Keith Alexander Wants $1 Million Per Month For 'Cybersecurity' Consulting

from the hence-the-FUD dept

In May, we wrote about how ridiculous it was that former NSA boss Keith "collect it all" Alexander was now launching a cybersecurity consulting firm. After all, it's difficult to think of anyone who has done so much to undermine cybersecurity as Keith Alexander. Now Bloomberg is reporting that he's offering his "services" for the cut-rate price of $1 million per month. Yes, I'll repeat that:

Keith Alexander wants banks and other companies to pay him $1 million per month to help them with their "cybersecurity." At that price, I'd hope that he's just selling them the location of the backdoors he ordered to be placed in all of their hardware and software. And idiotic banks are apparently willing to pay, rather than going with the much, much cheaper option of hiring an actual security expert:

Joining a crowded field of cyber-consultants, the former National Security Agency chief is pitching his services for as much as $1 million a month. The audience is receptive: Under pressure from regulators, lawmakers and their customers, financial firms are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into barriers against digital assaults.

Either way, given that Alexander stands to profit quite nicely from his own undermining of cybersecurity, it's obviously no wonder at all that he's spent the past month exaggerating the "threat" of what's out there, often taking it to ridiculous levels.

While Alexander is doing the exact same thing as his predecessors, pay attention to the various media coverage of Alexander in the coming months and years. He's going to appear on TV and in newspapers and magazines a lot. And he will frequently be quoted spewing FUD about threats and how dangerous it is out there. And in almost none of those cases will any of the press covering him highlight the fact that Alexander stands to profit massively from keeping big banks and other companies scared shitless, so they hire him for $1 million a month to "protect" them from this threat that he both helped to create... and is now overhyping.

Filed Under: banks, consulting, cybersecurity, fud, keith alexander, nsa, surveillance

Mike Rogers Says Google Is Unpatriotic For Not Wanting NSA To Spy On Its Users

from the because-mike-rogers-is-a-hypocrite dept

This past Wednesday, the CIA held its first ever Conference on National Security at Georgetown University. It included plenty of the usual talking heads spouting nonsense, but I wanted to focus in on one particular talking head spouting particularly ridiculous nonsense. It's our old friend, Rep. Mike Rogers, who is retiring from Congress to try to become an even bigger blowhard on talk radio (as if that's possible). Apparently, Rogers is using this conference to practice the classical blowhard strategy of making a variety of absolutely ridiculous claims that directly contradict each other.

So, for example, he kicked it off by attacking Silicon Valley tech companies for fighting back against NSA surveillance, and for arguing (accurately) that the NSA's efforts have created a major business problem for them around the globe, as people outside the US no longer trust them. In Rogers' mind, that means these companies are putting "European profits above national security." This isn't even close to true, but that's what Rogers is claiming (at about 2 hours 10 minutes into the video, which is also embedded below):

While I'm on my soapbox, we should be really mad at Google and Facebook and Microsoft, because they're doing a very interesting, and I think, very dangerous thing. They've decided to come out and say "we oppose this new FISA bill, because it doesn't go far enough." And when you peel that onion back a bit and say "Why are you doing this? This is a good bill, it's safe, it's bi-partisan, it's rational. It meets all the requirements for 4th Amendment protections and privacy protection and allowing the system to work."

And they say, "Well, we have to do this because we're trying to make sure we don't lose our European business." I don't know about the rest of you but that offends me from the words "European business." Think about what they're doing. They're willing to, in their mind, justify the importance of their next quarter's earnings in Europe versus the national security of the United States. Everybody on those boards should be embarrassed and their CEOs should be embarrassed and their stockholders should be embarrassed. That one quarter cannot be worth the national security of the United States for the next ten generations."

This is wrong and ridiculous on so many levels, but let's just jump to the biggest one and then circle back later to the rest. Less than 15 minutes later (at about 2 hours 25 minutes into the video), Rogers was arguing how important the internet is to our economy, and how a cyberattack might destroy it. He's basically discussing his beloved CISPA and its "information sharing" components, which is really a backdoor way to "legalize" companies handing over all their data to the NSA without warrants.

One sixth of our economy now, is through the internet! One sixth! So this notion that we're all going to say "well the government should do nothing and just completely keep away" -- and I'm not for regulation, by the way, that's not what I mean, but I mean in some way to... to help defend these private networks or allow them to defend themselves -- if we don't get it right, one-sixth of our economy is going to go away. Like that (*snaps*). If every time you turn it on, you lose money, how many times are you going to turn it on and use the internet for commerce? You're not!

