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9 November 2001. Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe

November 8, 2001 When Osama Bin Ladin Was Tim Osman

By J. Orlin Grabbe

The two men headed to the Hilton Hotel in Sherman Oaks, California in the late Spring of 1986 were on their way to meet representatives of the mujahadeen, the Afghan fighters resisting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

One of the two, Ted Gunderson, had had a distinguished career in the FBI, serving as some sort of supervisor over Special Agents in the early 60s, as head of the Dallas field office from 1973-75, and as head of the Los Angeles field office from 1977-1979. He retired to become an investigator for, among others, well-known attorney F. Lee Bailey. And all along the way, Gunderson, whether or not actually a CIA contract agent, had been around to provide services to various CIA and National Security Council operations, as he was doing now.

In more recent years Gunderson was to become controversial for his investigations into child prostitution rings, after he became convinced of the innocence of an Army medical doctor named Jeffrey McDonald, who had been convicted of the murder of his wife and three young children in the 1970s. This has led to various attempts by the patrons and operators of the child prostitution industry to smear Gunderson's reputation.

Michael Riconosciuto was there to discuss assisting the mujahadeen with MANPADs--Man Portable Air Defense Systems. Stinger missiles were one possibility. If the U.S. would permit their export, Riconosciuto could modify the Stinger's electronics, so the guided missile would still be effective against Soviet aircraft, but would not be a threat to U.S. or NATO forces.

But Riconosciuto had another idea. Through his connections with the Chinese industrial and military group Norinco, he could obtain the basic components for the unassembled Chinese 107 MM rocket system. These could be reconfigured into a man-portable, shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft guided missile sytem, and produced in Pakistan at a facility called the Pakistan Ordinance Works. The mujahadeen would then have a lethal weapon against Soviet helicopter, observation, and transport aircraft.

Riconosciuto was more than just an expert on missile electronics; he was also an expert on electronic computers and associated subjects such as cryptology (see my "Michael Riconosciuto on Encryption").

Riconosciuto was a prodigy who had grown up in the spook community. The Riconosciuto family had once run Hercules, California, as a company town. In the early days (1861) a company called California Powder Works had been established in Santa Cruz, CA. It later purchased land on San Pablo Bay, and in 1881 started producing dynamite, locating buildings in gullies and ravines for safety purposes. A particularly potent type of black powder was named "Hercules Powder", which gave the name to the town of Hercules, formally incorporated in 1900. In World War I, Hercules became the largest producer of TNT in the U.S. Hercules, however, had gotten out of the explosives business by 1940 when an anhydrous ammonia plant was constructed. In 1959 Hercules began a new manufacturing facility to produce methanol, formaldehyde, and urea formaldehyde. In 1966 the plant was sold to Valley Nitrogen Producers. Labor problems led to a plant closure in 1977. In 1979 the plant and site was purchased by a group of investors calling themselves Hercules Properties, Ltd.

However, Michael and his father Marshall Riconosciuto, a friend of Richard Nixon, continued to run the Hercules Research Corporation. In the early 1980s Michael also served as the Director of Research for a joint venture between the Wackenhut Corporation of Coral Gables, Florida, and the Cabazon Band of Indians in Indio, Calif

This device is thought to secure your calls against eavesdropping from the Telcos (read: the government). The GSM encryption will not guard you against that, as the telcos still have the possibilities to store and deliver to the government your unencrypted voice data. And this is exactly what they do in Switzerland, where the producer of this device is located (see http://cryptome.sabotage.org/ch-ilets-regs.htm).

From their FAQ page:

I'VE BEEN TOLD THAT THE TELECOMMUNICATION PROVIDERS ALSO USE AN ENCRYPTION, DON'T THEY?
Yes, they do. But this kind of encryption called A5 is not effective enough to secure your calls. With the so called 'IMSI Catcher' A5 encryption can be turned off. Another fact is that their encryption is only effective between your mobile phone and the Base Station. The whole way through the network (public?), and maybe some more over the air radio connection, the call is not protected by this encryption.

Use this

It's a little frustrating when I want to try OpenBSD, and I can't because there's no ISO to FTP or torrent...I want to quickly download, install, poke around. Not spend $X on a CD, wait for it to come in the mail...

