January 2019 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Hacker Group Dark Overlord Threatens to Dump Insurance Files Related to 9/11 Attacks
by Razer 03 Jan '19

03 Jan '19

> "A spokesperson for the Hiscox Group confirmed to Motherboard that the hackers had breached a law firm that advised the company, and likely stolen files related to litigation around the 9/11 attacks. "On Monday, New Year’s Eve, a hacker group announced it had breached a law firm handling cases related to the September 11 attacks, and threatened to publicly release a large cache of related internal files unless their ransom demands were met. The news is the latest public extortion attempt from the group known as The Dark Overlord, which has previously targeted a production studio working for Netflix, as well as a host of medical centres and private businesses across the United States. The announcement also signals a slight evolution in The Dark Overlord’s strategy, which has expanded on leveraging the media to exert pressure on victims, to now distributing its threats and stolen data in a wider fashion. In its announcement published on Pastebin," https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw79k5/hacker-group-threatens-du… Rr Sent from my Androgynecological dee-vice with K-9 Mail

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Meditation with Stephan A. Schwartz
by Cari Machet 02 Jan '19

02 Jan '19

https://youtu.be/UW88H-PYpLg -- <https://about.me/carimachet?promo=email_sig&utm_source=product&utm_medium=e…> cari machet about.me/carimachet <https://about.me/carimachet?promo=email_sig&utm_source=product&utm_medium=e…>

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Zeller-Nikolov: hard-surfaced solar body average temperature determined by distance(Sun) and atmospheric pressure
by Zenaan Harkness 02 Jan '19