Right. Did you get that? If the NSA is violating all of your privacy, no big deal, and people will continue to use the internet and contributing to the economy -- and if it hurts the economy, well that's just the price we pay for national security. But, if those evil foreign governments violate your privacy, well, then all of you will stop using the internet and it will destroy our economy.

In short: if NSA hacking into Europeans eats into US companies' profits: that's patriotism. But if Europeans hack into US companies, then everyone will stop using the internet and it will destroy us all.

And then he goes even further:

If one financial institution -- we have one particular financial institution that clears somewhere about $7 trillion in global financial transactions every single day. Imagine if tomorrow that place gets in there, and through an attack of which we know does exist -- the potential does exist -- where the information is destroyed and manipulated. Now you don't know who owes what money. Some of that, they have lost transactions completely, forever. Imagine what that does to the economy? $7 trillion. Gone. Right? Gone! It's that serious!

So, profits of Wall Street banks are patriotic. But profits of Silicon Valley companies... well, they can be sacrificed for national security.

Except, of course, the underlying assumption in all of this -- which has been proven time and time again to be false, is that these efforts actually help with national security. Mike Rogers was one of the leading FUDspreaders, concerning the claim that the section 215 bulk phone records collection helped national security. Except that's been proven to be false time and time again. Both judges and the President's own task force have marvelled at the total lack of evidence that the bulk records provision was necessary.

The complaints from various tech companies (who Rogers himself admits makes up a huge part of our economy) is not about their "next quarter" of European profits, but about the very idea that he and his friends have more or less convinced the rest of the world that American internet companies are not trustworthy. That's not about next quarter's profits, it's about violating the privacy of everyone around the globe -- for no actual benefit.

So, in the end, we see what hypocritical views Rogers has. It's shameful and unpatriotic for Silicon Valley to be concerned about the privacy rights of their users, because that might lead to an attack on national security, and that attack on national security might harm the profits of Silicon Valley and (more importantly) Wall Street, and any attack on profits is unpatriotic (except, apparently, the profits he wanted them to give up first). Confused? Don't be. What Rogers is really saying is he doesn't give a shit, so long as the NSA gets to violate everyone's privacy, and he'll make any ridiculous argument to keep that happening. And, of course, to keep it secret, because if you don't know about it, he still thinks your privacy hasn't been violated.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, cia, cia conference, fisa, fud, mike rogers, national security, nsa, patriotism, privacy, section 215, usa freedom act
Companies: facebook, google, microsoft

James Clapper Admits What Everyone's Been Saying For Months: Snowden Didn't Take 1.7 Million Documents

from the a-bit-slow dept

You know, you'd think that the "intelligence community" would be a bit more intelligent. As we've discussed many, many times, nearly all of the estimates of "harm" concerning Ed Snowden's actions were based on the faulty assumption that he "took" (and revealed) every document he ever "touched" while at NSA -- somewhere around 1.7 million (sometimes referred to as 1.5 million, but then upped to 1.7 million). Except that two of the reporters who got the documents, Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill, have both said from the very beginning that it was about 60,000.

And yet, NSA defenders keep insisting that he's caused all of this harm because of what was in the 1.7 million documents... nearly all of which he did not take. Indeed, the much-hyped (by NSA defenders) Pentagon report on the "staggering harm" that Snowden has created doesn't actually say that. It says it's "staggering" how many documents he had access to, not that he took. Because the NSA, one year after the first Snowden revelation still has no idea how much he actually took (which certainly raises questions about their vaunted "auditing" of everything done at the agency).

In fact, James Clapper is now admitting that maybe Snowden didn't take so much, and maybe the "harm" wasn't as bad as he, himself, has been arguing:

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says it appears the impact may be less than once feared because "it doesn't look like he [Snowden] took as much" as first thought.

"We're still investigating, but we think that a lot of what he looked at, he couldn't pull down," Clapper said in a rare interview at his headquarters Tuesday. "Some things we thought he got, he apparently didn't." Although somewhat less than expected, the damage is still "profound," he said.

In other words, exactly as pretty much all of us have been saying -- all of the frantic FUD-filled estimates of "harm" were actually massively over-hyped based on faulty assumptions. And yet that never stopped Clapper, Mike Rogers, Keith Alexander, Dianne Feinstein and others from continuing to trot out those bogus numbers, even though tons of people had debunked them. And now that Clapper is finally admitting that he himself over-hyped the supposed "harm" and the documents that Snowden took, he acts as if he's revealing some big news.

