Why Hillary Recalled Ambassadors to D.C. Meeting

On February 7, the ModernSurvivalBlog asserted that “In an unprecedented move…nearly all U.S. Ambassadors to all nations have been called back to Washington for a summit conference this week,” but we don’t know why.

Veteran D.C.-based investigative reporter Wayne Madsen has an exclusive-to-subscribers report on this. Below are excerpts from his exclusive Wayne Madsen Report.  

~Eowyn

Peering through the shroud of global corruption: Hillary’s “all hands” meeting and bribery and kickbacks

Wayne Madsen Exclusive Special Report, Feb. 9-10, 2011

Amid a major FBI and Department of Justice criminal investigation of a hacktivist group known as “Anonymous,” which has hacked into public and private computer systems in retaliation for actions taken against Wikileaks for its release of over 250,000 classified State Department cables, WMR has been contacted by a source close to Anonymous to set the record straight on the group’s intentions and convey a road map of its future plans…. It should be noted that Anonymous is not connected to Assange or Wikileaks.

It is the penetration of the State Department’s communications networks by Anonymnous that prompted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to call all of America’s ambassadors, consuls general, and special envoys to Washington for an unprecedented diplomatic “all hands” meeting. WMR has learned that Clinton briefed the envoys on the State Department’s security problems and that information sent over channels thought to be safe was no longer guaranteed to be secure. Other means of communicating sensitive information from overseas posts to Washington were apparently discussed. In addition, the fallout from bigger and more damaging leaks of classified cables matched with off-shore banking information and emails was also discussed with the envoys. The fallout includes the spread of Tunisia- and Egypt-style popular revolts around the world and the need by the diplomats to be prepared for a surge in anti-American attitudes globally.

Anonymous, which uses the Guy Fawkes mask-wearing character “V” in the film “V for Vendetta” as a role model, first came on to the media radar screen in 2008 when the loose-knit association of bloggers took on the Church of Scientology by subjecting the cult to a series of denial of service attacks after the “church” had YouTube pull an interview with actor Tom Cruise over copyright violations.

However, the group now finds itself as a target of a major FBI investigation with FBI agents confiscating computer equipment and cell phones at gun point. A federal grand jury in San Jose, California is now empaneled to hear evidence against suspected members of Anonymous. The group hacked into PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and the UK’s Moneybookers in retaliation against the blocking of donations to Wikileaks. Anonymous also retaliated against the computer security firm, HBGary Federal, after an official of the company threatened to publicly expose the leaders of Anonymous.

…Anonymous…is currently conducting data matching and fusion of information contained in the State Department cables and banking data and hacked email it has obtained from around the world. The picture that Anonymous is painting is one of the State Department being part and parcel of a global “pay-to-play” operation for foreign and U.S. defense contracts and the siphoning of kickbacks by world leaders to numbered bank accounts in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein, and elsewhere. From the information gleaned from multiple sources by Anonymous, it is clear that the CIA facilitates America’s “play-to-pay” system of corruption and contract fraud.

…The global payola scam also involved top French government officials who benefited from sweetheart rendition and defense contract deals with Tunisia and Egypt…. What Anonymous has discovered is a global pattern of such kickbacks in return for lucrative contracts and the world’s elites growing wealthier as a result. The graft and corruption globally is sweeping, with details of pay-offs to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair and his ministers by BP in return for releasing accused Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi from a Scottish prison to Libya in return for lucrative Libyan oil concessions and  a defense contract with Sri Lanka during the Bush administration that permitted that nation’s government to commit a genocidal campaign against ethnic Tamils being just the tip of the iceberg.

State Department cables previously leaked and those that have to be revealed show that U.S. diplomats are the prime facilitators of U.S. graft and corruption, with member companies of the US Chamber of Commerce and top Pentagon contractors reaping a financial whirlwind as a result.

