Internet Scamsters, Spies and Trolls

[ThePythonicCow]

Gordon Duff has a good article describing who's involved in Internet scams, spying and trolling, and how they operate. See Scamsters, Spies and Trolls, an Internet Story (http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/12/09/scamsters-spies-and-trolls-an-internet-story/).

There is (not surprisingly) heavy involvement of major intelligence organizations, as well as major Internet companies. Internet scams such as the infamous Nigerian (419) scam (http://www.ngex.com/news/public/newsinfo.php?nid=9017) help fund those who also spend their day trolling Internet forums. Email can be watched, and targeted individuals can have incriminating evidence planted on their PC's, and in their email boxes.

Duff's begins the article with:




A recent investigation carried out by Veterans Today in concert with international agencies tasked with investigating computer crimes has made some startling discoveries.

Computer intelligence specialists, some formerly to level “hackers” themselves, have “backtracked” the careers of “internet personalities,” including but not limited to comment board “trolls” from key websites, top Wikipedia editors, policy makers at Yahoo, Google, AOL, YouTube.

What we found was a direct correlation between these individuals and some members of these organizations and lobbying groups with suspected ties to espionage and terrorism, corrupt “think tanks,” actual intelligence agencies, radically biased press organizations and widespread “419″ internet scams that have cheated people around the world out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Moreover, we came across the footprints of organizations that hacked the computers of journalists and political leaders, intelligence and law enforcement officials, not just infecting their computers with sophisticated spyware but systematically placing highly encrypted illegal child pornography onto the computer systems of many.

Behind this even still, we discovered foreign intelligence agencies working directly with local police “child pornography task forces,” relationships based on bribery, that have been used to blackmail, intimidate and silence.
Duff concludes the article with:



WHAT THE INTERNET BRINGS TO YOUR HOME

Becoming a targeted individual is simple. Attempts to call for redress on issues that threaten criminal or financial interests may make any individual a target. Harassment and stalking by paid “trolls” is enough to discourage most.

For others, being threatened with prosecution, threats, pornography, classified documents placed on your computer and discovered through “convenient” police investigations, is a daily occurrence.

All the while, members of our government and the Washington establishment amuse themselves with kidnapped children, later slain and disposed of and have for a long time. The Franklin Affair was only a shadow of what is really there and more than enough officials have come forward about this.

Time and time again, the FBI and Department of Justice has been asked to prosecute major sex traffickers tied to the powerful “overlords” only to turn away. Law enforcement officials who push “too hard” are retired, fired or are discovered with drugs or accidentally lose computers filled with classified information.

Some simply disappear.

Others have been infected with weaponized anthrax from Ft. Detrick or wake up “dead” on a garbage dump.

Key to remember is that, for each and every American, the connection to treason, to espionage, to world organized crime is as close as a Facebook post or that crazy person who keeps sending emails. Too often, it is in the wild accusations received from a “patriotic” website said to be run by former “Black Ops” or “Swift Boaters.”

No, sitting there with your “tablet, smartphone or laptop,” you are quite probably touching the most hare-brained and malevolent tentacles of the world’s intelligence community, a “community” that, in reality, is the heart and soul of very real terrorism.

It isn’t your children that need protecting from the internet, not hardly.
More at Scamsters, Spies and Trolls, an Internet Story (http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/12/09/scamsters-spies-and-trolls-an-internet-story/).

[Cjay]

Imagine if all that brain power was used for good instead of evil.

[Tony]

...and then that creates wannabe's!

[ThePythonicCow]

Those interested in the above may also enjoy reading the new Rolling Stone article on the hacker that took down Stratfor: The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Hammond: Enemy of the State (http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-rise-and-fall-of-jeremy-hammond-enemy-of-the-state-20121207). The FBI got enough incriminating data on another hacker (of less talent but more emotionally vulnerable) to get that hacker to turn and help them out, getting the more capable hacker Jeremy Hammond for the Stratfor job. The umbrella Anonymous under which these hackers were working took a serious hit from all this.

[Carmody]

Those interested in the above may also enjoy reading the new Rolling Stone article on the hacker that took down Stratfor: The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Hammond: Enemy of the State (http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-rise-and-fall-of-jeremy-hammond-enemy-of-the-state-20121207). The FBI got enough incriminating data on another hacker (of less talent but more emotionally vulnerable) to get that hacker to turn and help them out, getting the more capable hacker Jeremy Hammond for the Stratfor job. The umbrella Anonymous under which these hackers were working took a serious hit from all this.