If your sole purpose is to just "poke around" and try out OpenBSD, there are plenty of people offering workable unofficial ISOs that are functionally equivalent. Sabotage.org has one that I've used; if you have requirements that demand a feature only available in the latest version, you are well beyond the stage of "poke around" and a budget request is in order. If you want something for free that is one of the project's ways of making ends meet...well, sorry, can't help you much there.

If you are that much a stickler for getting the "official" CD image, then that goes quite a ways beyond the "poke around" level of interest, and whoever is dictating the requirement for the official image either needs to pony up more money or more training/education to close the gap between bringing up the "official" OpenBSD and an FTP-based install (for just playing around, there is no difference). As any number of OpenBSD folks will attest, getting any of the unofficial images will more than suffice to satisfy your curiosity about the OS, and you won't have to retrain if you switch to the official CD's later. Personally, if I were you I would simply just follow the FTP-based install instructions; to really "play around" with a new OS and get any reasonable feel for it you're going to spend a week with it, so doing the FTP install is a fine way to introduce yourself to the OS (if for nothing else than how it lays out devices, for example) and install it at the same time. The instructions are extremely detailed and specific, certainly easy enough for people like yourself who dabble with different OS's and distros. Actual time spent messing around with the installation modulo the download time (which you would have spent anyways) will probably total no more than 1-2 hours.

Finally, note that for disaster recovery purposes, installation from FTP/HTTP/rsync/etc. repositories is one recovery mode that should be supported. You cannot absolutely count upon the availability of the discs, so any production-level interest that has any disaster recovery component (and if that component doesn't exist, you're playing with fire) should require familiarity with the FTP-based installation.

This should help you out. It is also possible to download the floppy and install over nfs or by having the installer fetch the files directly over the web. You can also use your method, which is no where near the hassle of linux from scratch.

Jared

There's absolutely no reason to believe you.

Well, I happen to live in Geneva and, like it or not, one couldn't possibly avoid being in the demonstration at some point for it's quite a small town and it was blocking most of the downtown area for almost a week. The demonstration was against a G8 summit taking place in Evian, France, but the French authorities had tightly locked the whole place and no demo could take place there. Geneva being very close and a much bigger city than Evian, the bulk of the demo took place here. At some point there was a HUGE cross-border walk and I can assure you there were LOTS of people, for this summit was highly impopular due to the presence of Bush and Blair who are frankly hated here. Imagine a 10 miles long procession of peaceful protesters.

I took many photos - which are not online at the moment - but will gladly send you some should you request them and prove me you're not working for any government. Given the present censorship atmosphere in here, I'd rather not have them visible to all on a swiss-hosted server.

No, not funny. A police officer's job is stressful enough without having his/her house being a target of some asshole or paranoid schizophrenic who think's he's saving the world by harrassing your kids and your home. That's juvenile bullshit.

I think it's our duty as citizens to point at cops when, instead of doing their jobs properly, they start behaving like the ones they're supposed to arrest, even encouraging such conducts. These cops believe they can do whatever they wish and get their orders from a well-know right-wing Distict Attorney with no sympathy whatsoever for the anti-globalization movement. Several of Geneva's elected representatives (wearing OBSERVER vests in the demo) got gased and shot (with rubber bullets) and then procecuted for "encouraging civil unrest". Neo-Liberals used these events to undermine left-wing political parties ever since, dissing the fact the police had been terribly mismanaged and abusive in its response. Furthermore, the only cops who worked properly were German riot-cops "hired" by our authorities because no other state in the country agreed on helping our stupid local police force (nice feeling of national unity here...), whose commander declared he had never seen poorer management and judgement from local authorities ever.

Oh really, where are these supposed mirrors?

Here's one of many

And here's some sites with lots of photos from the events:

here and here (in French).

Proof?
This guy may be telling the truth, or he could be making up 95% of this. Unfortunately, Mr. Max Von H.'s post is so lacking in substance that we'll never know whether he's telling the truth or he's making up most of this to gain notoriety.

Well I hope I've managed to dissipate some of the doubt that seems to overcome every one of your brainfarts. I suppose you've never found yourself demonstrating for or against anything in your life, only to find some hysterical cops firing at you as an answer.

You're a Bush supporter, aren't you?

See aerial photos of his house.

(mirror site) http://cryptome.sabotage.org/gates-eyeball.htm
(main site) http://cryptome.org/gates-eyeball.htm

Here is the relevant page:

http://cryptome.sabotage.org/sec-con.htm

So would making the subpeona public in this case help or hurt the cause?

looks interesting. (mirror)

Here it is