Posts by James George
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Hard News: The Huawei Question, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Simon I suggest you do some more recent research on Lang. The worm has turned is one way to describe it. Prolly more correctly that the leopard never changes his spots. Lang may not have been a major proponent of the invasion of Iraq, but once it happened and the US found itself in the quagmire of 04 and 05, Lang stepped in with his strategy to drive a wedge between the Sunni and Shia populations. Sure it already existed in some parts of outlying Iraq, but in the major metro areas, where the worst slaughter eventuated, people had learned to live with each other.
I'm wary of many false flag claims (the ones that get publicised are too often not false flag, just the other side trying to de-emphasise a tactical defeat. e.g. The claims by redneck americans that 'those people couldn't have destroyed the world trade centre from their 'caves') but there was considerable speculation about the way that the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, the event which triggered Iraq's civil war, went down, because not only was the US agenda the only one that was served, there were eyewitness accounts of the area being cleared by US special forces before the explosion and the extent of the demolition was more than a couple of car bombs could have achieved.
There is even a piece in that blog run by the dem party half of the american imperialist party that you linked to. It is here.
Maybe Lang is a dem party supporter, I neither know nor care. I do know he is a supporter of the US imperialism that kills millions around this planet every year.
Spend some time reading his poison on Sic Semper Tyrannis if yer stomach can stand it. His latest offence was to campaign Zimmerman’s innocence of the murder of Trayvon Martin.
Last year it was to call for the intervention in Libya which resulted in the destruction of most of that nation's infrastructure and the replacement of a stable society with an on-going anarchy that prohibits darker skinned Libyans from walking the streets lest they be murdered on sight by the european armed racist militias who are hell bent on the ethnic cleansing of Libya.But the 1955 Libyan Petroleum Law, the legislation which kept Libya free of transnational energy corporate dominance from long before the arrival of Col Gadhafi, has now been subverted & ignored and will soon be repealed, allowing the major US & European energy corps free hand in the anarchic failed state Libya has become. Thanks to Lang and his ilk - aforesaid spook scum.
This is what intelligence agencies do. They further their nation's economic agenda at the expense of others. e.g. NZ. The only reason we don't have more trouble from em, e.g. deposed Prime Ministers and the like, is that unlike Oz, we don't have much anyone else wants.
Huawei are grabbing a swathe of business off the US Cisco; so the american intelligence communities' corporate masters have told them to go in hard.
One issue overwhelms network dominance; the IP, no not internet protocol, intellectual property. The motive for so much US interference in other nation's domestic affairs.
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Oh that's all right then it wasn't the analysts at the CIA who claimed Iraq was chocka with WMD, it was just the head of the CIA, who described the likelihood of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction as a slam dunk.
Tenet was no outsider parachuted into the agency either. He had been in the Washington intelligence game since 1986 after graduating from that breeding ground of spook scum, Georgetown Uni.
Sure a few retired agency hands muttered about the WMD issue, but go back to the NY Times coverage in 02 and 03 and you'll find plenty of 'old hands' also running the BushCo line, so it is misleading to claim that the spooks were united in their opposition to the wmd issue.
Pat Lang is typical of the breed. After claiming to want peace and not war in the ME, he changes his tune once it becomes apparent the septics couldn't win a chook raffle and instigates the strategy that killed a million Iraqis and made 4 million more refugees in Syria and Jordan. That was when the US by way of paid agents and their own false flag attacks cranked up the sectarian conflict, to get Iraqis fighting each other rather than the invader.That sectarian split has been encouraged to spread outside Iraq's borders by US spooks eager to 'control' the Arab spring. Iraqis who understand precisely how awful things can get for Syria if outside forces arm any of the Syrian sectarian militias, have called a summit to get the Syrians talking to each other, with the support of the other nations in the region. But that would stymie Israel/US foreign policy. Consequently US spooks have been arm twisting, bribing, and blackmailing to keep their Sunni 'mates' away from the summit.
