themeekforgotpw

The long term strategy of the US is to provide energy security to Europe between tar sands, crude, gas and oil. It has multilateral plans with Canada and Mexico to build North-South pipelines to achieve this.

Recently the conflict over oil off the shore of Guyana and the documents I linked to above (where it is STATED that the coup is motivated by oil) show recent actions by the US that contradict you.

And further it is not merely about TAKING the oil (though it is). Venezuela uses its energy economy to unilaterally fix political outcomes. Think their shipping of oil to Cuba despite US sanctions. The US wants control of that oil.

The United States has been working on a coup for Maduro, since its coup of Chavez hasn't worked out for it. This time it would really like to install Leonardo Lopez as he's willing to privatize Venezuelan oil to US companies. The US has been encouraging and organizing protests, gatherings and projecting anti-Maduro sentiment and news into the country. (https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/releasedate/2012-06-18-08-canv...)

It's possible that if their economy (amid new US sanctions) collapse that this could trigger the regime change we've been eyeing and the energy security we've been wanting to establish there.

We do have to be careful about CALEC and UNASUR, however. South American countries have been ever moving closer to isolating the US from its multilateral diplomatic plans and are regularly condemning the US for its interference, funding of death squads, war on drugs, and unilateral sanctions of various South American countries. If we take Venezuela we need to make sure that we don't isolate the rest of the continent.

Like China's "One Belt, One Road"?

I bet corruption will remain. But it's my understanding its been drastically reduced.

No positive news of China gets upvoted in America though, because we are burned that they are winning the trade war.

Can you document that for me, and for HN?

They've been purging corruption for the entire Xi Jinping's administration. Not that it isn't there.

They would also have to disrupt the world reputation of China - not just its domestic one.

And be rest assured the US already does and attempts to do this.

Right but 'they reached too far during Windows 8' isn't an argument for reaching too far on Windows 10 (plus, Windows 8 really wasn't that long ago so it's still a pretty new policy).

shouldn't include the full contents of emails, just telemetry on how they were typed.

Can you explain how you got to this from what you asserted before? Autocomplete data should be more than enough to get that content.

The fact is that there is a greater East-West struggle going on right now. It was Saddam. Now it is Assad. Next it may be Rouhani.

The Middle East is caught between Eurasia and Europe: the East's plans to move Westward and the West's plans to move Eastward and the conflict in each of these regions to ensure their security into the future and their access to geostrategic assets.

Obama's deal gets a 10 year delay on nuclear forces. So while it may appear to be conventional now or nuclear tomorrow, it's conventional now or nuclear in 10 years.

Israel, especially with its technological superiority, Western backing and Iron Dome, would most certainly win. Would still be quite costly.

If the downvoter needs help understanding the historical analogy that makes this above comment make sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i...

Inalienable rights. Not civil rights.

Inalienable rights are human rights - which extend (at least in theory) to foreigners.

I read the story.

But anyway if the Supreme Court ruling holds from Zimmerman it would apply equally well to everything in the article. Of course the Zimmerman case was about foreign exports as well.

Try to be charitable.

Aren't cyberarms arms?

Isn't the right to bear arms an 'inalienable right'?

I don't get it. And I don't get why this is a 'privacy' or 'free speech' issue or why corporations, as Google argues, should be exceptions to the law.

Well they are trying to destabilize the regime - I didn't provide data on that. (Would you like some?)

The anthrax thing is reporting facts. I didn't say that the US IS organizing this. I didn't say NK was RIGHT about their worries. What I did say about anthrax is quite true.

No leg pulling sir.

How difficult is it to configure this? Users should definitely choose passphrases of sufficient length and sufficient types to be secure. This is unfortunately an infamously tricky area of security to get right.

Nice!

Of course this isn't ever actually used - in practice users choose four to eight digit passcodes.

Users should, if they want to secure their information, use a randomly chosen passcode of approximately 30 digits long.

I see. Is there a limit? Does it approach 128 bits?

Four digits, choice of 10 for each digit.

log(10000)/log(2) ~ 15.

Giving your data to a third party is a very difficult thing to do. Either their policies and heuristics are not perfect (like this article), they go under and you lose your data and service (probably not the case now with Apple) or they will be compelled by law to share your data with law enforcement.

On this last issue, Apple has the reputation of being one of the best technology corporations. However according to their legal guidelines (http://images.apple.com/privacy/docs/legal-process-guideline...) they will and do give at least:

    Device Registration (name, address, email address, and telephone numbe, iCloud Apple ID)

    Customer Service Records

    iTunes (name, physical address, email address, and telephone number, purchase/download transactions and connections, update/re-download connections, and iTunes Match connections, iTunes subscriber information and connection logs with IP addresses, specific content purchased or downloaded).

