>>The chances that the US could pull off an action like this against UK interests are pretty slight, if you have ever been to NSA or GCHQ headquarters you will know exactly why.
Why?
Because something like 10% of the Fort Meade staff and 30% of the GCHQ staff are British and US foreign nationals respectively. As a Brit I can get a gold ID card at Fort Meade which allows me to work basically anywhere on the site. No other foreign national can. Same in reverse at GCHQ.
The only exception is the Whitehouse, which I know about since as is well documented on slashdot I did some security work there but had to sit in a coffee shop across the road from the Executive Office Building. When Nixon was getting paranoid about everyone he started to believe that the British were spying on him. So he called in the NSA to have the oval office sweeped for bugs, he did not say why. As it happened the guy who was on duty that day was a Brit. So when he arrived Nixon went ape-shit and signed an executive order that requires all security personel working at the Whitehouse and Executive Office Building to be US citizens.
The idea that the CIA could do this type of thing and not have the Brits notice is simply not credible. In any case the US was bidding for the Siberian pipeline under Nixon, they only objected to the UK involvement after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
During the Nixon-Ford-Carter period the official policy was detente. The idea that the CIA was off blowing up Siberian oil pipelines causing huge civilian casualties is stupid enough. The idea that a program this big could happen without someone telling either Carter or Wilson (the UK PM) is pretty rich.
In case you don't get the message here, I am not trying to claim that the CIA are not apt to act stupidly, they have done so many times. But they never did anything that was comparable to this, not intentionaly. Not even Gladio went this wrong.
He certainly was a fascist. He annexed the oil fields to his personal control.
Mosadegh nationalized the oil fields after Anglo-Persian refused to allow him to even have the books audited. It was well known that the Iranians were being cheated of the megre share they were allowed of the oil revenues. Even the US administration thought that Anglo-Persian had brought the crisis on themselves. Had they offered a 50:50 split they would have kept their place.
No, they were not. The Shah, secular whatever his faults, kept their power down.
The installation of the shah as dictator was never going to be very stable for very long. The Shah was only the second of his line, his father had replaced the previous monarchy only 40 years earlier. The way the Shah was installed meant that he would never be seen as anything more than a foreign puppet and his eventual fall was inevitable. It was highly unlikely that the mullahs would ever have gained control if operation Ajax had never taken place.
What are you smoking? Saddam's involvement with the CIA was brief, and long after he put himself in power.
Saddam came to power in a party coup with US support. The CIA provided him with lists of opponents to liquidate. The US supported Saddam from the very beginning of his rule, all the way through to the invasion of Kewait. Even that would have been allowed if he had only kept the northern oil fields where the Kewaitis had been under-drilling Iraq's oil fields which was the original agreement.
Iran did have CIA involvement. However, Saddam put himself in power, and the CIA only helped him (along with many others) during a brief part of his long reign.
The CIA was mucking about in Iraqi politics ever since the British left.
DirecTV does carry porn -- and some of the channels are the same as Dish Network. They have Playboy, Spice, and three hardcore channels. From what I hear, Dish will show more (namely: anal), but DirecTV does carry porn (channels 594 - 598)
I have always wondered just how hard core the hard core is on these channels. Is it the type of hard core you get in some hotel rooms where 'hard core' means that the couple are really having sex but you can't see it because there is a blob in the way?
I just don't feel curious enough to pay $20 to find out.
You would need to know the extent and nature of the CIA's penetration of Soviet institutions before you can make such a claim.
From what we know of the Soviet penetration of the CIA and FBI it is clear that it was nowhere nearly large enough. If you are correct and there was a massive network of Western moles then Safire has just blown a very important secret.
We are dealling with a series of unknowns here, and yes there is a claim to privilleged acess to information. But that cannot be allowed to be a trump card. You have no idea what my sources are either.
Safire's claim is not credible for a whole rack of reasons, not least the fact that he has published politically motivated bogus intel stories before. If his story was credible in every respect except for this particular one it might be believable, but the problem is that there is almost no single part of it that is believable.
You don't need to go much further than the claimed goal, to wreck the pipeline. Sabotage was unlikely to put the pipeline out of commission permanently (it is working today) but was likely to kill thousands of civilians. The superpowers did not do that kind of thing to each other, that would open them to retribution in kind.
Soviets are pretty well-known for not being as through or careful as those in the US are before implementing technology.
Hence the reason Safire's claim that the US would think it necessary to help them cause massive civillian casualties.
As far as your time tables are concerned, you are using the same source of this story - the news media and government (which you appear to disbelieve) - for the fact that the Soviets were 5 years behind us technologically.
If as was claimed the Soviets were basically copying Western technology they would be at least one production cycle behind the West. In those days that was about five years.
Sure, I'd believe that overall, life was not as modern in USSR as it was in the USA at the time. However, is it not remotely possible that at least a handful of people had access to more up-to-date western technology?
Of course there were, if you read Dolkady you would see quite a lot of cutting edge research, particularly in mathematics and theoretical physics. They had huge problems when it came to practical engineering.
The issue was not just the avialability of technology it was the breadth. A computer is not much by itself. You need the whole infrastructure. The Russians were not simply copying Western technology blind, they did not have the resources to do that. They had to adapt to the production methods available to them. The Russians had to strip the thing they were copying down to basic principles and build it up again from scratch.
The idea you could do that and not notice that the plans had been cooked...
