Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

The 2012 End of Year Review by Dark Politricks

January 2, 2013

The 2012 End of Year Review by Dark Politricks

By Dark Politricks

Well the crazies who didn’t bother to read the Mayan prophecy before declaring 2012 the end of the world were proved wrong.

However 2012 was certainly no reprieve from looming disasters that we seem to lurch drunkenly from like a Glaswegian drunk on Hogmanay. It has been an unmitigated disaster from all corners of perspective and from my own view point it doesn’t seem to be getting better any time soon.

So if last year was Time magazines year of the protester what was 2012?

It was firstly the year that the Arab Spring turned into an Islamic winter.

From the dictator swap in Egypt from Mubarak to Mohamed Morsi to the Syrian civil war that see’s the western backed Islamic rebels murder and massacre Christians and Muslims alike it seems that “the Western axis of war” hasn’t learnt from their mistakes in Libya and are still trying to impose democracy (whatever that is) by the gun and the bomb.

It was not enough that Libya was an unmitigated failure with the country still caught up in under reported rebel gangs, armed with NATO weapons, fighting it out among each other, desecrating World War 2 British graveyards and murdering US ambassadors.

It seems that we have learnt nothing and are still backing the enemy of our enemy, even if that means supporting Islamic extremists linked to terrorists and our supposed mortal enemy al-Qaeda.

Syria is being torn apart by Western and Saudi backed rebel groups as extreme as any dictator we might be justified in other-throwing.

Even though Saddam Hussein, Col Qaddafi, Mubarak and Assad were or in the case of President Assad, still nasty dictators  The people of their countries were not worrying daily about car bombs or NATO planes blowing their houses to bits. Christians lived alongide Muslims and Sunnis lived alongside Shiites in peace.

They may have had to keep their mouth shut when it came to politics but in the case of Libya they had high standards of living and life expectancy in comparison to their neighbours plus they were doing well economically even if they were not “free” as they now supposedly are.

How free are the thousands of protesters in Tahrir square who are still hoping that their earlier revolution against the western backed Hosni Mubarak is not lost as they fight on against the new democratically elected “pharaoh” Mohamed Morsi.

The head of the Muslim Brotherhood, a Western intelligence linked group, that took power in an election before granting himself dictatorial like powers that liberal minded Egyptians are outraged about.

There has been no slowing down of the torture, imprisonment without trial and police brutality that occurs almost nightly as Tahrir square once again becomes the focus of change versus the establishment. The only difference is that this is now an Islamic establishment and one that I suspect the West has been wanting to be implanted for years.

Why?

Well the long predicted Culture War between Western Judo/Christianity and Islam has been on the cards for a long time. It is in these eyes that we can see that the West is not too bothered about the Middle East becoming an Islamic Caliphate as it will give them the perfect excuse to continue feeding the Military Industrial Complexes pockets before preparing for the next big war with Iran.

From Afghanistan to the United States we have seen tensions between the two religions of “the book”. Both offshoots of the first books of the Bible and both linked by history and commonly shared religious beliefs.

As western backed Syrian rebels ransack Christian Churches and Christian ministers burn Korans, the fires that are slowly burning away underneath a groundswell of anti-immigration furor in Europe are gently being stoked until the general population are ready for all out war. The next big war is coming – how bad it will be is up to us.

Apart from the upcoming battles that will thin the herd we have spent the year watching people hand over their privacy as if it was an antiquated concept in return for gadgets, applications and the latest phone or computer tablet.

Google, Amazon, Twitter and the rest of the big Internet companies have already been caught out avoiding paying their fair share of tax by using 1 man offices in tax havens. However the bigger news is their links to the new American Security State Apparatus and how the upcoming generation are being conditioned to accept a world of total surveillance.

We have people selling their private information to these corporations just so that they can watch their own house or car on Google maps or tell the world of Twitter users what they had for breakfast that morning.

In 50 years George Orwell’s 1984 nightmare of a state camera in every room of your house will be an old fashioned concept.

We already have surveillance states in the UK and USA where city walls are adorned with CCTV cameras linked to huge city sized databases and the TRAPWIRE system that uses facial recognition technology to link up with other super computers and store, analyse and log every “person of interests” move for the new 1 million strong – super spies that already have top level security clearance in the USA.