Can't be having peace lest no one buys our guns, is the kindest rationale to come to mind.
Doubtless the minority Sunni government of Bahrain, the one who hired Saudi thugs to invade Bahrain and rape teenage schoolgirls for the crime of reading poetry during the Bahrain Arab Spring last year, will be at the forefront of those nations who claim to be making an ethical stance against Shia political participation.The wikileaks docs dump showed us that the US is complicit in these acts far more than they pretend. Intelligence workers willingly gather truths, half-truths and complete bulldust every day; knowing that their 'product' will be used to ruin the lives of innocents across this planet, yet we are supposed to salute and go yessir, nossir, three bags full sir, when they tell us to buy equipment that just 'happens' to be made and sold by the country they do this dirty work for? Yeah right. That sounds fair.
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Call me a paranoid old fart but I have always assumed that there have been back doors in western manufactured systems since the us legislature backed a way from the clipper chip.
Apart from the big back off which was pretty unusual for the americans, a couple of other things occurred afterwards that gave pause.
The first was the Chinese government refusing to allow windows operating systems in any governmental departments because M$ refused China access to all source code so they could check it for such things as back doors. The Chinese used linux systems for quite some time until a quiet deal was reached with M$.
The 90's are a bit vague now but I seem to remember lending computing time to a project that trying to brute force the encryption system that was all the US government would give an export contract for. From memory it was a 64 bit key which the cypher punks held was insufficient to prevent state sponsored brute force attacks on encrypted communications. Eventually 128 bit keys were allowed and now there isn't any limit but that may be because of a different method of attack.
The second indication all was not well with encryption systems came when PGP inventor Phil Zimmerman refused to guarantee a version of PGP that was released a year or so after he sold his corporation to Computer Associates (PGP is now part of Symantec). PGP used to release its source code; partly to get around export controls and partly to allow anyone to debug the script to be sure there were no security flaws or back doors.
That stopped after he sold most of PGP. At first Zimmerman would guarantee each build as it came out and for many Zimmerman's personal guarantee was enough. Then he flat out refused to guarantee one version, resigning from his gig at PGP shortly afterward.
Many people assumed that PGP had gone the same way as all the other US manufacturers of communication encryption software and had included a back door.Reality check! This is more likely to be more a commercial decision by Australia than a security one. Anyone doubts that just has to consider the extraordinarly powerful legislation Australia has to protect US owned intellectual property. The most recent case in point was the ban on sales of Samsung 10.1 tablets until the week before Xmas 2011. That was a blatant sop to Apple who didn't have a case, a fact that Samsung finally bought out into the open after nearly 12 months of trying to get a proper hearing in the High Court. The protection of Sony playstation DRM is another example. And that part of Sony is for all intents and purposes american. e.g. The bloke who sailed his luxury Playstation yacht into Auckland during the last americas cup was an american, not Japanese.
Why lean over backwards for the US -list favourite conspiracy. . . Knowing how hard some in Canberra work to emulate US political corruption, the most likely theory would be the dreaded kickback.
That wouldn't preclude ASIO getting onboard. Intelligence services' readiness to participate in capitalist endeavours in a less than honourable way precedes John le Carre's novels.The vague rumours about Norman's ties to ASIO have been persistant over the years. From memory - warning this is unproven scuttlebutt - the connection was alleged to have begun when Norman was studying at ANU, which is regarded by some Australian radicals as being the uni that australian defense forces and security services most use to train their staff. Why? Well it is based in Canberra and Duntroon Officer school or whatever it is called sends their cadets to ANU for many courses.
There is a bit more to the rumour but nothing of real substance and repeating it would add more heat, no light and make it even more difficult to uncover the reality.
This could just be Norman trying to make the Greens seem more responsible, in which case Norman has shown once again that he doesn't truly understand the kiwi electorate. Kiwis in general aren't nearly as paranoid about security as Australians. There are reasons for that which are not straight out racist but xenophobia has a part to play as well.
