Slashdot Mirror

See subject & http://blog.talosintel.com/2016/08/vulnerability-spotlight-multiple-dos.html/ http://blog.talosintel.com/2016/09/vulnerability-spotlight-kaspersky.html/ http://www.dshield.org/diary/Kaspersky+Anti-Virus+Products+Remote+Heap+Overflow+Vulnerability/719/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/22/nsa-gchq-targeted-kaspersky/ http://slashdot.org/submission/4787123/former-employees-accuse-kaspersky-lab-of-faking-malware/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/08/kaspersky_0day/

* FAR from a complete list mind you...

APK

P.S.=> APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-7 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=%22APK+Hosts+File+Engine%22+and+%22start64%22&btnG=Google+Search&gbv=1/ has no bugs, is lighter on resources & less moving parts complexity for exploit + makes you faster (& is native to the IP stack (no filtering drivers) vs. "Bolt on 'MoAr'" stupidity)... apk

See subject & a list: http://blog.talosintel.com/2016/08/vulnerability-spotlight-multiple-dos.html/ http://blog.talosintel.com/2016/09/vulnerability-spotlight-kaspersky.html/ http://www.dshield.org/diary/Kaspersky+Anti-Virus+Products+Remote+Heap+Overflow+Vulnerability/719/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/22/nsa-gchq-targeted-kaspersky/ http://slashdot.org/submission/4787123/former-employees-accuse-kaspersky-lab-of-faking-malware/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/08/kaspersky_0day/

APK

P.S.=> APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-7 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=%22APK+Hosts+File+Engine%22+and+%22start64%22&btnG=Google+Search&gbv=1/ has no bugs, is lighter on resources, has less moving parts complexity for exploit + makes you faster & is native to the IP stack (no filtering drivers) vs. "Bolt on 'MoAr'" stupidity... apk

So far that's just on social media, so although it's gotten people fired, it doesn't quite look like Germany in the 30s yet.

It's looking more like Germany in the '30s every day.

http://www.slate.com/content/d...

https://prod01-cdn06.cdn.first...

https://markosun.files.wordpre...

Thanks AC, The Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Public private partnerships for realtime access to all CCTV networks are been worked on in many city areas.
The use of small or large manned aircraft has been seen at a state and federal level over the years but seems to be in the press too much now thanks to low level wireless search patterns over hours. Locals tend to notice that.
New Senate Bill Would Require Warrants for Federal Aerial Surveillance (June 18 2015)
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
Drones, blimps, aerostats are sold as looking outwards or for internal mil testing but will soon be very common for domestic use.
Moored balloons and other efforts over many years show the advancement for more downward looking platforms at a per state or for domestic use from the early 1980's on.
Every powered cell phone in areas will be tracked 24/7 by default from above for the price of a few 10's millions with hidden ongoing reimbursable line items funding.

An interesting long term review of NSG/GCHQ snooping - by Duncan Campbell.

Meanwhile it's completely legal for members of Congress to inside trade

Well first they tried to hack into Google's data centers without a warrant. https://www.washingtonpost.com... When that didn't work they tried to hack into the app stores, again without a warrant. https://firstlook.org/theinter... After that, Google et al cranked up the encryption. This is entirely a reaction to the US government trying to get data without a warrant. People didn't feel comfortable with that and wanted the device makers to protect data better. The manufacturers have responded to market demands.

Re: "Unless the zero day flaw was put there intentionally, as back doors are put there intentionally, a zero day flaw is not a back door, it's just some incompetent who should be employed"
The US and UK security services have noted that difference and can shape generations of code, funding, standards, trade and competition policy.
An average company thats incompetent due to hardware and software limitations gets contracts, good press and friendly govs buy in for their own staff, education and clear standards for banking.
Thats a lot of historic power and cash to shape funding to a few US brands globally within the 5 eye nations and other friendly Western powers.
The next method is to set encryption at a level that keeps the press/other users out of a network but is 100% law enforcement friendly.
Over decades that access, funding, standards offers a perfect look down system into wider consumer networks.
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
If all that still cannot keep weak networks and plain text access try the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA.
Immunity to share all data with govs and mil looking for "cyber threat indicators". All that strong encryption for the network reverts to plain text at some point in the system and thats where a company will be waiting to sort domestic data.