02 Jan '19

TLDR: Venus has 2,412 times more carbon dioxide than Earth measured as a percentage of its atmosphere, and this CO2 has no measurable effects on Venusian average long-term temperature according to many repeated technical reviews of the data supporting this simple formula. Only distance from the Sun and atmospheric pressure (of hard- surfaced bodies such as the moon and earth) determine long term average temperatures. CO2 has no measurable direct effect on planetary temperature. Put a snowflake in their flunky place today - present a fact :) Burn those "fossil" fuels baby, yee haw! ----- Forwarded message from Gil May <gilmay97(a)gmail.com> ----- Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2018 19:23:48 +1000 Subject: The Zeller-Nikolov climate discovery may turn the world upside down *The Zeller-Nikolov climate discovery may turn the world upside down.* https://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Zeller-Nikolov-climate-by-Christopher… Nature created the fundamental mathematical relationship now known as E=mc2. A mathematical finding, if proven valid, is a real phenomenon; as real as finding a diamond in a river bed. Nature creates fundamental mathematical relationships; humans only discover them. The straightforward and crystal-clear mathematical discovery by Dr. Karl Zeller and Dr. Ned Nikolov has many enemies. If their finding is proven accurate, it could bankrupt the wind and solar industries and put heavy pressure on politicians to end biofuel mandates. It would embarrass most politicians and almost all climate scientists, even those who believe carbon dioxide has no significant effect on Earth temperatures. The Zeller-Nikolov climate finding uses official NASA data to quantify the average temperatures of the hard-surfaced satellite bodies orbiting our Sun. The formula is not applicable to the gas planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Zeller and Nikolov claim to be able to determine the long-term average temperature of Venus, Earth, Mars, Titan (a moon of Saturn), and Triton (a moon of Neptune) by using just two informational values: their distance from the Sun and their atmospheric pressure. Zeller and Nikolov have found that the gaseous composition of atmospheres is immaterial to determining long-term average temperatures. For example, the atmosphere of Venus is composed of 96.5% carbon dioxide, while Earth's atmosphere contains only .04% carbon dioxide, yet those vast differences are irrelevant to the mathematical calculations required to determine average temperatures. This mathematical proof tells us that even though Venus has 2,412 times more carbon dioxide than Earth measured as a percentage of its atmosphere, that CO2 has no measurable effects on its average long-term temperature. Zeller and Nikolov claim that carbon dioxide and all the other atmospheric gases only contribute to temperature by their physical mass and resultant atmospheric pressure. They point out that their predictions for planets and moons are accurate to within one degree Celsius, a confidence-inspiring finding so precise that coincidence can reasonably be ruled out. The Zeller-Nikolov discovery means that Earth's atmosphere keeps us warm via gas-compression heating under the weight of Earth's approximately 300-mile-thick atmosphere, not by the greenhouse effect. An actual greenhouse has a glass wall enclosing it. Earth has no enclosure and is open to space, so the two scientists suggest that the term "greenhouse effect" be replaced by "atmospheric thermal enhancement." Heat is created by compressing atmospheric gases through the pull of gravity. Similarly, in a diesel engine a piston is used to compress gases to generate enough heat to eliminate the need for a spark plug. The tremendous gravitational pull on the enormous mass of Earth's atmosphere combined with solar radiation warms our planet just enough to allow carbon-based life forms to flourish. If carbon dioxide was the powerful greenhouse gas alarmists claim it to be, the calculations for Venus would have to be dramatically different than the calculations for Earth, but they are the same. This tells us that CO2 has no measurable direct effect on planetary temperature, which makes perfect sense as the Earth has experienced severe ice ages when atmospheric CO2 levels were many times higher than they are today. The carbon dioxide-driven greenhouse gas *theory* Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first proposed in 1896 has never been proven valid by empirical testing. Svante's ideas sounded plausible, so people accepted them without proof. More recently, American politicians literally ordered the IPCC to burn through enormous amounts of taxpayer dollars concocting wild and fanciful computer-model projections based on Svante's assumptions. As the old computer-programming saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out" (GIGO). All of the IPCC's doomsday climate predictions have failed to materialize despite our heavily biased media's best efforts to distort and exaggerate. Ordinary summer heat waves and winter storm activity has been falsely portrayed as precursors to the end of the world, which will certainly come unless we elect more Democrats. Climate gurus keep pushing the date of catastrophe into the future because the global doom they keep predicting never arrives. What has arrived are ordinary and expected minor fluctuations in Earth's climate that have been going on since Earth was formed. Ask yourself, when did the Earth have a climate that was more pleasant and beneficial to mankind than the climate we have today? The honest answer is simply *never*. Despite multiple technical reviews by scientists around the world, no one has found error in Zeller and Nikolov's mathematical formulas and specific computations. Objections raised against their discovery are largely that it does not fit accepted climate theories that are professionally and politically popular. Climate science has become an Orwellian tool of political power and an enormous money-making profession for scientists, professors, universities, state and federal government employees, and a thousand and one green-scam businesses. Just think of all the billions of dollars being spent on "global warming" and the mandated false remedies. No doom equals no costly remedies and no profits for those selling fear. Real scientists know that you cannot control the weather with windmills and solar panels any more than you can control the weather with bowling balls and statues of dead politicians, yet the costly and impractical renewable-energy fad continues. Crony capitalists and ambitious but scientifically naive politicians from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to Beto O'Rourke, to billionaire Michael Bloomberg want taxpayers to spend trillions of dollars on energy schemes that have already raised the cost of food and energy all over the world. This has harmed the world's poor far more than the wealthy, the very opposite of what liberals are supposed to stand for. Now they want us to dramatically escalate our war against the carbon atom, the very element all our food and our own bodies are made of. Carbon creatures fighting carbon; human events rarely get more twisted and surreal than this. ----- End forwarded message -----

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Consciousness and Reality with Thomas Lombardo
by Cari Machet 02 Jan '19

02 Jan '19

https://youtu.be/pinHV_8Dvb0 This whole channel is amazing remote viewing et al -- <https://about.me/carimachet?promo=email_sig&utm_source=product&utm_medium=e…> cari machet about.me/carimachet <https://about.me/carimachet?promo=email_sig&utm_source=product&utm_medium=e…>

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Anyone's taobios-v2.tar.bz2
by grarpamp 02 Jan '19

