Category Archives: Globalization

War On India: Is Massive Electricity Outage Sabotage By Elites?

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Power Grid failure hit India States Affected What is causing power grid failure in India? What is an electrical grid?.

Update

Soutik Biswas at the BBC has some interesting facts about India’s power consumption:

  • Despite its soaring energy needs, India has one of the lowest per capita rates of consumption of power in the world,734 units, as compared to a world average of 2,429 units. This is nothing compared with say, Canada, (18,347 units) and the US (13,647 units). China’s per capita consumption (2,456 units) is more than three times that of India.
  • The low per capita consumption is despite the fact that the power sector has been growing at more than 7% every year.
  • Other interesting points Biswas makes: India’s electricity is mostly derived from coal, with about a fifth from hydro-elecric power; the main problems are massive subsidies to rich farmers, pervasive theft, and failures in transmissions and distribution; there is no shortage of money (this contradicts the usual mythology).
  • The most telling statistic: At the time of Independence, about 60% of India’s power sector was privately owned. Today, about 80% of the installed capacity is in the hands of the government

Update: I should point out how calm most of India looks in the pictures of the outage. There seems to be more panic in the Western media.

I can only imagine what would happen here if the entire population of the US (double that, actually) was plunged into darkness.

Part of the reason is that Indians are used to this sort of thing.

Rolling electricity cuts are common. In Tamil Nadu where a huge number of multinationals have relocated and heavily tax the system, there are current cuts practically every day, from anywhere between 4 hours and 12.

Usually, customers get notice and have time to arrange their day around the cut. But still, in temperatures of 45 degrees Celsius, it can be dangerous to have go without a fan, let alone an air conditioner, especially for older people, like my parents.

But, there hasn’t been a major power failure like this since 2001.

Causes of the current shortages include massive subsidies to farmers, pervasive current theft, and price controls. However,  for private industry to come in and suddenly take over would also have terrible immediate effects. The smart thing would be to improve the existing infrastructure, remove the subsidies, and crack down on theft.

Update: The AtlanticCities.com explains why it took longer to restore power in DC than in India.

“That’s 10 days for less than half a million people [in DC] compared to about 6 hours for most of the power to be restored to the roughly 350 million affected by the outage Monday, or compared to the 6 hours it’s taken Tuesday to restore power to 75 percent of the more than 670 million people affected by this latest outage. The Times of India notes that the last major outage – in 2001, affecting a region home to 230 million people – was resolved in 16 hours.”

“http://m.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2012/07/why-indias-massive-power-outages-get-fixed-more-quickly-dcs/2775/

Update:: A piece in Zdnet in June 2012 describes a new Indian security initiative that involved allowing some government agencies to carry out cyber attacks, apparently as a preemptive move. So, the Indian government had been anticipating a cyber attack and even planning one, if necessary. Curious.

India is taking steps to protect its cyberinfrastructure by designating relevant government agencies to carry out offensive cyberattacks on other countries when necessary.

The country’s National Security Council (NSC) will soon approve the “comprehensive” plan and designate the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and National Technical Research Organization (NTRO) to carry out offensive cyber-operations if needed, sources told The Times of India in a report Monday. All other intelligence agencies will be authorized to carry out intelligence gathering abroad, but not offensive operations.

Update: A piece in the Telegraph of July 30 (the first day when the NE grid was down) quotes a businessman saying it felt like a cyberattack:

There is no way India can become an economic world power with such outages that leave a third of the country paralysed” businessman Virender Kapoor said. Its almost as if somebody had launched a crippling cyber attack on its power grid, he declared.

Update: An article in Economic Times, (India) July 19, 2012, reported a warning by McAfee (a computer security firm) that electric grids are easy to attack and can have a major impact. So, two weeks before a historic power outage occurs, a mainstream outlet runs a warning about a massive outage occurring, helpfully spelling out the details and warning that air defense systems could also be at risk?

“If a rogue state, terrorist, or malcontent wanted to debilitate a major city or even an entire country, how could it make a widespread, immediate, and lasting impact? Quite simply, by striking at the facilities that produce and distribute the electrical power that everything else depends on!

“Anything from the lights and appliances in your home to heart monitors in hospitals to air defense systems-anything could be compromised by a single, targeted attack on the energy grid. Only today, the weapon of choice is not a rocket launcher, but rather, malicious software code-malware that is skillfully designed to destroy, disrupt, or take control of the complex systems on which the grid runs,” Tom Moore, vice president, Embedded Security at McAfee said.

What’s more, it is modernization that has made the cyberthreat worse. The old systems were not sufficiently interconnected to make them that vulnerable.  The new systems, the Smart Grids, like Smart phones, are actually far more vulnerable to attack because they contain programs and embedded information that trojans or viruses can attack. Often, when modernizing, security and encryption are after thoughts…or might be just too expensive to consider.

“Moving systems from a manual process to one that is internet connected gave energy grid operators real-time info and allowed administrators to telecommute and field workers to re-program systems from remote locations through their smartphones however this also opened all their systems to the outside world.”

From what I can tell, India is trying to upgrade to smart grids.

That could make the system even more vulnerable, although it might help the single biggest problem after the aging infrastructure – the theft of electricity.

Update: Here’s another clue, in Rothschild-owned Reuters:

Stretching from Assam, near China, to the Himalayas and the northwestern deserts of Rajasthan, the outage was the worst to hit India in more than a decade and embarrassed the government, which has failed to build up enough power capacity to meet soaring demand.

If you have been following the Rothschild media for any length of time, a piece like this immediately gives the  game away. Who  thinks about the embarrassment of a government when hundreds of millions of people in the tropics have to go without electricity?

Most normal people are stunned or saddened, because they’re thinking of the people.

If the government actually is behind the failure in some way, it’s not an embarrassment, it’s criminal. And if the government’s not, then it’s an attack of some kind, in which case, it’s either criminal or some kind of state or non-state terrorism.

But embarrassment is the kind of thing only someone conducting a psyops would impute.

Update: Another clue that there is something fishy going on is that this occurred during the monsoon

season, when the demand on electric power-grids is lower than at other times. Correction: I read now that the monsoon was weaker than usual so there was an increase in electric usage to draw on well water:

The problem has been made worse by a weak monsoon in agricultural states such as wheat-belt Punjab and Uttar Pradesh in the Ganges plain, which has a larger population than Brazil.

With less rain to irrigate crops, more farmers resort to electric pumps to draw water from wells.

Also highly relevant to the blackout is the controversy over nuclear energy. While some people want to supplement the overloaded electric grid (overloaded because of economic growth), with nuclear power, others are understandably concerned about the potential for accidents in such a highly populated region of the world. That has led to rioting and protests against nuclear plants, like the one in Kudankulam Tamil Nadu, where usage of electricity is particularly heavy. A collapse of the electricity grid is an excellent way to force the issue and also strike a major blow to the country.

Update: I found some confirmation for my suspicions in comments made by executives responding to the crisis:

The failure happened without warning just after 1 p.m., electric company officials said.
“We seem to have plunged into another power failure, and the reasons why are not at all clear,” said Gopal K. Saxena, the chief executive of BSES, an electric company that services South Delhi, in a telephone interview. It may take a long time to restore power to north India, he said, because the eastern grid has also failed, and alternate power sources in Bhutan and the Indian state of Sikkim flow into the east first.
About two hours after the grid failure, power ministry authorities said some alternate arrangements had been made. “We are taking hydro power from Bhakhra Nangal Dam,” in northern India, said Sushil Kumar Shinde, the power minister, in a televised interview.”

I also found a statement contradicting claims that the outage was caused by an overdraw from state governments::

“No official reason for the Monday’s failure has been given, although some local news reports pointed fingers at state governments which were overdrawing power.

That assessment is too simplistic, Mr. Saxena, of BSES, said. There are controls in place on India’s electricity grids that override an outsized power demand. “We have one of the most robust, smart grids operating” in the world, he said. It would “not be wise” to give an assessment of what happened at this time, he added.”

Update: (July 31, 4:19PM) A couple of Pakistani websites are claiming that this was a Pakistani-Chinese cyberattack and that the Indian media has been told not to report on it.

This sounds pretty flimsy to me.

Even under Emergency in Mrs. Gandhi’s time there was no way to keep the press quiet.  But I’ll be on the look out. The timing of this, following the mysterious rioting in the strategic NE, is suspicious.

Update  : I was finally able to get through to family members, who tell me that the power failure mostly affects the north.  So, again, there is some hype about the situation. I’ll be adding info as I find it.

Update

SF Gate:

The massive failure – a day after a similar, but smaller power failure – has raised serious concerns about India’s outdated infrastructure and the government’s inability to meet its huge appetite for energy as the country aspires to become a regional economic superpower.

LR: The elites have been demanding that the government make it easier to invest in India’s infrastructure (public utilities), which they claim hasn’t been opened up at the speed at which they want:

Rothschild-affiliated Lakshmi Mittal on April 30, 2012

“India still has a tremendous potential to grow, but the slow progress in the infrastructure sector was proving to be an impediment, said Lakshmi Mittal, chairman and CEO of steel giant ArcelorMittal. He was in Bhatinda, Punjab in India recently where his company has set up Hindustan Mittal Energy Ltd (HMEL), a joint venture between state-run Hindustan Petroleum and Mittal Energy.

“Indian condemning millions to stay poor, Lakshmi Narayan Mittal says,” PTI, Times of India, June 20, 2012.

PM Manmohan Singh has responded that some of the problems have arisen because of Eurozone problems (where India has loaned money toward the bailout of European bankers) and also because of vehement press criticism of crony-capitalism that has made government officials extremely wary of doing anything. “Bollygarchs At Bay,” Investor’s Fresh New, July 31, 2012.

“Many foreign businesses have fallen foul of India’s tricky regulatory system but analysts note that it is domestic companies in sectors dependent on regulation that seem to be struggling more than most. Those with weaker links to government, such as consumer goods or pharmaceuticals, are proving more resilient.

A stark example is provided by Ambit Capital, a Mumbai-based broker. Its “politically connected companies” index ranks 75 big Indian businesses with either “strong connectivity to the political establishment” or fortunes that rely on state licences. For most of the past five years, they outperformed the 500 leading shares on the Bombay Stock Exchange. The pattern flipped last year, a trend that seems to be growing.”

ORIGINAL POST:

This is being called the largest black-out ever, affecting over 600 million people. (Hype?)

Power Fails Again in India, Wall Street Journal:

(I will add links to support my argument when I have time, so bear with me….)

“A massive power failure hit India’s north, east and northeast regions Tuesday, forcing offices and factories to shift to emergency generators and raising more questions about the state of infrastructure in Asia’s third-largest economy.

A commuter walked past an information board at a

The blackout was even more wide-reaching and severe than the power failure that plunged several states in northern India into darkness Monday.

Some 20 of India’s 28 states were affected Tuesday, and as many as 600 million people – half of India’s population – reportedly impacted. Monday’s blackout, which was caused by a failure of the northern grid, affected eight states with a total population of around 370 million.

Tuesday’s power outage was caused by the failure of the power supply networks in the north, east and northeast regions at 0730 GMT, according to the National Load Dispatch Center, a unit of Power Grid Corpof India Ltd. It added that work is on to restore the grid.