I guess we can assume there are quite a few system admins here. Sysadmins are high priority targets for the NSA. In fact we can assume that the same applies for all the state level actors. If you are an American admin in a corporation, even if you take the view that you have "nothing to hide" from the NSA you must assume you have to protect your company from Chinese and Russian competitors. Every admin basically has to assume that state level attackers are after their user's information.

The game changed and nobody told us. Nobody can assume that they aren't "important enough". You may just be the stepping stone to attack the sysadmin to attack the developers which destroys your job. The NSA leaving backdoors in systems was directly responsible for the OPM hack and the consequences against the US government. By having and tolerating insecure systems, consumers are responsible for destroying their own jobs.

One Nation under advertising, indivisible, with liberty and CISA for all.
Other parts of the world may want to consider what CISA will be about on any US provided connection.
Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act
"How Big Business Is Helping Expand NSA Surveillance, Snowden Be Damned" (Apr. 2 2015)
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
"A government surveillance bill by any other name is just as dangerous" (13 June 2015)
http://www.theguardian.com/com...

Yet whenever anyone wants to raid a fund to pay for something... its the military budget. Why is that?

Because that is where the money is and we spend ludicrously more on our military than is sensible or necessary. We apparently spend more on our military than the next 7 or so largest military spenders COMBINED. There is no reasonable justification for that. That is just rampant paranoia.

And I should point out that the military is one of the few things the government does that it is supposed to do and it is one of the few things the world... especially our allies need us to be competent in.

Remind me again why we have to be the ones to defend other countries that are perfectly capable of paying to defend themselves? Europe should not need the US to defend them and yet their largest military spender (France) spends literally 1/10th of what the US does.

So why are you raiding the military budget? Do you want the US to pull out of NATO? Maybe sunset its guarantee to protect Japan? We could let Israel get genocided. Maybe let the Russians run wild in Eastern Europe. Possibly allow the North Koreans to invade and enslave the south koreans?

Let's address those:
1) NATO: NATO has 28 members yet the US pays for 3/4 of the budget. The other members can pony up more.
2) Japan: Japan SHOULD be responsible more for its own defense. WWII ended 70 years ago.
3) Israel: Israel is quite capable of defending themselves and have shown that several times. They also are not working productively for peace (nor are the palestinians) so until they get serious they can get help elsewhere.
4) The Russians already are running wild in Easter Europe (see Ukraine) and we are doing nothing about it.
5) North Korean "enslaving" the South? Spare me. That's just ridiculous on the face of it. South Korean can handle their business just fine.

Where would you like to cut the US military budget?

Let's start with the items like hardware the military says it doesn't need but congress still forces them to buy. Then I would move on to cutting programs like the F35 that are wildly over budget and under performing and arguably unnecessary. We probably don't actually need 11 aircraft carriers with their attendant fleets. I'm quite sure we don't need as many nuclear weapons as we currently have. We have numerous military bases that we no longer need and which are only being kept alive because they are congressional pork. We don't need to maintain Guantanamo Bay and the prison it contains. We could get out of the money pit that is the Middle East. I could go on and on.

Seriously, did you even give this a moment's thought?

https://firstlook.org/theinter...

As one example, when the CIA asked Melvin Gravitz, a long-time APA governance member and former CIA contractor, to weigh in on whether or not it was ethical for psychologists to participate in torturous interrogations in early 2003, he concluded that it was fine because ethics need to be âoeflexibleâ in the face of national security.

