NSA GCHQ use Angry Birds as a Trojan Horse

There is never likely to be more conclusive proof that the NSA's spying programme had little, if anything to do with defence or counter-terrorism than Edward Snowden's most recent revelation.

The liklihood of radicals from either end of the bogus political spectrum or the extremes of any religion are unlikely to be detectable within a boolean hoop as massive as the 1.7 billion players of Angry Birds. If your brain is jellied sufficiently to gain anything meaningful from playing the game, it is extremely unlikely that you are going to pose a threat to western civilisation but according to the latest leaks, that is not how intelligence gatherers see things.

US and British spies 'get personal data from Angry Birds'

That is, of course, unless those cartoon anarchists are practicing throwing their fizzing bowling ball bombs on their iPhones cunningly disguised with feathers.

The greatest sadness I feel here is that those most affected by this are the ones who will least give a shit. They will reside firmly in the 'if you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to hide' camp. But it questions the role played by developers such as Rovio and manufacturers such as Apple play in producing and marketing extremely addictive Trojan Horses for the nefarious exploitation of government spies and the relationship between corporate and government power which has become increasingly nebulous.

PNAC Redux in Wikileaks Syria Document

If there is there anybody reading this who has not read the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) 2000 document, 'Rebuilding America's Defenses [sic], I urge you to do so; it can be read on their own website here.

If you haven't got time (and it is rapidly running out), the salient points from it are that it was sponsored by some extremely Machiavellian individuals and it includes the infamous line:

'A transformation strategy that solely pursued capabilities for projecting force from the United States, for example, and sacrificed forward basing and presence, would be at odds with larger American policy goals and would trouble American allies.

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing [sic] event - like a new Pearl Harbor.'

This one sentence has been focal to much speculation surrounding the events of 11th September 2001 and subsequent US military misadventures. The attacks have been called the New Pearl Harbor and the phrase was used in the title of a book by Professor David Ray Griffin which presented many convincing arguments that the US Government or elements therein had been involved in order to manufacture domestic support for neocolonial wars of aggression.

It was with a sense of deja vu that I read a blog from Channel Four News reporter Alex Thompson about one of the Wikileaks documents from 'a military officer writing up a report on a meeting with US military intelligence officers and gives telling insight into their view of matters inside Syria. It was written at 00:49am, 7 December 2011.' It read:

'There still seems to be a lot of confusion over what a military intervention involving an air campaign would be designed to achieve. It isn’t clear cut for them geographically like in Libya, and you can’t just create an NFZ (no fly zone) over Homs, Hama region. This would entail a countrywide SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses [sic]) campaign lasting the duration of the war. They don’t believe air intervention would happen unless there was enough media attention on a massacre, like the Gaddafi move against Benghazi.'

I guess we just experienced the prerequisite media attention on a massacre. No doubt the air intervention will follow shortly.

Further reading:

BBC News uses 'Iraq photo to illustrate Syrian massacre'
Daily Telegraph 27th May 2012

Bradley Manning - Shame Will Rain On America

So, how come Bradley Manning was sentenced to just 35 years?

It's not with any intention to sound controversial that I ask this; in my opinion, he should be a free man and several dozen current and former members of the US government should be donning orange boiler suits along with a few hundred CEOs and military officers. I ask because I think even his supporters who, at best, hoped for a humane sentence feared that he would receive a life term - especially as some extremists called for his death.

It seems to me that the sentence is the result not of justice but of political compromise. Long enough to keep the authoritarians happy whilst not quite so long as to stir up the liberals and libertarians into a riotous and dangerous cocktail.

However, it is a grim prospect for a man who's motives were immensely honourable to be facing three and a half decades in prison and the consequences thereafter. At this moment, it would seem that only the overthrow of the corrupt and vile system which has consumed America and most of the rest of the planet would offer any hope for his exoneration.

There are many fools in positions of power who cannot see the corruption and wickedness in front of their noses and who in their blindness prop up the rot. There are millions who are enslaved by their own ignorance in the belief that the austerity they endure is a necessity for the collective good rather than an element in an osmotic system designed to perpetuate their subordination. The cognitively dissonant who wave the flags of the nations who rob and oppress them must bear the shame of what happened to Bradley Manning, and those like him, as much as the criminal persecutors.

Eyes will reluctantly open as freedom diminishes.

 

Bradley Manning sentenced to 35 years in WikiLeaks case