And finally, since your sig suggests you just have a problem with the government in general, what makes you think the CIA even thought of the negative consequences of leaving "sleeper" chips out in the open for the KGB to grab?
Well since the President during that spell would be Jimmy Carter I don't see why thinking Bush is an idiot would lead me to a biased analysis. I think the CIA would reject this scheme as being simply too far fetched. The CIA is a human intelligence organization. They don't do technology.
Maybe they assumed the Soviets were behind in technology 5 years and didn't think they had anything to control like what they used the chips to control. What makes you think they planted chips to cause an explosion?
I don't, Safire does. I think the story is a total crock and is no more believable than any of the other fairy stories told by Safire of late. According to the world according to Safire, Bush was warned of an attack against Airforce One and the Whitehouse involving a nuclear weapon on 9/11 [Obvious drivel since if the Whitehouse even suspected that they would have to know much more about 9/11 than they did], Saddam had WMD [More drivel, proven false by Kay] and Hilary is running for President this year [which is probably why she decided to skip Iowa, New Hampshire and the rest of the primaries].
Where in this whole thread do Republicans come into play?
Safire is a well known Republican/Likud flack and his stories are usually little more than embellished press releases from his political masters.
If you've ever read some of the history of U.S. submarine intelligence, you'll discover some great stuff like the Soviet cable taps that took place for nearly a decade, until some rat at the CIA sold out the fact for a mere $2million.
I have read a lot of the history of the US intelligence services. Enough to know the difference between the CIA crew at Langley and the rest of the agencies.
Interception of signals and decoding them is the job of the NSA. The CIA is only a small part of the US intelligence services, it is not even the largest part of the intelligence budget. Submarine intelligence would be the primary responsibility of naval intelligence and the signals would be decoded by the NSA at Fort Meade. The CIA would have nothing to do with that.
No, the Allende government was not democratic. By this time, they had outlawed opposition political parties. Also, you exagerate by a factor of 10. Pinochet's execution toll was more like 4,000. A lot less than the bloodbath and purges Allende and the USSR had planned.
I'm not surprised that you pump out this type of appology for fascism as AC. No, Pinochet did not 'execute', he had people murdered. There were 4,000 murdered during the coup alone. The figure of 40,000 is well established.
But lets imagine for a moment that he 'only' murdered 4,000. Was the Nixon administration justified in putting a murderer into power?
There is of course no evidence whatsoever for the claim that Allende was not elected by the people or that he planned any form of coup. Of course there are a lot of people who will make these claims to try to justify the coup, but they have no more substance than allegations that Saddam had WMD "that are ready for use within 45 minutes" as Tony Blair claimed.
Similar is true of the fascist Mossadegh. The Shah held off the advent of the much worse Khomeini reign of terror.
Mossadegh was no fascist, he was a nationalist whose 'crime' in the eyes of Eisenhower and Churchill was to insist that BP pay a fair price for the oil they took. Operation Ajax was justified to Eisenhower by claims made by the Dulles brothers that the USSR was plotting an invasion through the North. The fact that Stalin died before operation Ajax was not allowed to affect this analysis.
Justifying operation Ajax by what followed is ridiculous. The mullahs could not have taken over if Mossadegh had not been replaced by the Shah. The mullahs are the result of operation Ajax, not a justification for it. Next you will be claiming that the Versailles treaty should have imposed harsher conditions on Germany to prevent the rise of Hitler.
This happened only rarely. The CIA overall has been quite successful.
There actions have backfired far more frequently than they have succeeded. Noriega and Saddam were both CIA proteges, Pinochet, the Shah of Iran were installed in CIA led coups. Meddling in Guatelmala, Honduras, Nicaragua led to civil wars. And those are just the cases where the CIA were the principal actors.
The record of the CIA is by any objective standard a failure. The problem with the macho posturing they engage in is that you have to have brains and a strategy for realpolitique. The CIA strategy has been to prefer a strong man they feel they can control no matter how repressive and corrupt. This strategy fails because the strongmen who can be controlled can rarely control their own populations who depose them and the strongmen who can control their populations tend to refuse to be controlled themselves. Iraq and Iran show both modes of falure of the CIA strategy.
Further, there are plenty of technical details that are "glossed over", but this is hardly suprising given that the writer is not technical. For the rest, you're making TONS of assumptions for which you simply don't have the information.
It is very clear that Safire has no idea what he is talking about. I suspect that is because he simply printed the story without first checking it for credibility with someone who would know.
These chips didn't have to be CPUs, they could have merely been ROM chips. Remember your old design classes (yeah, it's been a while for me as well, but...)?
ROM chips don't make a lot of sense until you have invented microprocessors. In 1974 when this plot is meant to have started the 4004 has been out for only 3 years. It only appeared in the first pocket calculator in 1972. Microprocessor based industrial control systems simply do not exist at this point.
It does not make sense for the US to plot to give the Soviets something that would not even be common in Western oil and gas installations for ten years. Or to believe that the Soviets would be eager to throw away the three term control units that work perfectly well and replace them with a bleeding edge technology stolen from the West.
Even if we accept your 'ROM chips' theory, why would the soviets steal and copy blind 256 bytes of code? ROM chips were simply not very big at the time. 2Kb was pretty big even in 1978.
It would be a pretty easy matter to hide a trojan in Windows NT or Linux today. The systems that existed in 1980 were simply not that complex. The Soviets were not stealling to simply copy blind, they were stealing to learn the technology. The US had to expect that every line of code they gave would be reverse engineered and disassembled.