You obviously prefer reading Google press releases, here is real news instead:
The original NSA document stating seven companies helped with PRISM, one being Google.
[The] presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge

News from today another example of how little Google values privacy.

You Millenial fanboi's are so gullible. Corporations could give two flying fucks about you or your privacy, but you go on defending them.

If you were just scanning, you might easily read that for:

Leading privacy expert backs The Sunday Times report

Which is not the case.

While it is a great news that Assange is going to have his interview done in London we must not forget that England is also on board of the American spy gravy train as a full member

We do not need to look far and wide to understand England's role on helping America to spread its propaganda other than its claim that the British spies have been 'harmed' with Snowden's files being successfully decrypted by the Russian and Chinese government

The Intercept has a piece on it --- https://firstlook.org/theinter...

The British 'drama' conveniently plays out while its American partner hoarding news headline of data on millions of its civil servants' being stolen by "Chinese hackers', even after revelations that the whole thing is nothing more than an inside job

What we have witnessed thus far has been a false flag fest - false flags that play out one after another hitting out on the Russian bogeyman and the Chinese bogeyman

Even when Mr. Assange's interview is to be held in London, let us not forget that he is still being entrapped inside London by none other than the British government

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
https://firstlook.org/theinter...

and from 2009 : http://www.hrw.org/fr/node/818...

For those who haven't seen it yet. https://firstlook.org/theinter...

The Murdoch article is pure propaganda.

We now have one of the purest examples of this dynamic. Last night, the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times published their lead front-page Sunday article, headlined “British Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese.”

Just as the conventional media narrative was shifting to pro-Snowden sentiment in the wake of a key court ruling and a new surveillance law, the article (behind a paywall: full text here) claims in the first paragraph that these two adversaries “have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services.”

https://firstlook.org/theinter...

...by Glenn Greenwald, with copious facts, in The Intercept: https://firstlook.org/theinter...

Greenwald has replied:

The government accusers behind this story have a big obstacle to overcome: namely, Snowden has said unequivocally that when he left Hong Kong, he took no files with him, having given them to the journalists with whom he worked, and then destroying his copy precisely so that it wouldn’t be vulnerable as he traveled. How, then, could Russia have obtained Snowden’s files as the story claims – “his documents were encrypted but they weren’t completely secure ” – if he did not even have physical possession of them?

The only way this smear works is if they claim Snowden lied, and that he did in fact have files with him after he left Hong Kong. The Sunday Times journalists thus include a paragraph that is designed to prove Snowden lied about this, that he did possess these files while living in Moscow:

David Miranda, the boyfriend of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was seized at Heathrow in 2013 in possession of 58,000 “highly classified” intelligence documents after visiting Snowden in Moscow.

What’s the problem with that Sunday Times passage? It’s an utter lie. David did not visit Snowden in Moscow before being detained. As of the time he was detained in Heathrow, David had never been to Moscow and had never met Snowden. The only city David visited on that trip before being detained was Berlin, where he stayed in the apartment of Laura Poitras.

Glenn Greenwald has written a clear statement here arguing that the assertions of the Telegraph article are deeply flawed, and based entirely on anonymous statements from government officials. It is worth a read. Here is one paragraph from it:

The Sunday Times today merely recycled the same evidence-free smears that have been used by government officials for years – not only against Snowden, but all whistleblowers – and added a dose of sensationalism and then baked it with demonstrable lies. That’s just how western journalism works, and it’s the opposite of surprising. But what is surprising, and grotesque, is how many people (including other journalists) continue to be so plagued by some combination of stupidity and gullibility, so that no matter how many times this trick is revealed, they keep falling for it. If some anonymous government officials said it, and journalists repeat it while hiding who they are, I guess it must be true.

https://firstlook.org/theinter...

Heck, WMD were found: http://www.defense.gov/News/Ne... [defense.gov] http://www.nytimes.com/interac... [nytimes.com]

You're embarrassing yourself.

