statism watch

Flashback: Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated By Spies | Pentagon spending millions to fix cyberattacks | Should Obama Control the Internet? | Cybersecurity law would give feds unprecedented net control | Munk Centre researchers discover botnet, call for international cyberspace ‘legal regime’ | NSA Dominance of Cybersecurity Would Lead to ‘Grave Peril’, Ex-Cyber Chief Tells Congress

Kevin Poulsen, Wired.com
April 8, 2009

They’re baaaack.

Those impish Chinese government cyber-saboteurs we last saw posing as 20-foot high trees to trigger the 2003 northeast power outage have returned in an all new adventure, this time in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

In this episode, the clever hackers have teamed with the Russians to penetrate the U.S. electrical grid from coast-to-coast, planting diabolical malware designed to let them plunge portions of America into darkness with a few keystrokes, the paper reports.

The real authors of this tale are unnamed “U.S. intelligence officials,” perhaps the same ones who claimed last year that the Chinese government may have caused the 2003 blackout that cut off electricity to 50 million people in eight states and a Canadian province.

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Flashback: Protests in Moldova Explode, With Help of Twitter | U.S. ’stands in solidarity with people of Georgia’: Cheney | Russia: US delivering weapons to Georgia under cover of humanitarian aid | The Puppet Masters Behind Georgian President Saakashvili | US military advisers arrive in Georgia

Daniel McAdams, LewRockwell.com
April 8, 2009

It makes for a great story-line – the kind the international media embrace with relish: thrusting young Moldovans grab their iPhones, rush to the town square, and Twitter their way to a revolution against a Communist Party that had just stolen an election. The story-line has been written with orange and with roses and tulips and almost with denim, the press reducing the phenomena in each case to a few slogans repeated until they become accepted as reality with little further analysis.

Such is the case with recent events in Moldova, where even a casual reading of the vast contradictions between objective reality and the developing story-line – the “Twitter Revolution” – is glaringly obvious.

The protests, which intensified Tuesday, were sparked by claims that the Communist Party of President Vladimir Voronin rigged parliamentary elections last Sunday – a vote they were widely expected to win – to gain enough of a margin to amend the constitution and extend Voronin’s rule beyond that which is currently permitted. While the press lauds the “spontaneous” mass organization to overthrow Voronin, one does not have to dust the scene of the crime too carefully to see US foreign policy fingerprints all over the place.

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CBC News
April 8, 2009

British police arrested 12 men Wednesday in a series of anti-terrorist raids involving hundreds of officers across northwest England.

Greater Manchester Police said the suspects were detained under the Terrorism Act at eight addresses in the cities of Manchester and Liverpool and the surrounding area, 320 kilometres northwest of London.

Police would not give any details of the alleged plot. The BBC reported that most of those arrested were Pakistani nationals.

Police said the suspects range in age from a youth in his mid-teens to a 41-year-old man. [Ed. Note: Would that be the handler?]

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CBC News
August 8, 2009

Despite a dramatic drop in the RCMP’s use of stun guns in 2008, the force is still zapping some suspects five times or more with the controversial weapon.

Mounties shocked at least 16 suspects with a Taser five or more times, according to analysis done by CBC/Radio-Canada and The Canadian Press of RCMP reports released through access to information requests. Ten of the cases topped five stuns.

The most extreme example is an incident in southern B.C., where three officers from the Ridge Meadows RCMP detachment fired a Taser nine times on an unarmed person.

Another report indicated a suspect, who had been drinking heavily and acted aggressively, was jolted eight times. Two other cases involved seven deployments of a stun gun.

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In one of the more bitter ironies of mixed-economy statism, it is emerging that the only thing that has been socialized is economic risk – for the people to bear. Socialism was always a sham, as the trillions of public money flowing into the coffers of international banks makes all too clear. But under that system, one would think that since the printing presses are humming, some of that paper money would be earmarked for pensions – who’s going to buy the products of economic activity if pensions (and wages) collapse?

The Canadian Press
April 8, 2009

Premier Dalton McGuinty is warning that Ontario’s pension plan safety net isn’t large enough to cover auto workers should GM go bankrupt.

He says the Pension Benefits Guarantee Fund has about $100 million in it – money that comes nowhere near meeting any liabilities for the auto sector alone, to say nothing of all the other troubled sectors.

McGuinty wouldn’t say whether he agreed with Ottawa’s assertions about the likelihood of bankruptcy for GM and Chrysler and maintains he’s committed to helping the sector.

Regardless of what happens, McGuinty says there’s a “real pension issue” and the government bears some of the responsibility for it.