Amusingly, the report also claims that the DOD is also lowering its estimate of how much Snowden "touched" from 1.77 million (up from the 1.7 million they had been saying, actually) down to the 1.5 million which was the number they had been using back at the beginning of December anyway. It's almost as if they actually have no idea and are just pulling numbers out of thin air.

Filed Under: documents, ed snowden, fud, james clapper, nsa, surveillance

General Keith Alexander Is An Opportunistic Coward

from the shielded-in-shame dept

In all that we've written about General Keith Alexander, former chief guy at the NSA who has overseen the most egregious overreach in domestic spying American history, we've learned a great deal about him. For instance, we know logic eludes him, after he insisted that we need more spying because current spying is encouraging terrorism. We also know he doesn't give a damn about the whole freedom of the press thing, what with his support for press gag orders. And we know he's a man of limited imagination, having told Congress he just can't think of any other way to keep you and I safe without the NSA's massive surveillance programs.

You know what else Keith Alexander is? A coward. I say that absolutely knowing that I'll probably get killed in the comments for suggesting a man who signed up to serve the public, serve in the military, and serve in intelligence is a coward. Well to hell with anyone who suggests you can't call a man who serves a coward. Where were all of you when Edward Snowden was getting lambasted in the exact same way? Still, accusing a man like Alexander of cowardice requires an explanation. Get yourself started by watching this clip of his appearance on CNN.

"It's going to get more dangerous. I would rather be sitting here in the hot seat defending what we're doing than sitting here in the hot seat after a terrorist attack and you asking me 'how did we fail the country?' It's a bad place out there. They're trying to kill us. These are some of the tools. If you take away some of the tools, it is my assessment after forty years in the business, and today is my fortieth anniversary in joining the army, it is my assessment that it is going to get tougher. And these leaks have hurt us. They will get tougher."

Okay, let's get the obvious out of the way. All this harm that has supposedly been done by Snowden's leaks turns out to be smoke and mirrors, as far as what the government is willing to prove is concerned. Now that that's out of the way, perhaps unlike some of my colleagues here, I too believe there is a very real danger from international terrorism. That said, a blanket statement about how bad things are and how "they" are trying to kill us is about as useful as a rectum on a houseplant. Nobody is arguing that there isn't at least some degree of danger, the argument is over how far we're willing to let our government go to protect the liberty at which they're chipping away, nevermind the way we comport ourselves as a member of the international community.

But it's the first part of that statement that really pisses me off and it's that same part that reveals the cowardice inside Alexander. This constant hint-dropping of how much more difficult it is to prevent the next domestic terrorist attack now that the public is aware of the massive surveillance program is a pretty clear attempt at innoculation of responsibility. It's as if these spy chiefs looked at the damning of public officials that occurred after 9/11 (far too little of it, in my opinion) and decided to shield themselves from possible future criticism by proactively blaming Snowden's leaks for forthcoming attacks. Read another way, his hot seat comment reads to say: if sometime in the future, thousands of Americans end up dead in an attack, don't come blame us, you took our tools away from us.

For me, it's hard to imagine a more cowardly statement. Is Alexander so afraid to face potential failure that he would scapegoat someone who, at the very least, thought he was doing his patriotic duty? Would he have the intelligence community sidestep their responsibility simply because the public now recognizes the NSA's overreach? Would he cast off his duty simply because sunlight has finally marked his underground lair?

That kind of chess-piece positioning isn't the act of a patriot. It isn't the act of a hero. It's the act of a coward, which is exactly what General Keith Alexander is, and I'm happy to treat him like one. After all, the brave thing to do is to understand that freedom comes with danger and to bear that danger gratefully and willingly.

Filed Under: danger, fear, fud, keith alexander, threats

If Comcast CEO Brian Roberts Really Believes Netflix Gets Bandwidth For Free, Will He Pay Netflix's Bandwidth Bill?

from the just-saying... dept

So there was some buzz earlier this week when Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, speaking at the Code Conference, more or less admitted that he was seeking to shake down the entire internet:

In a series of analogies, Roberts likened his company’s role to that of a postmaster, pointing out that Netflix pays hundreds of millions of dollars to mail DVDs to its customers but now expects to be able to deliver the same content over the internet for free.