Amerika is no longer a fear but a reality.

The NDAA allows the President to lock up Americans for eternity without trial on his say so alone. If he wanted to he could even have you killed as he has already shown with the assassination of American born Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen by a done strike.

You know onne of those deadly accurate drone strikes that treat every male over the age of 8 as enemy combatants (unless proven otherwise) and kill 49 innocent civilians for every “terrorist”.

This is only an extension of the emergency act implemented after 9.11 and still exist to this day – something most American’s know nothing about and literally give the President the power to do what he wants to defend the country.

Whether that means grope or virtual strip machines at airports, bombing Afghan and Pakistani weddings or just starting wars without the consent of Congress as he did in Libya. He has more powers than previous Presidents and all because of the events of 9.11 and the endless war on terror we are still feeling the effects of 11 years on.

A case can be made that the right wing in America have it totally wrong when they call Obama a communist but in reality he is more of a dictator who has continued the George W Bush’s policy of  stripping American citizens of their liberties with laws like the PATRIOT ACT and he has taken them a whole mile further down the road to dictatorship with laws like the NDAA.

The only socialism on show at the moment is the one in which banksters take hard earned tax dollars from the public as state handouts to be used to make even more money in the rigged game that is Wall St through front running and high frequency trading.

As Europe teeters on the brink of self-collapse and America countries printing it’s way to self destruction the BRIC countries are growing in strength.

China is collecting gold bars at the same rate their slave workers throw themselves off the US corporation balconies that were offshored. Workers working for companies that make their goods overseas, pay hardly any tax and care not a jot for the quality of life that the makers of their products have to endure.

So when you next open your iPhone to send a Tweet about how your Facebook profile has been updated just remember that some poor soul in China has worked 18 hour days for a pittance just so that you can throw your privacy away to companies that are in cahoots with America’s new global surveillance society and that your email, contact info and other personal information is just another commodity to be sold and re-sold by these companies.

Just don’t scratch your head when your inbox fills up with spam or every web page you seem to visit seems to show adverts targeted especially for you.

What can we hope for 2013 then?

Well the end of the world isn’t being booked for this year as the Mayans don’t have anything planned so far.

Therefore if the world does end it will be of our own making. We are already being cajoled into believing Iran is on the brink of nuking us all despite any evidence from the IAEA and it is only Israeli pressure on the US congressmen they own and the blackmail they have probably collated on the President that will force any pointless war.

It might be all the assassinations and military base attacks by US/Israeli backed terrorist groups (or freedom fighters in this case) that has changed Iran’s mind.

Or it might be the first cyber warfare weapon STUXNET that changed it by almost destroying their nuclear program through multiple zero day exploits only a nation state would have the manpower and knowledge to use.

Or it might just be the fact that Iran wasn’t making a bomb in the first place – it is un-Islamic after all.

On the one hand Iran is called a fanatical Islamic state but when it comes to the part of Islam that says nuclear weaponry is against God’s will then that seems to get overlooked.

However what cannot be overlooked is the total hypocrisy of an apartheid state like Israela country that unlike Iran isn’t a member of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Agency but still has 200+ nuclear bombs calling Iran a threat for “maybe” thinking about building one without proof.

This is after all a country that only recently assassinated the Hamas military commander who had brokered a cease fire that stopped Hamas firing rockets into Israel and then sat back as Hamas fell into their trap firing hundreds of firecracker rockets into Israel.

Some of these were long range ones that got lucky almost reaching Tel Aviv, others were not so lucky and almost hit their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank.

However this battle was once again one sided and whilst the world waited for Israel to once again enter Gaza and massacre over  a thousand innocent people as they did in Operation Cast Lead they instead blew up children playing football and attacked journalists from the air in a short but powerful onslaught that stopped short before any Israeli troops entered Gaza city.

Therefore if we are to see the next year out without another middle eastern war it is only going to be if someone reigns in the Likud war party and brokers some kind of peace deal in the Middle East.

This bleeding sore on the face of the world has been leaking for too long and the longer it goes on the more chance there is of a catastrophe occurring.

The more Middle Eastern states that turn from their ex Western backed dictators  to new Islamic governments the more chance we have of the perfect trigger to start the culture war that ne-cons and ex cold war warriors have been planning for decades.

