Blog Archive

Friday, June 29, 2012

La CIA puede espiar tu hogar utilizando equipos conectados

Fuente:
current (punto) com/technology/93707307_cia-spies-on-you-via-connected-devices-in-your-home (punto) htm
CIA Spies On You Via Connected Devices In Your Home
More and more personal and household devices are connecting to the internet, from your television to your car navigation systems to your light switches. CIA Director David Petraeus cannot wait to spy on you through them.

Earlier this month, Petraeus mused about the emergence of an “Internet of Things” — that is, wired devices — at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. “‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,” Petraeus enthused, “particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.”

All those new online devices are a treasure trove of data if you’re a “person of interest” to the spy community. Once upon a time, spies had to place a bug in your chandelier to hear your conversation. With the rise of the “smart home,” you’d be sending tagged, geolocated data that a spy agency can intercept in real time when you use the lighting app on your phone to adjust your living room’s ambiance.

“Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,” Petraeus said, “the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.”



Petraeus allowed that these household spy devices “change our notions of secrecy” and prompt a rethink of “our notions of identity and secrecy.” All of which is true — if convenient for a CIA director.

The CIA has a lot of legal restrictions against spying on American citizens. But collecting ambient geolocation data from devices is a grayer area, especially after the 2008 carve-outs to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Hardware manufacturers, it turns out, store a trove of geolocation data; and some legislators have grown alarmed at how easy it is for the government to track you through your phone or PlayStation.

That’s not the only data exploit intriguing Petraeus. He’s interested in creating new online identities for his undercover spies — and sweeping away the “digital footprints” of agents who suddenly need to vanish.

“Proud parents document the arrival and growth of their future CIA officer in all forms of social media that the world can access for decades to come,” Petraeus observed. “Moreover, we have to figure out how to create the digital footprint for new identities for some officers.”

It’s hard to argue with that. Online cache is not a spy’s friend. But Petraeus has an inadvertent pal in Facebook.

Why? With the arrival of Timeline, Facebook made it super-easy to backdate your online history. Barack Obama, for instance, hasn’t been on Facebook since his birth in 1961. Creating new identities for CIA non-official cover operatives has arguably never been easier. Thank Zuck, spies. Thank Zuck
Otras fuentes:
Wired (punto) com

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Desmienten diversos datos de la autobiografía de Obama

Seguramente usted fue uno de los que se sorprendió ante la postura y afirmaciones recientes de Barack Obama en torno al tema de "los derechos de los homosexuales". Nunca ningún presidente de los Estados Unidos había hecho semejantes afirmaciones favoreciendo a dichos activistas. Mucho más sorprende el hecho que editoriales que afirman ser cristianas como el Grupo Nelson utilizaran sus alcance literario para llevarle al público una amplia propaganda en el 2008 presentando a un Barack Obama como un hombre de fe en su libro: LA FE DE BARACK OBAMA del autor MANSFIELD STHEPHEN. Se han escrito diversos libros sobre la figura de Obama entre los que surge la biografía de Obama de David Maraniss Obama. Hoy muchos de los datos que le hicieron creer al mundo por medio de sus publicaciones están siendo cuestionados. Obviamente siempre "pitcheados" más que un pelotero por las expresiones de Obama.
 Dice la noticia:
David Maraniss Obama Biography Questions Accuracy Of President's Memoir

 huffingtonpost (punto) com/2012/06/20/david-maraniss-obama-biography-barack-obama-the-story_n_1613758.html?1340240962#s=1121685&icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl1%7Csec3_lnk1%26pLid%3D171708


It almost seemed too good to be true. When President Barack Obama's 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father," was re-published soon after the young politican catapulted onto the national stage with a charismatic speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, his amazin life story captured the hearts and minds of millions of Americans.

But like many memoirs, which tend to be self-serving, it now appears that Obama shaped the book less as a factual history of his life than as a great story. A new biography, "Barack Obama: The Story," by David Maraniss raises questions about the accuracy of the president's account and delivers fresh revelations about his pot-smoking in high school and college and his girlfriends in New York City.

In his memoir, Obama describes how his grandfather, Hussein Onyango, was imprisoned and tortured by British troops during the fight for Kenyan independence. But that did not happen, according to five associates of Onyango interviewed by Maraniss. Another heroic tale from the memoir about Obama's Indonesian stepfather, Soewarno Martodihardjo, being killed by Dutch soldiers during Indonesia's fight for independence also is inaccurate, according to Maraniss.

The president explains in his memoir that some of the characters in his book have been combined or compressed. Maraniss provides more details about the extent of that alteration. One of Obama's "African American" classmates was based on Carolina Boss, a white student whose Swiss mother was named Regina, according to Maraniss, a Washington Post editor and author who has won a Pulitzer Prize. The president also described breaking up with a white girlfriend due to a "racial chasm that unavoidably separated him from the woman," writes Maraniss. But Obama's next girlfriend in Chicago, an anthropologist, also was white.

