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P2P Network Exposes Obama's Safehouse Location
Lucas123 writes "The location of the safe house used in times of emergency for the First Family was leaked on a LimeWire file-sharing network recently, a fact revealed today to members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Along with the safe house location, the LimeWire networks also disclosed presidential motorcade routes, as well as sensitive but unclassified document that listed details on every nuclear facility in the country. Now lawmakers are considering a bill to ban P2P use on government, contractor networks."
If it had been leaked by uploading it to a server, would they ban the ftp protocol?
GFA/M/S d-- s: a--- C++++ UBL++$ P+ L+++ !E- W++ N+ !o K- w--- !O !M !V PS++ PE Y+ PGP+ t+++ 5- X+ R tv@ b++ DI++++ D+ G
We must ban everything that we don't understand until we can feel safe again.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Its not P2P in itself that is wrong. It is the use. The leaked information could have wound up on a website, blog, or FTP server, and I'm almost sure nobody would be saying that those technologies should be banned.
whatever network administrator lets limewire traffic outside of the firewall needs tossed
If the leaked data was so sensitive, shouldn't it have been encrypted, or at the very, very least, password-protected? That seems like a no-brainer.
p2p on government networks eh, who would have thought it ? before you know it they'll be insisting on airgaps between the LAN and t'internet..
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Information wants to be free.
Especially high-value information.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
People who have no idea of how the Internet or its related technology works making laws to regulate it. Next it will be brief cases becasue sometimes important documents get left in them and then they get lost or stolen.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Because these documents could never be exposed using HTTP, FTP or a number of other protocols. So of course the answer is to ban P2P.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Banning or simply ensuring employees that they will be terminated in the event you use P2P software is a good idea. Financial Institutions already enforce strict policies regarding P2P software. Notice we haven't heard of a bank getting P2P'd lately?
Biden has already told the press the secret location of the VP's emergency bunker.
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/thegaggle/archive/2009/05/15/shining-light-on-cheney-s-hideaway.aspx
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
If any data is that sensitive, then the responsibility should be assigned to someone (an actual person). It will be their job to make sure it doesn't end up on the Internet. Wow. How tough is that?
They only say they want to ban P2P in government and contractor offices and frankly this does make sense. I don't work for the government, but I'm not about to start running Limewire or a torrent client on my work computer. I also certainly hope none of my coworkers do, since if they're dumb enough to, they're probably also dumb enough to let Limewire find and share any file on their harddrives that it wants - including code, payroll, proprietary software etc.
AccountKiller
Do they have anyone in charge of the Firewalls in the White house?
And why are they using Windows for security sensitive information?
Yeah, blame P2P, oh and Canada too, just to be sure.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Let me know when the government bans all forms of communication...
Until then, the problem with secret information is always going to be a matter of trusting the people who you share the secret. Secret service routes and secret emergency locations are secret for a reason, but this kind of breach of security is not due to the technology used to leek it, but rather due to the people who leaked it.
Rather than going after P2P technology, the government should be looking into who leaked this information and making it easier to discover and prove who leaked it, and then put them in front of a firing squad.
And any members of congress looking at technology tools and thinking that the tools did the sharing and not the people using them are themselves tools of an uneducated public. We need a better education system, but we're not going to get one by electing uninformed politicians whose only issue is whether women have a right to emergency procedures if they involve the termination of a pregnancy. Running for the US government is a popularity contest, and once people make it there, the job becomes lining ones pocket through lobbying.
Sure, I may be over dramatizing to make a point... Did you expect anything less on Slashdot? :)
They aren't banning the use of peer to peer, they are banning the use of p2p on government sensitive networks
Shouldn't that be a duh? Would you consider it a bad idea for your bank to disallow limewire from being installed on their computers?
It looks like Biden is a Limewire user.
Let me guess: the safehouse is under the White House?
As others have said, the problem isn't P2P networks.
But something has to be done to insure our safety, right?
Wrong. If doing something like baning P2P technologies doesn't make us safer (and it will not), then doing so will cost us money for absolutely no return on said funds.
I never feel safer when people that make policy do so in a way that proves they have no grasp of the problem. They need to find out who leaked the information and deal with them. That is low tech, find who is at fault and ban THEM.
"Now lawmakers are considering a bill to ban P2P use on government, contractor networks."
