $300 million to upgrade the $1.3 billion B-2 Stealth Bomber, which has successfully completed bombings run in Afghanistan."
According to Washington Technology, "Northrop Grumman Corp. spent $5.6 million to lobby the federal government in the first six months of 2007, the highest amount spent among the largest federal IT contractors, according to the latest disclosure forms filed with the Senate."
Congressman Brad Sherman: Martial Law if We Voted No
October 2, 2008, U.S. House of Representatives. Congressman Brad Sherman [D-CA] asks:
"But why are we bailing out the Bank of China? Why are we bailing out the Saudi royal family?...
The only way they can pass this bill is by creating and by sustaining a panic atmosphere...
A few Members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted ``no.''
National Level Exercise 2009 (NLE 09) - FEMA Website
National Level Exercise 2009 (NLE 09) is scheduled for July 27 through July 31, 2009. NLE 09 will be the first major exercise conducted by the United States government that will focus exclusively on terrorism prevention and protection, as opposed to incident response and recovery.
NLE 09 is designated as a Tier I National Level Exercise. Tier I exercises (formerly known as the Top Officials exercise series or TOPOFF) are conducted annually in accordance with the National Exercise Program (NEP), which serves as the nation's overarching exercise program for planning, organizing, conducting and evaluating national level exercises. The NEP was established to provide the U.S. government, at all levels, exercise opportunities to prepare for catastrophic crises ranging from terrorism to natural disasters.
NLE 09 is a White House directed, Congressionally- mandated exercise that includes the participation of all appropriate federal department and agency senior officials, their deputies, staff and key operational elements. In addition, broad regional participation of state, tribal, local, and private sector is anticipated. This year the United States welcomes the participation of Australia, Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom in NLE 09.
EXERCISE FOCUS
NLE 09 will focus on intelligence and information sharing among intelligence and law enforcement communities, and between international, federal, regional, state, tribal, local and private sector participants.
The NLE 09 scenario will begin in the aftermath of a notional terrorist event outside of the United States, and exercise play will center on preventing subsequent efforts by the terrorists to enter the United States and carry out additional attacks. This scenario enables participating senior officials to focus on issues related to preventing terrorist events domestically and protecting U.S. critical infrastructure.
NLE 09 will allow terrorism prevention efforts to proceed to a logical end (successful or not), with no requirement for response or recovery activities.
NLE 09 will be an operations-based exercise to include: activities taking place at command posts, emergency operation centers, intelligence centers and potential field locations to include federal headquarters facilities in the Washington D.C. area, and in federal, regional, state, tribal, local and private sector facilities in FEMA Region VI, which includes the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
EXERCISE OBJECTIVES
Through a comprehensive evaluation process, the exercise will assess prevention and protection capabilities both nationally and regionally. Although NLE 09 is still in the planning stages, the exercise is currently designed to validate the following capabilities:
Intelligence/Information Sharing and Dissemination
Counter-Terrorism Investigation and Law Enforcement
Public and Private Sector Alert/Notification and Security Advisories
International Coordination
VALIDATING THE HOMELAND SECURITY SYSTEM
Exercises such as NLE 09 are an important component of national preparedness, helping to build an integrated federal, state, tribal, local and private sector capability to prevent terrorist attacks, and rapidly and effectively respond to, and recover from, any terrorist attack or major disaster that occurs.
The full-scale exercise offers agencies and jurisdictions a way to test their plans and skills in a real-time, realistic environment and to gain the in-depth knowledge that only experience can provide. Participants will exercise prevention and information sharing functions that are critical to preventing terrorist attacks. Lessons learned from the exercise will provide valuable insights to guide future planning for securing the nation against terrorist attacks, disasters, and other emergencies.
