DHS: Our Reports To Congress Are Successful Bullshit
from the yeah,-we-already-kinda-figured dept
Okay, it's official. I no longer believe that our Department of Homeland Security is an actual government agency with important work to do. No, I now believe that it is a series of highly subtle performance art pieces designed to make us laugh at the sheer audacity of dumb government. We already know about the agency's boss, who is in charge of cybersecurity, not bothering to use the internet. And then there is the DHS's highly touted fusion centers being both a waste of money and a detriment to the very freedoms they're supposedly protecting.But Tim K writes in about a rather stunning admission by DHS officials of a bogus DHS report on a water pumping facility. It essentially amounts to: "sure the report is a complete lie, but it was a successful lie." Don't believe me?
Officials behind the false claims told Senate investigators that such reports weren’t meant to be “finished intelligence” and that despite their report’s inaccuracies and sloppy wording they considered it to be a “success.”Now, let's do some quick background on this report, less because it informs you and more because it's hysterical. About a year ago, a water pump failed in an Illinois water facility. In response, almost immediately, an Illinois fusion center (part DHS, part Illinois State Police) circulated a report blaming a hacking attack from Russia. Not soon after that report was circulated, the greater DHS office rebuffed the fusion center's hacking allegation as absolute nonsense. It pointed out, as does the linked article, that the allegation was pure conjecture based on the fusion center's inability to do even the most basic investigation.
“[It did] exactly what it’s supposed to do – generate interest,” DHS officials told Senate investigators.
Someone did access the water district’s SCADA system from Russia, but it was a water district contractor who was asked to access the system by water district employees, as Wired first reported. They had called him to seek his opinion on something while he was on vacation in Russia, and he had logged into the system remotely to check on some data for them.It's worth noting that the water pump busted 5 months after this Russian IP logged in. In other words, none of this makes a lick of sense, except if it's the case of someone looking for a convenient scapegoat. "Hackers! Russians!" is apparently what these people went with, for reasons unknown to this author.
When the pump broke five months later and someone examined the network logs to determine the cause, they found an IP address from Russia listed in the logs next to the username and password of the contractor. No one ever bothered to call the contractor to see if he had logged in from Russia; they just assumed someone in Russia had stolen his credentials.
But the DHS report circulated to Congress, which DHS says is a success even though it's bullshit, was written up after they called out their own fusion center for making stuff up. I think most reasonable people would suspect that such successful excriment is part of the fear mongering around so-called cyberwars and the trumped up need for Congress to pass some kind of cybersecurity bill. But even the least cynical person would at least expect the DHS to correct their report and alert Congress to the pure made-up-iness of it. DHS has thus far declined to do so, because, paraphrasing DHS itself, the lie is more effective than the truth. Yay, government!
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Filed Under: congress, cybersecurity, dhs, fear mongering, fud, homeland security
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The FBI sets up imaginary terrorist plots and successfully defuse said schemes.
Congressmen and executive members including Obama talk about some fantasy apocalyptic scenario where planes rain from de skies because of equally fantastic cyber attacks from some unknown source.
The DOJ along with some other Govt help keeps spewing statistic taken out of MAFIAAS collective imaginary arses and use it to seize domains that theoretically cause more financial harm than a tsunami or a horde of angry green leprechauns.
DHS spreads fictional reports on how their seemingly double-agent fellow American pump engineer time traveled from the past and broke a pump by hacking it 5 months in the future.
Gentleman, I think the United States Government is a case that even Freud would find difficult to solve.
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I don't know. It doesn't seem difficult to diagnose antisocial personality disorder and pseudologia fantastica (pathological lying), even without a degree in psychiatry.
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It's quite obvious that they are TOTAL arses.
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Sometimes assholes are just assholes.
