Crapaganda.com

In their pursuit of terrorists, government intelligence agencies leave no digital rock unturned: telephone calls, emails, text messages, blogs, news sites – they monitor them all. Sometimes, as with social networks like Facebook, the companies behind these services gladly hand over data to governments to assist in this hunt. Yet there is still one place where terrorists can go, one place where they can talk to each other openly without fear of being detected: online video games. Hundreds of millions of people flock to massively multiplayer online role playing games like World of Warcraft, and revel in online virtual worlds like Second Life. …and somewhere in those millions are terrorists looking to plot the next big attack against Western civilization. That’s right, terrorism has been chased into using virtual reality as its staging grounds. The future is a strange, comical, and scary place to live when that Level 40 Night Elf looking for a group may be Al Qaeda in disguise.

The US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has been aiming to trace criminal and terrorist activities perpetrated online. Started in 2008, their “Project Reynard” is specifically geared towards uncovering recruiting and training operations going unnoticed in online gaming environments. Check out the news story explaining Project Reynard in the video below. While the IARPA project is unlikely to produce publicly accessible results anytime soon, anxiety over the use of virtual reality for terrorism is already increasing. The recent bombing and massacre in Norway, and a Dutch best selling novel have also heightened the public awareness of terrorists benefiting from online games. Yet even if terrorists can be found in virtual reality the way they have been found in every other communication system, will kicking them out really end their operations?

That terrorists have infiltrated online games is no longer largely questioned. The US National Intelligence director acknowledged the threat in his Data Mining Report in 2008. This is a real phenomenon, a real “threat to national security”, and that blows my mind. When did hard-line killers get together and say, “you know where we can organize our attacks? The same place where nerds go to pretend to be superheroes and kill bad guys.” The irony there is palpable. What remains to be seen, however, is if governments will be able to accurately quantify the size of this threat, and neutralize it. That’s where Project Reynard comes in, as Bill Moyers explains:

Bill Moyers’ coverage of IARPA’s Reynard gets a little hyperbolic (suddenly 2008 seems like a lifetime ago) but the concerns over the breadth of the project are real. Documentation for Reynard shows that the goal isn’t so much to find specific terrorist cells using specific online platforms, it’s to develop a way of discovering any kind of suspicious behavior occurring in these virtual realities. Essentially, IARPA wants to have a reliable means of quantifying the way characters act in these games so that they can draw reasonable conclusions about the people controlling those avatars. What does the guild you join on World of Warcraft, the shops you frequent in Second Life, and the characters you chat with reveal about your nationality, your economic status, and your inclination towards real world violence? It’s a little funny (weird, not ha-ha) to think of terrorists resorting to online video games as secret hideouts, but it’s considerably less so to consider governments will now be trolling through everyone’s game statistics to find those criminals.

By the way, if connecting digital behavior to personality traits seems like a foolish endeavor, remember that scientists are finding ways to translate the smallest facial tics and physical gestures into profiles to find terrorists entering public locations like airports. With enough data, even virtual clues may be able to reliably identify groups with terrorist associations. From there, it’s just a matter of data mining and analysis to determining who is “suspicious” and when and where they are gathering. The same basic approach is already used to cull through millions of emails, phone calls, and text messages.

Project Reynard launched in the last quarter of 2009 and is set to conclude sometime next year. It will join other online intelligence gathering operations, like the EU’s much larger Project Indect, aimed at combing through huge amounts of data looking to find evidence of criminal or terrorist activity. While there have been noted examples of terror organizations like Al Qaeda recruiting members through email, porn sites, and other internet forums, considerably less is known about recruitment and training in online games. That’s because so much that happens in those virtual worlds is simply unmonitored…for now. While privacy terms for most virtual worlds like Second Life make it clear that your actions in most online environments is considered public, most of us can converse freely without worrying about government eavesdropping. Reynard (and to some extent, Indect) may change that. While we’ve grown accustomed (or oblivious) to the automated sifting through our mobile calls, emails, and text messages, it’s going to be extra creepy to think that IARPA may be tracking who I talk to while role-playing a giant anthropomorphic panda.

Even before Reynard is ready to share its results, crime fighting organizations in the US have already taken up monitoring online gaming to catch illegal activities. According to documents captured by LulzSec, and released on Public Intelligence, New Jersey and New York authorities (in cooperation with the FBI) have monitored conversations made by gang members on the Play Station 3 and Xbox 360 consoles related to past and future crimes, some international. It seems gangs figured out that most voice over internet protocols would largely go unexamined. While clearly that is less true than they assumed, VOIP is probably still a safer bet for clandestine activities than landlines and mobile phones. In-game discussions, say in a rousing match of Halo may be even more difficult to pin down at the moment. I’m sure police and criminals are learning what Reynard already assumes – anytime you have a virtual location that enables one-to-one communication, you have the possibility of its use for facilitating illegal activity.