A commuter walked past an information board at a train station in New Delhi, Monday.

Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde also said that efforts are being taken to resume supply as soon as possible, especially to essential services.

The electricity failure resulted in a widespread breakdown of transport and other services. A spokesman for the Northern Railways and Eastern Railways said about 200 trains were stopped in their tracks.

Metro rail services in New Delhi and its suburbs were halted as well, a spokesman for the Delhi Metro Rail Corp. said.

At Delhi’s international airport, diesel generators were switched on quickly to ensure services were not interrupted.

Arup Roy Choudhury, chairman of NTPC Ltd., India’s largest power generator by capacity, said the company’s coal-based power plants have stopped operating.

“We are expediting [the process of restarting the plants and will supply] first to the railways within the next one hour,” Mr. Choudhury said.

The government has already announced the appointment of a three-member panel to study the causes of Monday’s power failure. The committee will submit its report in 15 days’ time.

Comment:

There is a strong suspicion in my mind that this is sabotage at some level.

First.

I have been compiling growing evidence of  low-grade psychological warfare directed against India in the Western media: – The Time cover of Manmohan Singh as an underachiever, the barrage of misleading information about the Rajat Gupta trial, the publication of highly tendentious biographies of canonical Indian figures and Hindu leaders, accompanied by inflammatory and mendacious press articles, coupled with attacks in India by secular authorities (in bed with Western elites) against Hinduism and on Hindu temples, where vast amounts of gold still exist.

Second. In “Breaking India,” Rajiv Malhotra has described in detail how western-funded NGOs are encouraging secessionist activity.

The US state dept has made a U-turn and gone from condemning the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist movement to now supporting them as victims of Sri Lankan genocide.

(Bruce Fein’s career shows this about turn). Western elites are behind the foundation-funded Afro-Dalit movement, which aims to control the south of India, by westernizing it and breaking it off from the north.

The south includes the highly industrialized Tamil Nadu state, Andhra, the relatively wealthy Kerala region, as well as the Poona-Mumbai region, and it has not been affected.

The majority of Western corporations are located here.

Third.

Earlier this year, there were reports that a part of RAW (Indian intel) had fallen out with the Mossad. This followed on the Indian government’s commencement of barter and non-dollar trade with Iran, a move sure to discomfit the US government.

According to reporter Wayne Madsen, Indian intelligence has been cracking down on Mossad. (There is a division in RAW between those who want to stand firm against the globalist cabal, and those who want to be on the winning team).

Fourth.

There was a recent attack on an Indian fishing boat by a US naval vessel, leading to fatalities; in early July this year, there was a cyberattack on India’s naval HQ in Vizag, from which sensitive information was stolen apparently by hackers with Chinese IP addresses.

In the last few days before the outages, there were accounts of serious rioting/attacks against Muslims by Christian and Hindu tribes in the NE (near China and Burma).  Around a hundred were killed and thousands were displaced.

Fifth.

There is extensive Mossad/CIA activity in the NE area (near Burma) and in India as a whole, relating to the drug-trade that is now finding an HQ in Kochi in Kerala (where there is an ancient Jewish community, supposedly dating to the time of King Solomon) and in Mumbai, where there are numbers of Chabad houses through which the drug-money is laundered and where spies and saboteurs find refuge.

Sixth

Mossad and CIA have admitted being behind the creation of the Stuxnet virus and were behind David Headley, the alleged mastermind of the Mumbai bombing. Some allege that parts of Indian intelligence colluded with CIA and Mossad.

India was a minor victim of that virus when it first raised its head a couple of years ago.

[Check out my blog posts on Stuxnet.  I was one of the earliest bloggers to even follow the story and to allege it was an Israeli operation, not due to any so-called anti-Semitism on my part, but because I am aware that Israel leads the world in this area of technology.

Ditto with the Headley story, which was blogged here as well. ]

Seventh

The NE region is the area in which the electricity grid collapse began. Burma has recently been opened up and there has been some talk about Jewish republics being created there.

One such group is the Bnai Menashe in the NE part of India:

“Hillel Halkin, a well-known writer and translator who has lived in Israel for three decades, has written a fascinating new book out about his growing interest and belief in the Bnai Menashe, a group of some 5,000 people in a remote corner of northeastern India who live as observant Jews, claiming a link to the biblical tribe of Menashe. The book, Across The Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel, describes how Halkin’s skepticism was reversed after visiting the community, which began in the 1970s and has been guided for the last two decades by Eliahu Avichail, an Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem. Over the years he has helped some 600 of the Bnai Menashe settle in Israel, where they underwent formal conversion. Another 100 arrived last month and more of their brethren would like to join them.

Michael Freund is a former New Yorker living in Jerusalem who has come to espouse the cause of the Bnai Menashe. A Modern Orthodox Jew who served as deputy director of communications and policy planning in the Prime Minister’s office under Benjamin Netanyahu, Freund, after visiting the community, has agreed to succeed Rabbi Avichail as head of Amishav, the organization championing the Bnai Menashe.

He believes that groups like the Bnai Menashe and the descendants of the Marranos “constitute a large, untapped demographic and spiritual reservoir for Israel and the Jewish people.” And while Freund opposes outright proselytization, citing traditional Judaism’s hesitancy about such an approach, he says that since groups like the Bnai Menashe have taken “the first step in our direction, it is time that we reach out and help them as they undergo the process of returning to the Jewish people.

The NE area is strategically-positioned between China and India, and has been the site of considerable secessionist activity over the last decade.

In 2009, two researchers claimed that a second Israeli state was emerging in India: “Second Israeli state emerging in India: “New Jersualem” movement eyes take over of three eastern states, near center of opium production,” John Kaminski and Arun Shrivastava, August 19, 2009

:A second “nation” of Israel today is nearing completion smack dab in the middle of the world’s premier drug producing region, the Golden Triangle of Burma — located right on the border between India and the military dictatorship now known as Myanmar, which is the real model of the human future.

Activities presaging the creation of a second Israeli state are well-known in India, but not elsewhere. Most everyone remembers how the first Israel popped onto the world scene in 1948 and has continued mass murdering its neighbors and hapless nations that fall under its sway ever since.

Precisely, political stealth moves over the last three decades and an aggressive outreach effort by “rabbis from Israel” to convert inhabitants of the three easternmost provinces of India to Judaism have been reported for years by Indian patriots in the Himalayan foothills who seek to return their country to its much longed for pre-British liberty.

The Deccan Chronicle, a newspaper in Hyderabad, reported that by means of “a ritual bath,” rabbis promise penniless Christian, Muslim and pagan converts a trip to Israel and preferred employment status, then buy votes of peasants, take over local boards and pass laws to legalize their manipulations, the same way they do everywhere else.

While the core issue in this geopolitical expansion of Rothschild-Rockefeller money empire that controls the world is proximity to the centuries old center of opium production run by the generals in Myanmar, the creation of a new Israeli state in the exact center of China, India and Southeast Asia augurs badly for the peoples of the region, as the current level of destabilization among Israel’s neighbors in the Middle East clearly illustrates.

And not to be forgotten is that the world’s oldest still functioning oil field is located in this area and Tripura state is reported to be floating on a sea of natural gas.”

The left and many non-governmental human rights group claim that the trouble in the NE is simply indigenous rebellion against multinational land-grabbing and government abuse of those who protest .

(The area is rich in minerals).

The right and the government claim that this is Naxalite-Maoist provocation, using the cover of trade-unions.

“There is enough documented information which reveals that trade unions are the new hunting grounds of Maoists. If we get good evidence that there was indeed a Maoist link to the Maruti violence, then we would invoke the anti-terror law,” a senior IB official told ET on condition of anonymity. The official says intelligence agencies suspect the attack on the Maruti plant was “premeditated” and believe that the union leaders could have links to top Maoist leaders. He cautioned it was early to reach any conclusion.

Former home secretary GK Pillai told ET: “The government has had information that Naxals have been trying to infiltrate labour organisations in urban areas for a while now. That information was passed on to states, and in some places action was taken.”

In recent days, there have been reports of violent rioting in the NE and the displacement of thousands of people.

Here is a report from France24

“”This time, it seems the violence was set off after a Muslim youth group in the district of Kokrajhar called for a strike to protest the removal of a signboard at a local mosque. This was followed by a series of drive-by killings, before large-scale rioting broke out on July 19. Roving bands of armed men – reportedly from both sides of the conflict – torched hundreds of houses, leaving both Bodos and Muslims homeless.

The indigenous Bodos represent just 10 percent of the population of Assam state. Since the early 1970s, the state has seen a steady influx of immigrants from Bangladesh. The rising number of Muslim immigrants has been cause for worry among Bodos, who are afraid that this could thwart their hopes of establishing an independent state.
[Hindu nationalists see this immigration as a kind of infiltration and subversion of the country.]
India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who visited both a Bodo and a Muslim refugee camp in Assam state on Saturday, promised “a proper inquiry into the tragic incidents”, as well as a three billion rupee (44 million euro) relief package for the region.”
And most significantly, no one seems to be able to say what set off the rioting.
“No one can explain how the violence started. They tell me they usually have good relations with the Bodo people. Muslims have lived in Bodo areas for a very long time – some even speak Bodo. Though this is not the first time Muslims and Bodos have clashed, the violence still seems to have taken them by surprise.”

Now comes the report of the grid being hit in the north (Monday) and spreading to most of the rest of the country (Tuesday)

There is not doubt in my mind that this is sabotage.

Eighth

Naturally, the Trojan horse Anna Hazare group (blessed by Wikileaks and heavily supported by Western NGOs of the “color revolution” variety) claims that the outage is an Indian government conspiracy.

That conspiracy theory covers the first few pages of Google already, very conveniently.

Just now, I noticed several sites referring to “Bhagat Singh” and praising revolution in India.  Here is one identifying itself as Naxalite and asking Indians to join the revolution. It looks like some kind of intelligence-created OPTOR! style site to me.

If the grid got hit only yesterday, how is it that Anna Hazare has so quickly come up with this theory and Google has already taken it up so fast? This means that any other interpretation of events  – for eg. that it is  likely orchestrated by the Western elites – is unable to get a hearing.

I know that when I posted my Goldman articles on LRC in 2008, they were rarely linked or passed around. A couple of them in fact landed up on sites like “Assassinated Press.” But any rumor passed on by NGO-backed journalists gets read over international radio, passed around in a flash, and rises to the top of Google searches. [As soon as I said this, of course, this post rises in Google!]

In fact, whenever I post a controversial piece like this one, I notice my home page on Google searches doesn’t change. I also notice an increase in spam and evidence of browser hijacking.

This is a pattern I’ve seen over and over.

I think there is a fair possibility that some parts of the Indian government (those colluding with outside interests, whether left-communist or right-corporatist) might be involved in the sabotage, but there is no doubt in my mind that the puppet-masters are Western elites.

The attack might be part of the show of strength necessary to collapse the government or force its hand.

[Added: I also wonder if it could be a kind of “war-gaming” by parts of the government for its own ends? ]

Anna Hazare’s grandstanding over the grid failure is also getting the headlines. This is the same way in which the Anna  movement got off the ground in the first place, at lightning speed, overtaking the indigenous resistance movement. Anna Hazare, like OccupyWallStreet, has the blessings of the western elites.