02 Jan '19

https://threatpost.com/uefi-rootkit-sednit/140420/ Researchers hunting cyber-espionage group Sednit (an APT also known as Sofacy, Fancy Bear and APT28) say they have discovered the first-ever instance of a rootkit targeting the Windows Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) in successful attacks. From a report: The discussion of Sednit was part of the 35C3 conference, and a session given by Frederic Vachon, a malware researcher at ESET who published a technical write-up on his findings earlier this fall [PDF]. During his session, Vachon said that finding a rootkit targeting a system's UEFI is significant, given that rootkit malware programs can survive on the motherboard's flash memory, giving it both persistence and stealth. "UEFI rootkits have been researched and discussed heavily in the past few years, but sparse evidence has been presented of real campaigns actively trying to compromise systems at this level," he said. The rootkit is named LoJax. The name is a nod to the underlying code, which is a modified version of Absolute Software's LoJack recovery software for laptops. The purpose of the legitimate LoJack software is to help victims of a stolen laptop be able to access their PC without tipping off the bad guys who stole it. It hides on a system's UEFI and stealthily beacons its whereabouts back to the owner for possible physical recovery of the laptop. The notion that any closed source SW or HW blob, even a BIOS, by whatever ridiculously secretive and unknown companies, partnered with and employing whatever other unknowns, let alone in any new codebase such as UEFI or *Lake or Ryzen or Phone... that you can't inspect however and whenever the fuck you want... is somehow secure, open, trustable, and miraculously free from holes, exploits, and exploitation... is utterly ridiculous. Doesn't matter whether "taobios" was fake or not, you're all still fucked. #OpenFabs , #OpenHW , #OpenSW , #OpenDev , #OpenBiz

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counting 1's and 0's - Roger Nelson on global consciousness
by Cari Machet 02 Jan '19

02 Jan '19

https://youtu.be/ImmMj_IrLlg -- <https://rb.tc/41UB5#https://about.me/carimachet?promo=email_sig&utm_source=…> cari machet about.me/carimachet <https://rb.tc/41UB6#https://about.me/carimachet?promo=email_sig&utm_source=…>

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GitTorrent - Decentralized GitHub
by grarpamp 02 Jan '19

02 Jan '19

https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentr… https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent

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Fwd: [owscontent] Your Brain Is Furtively Read And Your Electromagnetic Brainwaves Are Furtively Stolen
by Cari Machet 02 Jan '19

02 Jan '19

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Khanh Dac Pham (via owscontent list) <owscontent+phamdackhanh= gmail.com(a)lists.occupy.net> Date: Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 4:36 PM Subject: [owscontent] Your Brain Is Furtively Read And Your Electromagnetic Brainwaves Are Furtively Stolen To: <owscontent(a)lists.occupy.net> Hello, CIA of the U.S. government, Intelligence of Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Public Security of Vietnam government have been using satellite/ remote electromagnetic brain control weapon to furtively read your brain and furtively steal your electromagnetic brainwaves for knowing your secret. Your secret information such as business, specialty knowledge, secret privacy memory, exciting feelings and pleasure of sexual intercourse, credit card, banking account, internet banking service, national identity, email account, etc are remotely stolen. Their purposes are such some as following: - With collected business secret, they transfer this information to their companies. - With collected specialty knowledge, they set up to their people’s brain. - With collected privacy of sexual intercourse, they will furtively manipulate your brain for their dishonoured genital intercourse with you. CHECKING YOU ARE BEING BRAIN-READ AS THE FOLLOWING GUIDE: Evidence - Recording of ELF Electromagnetic Waves of Mind/Brain Control Weapon <https://sites.google.com/site/torturebyelectromagneticweapon/home/evidecne-…> The information of electromagnetic brain control weapon is as the following: [image: Detecting EMF Fields] Yours Sincerely, Khanh Dac Pham Da Nang city, Vietnam Mobile/ Viber/ Line: +84 (0) 90 990 5651 - text please. *Vietnamese Website:* https://sites.google.com/site/vietnambrainhumanrights *Twitter:* https://www.twitter.com/khanhpham65 *Vietnamese Activism Facebook:* https://www.facebook.com/khanh.pham.65 *Personal Facebook:* https://www.facebook.com/khanh.d.pham.1 *Email:* phamdackhanh(a)gmail.com ____________________________________________________________ You received this message as a subscriber on the list: owscontent(a)lists.occupy.net To be removed from the list, send any message to: owscontent-unsubscribe(a)lists.occupy.net For all list information and functions, see: http://lists.occupy.net/lists/info/owscontent -- <https://about.me/carimachet?promo=email_sig&utm_source=product&utm_medium=e…> cari machet about.me/carimachet <https://about.me/carimachet?promo=email_sig&utm_source=product&utm_medium=e…>

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Re: [tor-talk] Status of Torrent on Onion in 2019
by grarpamp 02 Jan '19