Of course, some people don’t even need the one-to-one communication to help them commit terrorist atrocities. Anders Behring Breivik, the gunman responsible for killing dozens of children and camp staff in the recent attack in Norway, left a massive manifesto describing his motivations and preparations. Apparently the fiend used Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which has many realistic depictions of 21st Century military operations, as a training ground for his attack. Reactions to Breivik’s use of online gaming has provoked a wide range of reactions, from condemnations among gaming communities to knee-jerk calls for banning all sales of the game in Europe. No matter how you feel about violence in video games, however, Breivik’s activities suggest the possible uses terrorists may find in virtual worlds without using them for communication.

Dutch author Emile van Veen is far less subtle, preferring to outline exactly how terrorists can use video games to kill us all. His international best seller, MMORPG, is a Dan Brown-esque thriller wherein a duo of unlikely heroes must race against the clock to unveil a hidden terrorist plot centered around the use of a massively multiplayer online game. Schlocky? Yeah, maybe, but since its release in March of this year, van Veen’s MMORPG has raised public awareness of the links between terrorism and online gaming to new heights. Based on “two years of research” into the realities of virtual assisted terrorism,MMORPG paints a grim picture. Aided by the anonymity and accessibility of online gaming, terrorists can talk to each other almost anywhere, anytime, without the threat of being detected. At least, in van Veen’s fiction. It’s scary to contemplate that the same may be equally true in the real world.

As always with the ongoing “War on Terror”, the risks and defenses seem almost equally horrible. Clearly some lunatics will use video games as inspiration or preparation for their murder sprees. I doubt we’ll ever be able to stop that completely – such crazies will always find something to fuel their need to hurt people. What’s both more concerning, and more controllable, is the use of virtual worlds as staging grounds for organized terrorist attacks. It’s disturbing to think that the only solution proffered to fight such organizations is a reduction of everyone’s privacy while playing these MMORPGs. The loss of freedom to fight the loss of life seems like a zero sum game to me.

Yet it’s also the only game intelligence agencies seem to want to play. Before we sign over all privacy in virtual reality, we should remind our governments that while online games may temporarily provide ideal circumstances for terrorists to communicate, the advantages there won’t remain unique. Any virtual location where people can go unmonitored is going to be a problem. Even if Project Reynard effectively closes virtual games to terrorism, another such online opportunity will arise. Trolling World of Warcraft for terror cells may be necessary, but it’s a short term fix. Ultimately we’re going to have to fight the sources of these movements (both in the real and virtual worlds) if we’re to have any hope of them ending.

Source:  Singularity Hub

The personal effects of Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, will be sold via an online auction by the U.S. Marshals beginning May 18. U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell of the Eastern District of California ordered the sale in August 2010. Proceeds from the auction will be used to compensate Kaczynski’s victims.

The auction will run from May 18 to June 2. The online catalog, which will include approximately 60 lots of property, will be on gsaauctions.gov beginning May 18. Items to be sold include personal documents, such as driver’s licenses, birth certificates, deeds, checks, academic transcripts, photos, and his handwritten codes; typewriters; tools; clothing; watches; several hundred books; and more than 20,000 pages of written documents, including the original handwritten and typewritten versions of the “UnabomManifesto.”

“The U.S. Marshals Service has been given a unique opportunity to help the victims of Theodore Kaczynski’s horrific crimes,” said U.S. Marshal Albert Nájera of the Eastern Districtof California. “We will use the technology that Kaczynski railed against in his variousmanifestos to sell artifacts of his life. The proceeds will go to his victims and, in a very smallway, offset some of the hardships they have suffered.”Photos of selected auction lots are available at www.flickr.com/photos/usmarshals/(click on “Sets”). The catalog, photos and descriptions of all the lots will be available at www.gsaauctions.gov when the auction goes live on May 18.

See: US Marshall Service Press Release

Kurt Haskell is an attorney and was an eyewitness to the 12/25/09 “Underwear Bomber” incident. Kurt maintains that he witnessed a well dressed man argue with security and escort Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab onto his US flight without a passport. Shortly thereafter, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly attempted to blow up flight 254 with plastic explosives hidden in his underwear, prompting the new wave of Backscatter X-ray machines in airports.