P2P has never been by any means "Secure" (save ones built for a very specific function, like the blizzard patcher) - in fact programs like Limewire are known as the diseased prostitutes of the internet for all the trojans you will eventually acquire.
For the Government to use Limewire... for it to even BE there...
I can't even think of what to type next to describe such a fail. Facepalm doesn't cut it.
What they're really criminalizing is stupidity. Not P2P per se, but the use of a class of software that, when not properly configured, could give the world access to all your files, including ones that you may not want the world to have access to. And the kind of information on a government computer is can be so sensitive that you can't just make it a matter of policy, punishable by termination; you have to make it a crime.
Someone on here mentioned FTP, and they would be correct that setting up an FTP server on your machine and enabling FTP access to all the directories on your machine would be just as bad, perhaps even worse if you allow write access and gave a hacker the ability to push executable modules onto the host system.
But let's be honest, that's not enough. Any bill they come up with has to also make it a requirement that government and contractor systems prevent P2P software from reaching the outside world, with violation of the law punishable by heavy fines, mandatory complete shutdown investigation of the office/company, and and in the case of a contractor, being barred from being awarded government contracts ever again.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
I'm not sure why they're making such a big fuss about this.
All government departments should remove admin rights to their employees workstations so that they can't install unapproved software. There should also be period audits to ensure that unauthorized software didn't somehow find its way onto those workstations anyway and remove them.
What's the big deal?
This space left intentionally blank.
These are not commercial ISPs or home PCs we're talking about here. These are tax-payer financed networks. What business do these users have using tax-payer owned resources for downloading music/movies/etc. whether they are copyrighted or not? If you're not going to control the software installed on these workstations, at the very least the network traffic rules should not allow for this kind of outgoing traffic on client nodes.
This story is just like Biden revealing the secret bunker. The gov't needs to do a better job keeping secret things which need to be secret. You can't blame the inspector (e.g. P2P) for pointing out holes in your security. I want the First Family to be safe, but I'm unwilling to compromise my liberties to guarantee this (not that this is the proposed solution; I'm just saying).
At least flaws like these in security are being discovered during "peace" time.
Or the whole thing is just misdirection. It just smells funny.
Or it could be good old disinformation. It's hard to believe that the Fed's firewalls allow P2P traffic.
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
How could LimeWire let this happen? This is just as bad as fork and knife manufacturers who fail to keep fat, dumb people from eating too much.
I read through here and basically saw nothing but a bunch of smart ass comments about other ways documents could be lost or leaked. Great.
Tell me* when the last time you installed software on a briefcase and it automatically indexed all your media and documents, by default, and then broadcast it to millions of other people.
Tell me* when the last time you downloaded [ a linux distro / "something" ] from an ftp server, while in the meantime everyone else connected downloaded all of your media and documents (that were shared, again, by default).
Tell me* when the last time you posted a message on a forum, and while you did it, you accidentally attached a document containing all your passwords. Shared by default in Limewire.
And finally, tell me* the last time you downloaded ANYTHING via ANY p2p protocol that was legal and that didn't have an alternative place to download. Why the hell should anyone using a government computer be using Limewire or Bittorrent?
* Don't actually tell me. I'm not at all interested.
Whale
I heard a "security focal" in a large helpdesk group once tell us that mp3 files were "illegal" and anyone caught with them would be charged and fired.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Now that's an oxymoron definition. If it's genuinely important to the nation to keep a document secret, then classify it. If it's not important enough to classify, then it's not important enough to keep from the public. A transparent government is a good government.
Why stop there? Just ban p2p on the internet. Oh, and any other transfer protocol.
idiots
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So where is it?
Wow... Government IT Security is either forced to let nitwits use this stuff, or they are failing their employers horribly.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
It's rare that we even hear about Joe Computerguy fucking up by accidentally sharing his homemade porn stash by accident. The only examples I can think of were not accidental at all but jilted boyfriends trying to burn the ex. But ok, I can buy an accidental release -- you store your homemade porn in a default media directory, the p2p app does a scan for shareable media and autoselects it, ok, it's possible. The guy's an idiot but it's possible. But for government shit like this to make it out, the plans for Obama's canceled Marine One replacement, the stuff in TFA today? I know they say never attribute to malice what can best be explained by incompetence but this seems too deliberately stupid.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I can't find it via google either.
The former second in command filled many positions with NeoCon moles before retiring to Wyoming to re group.
I refuse to spell ChEny correctly.