Anonymous plans to release 40 more videos outlining the connections between U.S. political leaders and top-level bribery and kickbacks, including a deal worked out by then-President George W. Bush between Saudi Arabia and Boeing that saw Boeing receive a major Saudi Air Force contract in return for the King of Saudi Arabia receiving a plane similar to the Boeing 747 used as Air Force One. In the deal, Bush pocketed a “handling fee” that ended up in a Bush numbered account from a Saudi numbered account in an off-shore bank. And the trove of fused data from the cables and financial and email data show that Bush and Rove are not alone in receiving payola from his fronting for U.S. firms: the recipients of bribes and kickbacks include Hillary and Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, Vice President Joe Biden, and President Obama. Anonymous has uncovered details of Obama personally lobbying overseas for Boeing, with the now “accepted” practice of kickbacks ending up in the president’s off-shore accounts. Boeing is headquartered in Obama’s hometown of Chicago. And when it comes to this level of corruption, America can always count on its political police force, the FBI, to protect the criminals and attack the sources of the information, as the G-men are now doing to Anonymous.

“Bigger and badder” than Wikileaks: “Anonymous” analyzes and fuses hacked data and cable information and reveals that President Obama not only shills for Chicago-based Boeing but gets kickbacks from defense deals overseas. George W. Bush also shilled for Boeing and received similar sweetheart financial deals.

…The “V” fans who make up Anonymous also want it known that it is they who originally obtained the 250,000 State Department cables, which have the highest classification of Secret and came from the Defense Department’s Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet). Access to the cables did not come from hacking into the network but from individuals who had legitimate access and clearances. It was Anonymous that provided the cables to Wikileaks. And Anonymous is planning on conducting leaks of more enhanced information, the combination of cable information with financial banking information to expose leaders around the world as corrupt. Anonymous did not give Wikileaks the “entire store.” In addition to the Secret cable traffic from SIPRNet, Anonymous claims to have cables with classifications higher than Secret, traffic that sheds more light on the overriding role that “neocons and Zionists” play in shaping American foreign policy.

…The word on the street is that the world’s “military-industrial-political” complex is worried about further releases of sensitive information and is bracing itself for a global rebellion when the true nature of the world’s elites is revealed around the world. Anonymous has an ultimate target based on what it has managed to obtain from computers and networks around the world: the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family. It is now obvious why Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) wants an Internet “kill switch” to be thrown by the president of the United States. Their futures depend on it….

Federal Court Hearing Today on Wikileaks Investigation Methods

A hearing is set Tuesday in a courthouse in Alexandria, VA which will determine how far the Justice Department can go in its efforts to investigate Wikileaks activists.

CNet reported February 8 on freshly unsealed documents related to the case. The DOJ wants the authority to access Twitter accounts of those suspected to have been involved in the State Department leaks. While the persons under investigation are not American citizens, information stored by an American company could be fair game for federal investigators.

Prosecutors had sent a request to Twitter in December. Initially it was sent in secret, but somehow the suspects found out and asked Twitter to confirm. Attorneys for the activists pushed back, questioning if Twitter could be forced to comply and wanting more of the process to be carried out in public.

Current law allows prosecutors to access online information as long as it is specifically helpful to a criminal case. The DOJ argues that Twitter accounts of the suspects provide “relevant and material” clues as to whether they conspired with Julian Assange. It is not known if the suspects will deny involvement or if they simply think Twitter should be off limits; thus far they haven’t said much to reporters.

The hearing will decide how much prosecutors should disclose and whether Twitter accounts are relevant enough to be searched.

-Candance

Wikileaks’ James Bond Headquarters

Do you know where WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange store those thousands of confidential emails and documents that have shaken the world?

They are stored in the Pionen data centre — a former Cold War nuclear bunker 100ft below ground in Sweden. Michael Hanlon of the UK’s Daily Mail describes it as “like an 007 film set”:

The vast cave, drilled into granite under the Vita Berg Park in Stockholm, houses dozens of computer servers used as storage by many companies. Complete with a ‘floating’ conference room, suspended glass corridors, lunar landscape flooring, designer furniture, and even, intriguingly, German U-boat engines as back-up generators, all that is missing is the bleached-blond Assange himself, stroking a white cat.

The disused bunker was reopened in 2008 with its futuristic design the brainchild of Swedish architects Albert France-Lanord, who were inspired by Bond sets created by Sir Kenneth Adams. The brutalist design is softened by plants kept alive by brilliant solar lighting and artificial waterfalls.

While on the run from Swedish and American authorities, Assange has had to use this secure base for his files….