I don't care what the alleged technology is, there was no technology available at the time that was complex enough to hide a trojan in and expect it not to be found.
maybe if you'd RTFA you'd realize they stole the software, which eventually caused the explosion... Nice try though.
The article makes no sense, it talks about software and chips interchangeably as if they are the same thing. I was simply putting the most credible interpretation on the garbled account Safire gives. It is crystal clear he has no idea what he is talking about, I suspect that neither has his source.
It is now well established that the Soviets had a mole at Intel who stole tapes containing chip 'masters' at that time. So it is credible that 'software' could mean chips as Safire refers to them.
OK lets try your version: Steal the 'software' for a pipeline? Exactly where would you get that in 1982? You can't get that type of thing off the shelf even today, the best you do is to get a package that you customize.
Back in 1982 you practically had to write your own device drivers, I had to rewrite several of the ones I used. The type of generic software that controls systens at a high level simply did not exist as a package in those days, it was exclusively written as bespoke. Second, software to control pipelines would not have been export controlled, the Soviets would not go to the expense of stealing what they could buy outright quite easily.
BP and the British govt were investors in the pipeline. BP run quite a lot of pipelines, they would almost certainly use something based on their own in-house code. The idea that BP would instead use something that the KGB stole off the US is somewhat wierd.
Ahh, looks like the Republicans have got mod points again. Exactly what part of the political analysis do they consider to be wrong?
OK lets consider the technical issues, the explosion is alleged to have occurred in 1982, the secrets passed 7 years earlier.
Think about it just a bit, when did microprocessors become available in the US? When did computer based control systems become common in the West? (forget the Soviet Union for the moment).
I used the state of the art control systems available in 1985. Control systems using compressed air were still common. Electronic control systems were almost all analogue. Digital control systems were only just becomming common in control rooms.
The oil and gas plants tended to be much more conservative, I would not be suprised if they still use compressed air systems in a lot of applications, they may not be as accurate but they don't create sparks.
So just how credible is it that in 1982, three years earlier, that the Soviets who were at least 5 years behind technologically would throw themselves into using a technology that was bleeding edge in the West at the time? It just does not make any sense.
It is of course well established that the Soviets did build their own VAX and PDP 11 clones. These were still high value items though. We had only a single VAX 11/780 to run an entire chemical plant, one processor ran the plant and the other was hot-swap for when the other was on maintenance (don't ask I am sure they had only one PSU). Thats not a whole lot more processing power than an IBM PC.
Sure you could probably have done really bad things if you had got into the control system and sabotaged it on the ground. But the idea of planting a trojan in a chip just makes no sense. Its like claiming that you could stick a trojan in a memory chip or a resistor. Sure you can bring the system down, but not in a predictable way.
Finally, the CIA would have no way of knowing that their goosed up control system would not have found its way into a nuclear plant. The idea that they would have done this just makes no sense at all.
Safire sometimes just makes things up. Like the bit about 9-11 hijackers having the transponder codes for Air Force One.
No, Safire did not make that up, he was fed it by the Whitehouse and was gullible enough to print it rather than say what a crock. The Whitehouse story that the Whitehouse was threatened by a nuke was meant to cover the bad press Bush got for his panicked jetting arround the country aimlessly on airforce one.
There is a connection, the CIA obviously fed Safire this story in response to the pre-announcement over the weekend that there would be an 'investigation' into intelligence failures that led to the invasion of Iraq. The 'investigation' will not of course cover the intelligence that really failed, or rather was non existent - Bush himself.
So this little tidbit has been fed to Safire by the CIA to keep up their end of things. Unfortunately it is pretty difficult to work out what went on because the details are clearly contradictory. A trojan planted in the chips could not possibly lead to the failure of the pipeline, it is too low level. You would have to know about the design of the pipeline software in advance for that to work, and that is clearly impossible since not even the Russians would write software before they had the machine...
I suspect that the story is nothing more than repeated agency gossip. Lots of things used to blow up in the USSR, believe me they needed no help from the West to make shoddy equipment. Nothing in the damn place worked. Whenever something went wrong there would be some idiot hawk making some stupid claim that some scheme was responsible. None of them were very likely.
Deliberately blowing up a civilian pipe-line makes no sense, it would be an act of terrorism that the USSR could and would easily retaliate for. Blowing up a pipeline this way would be very risky, the soviets would certainly hold an enquiry and the chances are that the source would be identified.
Safire mentions the fact he was in the Nixon administration, and yes they did do a lot of bizare things that almost always turned out baddly. They replaced the democratic government of Chile with a thug who murdered at least 40,000 people in the first five years of his dictatorship. Guess what, the US is not trusted or very popular in Chile today. Nixon also got involved in a whole series of proxy wars against the Soviets, but when push came to shove they were very reluctant to actually face off against them directly.
Safire does admit that the Siberian piepline was financed by the UK and Germany. The chances that the US could pull off an action like this against UK interests are pretty slight, if you have ever been to NSA or GCHQ headquarters you will know exactly why.
The idea of Reagan collaborating with the French against Thatcher, just think about it for a moment. And that is before you remember that from 1976 to 1980 Jimmy Carter was in charge and the bulk of this covert operation is hypothesized to have taken place on his watch. Carter spent most of his time dealing with the consequences of CIA schemes that had gone baddly wrong. He lost the 1980 election because the CIA had thought it a great idea to replace the democracy in Iran with a dictator who the people hated and kicked out twenty years later.