As it does here. I can think of more examples of USuk IT sabotage than I can Chinese IT sabotage yet the old media has never jumped up and down about NZ allowing US defense contractors to build its network infrastructure.
Which is why I for one am disppointed that the Greens have chosen to get caught up the the silly spy game bulldust.
If anyone really cares about this stuff wouldn't it be smarter to keep Walter Mitty away from running the Defence Technology Agency, or whatever it is called, than worry about securing the insecurable?
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Well as someone who followed the NDS saga quite closely at the time, I have to say the old 'way back machine' must have been going hard. Old links that give detail to the story have gone from anywhere near the top of search engine results, while the barebones which iterate the fallacy now repeated here, that Vivendi/Canal Plus (for whom the original cards used by ITV Digital were manufactured for) used technology that was already outmoded at the time of implementation is repeated over and over. Unsurprisingly NewsCorp rags such as the FT predominate high up the list.
Remember all the digital TV companies were struggling with hacking at that time - including murdoch's channels. Some readers may remember how easy it was to watch sky in NZ if one fitted a video card to yer PC. The Vivendi/Canal Plus problem was the speed with which the cards were cracked and released following changes to the encryption made to circumvent crackers.
Many of the original, now hard to find articles included testimony from a former 'hacker' turned NDS employee who had to move to Israel because, he claimed, his NDS bosses wanted to work in a country where the US Digital Millennium Copyright type laws against reverse engineering hadn't yet been passed.
This bloke also said/claimed that NDS has spent considerable sums, in the millions, buying hardware that allowed the Vivendi/Canal plus cards to be physically scanned to determine embedded code and hard wired security.The bloke also had the job of uploading the newly decrypted codes to a site in Canada from where the Vivendi hacks were disseminated.
Now a decade later who can really remember when a particular protocol became 'too old' especially since many of the victims have been paid off, but it needs to be remembered that this was right at the beginning of the digital TV changeover and the technology was fast evolving. Only if channels had the resources to keep buying upgrades.
The worst thing about this sort of piracy (according to NewsCorp when explaining why they went to such lengths when they chased an escapee from a low security englander jail all the way to NZ. The bloke had been convicted of selling forged Sky digital cards) is that not only does the ready availability of cheaper cards compete with the legit product; it devalues the product in the eyes of consumers. "Only mugs pay full tote for ITV Digital" became a meme in england.As for Panorama's belated coverage, the BBC has made in plain that it will take no prisoners in its battle with News International. The blue started before the last englander election by young James launching attacks on state broadcasters for providing 'free' news.
Kind of ironic since the post Hutton Inquiry BBC News bulletins are tough to tell apart from Fox News Bulletins. John Simpson and Bill O'Reilly are pretty much birds of a feather esp on USuk imperialism.
Bring back Stratos/Triangle - whose disappearance strikes as another murky affair. (Forgive pun). -
Oh god let the fan bois have their moment. I mean who really cares which mega corp rapes yer wallet, thanks chiefly to abusing the loopholes which their lackeys insinuated into the plethora of insane bi-lateral trade agreements our pols foist upon us.
In a moment of utter stupidity I bought an Apple II sometime in the late 70's. There was a shop at street level in the Swanson Towers building where I worked.
After a particularly dull morning with the drongos who ran the Labour Dept back then, I splurged out a couple of grand (you could still buy a house on the less salubrious parts of the Auckland isthmus for that).
Never again.Like so much that continues to this day with this company's products, marketing buzz was more important than utility. It worked OK as a typewriter oops sorry "word processor", but couldn't match the contemporaneous x86 processors that were being put out by IBM or, most importantly; Wang who used a 16bit data bus on the 8086 based system. It was a killer word processor and Multiplan was great if incompatible with everyone else.
However the special 16bit lotus 123 run on that slayed every other iteration of that spreadsheet app.