As someone who was there for all the design stages for the creation of this hardware and code, way back when we had to know all this stuff inside and out...it might be safe to say that the most capable, if they decided to get involved, that is...the most capable hackers would be getting up to about age 50-60.

The younger folks might have learned it early, but they don't know the hardware-software from the ground up, in quite the same way.

For example, the collection of national taxes, in a large western country. The sheer complexity and interconnectivity, is mind boggling, even for most highly capable and educated folks.

I know of one single person, who is responsible for all that code. Every bit of it.

The same thing tends to happen for lets say, Cisco routers. One person for the software, one person for the hardware. I know another person who is the origin point for some very common but highly complex digital hardware. That is how things tend to work. The idea that there are 'giant teams working on it' is more for the hairdresser and telephone washing aspects. like marketing, product shape and design, and so on.

They may have a team working on assembly or implementation, but the ideas and direction, and control or corrective inputs..tend to flow from the single minds..and all else is support structure.

When it comes to the critical aspects, like lets say...the minutiae of an Intel processor design, that tends to come from one single mind.

What I'm saying is that if, for example, one where to deeply investigate lets say Intel, or AMD's processor designs branches or departments...the entire thing, at each major corporation..could be traced to the desk of one person. And that person would not be a director, or office blowhard, even though that blowhard CEO board director would be spending their time covering that up. Those folks tend to do their best to make the innovator feel as if they are replaceable. The innovator is NOT replaceable. the CEO is replaceable --blowhards and egoists are a dime a dozen.

The originator, the creator..they are not replaceable, and due to blowhards and CEO grubbing types, few even know that such a condition that I outline is the NORM, not the exception. Norm, meaning the vast majority of technological firms are exactly as outlined.

[Flash]

When you worked around lots of IT people, you know that what you say Carmody is the full truth. Usually, that one person is highly respected by his colleagues, because they know how much he knows that they don't, but usually that one person had little social skills (otherwise he would be a manager) and is not always like by managers because of it, and by some colleagues for whom social skills are priority of from the jalous ones.

So managers make trouble, try to instill social skills (that will never happen) and make sure they make him somewhat miserable because that one person does not fit the curriculum of the "good employee" who "share" with his colleagues.

It is rarely understood that the sharing is about impossible because the guy is simply so knowledgeable that it takes years for someone else to come to his ankles. Add to that a pinch of genius, and these people come rare in between.

As they have few social skills, they do not realize how difficult it would be to replace them and they submit to the harassment. On the other hand, the sometimes stupid managers and CEO do not realize either how important that one worker is and let him go (often to competitors with better job offers). How stupid one can get.

This is the case of my neighbour, 45-47 years old, about the only one to know how to deal with specific kind of software used in flight data.

They let him go to get him back at his conditions this time. But all along, the poor guy thought he could not find something else (which he did easily). In every single company, I saw someone like this on the IT side. When there is none, the company is in for a tough technical ride.

Carmody, I wish the kiddies I know who are internet and computer whiz would get with you to have some training on the true basics.

[Maia Gabrial]

Imagine if all that brain power was used for good instead of evil.

Exactly, Cjay. To decent moral people with integrity, this is logical. But of course, evildoers don't think like that. But they'll get theirs soon enough....
I wonder how they'll feel when every man, woman and child on the planet suddenly "knows" everything that has been hidden for so long, who did what and why? Will they be able to hold their heads up or hang them in shame? We'll see....

Thank you for this insightful article, Paul. It just shows how low things have sunk.... I say enough already....Remember all those human behavior studies that go on? That information is why this sort of thing has been so successfully used against us.....

[ThePythonicCow]

The innovator is NOT replaceable.
I've left a few sizable chunks of code behind in my time ... subsystems that I conceived, designed, wrote, documented, and got into production ... subsystems that would not have existed otherwise ... subsystems of tens or hundreds of thousands of lines each ... subsystems that first required that I spend a longer time (whether months in the 1970's or years in the 2000's) in that area than most anyone else ... subsystems whose design sometimes depended on my understanding or building the system, hands on, from the solder joints and logic gates up through the drivers, operating system, compilers, communication protocols, data store, system libraries and application interfaces.

In almost each such case, I was replaceable and replaced. One can write code so that others can maintain, adapt and extend it, sometimes substantially. One can write it so that the maintainers who replace you quit calling you because it's easier to figure it out themselves, and so that the maintainers who replace them don't call because, outside of a few code comments and fading legends, they don't even know what role you played in the creation of that subsystem.

I am not alone in this. Many of the core portions of the Linux kernel are this way.

Yes, there is much code, in most proprietary systems, that is as you describe. Such code eventually becomes extinct, as it cannot adapt to changing needs.