The elites need to break up India so as to have its constituent parts under control.

The idea is to stir up the Indian masses and to show the Indian government that it is the elites who are really in charge. Thus, Lakshmi Mittal (who is hand-in-glove with the Rothschilds) delivered an ultimatum to the Indian government recently, to “grow” or else.

Ninth (and the most controversial and speculative).

There were two massive earthquakes in Indonesia earlier this year (once was 8.9), of a magnitude that should have set off tsunamis that would have been in the direction of India.

In fact, there were tsunami warnings, but nothing came of it. The earthquakes took place off the Aceh province, which is just where the 2004 Asian tsunami had its origin. Had there been a similar tsunami from the earthquakes this year, it would have hit the Kudankulam nuclear plant which is at the tip of the peninsula, right on the Indian ocean. It would have been Fukushiima all over.

“More than 1 million people live within the 30 km radius of the KKNPP which far exceeds the AERB (Atomic Energy Regulatory Board) stipulations. It is quite impossible to evacuate this many people quickly and efficiently in case of a nuclear disaster at Koodankulam.”

The 2004 tsunami, which killed over 250,000 people hit, India and Sri Lanka.  I speculated then that it might have been caused by underwater nuclear testing in the Indian ocean.  Coincidentally,  the southern half of Iran has been struck by a massive drought (as have the grain-belt (heartland region) of the US and three quarters of Mexico) this past year.

Note:

I was unable to get through on the phone to India when I tried.

Notes:

“”Wikileaks takes credit for Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption campaign,”  MSN, April 20, 2011

http://news.in.msn.com/national/article.aspx?cp-documentid=5111803

The End Of Chinese Manufacturing?

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Vivek Wadhwa at Forbes:

The End of Chinese manufacturing?

“There is great concern about China’s real-estate and infrastructure bubbles.  But these are just short-term challenges that China may be able to spend its way out of. The real threat to China’s economy is bigger and longer term: its manufacturing bubble.

By offering subsidies, cheap labor, and lax regulations and rigging its currency, China was able to seduce American companies to relocate their manufacturing operations there. Millions of American jobs moved to China, and manufacturing became the underpinning of China’s growth and prosperity. But rising labor costs, concerns over government-sponsored I.P. theft, and production time lags are already causing companies such as Dow Chemicals, Caterpillar, GE, and Ford to start moving some manufacturing back to the U.S. from China. Google recently announced that its Nexus Q streaming media player would be made in the U.S., and this put pressure on Apple to start following suit.

But rising costs and political pressure aren’t what’s going to rapidly change the equation. The disruption will come from a set of technologies that are advancing at exponential rates and converging.

These technologies include robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), 3D printing, and nanotechnology. These have been moving slowly so far, but are now beginning to advance exponentially just as computing does.  Witness how computing has advanced to the point at which the smart phones we carry in our pockets have more processing power than the super computers of the ’60s—and how the Internet, which also has its origins in the ’60s, went on an exponential growth path about 15 years ago and rapidly changed the way we work, shop, and communicate.  That’s what lies ahead for these new technologies.

The robots of today aren’t the Androids or Cylons that we used to see in science-fiction movies, but specialized electro-mechanical devices that are controlled by software and remote controls. As computers become more powerful, so do the abilities of these devices. Robots are now capable of performing surgery, milking cows, doing military reconnaissance and combat, and flying fighter jets. And DIY’ers are lending a helping hand. There are dozens of startups, such as Willow Garage, iRobot, and 9th Sense, selling robot-development kits for university students and open-source communities. They are creating ever more-sophisticated robots and new applications for these. Watch this video of the autonomous flying robots that University of Pennsylvania professor Vijay Kumar created with his students, for example.

The factory assembly that the Chinese are performing is child’s play for the next generation of robots—which will soon become cheaper than human labor. Indeed, one of China’s largest manufacturers, Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group, announced last August that it plans to install one million robots within three years to do the work that its workers in China presently do. It found Chinese labor to be too expensive and demanding. The world’s most advanced car, the Tesla Model S, is also being manufactured in Silicon Valley, which is one of the most expensive places in the country. Tesla can afford this because it is using robots to do the assembly.

Then there is artificial intelligence (AI)—software that makes computers do things that, if humans did them, we would call intelligent. We left AI for dead after the hype it created in the ‘80s, but it is alive and kicking—and advancing rapidly. It is powering all sorts of technologies. This is the technology that IBM’s Deep Blue computer used in beating chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997and that enabled IBM’s Watson to beat TV-show Jeopardy champions in 2011. AI is making it possible to develop self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems such as Apple’s Siri, and the face-recognition software Facebook recently acquired. AI technologies are also finding their way into manufacturing and will allow us to design our own products at home with the aid of AI-powered design assistants.

How will we turn these designs into products? By “printing” them at home or at modern-day Kinko’s: shared public manufacturing facilities such as TechShop, a membership-based manufacturing workshop, using new manufacturing technologies that are now on the horizon.

A type of manufacturing called “additive manufacturing” is making it possible to cost-effectively “print” products.  In conventional manufacturing, parts are produced by humans using power-driven machine tools, such as saws, lathes, milling machines, and drill presses, to physically remove material to obtain the shape desired. This is a cumbersome process that becomes more difficult and time-consuming with increasing complexity. In other words, the more complex the product you want to create, the more labor is required and the greater the effort.

In additive manufacturing, parts are produced by melting successive layers of materials based on 3D models—adding materials rather than subtracting them. The “3D printers” that produce these use powered metal, droplets of plastic, and other materials—much like the toner cartridges that go into laser printers.  This allows the creation of objects without any sort of tools or fixtures. The process doesn’t produce any waste material, and there is no additional cost for complexity. Just as, in using laser printers, a page filled with graphics doesn’t cost much more than one with text, in using a 3D printer, we can print sophisticated 3D structures for about the cost of a brick.

3D printers can already create physical mechanical devices, medical implants, jewelry, and even clothing. The cheapest 3D printers, which print rudimentary objects, currently sell for between $500 and $1000. Soon, we will have printers for this price that can print toys and household goods. By the end of this decade, we will see 3D printers doing the small-scale production of previously labor-intensive crafts and goods. It is entirely conceivable that in the next decade we start 3D-printing buildings and electronics.”

Vox Day: Free Trade Violates The Property Rights Of The Nation

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Christian libertarian Vox Day turns propertarian arguments against free-traders:

“In the comments, PG constructed an interesting and effective logical argument against free trade, which I have organized thusly:

1. Free traders insist upon the existence of property rights and the sovereign exercise of those rights as axiomatic. From this foundation, they argue that all actions concerning with whom one will trade, regardless of their location or nation, are protected by those property rights and cannot be morally infringed.

2. If a group of people happen to share the rights to a property in an ownership group, they must decide together on how those rights are exercised. No single individual can sell the property or permit its use by others without the agreement of the other rights holders. The ownership group collectively has the right to decide who and what are permitted to enter their property. It is not an infringement of any one owner’s property right if the greater part of the ownership group does not wish to sell the property or to permit entry to certain parties or items.

[Lila: Libertarians and classical liberals would argue that property rights cannot be exercised by an abstract collective entity like “the nation” and can only be exercised unjustly by any government that claims to represent the nation.]

3. A nation is a group of people who share a common property that is delineated by the national borders. This group of people must therefore decide in some consensus manner how the rights to that property are exercised. They can therefore decide who and what are permitted to enter the national property in precisely the same manner that a house-owning group decide who and what are permitted to enter their house. It is not an infringement of any one individual’s property right if the greater part of the nation does not wish to sell the land possessed by the nation or permit entry to certain parties or items.

4. To deny a nation the property right to enact tariffs or refuse permission for goods, capital, or labor to cross its borders, is tantamount to either denying a) property rights or b) the nation’s existence.

[Lila: Rather than enact laws against the property rights of companies wanting to trade under the present “managed trade” regime, it might be more conducive to freedom to undo the subsidies that currently exist, whether in the form of fixed prices, welfare, preferential tax treatment,  or any other grant by the government.  Doing so, would probably make it far less beneficial for some companies to trade, discourage some movements of labor, and generally have the same effect as a sanction or tariff, without needing to invoke group property rights.]

5. However, denying the existence of nations is not only empirically false, it creates a logical contradiction for the free trader because it requires denying the individual property-owner the right to form collective property-ownership groups from which nations are made. The free trade position depends upon the idea that individuals possess property rights, but groups of more than one individual cannot.

6. Therefore, free trade doctrine requires the denial of the very property rights upon which it is founded. As PG correctly concludes, “their whole argument is an outright logical contradiction”.

As evidence in support of PG’s logical construction, I offer the following statements concerning the existence of nations from two champions of the dogma, Mr. Gary North and our own Unger.

North: “Defenders of tariffs present themselves as defenders of the nation, when in fact the nation, from the point of view of economics, is not a collective entity. The nation, from an economic standpoint, is simply a convenient name that we give to people inside invisible judicial lines known as national borders.”

Unger: “I do not consider myself an ‘American’, except as a verbal convenience, or have any care at all for ‘America’.”

Now, it can certainly be pointed out that the mere existence of a nation does not mean that all of its members are voluntary members of it and it cannot be denied that the legitimate property rights of the nation can be abused or ignored just as they are in the case of individual property rights. But PG’s logic suffices to demonstrate that the property rights argument upon which many free traders heavily rely is far from the conclusive one that they believe it to be.”

[Lila: A version of this argument was made by David Boaz in reviewing the movie, Avatar]

Edward Feser On The Weakness of Rothbard’s Philosophy

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[Added, July 4:  In response to a video of Rand on the Middle East, posted at Lew Rockwell.

Yes, Rand was wrong about that.

But that does not diminish the validity of her thinking in other areas, any more than Rothbard’s rightness on foreign policy validates everything else he wrote. Nor is the Middle East the reason the left hates Rand.  It detests her because her appeal to individualism and achievement is perennially powerful and popular.

And it also detests her because she dissected at least a part of the motivation behind much charity/altruism, to which the left insistently appeals.

Now, Rand owes her thought on that subject and other things  to Nietzsche, whom she adapted very originally and powerfully. In turn, Nietzsche, also an original and creative mind, owed his thinking to his studies of Eastern religion, especially Buddhism and Hinduism.

As is the case with Heidegger, Nietzsche, as far as I know, did not properly credit that influence.

(On the other hand, Yeats, also massively influenced by Nietzsche, did….]

In this way, intellectual chicanery/cultural fraud is at the heart of the modernist project.

Imagine if I were to study Christianity surreptitiously, and then go to some state in India where the villagers knew nothing about it and preach about such things as the resurrection of the body, judgement day, the fall, and original sin, passing off these notions as my own original thought, while denigrating the culture from which I took those ideas?

What kind of a fraud would that be?

What kind of damage would that do to the villagers’ understanding of the world at large, and to my own ability to reach valid conclusions about that world?]