I used to do all my grunt work on a Wang in multiplan, import the csv's into Lotus then export the result into an IBM to edit and add graphics. And no, one Apple could not have 'done it all' Number crunching was slow and precarious on apples back then.Since the Apple II I have never used Apple; not because its products are made in concentration cum work camps, but because I know that whatever they are selling will always be available in better a form factor (ie free from restrictive conditions) for less elsewhere.
As Henry Ford pointed out a long time ago, you can make a reasonable quid shooting for the top end of the markets where dilettantes fret over matching their keyboard to the drapes, but the most profitable business is that which considers the masses, the hoi polloi, to be their number one customer. Apple appear to be going after us plebs at the moment so doubtless the form ahead of function types will find someone else to adore. -
Yeah lets all get wound up about a few chickens coming home to roost in the US. After all how many Aghan and Iraqi politicians do you thing have been smashed into a fine pink cloud after Gifford did her worst on Capitol Hill?
First off; casting Gifford as some sort of liberal is a sick joke, she is that worst of all US politicians a blue dog democrat who takes the votes from the underclass and uses them to favour the corporatists. She is rated at 187th (out of 193) in terms of progressiveness and support for the disadvantaged based on her voting record over at ProgressivePunch
As for the health vote well I dunno about others but I was always taught that legislation which forced citizens to buy something from a private corporation (rather than a socialised co-op where citizens had input and profits weren't hived off for the good of a few) is the sort of thing fascist governments such as Hitler's and Mussolini's did.
One of the great misconceptions people outside the US have about Obama and healthcare is that he somehow broke down the health insurance oligarchy last year.He did the exact opposite and reinforced the power of insurers as soon as he agreed that a single payer scheme was off the table. Must have been the hundred million plus that Wall St gave him eh?
Anyway back to Gifford she got shot that happens in the US where too many people carry guns. There is no hidden or greater meaning. Playing to the "great! lets scare the citizens" media hoohah doesn't progress anything except more sales of more guns - so why buy into it?
I am far more interested in issues back here in NZ.
Like when did it become law that in a simple firearm case, but one that carries a penalty well over the limit for a jury trial, citizens could be denied access to trial by a jury of their peers? Was it in the recent shake up, and if so how can that be, shouldn't people be tried under the law as it was when the alleged crime was committed? Or was it always this way under the rules designed to keep juries out of trials of 'complex fraud cases'? If it was the latter what is going on? Have we been lied to by politicians about the details of their legislation and the actual impact it will have, yet again?
I don't believe there are any circumstances where it is ok to deny an accused access to a jury, because in very short order jury trials will become impossible to access, if that situation continues.
If the courts system is really that clogged, build more courts and stop pissing about.
This little silly season bombshell, initially released with all details supressed, should shock every New Zealander, yet here we are worrying about some hypocrite on the other side of the planet catching a bit of karma.
It seems to me that the manifest injustices that have been dished out to Tuhoe ever since whitefellas first arrived here, are going to continue in the 21st century.
"Who cares they're only angry Maoris. Lock em up", seems to be the order of the day.
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How do we even know that all of the media outlets with copies of the cables, obtained those copies through WikiLeaks? The US must know exactly which cables WL had access to and if you knew they were all going to be published anyway, surely pushing, say all the NZ cables out at once, would be infinitely preferable to the death by a thousand cuts of slow release.
Maybe they did come from Wikileaks although the fact they aren’t included in an easily downloadable WL archive does indicate that they may not have.
This cable which details the US embassy involvement in the campaign to force Pharmac into wasting money on expensive drugs, should be the subject of considerable scrutiny, but the odds of that are unlikely given the manner in which it has been released. That is along with many other cables.
If the Sunday Herald follows the lead of the SST the cables won’t be available in full after tommorow so if you are interested the entire release is on a link page at the Herald here.