9.11 did the job of getting America fighting Muslims on Israels terms, and with their dumbed down public they don’t even realise that 92% of Afghans have never even heard of this event they are supposed to be fighting America for. Instead it’s sold to American’s that it’s all because they “hate our freedoms” of course!

Nothing to do with the army bases in their holy lands or their biased one sided support for Israel – no it was American freedom they hated.

The sad thing is a mud hut dwelling Afghan probably has more freedom than any American ever had.

They certainly don’t have to worry about CCTV or TSA gropers it’s only drones blowing up their weddings and soldiers going on killing sprees for fun that they have to deal with on a daily basis.

Add to that pertinent point that America has thrown away most of their freedoms anyway and the people the US are fighting in the Stan are just Taliban/civilians who see the US/UK soldiers as just another group of invaders they have been putting up with for centuries. It  seems that they don’t actually have much left to do to “win the war” by defeating all that American freedom they hate so much.

Plus seeing that there is hardly any “real” al-Qaeda in Afghanistan anymore.

The rest of them are being funded and backed by the US/UK axis of war in Syria doing their next de-stabilisation job after we already supported them in Libya. It looks like the world is on it’s head and needs a dose of reality shoved down it’s throat.

That doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon.

Therefore if we end 2013 without another war we will have done well indeed and I reckon that is the best we can hope for!

 

View the original 2012 End of Year Review by Dark Politricks at the main site www.darkpolitricks.com.

Internet giants Google, Facebook and Twitter stick up for privacy whilst selling our personal data for money!

October 15, 2012

Internet giants Google, Facebook and Twitter stick up for privacy whilst selling our personal data for money!

By Dark Politricks

A story in yesterday’s Daily Mail tells how the “big 3” Internet giants, Twitter, Google and Facebook are planning to block a bill being introduced in the UK parliament which requires them to store all data for a year so that security agencies, police and councils can request its disclosure at a later date.

The Internet giants were interviewed by a cross party committee of UK MP’s and they have all come out apparently fighting the draft Communications Data Bill.

From the article in the Daily Mail.

They reveal directors from Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Twitter believe the Bill would breach users’ privacy and allow repressive regimes to spy on Britons.

“Facebook said it might go to court to resist the new law, while Google and Twitter executives said they could refuse to unlock encrypted data if the Government were to seek the information via third-party providers such as BT.”

“Facebook said it might go to court to resist the new law, while Google and Twitter said they could refuse to unlock encrypted data.

“Facebook director Simon Milner accused the Government of using a ‘sledgehammer to crack a nut’, and claimed the potential for nations with poor human-rights records to obtain data ‘should be a real concern’.”

Now I’d say that it doesn’t even matter if these companies, which are all spying on us for their own marketing purposes anyway, say they are sticking up for privacy. Especially when it has been shown time and time again that companies like Microsoft and Google help the NSA and other US secret service 3 letter acronyms anyway.

We now have the all invasive TRAPWIRE system that is linking up CCTV cameras and spying on US citizens constantly, along with the city sized computer base under UTAH to hold and analyse all the data that is being constantly collected on US citizens which is apparently now all perfectly legal.

There is no doubt in my mind after the EU caved in on banking data transactions that these systems will be linked up in future to the UK who is already the most surveillance country if you go by the number of CCTV cameras that follow us around day and night.

Is it another case of let the “plebs”‘ think they are pushing big brother back a bit whilst all the time lying to our faces as our personal data is stored by a multitude of electronic databases.

Systems as old as ECHELON which was created by the West to spy on the USSR and Eastern Bloc countries but after the cold war was turned on our own citizens.

To get round laws preventing the trawl method of spying that ECHELON does on their own citizens the countries involved decided to spy on each other and share the data. Australia would spy on the UK and the UK would spy on the USA and the USA on Australia. This way the national laws were bypassed and the data was shared among the countries anyway.

However with more and more spying methods and snooping laws being introduced in western nations there seems little need for these pleasantries and our own countries are freely admitting to spying on us all. For our own safety of course.

You never know when those 20-30 real remaining al-Qaeda members left over from the times of “the base” in the 80’s war against the USSR in Afghanistan might pop out under your bed.