Edward Feser on Murray Rothbard as a philosopher:

“I should also make it clear that my low opinion of Rothbard’s philosophical abilities has nothing to do with the particular conclusions he wants to defend. I certainly share his hostility to slavery, socialism, communism, and egalitarian liberalism. I also agree that much of what modern governments do is morally indefensible and that many of the taxes levied by modern governments (maybe even most of them) are unjust. And while I strongly disagree with his claims that government per se is evil and that all taxation is unjust, these are at least philosophically interesting claims. The problem is just that Rothbard seems incapable of giving a philosophically interesting argument for his claims. (Moreover, the claims in question were borrowed by Rothbard from 19th century anarchists like Lysander Spooner, so even where Rothbard is philosophically interesting he isn’t original.)”

Lila: He also borrowed from Rand, indeed, plagiarized her theory of volition, it is said, as well as a dissertation by a student, Barbara Branden. Which might explain why some Rothbardians feel the need to attack Ayn Rand all the time, usually without seeming to have read her very well. It is another way the modern libertarian movement panders to the left – by adopting its superficial reading of Rand, who, while flawed, is a giant next to most of her critics.

Feser goes on to deconstruct Rothbard’s arguments about self-ownership:
“Here, then, is the example. It is Rothbard’s main argument for the thesis of self-ownership, which is, as I have indicated, the very foundation of his moral and political philosophy, without which his moral case against taxation and government totally collapses.
I know of at least three places where he presents it (there may be others): in his book For a New Liberty (first published 1973, revised 1978); in his essay “Justice and Property Rights” (first published 1974, reprinted in his anthology Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, 2nd edition); and in his main work on moral and political philosophy, The Ethics of Liberty (1982, revised edition published in 1998). In the revised edition of For a New Liberty, the argument begins as follows:
“Since each individual must think, learn, value, and choose his or her ends and means in order to survive and flourish, the right to self-ownership gives man the right to perform these vital activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation. Consider, too, the consequences of denying each man the right to own his own person. There are then only two alternatives: either (1) a certain class of people, A, have the right to own another class, B; or (2) everyone has the right to own his own equal quotal share of everyone else. The first alternative implies that while Class A deserves the rights of being human, Class B is in reality subhuman and therefore deserves no such rights. But since they are indeed human beings, the first alternative contradicts itself in denying natural human rights to one set of humans. Moreover, as we shall see, allowing Class A to own Class B means that the former is allowed to exploit, and therefore to live parasitically, at the expense of the latter. But this parasitism itself violates the basic economic requirement for life: production and exchange.” (pp. 28-29)
The rest of the argument attempts to rule out alternative (2) and has its own problems, but I won’t bother with it because the passage quoted is enough for my purposes.
I think this argument is a very bad one; indeed, I think that to anyone with any philosophical training it will be quite obvious that it is bad. And not only is it bad, but given that Rothbard says nothing more in defense of the claims made in this passage (apart from trying to rule out alternative (2)), I think it is clear that the argument fails to be even minimally respectable in the sense described above. I suspect that most readers can immediately see at least some of the problems with it. Here are the ones that occur to me:
1. Even if it were true that “each individual must think, learn, value, and choose his or her ends and means in order to survive and flourish” and that “the right to self-ownership gives man the right to perform these vital activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation,” it just doesn’t follow that anyone has a right to self-ownership. For all Rothbard has shown, we might also be able to think, learn, value, etc. even if we didn’t have any rights at all. (That X could get us Z doesn’t show that Y wouldn’t get it for us too.) Or we might need some rights in order to do these things, but not all the rights entailed by the principle of self-ownership. Or we might really need all the rights entailed by self-ownership, but nevertheless just not have them. After all, the fact that you need something doesn’t entail that you have it, and (as libertarians themselves never tire of pointing out), it certainly doesn’t entail that you have a right to it. For example, wild animals need food to survive, but it doesn’t follow that they have a right to it (indeed, Rothbard himself explicitly denies that animals can have any rights).
Furthermore, why should we grant in the first place that “each individual must think, learn, value, and choose his or her ends and means in order to survive and flourish”? Children survive and flourish very well without choosing most of their means and ends. Some adults are quite happy to let others (parents, a spouse, government officials) choose at least some of their means and ends for them. Many physically or mentally ill people couldn’t possibly survive or flourish unless others chose their means and ends for them. Even a slave or serf could obviously survive and even flourish if his master or lord was of the less brutal sort. And so forth. And if surviving and flourishing are what ground our rights, how could we have a right to suicide or to do anything contrary to our flourishing, as libertarian defenders of the thesis of self-ownership say we do?
Also, why should we grant that respect for each individual’s self-ownership really would ensure every individual’s ability to choose his means and ends, etc.? A leftist might argue that respect for self-ownership would benefit some but leave a great many others destitute and bereft of any interesting range of means or ends to choose from.
Of course, there might be some way a Rothbardian could reply to these objections; I certainly don’t find all of them compelling. But the point is that they are obvious objections to make, and yet Rothbard doesn’t even consider them, much less answer them. Even a brief acknowledgement of some of these objections and a gesture in the direction of a possible reply might have been enough to make the argument minimally respectable, but Rothbard fails to provide even this.
2. The claim that there are “only two alternatives” to denying the thesis of self-ownership is just obviously false. Here are some further alternatives that Rothbard fails to consider:
(a) no one owns anyone, including himself
(b) God owns all of us
(c) one class of people has a right to only partial ownership of another class (e.g. the former class has a right to the labor of the latter class, but may not kill members of the latter class, or refuse to provide for their sustenance, or forbid them from marrying, etc.)
(d) everyone has partial and/or unequal ownership of everyone else (e.g. everyone has an absolute right to bodily integrity, but not to the fruits of his labor, which are commonly owned; or everyone has an absolute right to bodily integrity, and an absolute right only to some percentage of the fruits of his labor, with the rest being commonly owned; or everyone has a presumptive right to bodily integrity, which might be overridden in extreme cases, with a right to a percentage of the fruits of his labor; or the weak and untalented have an absolute right to bodily integrity and to a large percentage of, though not all of, the fruits of their labor while the strong and talented have an absolute right to bodily integrity and to a much smaller percentage of the fruits of their labor; or the strong and talented, unlike the weak and untalented, have only a presumptive right to bodily integrity, which might be overridden if someone desperately needs an organ transplant; and so on and so forth).
Alternative (b) was defended by Locke (for whom talk of self-ownership was really just a kind of shorthand for our stewardship of ourselves before God) and it would also have been endorsed by natural law theorists in the Thomistic tradition. Rothbard explicitly cites both Locke on self-ownership and the Thomistic natural law tradition, so this alternative should have been obvious to him, and yet he fails even to consider it.
Lila: Chesterton has an excellent essay about the uses of the word “own,” but I think anyone with common sense can understand that the meaning of ownership itself varies with the context.
That Rothbard is not reflective about language – a lack of reflection pervasive among certain kinds of libertarians –  is immediately apparent to any reader with the slightest acquaintance with modern literature, let alone semiotics or philosophy.
“Alternative (c) was the standard view taken by defenders of slavery, most of whom would not have endorsed the unqualified ownership of other people implied by Rothbard’s alternative (1). One would think that Rothbard, who fancied himself a historian of ideas, would be aware of this, and yet here again he simply ignores what should have been another obvious possible alternative.
Some version or other of alternative (d) is arguably implicit in the views of many leftists, very few of whom (if any) would really claim that all of us have equal quotal ownership of each other. At the very least, a minimally charitable reading of left-wing arguments about taxation and redistribution would acknowledge that this, rather than Rothbard’s alternative (2), might be what egalitarian leftists are committed to. But Rothbard fails even to consider the possibility. He suggests (later on in the argument, after the passage quoted above) that “communist” ownership by everyone of everyone would entail that no one could take any action whatsoever without the permission of everyone else, but while this might be true under option (2), it would not be true under the less extreme egalitarian possibilities enshrined in (d).
Alternative (a) is one that Rothbard finally did consider – almost a decade after first giving the argument and after once again ignoring this alternative when repeating the argument in “Justice and Property Rights” – in a brief footnote in The Ethics of Liberty. (He attributes it to George Mavrodes, apart from whom, apparently, Rothbard might never have seen the obvious.) Rothbard’s reply to it is to say that “since ownership signifies range of control, this [i.e. no one’s owning anyone, including himself] would mean that no one would be able to do anything, and the human race would quickly vanish.”
But the badness of this argument should also be obvious. While having ownership of something does imply having a range of control over it, having a range of control over it doesn’t imply ownership. I have a certain “range of control” over my neighbor’s flower bed – he couldn’t stop me if I walked over right now and pulled some flowers out of it – but it doesn’t follow that I own it. Animals have a range of control over their environment, but since ownership is a moral category implying the having of certain rights, and animals (by Rothbard’s own admission) have no rights, it follows that they have no ownership of anything. And of course, their lack of ownership of anything hasn’t caused animals as a whole to “vanish,” “quickly” or otherwise, which makes evident the absurdity of Rothbard’s claim that alternative (a) would entail the extinction of the human race.
3. Alternative (1) just obviously doesn’t imply that the members of class B are “subhuman.” Not all defenders of slavery have denied that slaves are fully human; their view is just that some human beings can justly be owned by other ones. Rothbard’s assertion that this “contradicts itself in denying natural human rights to one set of humans” is just blatantly question-begging, since what is at issue is precisely whether there are any natural human rights that might rule out slavery.
4. Rothbard’s claim that the “parasitism” entailed by alternative (1) “violates the basic economic requirement for life: production and exchange” is also just obviously false. Animals do not engage in “production and exchange,” certainly not in the laissez-faire economics sense intended by Rothbard, but they are obviously alive.

In this one brief passage, then, Rothbard commits a host of fallacies and fails even to acknowledge, much less answer, a number of obvious objections that might be raised against his argument. Nor is this some peripheral argument, which might be written off as an uncharacteristic lapse. It served as the foundation of his entire moral and political theory, and was repeated several ti”mes over the course of a decade virtually unaltered. And if things are this bad in the very foundations of his moral and political theory, you can imagine how bad the rest of his philosophical arguments are.”

Comment:

I would also add that  Rothbard’s weaknesses as a thinker are replicated in some of his most fervent acolytes, who substitute sound and fury for depth of reasoning and seem to think incorrect thinking becomes better the more violently it is articulated.

This is not a criticism of  libertarianism as such. A term broad enough to embrace everyone from Tolstoy to Milton Friedman can hardly be criticized as one.  “Libertarianism” cannot be considered a singular movement, however much, for political or marketing reasons, some anarcho-capitalists might try to drag someone like Tolstoy into their fold.

Tolstoy was a libertarian in the way Gandhi was. Profoundly anti-capitalistic. They both believed in voluntary poverty and simplicity and abhorred the complexity of modern life. I doubt either would relish becoming the mascot of the Mises or Bastiat Institutes. To try to ride their reputations for the sake of broadening one’s appeal is intellectually disingenuous.

So I have profound differences with  American-style libertarianism (of the LRC type or of the Reason Magazine type), while supporting LRC’s antiwar and anti-police state positions.

Another point. In things of which  I know something, I can clearly spot the flaws and limitations of Rothbard’s arguments, which makes me think that in areas in which I am uncertain, he must be flawed too.

