interesting brit/american satire .. to say the least
Funny Smack Talk from "In the Loop" | Military.com
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Army Was Warned Not to Deploy Bradley Manning to Iraq
Army Was Warned Not to Deploy Bradley Manning to Iraq: "
Army commanders were warned against sending to Iraq an Army private who is suspected of leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents to the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks.
Pfc. Bradley Manning’s supervisor at Ft. Drum in New York had told his superiors that Manning had discipline problems and had thrown chairs at colleagues and shouted at higher-ranking soldiers, according to a report by McClatchy News service.
But Manning was deployed to Iraq anyway because the Army needed his skills and was short-staffed with intelligence analysts, according to anonymous military officials who spoke with McClatchy. Manning’s superiors believed his discipline problems could be addressed in Iraq, but then they failed to properly monitor him once he got there.
The information was uncovered by a six-member taskforce that was charged with investigating how Manning was trained and whether his supervisors had made mistakes. Their report is due to be delivered to Army Secretary John McHugh by Feb. 1.
The taskforce found that although the military had followed procedures in giving Manning his security clearance, they neglected to re-assess this decision to determine whether he should have retained his clearance once he exhibited disciplinary problems.
Three officers in Manning’s chain of command could face disciplinary action over their handling of the soldier, according to McClatchy.
Manning was deployed to Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq in late October 2009. There, he served as an intelligence analyst with a rank of Specialist and with a Top Secret/SCI clearance. He had access to classified networks, including SIPRnet, the Army’s secret-level wide area network linked to WikiLeaks’ most high-profile releases. He allegedly began leaking within months of being deployed.
He was arrested in Iraq in May 2010, after allegedly confessing to a former hacker in online chats that he had illegally downloaded thousands of classified and sensitive documents from classified networks and passed them to WikiLeaks. He also revealed in the chats that he had similar discipline problems in Iraq, where he had punched a colleague in the face. The action resulted in his demotion from Specialist to Private First Class shortly before his arrest.
In the chats, Manning told Lamo that he first contacted WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange in late November 2009, after Wikileaks posted 500,000 pager messages covering a 24-hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
Manning said he had already been sifting through the classified networks for months when he discovered a classified Iraq video in late 2009. The video showed a 2007 Army helicopter attack on a group of men.
In January 2010, while on leave in the United States, Manning visited a close friend in Boston and confessed he’d gotten his hands on unspecified sensitive information, and was weighing leaking it. He allegedly then passed the video to Wikileaks in February, which published it online in April last year.
In early May, Manning was demoted after punching a colleague during an argument. “Something I never do …!?” he told Lamo.
“It was a minor incident, but it brought attention to me,” he said. At this point, his life, which was already in turmoil, began to unravel as his career began to implode.
“I had about three breakdowns, successively worse, each one revealing more and more of my uncertainty and emotional insecurity,” he told Lamo.
Last July, Threat Level reported that Manning’s behavior had raised red flags as early as 2008 when he was still in training and before he was stationed at Ft. Drum. He was admonished then for uploading YouTube videos in which he discussing classified facilities.
Manning had enlisted in October 2007 and was only three months into his 16 weeks of training as an intelligence analyst when about 25 of his fellow recruits reported him for the videos. At the time, he had completed basic training and was receiving advanced individual training at the Army’s Intelligence Center of Excellence at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
The videos were messages that Manning shot for his family from his room at the barracks. Manning would talk about how his day was going and although he did not disclose classified information in the videos, he talked about the base’s SCIFs, secure rooms where classified information is processed.
“It was brought up to his command, and his command took action on that,” an official told Threat Level last July. “A lot of his actions back then, you couldn’t tell it would come to what it’s come to now, but it was a red flag.”
Manning was ordered to remove the videos but he did not lose his then-provisional Top Secret security clearance.
"Internet ‘Kill Switch’ Legislation Back in Play
Internet ‘Kill Switch’ Legislation Back in Play: "
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The resurgence of the so-called “kill switch” legislation came the same day Egyptians faced an internet blackout designed to counter massive demonstrations in that country.
The bill, which has bipartisan support, is being floated by Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The proposed legislation, which Collins said would not give the president the same power Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak is exercising to quell dissent, sailed through the Homeland Security Committee in December but expired with the new Congress weeks later.
The bill is designed to protect against “significant” cyber threats before they cause damage, Collins said.
“My legislation would provide a mechanism for the government to work with the private sector in the event of a true cyber emergency,” Collins said in an e-mail Friday. “It would give our nation the best tools available to swiftly respond to a significant threat.”
The timing of when the legislation would be re-introduced was not immediately clear, as kinks to it are being worked out.
An aide to the Homeland Security committee described the bill as one that does not mandate the shuttering of the entire internet. Instead, it would authorize the president to demand turning off access to so-called “critical infrastructure” where necessary.
An example, the aide said, would require infrastructure connected to “the system that controls the floodgates to the Hoover dam” to cut its connection to the net if the government detected an imminent cyber attack.