The young Obama's lack of playing time on the high school basketball team was due more to his ability than the coach's preference for white players, Maraniss writes. And Obama's mother likely left his father -- not the other way around -- after domestic abuse, note reviews of the book in the 'Los Angeles Times' and Buzzfeed.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

"And Justice for all..."

Título: Kony 2012: Don't be fooled

newstatesman (punto) com/blogs/the-staggers/2012/03/africa-kony-uganda-military

By Tom Rollins

Fecha: 8 marzo 2012

¿Es realmente Kony el culpable de las desgracias de millares de niños mutilados en Africa? O se trata de una compleja propaganda para desviar la atención de los verdaderos responsables.
The viral video is an attempt to further the US's economic and military interests in Africa.

If you do anything on the back of watching Kony 2012, the new viral sensation currently embarassing the world wide web, it's to investigate exactly who or what is behind it and why people have been so taken in.

US charity Invisible Children wants the Ugandan Lords' Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony, responsible for forced recruitment of thousands child soldiers and sex slaves, brought to justice at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

I actually find it amazing that people can suddenly care so much about an issue that they presumably have a superficial awareness of already, just because of a social media campaign led by Twitter and Facebook twinned with a campaign that aims its cross-hairs on the western all-feeling heart.

How many people have seen Blood Diamond? On its opening weekend in January 2007 it took £1,471,104, two months later it had grossed £7,269,409. One of the main sub-plots of the film, amidst vicious militias, is saving Dia Vandy, an abducted child soldier, before returning him to his family.

This is not a new issue, nor is our awareness of it.

Aside from Invisible Children's suspect finances (pay $32 for an "Action Kit" and 10% of that goes to "direct services," the rest on salaries, travel expenses and so on), worse is the fact so many people could be duped by a video that explicitly calls for US-led intervention in Central Africa. Invisible Children wants its young and beautiful activist community to directly fund the Ugandan army (itself guilty of atrocities against civilians, according to Human Rights Watch reports), which will be led by "American advisers."

For someone who portrays himself as a good Dad and a great all-round guy, Jason Russell is peculiarly fond of using Pentagonese, the opaque, Orwellian language of the military-industrial complex that gave us "collateral damage" (civilian dead), "immediate permanent decapitation" (death) and "pacification" (destruction).
What are these advisers going to be advising about? Who will their advice be advised to? Will it be good advice?

If Invisible Children is anything to go by, probably not. Because Russell and his Hipstomatic-schmaltz wants "direct foreign intervention" in Central Africa - that means boots on the ground, drones and jets in the air and the next inevitable step in America's programme of endless war.

You would think we had learned something after Afghanistan and Iraq, wars that have already killed over 1 million innocent people with a 90 per cent civilian to combatant death rate, and a "textbook" intervention in Libya which has resulted in regime change and with it the total destabilisation of yet another Middle Eastern country. This, as they say, is what democracy looks like.
A coincidence, perhaps, but the United States military has been running an extensive continent-wide programme under AFRICOM, the United States African Command. This includes a string of new drones airfields in the Horn of Africa (conveniently in-land enough to deal with Uganda and Kenya too), and the trans-Saharan Operation Enduring Freedom, to "fight al Qaeda in the Maghreb."
But what about Central Africa? Last October President Obama deployed around 100 US special ops troops to Central Africa, reportedly "to assist African forces in the removal of [LRA leader] Joseph Kony and the leadership of the LRA from the battlefield." Perhaps these are Russell's faceless "US advisers."

And yet there has been no reported (and verified) LRA activity in Uganda since 2006, and it is widely accepted that Kony is no longer in Uganda. Does the west really want to inflame another region by pursuing a small, embattled radical organisation and giving it indispensable credibility and victimhood?

There is clearly more than Kony at stake here. Central Africa is well known for its rich natural resources - including copper, cobalt, gold, uranium, magnesium and tin. Once ravaged by King Leopold II of Belgium, the 21st-century American Empire now wants in.
At an AFRICOM Conference at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller declared the programme's mission meant maintaining "the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market."

Not only that. Ugandan President Yower Museveni has for some time courted Iran and President Ahmadinejad "in all fields". This is the new Scramble for Africa - a sick twist of history in which global powers are returning to old hunting grounds and fiefdoms in preparation for a new proxy war.

If Invisible Children does not turn out to be some Pentagon-CIA front, the charity is still attempting to align social media, activism and youth political disengagement with the United States' hawkish economic and military interests in Africa.

So please, don't be fooled.
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