The fact is that the CIA has been a collosal failure. It has consistently failed to provide the US with the intelligence it needed and it has meddled incompetently in other countries affairs, almost always causing a backfire. All the intelligence successes of the US have come from satelite and communications intelligence.
So no, Safire is not making this up, he is just repeating stories that anyone with the inside knowledge he claims would know are false. The fact is that speechwriters like Safire was are pretty minor functionaries.
You've got it in one. MS would most certainly not get this treatment if it was a European company.
European companies are governed by a much stricter monopolies law that makes it illegal to have a monoplistic market share, even if it was obtained fairly. Plenty of EU companies have been broken up long before they became as big.
Compared to Enron, the Parmalat scandal is pretty small beer, the shareholders were cheated, but they were not allowed to do anything like the manipulation of the California energy market Enron did.
Berlusconi's media empire has been getting away with plenty of chicanery, but only because Burlusconi became Prime Minister and awarded himself immunity from prosecution. Even then, he is being investigated and is likely to be brough to trial. Compare that to the treatment of Bush over his proven-beyond-doubt insider trading at Harken.
OK the US is no more corrupt than Italy, but it is pretty bad when it sinks to that level.
It's not the cash reserves of Microsoft... Just think what the government could do what that sort of dough!:)
In the case of the EU spend it on more subsidies for French farmers.
The report is wrong, IBM was fined $1.5 billion in the 1980s for anti-trust abuses, so the Microsoft fine would not be a record.
Its a pretty pathetic lawsuit, O/S have shiped with standard video and audio players since the hardware came with the machine. The O/S job is to provide a way to make this stuff work.
Real is a real shitty piece of code that wrecks your machine almost as baddly as comet cursor. Its the same game of trying to lock the market into one proprietary format. What the EU should do is order Microsoft to ship a player that plays an open, unencumbered format.
George W. did not campaign on war; in fact the foreign policy on which he campaigned in 2000 was isolationism. So you can chalk that up to another broken promise, though 9/11 probably counts as an extenuating circumstance.
Ack, forgot to say what I meant to last time.
Yep, Bush promised to be 'humble' and a kinder gentler foreign policy and clearly was talking through his hat. But the point I was making was that I would believe he would keep a promise to invade Iran, or Syria or wherever the neo-cons want to attack next.
Basically the only priorities they have are Bush's ultra-rich friends (but I repeat myself).
George W. did not campaign on war; in fact the foreign policy on which he campaigned in 2000 was isolationism. So you can chalk that up to another broken promise, though 9/11 probably counts as an extenuating circumstance.
Historically isolationism meant invading other countries when folk felt like it. The isolationist bit meant not giving a damn about defending any other country that might be attacked. So letting Hitler invade Europe was fine with the isolationists, and so was invading the Philapeans, Cuba etc.
The Bushies have taken isolationism to a new extreeme, don't bother with Bin Laden, give up looking for him and invade another country that had nothing to do with 9/11.
Lets hope that the result is progress
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Google v. Microsoft
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Could do with some competition, Internet getting very dull
If that fails, then clearly the error lies with the person that made the second or N+1 request: the Air Force is not in the business of losing spacecraft or astronauts: if the importance of getting those pictures was clearly shown, there is no way that any reasonable officer would have denied it.
I think it is very clear that the fault here lay with NASA. It was pure butt-covering that they have been engaged it.
The cost of the photos is irrelevant. The satellite is a sunk cost. Taking a look at another space object is a reasonable experiment to consider regardless of whether you use the data.
NASA nixed the photographs because they were not interested in looking for failure.
Honestly, I am very glad we are going to be at least planning on going back to the moon and too mars (hopefully this isn't just an election year ploy).
It is not a tax cut for the W's riches friends and it is not a war, can you think of any other campaign pledges he kept?
But personally I wonder what we are going to do from 2010 to 2015 in terms of manned space vehicles.
The shuttle is permanently grounded. They have not yet killed the budget but it won't ever take off again. Earliest a manned vehicle could take off is 2010 and that would be a copy of an old design. The very earliest we are likely to see a manned space vehicle is 2015, more likely it would be 2020 if ever.
Dufus has spent the country into the ground in just under three years. The budget is now $500 in deficit and the baby boomers have started to retire. Grover Norquist and his cronies call this strategy 'starve the beast'. The idea is that government services will be cut when the crunch comes.
So far that has not happened, government spending has risen faster in all areas than under Clinton. But when the crunch comes programs like NASA will be the first to go. Then taxes will be raised to cover the gap. Those seniors are not going to let their social security be cut and there will be more of them than of us.
Re:Finally!
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SCO Offline
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Funny, i thought the linux community DOES consist of a bunch of overweight hippies who never get any excercise and live off a diet of potato chips and caffiene.
At any rate the moderators today don't seem to be able to tell the difference between sarcasm and a flame.
Its all that caffiene that does it.
Whoever wrote the virus is like one those EarthFirst! loonies who go arround spiking trees with steel pins to kill anyone who tries to chop down the tree with a chainsaw. Its just a person on a personal ego trip who does not care what their actions do to the reputation of the movement.
Re:Finally!
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SCO Offline
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
I wish it wouldn't happen. This virus is painting the Linux community as a bunch of petulant adolescents - regardless of who's doing it.