Fighters who we helped train and fund and at that time we called them freedom fighters or more accurately the Mujahideen. Our proxy fighters who over time turned into our mortal enemy/de-stabalising friends.

Al-Qaeda terrorists who we obviously have some control over and are used whenever required to overthrow nations we suddenly dislike such as Libya and Syria.

So it might seem like a “win” when these Internet giants say to our government they will refuse to help them spy on us whilst at the same time collecting and keeping the same data for over a year, who knows for how long, by selling adverts, email lists, and details of our friend networks and who knows what else to advertisers to make money.

Obviously there is an easy solution – don’t use the Internet.

However it’s just too damn addictive isn’t it?

So if you don’t want to be spied on then you better go and buy a shack in the woods and wrap tin foil round your head but then it isn’t going to stop those thousands of satellites spinning round the globe spying on you is it?

We do truly live in a world of hypocrisy and George Orwell would be dismayed how we have just allowed ourselves to walk into a world of high tech police state style surveillance.

You can read the full Daily Mail article at www.dailymail.co.uk

iPhone caught out breaching users privacy again as Twitter apps upload full address books without their users permission

February 17, 2012

By Dark Politricks

Another example of modern technology being used to implement the surveillance state by consent has come to light with the recent news that Twitter has been caught out invading it’s millions of iPhone users privacy by uploading the entire contents of the phone users address books to their servers without permission.

From a story in the Irish Times:

TWITTER HAS promised to make changes to its privacy policies after admitting to uploading entire address books from users’ iPhones and storing them on its computers for up 18 months.

The social network uses the information to help users find existing contacts who already have a Twitter account.

It is the latest internet company revealed to have been copying and storing entire address books from smartphones to provide a “Find Friends” service.

Last week Arun Thampi, a programmer in Singapore, revealed that Path, a social network app created by a former Facebook engineer, was copying address-book data from users’ iPhones without notifying them.

Mr Thampi’s blog post about the practice received worldwide attention, with the result that programmers and privacy advocates began checking to see if other popular apps also uploaded user data without user permission.

Other popular apps – including Yelp, Foursquare, Foodspotting and Instagram – were found to be uploading user data without making it clear they were doing so.

The issue attracted attention from the US Congress. Two members of the subcommittee on commerce, manufacturing and trade have written to Apple chief executive Tim Cook seeking further information on its privacy guidelines for apps. The letter makes reference to one appmaker who claims to have a database including “Mark Zuckerberg’s cell phone number, Larry Ellison’s home phone number and Bill Gates’s cell phone number”.

Apple has responded by saying that in future any app accessing contact information will need explicit approval from the user.

An Apple spokesman said that “Apps that collect or transmit a user’s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines”.

So Apple are basically admitting any application that collects or stores users contact data is in breach of their terms of service but somehow I doubt that Twitter is going to be punished in the same way anyone else would if they had been caught breaking the Terms of Service of a global technology giant like Apple.

This comes not so long after the last iPhone related story about your privacy being nothing but an antiquated concept when it was realised that iPhones were secretly tracking every users movements through their inbuilt GPS systems and logging them to a database which could then be taken from the phone by anyone with the right tools. This included Police forces who would pull over drivers and use mobile scanners to transmit the database from the drivers phone to their own computers so that they could see where the person had been travelling to.

Even though stories like this come around every few months or so causing big outcries until the technology device manufacturer promises to fix the “bug” in their software. People need to realise that it doesn’t matter if the phone or computer they are using is fitted with key-logging detector software and have their GPS turned off or any other method they think will avoid them being tracked. The only way to avoid being tracked and monitored is to go and live in the woods with no modern electrical devices and divorce yourself from society altogether.

I have documented on this site many times how the big technology players all have links to the global surveillance network in some cases working closely together with agencies such as the CIA and NSA. Even if you disable every possible app and feature on your smart-phone you are still going to be tracked by the cellphone towers that provide your signal and all the modern super computers that reside at those huge data centres monitoring your calls, emails, web traffic and emails for signs of terrorism, malcontent or displeasure at our utopian society.

