Expect our lying US government to pull out all the stops for the next false flag attack.
A few years ago I removed myself from the traditional church scene, which had, up to that time, been my primary career choice. Part of what drove me out was the false accusation of a good friend. He was on staff of a church being hijacked, and was an impediment to the process. To get rid of him, they concocted a scheme involving really nasty emails he was supposed to have sent. Except, he didn’t even know how to use email. He barely knew how to read it on the computer the church provided. When I saw the supposed evidence they used to fire him, I knew I could have produced that in a matter of seconds, and done a better job. They didn’t even have the right IP addresses in the header. But it was a railroad job to impress a bunch of church members who didn’t know any better.
They should have known better. Not because of technology understanding, but because they knew the man. Some did, and when he left, and went on to pastor another church, quite a few followed him by moving their membership and their money. But the lack of computer expertise among the church members was a contributing problem, and I was aware of it from having organized a couple of computer repair clinics at that church before that hijack got rolling.
By no means am I a serious technician; I’m just somewhere above the average user. I’ve spent some time reading up on such things, and hung out with real technicians when it was possible. I still chat with a few online when I can, trying to learn a little more. Most of the time I end up cleaning up after someone who thought they knew what they were doing. My one real area of expertise is not messing with something I don’t know about, because I know what I don’t know. I’ve actually avoided a few subjects because I knew I didn’t have the time and equipment to fool with it. This is what puts me way out ahead of most of the computer users in the world.
All of this makes me a useful computer service guy for private computer owners, but in a bureaucratic setting, this would never happen. As we all know, government technicians are permitted to do only a certain narrow range of activities, and any real talent for diagnosis will simply get you in trouble. What they want is someone who’s been through the proper schools, memorized the proper procedures, and can follow them without having a clue. Having had extensive experience with government training standards, I know all too well this lowest-common-denominator approach. It’s why our government computer systems are wide open to cracking, should anyone bother. The current cyber defenses are entirely reliant on contracted firewalls, AV and anti-malware from the lowest bidder.
Of course, most of it is not worth bothering. The really important stuff is protected by a somewhat better group of technicians, some of whom actually know a thing or two, and get paid accordingly. These are the ones in the best position to engineer a false flag attack, which is simply part of their job. It will surely come. However, I tend to think it will be part of a bigger deception, involving some serious loss of human life. Still, a ginned up cyber attack from the same people alleged to cause the destruction and death in meatspace would make for great theater. “Look out for them thar turrrrrists!”
If you read some of the better analyses from the fallout of the Anonymous attack on HBGary, you may know there is a lore of Windows vulnerabilities known to a select few technicians who keep track of such things for nefarious purposes. It permits them entry points for spying either for corporate or government clients. It’s rather like their own corporate knowledge assets, but you’ll notice it never occurs to anyone how simply nasty it is. If one smart guy can know about them, surely another does. Meanwhile, every Windows system remains vulnerable because it makes more money for the sake of just a few owned by whomever these guys plan to target. You have to wonder if Microsoft themselves aren’t involved in this game for the sake of profit. Does anyone else see a moral issue here?
It’s not as if these people trading in unannounced vulnerabilities don’t also have some tricks for Mac and Unix/Linux, but those are smaller targets. (Yes, I know Mac is actually Unix, but the GUI is far more vulnerable than, and deeply intertwined with, the underlying Unix core, which makes it a different beast.) They tend to be designed in part from a security model, whereas the majority OS is decidedly insecure by intention. But when the government or some big corporation needs real security, it’s always some type of Unix or Linux, usually without any GUI at all — pure command line stuff. If they need a conveniently timed attack, there’s always a way to make it vulnerable intentionally, or to simply lie about it, since the vast majority of folks don’t know anything about it.
So when this nasty business comes, look for all the mainstream sources to lie about it, simply because the few who actually understand are compromised. They know they are paid to lie, and they’ll do it without hesitation, which is why they have that job. A few honest technicians will poke holes in the story, but who reads geek blogs? Other geeks. I’ll be keeping track as best I know, and I’ll do what I can to share it here broken down as much as I reasonably can, but it may take until some time afterward for the facts to leak out, or be discerned from outside by someone to whom the whole thing is obvious.
Of course, this assumes we are all still able to use this Internet thing with some modicum of freedom as we do now. That’s the whole point, of course: to shut down this free sharing of knowledge about government lying. Look for it to happen, though.