Yeah! Like that is sooo untrue. Next they are going to be saying that the Linux community is a bunch of overweight hippies who never get any exercise and live off a diet of potatoe chips and caffine. There is not the slightest evidence to back those claims.
Besides the guy can not be an OSS guy, other wise he would not have only released his code on the closed proprietary Windows platform.
It will take you weeks to learn all the tons of things you need to turn off to keep that thing from harrassing you.
This is the reason I removed realplayer from my systems. Along with comet cursor Real inc has the distinction of being one of the few sites I have blocked using the 'parental filter' feature of my firewall. I don't want anyone else downloading that crap onto my systems either.
One of the depressing facts of comp sci is that everything gets copied blind. I have no idea why every 'mejaah player' feels the need to support sixty different 'skins' none of which support the native look and feel of the machine O/S. I'm not a 14 year old kid, I want a tool not a kalaidescope.
I use media player because it has the fewest whizz-bang features of any of the players - you still have to turn some off. It also does a pretty good job of buffering enough content to play without jitter most of the time.
One thing I have never quite worked out is why the audio/video sync on so many players is so poor. That is the one feature that has the single biggest effect on quality. Even with a really fat pipe I usually end with a lag of about 2 secs at the end of a lot of clips.
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Why?
Because something like 10% of the Fort Meade staff and 30% of the GCHQ staff are British and US foreign nationals respectively. As a Brit I can get a gold ID card at Fort Meade which allows me to work basically anywhere on the site. No other foreign national can. Same in reverse at GCHQ.
The only exception is the Whitehouse, which I know about since as is well documented on slashdot I did some security work there but had to sit in a coffee shop across the road from the Executive Office Building. When Nixon was getting paranoid about everyone he started to believe that the British were spying on him. So he called in the NSA to have the oval office sweeped for bugs, he did not say why. As it happened the guy who was on duty that day was a Brit. So when he arrived Nixon went ape-shit and signed an executive order that requires all security personel working at the Whitehouse and Executive Office Building to be US citizens.
The idea that the CIA could do this type of thing and not have the Brits notice is simply not credible. In any case the US was bidding for the Siberian pipeline under Nixon, they only objected to the UK involvement after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
During the Nixon-Ford-Carter period the official policy was detente. The idea that the CIA was off blowing up Siberian oil pipelines causing huge civilian casualties is stupid enough. The idea that a program this big could happen without someone telling either Carter or Wilson (the UK PM) is pretty rich.
In case you don't get the message here, I am not trying to claim that the CIA are not apt to act stupidly, they have done so many times. But they never did anything that was comparable to this, not intentionaly. Not even Gladio went this wrong.
Mosadegh nationalized the oil fields after Anglo-Persian refused to allow him to even have the books audited. It was well known that the Iranians were being cheated of the megre share they were allowed of the oil revenues. Even the US administration thought that Anglo-Persian had brought the crisis on themselves. Had they offered a 50:50 split they would have kept their place.
No, they were not. The Shah, secular whatever his faults, kept their power down.
The installation of the shah as dictator was never going to be very stable for very long. The Shah was only the second of his line, his father had replaced the previous monarchy only 40 years earlier. The way the Shah was installed meant that he would never be seen as anything more than a foreign puppet and his eventual fall was inevitable. It was highly unlikely that the mullahs would ever have gained control if operation Ajax had never taken place.
What are you smoking? Saddam's involvement with the CIA was brief, and long after he put himself in power.
Saddam came to power in a party coup with US support. The CIA provided him with lists of opponents to liquidate. The US supported Saddam from the very beginning of his rule, all the way through to the invasion of Kewait. Even that would have been allowed if he had only kept the northern oil fields where the Kewaitis had been under-drilling Iraq's oil fields which was the original agreement.
Iran did have CIA involvement. However, Saddam put himself in power, and the CIA only helped him (along with many others) during a brief part of his long reign.
The CIA was mucking about in Iraqi politics ever since the British left.
I have always wondered just how hard core the hard core is on these channels. Is it the type of hard core you get in some hotel rooms where 'hard core' means that the couple are really having sex but you can't see it because there is a blob in the way?
I just don't feel curious enough to pay $20 to find out.
From what we know of the Soviet penetration of the CIA and FBI it is clear that it was nowhere nearly large enough. If you are correct and there was a massive network of Western moles then Safire has just blown a very important secret.
We are dealling with a series of unknowns here, and yes there is a claim to privilleged acess to information. But that cannot be allowed to be a trump card. You have no idea what my sources are either.
Safire's claim is not credible for a whole rack of reasons, not least the fact that he has published politically motivated bogus intel stories before. If his story was credible in every respect except for this particular one it might be believable, but the problem is that there is almost no single part of it that is believable.
You don't need to go much further than the claimed goal, to wreck the pipeline. Sabotage was unlikely to put the pipeline out of commission permanently (it is working today) but was likely to kill thousands of civilians. The superpowers did not do that kind of thing to each other, that would open them to retribution in kind.
Hence the reason Safire's claim that the US would think it necessary to help them cause massive civillian casualties.
As far as your time tables are concerned, you are using the same source of this story - the news media and government (which you appear to disbelieve) - for the fact that the Soviets were 5 years behind us technologically.
If as was claimed the Soviets were basically copying Western technology they would be at least one production cycle behind the West. In those days that was about five years.
Sure, I'd believe that overall, life was not as modern in USSR as it was in the USA at the time. However, is it not remotely possible that at least a handful of people had access to more up-to-date western technology?