1. I was blocking Limewire (and Kazaa, etc.) traffic for clients with substantially less security exposure for years and years. Most P2P networks are just hives of viruses, malware, exploits, illict file sharing, and worse. My clients pretty much expected it. Of course, blocking Webshots gots people a little hot, but they get over it.
2. Any bets that the actual culprit was a security wonk, figuring they were smarter than the rest of the world? Very few of the 'security' folk I've worked with actually practiced what they preached. And most either wandered from job to job, or lasted only until the first noticeable breach. One of my former clients made the news a few months ago, because someone was putting USB keys into their corporate servers. Even the PKI repository. Apparently they thought a free utility they got from a friend at a user group was really useful. Not.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Or where was it? It's public information now, and the President sure as hell isn't going to be using it anymore, so what's the harm in telling us?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The real fear is that somehow a scanned copy of the President's real birth certificate will leak out via P2P
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
I just don't buy that this is genuine. I am not saying it didn't happen, maybe it did...but I am saying that it seems like there is a campaign being orchestrated to allow the government to step on technologies that are decentralized and allow individuals to reach the masses with information very quickly and anonymously.
We saw it a couple of months ago with the (total bullshit red herring I might add) same scenario with the helicopter plans being "found on a P2P network" being described as " the plans for Marine One," just because Marine One is a modified version of that model of helicopter does not mean the plans for Marine One were leaked.
Like it or not (and I am sure some people will refuse to believe this) but the way that governments operate these days when they want to undermine or regulate something with popular public support is to either create an issue, ensure that an issue will be created, or wait for an issue they know is bound to occur and then jump out and say "Something must be done!" Or, "there must now be regulation," or "we can no longer afford these sorts of freedoms; safety and security must be our primary concern."
Every government in the world, particularly the US and UK is itching to control the net in every way possible; their corporate benefactors want it as well.
Lets ban all means in which people communicate, or at least have the government moderate it. MUAHHAHAHAH
...surely you've got the cash to just buy the tunes.
they could have fabricated similar testimony 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 year ago (you pick). oh wait, they did. meanwhile harddrives, laptops and usb drives keep wandering away with impunity & multi gigabytes of really sensitive data. god forbid you encrypt. much easier blame p2p on the house floor in front of the bright lights of the very media cartels who create this artificial drama.
Naval Observatory.
P2P wasn't already banned on government employee and government contractor systems?
And the award for "should have known better" goes to....
Government IT Professionals!!
I mean come on. Most private businesses have banned P2P software for a long time now. It's 2009 and this is still something that has to be brought up in regards to government systems?
Pure stupidity.....and a touch of laziness.
Well, so do I, but that's different.
But really--why be responsible focus on solving our nation's real problems, like our LOOMING debt, the economy, permanent loss of jobs overseas, health care, social security ... etc. etc. etc. when you can keep yourself busy addressing stupid little bull***t issues all day long and leave someone else to clean up the REAL mess.
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 32, 2009 - Details about a U.S. Secret Service safe house for the First Family - to be used in a national emergency - were found to have leaked written in pencil in a composition book recently, members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee were told this morning. Also unearthed in other spiral-bound notebooks, composition books, and loose sheets of paper in recent days were presidential motorcade routes and a sensitive but unclassified document listing details on every nuclear facility in the country, Robert Boback, CEO of Tiversa Inc. told committee members. The data came in a variety of forms: written in longhand, hand printed, in pencil, in ink, in crayon, even in photocopies or computer printouts.
The disclosures prompted the chairman of the committee Rep. Edolphus Moronicus Estupidisimus, (D-N.Y.), to call for a ban on the use of pens, pencils, notebooks, paper, photocopting equipment, and computer printers at all government offices and installations. "For our sensitive government information, the risk is simply too great to ignore," said Towns who plans to introduce a bill to enforce just such a ban on all forms of written information.
The problem is well-understood, but remains difficult to stop. The leaks typically occur when an office worker writes down, photocopies or prints information out on paper or in notebooks of various kinds for the purposes of sharing it with others in the workplace. In many cases, users inadvertently expose not just the documents they want to share, but also many other kinds of knowledge and information in their possession. Sometimes, it is done deliberately, sometimes accidentally due to poor adherence to security policies or simple incompetence.
"People just don't pay attention to what they're doing or think of the consequences of their acts," said Moronicus Estupidisimus.