Anyway, Feser’s points don’t need any great acquaintance with Rothbard’s economic reasoning to follow. They are points that have occurred to me on and off, as I’ve read the great (?) man.

But frankly, my increasing disinterest in Rothbard has grown from more intuitive roots.

First, there is something cocky, smug, and shallow in the writing itself….despite its superficial good humor and sense.

Then, there are the stories of plagiarism – something which intensely prejudices me against a writer. And there are his attacks on writers many would consider his superior, like Ayn Rand and Adam Smith.  I wonder how much of envy lay behind all that.

On the many people whom he knew and taught, he seems to have had a profound influence, which speaks well of him. But I haven’t had the pleasure of knowing him personally, so my judgement must be from what I read of him.

And from reading him, and reading of him,  I get the picture of a shallow, bright, abrasive man, who thought very highly of himself, yet plagiarized often, and covered up the lack of originality by attacking others, attacks that his followers continue, see here,

as well as here.

[Rand was the most famous instance of Rothbard’s plagiarism. But he also borrowed from Spooner, as Feser points out. And a commenter at this blog adds this:

“The first part of his book on the history of American banking drew on a report about the “Suffolk System” published by that bank, but since buried in the archives. After finding a bad microfilm copy at my university library, I paid the Adam Smith Institute to send me a good one. (I also bought one of their neckties.) Rothbard plagiarized heavily from the original Suffolk Banking System and, worse, projected his own anarchist opinions on the facts of history. As a criminologist, I am fully sympathetic to a free market in protection and adjudication, but the fact is that the Suffolk System was not destroyed by the evil machinations of Salmon P. Chase’s Treasury Department.”

So, if Rand has her flaws (and she does), Rothbard has his, analyzed at length in this piece by G. Stolyarov.

Meanwhile, in general power of reasoning, insight into the psychology of the modern mind, and overall influence, frankly, Rothbard cannot hold a candle to Rand, whatever powers he might have as a historian or economist.

There is a reason that the left attacks her, not him.

The Problem With The Rajat Gupta Insider Trading Case

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Update:

New charges have been added to the indictment, including alleged tips on March 12, 2007 (Goldman Sachs) and Jan 29 (Proctor & Gamble) that led to Galleon trading.

ORIGINAL POST:

You gotta hand it to the government. They know how to do theater.  Except it’s theater of the absurd.

While mafia outfits with…er…skeletons in their closet sail on unscathed; managers – especially brown ones –  who might have talked out of turn are facing the firing squad.

Walter Pavlo in Forbes:

“The government does have a case, but what they do not have is Gupta on tape, or anyone naming Gupta on tape, as being a source of insider information.  The way to sway a jury, beyond the evidence, is to portray the person sitting on trial as either a devil or saint; a devil guilty, a saint innocent.  According the NY Times, during one discussion outside of the presence of the jury on the first day of trial, Naftalis was warned by Judge Jed Rakoff to not get into too much detail about Gupta’s record of philanthropy (saint).  This, Naftalis argued, would go to discredit “greed” as being a factor in the alleged crime. I think it is a fair point.

Rajat Gupta is a good person who came from humble beginnings and rose to be someone who was well respected in the business community.  He should get a fair trial and I believe that will happen. However, the government’s mosaic of Gupta as a source of inside information is countered by a defense of a man of intelligence, character, and integrity. Those fine characteristics of a person should not go away with an indictment alone, they must be tried in court.  I think Gupta has a good chance, but if Raj shows up, all bets are off.”

I started out being unsympathetic to Rajat Gupta, when the government first brought charges against him last year. At the time, I thought he would be one of many top business leaders who would be charged, and that Lloyd Blankfein, Geithner, and others higher up the food chain and more culpable for the financial crisis, would follow.  Now that I’ve seen that Gupta is going to be served up as the main course for the public to devour, I’ve become a bit suspicious of the bona fides of the prosecution.

Insider-trading, whatever you think of it, is a very tangential part of the financial crisis, except in so far as it was partly the means by which some of the major firms were naked-shorted.

Goldman Sachs, as we’ve seen, is central to that story.

But the Gupta trial casts Goldman as a victim and GS chief Lloyd Blankfein is actually testifying against him. That’s the man whose confab with Timothy Geithner, NY Fed Reserve chairman, in the same month that Gupta is supposed to have tipped of Galleon’s Raj Rajaratnam (September 2008), constituted a scandal several orders of magnitude greater than the alleged shenanigans of Gupta.

Blankfein, surely more culpable, than Gupta or Rajaratnam, is getting good PR, from this trial, as he did from the Rajaratnam trial last year.

So what’s really going on here?

I don’t want to get into the larger picture in this post, except to say it’s all part of a strategy of rescuing Goldman from any serious damage and of redirecting energy away from the most dominant members of the financial world to the relatively new upstarts – the Indians.

In “Breaking India,” Rajiv Malhotra, a former tech entrepreneur turned author, has written eloquently about the dual strategy pursued by the US government in building up India (through the business schools and management networks), while simultaneously breaking it down (India-bashing from leftist journalists, activists, and academics, including the incitement of Dalit activism against India itself as a symbol of Brahmin supremacism).

In a sense, the dual strategy has ended with the Gupta trial and now the object seems to be solely to break the country. The media portrays it with increasing negativity, directing popular anger toward South Asian financial networks, to the exclusion of others,  and, specifically, away from the Anglo-Jewish elites who actually caused the financial crisis.

The new comers might have profited from it illicitly but in no way were they the prime movers of the global heist.

With that quick sketch of the general context, here are the particulars that I find striking for a criminal case pursued with so much fanfare and media attention:

1. There is no “smoking-gun,” whatsoever. That’s right. Zip. Nada. There is not one tape in the over 2000 (TWO THOUSAND) tapes held by the prosecution that either shows Gupta passing on a  tip to Rajaratnam or names Gupta as someone who tipped off RR.

Think about it. It’s pretty incredible. The government was secretly investigating Rajaratnam’s network as far back as 2007, with FBI wire taps over a period of at least 11 months between March and December 2008.

And not one of those conversations, intimate, unsuspecting conversations, actually contains a concrete tip or refers to Gupta as a tipster. There is actually only one Gupta conversation with Rajaratnam in the whole file – on July 29, 2008.

It’s based on this and other circumstantial evidence that the government rests its case that Gupta was passing on confidential board information to Galleon between March 2007 and January 2009, charging him with five counts of securities violations and one count of conspiracy, potentially opening him up to 105 years in prison and $25 million in fines.

I know if someone had taped me for over a year,  there would be a lot of things I’d find it hard to explain. Not because I’m up to anything wrong. Not at all. But simply because I blurt out my feelings in private. It’s the way I am. Sometimes, those are just passing feelings and quite meaningless to anyone who knows me.  I once told my family I wanted to raise a tiger cub in the garden; I’ve called friends names I’d rather forget; I’ve made forceful political statement that I wouldn’t think of venting on my blog. I say things that aren’t even accurate, just because it’s a casual conversation and I’m not thinking, or because I’m thinking of something else or…or…any of a dozen reasons.

And guess what, I’m not sorry I do. I have a right to.  Expressing your views, whether momentary feelings or long standing opinions, is what you do with your friends in your home.

It’s called privacy. If you can’t be free to vent feelings or express opinions, however unpleasant they might sound to a third party (third parties shouldn’t be listening, should they?), what the heck is privacy for?

But drawing conclusions from the haphazard, half-spoken chitchat of people’s private conversations is another things. Private chat is difficult to interpret, unless you get explicit repeated statements that are black and white. Everything else is open to interpretation.

2. There is no evidence that Gupta profited from the information he’s alleged to have passed on. This again is a big gaping hole in the government’s case. The essence of illegal insider-trading is that the wrong-doer materially benefited and that he passed on the tip with that benefit in his mind.

It’s a “mental state” crime, which also makes it hard to prove.

No profit, and bingo, half the case has crumbled.

Now, given that, why would Rajat Gupta turn down a civil trial, where the maximum he faced would have been fines and bans from sitting on corporate boards, and go in for a criminal trial, where he could go to jail? There’s only one reason. An administrative hearing has a lower standard of proof and a judge who can make up his mind as he wishes. A criminal trial gets a jury and demands “beyond a reasonable doubt” as the standard.  But it’s also riskier. Juries can go one way or other.

Here’s my point. The only defendant who would take that kind of risk would be a defendant who thought he was innocent.

So what’s the government doing without these two major elements of a successful insider trading case?

It’s trying to build a circumstantial case, putting together a kind of “mosaic” of the evidence, as someone has noted. It’s calling witnesses to show that while Gupta might not have literally profited from his tips, he indirectly profited, because he was invested with Galleon and he intended to do even more business with it in the future. The tips were credit toward that future return.

The prosecutions’ second line of argument is to suggest that Gupta and Rajaratnam were such close friends, that Gupta had to have passed on tips, because that’s what buddies do.

But, here’s another thing. The government (SEC) didn’t let Gupta see settlement documents with cooperating witnesses against him.

That means the defense doesn’t get to learn the terms on which the government struck deals with cooperating witnesses against Gupta.

That’s pretty significant.

Fortunately, the judge did force the FBI  to review documents (notes) from the SEC’s civil investigation, which overlapped the FBI criminal case (Brady material), and it did force them to show the defendant exculpatory evidence in them.

Thirdly, the government is trying to piece together the timing of the calls to show that it must have been Gupta who put through the call just before closing on Sept 23, 2008, to tell Rajaratnam that Warren Buffet was going to invest in Goldman Sachs. That tip is the piece de resistance of the trial, because Rajaratnam turned around and managed to squeeze a trade through before closing that netted around $800,000.

The Buffet investment information was, of course, confidential, as Lloyd Blankfein testified, as was the information about a Goldman Sachs audit committee meeting, whose results are alleged to have been passed onto Rajaratnam (March 2008).

What Blankfein didn’t testify and someone should have asked was if Blankfein and everyone else in the firm had actually kept the information confidential, as they expected Gupta to. Blankfein does remark that there was a lot of speculation going on about the audit committee findings.

Does that mean there were loose lips all over the place?

Because if there were, then the case against Gupta founders again.

Because then, how do we know who it was that tipped off Raj Rajaratnam?

The answer is, we don’t.

And, in fact, so far the defense has found at least two (and possibly three) other people at Goldman, lower down in the food chain, who were passing on tips to Galleon’s chief. One of those, David Loeb, head of Goldman Sachs’ Asia Equity Sales In New York, made two dozen calls to Galleon, some of them on the same day Gupta is alleged to have tipped the hedge fund off.  Besides Loeb, an analyst Henry King, as well as a Mr. X , have also been mentioned as tipsters. King, a high profile tech analyst known for his spot-on calls, is alleged to have been leaking information from Taiwanese manufacturers to US investors.

Then there’s Anil Kumar, a colleague at McKinsey, who turned informant for the government, in the Rajaratnam case. Kumar testified that Rajaratnam often played off his sources against each other so they would be work harder to get a pat on the head from “Big Raj.” One of the tipsters Rajaratnam played off against Anil Kumar was the “insanely hot” blonde tipster, Danielle Chiesi, whose antics eventually sank the good ship Galleon.