Of course there were, if you read Dolkady you would see quite a lot of cutting edge research, particularly in mathematics and theoretical physics. They had huge problems when it came to practical engineering.
The issue was not just the avialability of technology it was the breadth. A computer is not much by itself. You need the whole infrastructure. The Russians were not simply copying Western technology blind, they did not have the resources to do that. They had to adapt to the production methods available to them. The Russians had to strip the thing they were copying down to basic principles and build it up again from scratch.
The idea you could do that and not notice that the plans had been cooked...
And finally, since your sig suggests you just have a problem with the government in general, what makes you think the CIA even thought of the negative consequences of leaving "sleeper" chips out in the open for the KGB to grab?
Well since the President during that spell would be Jimmy Carter I don't see why thinking Bush is an idiot would lead me to a biased analysis. I think the CIA would reject this scheme as being simply too far fetched. The CIA is a human intelligence organization. They don't do technology.
Maybe they assumed the Soviets were behind in technology 5 years and didn't think they had anything to control like what they used the chips to control. What makes you think they planted chips to cause an explosion?
I don't, Safire does. I think the story is a total crock and is no more believable than any of the other fairy stories told by Safire of late. According to the world according to Safire, Bush was warned of an attack against Airforce One and the Whitehouse involving a nuclear weapon on 9/11 [Obvious drivel since if the Whitehouse even suspected that they would have to know much more about 9/11 than they did], Saddam had WMD [More drivel, proven false by Kay] and Hilary is running for President this year [which is probably why she decided to skip Iowa, New Hampshire and the rest of the primaries].
Where in this whole thread do Republicans come into play?
Safire is a well known Republican/Likud flack and his stories are usually little more than embellished press releases from his political masters.
I have read a lot of the history of the US intelligence services. Enough to know the difference between the CIA crew at Langley and the rest of the agencies.
Interception of signals and decoding them is the job of the NSA. The CIA is only a small part of the US intelligence services, it is not even the largest part of the intelligence budget. Submarine intelligence would be the primary responsibility of naval intelligence and the signals would be decoded by the NSA at Fort Meade. The CIA would have nothing to do with that.
I'm not surprised that you pump out this type of appology for fascism as AC. No, Pinochet did not 'execute', he had people murdered. There were 4,000 murdered during the coup alone. The figure of 40,000 is well established.
But lets imagine for a moment that he 'only' murdered 4,000. Was the Nixon administration justified in putting a murderer into power?
There is of course no evidence whatsoever for the claim that Allende was not elected by the people or that he planned any form of coup. Of course there are a lot of people who will make these claims to try to justify the coup, but they have no more substance than allegations that Saddam had WMD "that are ready for use within 45 minutes" as Tony Blair claimed.
Similar is true of the fascist Mossadegh. The Shah held off the advent of the much worse Khomeini reign of terror.
Mossadegh was no fascist, he was a nationalist whose 'crime' in the eyes of Eisenhower and Churchill was to insist that BP pay a fair price for the oil they took. Operation Ajax was justified to Eisenhower by claims made by the Dulles brothers that the USSR was plotting an invasion through the North. The fact that Stalin died before operation Ajax was not allowed to affect this analysis.
Justifying operation Ajax by what followed is ridiculous. The mullahs could not have taken over if Mossadegh had not been replaced by the Shah. The mullahs are the result of operation Ajax, not a justification for it. Next you will be claiming that the Versailles treaty should have imposed harsher conditions on Germany to prevent the rise of Hitler.
This happened only rarely. The CIA overall has been quite successful.
There actions have backfired far more frequently than they have succeeded. Noriega and Saddam were both CIA proteges, Pinochet, the Shah of Iran were installed in CIA led coups. Meddling in Guatelmala, Honduras, Nicaragua led to civil wars. And those are just the cases where the CIA were the principal actors.
The record of the CIA is by any objective standard a failure. The problem with the macho posturing they engage in is that you have to have brains and a strategy for realpolitique. The CIA strategy has been to prefer a strong man they feel they can control no matter how repressive and corrupt. This strategy fails because the strongmen who can be controlled can rarely control their own populations who depose them and the strongmen who can control their populations tend to refuse to be controlled themselves. Iraq and Iran show both modes of falure of the CIA strategy.
It is very clear that Safire has no idea what he is talking about. I suspect that is because he simply printed the story without first checking it for credibility with someone who would know.
These chips didn't have to be CPUs, they could have merely been ROM chips. Remember your old design classes (yeah, it's been a while for me as well, but...)?
ROM chips don't make a lot of sense until you have invented microprocessors. In 1974 when this plot is meant to have started the 4004 has been out for only 3 years. It only appeared in the first pocket calculator in 1972. Microprocessor based industrial control systems simply do not exist at this point.
It does not make sense for the US to plot to give the Soviets something that would not even be common in Western oil and gas installations for ten years. Or to believe that the Soviets would be eager to throw away the three term control units that work perfectly well and replace them with a bleeding edge technology stolen from the West.
Even if we accept your 'ROM chips' theory, why would the soviets steal and copy blind 256 bytes of code? ROM chips were simply not very big at the time. 2Kb was pretty big even in 1978.
It would be a pretty easy matter to hide a trojan in Windows NT or Linux today. The systems that existed in 1980 were simply not that complex. The Soviets were not stealling to simply copy blind, they were stealing to learn the technology. The US had to expect that every line of code they gave would be reverse engineered and disassembled.