If you don’t believe me just spent a minute or two reading up on ECHELON, and that is a system that has been around for decades. Just imagine what the NSA is capable of now in this post 9-11 world of fear where a terrorist is living in every street and citizens are being asked by Big Brother and Big Sis to keep an eye out for anything “unusual”.

This includes people paying with cash, texting in public, supporting the right to bear firearms, ex servicemen, patriots, supporters of Ron Paul or the Occupy movement, belief in outlandish conspiracies like 9.11 or any of the other lies that started our decade of war or anything else on the many leaflets given out to shop keepers and citizens eager to do their duty by snitching on others trying to change the world for the better.

So it comes as no surprise to find yet another example of one of the huge Internet companies breaking privacy laws and stealing personal info at every opportunity as that’s the name of the game nowadays.

We have Microsoft building backdoors into their PC’s so that the NSA can bypass local security measures and access them remotely, Google helped to get going with CIA money as well as helping the myriad of US security companies come up with real time monitoring systems. We also have these huge companies buying up smaller enterprises at every opportunity and with most of the world on Facebook (who seem to have issues with their users privacy on a monthly basis) it makes sense for the intelligence community to have close links with any web outfit who’s only product is YOUR personal information.

As with Microsofts recent purchase of SKYPE and Googles purchase of most new web technologies that make communication easier the introduction of IPv6 will soon mean that every computer, smart phone, TV and digital appliance connected to the Internet will have it’s own unique static IP address enabling any organisation to easily monitor a “person of interest”. I can only imagine the size of the databases required at Langley and GCHQ to keep all the information logged about everybody.

8.30 am Mr X’s alarm clock went off

8.45 am Mr X emptied his dishwasher, he unloaded 6 plates, 3 forks and 2 tea spoons.

9.30 am Mr X made a phone call to Mr Y lasting 5 minutes 30 seconds in which the following sentences were mentioned: “The government sucks”, “I wish someone would do something about the debt crisis” and “I think someone shoot punch David Cameron”.

9.50 am Mr X left his house and walked 0.4 miles to the shops at these co-ordinates X,Y. His phones GPS logged his journey and 5 CCTV cameras caught his travels in real time.

10.15 am Mr X visited Tesco’s where he bought the following items: A pack of batteries, a torch, the Guardian and some cigarettes. He paid in cash!

10.22 am A CCTV camera recorded a conversation Mr X had with someone outside the shop. The facial recognition software has identified this person as Mr Q who has a criminal record for public order offences as well as being logged as attending a recent Occupy Wall St protest in London.  The nearest voice activated lamppost recorded the full conversation which is ranked the malcontent level of the people as 8.2 out of 10.

10.45 am Mr X logged onto his computer with the following password XXXXX. He went to the following flagged website http://www.infowars.com where he made the following comment on an article titled “why we need a revolution”. His comment suggests that he is a potential threat to society and a believer in conspiracy theories. He is currently being processed by the new database at GCHQ for possible signs of danger to society.

10.40 am Mr X has been flagged as domestic extremist and a SWAT team is proceeding to his residence to extract him for questioning.

I’m sure that was all just the fantastical ramblings of a wild imagination and nowhere near the realms of possibility but at least we can rely on the youth of today to sort things out for us before things get too far down the road to a total surveillance state – oh wait they don’t know what privacy means. Looks like we’re screwed then.

Is the UK journalist who broke the Super Injunction asking for a test case in court?

May 23, 2011

By Dark Politicks

It seems I wasn’t far from wrong in my last article: UK Super Injunctions prove #altnews is the premier source of real news when I said:

It would not surprise me in the slightest if the person or persons behind the Twitter accounts that are leaking the super injunction info are not far removed from the papers themselves.

It seems that I was spot on. Not only are the lawyers for one of the footballers covered by an injunction trying to sue Twitter to get details of the person behind an account breaching the injunctions but the Daily Mail reported yesterday that:

A journalist on one of Britain’s most respected newspapers – who also appears on a widely-viewed BBC programme – could face a jail sentence after naming on Twitter a Premier League footballer who had taken out a privacy injunction.

In the first case of its kind, lawyers for the soccer star have persuaded a High Court judge to ask Attorney General Dominic Grieve QC to consider a criminal prosecution against the writer for breaching a privacy injunction. If Mr Grieve decides to issue contempt of court proceedings, the individual faces a prison sentence of up to two years.