“They would like it all to be free. I would like to not have to pay for cable boxes,” he said.

Except, of course, Netflix already pays for its bandwidth. And Comcast's customers already pay for their bandwidth. What Roberts really wants to do is to get Netflix to pay a second time for Comcast's customers' bandwidth, even though they're already paying for it.

As for this argument that Netflix is trying to get anything "for free," we went through this ridiculous argument nearly a decade ago, when the lobbyists for the telcos made the same claim (though, at that time it was about Google instead of Netflix). Mike McCurry, working as an AT&T lobbyist at the time, argued that Google "will never have to pay a dime no matter how much bandwidth they use." Basically the same argument that Roberts is making about Netflix wanting "it all to be free."

So as we did with McCurry, we'd like to make a small request of Roberts: if he's so sure that Netflix pays nothing for these things, why not agree to pay Netflix's bandwidth bill? After all, he's arguing that it's free, so he shouldn't have to pay anything. Of course he knows that Netflix pays a ton for bandwidth. And he knows that his customers pay a ton for bandwidth. He's just hoping to get them both to pay more.

Filed Under: brian roberts, double paying, fud, mike mccurry, net neutrality, open internet
Companies: comcast, netflix

The Three Big Lies: How The Federal Government Kept Its Post-9/11 Spying On Americans A Secret

from the three-big-lies dept

Last night, the first episode of Frontline's United States of Secrets aired, going deep into the history of "The Program," which is what the Bush (really Cheney) White House referred to the NSA program to spy on Americans based on incredibly shaky legal theories -- theories that were locked in a safe in Michael Hayden's office at the NSA, which almost no one was allowed to see. If you want additional background or summaries of the episode, Monday night's Fresh Air was great, including interviews with both the director of the program as well as Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe -- two NSA whistleblowers (who we've mentioned before) who had their lives turned upside down due to totally bogus FBI raids, which were clearly a response to their whistleblowing activities. Another great summary comes from PRI's The World.

Either way, the thing that stands out to me is how the administration tried, desperately to stop anyone from revealing "The Program" with three big lies, which are discussed in all three of the links above. Here's the short summary of what happened any time anyone sought to raise issues about the legality of "The Program":

• It's completely legal and has been judged as such (though don't ask why)
• It's "unbelievably effective." You wouldn't believe the threats we're stopping -- and that's why we can't talk about it.
• If you reveal it, hundreds of thousands of Americans may die in a future attack -- and the blood will be on your hands if you reveal and/or stop this program.

Of course, at this point, we now know that basically all three of those things are untrue. The "legality" was from a (still secret) memo from Cheney's lawyer David Addington that was kept almost totally secret. Some of the people who have seen it (including Jack Goldsmith at the OLC), apparently found that the legal reasoning was insanely weak, which may be part of the reason it was kept secret. It also notes, as has been discussed here in the past, that eventually the DOJ figured out a way to get the FISA Court's Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to issue a very questionable ruling effectively authorizing the program.

As for the "it's working," we've seen recently what a huge and incredible lie that was. Similarly, while the NSA and its defenders love to throw around the idea that if anyone reveals anything "blood will be on your hands," that threat is always issued when whistleblowing happens, and it's always a massive exaggeration.

Either way, those three big lies were effective in scaring people off from doing anything about the program -- including Bill Keller at the NY Times, who spiked James Risen's big story about the warrantless wiretapping (a part of the larger program) for over a year (well past the 2004 Presidential election). And, of course, since the program became known finally when Risen was getting ready to publish a book about it (and thus Keller felt he couldn't sit on the story any longer), those "hundreds of thousands of deaths" were (once again) proven to be nothing but bogus FUD.

Of course, in the past year, Ed Snowden has revealed many more details of The Program and what it later turned into, and thus provided even more evidence that the three claims were just ridiculous lies all along. And yet, for over a decade now, those three big lies have been at the heart of the NSA's program to spy on Americans.

Filed Under: david addington, dick cheney, fud, nsa, surveillance, united states of secrecy

AT&T Warns FCC Of A Parade Of Horribles That Wouldn't Actually Happen If FCC Reclassifies Broadband

from the fud-fud-fud dept

As it appears that the FCC is (at least publicly) potentially warming to the idea of reclassifying broadband services under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, we warned that the big broadband providers would go absolutely apeshit. And, so it begins, with AT&T sending a ridiculous FUD-filled letter to the FCC warning it about a whole bunch of horrible things that it says will happen if the FCC does go with the Title II option. Of course, almost nothing it describes is actually true.