02 Jan '19

On 1/1/19, Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) - lists <lists(a)infosecurity.ch> wrote: > i'm supporting with some technical analysis a volounteer-non-profit > collaborative torrent forum/site with their future-looking upgrades of > infrastructure. > > I would love them to bring all their public forum That's just webwork. > and public tracker on Onion, > while exporting their +160k releases database as open-data so > that Torrent Search sites and Torrent Software with incorporated Torrent > Search could use it. There are probably lots of ways out there. Even maybe something like "getstrike" and "strike-search" API. > My question is about the status of uses of Torrent on Onion, > not for "content downloading" but for index tracking: "index tracking" seems a nonsensical mashup. Though one might say something like "publishing realtime torrent scrape info from trackers on index sites". Definitions... Index - Stupid forums where users publish descriptions for their infohash'es aka: torrent files, the scene. Rarely do centralized indexes use efficient plaintext search and insert interfaces instead of blingy forums and risk. Tracker - Leet tech that clients connect to to find nodes by infohash, ie: DHT, PEX, OpenTracker Client - transmission-bt, vuze, etc Protected - All traffic stays entirely within the overlay network. Exit - Some or all traffic may "exit" to clearnet > - Are there stable / long term Torrent Trackers running on Onion Addresses? Yes, and i2p etc too. Yet trackers are just bittorrent tech. So there are plenty of indexes as well. Most of the indexes are multihomed from clearnet, some exist only in the overlays. > - How many Torrent Software natively do support > Tor and Onion Addresses, > only for Trackers Assuming you're using tor+onioncat p2p v2 onions with v2 HSDir support, that yields ability to transport UDP over IPv6 over tor (many bittorrent protocols use or require UDP)... Thus all clients that support IPV6 can work over "Tor and Onion Addresses". Native .onion support (TCP only, no IP) is not as simple. Nor is split horizon exit or full exit. Same for trying to get TOR space to interop with I2P space or CJDNS space, client multihoming, etc. > (not for content-download-upload-exchange)? This is moot as typical users don't run their clients just look at the scrape, they do it to seed and leech. Which of course they can do 24x365 over both tor and i2p, and other overlay networks. And due to rampant censorship and loss of free speech on clearnet they are doing it more and more. See all the recent bans by Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc etc etc. The overlays are now the only reasonably safe spaces for free speech to thrive. That's sad. Users may also want to look at DTube, IPFS, Brave Browser, BitChute Webtorrent, lists of p2p apps and overlay networks, distributed file sharing and storage, blockchain and cryptocurrency, etc for other ideas and things to read and try. Lots of new protected overlay networks and apps are now online, and more will be coming in the years ahead. Things are changing fast. Plug in and have fun :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bittorrent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_(BitTorrent_client)

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Where is Coderman?
by Where is Coderman? 02 Jan '19