Kurt explains why he feels like the entire event was staged by the government in order to perpetrate the threat of terrorism in this country, and how being an eyewitness to a false flag attack caused him to question his entire political paradigm.

Listen to the entire interview with Media Roots Radio

<object height=”81″ width=”100%”> <param name=”movie” value=”http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F11980887&amp;show_comments=false&amp;auto_play=false&amp;color=ff7700″></param> <param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param> <embed allowscriptaccess=”always” height=”81″ src=”http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F11980887&amp;show_comments=false&amp;auto_play=false&amp;color=ff7700″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”100%”></embed> </object>   <span><a href=”http://soundcloud.com/media-roots/mediarootsradio-2″>Media Roots Radio- Interview with Key Eyewitness to “Underwear Bomber” False Flag</a> by <a href=”http://soundcloud.com/media-roots”>Media Roots</a></span>

Obtained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the leaked footage from inside the chopper shows the twin towers engulfed in clouds of smoke – and captures the stunned reactions of the cops when they fell.

“The whole tower, it’s gone!” one cop yells. “Holy crap, they knocked the whole fricking thing down!”

Another officer wonders out loud, “How could it go down?”

Earlier in the footage, the officers take in a panoramic view of the unfolding pandemonium – and get perilously close to the black roiling smoke.

Source: New York Daily News

President Barack Obama approved Monday the resumption of military trials for detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ending a two-year ban.

Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system.

The unclassified 2009 report “Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses” by financial analyst Kevin D. Freeman, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, states that “a three-phased attack was planned and is in the process against the United States economy.”

While economic analysts and a final report from the federal government’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission blame the crash on such economic factors as high-risk mortgage lending practices and poor federal regulation and supervision, the Pentagon contractor adds a new element: “outside forces,” a factor the commission did not examine.

“There is sufficient justification to question whether outside forces triggered, capitalized upon or magnified the economic difficulties of 2008,” the report says, explaining that those domestic economic factors would have caused a “normal downturn” but not the “near collapse” of the global economic system that took place.

Suspects include financial enemies in Middle Eastern states, Islamic terrorists, hostile members of the Chinese military, or government and organized crime groups in Russia, Venezuela or Iran. Chinese militaryofficials publicly have suggested using economic warfare against the U.S

In an interview with The Times,Mr. Freeman said his report provided enough theoretical evidence for an economic warfare attack that further forensic study was warranted.

“The new battle space is the economy,” he said. “We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons systems each year. But a relatively small amount of money focused against our financial markets through leveraged derivatives or cyber efforts can result in trillions of dollars in losses. And, the perpetrators can remain undiscovered.

“This is the equivalent of box cutters on an airplane,” Mr. Freeman said.

Paul Bracken, a Yale University professor who has studied economic warfare, said he saw “no convincing evidence that ‘outside forces’ colluded to bring about the 2008 crisis.”

“There were outside players in the market” for unregulated credit default swaps, Mr. Bracken said in an e-mail. “Foreign banks and hedge funds play the shorts all the time too. But suggestions of an organized targeted attack for strategic reasons don’t seem to me to be plausible.”

Story continues at: Washington Times

Using the available scientific evidence “it is not possible to reach a definitive conclusion” about the source of the anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax letter attacks which killed five people, according to a report issued Tuesday by the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings come two and a half years after the FBI said Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins was allegedly behind the anthrax mailings, and the spores could be genetically traced to a flask labeled RMR-1029 in his lab.

The scientific panel said the anthrax used in mailings to news organizations and members of Congress was the Ames strain Bacillus anthracis, and spores from those letters shared “a number of genetic similarities” with spores in Ivins’ flask. But the findings say the FBI did not fully explore other possible explanations for those similarities.

Ivins knew he was under suspicion by the FBI and committed suicide in July 2008 before any charges were filed against him. Ivins was involved in anthrax vaccine research at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.

Paul Kemp, a lawyer who represented Ivins, said that since August 2008, the Justice Department has maintained it had a “smoking gun” in the case against Ivins, citing the flask.

“Their smoking gun just turned into smoke and mirrors,” Kemp said of the report. “They said they had a smoking gun that would have convicted him (Ivins) in court and this report shows they didn’t.”

Kemp later added: “Over 200 people had access to the anthrax that came out of that flask.”

In response to the report, the FBI said, while the scientific investigation could not pinpoint the source of the anthrax, it helped its agents and the Justice Department to focus resources and conclude that Ivins was behind the attacks.