So I guess Saddam gassing all the Kurds didn't really happen, and we should have never gone in there to put a stop to the systematic genocide Saddam was up to...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]

Saddam gassed the Kurds with the gas that you gave him. And later Rumsfeld dropped by to shake his hand.

Don't expect to be given the moral high ground over Saddam. During their mercifully brief but incredibly bloody reign, Rumsfeld/Cheney killed more Iraqis than he did during any period of the same length.

That gas was expired long before the lying started: the best the Iraqi Air Force could have done with it would be to hurl it from the plane and hope to hit someone in the head with the canister.

https://firstlook.org/theinter...

'One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.

I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.'

He was framed: https://firstlook.org/theinter...

Wall Street Analyst Encouraged Rail Company to Lobby Against Train Safety Rules
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/15/wall-street-analyst-demanded-rail-industry-invest-lobbying-train-speed-safety-regulations/
By Lee Fang (@lhfang)
05/15/2015 11:26 AM

Positive Train Control, a technology system used to monitor trains and automatically keep them from reaching unsafe speeds, would likely have prevented the tragic Amtrak derailment earlier this week and many other train crashes in recent years, according to the National Transportation Safety Board and train safety experts.

But ever since Congress passed a law in 2008 requiring train companies to implement PTC by the end of 2015, the railroad industry has mounted a ferocious lobbying campaign to delay the rule.

Amtrak, like many other railroads, has been slow to comply. The federal government has been accommodating. And most recently, senators have been fighting primarily over how long an extension should be granted.

Train companies did not want to invest the needed funds to upgrade their systems. But they may have been feeling direct pressure from Wall Street, as well.

In one revealing exchange during an investor call in 2009, Jason Seidl, then a financial analyst with the Dahlman Rose & Co. investment bank, asked Wick Moorman, the chief executive of Norfolk Southern Corp., what “you guys can do in terms of lobbying” on the PTC. And given the costs of complying with the PTC rule, the analyst wanted to know how future investments might be impacted.

Moorman said he and other rail executives were busy working to “educate members of Congress as to what the implications of this legislation are.” Seidl encouraged Moorman to “further educate” them.

Lobbying and other government records show the rail industry extensively sought to influence the Federal Railroad Administration and Congress on the PTC rules. Individual rail companies, including Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, CSX, Canada National Railway Company, among others, hired a small army of lobbyists.

But the largest and most prominent lobbying group to work to delay and weaken the PTC rule was the American Association of Railroads, which employed a veritable who’s who of D.C. consultants and lobbyists, including:

— Linda Daschle, the wife of former Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle, was paid to lobby on the PTC on behalf of the Association of American Railroads.

— The bipartisan lobbying duo of Max Sandlin and Vin Weber, both former congressmen, are registered with the American Association of Railroads to lobby on the PTC. Weber, an advisor to Jeb Bush, is also on the board of the American Action Network, a GOP dark money group that spends millions on election campaigns.

— Another bipartisan lobbying team, including former Sen. John Breaux, D-La., and former Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., is registered to lobby on behalf of the American Association of Railroads on PTC.

— The tax returns for the American Association of Railroads lists SKDKnickerbocker as a consultant for public relations and advertising throughout 2011 and 2012. SKDK is a public affairs firm led by senior Democratic staffers including former White House communications director Anita Dunn and CNN contributor Hilary Rosen. SKDK did not return a call requesting information about what services the firm provided for AAR, or if they continue to count AAR as a client.

— Former National Transportation Safety Board Kathryn Higgins was registered on behalf of AAR to lobby on the PTC.

— Former Rep. William Lipinski, D-Ill., was registered on behalf of the AAR to lobby on PTC. Lipinski’s son Dan is now a member of Congress who serves on the House Transportation Committee.

Engineers have complained about the influence of the train

I'd say 99% of people I've met in my life can tell what hate speech is when they read it.

This is the "appeal to the reasonable man" approach. It's quite common in law. Basically punts the decision to a randomly selected judge who is just trusted to be reasonable.