They are not banning P2P they are banning running it on government PCs and contractors PCs.
Frankly any company that allowed it's employees to put Limewire on a work PC shouldn't be a government contractor.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
How much sensitive information was leaked via POTS, Cellular and the USPS? Should those be banned/content-regulated too? I don't see Congress going after these carriers/entities.
Well, if revealing its location poses a risk for Obama, then it is not much of a safehouse, is it? ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Presidential assassins are on the same side of this president: Leftist.
Sure, there's the odd anti-abortion bomber here and there, but those actually on the Right have no interest in changing the government with a gun wait until they've tried every other way.
Remember the guy that attacked in the recent Holocaust museum thing? A Jew hater- not a Christian. In fact he had SO much more to share with the president, it was scary.
(I was gonna use "anti-semite" there, but "Semite" refers to sand dwelling people, both Arab and Israeli.)
Christians, or those on the Right who pick up a gun leave the movement at that moment; both groups have a strict doctrine against killing the innocent. Anyone who tells you differently has an agenda.
The Left, however loves death. See Abortion, a eugenics for the poor ethnic classes. (Margret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood on this intent). They also hate to keep the old around, as well as the deformed. This is the concept of INCONVENIENT PEOPLE. You may be aware of other civilizations who found these, too.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
An FTP apps is less likely to have picked it up than some FS program that shared all of some foolish aid's "My Documents" folder or something of the like. What happened here with Limewire is less likely with other forms of P2P such as BitTorrent, etc, as many of the LW'ish programs tend to have options to search the drive for media or auto-add common locations to the shared repository.
I don't have a problem with blocking these types of filesharing apps on gov't computers. Unlike bittorrent I don't really see a legit use for them.
That should put any doubts aside. The president's entourage, especially the military parts, are capable enough ... it's just the "commander" (heh) "in chief"
Peer-to-peer networks have a multitude of applications, few of which run counter to security.
File-sharing, by definition, involves uploading files from your own computer to a network that distributes them uncontrollably.
The government is usually dumb about technology, but apart from the p2p/file-sharing distinction it makes perfect sense that they don't want this on a computer containing sensitive data. Companies tend to outlaw it as well. These are places that prohibit you from carrying portable memory in or out; they don't want file-sharing on there either, just like you wouldn't run Windows, IE or Outlook on them.
(Err... okay, they probably do. But every little bit helps, and if they throw out LimeWire, it's at least a first step toward security.)
Sounds like some Pentagon builder is trying to drum-up some construction business.
Inquiring minds want to know...
Isn't the issue here that A. apparently a government contractor had access to information that should be restricted to secret service staff and even then only disclosed on a need to know basis B. that we haven't already seen images of this person in shackles on CNN C. refer to A.
The proposed ban on P2P software in government agencies is not what surprises me. I think work locations should have a bunch of leeway in discouraging or banning non-work related, distracting, or potentially damaging activities.
Rather, it's the suggestion that this is all LimeWire's fault that catches me. I just downloaded and installed LimeWire for the first time on this Windows XP machine. After install, it shares nothing from your hard drive. If you click on My Files > Public Shared > Add Files, it brings up the standard browse and select a file window. It starts out in %UserProfile%, which is a bit odd but OK. If you select a folder to share, it asks "What kind of files do you want to share with the world from "folder name" and its subfolders?" (emphasis original).
You couldn't make it any more clear to the user if you hit them with a sledge hammer. I say, if anything is unintentionally shared, full responsibility falls on the user only, and not on this program or its creators.
BTW, this isn't just one guy saying it's LimeWire's fault. TFA says that a couple years ago, a committee told LimeWire "to implement changes in the company's products to make it harder for users to inadvertently share files", and the committee just said that they haven't done enough.
And now to uninstall LimeWire and remove any lingering stuff it leaves behind.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
sigh
I work at a civilian government lab, and P2P stuff is already forbidden on our network, but the reason is rather prosaic.
P2P schemes imply the transfer of data between government systems and third parties. Even for legal content, helping J. Random third party download their Ubuntu ISO or whatever is not government business, and so is not an appropriate use of the government network.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
About 5 years ago, I led a private project that looked at the terms most often searched over Limewire, Napster, etc. The results were most similar to those of an academic study that emerged a bit later: the most commonly-searched terms were NOT popular songs or p0rn. They were pings for bank account information, SSNs and passwords.