“Ultimately, the late Dr. Bruce Ivins was determined to be the perpetrator of the deadly mailings. The FBI and Department of Justice were preparing for prosecution at the time of Dr. Ivin’s death,” the FBI said.

Ivins maintained his innocence up until his death, Kemp said, adding that Tuesday’s report “just casts doubts” on the FBI’s conclusion that his former client was responsible.

The FBI praised the report for highlighting the value of what the FBI called “microbial forensics,” which it said “proved significant” in solving the case.

“Although there have been great strides in forensic science over the years, rarely does science alone solve an investigation. The scientific findings in this case provided investigators with valuable investigative leads that led to the identification of the late Dr. Bruce Ivins as the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks,” the FBI said.

Throughout the anthrax probe, investigators grappled with questions about how much experience the perpetrator would have needed to make the anthrax and whether the material was “weaponized” with a silicon dispersant to allow it to float through the air, thus making it more likely the deadly spores would be inhaled.

The National Academy of Sciences panel said it found “no scientific basis on which to accurately estimate the amount of time or the specific skill set needed to prepare the spore material contained in the letters.” The panel said the time required to make the anthrax could range from two to three days to several months depending on the methods used to make the anthrax.

The group said it found no evidence the perpetrator intentionally added silicon-based dispersants to increase the flow of spores in the air. The panel said silicon was not detected on the outside of the spores which would be necessary as a dispersant. Silicon was found only inside the spores.

The FBI conducted a security review of the academy’s draft report in October 2010. The FBI subsequently asked to provide the panel some additional information. That material included an analysis of environmental samples taken from “an undisclosed overseas site at which a terrorist group’s anthrax program was allegedly located.” Investigators looked at the overseas site as part of the anthrax letters investigation. The Academy of Sciences report said samples from the site had inconsistent evidence of Ames strain B anthracis and further review was recommended.

The FBI also told the panel an analysis was done on human remains identified as belonging to 9/11 hijackers from United flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania. One test came up positive for anthrax but all other results were negative. Remains from the other 9/11 flights were not tested for anthrax.

The National Academy of Sciences report offers no opinion on Ivins’ guilt or innocence. It looks only at the scientific underpinnings of the FBI’s investigation. The scientists also did not have access to classified information.

The FBI asked the National Academy of Sciences to conduct an independent review of the science used in its investigation. That review began in 2009. The FBI’s investigation of the anthrax attacks was closed in February 2010 and some critics have said the bureau should have delayed that move until the release of the National Academy of Sciences report.

Rep. Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey who had criticized the FBI investigation, said he’s re-introducing legislation calling for a 9/11 style commission to look into the anthrax letter attacks.

“It would take a credulous person to believe the circumstantial evidence that the FBI used to draw its conclusions with such certainty,” Holt said in a press release. “The FBI has not proiven to me that this is an open and shut case.”

The anthrax letters were mailed from New Jersey, the state Holt represents.

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said the report “shows that the science is not necessarily a slam dunk.” Grassley called for an independent review of the FBI’s investigation.

At one time the FBI used Ivins as one of its scientific consultants in the anthrax investigation. After clues led investigators to focus on Ivins, the FBI performed surveillance on him, executed search warrants and studied lab records showing he had spent late hours alone in his lab prior to the time the anthrax letters were mailed. After his death, Justice Department and FBI officials released numerous documents from the investigation and said they believed Ivins bore sole responsibility for the attacks.

The anthrax-laced letters were mailed in fall 2001 — shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks — to then NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw, the New York Post, Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Tom Daschle, who was the Senate Majority Leader at the time.

Five people died from inhalation anthrax which officials say was caused by contaminated mail. Two of those people were Washington area postal workers Joseph Curseen Jr. and Thomas Morris Jr. The other victims were Bob Stevens, a photo editor at American Media, Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida; Kathy Nguyen, a New York City hospital worker; and Ottilie Lundgren, an Oxford, Connecticut, widow. Seventeen other people became sick from either inhaling anthrax or skin exposure.

Source: CNN

British Channel 4 engaged the Team Delta Cadre to recreate the Guantanamo Bay interrogation experience.

At the production company’s request, along with Team Delta’s normal approach to interrogation, the cadre also reenacted several specific events reported to have occurred at Guantanamo.

In most cases these reenacted events were counter productive to the interrogation plan developed by Team Delta – a plan that had learned 80% of the requested intelligence within the first few hours of capture.