So now we know that Rajaratnam has a profile of manipulating  people and that he could ‘have been trying to get Anil Kumar to do more for him (remember, in the call with Gupta he complains that Anil Kumar isn’t earning the million dollars a year he was giving him). One way to do that would be to hint that he was getting information from someone else, even if that someone else was simply chatting with him and wasn’t actually tipping him.  There’s another angle.  If Anil Kumar could wear a wire and rat out Rajaratnam,  what are the chances he wouldn’t agree to anything else the Feds wanted from him? Maybe he cut a deal to point the finger at someone higher up.  Gary Naftalis, Gupta’s lawyer seems to be thinking along those lines, in demanding to see the SEC’s deals with cooperating witnesses.  Anyway, Kumar is no pillar of integrity and his accusations should be taken for what they’re worth.

What’s also strange….passing strange….is that David Loeb, whom the government caught on tape passing on tips about Intel, Apple, and Hewlett Packard to RR,  has not been charged at all.

Yet, Loeb called Galleon traders twice on September 23, 2008, including once  at  3:07 pm. That’s the same day prosecutors are trying to pin the Buffett tip on Gupta.

I wonder when the other call was; reports don’t specify.

Loeb also made four calls to Galleon’s Adam Smith on October 23, 2008, the same day that prosecutors say Gupta told Rajaratnam that Goldman Sachs would lose almost two dollars a share.

That’s pretty damning. And it’s on tape.  But Loeb hasn’t been fingered.

Instead, the government has gone straight for the jugular of Rajat Gupta.

You have to wonder why.

Climate-Gate: The 2011 Edition

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James Delingpole at The Daily Telegraph breaks the latest from the Climatistas:

“Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the “scientists” at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they’d like it to be.”

Some quotes from more scrupulous researchers are cited in the article:

/// The IPCC Process ///
Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary […]
Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.”

The email writers recognize that public perceptions about ” global freezing” might be ruining the brand value of “global warming” as a technique of social change:

Minns/Tyndall Centre:
In my experience, global freezing is already a bit of a public
relations problem with the media
Kjellen:
I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global
warming
Pierrehumbert:
What kind of circulation change could lock Europe into deadly summer heat waves
like that of last summer? That’s the sort of thing we need to think about.”

 [Some of my blogging on climate-gate can be found here and in other posts you can locate by using the Search function on this blog]

The blog Watts Up With That has links to a comprehensive timeline and graphics that display the thirty-year subversion of climate science behind climate-gate.

The Guardian suggests that the new climate emails probably date back to the first group, released in 2009, and that the motive is, again, to sabotage the Durban Climate summit, which starts on Monday:

“The emails appear to be genuine, but the University of East Anglia said the “sheer volume of material” meant it was not yet able to confirm that they were. One of the emailers, the climate scientist Prof Michael Mann, has confirmed that he believes they are his messages. The lack of any emails post-dating the 2009 release suggests that they were obtained at the same time, but held back. Their release now suggests they are intended to cause maximum impact before the upcoming climate summit in Durban which starts on Monday.”

 There are similarities to the first release, says the Guardian:

“In the new release a 173MB zip file called “FOIA2011” containing more than 5,000 new emails, was made available to download on a Russian server called Sinwt.ru today. An anonymous entity calling themselves “FOIA” then posted a link to the file on at least four blogs popular with climate sceptics – Watts Up With That, Climate Audit, TallBloke and The Air Vent.”

But there are also differences:

“The use of points instead of commas to mark the thousands when writing a number – highly unusual in both the UK or US – is sure to lead to speculation about the nationality of those responsible.”

The Guardian also indicates that although not all the emails have been confirmed genuine, the University of East Anglia claims that they have had no recent breach of security and says that the emails were probably held back from the original batch released in 2009.

Michael Mann, Director of the Earth Sciences Institute at Pennsylvania State University, whose messages are part of the release, is quoted in the piece dismissing the emails as more of the same. He calls the anonymous FOIA “agents” of the fossil-fuel industry and “criminal” hackers.

An Intelligence Front? The Case Against WikiLeaks, Part III

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Note: This piece is now up at Veterans Today:

“In my previous articles, I pointed out the most obvious problems I have with WikiLeaks –  the fact that its leaks seem to leave larger Zionist imperial goals untouched; its antagonistic stance to 9-11 truth; it frantic validation and promotion by major media; the falsity of many of its claims of confidentiality for leakers; the implausibility of its achievements absent intelligence or government connections; the contradictions between its public advocacy of transparency and its own secrecy; and the authoritarian tendencies in the writing and personality of its co-founder Julian Assange, tendencies that contradict the anarchist persona presented for public consumption.

In brief, to the question –  What is WikiLeaks?

My answer is –  Whatever it is, it has become a vehicle for disinformation.

Next, the companion question –

Who is behind WikiLeaks?

Here, the answers are less clear.

According to several sources, WL is “run” by a non-profit called the Sunshine Press. Assange is reported to be director and co-founder. According to the WikiLeaks website, the Sunshine Press is an “international non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists, lawyers and the general public.”

This doesn’t make it clear if  Sunshine Press and WikiLeaks are the same thing or two separate outfits.  A little googling gives me three Sunshine presses. None of them is our guy.

The website we want turns out to be Sunshine press.org (dot org, not dot com).

The Facebook page for Sunshine Press.org lists three URLs http://www.sunshinepress.org http://www.wikileaks.org and http://www.collateralmurder.com and clicking on the sunshine press.org link takes you back to WikiLeaks.

According to Sunshine Press’s Facebook page, the two organizations, WikiLeaks and Sunshine press, are the same. This seems to be borne out by the fact that the Sunshine Press Youtube channel consists of only WikiLeaks videos.

Some more googling about sunshinepress.org  yields several IP addresses; various domain names; its server, everydns.net; the location of the host in Sweden; the page rank (7); links (37); and other information.

http://www.robtex.com/dns/www.sunshinepress.org.html

www.sunshinepress.org (“http://www.sunshinepress.org/. Wikileaks. Sunshinepress”) has one IP number (88.80.2.32) , which is the same as for sunshinepress.org, but the reverse is host-88-80-2-32.cust.prq.se. Apple-memory.org, leaks.be, wikileaks.to, sunshinepress.org, apple-memory.de and at least three other hosts point to the same IP.

Sunshinepress.org is a domain controlled by four name servers at everydns.net. All four of them are on different IP networks. The primary name server is ns1.everydns.net. Incoming mail for sunshinepress.org is handled by one mail server at wikileaks.org. We are missing the IP:s of one server: mail.wikileaks.org. www.sunshinepress.org is ranked #514197 world wide as sunshinepress.org and is hosted on a server in Sweden. It has 37 inlinks. The Google Pagerank™ of sunshinepress.org is 7. backorder sunshinepress.org for 49.95 USD.Trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety of this site is excellent. (more on reputation).It is not listed in any blacklists.

I still couldn’t find a webpage devoted to Sunshine Press itself, although, according to the WikiLeaks site, SP has been in existence since 1996.

Emails referencing WL at Cryptome goes back to October 2006. Sunshine Press (which doesn’t appear in the Cryptome emails) seems to have come into being at the same time and seems to be identical with WL. We can tentatively conclude that there is no separate Sunshine Press. Nonetheless, the latest development is a new limited liability company formed on behalf of WikiLeaks called Sunshine Press Productions, which is registered in Iceland:

“The brand new company registered on behalf of Wikileaks is called Sunshine Press Production – the same as the formal international name of Wikileaks, RUV reports. The chairman of the company is Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and he shares the board of directors with filmmaker Ingi Ragnar Ingason and journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson. The deputy board member is Gavin MacFadyen, a professor of journalism in London. The company is registered at the home address of one of the board members at Klapparhlid in Mosfellsbaer.”

Researching the names mentioned in this paragraph give us some interesting tidbits.

Hrafnsson, an Icelandic investigative journalist formerly with national broadcaster RUV and a staff member of WL since April 2010, is now the public face of WL. Hrafnsson is also an outside advisor to the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), started by Birgitta Jonsdottir, an anarchist and member of the Icelandic parliament. IMMI seeks to make Iceland a kind of Switzerland for journalistic freedom. Investigative reporter Wayne Madsen has argued that IMMI is a stalking horse for currency speculator George Soros’ interests.

Jonsdottir’s inspiration for IMMI was reportedly a presentation by Assange and WL’s German staffer Daniel Domscheit-Berg in Iceland, just prior to WL’s outing of Iceland’s corrupt Kaupthing bank, which collapsed in August 2009. Other accounts describe IMMI as having been initiated by a Soros spokesman Mark Thompson in May 2009.

(Domscheit-Berg has since fallen out with Assange and left to form his own company, OpenLeaks).

Birgitta Jonsdottir is also, and significantly, a member of International Network of Parliamentarians for Tibet, which “brings together 133 Parliamentarians from 30 Parliaments to advance the Tibet issue in governments worldwide.” according to the activist website Savetibet.org .

Now Tibetan autonomy, as championed by the Anglo-American elite, is reported to be a pretext for encroachment on Chinese sovereignty. Tibet itself is central to ecosystems and desertification in the region, as it provides water for several countries. Its grasslands also act as a carbon sink. Recall that a recent WL leak, trumpeted by the major media, was the reported assertion of the Dalai Lama that climate change trumps political issues in Tibet.

Meanwhile, while Westerners consider the Dalai Lama a benign spiritual guru, not everyone else finds him so warm and fuzzy.  Many in Asia  consider him an ethnic grievance-monger , who wants to segregate Tibetans from Han Chinese. His political positions also fit nicely with Anglo-American imperial ambitions in that region, for which human rights and climate-change are cover for surveillance and control.

Tibet, after all, is a highly strategic and sensitive area.  The Dalai Lama is reported to be financially supported by the National Endowment for Democracy and NED itself receives CIA funding.

Jonsdottir is not the only interesting figure in this group.

Gavin MacFadyen, with whom Julian Assange is now staying, is also someone with strong connections to the financial elites. MacFadyan is a senior producer-director at corporate mainstream outlets,  BBC and PBS, and a director of the NY conference of financial and business journalists at the Columbia Journalism School. He is also the director of the Center for Investigative Journalism, where Assange is listed as a teacher, along with such well-known names as leftist author-activists,  Mike Davis, John Pilger, and Vandana Shiva. Sponsors of the CIJ are George Soros’ Open Society Institute (which, notably, sponsors a number of pro-Tibet projects),  the David and Elaine Potter Foundation, the Ford Foundation (another foundation with ties to the CIA), Park Foundation, City University London and several smaller private trusts.

There’s a third connection to the Anglo-American elites. Assange is staying at the 600 acre  Suffolk manor of Vaughan Smith, a former British army captain, who owns a popular journalists’ club in Paddington in London, called The Frontline Club (along with the related Frontline TV News).

Frontline, it is reported, has sponsored a documentary that “casts doubt on allegations of a massacre at Jenin on the West Bank by the Israel Defense Forces in 2002” and has received funding from George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

On a side note, notice the company Assange keeps. If Assange is a “libertarian,” then, he travels a lot in very government-friendly circles. He is most certainly not the anarchist he’s often portrayed to be and which hackers and computer geeks often really are.