For example, AT&T pretends (based on absolutely nothing) that if the FCC reclassifies broadband providers as telco services, it will have to reclassify all sorts of other services, including various internet companies such as search and email providers:

Section 222 obligations would also kick in, imposing new obligations on a host of entities and causing wholesale disruption of current Internet business models. ISPs at both edges of the network, as well as transit providers, content delivery networks and others would appear to be statutorily required to take reasonable measures to prevent disclosure or use of information, such as IP addresses, websites visited, customer location information and other data, and they would be precluded from using this information without customer consent. Email providers and search engines, as telecommunications service providers in their own right, could likewise be subject to these requirements.

[....]

Moreover, it is foolish to think that the Commission could reclassify the provision of broadband Internet access to consumers as a telecommunications service without similarly reclassifying a broad array of other functionally analogous services in the Internet ecosystem. For example, there is no logical or legally sustainable basis to distinguish between ISPs serving consumer “eyeballs” and those serving content and other edge providers. Likewise, transit providers and content delivery networks (CDNs) would be telecommunications service providers subject to Title II, as would connected device customers. (The latter would be resellers of telecommunications services and thus telecommunications service providers in their own right.) Indeed, the logic behind reclassification would dictate that when a search engine connects an advertising network to a search request or effectuates a connection between a search user and an advertiser, it too would be providing a telecommunications service. And so too would an email provider that transmits an email or a social network that enables a messaging or chat session. The point is, once the Commission separates transmission from information processing, there is no way logically to limit that rationale to one segment of the Internet and not others. Every entity that provides an over-the-top communications capability, whether it’s voice, text, or video, becomes either a facilities-based provider or a reseller (or both) of a telecommunications service.

Except that's not true. As Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica points out, this appears to ignore basically all of the past dozen years of FCC decisions, including those that defined broadband as information services in the first place. The FCC was able to narrowly tailor those decisions to specific types of broadband, without impacting other types of services, and there's no reason why it can't do so here with reclassification. As Free Press's Matt Wood told Brodkin: "Nothing in Title II says that every last provision has to apply to any Title II service."

AT&T also spends a lot of time quoting idiotic assessments from Wall Street about how reclassification would be viewed by investors. This is a total red herring and actually should work against AT&T's point. After all, if Wall Street had its way, broadband providers wouldn't invest in their networks at all, because that's just wasted capital expenditure. The analysts that AT&T quotes are the same people who were hammering Verizon for years about its decision to invest in fiber to the home with its Fios service. That investment -- which Verizon's CEO Ivan Seidenberg did despite Wall Street freaking out -- helped Verizon build a much better internet offering (though, the company basically stopped investing in it once Seidenberg left). Wall Street's concerns are about the impact on the next three months. The FCC's concern is supposed to be on making sure we have a fast and competitive communications infrastructure. Wall Street's concerns about investment should actually be a clear signal to the FCC that it may be moving in the right direction, in setting up a system whereby the big broadband providers actually have incentives to improve their network.

In short, the Wall Street analysts fretting is really just them worried that AT&T (and others) might actually have to invest in building a better network. That's a good thing.

Even more hilarious is that nearly all of the Wall Street analyst quotes that AT&T tosses out are from five years ago, and many are insisting that there's no need for reclassification because of all that "competition" in the broadband space. But now we know that was bunk then, and it's even more bunk today. Look at some of these quotes from the 2009/2010 time frame:

Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research observed, on the day the Commission proposed Title II reclassification, that: “Markets abhor uncertainty. Today we got uncertainty in spades.” He added that “it is unclear what, precisely, this means for [other] information service providers, including Google”; that he “expect[ed] a profoundly negative impact on capital investment”; and that the “third way” was “an unequivocal negative development[.]”

Jonathan Chaplin of Credit Suisse explained, also in the aftermath of the reclassification proposal, that “[t]he biggest disconnect between Washington and Wall Street is on how the competitiveness of the industry is viewed. . . . Competition is doing its job and regulations would make it very difficult for companies to get reasonable return on investment. . . . The threat of regulation could discourage investment and cost jobs[.]”

Mike McCormack of J.P. Morgan agreed that investors were “extremely nervous about what’s coming” out of this proceeding, and added that “[b]roadband is a very competitive place so there’s no point [in] fixing it[.]”