Prisoner 73 on his experience: Total deprivation of sleep, food and water, exposure to extreme heat and cold, up to 20 minutes in stress positions, up to 2 hours listening to white noise… plus any other interrogation technique deemed acceptable by the interrogation team’ By any standards the waiver I signed for “Guantanamo Guidebook” was special, and two weeks later when I was lying naked, shaved, shackled in a ball on the floor, alone with a hood over my head, listening to white noise with a cold fan at my back, I realized just how superficial the term ‘informed consent’ can be.

Two weeks earlier I had received an e-mail looking for students who would be willing to participate in a Channel Four documentary investigating US interrogation practices for Terror detainees held in Cuba.

I was to be one of seven male volunteers from various backgrounds – three Muslims: a father of two, a youth worker, and a recent graduate; plus Britain’s fittest Fireman, a triathlete, Britain’s Thai Kickboxing Champion and me, a plucky Oxford undergraduate finalist in philosophy and politics.

The test was to see how we fared in a simulation of up to 60 hours under a team of retired US army interrogators, led by a founding member of Delta Force, who used the techniques officially sanctioned for Guantanamo detainees to extract information about us and make us confess to the scenarios we had acted out with the production company the week before. We were to withhold information and endure.

Watch the full documentary now (playlist).
Warning-Might be graphic: Human torture experiment on voluntary citizen.

The United States is conducting a manhunt for a previously unknown group believed to be involved in the planning of the 9/11 attacks, according to a US cable published in Wednesday’s Telegraph newspaper.

In the memo, leaked by the WikiLeaks website, a US official in Qatar told the Department for Homeland Security in Washington that three Qatari men were under suspicion of conducting surveillance operations on the attack sites.

The team, who flew from the US to London a day before the attacks, aroused suspicion after refusing to allow cleaners into their Los Angeles hotel room which staff earlier noted contained several “pilot type uniforms.”

According to the cable sent by Mirembe Nantongo, the deputy chief of mission in Doha, the men “visited the World Trade Centre, the Statue of Liberty, the White House and various areas in Virginia,” weeks before the attacks.

The group had tickets to fly on an American Airlines Boeing 757 jet from Los Angeles to Washington DC on September 10 but failed to board, and flew to London instead. A day later, the 757 plane was flown into the Pentagon, killing 184 people.

The cable, sent in February 2010, revealed the concerns of hotel staff during the group’s stay in Los Angeles.

“Hotel cleaning staff grew suspicious of the men because they noticed pilot type uniforms, several laptops and several cardboard boxes addressed to Syria, Jerusalem, Afghanistan and Jordan in the room,” the memo stated.

“The men had… a cellular phone attached by wire to a computer,” it added. “The room also contained pin feed computer paper print outs with headers listing pilot names, airlines, flight numbers, and flight times.”

A subsequent FBI investigation found that the men’s flight tickets and hotel were paid for by a “convicted terrorist,” according to the memo.

According to the cable, the three men, named as Meshal Alhajri, Fahad Abdulla and Ali Alfehaid, were helped by a fourth man, Mohamed Al Mansoori, while in the US.

Mansoori, who has never been publicly named in connection with the 9/11 attacks, is suspected of “aiding people who entered the US before the attacks to conduct surveillance… and providing other support to the hijackers.”

Mansoori is under FBI investigation and had his visa revoked after the information came to light but “his name was not watchlisted in the class system,” implying he may have left the US.

The three Qatari suspects were mentioned in a leaked list of 300 people that the FBI wanted to question over the attacks, which killed over 3,000 people.

The 9/11 Commission report, released in 2004, confirmed that at least two of the hijackers had a “brief stay in Los Angeles about which we know little.”

Source: Agence France-Presse Via Raw Story

An unexpected and unwanted text message from a wireless company prematurely exploded a would-be suicide bomber’s vest bomb in Russia New Year’s Eve, inadvertently thwarting a planned attack on revelers in Moscow, according to The Daily Telegraph.

The would-be suicide bomber was planning to detonate a suicide belt bomb near Red Square, a plan that was foiled when her wireless carrier sent her an SMS while she was still at a safe house, setting off the bomb and killing her. The message reportedly wished her a Happy New Years, according to the report, which sourced the info from security forces in Russia. Cell phones are often used as makeshift detonators by terrorist and insurgent groups.

If true, the SMS might be the only time that a wireless carrier’s SMS message has ever been useful.

The authorities suspect the female bomber was part of the same Jihadist group that is suspected of hitting Moscow’s airport on Monday with a suicide bomb attack that killed 35.

Via The Telegraph