The Guise Of Security

Oh boy, here we go!

The U.S. Government is trying to infringe on our civil liberties once again, all under the guise of security.

We all know that computer hacking and cybersecurity vulnerabilities have been a little crazy recently.
If not, here’s a recap.

It all started in April 2014 with The Heartbleed Bug.

Heartbleed is a catastrophic bug in OpenSSL:

“The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content. This allows attackers to eavesdrop communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users.”

Cryptographer Bruce Schneier wrote, “On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11.”

Then, in August 2014 we had Celebgate.  Apple’s iCloud services were hacked and hundreds of images, including nude photos, from many of the world’s biggest female celebrities were posted online.  The hack also allowed attackers to steal passwords, usernames, and other data.

Also, in August 2014, JP Morgan Chase was hacked.  The data breach that allowed hackers inside JP Morgan Chase was one of the biggest in history. Over 83 million households and small businesses were affected, including previous account holders. It was estimated that about 65 percent of all U.S. households were affected. 

In September 2014 Shellshock was introduced.  This vulnerability allowed hackers to gain access to vulnerable systems on Mac OS X and Linux computers.  These systems are exactly the type of machines that run the back-end of countless major websites and services.  Within hours, hackers took over machines to create enormous botnets of slave computers that launched millions of attacks on, among other targets, the U.S. Department of Defense.

Home Depot’s systems were also hacked in September of 2014.  This resulted in the theft of 56 million credit and debit cards.  Target was also a victim to a hack in September 2014.  That hack led to the theft of 40 million credit and debit cards. 

An odd discovery was found in November 2014.  The United States and United Kingdom were reportedly responsible for creating and deploying Regin.  Regin, which steals data and disguises itself as legitimate software, was found on European Union computers, where it reportedly stole data for months with direction from America’s National Security Agency (NSA). It’s been called a “top-tier espionage tool” and “among the most sophisticated ever discovered by researchers.”

Also, in November 2014, Sony was hacked.  The attackers demanded the company pay a ransom to keep a big cache of stolen data private.  When Sony executives didn’t pay up, a torrent of sensitive data was released for public view.  Among this data was unreleased films, financial information about executives, secret marketing information, and political plans.

Out of all of these, the most profound breach we know about was this year’s hack of the Office of Personnel Management.  This is the agency that holds the records on federal employees’ security clearances. That means, the most sensitive information about people filling some of the most sensitive positions in the federal government, along with tens of millions of others, have been compromised.

Headlines Say, Cyberterrorism Is Country’s Biggest Threat!

With all of these hacks going on, it’s understandable that the U.S. government and the American business community are worried about cybersecurity.  However, the question I have to ask is, what if these hacks were implemented from the inside?  I mean, the government created and deployed Regin, right?  Could it be that these hacks were part of a false flag operation? 

False flag operations are covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities. (Wikipedia)
False flag operations work.  As quoted by  Hermann Goering,  A Nazi leader

“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”

The United States government has a long and detailed history of “staging” events in order to sway public opinion.

The Gulf of Tonkin event in the Vietnam War era was deliberately staged by U.S. government officials in order to justify an escalation of military attacks on the North Vietnamese. Documents that were declassified prove that the U.S. government conspired to stage this “false flag” event.

Operation Northwoods was a similar plot. As Wikipedia relates:

“The planned 1962 Operation Northwoods plot by the U.S. Department of Defense for a war with Cuba involved scenarios such as hijacking or shooting down passenger and military planes, sinking a U.S. ship in the vicinity of Cuba, burning crops, sinking a boat filled with Cuban refugees, attacks by alleged Cuban infiltrators inside the United States, and harassment of U.S. aircraft and shipping and the destruction of aerial drones by aircraft disguised as Cuban MiGs. These actions would be blamed on Cuba, and would be a pretext for an invasion of Cuba and the overthrow of Fidel Castro’s communist government. It was authored by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, nixed by John F. Kennedy, came to light through the Freedom of Information Act and was publicized by James Bamford.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag#As_p…)

On the conspiracy theory front, there have long been accusations that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job” staged as a pretext to clamp down on Americans’ freedoms and roll out the Patriot Act.  Evidence surrounding the collapse of the WTC 7 building has literally thousands of engineers, scientists and citizens realizing the building was obviously brought down by demolition explosions.

Congress passed the Patriot Act, which granted the President broad powers to fight a war against terrorism, right after 9/11. The George W. Bush administration used these powers to bypass the FISA court and directed the NSA to spy directly on Al-Qaeda in a new NSA electronic surveillance program. But, they did more than that.  They collected data on Americans too!

So, what does this have to do with the recent hacks and/or governmental false flags? 

Well, in May 2013, Edward Snowden revealed documents, to the American public, on the NSA’s mass surveillance programs, which were shown to be operating without any public oversight and outside the limits of the U.S. Constitution.  Since then, the NSA has been dealt many significant legal setbacks.  The first of such, happened in December 2013.  

“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary’ invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval,”  A U.S. federal judge, Judge Richard J. Leon of the District of Columbia, wrote in a 68-page ruling,. “Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment,” which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

 
In response to the new hack threats and the NSA losing some of it’s power, the Republican-controlled Congress is debating the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), a bill designed to make it easier for businesses to share information about cybersecurity threats with the government. 
 

 

Image by Jonathan Mayer at http://webpolicy.org.

Because this flow of information is indirect, it prevents businesses from acting as privacy gatekeepers. Even if firms carefully screen personal information out of their threat reports, the NSA can nevertheless intercept that information on the Internet backbone.

 Here’s A Short Video Explaining CISA

Video Provided By FreedomWorks 
Sound Familiar?
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is.  The bill follows up on the failed cybersecurity legislation called The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which was already resoundingly rejected in Congress three times after overwhelming public outcry.  It seems the government just took away the “protection” part.
The problem with this is that it will not improve cybersecurity.  In fact, it appears that Congress didn’t bother consulting with anyone who knew about cybersecurity when drafting this bill.
Another Notch In The Belt
CISA, is just another form of government surveillance.  It’s just another Act in the long line of Acts the government tries to implement to spy on us, so they can make sure they know every little thing we do.  And all this data they collect on us is stored on huge servers so that they can pull it up whenever one of us gets too rowdy.  Then, they scour through the lines of these obscure Acts to find a section that is so open to interpretation and use it to imprison us, if they so see fit.   It’s just like CISPA, SOPA, The USA Patriot Act, USA Freedom Act, PIPA, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that they used on Aaron Swartz
 
We have to stop being like little sheep. 
 

“Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death”.– Adolph Hitler

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Jose Cosme

Originally from Bronx, New York, Joe is no stranger to adversity. Having studied many philosophies, he has triumphed over these adversities and has helped others do the same. Professionally, Joe has had the rich experience of working with people with disabilities as he helped them reach their fullest potential. Now, as the creator of the "What I Gotta Say About It" blog, Joe continues to influence the world as he helps people to realize their highest potential and to reach for the unlimited possibilities available to us all.

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