The unprecedented legal action is the latest attempt by a public figure to try to curb the growing use of the Internet – especially Twitter – to expose the adulterous affairs and misbehaviour of celebrities and footballers.

As the UK Courts are criticised for creating a privacy law through the back door and our Parliament is accused of lagging behind the huge changes in social media these are interesting times in the UK as two “Human Rights” battle each other out for supremacy.

Article 8 provides a right to respect for one’s “private and family life, his home and his correspondence”, subject to certain restrictions that are “in accordance with law” and“necessary in a democratic society”.

and

Article 10 provides the right to freedom of expression, subject to certain restrictions that are “in accordance with law” and “necessary in a democratic society“. This right includes the freedom to hold opinions, and to receive and impart information and ideas.

So we have the right of freedom of speech battling it out with the right of those who can afford expensive lawyers to take out injunctions to protect their private life.

Scanning the list of named individuals on one of the Twitter accounts at the centre of the storm this usually this comes down to the fact that a famous man has been caught having an affair or some form of sexual shenanigans and is trying to prevent his wife or family from finding out the details.

As Mark Easton says on his recent blog posting:

What is private? And, when push comes to shove, who should decide?

The arguments of the last week have exposed an ancient tension between Parliament and the judiciary.

Politicians, including the prime minister, have expressed concern that “unelected judges” are using the Human Rights Act to create a privacy law on the hoof.

Basically, they are saying: “Get your undemocratic tanks off our lawn”.

On Friday two of the most senior judges in England and Wales lobbed the criticism back saying that, by passing the Human Rights Act, Parliament has already effectively created a privacy law, and it was down to the poor old judges to try to make sense of the confusion and mess.

The Super Injunction system is plainly ridiculous at the injunctions seem to only cover media covered by English law and this was proved right when yesterday the Sunday Herald published details of one the footballers covered by such an injunction. They claimed that

“The issue is one of freedom of information and of a growing argument in favour of more restrictive privacy laws.”

He added that he had taken extensive legal advice and was not expecting any legal consequences because the injunction was not valid in Scotland – only in England.

His paper, he said, was not published, distributed or sold in England.

Therefore it will be interesting to see how far the lawyers trying to get hold of Twitter account details regarding breaches of other injunctions will get.

Twitter is a US based company and presumably covered by US law and the First Amendment which prohibits the making of any law infringing on the freedom of speech or the freedom of the press.

As bloggers, micro bloggers, Tweets and personal websites could be classified as “citizen journalism” then surely the account the Tweets came from would be protected by this law if based in the USA.

However if the account was based in England or Wales or the computer used to post the tweet came from an IP address located in the countries covered by the super injunction e.g England, Wales and Northern Ireland then there could be case made for a breach.

I cannot believe a tech savvy journalist would have been so stupid to open an account up in his own name, using his real email address and then post messages knowingly from an English IP address unless he wanted to be caught.

There are so many mechanisms nowadays to avoid having to do this such as using Proxy Servers based overseas and Disposable Email Accounts that are untraceable that anyone caught breaching Super Injunctions by micro blogging could only be asking for a chance to bring a test case to a UK court.

Maybe that is exactly what this supposedly famous UK journalist wanted to do in the first place.

Are you one of the 650,000 WikiLeaks Twitter followers covered by the subpoena?

January 9, 2011

By Dark Politricks

Having just checked my Twitter follower list it appears that I along with 636,486 other people follow the WikiLeaks account and therefore all our details will shortly be winging their way over to the modern day Stasi-esque country that currently calls itself Amerika.

At first I only understood it to be the details of the actual Twitter accounts mentioned in the subpoena that were going to be sent over e.g Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Rop Gongrijp and Birgitta Jonsdottir but it seems that point B2 of the attachment covers all followers of these accounts as well.

Point B2 requests information related to those accounts that include:

“all records and other information (…) including non-content information associated with the contents of any communication or file stored by or for the account(s), such as the source and destination email addresses and IP addresses”.

If you also have followed one of the twitter accounts contained within the twitter/subpoena.pdf that has been issued then you too will also have your twitter account details put on a disk and shipped to the states so that a grand jury can print the names out, stick them on a wall and then take turns throwing darts at it to see which lucky prize winner will get a chance to join Assange, Manning and the others in the dock.