Wikileaks is funded by a mixture of public donations, help from Assange’s wealthy patrons and, so far as anyone can tell, a fair bit by Assange himself. But the cost of this storage will be very little, because although Assange’s team have released several million documents, in data terms this is not a large amount. Everything WikiLeaks has in its possession could probably be stored on a high-capacity memory stick.

Here are some pics of WikiLeaks’ JamesBondish headquarters:

Entrance to WikiLeaks' Pionen high-security computer storage facility

Superservers to store WikiLeaks' information

Submarine engines used as emergency generators

The bunker drilled into granite can withstand a nuclear attack

Offices have lunar landscape flooring, glass corridors, and a floating conference room

WikiLeaks' floating conference room

So who/what pays for all this?

H/t beloved Fellowship co-founder Steve.

~Eowyn

Wikileaks and Net Censorship

About Wikileaks, has anyone wondered:

• Why and how, with all of our spying technology and cybersecurity, WikiLeaks.org mastermind Julian Assange could have gotten away with pilfering thousands of secret government documents and diplomatic cables?, or
• Why and how Assange’s source, an enlisted soldier in the US Army managed not only to access those secret documents and diplomatic cables, but also download and photocopy them? (The UK’s Telegraph reports that Private First Class Bradley Manning was not only a homosexual but was considering a sex change. Manning was arrested at the end of May and is being detained by U.S. authorities) or
• Who/what is really behind Wikileaks? Did our government engineer the Wikileaks document disclosures in order to use it as a perfect excuse to censor or shut down the Internet?

H/t beloved fellow Joseph for the article below.

~Eowyn

H/t Tina

 

Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It’s your choice

Western political elites obfuscate, lie and bluster – and when the veil of secrecy is lifted, they try to kill the messenger

By John Naughton – Guardian – December 6, 2010

‘Never waste a good crisis” used to be the catchphrase of the Obama team in the runup to the presidential election. In that spirit, let us see what we can learn from official reactions to the WikiLeaks revelations.

The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.

And as the backlash unfolds – first with deniable attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks, later with companies like Amazon and eBay and PayPal suddenly “discovering” that their terms and conditions preclude them from offering services to WikiLeaks, and then with the US government attempting to intimidate Columbia students posting updates about WikiLeaks on Facebook – the intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been obscured. The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.

There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.

Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. “Information has never been so free,” declared Clinton. “Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.” She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had “defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity.” Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.

One thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they expose how political elites in western democracies have been deceiving their electorates.

The leaks make it abundantly clear not just that the US-Anglo-European adventure in Afghanistan is doomed but, more important, that the American, British and other Nato governments privately admit that too.

The problem is that they cannot face their electorates – who also happen to be the taxpayers funding this folly – and tell them this. The leaked dispatches from the US ambassador to Afghanistan provide vivid confirmation that the Karzai regime is as corrupt and incompetent as the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon was when the US was propping it up in the 1970s. And they also make it clear that the US is as much a captive of that regime as it was in Vietnam.

The WikiLeaks revelations expose the extent to which the US and its allies see no real prospect of turning Afghanistan into a viable state, let alone a functioning democracy. They show that there is no light at the end of this tunnel. But the political establishments in Washington, London and Brussels cannot bring themselves to admit this.

Afghanistan is, in that sense, a quagmire in the same way that Vietnam was. The only differences are that the war is now being fought by non-conscripted troops and we are not carpet-bombing civilians.

The attack of WikiLeaks also ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. These are firms like Google, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace and Amazon which host your blog or store your data on their servers somewhere on the internet, or which enable you to rent “virtual” computers – again located somewhere on the net. The terms and conditions under which they provide both “free” and paid-for services will always give them grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their interests to do so. The moral is that you should not put your faith in cloud computing – one day it will rain on your parade.

Look at the case of Amazon, which dropped WikiLeaks from its Elastic Compute Cloud the moment the going got rough. It seems that Joe Lieberman, a US senator who suffers from a terminal case of hubris, harassed the company over the matter. Later Lieberman declared grandly that he would be “asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information”. This led the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson to ask whether “Lieberman feels that he, or any senator, can call in the company running the New Yorker’s printing presses when we are preparing a story that includes leaked classified material, and tell it to stop us”.

What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

As Simon Jenkins put it recently in the Guardian, “Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure.” What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net.

Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far – bending to their will.

But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won’t work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables – and probably of much else besides – are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.