The problem is that the people deciding what reasonable means are of course never a perfect cross section of society at large. In the UK there have been cases where e.g. someone posted to Facebook that he hated British soldiers and he hoped they would go to die and go to hell because of all the muslims they killed.

This was interpreted as being literal hate speech. He was arrested, charged with "a racially aggravated public order offense" and then found guilty of sending a "grossly offensive communication" and sentenced to community service. The police explained, "he didn’t make his point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother".

Most likely this post would violate Twitters policies (if Twitter allowed such a long tweet).

Now what about posts like these? What about tweets that threaten "the terrorists" with death? Do you seriously think Twitter, an American company, is going to start shutting down these sorts of accounts? What about movie studios tweeting quotes from American Sniper to promote it?

I am seriously skeptical. Most likely it will be like every other attempt to do this I've seen - what is or isn't threatening or abusive will depend entirely on the world view of the people doing the moderation and how famous/politically connected the tweeters are. It won't ever attempt to be even handed.

The intercept believes that dice are cryptographically secure, and I wouldn't doubt it if they were well polished. Honestly, it's probably much easier is it to secure the integrity of the results of rolling dice, if everyone in a crowd watches the roll. (Of course, you'd need reasonable physical security to protect against enraged losers)

Rewrite the drive's firmware so it cannot be used for anything but encrypted backup and only when given a certain key. You'll just need to borrow some of Equation's hard drive firmware rewriting malware, and use it correctly.

Encrypt with GPG and a 20 character random passphrase.

FIFTY.

Use a passphrase, not a password

I wouldn't doubt thaht the NSA has broken iPhone's encryption. https://firstlook.org/theinter...

In real surveys with a scientific basis, an extremely high percentage of Americans could not name the Vice-President, or any Supreme Court justice, let alone Edward Snowden. Historically, Americans are easy marks for deception by government and 'journalism' (Amiri Baraka's "slobbering prostitute reporters", if you will). https://firstlook.org/theinter... Put that in your crack pipes and smoke it.

> You know, I'm a pretty heavy user of tinfoil with an inherent distrust of government.

Just wait and see that it turns out these guys were 'groomed' by the FBI, like all the others. Their vehicle is going to be packed with fake explosives, supplied by the FBI. They intended to ram through the gate (because they are stupid, just the way the FBI likes 'em) and detonate it somewhere on base - maybe at one of the other buildings that have nothing to do with the NSA. And the only reason they actually got to the gate is that their FBI 'handlers' were sloppy and lost track of them. Probably because they got up earlier than planned and left before the FBI handlers got to work that day...

That is totally made up on the spot, but I don't think its implausible. I wish it were, but the FBI program of terrorist grooming has just gotten completely out of hand.

Prior to landing on /. for the Nth time today ( is a slow day ) I finished reading an article about password complexity and a system called " DiceWare "

The main article can be found here with the Wikipedia version here

The system doesn't rely on crazy levels of complexity in a password, rather longer and random words combined to form phrases which are far easier to remember. If only we could get some sort of standard in place so that every website you visit doesn't use their own in house rules for password length, complexity and storage of the hashed and salted versions. Would be nice to know using a thirty character passphrase would work across the board ( different for each site obviously ) instead of having to hop through the password rules for every site :|

Linky:

The document suggests CSE has access to a series of sophisticated malware tools developed by the NSA as part of a program known as QUANTUM. As The Intercept has previously reported, the QUANTUM malware can be used for a range of purposes – such as to infect a computer and copy data stored on its hard drive, to block targets from accessing certain websites, or to disrupt their file downloads. Some of the QUANTUM techniques rely on redirecting a targeted person’s internet browser to a malicious version of a popular website, such as Facebook, that then covertly infects their computer with the malware.