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CBC News
April 8, 2009

$100M Ontario fund ‘nowhere near’ enough to cover autoworkers’ pensions, says McGuinty

The head of General Motors Corp. told CBC News the company is using the 60 days it has been given to pull together a more aggressive turnaround plan and also preparing paperwork in case it files for bankruptcy.

“If we need to resort to bankruptcy, we have to do it quickly,” chief executive Fritz Henderson told the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge in an interview at GM’s headquarters in Detroit, Mich., on Wednesday afternoon. “And there’s no way you could do it quickly without being prepared for it.”

Late last month, the White House removed chief executive Rick Wagoner and rejected GM’s restructuring plan, giving it 60 days to develop a more aggressive approach.

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Notice how you’re not hearing so much about ‘Al-Qaeda’ these days. We’ve a new bogeyman – the media has recently rediscovered that hackers and botnets exist, and so mass coverage ensues right on cue as the American, Australian, Canadian, and British administrations push for control of the flow of information on the Internet.

Flashback: Pentagon spending millions to fix cyberattacks | Should Obama Control the Internet? | Cybersecurity law would give feds unprecedented net control | Munk Centre researchers discover botnet, call for international cyberspace ‘legal regime’ | NSA Dominance of Cybersecurity Would Lead to ‘Grave Peril’, Ex-Cyber Chief Tells Congress | Do We Need a New Internet? | Defense Contractors See $$$ in Cyber Security | RCMP to helm a Canadian “cyber-security strategy” | Law Professor tells tech conference: plans to shut down Internet already on deck

Siobhan Gorman, Wall Street Journal
April 8, 2009

WASHINGTON — Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.

The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven’t sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” said a senior intelligence official. “So have the Russians.”

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It appears as though the chickens of a racist policy are coming home to roost, which serves to demonstrate that the government should be in neither the welfare nor the eugenics business. The case described below would not be necessary if the British and Canadian government had not continuously broken their treaties with tribal peoples – but now that the natives of this land have been made wards of the state, the state finds itself trying to sort through issues of patrimony, matrimony, and what percentage of tribal blood makes one a ‘real’ native. Good luck with that. What’s next, genomic sequencing for your status card?

CBC News
April 8, 2009

The B.C. Court of Appeal has given the federal government a year to change parts of the Indian Act that violate the charter rights of some aboriginal women and their children.

In a unanimous decision, the court found that 1985 amendments to the Indian Act designed to bring it in line with the Charter of Rights actually discriminated against aboriginal women who married non-aboriginal men and against their children in terms of conferring Indian status and the benefits that come with it.

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Flashback: Was Couillard used to push leasing bid?

CBC News
April 8, 2009

RCMP officers raided the offices of a major Quebec construction company on Tuesday as part of a corruption investigation that has led to the arrests of two Canada Revenue Agency officials.

One of the officials works for a branch of the federal agency that deals with black-market activities, and the other works for a branch that does tax-avoidance probes, the Globe and Mail reported. So far, no charges have been laid.

The corruption scheme is alleged to have involved at least one employee who gave favourable treatment to certain companies, reported the CBC’s French-language service, Radio-Canada.

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Police – you, too, are being herded, kettled, painted as the enemy, and being placed on a collision course with the citizens of your respective countries. That’s not a tenable position to be in, viewed from either side of the ‘thin blue line’. It’s time we all took a moral stand and spoke out against, and refused to participate in, the incremental advances of tyranny. Here’s an example of an American police movement that personnel in other jurisdictions may take a page from. Thank you, and remember: Serve and Protect.

Flashback: G20 ‘kettle’ police containment traps protesters, photograph a requirement for exit | G20 protests: Riot police, or rioting police? | G20 protests: riot police clash with demonstrators

CBC News
April 8, 2009

A video showing a London police officer pushing a man forcefully to the ground minutes before he died during last week’s G20 protests has prompted the city’s police chief to say the matter warrants a “full investigation.”

Ian Tomlinson, a 47-year old newspaper vendor, collapsed and died last Wednesday shortly after being pushed by a police officer patrolling London’s financial district, packed at the time with protesters. Tomlinson was on his way home and was not believed to be taking part in the anti-G20 protests, according to local media reports.

“The images that have now been released raise obvious concerns and it is absolutely right and proper that there is a full investigation into this matter, which the [London Metropolitan Police] will fully support,” said police Commissioner Paul Stephenson Wednesday in a statement.

A U.S. fund manager, on a visit to London, shot the footage and gave it to the Guardian newspaper, which published it online.

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