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Hope to High Heavens
Also, spellcheck - excrement. =]
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Re: Hope to High Heavens
But, of course, why is the government involved at all? Pipeline companies are much more concerned about their pipelines going down than governments are. This idea that if companies make mistakes, the government has to come in and regulate is absolute nonsense. Governments are full of bureaucrats who have little or no experience running a business. They are the last people we want making more laws and regulations. Let the businesses be responsible for running the businesses. If governments need to make laws, make sure they are about the results (e.g., power grid online 99.9% of the time), not procedures (e.g., power companies shall do this, this, and this).
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Re: Re: Hope to High Heavens
You're talking about the Gilded Age with added law requiring results. Financial penalties if they fail (I assume, because otherwise why have a law?) Without basic regulation, what would keep these companies from working their employees (read: wage slaves) to their literal deaths?
I'm thinking you just didn't think this through. There should absolutely be BASIC and FUNDAMENTAL regulation on what companies and certain industries must do at a minimum to deal with safety and basic human fallibility issues.
Issuing tightly-focused regulations is a waste of everyone's time and money, it's true - but you absolutely must have a foundation, because without it, people get exploited in the name of profit. It still happens today, in America, the "greatest country in the world"... just with undocumented workers instead of citizens.
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Re: Re: Hope to High Heavens
If you look at most utility numbers on power grid reliability you will see 99.985% (Average Service Availability Index) online for the year. Even a day long outage doesn't put much of a dent in that number. Outages will happen, every once in a while they are more widespread and gain big headlines but regulations will not make a significant dent in improving reliability. Outages caused by negligence are such a small percentage of that number. Weather contributes more to widespread outages. So until we can regulate the weather then we are just throwing money down the toilet (the bureaucracy rejoices).
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Successful Bullshit
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I really hate this Government Nowadays and see no Solution but to Shitcan the lot of them.
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I do not like their methods at all, but if DHS is really meant to come up with possible ways the US security could be compromised, it is not bullshit at all.
Do not get sucked into the utilitarian thought of: The report is bullshit = The DHS is bullshit.
It is a question of identifying the weaknesses in the system. Who in their right mind would make a homepage without even considering how to avoid hackers?
How politicians and media react to the knowledge of the weaknesses is the real problem!
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This is fear-mongering, nothing more.
Why not? The report isn't just bullshit, it's a lie. An agency that lies is bullshit.
However, pretty much everything else about the DHS screams that it's bullshit (and dangerous bullshit at that), so even if the logic of that utilitarian thought is wrong, the conclusion still holds.
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Yea Assange
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Re: Yea Assange
Oh, wait...
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Really?
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Re: Really?
As if bureaucrats aren't running health insurance and health care now?
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Re: Really?
These people would certainly be no worse than the bureaucrats currently running the health care system.
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Fusion centers
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Re: Fusion centers
1) The center where we'd all like to drop a fusion bomb.
2) The location where a bunch of crap is fused together to attempt to form the ultimate piece of crap.
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No kidding
Of course what is real though is the giant police state underneath it, the FEMA camps, the spying grids, all to tackle the American people when they find out 9/11 was a false flag operation, the treasury not only is it bare its gone and printing money has created huge inflation and the whole economy breaks.
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Re: No kidding
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Ya, I think it's spam.
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Citizen Spy Syndicates
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOiK9MdlYBo&feature=colike
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJqz 8HtyoCc&feature=colike
and there's much more about their incredible, brazen, daylight racketeering.
Best Regards,
ogs-silentcrimes.com
ogs-silentcrimes.blogspot.com
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Citizen Spy Syndicates
Check out the following links
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOiK9MdlYBo&feature=colike
next link ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj1iK397zDk&feature=colike
And the next link illustrates the "modern", Fusion coordinated, cult-hate groups hating all law abiding, liberty promoting American patriots ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJqz8HtyoCc&feature=colike
and there's much more expose about their incredible, brazen, daylight racketeering.
The 72 Threat Fusion Centers Were Designed To Threaten You
http://www.infowars.com/the-72-threat-fusion-centers-were-designed-to-threaten-you/
Best Regards,
ogs-silentcrimes.com
ogs-silentcrimes.blogspot.com
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