To return to the question of WL’s origins, the first part of this series pointed out that many of WL’s earliest staffers were Chinese dissidents and pro-Tibet activists.

Thus, the Soros connection turns up in six separate WL relationships:

  • Its Chinese and pro-Tibetan volunteers/advisors, some of whom worked at Soros connected Radio Free Asia and National Endowment for Democracy
  • Its connection through Hrafnsson to IMMI, considered by many to be a stalking horse for Soros in Iceland
  • Its connection to Jonsdottir and her Tibetan advocacy, which parallels objectives of Radio Free Asia and OSI
  • Assange’s and MacFadyen’s sponsorship by the Open Society Institute, with its pro-Tibetan positions
  • Frontline Club’s funding by the Open Society Institute
  • Direct requests by WL in 2007 for funding from the National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House, both CIA connected. (Note: Open Society Foundation denies funding WikiLeaks).

    • In this regard, it’s relevant that the Open Society Institute had no critical comment about Wikileaks until recently, when it suddenly joined the chorus of voices suggesting that WL’s actions could have jeopardized the lives of Afghan informants (WSJ, August 9, 2010. This happened about a week after border security detained WL’s Jacob Applebaum for several hours. (Applebaum is a security researcher and hacker who works for the Tor privacy protection project as well as for WL).

    Next question. Who specifically set up WikiLeaks?

    A little research into the first appearance of WikiLeaks on the web shows that Assange is not the only name associated with it from its inception.

    On the Internet archive  (the Wayback machine) the earliest archived pages for WikiLeaks go back to Jan 14, 2007. There are 60 pages in 2007 for the outfit, 19 for 2008, 0 for 2009, and 87 for 2010.

    A click on January 14 2007, gives us mostly dead links, but the contact page produces two web addresses:  w i k i l e a k s  @ w i k i l e a k s . o r g   &    p r e s s   @ w i k i l e a k s . o r g,  a phone number (a cell number) in Washington DC, +1 (202) 657-6222, and a skype address, wikileaks.

    The  DC cell number turns out to be registered in Adelphi, Virginia, and it traces back 20 miles to Reston Virginia, which seems a bit odd, considering that WL’s professed interests originally were in Asia and Africa and its volunteers were supposedly mostly from the Pacific and Europe.

    Reston is a center for outfits working on US cybersecurity, information technology, and defense, as indeed is the whole DC-MD-Va metropolitan area. Among many similar companies HQ’d there, one finds NCI, whose website announces that it is  “an industry leader and provider of full-spectrum IO (Information Operations) enabling technologies and services to promote and protect our US federal government customers’ information and information systems.”

    IO, electronic warfare (EW) and Cyberwar are its specialties.

    Wondering why I hadn’t come across the Reston cell phone in articles about Wikileaks, I did another search and found that in fact in March 2007 a Columbia Journalism Review intern Dan Goldberg had published something about it, only the piece had been removed from the web.

    This is one angle for further research.

    Next, double-checking the domain information, I did a  whois search for WikiLeaks.org, which pulled up the following information:

    Domain ID:D130035267-LROR Domain Name:WIKILEAKS.ORGCreated On:04-Oct-2006 05:54:19
    UTC Last Updated On:17-Dec-2010 01:57:59 UTCExpiration Date:04-Oct-2018 05:54:19
    UTC Sponsoring Registrar:Dynadot, LLC (R1266-LROR)Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
    Registrant ID:CP-13000Registrant Name:John Shipton c/o Dynadot PrivacyRegistrant
    Street1:PO Box 701 Registrant City:San MateoRegistrant State/Province:CA Registrant
    Postal Code:94401Registrant Country:US Registrant Phone:+1.6505854708

    The address of the registrar, Dynadot, as it appears at page insider is PO Box 1072, Belmont, CA 94002, the email is privacy@dynadot.com  and the phone number is 1-866-652-2039.

    I called, and Dynadot confirmed that it is the current registrar for Wikileaks.

    A Cnet blog article and documents from the Julius Baer court case also confirm that the registrar in 2008 was California LLC, Dynadot, and that the registrant/owner was John Shipton, an Australian citizen resident in Nairobi. This is also confirmed by the notice of intent to appear filed by Shipton and his California law firm, Chadwick, Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton. Shipton has a Nairobi address in the notice and Dynadot has its usual San Mateo CA address. 1-650-585-1961.

    Now who is John Shipton? Does he exist in his own right or is he simply a nom-de-plume of Julian Assange? Most likely the second, since it would be grotesquely coincidental to have two Australian nationals resident in Kenya, both involved in human rights activism at the same outfit. Again, more research is in order.

    The original whois information for WikiLeaks appears at Cryptome.org, where the registrant’s name is given as John Young, the owner of Cryptome and a co-founder of Wikileaks. The Cryptome site carries the email correspondence between Young and Wikileaks from a restricted mailing list housed at the collective, rise-up.net, in 2006-07.

    The letters show Young to be first enthusiastic about WL and then increasingly frustrated and annoyed by its methods. He calls the claim of over a million documents exaggerated and the repeated assertions of superior ethics and confidentiality deeply suspect, in the absence of a track-record.

    The final straw comes when WL says it needs $5 million in funding by the summer of 2007 to stay alive. Young erupts with accusations that WL is a CIA “hustle.”

    On the plus side for WL,  the Young correspondence suggests how WL might have got hold of names of activists. Members seem to have been regular readers of Counterpunch, Z Mag, and Mother Jones. I’d written several pieces for Counterpunch in 2005-06, and it’s possible that’s how they got hold of names that way.

    So that is an explanation that does not undermine WL.

    However,  the Cryptome emails note another problem that the review site, Wikileak.com (no S) describes in great detail.

    Wikileaks.org (with an S), it says, makes extraordinary claims about confidentiality and anonymity that are just that – claims. These claims are not justified by an examination of the actual procedures involved in uploading documents to the site, procedures that are often shoddy, incompetent, uncoordinated, or even deliberately misleading, Wikileak.com (no S) notes pointedly.

    [Lila, Dec. 26th, 2010: I made minor stylistic changes to the paragraph above to make it clear that it is not a verbatim quote from the review site, but a paraphrase of its position]

    Anyway, taking all this into account, WL seems to have been founded and registered in 2006 by Julian Paul Assange/John Shipton and John Young OR by a group of activists who for whatever reason let Assange and Young wear the public face of the company.

    Who were these activists?

    The original web entry on the subject (since changed) said WL was the creation of Chinese dissidents and other activists. This is also the claim of an article by Cass Sunstein, Obama’s Information Czar, in The Washington Post in February 2007, “A Brave New Wikiworld.”

    John Young says that the Sunstein article was the first public introduction of WikiLeaks and that WikiLeaks might well be the cointelpro operation to infiltrate conspiracy groups that Sunstein seemed to be arguing for in a later (2008) white paper.

    But this isn’t accurate. WikiLeaks had already been introduced to the public by a Time Magazine story, “A Wiki for whistle-blowers” a month earlier than the Sunstein piece, in January 2007.

    Time, Washington Post – this is pretty high-profile coverage for an outfit that had just begun three months earlier. What’s even more interesting is that the Time piece, like the Post piece, both point out the concurrent start of Intellipedia, the intelligence-sharing project started by US intelligence in October 2006, the month when WikiLeaks began.

    Both articles also explicitly mention rumors about WikiLeaks possibly being a CIA front. This is quite curious. Were these papers simply reporting all the information available to them?  Were they going on Young’s statement at the time, or did they have other sources for this suspicion? If the suspicions were credible, if WL was plausibly an intel operation, why the full-court press? If the suspicions were not credible, why mention them so pointedly?

    Again, it’s impossible to say for sure without first-hand information.

    One explanation of how activists created WL, comes, once more, from John Young.

    In his latest Cryptome posts on the subject, Young talks about Assange as a craven spokesman for WL, seduced by money and the promise of fame to betray the original ideals of the outfit. Those ideals, says Young, grew out of a cypherpunk mailing list going back to 1992 that debated issues around cryptography and privacy. Wikipedia has the list with individual descriptions.

    It’s a distinguished group.

    Besides Assange, who is described as WL’s founder, the inventor of deniable cyptography and the co-author of “Underground,” there are three Bell lab researchers; two elite university professors; the Chief Technical Officer of PGP corporation; the creators of Bit Torrent and other software/technologies; the founders of Anonymizer.Inc., Interhack Corp., HavenCo., C2Net and of Cypherpunk itself; a researcher at Lawrence Livermore labs; the founder and lawyer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; a former Chief Scientist from Intel;  authors of several books – “Assassination Politics,” “A Cypher Punk’s Manifesto,” “God Wants You Dead,” and “A Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto”; Sun Microsystems employees; and a noted blogger and author on computer security issues.

    These are accomplished activists, no question. And if they were at some point involved with the creation of WikiLeaks, or were aware of it, or promoted it, then it’s no wonder that the project quickly got such a high level of media attention. On the other hand, the involvement of the high-profile cypherpunks lends weight to the notion that intelligence played a hand in the creation of WikiLeaks. It is well-known by now that important American businesses have often been co-opted by the intelligence community.

    Given that, it’s impossible that companies in the vanguard of technological development in encryption, security, privacy, and espionage, especially as it relates to nuclear energy (Lawrence Livermore labs), could have operated without some monitoring or input from the CIA. Ergo, if WikiLeaks were in fact the creation of the cypherpunks, I believe intelligence would have been aware of it and involved in it, as private contractors are deeply involved in Homeland security at every level.

    Of course, I should add that it’s not only US intelligence that is involved in Homeland Security.  Many have seen the hand of the Israeli intelligence and security business in it too.

    Whether WikiLeaks grew out of the cypherpunk list or not, it’s not in dispute that Assange was quickly WL’s public face. In fact, he’s repeatedly and abrasively insisted that he was the “the heart and soul” of the outfit, angering colleagues and eventually leading to public fall-outs with some of them (Young, Domscheit-Berg).

    Besides the cypherpunk list, another group of activists have been treated as the creators of WL -the Chinese dissidents originally named on WL’s website.

    Who were these activists?
    The one mentioned on the webpage originally:
    “Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and startup company
    technologists, from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa”

    But there is another list  mentioned in an email dated Dec 9, 2006 from Cryptome.org’s exchanges with Wikileaks which refers to WL’ activists by their work (I have guessed at three of them in brackets).