According to one top-secret NSA briefing paper, dated from 2013, Canada is considered an important player in global hacking operations. Under the heading “NSA and CSEC cooperate closely in the following areas,” the paper notes that the agencies work together on “active computer network access and exploitation on a variety of foreign intelligence targets, including CT [counter terrorism], Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and Mexico.” (The NSA had not responded to a request for comment at time of publication. The agency has previously told The Intercept that it “works with foreign partners to address a wide array of serious threats, including terrorist plots, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and foreign aggression.”)

Notably, CSE has gone beyond just adopting a range of tools to hack computers.

According to the Snowden documents, it has a range of “deception techniques” in its toolbox. These include “false flag” operations to “create unrest” and using so-called “effects” operations to “alter adversary perception.” A false-flag operation usually means carrying out an attack but making it look like it was performed by another group – in this case, likely another government or hacker. Effects operations can involve sending out propaganda across social media or disrupting communications services. The newly revealed documents also reveal that CSE says it can plant a “honeypot” as part of its deception tactics, possibly a reference to some sort of bait posted online that lures in targets so that they can be hacked or monitored.

Glenn Greenwald asks a more interesting and important question than /. encourages its readers to consider when Greenwald asks "What's Scarier: Terrorism, or Governments Blocking Websites in its Name?" and then he answers it, "More damage has been inflicted historically by censorship than by the "terrorism" used to justify it.". Considering how little of a threat terrorism is in the US relative to other known dangers ('Terrorism Still Less Deadly in US Than Lack of Health Insurance, Salmonella', 'Gun Murders vs. Terrorism by the Numbers') one has to wonder about other western countries such as France.

For the most part, the fire department doesn't drive around stripping off insulation from electrical wires or drilling little holes in gas pipes under your house. Sure they _theoretically_ could, but the CIA is actually at this very moment doing this exact thing.

The biggest part of this story is a poisoned Xcode, and it's not even mentioned in TFS. WTF?

The security researchers also claimed they had created a modified version of Apple's proprietary software development tool, Xcode, which could sneak surveillance backdoors into any apps or programs created using the tool. ...

The modified version of Xcode, the researchers claimed, could enable spies to steal passwords and grab messages on infected devices. Researchers also claimed the modified Xcode could "force all iOS applications to send embedded data to a listening post." It remains unclear how intelligence agencies would get developers to use the poisoned version of Xcode.

https://firstlook.org/theinter...

'the editorial board at the New York Times has suggested that the most constructive approach to reducing the spread of cyber threats would be to "accelerate international efforts to negotiate limits on the cyberarms race, akin to the arms-control treaties of the Cold War."'

I would have thought the solution is to built 'computer' that can't so easily be hacked. DDOD attacks only being feasable because of all those hacked Windows desktops out there in cyberspace.

IRAN -- Current Topics, Interaction with GCHQ

" Iranian Cyber Attacks: Iran continues to conduct didtribituted denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks against numerous U.S. financial institutions and is currently in the third phase of a series of such attacks that began in August 2012."

Don't worry, he won't. And this story (like so much of /.) is "hyping empty garbage" (what Glenn Greenwald called Politicoâ(TM)s digital editorial director Blake Hounshell, but applies quite well here). Greenwald explains it all excellently, as per usual.

NSA and DEA team up to share data
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...

NSA and FBI team up to monitor American Muslim leaders (who've committed no crime)
https://firstlook.org/theinter...

As for the retroactivity, do you seriously think that dragjnet data-gathering like the NSA practices on every single one of us is meant to be used *proactively*? Are you going to tell me it'll just be used to target terr'roists?

You were right.

Meh.

I'm worried that every SIM on the planet may be backdoored.

https://firstlook.org/theinter...