The problem is a piece of software that assumes it is a good idea to automatically configure the software to "share" the contents of an existing folder without user approval.
Let us imagine an application that you install on your computer to send email. Upon installation it assumes that it would be a good idea to send an email to everyone in your address book and attach every file in the "My Documents" folder to these emails. Would this be a good idea? No. Why would implicitly sharing all of the contents of the same folder with the world be any better an idea?
This is the same kind of software idiocy that has permiated the PC world since the first PC came into being. Let's make things easier and simpler for the user, often by doing things that indeed to make things easier and simpler but at the cost of security and confidence in the platform.
This just in
The official presidential safe house has been relocated to a new secure location
Stay tuned, film at 5
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
Now, I realize that's highly generic, but it's up to the organizational unit to write some sort of policy around the guidance. If they aren't able to do that, they're not in compliance with FISMA and the GAO should rightly be sticking a rather large boot up their ass.
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
-- Ernest Hemingway
Okay, I'm an army contractor, so maybe the rest of the government is different. But . . . P2P is ALREADY very, very, very, high on the list of forbidden applications. Really, this whole thing confuses me. How did sensitive (and presumably classified??) information get into this state to be compromised on a machine having a P2P server. I mean, how did it get on an internet machine, one, and two . . . what sort of unregulated machine was it on that it had P2P apps on it?? Installing a P2P app on an army-owned machine is illegal ;)
Isn't it more likely that someone used their work laptop as a home laptop, and it was mixing work files with home filesharing that was the problem, so no company firewall would stop them?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Some leaks are good though, and necessary for maintenance of a free Republic. They are last ditch efforts by someone who is aware of "clear and present danger" when all else has failed to affect honesty and following the law in whatever bailiwick this person is working in, and usually the leakers are anything but traitors, they can be overwhelming patriots helping to expose the real bad guys and bad stuff. They can help expose government lies and corruption, when the official channels (all the way to *the very top*) are themselves completely corrupt, making any other effort doomed to failure.
Here's a prime example. This leak was a *really big deal* for my boomer generation and certainly did some good, long range/historically speaking.
He has a penchant for stepping in shit all the time. Like the time he called his future boss Obama clean and well-spoken for a negroid.
The college I work at is not a massive environment with a small budget - but we managed to purchase a couple of ASA firewalls with an IPS module to identify and stop P2P traffic.
It just fucking works - and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg to keep asshats from torrenting television shows and movies on our limited uplink and campus WANS.
The scary part is someone with this data was dumb enough to run a P2P client on the same machine. Who knows whatelse was on that machine.
I misread the name in the headline as "Osama" at first, couldn't figure out why US government was so upset about us finding his location until I reread it.
So who exactly would stoop this low?
... and they go all medieval on us. Sheesh.
Monitor bandwidth usage on IIS6 in real-time: http://www.waetech.com/services/iisbm/
... assuming these documents were shared by accident: There was a p2p program running on the computer sharing some directories on the disk, then somebody who was not aware of that or does not understand how these programs work, copied the documents in question to a shared location. Or, alternatively somebody who didn't understand how the program works installed it and accidentally shared the location that contained these documents.
In these cases banning the use of p2p software on government computers would actually have prevented the problem.
Jewels of information like this are called EEIFIs (E - Fees) -essential elements of friendly information. They are bits of unclassified information that combine to become real intelligence. Some tool was responsible for the leak of the designs of the Presidential helicopter awhile back. They can have serious consequences when all brought together. Stuff like this is why we need a cyber-command; too many idiots doing idiot things. This stuff is real. You can bet there's some serious work being done to revamp emergency plans. Don't get me started on the integrity of the people who freely release this information.
The no-brainer to me is that this whole thing was a setup by the MPAA/RIAA. This is EXACTLY the sort of thing that let's them go to Congress and say "See, P2P supports T E R O R R I S M !!!" I bet one of their shills is the one who uploaded these files (what pirate would upload something like that to Limewire, instead of movies and music?).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You're joking, right?
Almost every computer that handles classified information for the DoD is connected to a network. Not the Internet of course, but SIPRNET or one of the 30 or so other classified networks, depending on classification level and other considerations. I don't recall ever needing "a key, a passcard, and supervision" to access any of them, just a user name and password, like every other computer.
