Crapaganda.com

Among documents recently released by the Nixon Presidential Library was the text of a talk given by Richard Nixon to attendees at the secret summer camp-out of the Bohemian Club. The tradition of a summer encampment was established six years after the Bohemian Club was formed in 1872.  The outing held at the, privately owned, Bohemian Grove is shrouded in secrecy.  Each year some of the worlds elite men get together to party and, as some will tell you, plan their takeover of the earth.

Richard Nixon, and newly elected Governor Ronald Reagan, at The Bohemian Grove (1967)

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When planning for the reelection bid of President Richard Nixon, his aides plotted the “seduction” of Frank Sinatra, who was viewed as a source of “massive financial resources,” and a man who “controls a great number of celebrities, entertainers and other public figures.”

According to memos released by the National Archives,  the plan to woo Sinatra was detailed in a confidential “eyes only” October 1971 memo from Charles Colson to H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff.

The several month long campaign worked like a charm. Not only did the Tricky Dick and Ol’ Blue Eyes enjoy a fateful first date, their on-again, off-again romance lasted for years.

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Cyber attacks against power plants and other vital infrastructure may be higher than previously believed

A new study that interviewed power plant operators and other “critical infrastructure” indicates more than 50 percent of all U.S. power plants have had to deal with an increase in cyber attacks.

Security company McAfee funded the research, speaking with 600 IT managers and executives from 14 different nations.

Around 54 percent of those interviewed said some type of network “stealthy infiltration” took place, with the same number of executives noting they faced massive denial-of-service attacks on their networks at one point in time.

The threat of cyber attacks scare most computer users to be worried about potential data and bank theft — but security experts and government analysts note cyber attacks could be a national security issue as well.

Brazil had several high-profile blackouts in late 2009, which allegedly are tied to cyber attacks against the country’s IT infrastructure.  Brazilian officials denied cyber terrorism caused the outages, but it’s a major issue now that the 2016 Summer Olympic Games will  be held in Rio de Janeiro.

The threat of cyber attacks are even more serious now with China, North Korea, and Russia either hiring hackers directly to launch attacks, or are funneling money to hacker groups.

Power Plants Report Increase of Foreign-Based Attacks (DailyTech.com)

California’s Governor, in an attempt to  to save the state billions of dollars, has suggested that they build cheaper prisons south of the border.

“We can do so much better, in the prison system alone, if we can go and take inmates – for instance, the 20,000 inmates that are illegal immigrants that are here – and get them to Mexico,” Schwarzenegger said.

“We pay them to build a prison down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in the prison,” he added. “Half the cost to build the prisons and half the cost to run the prisons. That is money, again, a billion dollars right there that can go into higher education. That is an example of one of the things we do that is unnecessary spending.”

Schwarzenegger asks: Why not build prisons in Mexico? (Sacramento Bee)

The Indian government has produced a number of ads that are now running on TV in the worlds second most populous nation. I guess it is cheaper to convince citizens that placebos are effective than it is to provide healthcare for the people. Watch as Indian tax payers money goes out the window!

Killing of Infants by Government? (Scientific Indians)

Dara O’Briain on Homeopathy (and other nonsense)

As it turns out, retired CIA agent John Kiriakou has an active imagination, basically.

According to a piece by veteran intelligence reporter Jeff Stein, Kiriakou “basically made up” details about the waterboarding of al Qaeda agent Abu Zubaydah.

Arguing that waterboarding — or simulated drowning — is actually effective in forcing prisoners to share secret information, Kiriakou told ABC News’ Nightline in April, “The next day [after his first time being waterboarded], he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate.”

“From that day on, he answered every question,” he said, according to ABC. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

“Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story,” Stein noted in Foreign Policy. “On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.”

It seems, the CIA is not just making up stories for the American public.  They are creating propaganda for their own staff!

More at: Revealed: Retired CIA agent ‘made up’ waterboarding details (The Raw Story)

On a Monday morning earlier this month, top Pentagon leaders gathered to simulate how they would respond to a sophisticated cyberattack aimed at paralyzing the nation’s power grids, its communications systems or its financial networks.

The results were dispiriting. The enemy had all the advantages: stealth, anonymity and unpredictability. No one could pinpoint the country from which the attack came, so there was no effective way to deter further damage by threatening retaliation. What’s more, the military commanders noted that they even lacked the legal authority to respond — especially because it was never clear if the attack was an act of vandalism, an attempt at commercial theft or a state-sponsored effort to cripple the United States, perhaps as a prelude to a conventional war.

What some participants in the simulation knew — and others did not — was that a version of their nightmare had just played out in real life, not at the Pentagon where they were meeting, but in the far less formal war rooms at Google Inc. Computers at Google and more than 30 other companies had been penetrated, and Google’s software engineers quickly tracked the source of the attack to seven servers in Taiwan, with footprints back to the Chinese mainland.

More at:  In Digital Combat, U.S. Finds No Easy Deterrent (NY Times)

Clinton Condemns Cyber Attacks (Reuters)

The secret Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedure (2003) was clandestinely released to Wikileaks.  These are the rules governing the day to day operations at Camp Delta.

Its release revealed some of the restrictions placed over detainees at the camp, including the designation of some prisoners as off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross, something that the U.S. military had in the past repeatedly denied.

Wikileaks has since released a copy of the 2004 edition of the manual, together with a detailed analysis of the changes.

View the entire Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedure (2003)

Amid the mass of aid agencies piling in to help Haiti quake victims is a batch of Church of Scientology “volunteer ministers”, claiming to use the power of touch to reconnect nervous systems.

Clad in yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the controversial US-based group, smiling volunteers fan out among the injured lying under makeshift shelters in the courtyard of Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital.

“When you get a sudden shock to a part of your body the energy gets stuck, so we re-establish communication within the body by touching people through their clothes, and asking people to feel the touch.”

Some doctors at the hospital are skeptical. One US doctor, who asked not to be named, snorted: “I didn’t know touching could heal gangrene.”

When asked what the Scientologists are doing here, another doctor said: “I don’t know.”

Do you care? “Not really,” she said, wheeling an unconscious patient out of the operating room to join hundreds of others in the hospital’s sunny courtyard.

Scientologists ‘heal’ Haiti quake victims using touch (Yahoo News)

A federal judge has dismissed, a case from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of AT&T customers challenging the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls and emails.

“We’re deeply disappointed in the judge’s ruling,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “This ruling robs innocent telecom customers of their privacy rights without due process of law.”

In the ruling, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker held that the privacy harm to millions of Americans from the illegal spying dragnet was not a “particularized injury” but instead a “generalized grievance” because almost everyone in the United States has a phone and Internet service.

“The alarming upshot of the court’s decision is that so long as the government spies on all Americans, the courts have no power to review or halt such mass surveillance even when it is flatly illegal and unconstitutional,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “With new revelations of illegal spying being reported practically every other week — just this week, we learned that the FBI has been unlawfully obtaining Americans’ phone records using Post-It notes rather than proper legal process — the need for judicial oversight when it comes to government surveillance has never been clearer.”

EFF Plans Appeal of Jewel v. NSA Warrantless Wiretapping Case (Electronic Frontier Foundation)