I don't care what the alleged technology is, there was no technology available at the time that was complex enough to hide a trojan in and expect it not to be found.
The article makes no sense, it talks about software and chips interchangeably as if they are the same thing. I was simply putting the most credible interpretation on the garbled account Safire gives. It is crystal clear he has no idea what he is talking about, I suspect that neither has his source.
It is now well established that the Soviets had a mole at Intel who stole tapes containing chip 'masters' at that time. So it is credible that 'software' could mean chips as Safire refers to them.
OK lets try your version: Steal the 'software' for a pipeline? Exactly where would you get that in 1982? You can't get that type of thing off the shelf even today, the best you do is to get a package that you customize.
Back in 1982 you practically had to write your own device drivers, I had to rewrite several of the ones I used. The type of generic software that controls systens at a high level simply did not exist as a package in those days, it was exclusively written as bespoke. Second, software to control pipelines would not have been export controlled, the Soviets would not go to the expense of stealing what they could buy outright quite easily.
BP and the British govt were investors in the pipeline. BP run quite a lot of pipelines, they would almost certainly use something based on their own in-house code. The idea that BP would instead use something that the KGB stole off the US is somewhat wierd.
OK lets consider the technical issues, the explosion is alleged to have occurred in 1982, the secrets passed 7 years earlier.
Think about it just a bit, when did microprocessors become available in the US? When did computer based control systems become common in the West? (forget the Soviet Union for the moment).
I used the state of the art control systems available in 1985. Control systems using compressed air were still common. Electronic control systems were almost all analogue. Digital control systems were only just becomming common in control rooms.
The oil and gas plants tended to be much more conservative, I would not be suprised if they still use compressed air systems in a lot of applications, they may not be as accurate but they don't create sparks.
So just how credible is it that in 1982, three years earlier, that the Soviets who were at least 5 years behind technologically would throw themselves into using a technology that was bleeding edge in the West at the time? It just does not make any sense.
It is of course well established that the Soviets did build their own VAX and PDP 11 clones. These were still high value items though. We had only a single VAX 11/780 to run an entire chemical plant, one processor ran the plant and the other was hot-swap for when the other was on maintenance (don't ask I am sure they had only one PSU). Thats not a whole lot more processing power than an IBM PC.
Sure you could probably have done really bad things if you had got into the control system and sabotaged it on the ground. But the idea of planting a trojan in a chip just makes no sense. Its like claiming that you could stick a trojan in a memory chip or a resistor. Sure you can bring the system down, but not in a predictable way.
Finally, the CIA would have no way of knowing that their goosed up control system would not have found its way into a nuclear plant. The idea that they would have done this just makes no sense at all.
No, Safire did not make that up, he was fed it by the Whitehouse and was gullible enough to print it rather than say what a crock. The Whitehouse story that the Whitehouse was threatened by a nuke was meant to cover the bad press Bush got for his panicked jetting arround the country aimlessly on airforce one.
There is a connection, the CIA obviously fed Safire this story in response to the pre-announcement over the weekend that there would be an 'investigation' into intelligence failures that led to the invasion of Iraq. The 'investigation' will not of course cover the intelligence that really failed, or rather was non existent - Bush himself.
So this little tidbit has been fed to Safire by the CIA to keep up their end of things. Unfortunately it is pretty difficult to work out what went on because the details are clearly contradictory. A trojan planted in the chips could not possibly lead to the failure of the pipeline, it is too low level. You would have to know about the design of the pipeline software in advance for that to work, and that is clearly impossible since not even the Russians would write software before they had the machine...
I suspect that the story is nothing more than repeated agency gossip. Lots of things used to blow up in the USSR, believe me they needed no help from the West to make shoddy equipment. Nothing in the damn place worked. Whenever something went wrong there would be some idiot hawk making some stupid claim that some scheme was responsible. None of them were very likely.
Deliberately blowing up a civilian pipe-line makes no sense, it would be an act of terrorism that the USSR could and would easily retaliate for. Blowing up a pipeline this way would be very risky, the soviets would certainly hold an enquiry and the chances are that the source would be identified.
Safire mentions the fact he was in the Nixon administration, and yes they did do a lot of bizare things that almost always turned out baddly. They replaced the democratic government of Chile with a thug who murdered at least 40,000 people in the first five years of his dictatorship. Guess what, the US is not trusted or very popular in Chile today. Nixon also got involved in a whole series of proxy wars against the Soviets, but when push came to shove they were very reluctant to actually face off against them directly.
Safire does admit that the Siberian piepline was financed by the UK and Germany. The chances that the US could pull off an action like this against UK interests are pretty slight, if you have ever been to NSA or GCHQ headquarters you will know exactly why.
The idea of Reagan collaborating with the French against Thatcher, just think about it for a moment. And that is before you remember that from 1976 to 1980 Jimmy Carter was in charge and the bulk of this covert operation is hypothesized to have taken place on his watch. Carter spent most of his time dealing with the consequences of CIA schemes that had gone baddly wrong. He lost the 1980 election because the CIA had thought it a great idea to replace the democracy in Iran with a dictator who the people hated and kicked out twenty years later.
The fact is that the CIA has been a collosal failure. It has consistently failed to provide the US with the intelligence it needed and it has meddled incompetently in other countries affairs, almost always causing a backfire. All the intelligence successes of the US have come from satelite and communications intelligence.