Damn near nothing is paper only anymore, and any time I needed a copy of a document I clicked the "print" button in Word or Acrobat, walked over to the printer and grabbed it. And yep, I can email them too! Only to accounts on the same network of course, and I am ultimately responsible for determining whether or not the recepient has the appropriate clearance and need to know, but it's that simple.
Lots of things are sensitve but unclassified (also known as SBU).
I hate calling people out like this, but you're spouting lots of FUD. You're either intentionally lying about how things work, or you've never had any contact with anything classified and are rattling off garbage that you either made up or pulled from some crappy novel.
Jeremy http://alucinari.net
What do you think the 2nd amendment means today, and what do you think the founders meant it to do?
I mean, really, is this a trick question? I know there are a lot of (mainly right wing) blowhards yelling "you'll get my assault rifle, when you pry it out of my dead, cold fingers!" but is that really what the founders meant?
Did they mean, that the government can't require gun shows to do reasonable checks to slow down the gun running from U.S. to Mexico by Mexican drug lords — guns that often enough find their way to the good ol' U.S. of A. for the above mentioned blowhards to use as an argument in "guns should not only be in the hands of criminals" and "in New York City you can't get a handgun legally, but have no trouble getting one illegally".
Unfortunately, the Virginia Tech moved the issue in the wrong direction by making any mental patient unlikely to ever get a legal handgun in home state, but have no trouble finding one in another one. And this, because mental patients are the most likely to misuse it? No, actually, people, who do something like that have seldom been psych ward patients, and are only afterward seen to have exhibited signs of inordinate stress, violent behavior etc. — and have quite often been begging for someone to notice they're looking for help, but everybody just tells them to "cowboy up, everybody feels down every now and then."
I know that in my arguments I am using the same kind of tactics as the above mentioned blowhards. Well, another of their favorite sayings is that "you gotta fight fire with fire!"
I am also quite aware that there is no simple way to solve the problem.
Every problem has a solution that is simple, easy and wrong. Selling our Liberty for a little Security is a much too de
You mentioned "trust" and "defense contractor" in the same sentence.
Something in the Multiverse will break for that!
Every problem has a solution that is simple, easy and wrong. Selling our Liberty for a little Security is a much too de
That's we should hold a lot of these transnational corporations (including the defense industry) and various politicians to a strict standard. Remember Clinton and Loral? Forget BJs and lying to grand juries and on TV to the American public, that's chump change, that missile transfer tech was some serious treasonous action right there that just got ignored. And our supposed big "ally" in the middle east, the nation that we cannot criticize or be labled racist, guilty of "hate speech" or something, got caught trying to sell air to air tech they got from us to the same "manufacturer to the world". In their case it wasn't treason, just espionage and fraud. Again..nothing happens. The USS Liberty attack, covered up for years and lied about at the highest levels, an overt act of *war*. ..and nothing happens. The big lie about the tonkin gulf nam attacks...nothing happens to the perps. Some of that stuff isn't leaks, it is just either coverups of what should be leaked, or downright lies concocted and pushed for an agenda that wouldn't be "popular" without the lies.
And talk about high level corruption... I never did comment here about that skunk McNamara....rotting in hell is too good for him. The epitome of corporate blood profits hiding inside official policy. At least LBJ and Nixon are gone, too bad that war criminal Kissinger is still kicking. Why any civilized nation would let that blood drenched ghoul cross their borders is beyond me. That man is responsible for any number of massacres/wars/murders and other sorts of geopolitical rankness, and *he's still doing it*, still meddling, big politicians still listening to him.
It might also be, that the company has already made some money from RIAA, MPAA and/or M$.
Who would most like to get P2P off the web? The first two, because they perceive it as a threat.
Who creates a virtual-monopoly desktop OS that has ridiculous vulnerabilities they don't like to address? The last one.
Besides, it is well within feasibility, that Micro$oft execs think P2P is responsible for a big chunk of the (albeit slowly) growing popularity of Linux. I mean, they hired Seinfeld as their spokesman, and then launched a funny service called "Bing". These are guys, who live in late 1980s or early 1990s and think they just nailed two of the biggest hit shows on air.
Conjecture, I admit. All of the above, except the bit about RIAA and MPAA wanting P2P off the web, the monopoly desktop OS, ridiculous vulnerabilities someone does not like to address, Seinfeld deal or... Bing, was it?
Bada-Bing! Hahahahaha....
Every problem has a solution that is simple, easy and wrong. Selling our Liberty for a little Security is a much too de
I had missed that connection, good memory there!