There may be a "disconnect" between Washington and Wall Street, but there's also a big disconnect on the actual state of broadband in the US. It's not competitive and it sucks compared to much of the world. It's a disgrace, but Wall Street analysts don't care, because all they want is to make sure that broadband providers aren't doing capital expenditures on actually building a better network. Their short-term, narrow concern is on the next quarterly numbers from AT&T, Verizon and Comcast -- not the overall impact of good broadband infrastructure on basically the entire economy (including, by the way, those big broadband providers). It's an incredibly short-sighted stance. Ivan Seidenberg didn't fall prey to idiot Wall Street analysts for years -- and yet AT&T insists their word is gospel.

Filed Under: broadband, fcc, fud, net neutrality, open internet, reclassification, title ii, tom wheeler
Companies: at&t

Next NSA Boss Thinks NSA Just Needs Better PR; And Kicks It Off With A Bunch Of Cyberwar FUD

from the new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss dept

Vice Admiral Mike Rogers (not to be confused with Rep. Mike Rogers) is pretty much all set to take over for Keith Alexander as both the new head of the NSA and the new head of US Cyber Command. These are the two organizations that the government likes to pretend are separate, but clearly are not (same boss, same offices, same basic goals). While the Senate has no say in approving the NSA appointment, they do have a say in approving the head of US Cyber Command, so the hearings are really covering both positions. Appearing before the Senate, Rogers has made it clear that he's cut from the same cloth as Alexander, and will basically continue the same kind of misleading FUD. When asked about "takeaways" from the past few months, Rogers claimed that the NSA really just needed better PR:

"I believe one of the takeaways form the situation over the last few months is that as an intelligence professional...I have to be capable of communicating in a way that highlights what we are doing and why to the greatest extent possible," Rogers said to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Yeah, like that's going to work. And, by "better communicating" it appears that Admiral Rogers really means spreading more FUD about how we need to ramp up our "offensive" "cyber" attack capabilities. This is the same crap that Alexander has been pushing for years, when the simple truth is that the US (NSA) has been among the most aggressive on that front already, and the "threats" that it discusses are almost always things that the NSA/USCC are actually doing itself, rather than things that are being done to us.

As for any actual reform? Don't expect that under Admiral Rogers, as Marcy Wheeler highlights, Rogers seems to have the obfuscation-about-things-already-public game down pat.

Filed Under: admiral mike rogers, cybersecurity, fud, nsa, surveillance, us cyber command

FBI Admits It's Not Really About Law Enforcement Any More; Ignores Lots Of Crimes To Focus On Creating Fake Terror Plots

from the how-is-that-making-us-safer? dept

A couple years ago, it was revealed that the FBI noted in one of its "counterterrorism training manuals" that FBI agents could "bend or suspend the law and impinge upon the freedoms of others," which seemed kind of odd for a government agency who claimed its "primary function" was "law enforcement." You'd think that playing by the rules would be kind of important. However, as John Hudson at Foreign Policy has noted, at some point last summer, the FBI quietly changed its fact sheet, so that it no longer says that "law enforcement" is its primary function, replacing it with "national security." Of course, I thought we already had a "national security" agency -- known as the "National Security Agency." Of course, while this may seem like a minor change, as the article notes, it is the reality behind the scenes. The FBI massively beefed up resources focused on "counterterrorism" and... then let all sorts of other crimes slide. Including crimes much more likely to impact Americans, like financial/white collar fraud.

Between 2001 and 2009, the FBI doubled the amount of agents dedicated to counterterrorism, according to a 2010 Inspector's General report. That period coincided with a steady decline in the overall number of criminal cases investigated nationally and a steep decline in the number of white-collar crime investigations.

"Violent crime, property crime and white-collar crime: All those things had reductions in the number of people available to investigate them," former FBI agent Brad Garrett told Foreign Policy. "Are there cases they missed? Probably."

The article correctly notes that this has had a big impact:

The reductions in white-collar crime investigations became obvious. Back in 2000, the FBI sent prosecutors 10,000 cases. That fell to a paltry 3,500 cases by 2005. "Had the FBI continued investigating financial crimes at the same rate as it had before the terror attacks, about 2,000 more white-collar criminals would be behind bars," the report concluded. As a result, the agency fielded criticism for failing to crack down on financial crimes ahead of the Great Recession and losing sight of real-estate fraud ahead of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.