I just spend the morning capturing and indexing the lot, but I doubt many other Kiwis ‘will get around to it’ – meaning of course that without the ‘official’ link to the good old fishwrap, they won’t exist as far as a lot of people are concerned. -
Inevitable that this thread would be reduced to the "who's up who & which one is paying the rent?" tenor of every thread. After all why waste time on something boring like whether or not we should know if the peeps on the other side of the world who are being stood over courtesy of kiwi taxpayers, like it, want it or see it the same way we do?
Not when there are z list has beens and wanna be's to push our sticky-beaks into.Did ya see the govt is in the process of making us pay by way of taxpayer subsidy on the fiber to the door plan, for being oppressed by the same old Telecom monopoly. Crown Fibre has announced that Telecom are gonna be the preferred supplier of the fiber to the door everywhere except Christchurch (much already covered by saturn all those years ago when the Nats were last too cowardly to drive the wooden stake thru T'coms heart), Dunedin (minor regional centre), Hamilton (sop to some of the blokes who put the project together, they will get eaten up by Telecom eventually) and Whangerei (that bustling hub of kiwi commerce).
Apart from that the rest is pretty much Telecoms, thereby reinforcing a monopoly that fiber was meant to destroy naturally thru competition.
But we won't talk about that either because we don't wanna do anything to upset the crooked little comnspiracy nestled at the heart of NZ government, now do we? Especially not when there are some slightly famous people to gossip about and now xmas is so close. You don't think that was why the news came out now do ya? That nice mr key wouldn't do that.
I'm surprised - I guess the Key and the Stiassny families won't be having a good old knees-up this xmas, after all, eh?
5 to 2 any response will be on the last little throwaway irrelevancy. -
Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to HORansome,
According to HORansome pointing out the similarities of the flaws which the same sad brown-noses to power that defend the abuses of the powerful use to attack Mr Assange, is engaging in conspiracy theory.
I can’t wait until he refers to a post “as being all PC” or is that too last week even for him?
Perhaps Ransome never heard of Adam Smith's theory of the invisible hand?
Blog owners who chose to defend the powerful in the knowledge that doing so will endear them to the powerful don't need to conspire with anyone to come out in harmony with all the other sucks.
There are only a limited number of ways that attacks on Assange can be spun, and spun they will be because in the world of quid pro quo where 'opinion leaders' who base their profile on support of the status quo, depend on one another to keep each other’s profile 'out there', so as to remain opinion leaders. Not simply opinion leaders but ‘responsible opinion leaders' whose point of view is likely to be repeated in the major media outlets with a link, byline or reference, because they are 'responsible'.So all the usual apologists for power discovering they understand how awful rape is and that the things men accused of rape say can be made to appear weaselly no matter what they say or do, is no different than all the local dairy owners getting many more bunches of roses in on the second week in February than they do any other week of the year.
They didn't have to sit down with all the other dairy owners and plan to all have lots of roses, each individually perceived there would be a demand for the smelly things come Valentines Day because people would want flowers on that day as they always do, & there are only a limited species of flowers that always sell. So roses were ordered up by the dairy owner whether or not the other dairies did the same. Of course the other dairy owners/ 'opinion makers' did the same because they too knew the commodity would sell well too.
This is how opinion slanted information gets about in 2010. It doesn't require whispering or backroom deals, as so-called new media has evolved, self-interest by ambitious people creates the model without too many boring hook-ups with other flabby halitosis sufferers.
Of course various sock puppet representatives of large interests push talking points, embassies big corporations and the like, that is one of the things WikiLeaks has demonstrated time and time again over the years.
That wasn’t what I was addressing in that post, I was commenting on the awful sameness of the arguments those unoriginal thinkers posing as community activists or whatever usually present. -
If people bothered to read what it is that wikileaks [ [http://wikileaks.ch/about.html| publishes] ], before vomiting their ignorant claptrap across the net, they would discover that WINZ records, police gazettes and all the other exagerations which the enablers of crooked politicians can come up, with would never be published since it doesn't meet their criteria. Criteria which imo are far more rigorous than the average fishwrap, which are often more than happy to find a dog whistle method of engaging human prejudices when it suits.