02 Jan '19

Where is Coderman? Searching public database and https://www.bop.gov/inmateloc/ shows no record of Martin Peck in prison. He filed Court case "Roark v. United States 6:12-cv-01354-MC" at address: 27464 SW Vandershuere Road Hillsboro, OR 97123 https://www.google.com/maps/place/27464+SW+Vanderschuere+Rd,+Hillsboro,+OR+… This looks to be not there anymore? Or maybe Coderman got rid of horses. A while back Coderman posted about FBI disruption strategies. Did Coderman get disrupted? Or is Coderman dead? “FBI disruption strategies - extra-judicial life destruction ''' Disruption strategy involves “a range of tools including arrests, interviews, or source-directed operations to effectively disrupt subject’s activities.” “The FBI’s overbroad and aggressive use of its investigative and surveillance powers, and its willingness to employ ‘disruption strategies’ against subjects not charged with crimes can have serious, adverse impacts on innocent Americans,” the ACLU concluded. “Being placed under investigation creates an intense psychological, and often financial, burden on the people under the microscope and their families, even when they are never charged with a crime,” it continued. “All the more so when a heinous crime like terrorism is alleged, and when the investigators are convinced the subject of their investigation is guilty but they just don’t have the evidence necessary for arrest.” The Congressional Research Service report noted that such methods are reminiscent of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, and particularly the COINTELPRO program, which engaged in “preventive, covert, intelligence-based efforts to target and contain people, groups, or movements suspected by the Bureau to be ‘rabble rousers,’ ‘agitators,’ ‘key activists,’ or ‘key black extremists.’” The FBI “relied on illegal means to curb constitutionally protected activity it deemed threatening to national security.” ''' https://theintercept.com/2016/02/18/fbi-wont-explain-its-bizarre-new-way-of… FBI Won’t Explain Its Bizarre New Way of Measuring Its Success Fighting Terror Jenna McLaughlin Feb. 18 2016, 11:18 p.m. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly developed a new way to measure its success in the war on terror: counting the number of terror threats it has “disrupted” in a year. But good luck trying to figure out what that number means, how it was derived, or why it doesn’t jibe with any other law enforcement statistic, most notably, the number of terror suspects actually charged or arrested. In the section on “Performance Measures” in the FBI’s latest financial statement, the bureau reports 440 “terror disruptions” in the 12-month period ending on September 30, 2015. That’s compared to 214 in fiscal year 2014. And it’s more than three times the 2015 “target” of 125. In a vacuum, that would appear to suggest that the FBI’s terror-fighting mission — which sucked up $5.3 billion, or 54 percent of the bureau’s $9.8 billion budget in 2015 — is exceeding expectations. But that number — 440 — is much higher than the number of arrests reported by the FBI. The Washington Post counted about 60 terror-related arrests in 2015; a study by George Washington University found 71 arrests related to the Islamic State from March 2014 to the end of 2015. Of those arrests, many were of people trying to travel abroad or trying to help others do so. Many more involved people planning attacks that were essentially imaginary, often goaded by FBI informants. And according to a document from the Department of Homeland Security obtained by The Intercept in November, there was only one genuinely “foiled attack” in the United States between January 2014 and September 2015. And that one, involving would-be shooters in Garland, Texas, targeting a cartoon-drawing event inspired by the Prophet Muhammad, was stopped by the local police department. The FBI didn’t respond to emails asking basic questions such as what qualifies as a disruption, why the number is so much higher than the bureau’s recorded arrests, or how it comes up with its annual “target.” In a January 2015 Performance Report, Justice Department officials explained that the “targets reflect the number of expected disruptions based on the estimated threat, yet account for potential fluctuations.” The officials acknowledged that “disruptions can be a challenge to quantify for future years” because the number of potential plots is “outside of FBI control.” Nevertheless, they wrote: “Based on past data trends, coupled with current and emerging threat pictures, the FBI expects to achieve its FY 2015 and FY 2016 targets.” A strange way to provide transparency The “terrorism threat disruptions” metric is a relatively new arbiter of success for the FBI. In a 2013 Department of Justice document about strategic goals, fighting terrorism is identified as Strategic Goal 1, and “number of terrorism disruptions” is Strategic Objective 1.1. “To provide transparency to its work in the area of counterterrorism, the Department will disclose a key statistic: the number of terrorism disruptions,” the department announced. But the definition was vague: “A disruption is defined as interrupting or inhibiting a threat actor from engaging in criminal or national security related activity. A disruption is the result of direct actions and may include but is not limited to the arrest; seizure of assets; or impairing the operational capabilities of key threat actors.” And the department’s idea of transparency was problematic. Because the FBI’s “operational priorities are classified,” the document noted, “it is only possible to report aggregate data that lacks significant detail.” Experts interviewed by The Intercept suggested two possible explanations for the high number of terror disruptions. Gold stars One possibility, they said, is that the number is just a subjective way to make people at the FBI look good, or to rationalize the cost. “This is how the whole career system works in the FBI — statistics, performance,” said Coleen Rowley, a former FBI agent and whistleblower. Individuals use statistics to advance their careers, and the agency, in turn, uses them to justify its budget, she said. “In the agency, this is the way to advance.” The fact that the agency establishes a target for terrorism disruptions is also troubling, said Michael German, a former FBI agent and fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice. “That the FBI actually sets a performance goal stating the specific number of