    Apple Retail Store Transactions (cash, credit/debit card, or gift card transactions, type of card, name of the purchaser, email address, date/time of the transaction, amount of the transaction, and store location, receipt number)

    Apple Online Store Purchases (name, shipping address, telephone number, email address, product purchased, purchase amount)

    iTunes Gift Cards (sixteen-digit alphanumeric code, nineteen-digit code, any purchases, name of the store, location, date, and time, user account

    iCloud (music, photos, documents, iCloud email, encryption keys, Subscriber Information, iCloud feature connections, connection logs with IP addresses, Mail Logs, records of incoming and outgoing communications such as time, date, sender email addresses, and recipient email addresses, Email Content, Other iCloud Content, Photo Stream, Docs, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, iOS Device Backups, stored photos, documents, contacts, calendars, bookmarks and iOS device backups, photos and videos in the users’ camera roll, device settings, app data, iMessage, SMS, and MMS messages and voicemail)

    Find My iPhone (including connection logs

    Other Available Device Information (MAC Address for Bluetooth, Ethernet, WiFi, or FireWire)

    Requests for Apple Retail Store Surveillance Videos

    Game Center (Connection logs with IP addresses, specific game(s) played)

    iOS Device Activation (including upgrades the software, IP addresses, ICCID numbers, and other device identifiers)

    Sign-on Logs (iTunes, iCloud, My Apple ID, and Apple Discussions, Connection logs with IP addresses, Sign-on transactional records)

    My Apple ID and iForgot Logs (password reset actions, Connection logs with IP addresses)

    FaceTime (logs when a FaceTime call invitation is initiated, content protected by 15 bits of entropy if secure enclave baked key is obtained from manufacturer)

But this blurb fails to mention that the user provided passcode can only be about 15 bits of user supplied entropy - the rest is provided by a hardware manufacturer that is also obligated by law to respond to legal request.

Yes. Sure. The US arrested hundreds of journalists from covering Occupy, leading to a sharp drop in it's Freedom of Press score (I don't trust that metric, but other people seem to like it). They also put a media blackout zone around Ferguson. Facebook has blocked individuals, myself included, from posting Wikileaks documents, Snowden documents and Manning Documents, as well as organizing May Day protests. The US Government infiltrated and disrupted operations at the Associated Press following the Benghazi scandal. The US knowly falsely linked investigative reporters with ongoing criminal activity to hold them from investigations and to get access to sources (Rosen), held whistleblower Binney and his family at gunpoint, blackmailed Joe Nacchio, persecuted and proscecuted journalists for unfavorable coverage (Jassam, Poitras, Greenwald, Risen, Brown), partnered with US domestic media to skew coverage (Dilanian, Miller, Gordon), manipulated US media to support the Iraq war (Fallujah, Zarqawi), coordinated the removal of journalists reporting unfavorable coverage overseas (Mohyeldin), has published false international cables to manipulate the domestic press on purpose (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/heroes-error?pag...), seeded fake journalists to ask softball questions at press releases (Gannon), have paid for positive coverage by US domestic media outlets (Williams, Gallagher, McManus), injected pro-war news stories into local news channels through the WCIA (leading the resign of Tomlinson), sent fake letters from the US Army to media outlets to get positive coverage, completely fabricated hero stories and trotted them about the media (Lynch), repealed restrictions on propaganda operations in the Smith-Mundt Act so that propaganda aimed ultimately at other audiences can now be legally consumed and need not be prevented from consumption by Americans, has used coerced testimony to justify policy goals (reporting them to media as fact - Bush torture programs in advance of Iraq), research on at least both vote manipulation and emotion manipulation to be weaponized against other countries were tested on Americans - one during the 2010 congressional elections), made it impossible in practical terms for third parties to get access to the presidential debates, astroturfed during elections, released press information at inconvenient times to discourage press coverage (e.g. NSA oversight report on Christmas Eve). Hell, politicians and policy makers often either have relatives in influential positions in the media or sit on a board of directors. When Hillary Clinton said that the Benghazi attacks were about a youtube video, did you believe her? Hell, Bush Jr. instanciated HSPD-5 that clarified the use of information support for civil affairs (domestic propaganda) during the use of states of emergency. Then again his administration also perpetrated international fraud to justify the invasion of Iraq by knowingly falsifying evidence: knowingly and falsely linking anthrax from US bioweapons labs, weapons of mass destruction and 9/11 to Saddam; coordinated with intelligence agencies under the cover the UN commission.

If you ask anyone from outside America whether its citizens exist in a media bubble they will tell you that it's true. It's like talking to a Russian and telling them that they have state sponsored propaganda. They are going to be skeptical - and it will seem like for good reasons.

No. It is not. It similar only in from a technical perspective. From the perspective of the government's motivations for blocking them, and the moral acceptability of those motivations, the two are entirely different.