So no, Safire is not making this up, he is just repeating stories that anyone with the inside knowledge he claims would know are false. The fact is that speechwriters like Safire was are pretty minor functionaries.
European companies are governed by a much stricter monopolies law that makes it illegal to have a monoplistic market share, even if it was obtained fairly. Plenty of EU companies have been broken up long before they became as big.
Compared to Enron, the Parmalat scandal is pretty small beer, the shareholders were cheated, but they were not allowed to do anything like the manipulation of the California energy market Enron did.
Berlusconi's media empire has been getting away with plenty of chicanery, but only because Burlusconi became Prime Minister and awarded himself immunity from prosecution. Even then, he is being investigated and is likely to be brough to trial. Compare that to the treatment of Bush over his proven-beyond-doubt insider trading at Harken.
OK the US is no more corrupt than Italy, but it is pretty bad when it sinks to that level.
In the case of the EU spend it on more subsidies for French farmers.
The report is wrong, IBM was fined $1.5 billion in the 1980s for anti-trust abuses, so the Microsoft fine would not be a record.
Its a pretty pathetic lawsuit, O/S have shiped with standard video and audio players since the hardware came with the machine. The O/S job is to provide a way to make this stuff work.
Real is a real shitty piece of code that wrecks your machine almost as baddly as comet cursor. Its the same game of trying to lock the market into one proprietary format. What the EU should do is order Microsoft to ship a player that plays an open, unencumbered format.
Thats just the r I left out of the referer field reappearing, must have hit a wormhole in space or something.
If there is a bug in the kernel and nobody notices it, can we still flame Microsoft?
Ack, forgot to say what I meant to last time.
Yep, Bush promised to be 'humble' and a kinder gentler foreign policy and clearly was talking through his hat. But the point I was making was that I would believe he would keep a promise to invade Iran, or Syria or wherever the neo-cons want to attack next.
Basically the only priorities they have are Bush's ultra-rich friends (but I repeat myself).
Historically isolationism meant invading other countries when folk felt like it. The isolationist bit meant not giving a damn about defending any other country that might be attacked. So letting Hitler invade Europe was fine with the isolationists, and so was invading the Philapeans, Cuba etc.
The Bushies have taken isolationism to a new extreeme, don't bother with Bin Laden, give up looking for him and invade another country that had nothing to do with 9/11.
Could do with some competition, Internet getting very dull
I think it is very clear that the fault here lay with NASA. It was pure butt-covering that they have been engaged it.
The cost of the photos is irrelevant. The satellite is a sunk cost. Taking a look at another space object is a reasonable experiment to consider regardless of whether you use the data.
NASA nixed the photographs because they were not interested in looking for failure.
It is not a tax cut for the W's riches friends and it is not a war, can you think of any other campaign pledges he kept?
But personally I wonder what we are going to do from 2010 to 2015 in terms of manned space vehicles.
The shuttle is permanently grounded. They have not yet killed the budget but it won't ever take off again. Earliest a manned vehicle could take off is 2010 and that would be a copy of an old design. The very earliest we are likely to see a manned space vehicle is 2015, more likely it would be 2020 if ever.
Dufus has spent the country into the ground in just under three years. The budget is now $500 in deficit and the baby boomers have started to retire. Grover Norquist and his cronies call this strategy 'starve the beast'. The idea is that government services will be cut when the crunch comes.
So far that has not happened, government spending has risen faster in all areas than under Clinton. But when the crunch comes programs like NASA will be the first to go. Then taxes will be raised to cover the gap. Those seniors are not going to let their social security be cut and there will be more of them than of us.
At any rate the moderators today don't seem to be able to tell the difference between sarcasm and a flame.
Its all that caffiene that does it.
Whoever wrote the virus is like one those EarthFirst! loonies who go arround spiking trees with steel pins to kill anyone who tries to chop down the tree with a chainsaw. Its just a person on a personal ego trip who does not care what their actions do to the reputation of the movement.
Yeah! Like that is sooo untrue. Next they are going to be saying that the Linux community is a bunch of overweight hippies who never get any exercise and live off a diet of potatoe chips and caffine. There is not the slightest evidence to back those claims.
Besides the guy can not be an OSS guy, other wise he would not have only released his code on the closed proprietary Windows platform.
Apart from slashdot readers and lawyers who goes to the SCO site these days?
Oh yes, folk who clicked on the 'Make SCO.com your home page' link.
This is the reason I removed realplayer from my systems. Along with comet cursor Real inc has the distinction of being one of the few sites I have blocked using the 'parental filter' feature of my firewall. I don't want anyone else downloading that crap onto my systems either.
One of the depressing facts of comp sci is that everything gets copied blind. I have no idea why every 'mejaah player' feels the need to support sixty different 'skins' none of which support the native look and feel of the machine O/S. I'm not a 14 year old kid, I want a tool not a kalaidescope.
I use media player because it has the fewest whizz-bang features of any of the players - you still have to turn some off. It also does a pretty good job of buffering enough content to play without jitter most of the time.
One thing I have never quite worked out is why the audio/video sync on so many players is so poor. That is the one feature that has the single biggest effect on quality. Even with a really fat pipe I usually end with a lag of about 2 secs at the end of a lot of clips.
This stuff is not rocket science you know.
What about the 10 seconds every quarter of an hour or so when colmes gets to speak?
Interesting fact, Sean Hanity's speaking fee is $35,000. colmes gets less than $15,000.