terrorist disruptions it wants to accomplish over the year would seem to create an incentive to gin up cases where no real threat might exist.” And if the number is inflated, it wouldn’t be the first time the Department of Justice or the FBI had been criticized for inaccurately estimating the impact of their counterterrorism efforts. In 2007, an inspector general investigation found that the entire Department of Justice — the FBI included — had messed up its bookkeeping efforts on terrorism. The FBI mistakenly included marriage fraud, immigration cases, and others in their records of anti-terror cases. And in 2013, Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz called out the office that oversees U.S. attorney’s offices for shoddy reporting that significantly overstated the number of terrorism convictions, counting cases that actually dealt with narcotics or money laundering or including defendants who had their charges dismissed. “These inaccuracies are important in part because DOJ management and Congress need accurate terrorism-related statistics to make informed operational and budgetary decisions,” Horowitz said in a statement accompanying the 2013 report. Easier to disrupt than arrest Another possible explanation for such a big number, however, is that it accurately reflects a new FBI approach to fighting terror that is occurring outside of public view — where the bureau decides someone is a threat and disrupts his or her life in some way that isn’t nearly as subject to oversight and accountability as an indictment or an arrest. “I’m sensing a significant change in counterterrorism policy in the U.S., where we’ve gone from ‘watch and report,’ to ‘let’s just disrupt them any way we can,’” David Gomez, a former FBI agent and profiler, as well as a former LAPD officer, told The Intercept. “This has cut short the way the FBI does long-term investigations. … They’re not doing that anymore.” The FBI has indeed been going through some changes. As a 2013 Congressional Research Service report explains, “Since the September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks, the FBI has implemented a series of reforms intended to transform itself from a largely reactive law enforcement agency focused on investigations of criminal activity into a more proactive, agile, flexible, and intelligence-driven agency that can prevent acts of terrorism.” This has led law enforcement agencies to use aggressive, proactive techniques to catch potential terrorists before a crime is committed. According to the CRS report, one technique is the “Al Capone” approach — putting people in jail for a minor crime rather than sticking around and waiting for evidence of a serious violent threat. Another method is the informant, or “agent provocateur,” who starts communicating with potential suspects, goading them into committing an act of terrorism in order to catch them in the act. “Where the person targeted really is a terrorist, that might make sense,” said German. “But often when evidence that a person is a terrorist is lacking — that’s because he isn’t a terrorist.” German, in an email, asked: “Has the FBI secretly prevented people from getting jobs, hazmat licenses, gun permits, security clearances, or barred their travel where no charges were brought, providing no opportunity for them to challenge the accusations against them or prove their innocence? And then chalked that up as a successful ‘disruption’ so they would get a pat on the back and more resources from Congress, regardless of whether the person was actually guilty?” A 2009 FBI document obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union explicitly allows field offices to engage in “disruption strategies” at the conclusion of a terror assessment or investigation, after “all significant intelligence has been collected, and/or the threat is otherwise resolved.” Disruption strategy involves “a range of tools including arrests, interviews, or source-directed operations to effectively disrupt subject’s activities.” “The FBI’s overbroad and aggressive use of its investigative and surveillance powers, and its willingness to employ ‘disruption strategies’ against subjects not charged with crimes can have serious, adverse impacts on innocent Americans,” the ACLU concluded. “Being placed under investigation creates an intense psychological, and often financial, burden on the people under the microscope and their families, even when they are never charged with a crime,” it continued. “All the more so when a heinous crime like terrorism is alleged, and when the investigators are convinced the subject of their investigation is guilty but they just don’t have the evidence necessary for arrest.” The Congressional Research Service report noted that such methods are reminiscent of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, and particularly the COINTELPRO program, which engaged in “preventive, covert, intelligence-based efforts to target and contain people, groups, or movements suspected by the Bureau to be ‘rabble rousers,’ ‘agitators,’ ‘key activists,’ or ‘key black extremists.’” The FBI “relied on illegal means to curb constitutionally protected activity it deemed threatening to national security.” The goal of “disruption” has typically been reserved for FBI agents pursuing people like drug traffickers — where “impeding the normal and effective operation of the targeted organization, as indicated by changes in the organizational leadership and/or changes in methods of operation,” counts as disruption. But that standard doesn’t really apply to the “lone wolves” or small groups that make up most of the FBI’s terror suspects. Great expectations The FBI is under a lot of pressure these days — charged with preventing every possible terrorist attack before it happens, while withstanding public scrutiny of its methods. Gomez, the former FBI agent, cuts the bureau some slack. “As a policeman, we used to have a saying about local drug dealers — we put them in jail for everything, use of heroin, a misdemeanor,” Gomez said. “They’re doing life in prison 60 days at a time.” The FBI is “going to be under severe criticism” one way or the other, he said. “You can’t win.” Rowley, though critical of the strategy, said she was also sympathetic. “It’s a bad position of, oh, you better prevent every act of terrorism,” she said. Contact the author: ” https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/2016-February/012286.html

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