The motivations are pretty similar in this case, and the acceptability is the same.

I cited examples far beyond the ISIS/ISIL case. We're talking about those now. The 'tools by human rights lawyers' are state sponsored tools from Civil Society Organizations funded by the West. Like ZunZuneo and when the US criticized Cuba for blocking Cuban cell phone access.

The US absolutely does censor group organization efforts in the US and political speech as well. What the US does is quite different than China and it faces quite a different set of challenges than China. It's an apples and oranges comparison. We agree here.

So to address why this is relevant has to do with China DDoSing content that is not a domestic product/service of China. Telegraph is not from China. China blocking Telegraph is like the US blocking stopfasttrack.ru and videos from warfighters in the Middle East. China blocking Telegraph is like the UK plans to take what they currently do and what they plan to do by law and block certain foreign tools for secure communication. The US, too, blocks (and sabotages) secure communication software - it has been defunding secure communication software with partnerships in the valley, has Comey talking to Congress about the need for software front doors, and the Snowden leaks showed us how comprehensively backdoored everything is including relationships between vendors and services with customers.

The US does this with foreign developed services and it thwarts secure communication capabilities both provided by foreign governments and its own private sector intended for domestic use.

That's the equivalence and the relevance.

The ISIS example is far more complicated. It's part of information warfare. ISIS is of course partially supported by the US government for the purposes of destabilizing the Assad regime. But we don't want it in Iraq - just Syria - and its message as proved to move it farther than we want it to.

Much of the information warfare has to do with controlling the movement - stopping it from spreading where we don't want it to and letting or encouraging it to spread in Syria.

The State Department's "War of Ideas" and Congress's "Jihad 2.0" are higher level concepts that round down to the use of these capabilities to direct movements. Of course nothing can get done without some sort of conventional capability as well.

I'm sorry that you aren't aware of it. The allegations, I hope, and there's plenty of both evidence and anecdotes and law that supports it, will pique your interest.

I don't think its right to compare to China. I do think it's important to note that both need to fight against one another's propaganda.

Again, if you drop the case that it's like the Chinese, and just ask whether it is done (especially overseas - it is done in huge amounts overseas) then yeah there is pervasive Internet censorship and propaganda.

I encourage you to look up "strategic communication": http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA476331.pdf

Here's part of Jihad 2.0: http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf

The US works with media executives to develop foreign aimed propaganda: https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/133736

(And if you hadn't caught it that's what the SONY hacks were all about).

I've also read quite a bit of scholarship on the Chinese program and it doesn't look so very different from the US side (from a technical perspective): http://gking.harvard.edu/files/censored.pdf

There are certain things that get thwarted. Facebook's 'anti-spam' feature blocked the organization of this past year's MayDay protests. Whoops.

The political elite seriously see absolutely no difference. There are a number of directions we could go to expand on that.

A Russian spam site called StopFastTrack?

The US use the term 'spam' and 'trolling' as code to mean foreign propaganda. I can get you more information about that as well.

Well it's not irrelevant tu quoque.

Telegram is like ZunZuneo and other initiatives by Western governments to force their adversary to choose to either censor something and take a PR hit or have their countrymen radicalised.

I ought to have made that link clear. I apologize.

I agree with this. Sometimes I get brigaded and I feel the urge to call out the immaturity.

For references, here's an example of a website that was simultaneously blocked on a bunch of providers because it matched domain name patterns of a Russia propaganda site: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/duplicates/38pmg8/hey_re...

Here's a FOIA document from the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications in general about their (mostly overt capabilities to engage the Middle East). They mention DoD covert hacking/DoS capabilities: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/cen...

There's plenty of this stuff to go around. My favorite (using MRIs to help develop propaganda for Twitter in the Middle East): http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf

It's true. Downvotes don't change that.

The United States censors links to foreign propaganda as well. They DDOS sites sometimes, especially ISIL-active forums, etc. I don't know if they DDOS state sponsored sites - they are probably more stealthy (something the Chinese don't care about).

The reason I say this is that it's being used to exclude certain countries and it sets up rules that explicitly favor particular countries.

Given its strategic nature its role is to protect both Western powers and regional countries that want investment from the West and to grow against the rise of China.

Since it protects 40% of the world GDP at the explicit and planned sacrifice of other nations and because it is used to instantiate international laws that protect those same countries I call it protectionist. And if you look at the leaked memos it's really not so big a stretch. It's also been called protectionist by people not aware of its strategic value (e.g. Assange).

It's exactly that. Listen to Obama's State of the Union speech. He said it quite clearly. The TPP is about fixing international law and the terms of trade to benefit the US - as opposed to China (who has been pushing for other trade blocs with non-US law).