The U.S. Media and the 13-Year-Old Yemeni Boy Burned to Death Last Month by a U.S. Drone

Most Americans, by design, will have no idea that their government just burned a 13-year-old boy to death and then claimed he was a Terrorist. If they do know, the boy will be kept hidden, dehumanized, nameless, without the aspirations or dreams or grieving parents on display for victims of America’s adversaries (just as Americans were swamped with stories about an Iranian-American journalist detained in Iran for two months, Roxana Saberi, while having no idea that their own government imprisoned an Al Jazeera photojournalist, Sami al-Haj, in Guantanamo for seven years without charges).

Way to go! Rectal feeding freedom fighters!

The U.S. Media and the 13-Year-Old Yemeni Boy Burned to Death Last Month by a U.S. Drone

Most Americans, by design, will have no idea that their government just burned a 13-year-old boy to death and then claimed he was a Terrorist. If they do know, the boy will be kept hidden, dehumanized, nameless, without the aspirations or dreams or grieving parents on display for victims of America’s adversaries (just as Americans were swamped with stories about an Iranian-American journalist detained in Iran for two months, Roxana Saberi, while having no idea that their own government imprisoned an Al Jazeera photojournalist, Sami al-Haj, in Guantanamo for seven years without charges).

Way to go! Rectal feeding freedom fighters!

The U.S. Media and the 13-Year-Old Yemeni Boy Burned to Death Last Month by a U.S. Drone

Most Americans, by design, will have no idea that their government just burned a 13-year-old boy to death and then claimed he was a Terrorist. If they do know, the boy will be kept hidden, dehumanized, nameless, without the aspirations or dreams or grieving parents on display for victims of America’s adversaries (just as Americans were swamped with stories about an Iranian-American journalist detained in Iran for two months, Roxana Saberi, while having no idea that their own government imprisoned an Al Jazeera photojournalist, Sami al-Haj, in Guantanamo for seven years without charges).

Way to go! Rectal feeding freedom fighters!

You seem like a really reasonable guy.
These people are evil, sick fucks. There's no doubt about it. But you should put what they do in the context of what is done to them. First thing to look at- the bombed out building.
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
Then that.

I want these guys stomped out of existence as much as the next guy, but I'm pretty goddamn sure we're doing *nothing* but making more of them with every father that sees his child's destroyed remains in a bombing campaign against those people. I'm sure this dynamic has existed long enough that they're figured it out and actively WANT us to bomb them to some extent.

That being said, do we just let them win? Of course not. But we HAVE to find a way to fight them without creating more of them. Doing so is the very definition of fucking stupid.

There's a relevant article (yes, nobody would ever read another FA), written by Glenn Greenwald.
The title is "Burning Victims to Death: Still a Common Practice"

Burning people alive? Yes, it IS barbaric: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/04/burning-victims-death-still-common-practice/

Shockingly enough, the author selectively quoted the NCTC document, creating a false and misleading narrative for shock value. From page 84 of the March 2013 NCTC whitelisting guidelines:

TERRORISM AND/OR TERRORIST ACTIVITIES: is a combination of denitions because none of
the federal law definitions of "terrorism" or "terrorist activities" were directly applicable to the
consolidated approach to watchlisting. For terrorist watchlisting purposes under this
Watchlisting Guidance, "terrorism and/or terrorist activities" combine elements from various
federal definitions and are considered to: involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human
life, property, or infrastructure that may be a violation of U.S. law, or may have been, if those
acts were committed in the United States; and, appear intended to intimidate or coerce a
civilian population, infuence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or affect
the conduct of government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking.
This includes activities that facilitate or support TERRORISM and/or TERRORIST ACTIVITIES, such
as providing a safe house, transportation, communications, funds, transfer of funds or other
material benefit, false documentation or identifucation, weapons (including chemical, biological,
or radiological weapons), explosives, or training for the commission of act of terrorism and/or
TERRORIST ACTIVITY.

Emphasis added.

I'm no fan of the police state, either, but we should be honest on the facts. It's not merely the influencing the policy of a government that's considered "terrorism," it's doing so "by intimidation or coercion." Which I believe is a reasonable definition of terrorism.