What’s unclear, however, is how the government would have any idea when a cyber attack was imminent or why the operator wouldn’t shutter itself if it detected a looming attack.
About two dozen groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Library Association, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Center for Democracy & Technology, were skeptical enough to file an open letter opposing the idea. They are concerned that the measure, if it became law, might be used to censor the internet.
“It is imperative that cyber-security legislation not erode our rights,” (.pdf) the groups wrote last year to Congress.
A congressional white paper (.pdf) on the measure said the proposal prohibits the government from targeting websites for censorship “based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.”
Oddly, that’s exactly the same language in the Patriot Act used to test whether the government can wiretap or investigate a person based on their political beliefs or statements.
Photo: LeSimonPix/Flickr
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Anonymous Hacks Security Firm Investigating It; Releases E-mail
Anonymous Hacks Security Firm Investigating It; Releases E-mail: "
A U.S. security firm that claimed to have uncovered the real identity of Anonymous members responsible for a recent spate of web site attacks became a victim of Anonymous itself, when members of the online vigilante group breached the company’s network and stole more than 60,000 internal e-mails.
The group posted the e-mail spool Sunday on the Pirate Bay torrent site for anyone to download and sift through.
HBGary Federal, which does classified work for the U.S. federal government among other security work, claimed it had been working with the FBI to unmask hackers behind recent denial-of-service attacks against PayPal, Visa, MasterCard and Amazon. Members of Anonymous — a loosely structured group of internet troublemakers — had organized the mass attacks after the companies suspended accounts used by WikiLeaks to receive donations and host documents. More recently, members of the group directed denial-of-service attacks against government web sites in Tunisia and Egypt.
Last month, the FBI announced it had executed more than 40 search warrants against people suspected of participating in the WikiLeaks-related attacks. British police also arrested five men in relation to the attacks.
The hack against HBGary Federal occurred after the Financial Times published a story on Saturday quoting Aaron Barr, CEO of the company. Barr said his company’s researchers had uncovered clues to the real identities of top members of Anonymous by monitoring chat rooms and Facebook groups they frequented. Barr identified a co-founder of the group, who goes by the name Q, and said he planned to give some of the information to the FBI. He also planned to present his findings at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco next week.
On Sunday, Anonymous ridiculed the company’s research skills and the accuracy of its data in a press release posted at Daily Kos, mocking the company’s “infiltration of our entirely secret IRC server anonops.ru and in particular our ultra-classified channels #opegypt, #optunisia, and, of course, #reporters, which itself is the most secret of all.”
In addition to the sudden disappearance of Anonymous leader Q, Anonymous co-founder Justin Bieber also disappeared just before his top-secret mission to Eritrea to offer physical succour to the rebels, suggesting that Mubarak is in our base, eating our Cheetos, likely with military support authorized by Hill Dawg.
The group then hacked into the HBGary Federal web site and e-mail servers, and replaced the web site content with a lengthy message taunting the security firm for failing to protect its own network and for trying to gain attention by marketing its research on Anonymous.
“Your recent claims of ‘infiltrating’ Anonymous amuse us, and so do your attempts at using Anonymous as a means to garner press attention for yourself. How’s this for attention?,” the message reads. “You’ve tried to bite at the Anonymous hand, and now the Anonymous hand is bitch-slapping you in the face.”
The hackers then posted a file purporting to contain the research that Barr had collected on Anonymous members as well as more than 50,000 e-mails in Barr’s account. The group claimed to have financial details for the company and threatened to erase content on the company servers.
The group also hijacked Barr’s Twitter account, sending
In addition to the HBGary site, the hackers gained root access to Rootkit.com, an online forum dedicated to analyzing and developing stealthy “rootkit” malware technology. The forum was founded by Greg Hoglund, CEO of HBGary, a separate security firm that owns about 15 percent of HBGary Federal. They seized Hoglund’s e-mail account and then posed as him in order to manipulate a Rootkit.com administrator named Jussi Jaakonaho into giving them root access to Rootkit.
Hoglund, Barr and Hoglund’s wife Penny, president of HBGary, tried to negotiate with the hackers via phone and chats to get the company’s data taken down, stating that Hoglund’s e-mails shouldn’t be exposed because he has little to do with HBGary Federal and that disclosure of some of the data would cost his company millions of dollars. The group ultimately agreed to remove links to the published e-mails for this reason, according to an online post from an Anonymous member.
Hoglund declined to comment on the hack.
See also:
- FBI Knocks Down 40 Doors in Probe of Pro-WikiLeaks Attackers
- British Police Arrest 5 Men in Wikileaks-Anonymous Payback Attacks
- Vigilantes Take Offensive in WikiLeaks Censorship Battle
- Mastercard.com Taken Down by Pro-WikiLeaks Forces
- Pro-WikiLeaks Attacks Sputter After Counterattacks, Dissent Over Tactics
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