I joke of course but the whole thing is already so outlandish and far fetched that I don’t put it past any of the loons currently running Amerika to try and bring a few WikiLeaks followers over to their special contrived ahem I mean convened jury to explain to it why they have chosen to publicly declare their hatred of America and everything it stands for by following WikiLeaks.

I mean WikiLeaks is such a well known terrorist organisation that they must assume any follower is also a secret member of Hamas and has Bin Laden’s cave phone number on speed dial. Why else would they care who was following the Twitter account?

The only thing I can think of is that it is an excuse to go on a massive fishing exercise and use one of those huge new NSA super computers to map out all the virtual networks and relationships between online users that a normal web scrape wouldn’t achieve. This would be done in a similar way to how they used real time credit and debit card transactions after 9.11 to map terrorist networks and they already have large computers that are perfect for the job.

The added bonus is that not only do they then obtain a nice huge digital map of online dissenters they can also confirm the email addresses and IP locations as well which will then probably start another ball rolling to ISP’s and mail hosts to obtain traffic history and email logs. Oh the possibilities are endless and its a good job we live in a free world where we can freely talk and criticise the government without fear of being monitored and tracked…..

Potentially this would be some NSA techbods wet dream come true and I am guessing some bright spark realised that the easiest way to capture identifying details of the majority of the socially conscious and war dissenting blogosphere would be to legally wangle access to one of the kingpins of the social networks which is what they have done with their requests to Facebook and Twitter.

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the whole list of followers is quickly uploaded to the USA’s no fly list along with any other of the myriad of lists that the US government has started keeping since 9.11. It is not a joke to say that certain powerful people in the US government seriously believe WikiLeaks and internet freedom presents a real and present danger to their long term aims and the word terrorist and domestic extremist have diverted from their original dictionary definitions a long time back.

I guess there will be a few people worried about this news, people who have never so much as got a parking ticket in their life who are now part of the biggest news story of the decade. However I doubt anyone is going to get a free orange jumpsuit just for following or be-friending WikiLeaks on Twitter or Facebook and who wants to go to America anyway? The place is fast becoming a joke!

The country famed for its constitution, equal protection under the law and traditions of free speech has entered into a new level of unintended satire in which every new DOJ statement or Grand Jury indictment related to WikiLeaks just goes to show how right George Bush was when he said the constitution was nothing more than a piece of paper.

If you think you can just pop along to Twitter and un-follow the account then you are out of luck as WikiLeaks said themselves in a tweet a few hours back:

Too late to unfollow; trick used is to demand the lists, dates and IPs of all who received our twitter messages.

And anyway computers have long memories, longer than Elephants in fact which is why if you actually gave a shit about keeping your privacy online and avoiding grand jury subpoenas for the heinous crime of following someone on Twitter you would have been a bit more savy about the details you use.

Speaking of which I have build a proxy finder script which will run locally on your PC and find currently working proxies that can then be used to surf the web with. The thing with all the free proxy lists that you find is that by the time you get to them the proxy is usually dead and its estimated that only 1% will work. Therefore this script not only goes off and finds potential proxies it tests them in real time to ensure they work. If you are interested in buying this script then drop me an email.

View the full subpoena here: twitter/subpoena.pdf

Free Gary McKinnon Campaign, Planned Twitter Storm Nov 5th

October 30, 2010

By Dark Politricks

Now that we have a supposedly pro civil liberties inclined government in power it will be interesting to see whether they keep to all their promises regarding Gary McKinnon and his extradition to the USA on trumped up charges of hacking into US military computer systems.

Before the election both Nick Clegg and David Cameron attacked the Labour governments decision to allow his extradition to the USA for numerous reasons including:

  • The unbalanced extradition treaty that gives US citizens many more rights than UK citizens.
  • The fact the USA waited a number of years after the crime had been committed until the unfair treaty was ratified by the UK before requesting his extradition.
  • The fact that Gary, who claims he was looking for aliens, has Aspergers a form of autism which would make his extradition, trial and punishment all that more harsh.