The article accurately notes how the FBI has basically started ignoring a tremendous amount of financial/white collar crime, but unfortunately never bothers to do the flipside: to look at whether or not the FBI has been even remotely effective in the whole "national security" aspect that is now its "primary function." Because, from the evidence we've seen, it seems like a disaster. Rather than tracking down and capturing actual terrorists (remember how the FBI knew all about the Boston bombers, but did nothing about them?), it seems like the FBI has been coming up with ways to keep itself busy that have nothing to do with really protecting national security.

So... what has the FBI been doing? Well, every time we hear anything about the FBI and counterterrorism, it seems to be a case where the FBI has been spending a ton of resources to concoct completely made up terrorism plots, duping some hapless, totally unconnected person into taking part in this "plot" then arresting him with big bogus headlines about how they "stopped" a terrorist plot that wouldn't have even existed if the FBI hadn't set it up in the first place. And this is not something that the FBI has just done a couple times. It's happened over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And those are just the stories that we wrote about that I can find in a quick search. I'm pretty sure there are a bunch more stories that we wrote about, let alone that have happened.

All of these efforts to stop their own damn "plots" screams of an agency that feels it needs to "do something" when there's really nothing to be done. Thousands of agents were reassigned from stopping real criminals to "counterterrorism" and when they found there were basically no terrorists around, they just started making their own in order to feel like they were doing something... and to have headlines to appease people upstairs. The government seems to have gone collectively insane when it comes to anything related to "terrorism."

Filed Under: fake plots, fbi, fud, law enforcement, national security, nsa, own plots, terrorism

Every 'Threat' The NSA Spreads FUD About Seems To Be Something The NSA Itself Is Actually Doing

from the i-guess-they-would-know... dept

Nearly a year ago, well before all the Snowden leaks, we had a discussion about how, for all the talk from Keith Alexander about how the US was facing "unprecedented cyberattacks" that might bring about a "cyber Pearl Harbor," in reality, it appeared that the real global threat to computer systems was... the US government itself, via Keith Alexander's "US Cyber Command," which had, by far, the most sophisticated and advanced digital attack unit and wasn't afraid to use it. In fact, the US government seems to think it has incredibly broad powers to attack digitally. Of course, the nature of those attacks have become a lot more clear lately. And, as a part of that, one thing that's becoming clear: every time you hear a scary story about a kind of attack that some foreigners might do, you can pretty much guarantee: the NSA has already done it.

You may recall that, late in 2012, the House Intelligence Committee, led by dishonest NSA defender Rep. Mike Rogers, put out a report claiming that Americans should not use networking equipment made by Huawei, the Chinese networking giant, hinting that the company might be inserting backdoors and spyware into the equipment for the Chinese government. Huawei -- which had actually previously publicly asked the US government to investigate it to prove that such claims were false -- was not at all pleased about this, claiming that the whole thing was libelous and "utterly lacking in substance." A month ago, Huawei suggested that it was going to just ditch the US market because of all of this.

And yet... the recent NSA revelations about its technical capabilities to backdoor various hardware products showed that it's actually the NSA which has backdoors in Huawei's equipment. That doesn't foreclose the possibility that the Chinese have hacked it as well, but it sure looks ridiculous. As the Wired article linked above summarizes: "US to China: We hacked your internet gear we told you not to hack." This certainly plays into the hands of the Chinese, who have long argued that the attack on Huawei by Mike Rogers and friends was really just an attempt to pump up US-based competitors like Cisco (whose products the NSA has also apparently compromised).

And then there's the whole "BIOS" attack thing. You may recall that the big "scoop" in the hilariously lopsided 60 Minutes infomercial for the NSA by John Miller (a counterterrorism official pretending to be a journalist), was that there was some scary foreign threat out there from another country that was going to "infect the BIOS" of every computer on earth and turn them all into bricks. Experts pointed out that the claims were pure gibberish.

Except in that same report about the NSA's technical capabilities came the news that it's the NSA that is installing malware in the BIOS. As Marcy Wheeler notes:

Most fearmongering claims the NSA makes may well be projection about its own activities.

None of this means that others (and the finger is usually pointed at the Chinese) aren't doing the same sorts of things themselves. But it sure does seem pretty hypocritical to go around fearmongering about the things that we, ourselves, are doing.

Filed Under: bios, china, cyberattacks, fud, nsa, threats
Companies: huawei