Majorityrights News > Category: Cyberwarfare

Taylor does some good work - bringing this lawsuit against Twitter is commendable - Twitter’s prohibition of free speech is a travesty given that it is functioning as a public utility; its having gotten its corporate start with US government help; its remaining dependent upon the US Government created and sponsored internet network; and public telecommunications lines. Taylor also handles with aplomb stigmatic issues of blacks and their hyper-assertive biopower, as he did in his debate with black nationalist Tariq Nasheed. Nevertheless, he yields to Jewish crypsis, infamously having said, “they look huWhite to me” ...and now that Jewish interests seek fusion with the White right, their media refers to Taylor as a “White Nationalist.”

BBC, “White nationalist Jared Taylor sues Twitter over ban”, 22 Feb 2018:

White nationalist Jared Taylor is suing Twitter after the social network banned his account as part of a crackdown on abusive content.

Mr Taylor’s lawyer says the suspension of his account is a form of censorship, accusing Twitter of discrimination.

Twitter declined to comment on the case but has previously said that its tools are “apolitical.”

Mr Taylor is head of American Renaissance, a website that champions “racial difference”.

He had his account suspended in December, with Twitter explaining that it prohibited accounts affiliated with the promotion of violence, something Mr Taylor denies applied to him.

Mr Taylor has filed his case in California, in the state Superior Court in San Francisco. He argued that Twitter violated Californian law protecting free speech in public spaces - a law that has not previously been applied to the internet.

His lawyer Noah Peters wrote online that everyone should be “terrified” about what he called Twitter censorship. “Our lawsuit is not about whether Taylor is right or wrong. It’s about whether Twitter and other technology companies have the right to ban individuals from using their services based on their perceived viewpoints and affiliations.

“Allowing Twitter to censor content is extremely troublesome given Twitter’s self-proclaimed mission to ‘give everyone the power to create and share ideas instantly, without barriers’.”

Washington Post, “4 things we learned from the indictment of 13 Russians in the Mueller investigation”, 16 Feb 2018:

This post has been updated.

We have the first indictment in the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III that actually has to do with Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The special counsel on Friday indicted 13 Russians in connection with a large-scale troll farm effort aimed at influencing the election in violation of U.S. law.

The indictment of the Internet Research Agency comes on top of two Trump advisers having pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI — Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos — and two more being indicted on charges of alleged financial crimes that predated the campaign — Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Nobody is in custody and Russia does not extradite to the United States, but the document from the secretive Mueller investigation does shed plenty of light where there previously wasn’t any.

So what does the new indictment tell us? Here’s what we can say right away:

1. It doesn’t say the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, but doesn’t rule it out either.

Anybody looking for clues about the collusion investigation into the Trump campaign won’t find much to grab hold of. If anything, the indictment may hearten Trump allies in that it doesn’t draw a line to the campaign — which suggests there was a large-scale effort independent of any possible collusion. Perhaps that’s the real meddling effort, some folks in the White House may be telling themselves right now. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein even specified that Trump campaign officials who were contacted by the Russian nationals “did not know they were communicating with Russians.”

But that’s about as much insight as anyone can draw; we simply don’t know what else is coming down the pike, and any ties to Trump campaign officials may have been withheld from this indictment to avoid disclosing details of an ongoing investigation. The president hasn’t even been interviewed yet, so we wouldn’t expect any ties to the campaign at this juncture.

Asked whether campaign officials had knowledge of the scheme or were duped, Rosenstein chose his words carefully. “There is no allegation in this indictment that any American had any knowledge,” Rosenstein said.

The words “in this indictment” mean Rosenstein’s comments are pretty narrow.

Update:

In a statement, Trump and the White House suggested that the announcement “further indicates that there was NO COLLUSION between the Trump campaign and Russia.” Again, it doesn’t provide any direct indication.

2. It just got a lot harder for Trump to dismiss Mueller’s probe as a “witch hunt.”

At one point in the indictment, a price tag is put on the effort: $1.25 million in one month, as of September 2016. To put that in perspective, that’s as much as some entire presidential campaigns were spending monthly during the primaries. And that lends credence to the idea that this was a large-scale effort connected to the Russian government.

President Trump has often sought to downplay the idea that Russia interfered in the 2016 election — even suggesting he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assurances that it didn’t happen. This document lays it out in extensive detail.

The argument that this is a “witch hunt,” which Trump has argued and more than 8 in 10 Republicans believe, just became much more difficult to make. And the document would seem to make pretty clear that the Mueller investigation isn’t just targeted at taking down Trump, either.

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TV: postmortem on passivity induced runaway destruction, including speculation on zombie effects despite the new dawn of interactive media. It’s being a retrospective gives me an excuse to post this older show which I’ve only seen today for the first time. It’s funny as hell. Charlie Brooker is clever. I don’t vouch for his politics, am unfamiliar with that.

But as we say goodbye to the hegemonic days of television and the passive acceptance of its audiences of a world they could not interact with nor hope to change, it is worthwhile to take another look back on the days of how the Televitz shaped and manipulated our attention; and to speculate on some of its lingering effects, both on runaway systems in a world unchallenged, and its parallel tropisms in the computer screen, exponentially better though it is in the choice and interaction the mechanisms attached may provide…

“How Television Ruined Your Life”

Parts 1-6, BBC production, 2012, under Youtube license:

Episode 1 - Fear

Episode 2 - Life Cycle

Episode 3 - Aspiration

Episode 4 - Love

Episode 5 - Progress

Episode 6 - Knowledge

Looking back a year, to the onset of the Russia investigation…

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JTA, “Neo-Nazi who co-runs Daily Stormer has Jewish relatives on both sides of family”, 3 Jan 2018:

Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer

(JTA) — The mother of a neo-Nazi who co-runs the white supremacist website Daily Stormer and said Jewish children “deserve to die” has Jewish relatives on both sides of his family.

Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer’s mother, Alyse, confirmed to Newsweek magazine in an article published Wednesday that her son comes from a “large, mixed race family” with Native American heritage, and that he has Jewish lineage “on both sides of his family.” His Jewish heritage was first reported by Gawker in 2012 when he volunteered the information to a reporter, but this is the first time a family member has confirmed his background.

Auernheimer, who runs the technical side of the Daily Stormer, with its more well-known editor Andrew Anglin, is believed to be in Ukraine, where he has lived since serving jail time in the United States on a computer hacking charge. He has been estranged from his mother for over a decade, she told Newsweek.

“Weev” Auernheimer works for both Daily Stormer and TRS.

Auernheimer, 32, on the podcast Radical Agenda last month said Jews were to blame for the Daily Stormer website losing its dot-com status, causing it to jump from domain to domain in recent months.

“If you don’t let us dissent peacefully, then our only option is to murder you. To kill your children. To kill your whole families,” he said in an interview. “There is only one thing absent free speech that we can do to express our dissent and that’s to slaughter you like dogs, and you’re gonna have it coming and your children will deserve to die.”

While normal WN have been intent on denying a supremacist message in favor of a separatist message, Weev sent this missive everywhere from China to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Podcast host Christopher Cantwell, who is under house arrest in Virginia on two felony charges for allegedly using tear gas and pepper spray at the Charlottesville rally in August, tried to walk back the statements, saying that killing Jews “is certainly an undesirable option I’ll state for the FBI agents and prosecutors who are listening to this show.”

Auernheimer also said that the retaliation against the Jews should focus on the “top” Jews, “the most Jewish Jews.”

Related, Weev added in that show that he just wants Jews to convert to Christianity. He has in mind a special new denomination of Christianity which would conform to “natural order.”

The Paleoconservative deal…

Mancinblack remarked, “Oy vey Maria. Weev should go poke a polar bear with a crucifix. I’d pay good money for the film rights.”

Related, “Weev: Master Tactician, Semi-Tactful Infiltrator or Tactless Fool?”

It was quite picky on its target. It went through several checks and when those checks failed, it would not implement the attack. It was obviously probing for a very specific target…you have to put this in context - this was the most sophisticated piece of malware that we have ever seen. So, its kind of strange that someone makes this huge effort to hit one specific target…well, that must be quite a significant target:

Whoever was behind Stuxnet hasn’t admitted they were behind it.

Even after the cyberweapon had penetrated computers all over the world, no one was willing to admit that it was loose, or talk about the dangers that it posed.

Stuxnet first surfaced with a Belarusian security company servicing Iran.

“Had you ever seen anything quite so sophisticated before?”

“Not with this kind of ‘zero-day’ capacity…......... it was the first time in my practice.”

... a third kind of hactivist is sponsored by state governments…

It went beyond our worst fears… our worst nightmares ..and this continued the more we analyzed….

The first time we opened up Stuxnet there was just bad things everywhere.

Just to give you some context, we can go through and understand every line of code for the average threat in minutes… and here we are one month into this threat and we are just beginning to discover what we call its payload, or its whole purpose…

When looking at the Stuxnet code, its twenty times the size of the average piece of code but contains almost no bugs inside of it, which is extremely rare, code always has bugs inside of it. It’s dense and everything does something or does something right in order to conduct its attack.

One of the things that surprised us was that Stuxnet utilized what is called a zero day exploit.

...its a piece of code allows it to spread without you having to do anything…

A zero day is an exploit which nobody knows about except for the attacker; so there’s no protection against it, there’s been no patch released.

There’s been zero days protection against it. That’s what attackers value because they know 100 percent that if they have this zero day that they can get in whenever they want

They’re actually very valuable - you can sell them for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Then we became worried because immediately we discovered we had more zero days, and again, these zero days are extremely rare.

Inside Stuxnet we had four zero days, and for the entire rest of the year we only saw twelve zero days used.

It blows everything else out of the water ..we’ve never seen this before and never seen it since, either.

Seeing one in a malware you could understand because the malware offers a means to make money, they’re stealing people’s credit cards so its worth their while to use it, but seeing four zero days…could be worth half a million dollars right there in one piece of malware ..this is not your ordinary criminal gang doing this, this is someone bigger.

It’s definitely not traditional crime. Not hacktivists.

It was evident early on, just given the sophistication of this malware that there must have been a nation state involved - at least one nation state involved in the development.

However, there were “breadcrumbs” left…they had to have some human assets steal certificates, which they did, traceable from two companies in close proximity in a business park in Taiwan.

Eventually we were able to see that Iran was the number one infected country in the world.

That immediately raised our eyebrows.

...we’d never seen a threat before where it was predominantly in Iran.

So we began to follow what was going on in the geopolitical world, what was happening in the general news.

At that time there were actually multiple explosions of pipelines going in and out of Iran.

And we noticed that there had been assassinations of nuclear scientists

More breadcrumbs showed that Stuxnet was targeting Siemans progammable logic controllers.

The PLC is like a very small computer attached to physical equipment like pumps, like valves, like motors.

So, this little box is running a digital program and the actions of this program turns that motor on, off, or sets the specific speed.

They control things like power plants, power grids… things in factories… in critical infrastructure ...critical infrastructure is everywhere around us ...transportation, telecommunication, financial services, health care..

So the payload of Stuxnet was designed to attack some very important part of our world.

The payload was going to be very important..

We knew that Stuxnet could have very dire consequences.

Stuxnet caused the centrifuges (of Iranian nuclear reactors) to spin much faster (than programmed for, to the point where they would explode).