From a technical point of view I understand that the hacking was pretty unsophisticated and didn’t involve much more than Gary running an easily available port scanner tool to find unsecured computers on various US military networks and then popping up stupid messages whilst he was looking for evidence of aliens.

Whilst the USA claim he cost them a billion dollars in damages what they actually mean is that Gary exposed the uselessness of their unsecured networks and the cost incurred was actually the amount it cost to install proper security measures that should have been there in the first place. In reality they should have been thankful that it was only a stoned autistic alien hunting geekoid that was poking around their unsecured networks and not a professional team of Chinese or Russian hackers.

In fact I am guessing that the real reason the US is prosecuting Gary instead of offering him a well paid job in their cyber security department like they have done with other high profile hackers is purely the unsophisticated nature of the hack which didn’t actually involve any mad hacking skills at all. It’s probably out of pure embarrassment that they are pursuing him as he has basically revealed to the world that the most advanced high tech armed forces in the world had their network breached in such a simple manner.

This is not to say that Gary didn’t commit a crime and we all know hacking is illegal. However to give him the orange jumpsuit treatment and put him in some dark penitentiary with gang members, rapists and proper full on mentalists seems a bit harsh to me. The crime was committed in this country on a PC in London therefore he should be punished in the UK and not sent off to the USA to never come back.

Not only does the USA have stupidly over the top sentencing guidelines they seem to love locking people up for their natural lifetimes and I can easily foresee a US judge throwing the whole book at Gary for his crime and locking him up for 20+ years. The fact that the Labour government first introduced such an unfair and biased extradition treaty in the first place is bad enough but to then bend over and just let them have their way with one of our citizens in this manner is appalling and I just hope that our new coalition leaders have a bit more bottle and are capable of keeping their word on this subject.

Obviously I don’t hold up too much hope as power corrupts very quickly and it seems that morals and high ground are quickly left on the opposition benches once the ministerial cars pull up. We have already had cries of “sell out” directed a the Lib Dem’s due to their support of Tory cuts, increased tuition fees and the raise in VAT which they actively campaigned against during the election therefore I am half expecting the same excuse to be used in relation to Gary and aspects of their proposed freedom bill, which was a lofty idea aimed at rolling back Labours surveillance state, restoring Civil Liberties and reviewing the US extradition issue in particular.

Both Clegg and Cameron have gone on the record with their support for Gary McKinnon and pressure needs to be applied to both leaders of the coalition so that they are constantly reminded that this is one promise we expect them to keep. Not only is it an important case in terms of Gary’s personal situation but it is also a strong reminder and maybe even a wake up call to the UK population about how little our UK citizenship means when it really comes down to it. If we don’t fight together to keep Gary from being extradited then who is to say who could be next.

The USA is already trying to implement cut off switches claiming that they own the Internet and they are increasingly concerned about cyber security using the threat of terrorist hackers as a reason to implement mass online surveillance and tracking. Who is to say that the next person to be accused of cyber attack isn’t some middle aged housewife who accidentally forwards an email containing a dangerous virus onto an American government network. With our current extradition law British citizens can be extradited to an American jurisdiction without a prima facie case of a crime having been committed which makes it very easy for the US government to import Brits into their horrible justice system even when the crime was committed here as it was in Gary McKinnon’s case.

To highlight this current injustice an online campaign has been created which aims to create a Twitter Storm on November 5th to raise awareness for Gary McKinnon. If you want to join in this campaign for Gary then you just need to send one or more tweets to @ukhomeoffice between 12pm and 5pm that mention Gary and include the following tags: #tweet4gary #freegary #mckinnon #garymckinnon.

Hopefully we can create a mad Twitter Rush, get these tags to trend and raise Gary’s plight to those people not in the know. However the main aim is to show the current UK government how much support there is to prevent his extradition and to reform the unfair treaty that currently treats Brits as 2nd class citizens.

So remember to create some automated scheduled tweets for Nov 5th or just set yourself a reminder to post some or Retweet any of the others that will filling the web. For more details check out: tweetstorm4gary.wordpress.com

Twitter Updates for 2010-02-03

February 3, 2010

Twitter Updates for 2010-02-02

February 2, 2010

Twitter Updates for 2010-02-01

February 1, 2010

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-31

January 31, 2010