    1.Retired new york architect and notorious intelligence leak
    facilitator (John Young of Cryptome.org?)
    2. Euro cryptographer/programmer
    3. Pacific physicist and illustrator
    4. A pacific author and economic policy lecturer
    5. Euro, Ex-Cambridge mathematician/cryptographer/programmer
    6. Euro businessman and security specialist/activist
    7. Author of software than runs 40% of the world’s websites (Phil Zimmerman?)
    8. US pure mathematician with criminal law background
    9. An infamous US ex-hacker
    10. Pacific cryptographer/physicist and activist (Julian Assange?)
    11. US/euro cryptographer and activist/programmer
    12. Pacific programmer
    13. Pacific architect / foreign policy wonk

    This doesn’t sound quite like “Chinese dissidents, journalists etc” but
    both lists do refer to technologists. That fact makes it plausible that some or all of the original WL material came from hacking, and not whistle-blowing, a theory that fits with     a WL letter to John Young on Jan 7, 2007 suggesting that hackers were involved with some of the material, and that WL was gathering so much material it didn’t know where 90% of the material came from or what was in it:

    “ We are going to fuck them all. Chinese mostly, but not entirely a feint. Invention abounds. Lies, twists and distorts everywhere needed for protection. Hackers monitor chinese and other intel as they burrow into their targets, when they pull, so do we. Inexhaustible supply of material. Near 100,000 documents/emails a day. We’re going to crack the world open and let it flower into something new. If fleecing the CIA will assist us, then fleece we will. We have pullbacks from NED, CFR, Freedomhouse and other CIA teats. We have all of pre 2005 afghanistan. Almost all of india fed. Half a dozen foreign ministries. Dozens of political parties and consulates, worldbank, apec, UN sections, trade groups, tibet and fulan dafa associations and… russian phishing mafia who pull data everywhere. We’re drowning. We don’t even know a tenth of what we have or who it belongs to. We stopped storing it at 1Tb.”

    However you interpret this, one thing is clear, right from the start, Wikileaks was a conduit for a lot of material that they themselves could not identify or source.  If an intelligence agency wanted to plant or seed its own slanted “disclosures” in the welter of documents being dumped on the site, it would be only too easy to do.”

    (To Be Continued in Part IV))

    Time to Bow Out

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    Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?”
    – Jack Kerouac

    Updated (December 4)

    To all those it concerns: Let me repeat the conclusion of my previous update, once more, in case it didn’t get through. Try the right way.  Try it. This isn’t moral advice. It is practical advice. When you continually feed a vortex of negative energy around someone who harbors a justified contempt for your behavior, but no malice toward any individual,  that energy will destroy all of you, not me.

    Updated (December 3):

    This blog is officially still in limbo. A friend is supposed to be helping me set up the new format it will use. That has got delayed.  I am no longer interacting with comments, I’m afraid. I have an assistant who posts anything I find interesting in my morning reading, but that is only a sideline of her main duty which is to help me with my business.  She doesn’t have the time to comment. Any political comments of mine are made at The Daily Bell, but I have started to reduce my comments there, as well. I don’t think it’s wise to interact with people whose identity I don’t know. Some incidents made me wary that IP addresses had been harvested by someone.. unknown to the rest of the kind editors.  I also do not believe in the existence of every conspiracy posited there. The factual history of Zionism, as the latest incarnation of European imperialism, post-Renaissance, is all I am prepared to discuss or competently evaluate.

    I have commented recently at Veterans Today, where the authors are clearly described, but some of the material there also strikes me as unduly slanted. And I don’t know how/from whom the site receives its funding. [December 7: I have clarified from the editors at VT that the site is NOT funded, but survives on writers’ contributions and Google ads. It also runs an employment agency for vets. Kudos to VT for the courage and integrity to avoid funding that would compromise its clear and unequivocal voice].

    Actually, I’ve stopping sending articles to the main alternative sites on the left and right, because of such questions and because, in my experience they are all gate-keeping at some level. As soon as a site grows, it’s drawn into one camp or other, which means it’s essentially retailing a certain amount of spin, if not intentionally, in effect. Ideology does that. No criticism is meant by this of any individual site or activist or writer. That is just an accurate observation about the nature of all organizations.

    My great good fortune in life has been that I’ve been able to develop my thoughts largely free of organizations, on my own terms, except for the boundaries of good taste and the fear of provoking powerful people. Otherwise, I have no intellectual or professional allegiance to compromise my reasoning. I see no reason to undo that good fortune by posting/writing anywhere. I’d rather keep quiet. There are enough opinions out there, as it is…

    [Note: I have altered this post, December 5, in the interests of not provoking any more cyber-attacks. I am not going to explain anymore, or the deletion will lose its point. I hope the alteration will show interested parties that my intentions are not at all personal or malicious.

    Note (Added Nov. 3): I originally had another post following this one, with some email correspondence. I’ve deleted it because I don’t like it showing up at the top of a google search of my name. I’ve posted the emails instead further down on the blog, in the place of an article (deleted), with an explanation of the change. I’ll eventually move that post to one of my permanent pages (Lila at the DR or Media Control).

    ORIGINAL POST

    Some of you might have heard that Burning Platform (denial of service),  Naked Capitalism (denial of service), Lew Rockwell (credit card fraud, copyright violations). and Zerohedge (denial of service) have all been attacked quite recently. These are big blogs, so it’s to be expected. There are people out there who’d like everything to be swept under the rug.

    But what could be behind the attacks on a small blog like mine? That’s what bothers me.  Who would think it worthwhile?

    Yet, the attacks have gone on now for some three years. Obscene comments, stalking, flaming, web-libel, subtle threats, wiki deletions.

    Fortunately, you know what they say about fish that can’t keep their mouths shut? They get caught. And over the three years, I’ve been able to catch a few fishy folk who lurked around this blog.

    Fish one – the disgruntled Mr. T.R., whose history I’ve recounted at the tab Lila at The Daily Reckoning.

    Fish Two – attacks on the book and on my articles and wiki page. I finally figured those were from cyber-vigilantes and assorted liberal blog mafias who disliked my blogging in support of 9-11, on extremist Zionism, and on the banking elites.

    Fish Three –  emails [added: not published on this blog] seemingly related to my attribution problems with my former employer.

    [Note 1 added: There were also emails and stalking set off by a post contributed to this blog by Douglas Valentine, on the CIA.

    Note 2: I’ve deleted a section here that goes into this incident in more detail. I’m afraid of setting off the stalker, who, I should mention, is seems to be an ex-CIA operative. I’ve also deleted the links placed on my blog by a commenter, since that was what provoked him. The case cited in the comment link has since been resolved in the stalker’s operative’s favor….or so, it would seem, but, meanwhile, what court’s going to give me back my reputation, peace of mind, career, and privacy, all grossly violated by this man’s actions?

    And  for what? For posting someone else’s piece on the CIA, a piece that was then reprinted widely on the net

    That brings me to the last point I want to make – which is that female bloggers attract a very high number of threatening and sexually intimidating comments.

    This ABC report from 2007 cites cases:

    “Kathy Sierra, a software developer, gained a large following on her design blog. She never dreamed her benign postings would attract an online attacker.

    “I started getting comments on my own blog that were really threatening like, ‘I’m going to slit your throat,'” Sierra said.

    Then the threats became more personal. Her attacker posted a photo of Sierra in a muzzle as if she was being smothered, along with the words, “I dream of Kathy Sierra.”

    “At the time, I thought, ‘This is something serious. This is not some kids. This is someone going to great lengths to frighten me,'” she said.

    She shut down her blog, and in her final posting wrote, “I am afraid to leave my yard. I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.”

    As more women enter the blogosphere, with sites running the gamut from professional advice to cooking recipes, they are increasingly being singled out as targets of threats and sexual harassment.

    “Cyberharassing or stalking of a female blogger in particular will often be sexual harassment,” said Internet and privacy lawyer Parry Aftab. “They will often take her head and put it on someone else’s naked body. There may be threats to her children.”

    Aftab runs Wired Safety.org, an organization that has handled thousands of cyberstalking cases. She advises women who are targets of online harassment that they not respond to threatening posts.

    “The easiest thing to do is turn around and attack your attacker, but that is exactly what they want,” she said. “They will come at you more and more.”

    True enough. It’s what I’ve learned.

    Still, I’ve tried to put these unpleasant things behind me. I’ve tried to keep the conversation here courteous and free from personal attacks. Any criticism has always been directed at people for their public positions or professional performance. And I’ve only done that to support serious arguments, or in self-defense, to salvage my reputation from slander.

    But it doesn’t seem to have helped.

    Having failed to find anything wrong with my credentials or professional actions, my ‘enemies’ (I wish I could reassure them somehow!) hacked my personal email addresses in 2008. My blog was also hacked. Vague threats directed at me or my family showed up in the comments section whenever I blogged about certain subjects, even though I was obliged to comment on them by the nature and mandate of this blog.

    In short, even though what I wrote wasn’t from malice, I was attacked by malicious people…..and, at the same time, by ignorant people who claimed I was “covering up.” I’ve described all this in posts on this blog.

    But still, it’s not enough for someone. Strange things keep happening.

    Today, again, I got a comment with a vague threat. Much too vague to go to the police. Not too vague to leave me in the dark.  It is, I think, the final straw. I can’t waste so much energy and time, and I can’t risk any hurt or danger to my family. I’ve decided to call it quits……for real, this time.

    My blog will be taken over by a libertarian friend (s). There’ll be other people running it. It was time for me to leave this country anyway.

    Let’s see how that goes. It could take a few days….or a few weeks. Until then – goodbye, good luck, and thanks very much for reading.

    Civil Unrest In Guadalupe, February 2009

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    Researching trouble spots that could predict how civil unrest might  unfold in the future, I came across this report from February 2009 ,about insurrection in the French Caribbean. It is described, literally, in black and white terms, as a class war that breaks out along racial lines. The source being The Daily Mail, this might be sensationalistic. But there’s no denying it’s plausible:

    “Britons are among thousands of tourists fleeing Guadeloupe after full scale urban warfare erupted on the French Caribbean island.

    Trouble broke out on the island earlier last month after protesters began rioting over high prices and low wages.

    But the situation escalated this week after protesters began turning on rich white families as they demanded an end to colonial control of the economy.

    The troubles come at the height of the holiday season, with thousands of mainly British, French and American tourists on the paradise tropical island.”

    Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1150062/Britons-flee-French-island-Guadeloupe-rioters-turn-white-families.html#ixzz10g0gHgMy

    South Asia Increasingly Under Biometric Surveillance

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    Wired.com has a piece on the collection of biometric data on hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan.

    According to NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan commander Lt. Gen. William Caldwell (as reported to Wired’s Danger Room) the idea is to screen applicants for Army positions to keep out people with ties to the Taliban or criminal histories. But with biometric files are being compiled on Afghans at the rate of 20-25 per week, the process is likely to include a large number of ordinary citizens, especially as there’s now a  plan in the works that aims to have biometric ID’s for some 1.65 million Afghans by May 2011 through the “population registration division” of the Afghan Ministry of the Interior. Apparently, Caldwell is taking a leaf out of the book of General Petraeus, who used biometric monitoring to keep on top of the Iraqi resistance. It’s also modeled on monitoring during the siege of Fallujah, when the only way to get in and out of the place was with an ID card that needed an iris scan.

    Right now, there are apparently two biometric projects in the country, one run by the Afghans accounting for about a quarter of a million files and the other by the Americans, which has nearly half a million, but  so far, there’s not been much integration between the two. The Afghan involvement is a change from the past, when Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has shut down  biometric monitoring at checkpoints by NATO as a violation of Afghan sovereignty.

    Meanwhile,  neighboring India has already launched the first biometrically verified universal ID on a national scale. While not compulsory, it will be needed to access certain social and financial services, and is intended for the entire population of 1.2 billion. Biometric IDs were first used in India in 2002 to check corruption involved in accessing services and rations meant for the poor.

    Earlier this year (July 2010), Afghanistan and Pakistan concluded a trade agreement that included the exchange of biometric data as part of the deal.