This is one of those really difficult posts to write. Not just because I've got a lot of stuff going on (when do I ever not, you're probably asking yourself) but because of the sheer volume of data at hand. Like a lot of folks, I caught wind of the House Oversight Committee hearing on UAPs (anonymized) (archive.is) (Internet Archive) (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) and my curiosity was piqued. Unfortunately because I had to work early that day I didn't get to watch or listen to much of it, but because House Oversight hearings are a matter of public record …
Note the first: I started working on this article last week, but didn't post it until now because I wanted to let all of the (usually astoundingly bad) hot takes die down. While I realize that the Internet has given everyone an attention span rivalled only by the lifespan of the adult mayfly, I think it might be useful to have something laying around that can be pointed to later if need be.
Note the second: A reminder that I do not speak from an official position. I do not speak for or represent my employers, past, present, or future …
DC AC - noun phrase (humorous) - The primary mechanism of air conditioning inside the DC Beltway. Notionally, the movement of air due to revolving doors caused by the never-ending cycle of contractors becoming civil servants, civil servants becoming lobbyists, and lobbyists forming startups and becoming government contractors once more.
As a child of the Cold War era I'd always been curious about politics and how things worked. My mom (and grandmother, for that matter) always warned me that asking those kinds of questions would mean that my name would wind up on a list someplace. They were never clear on what sort of list that was, or what effect being on one might have. The context was never a good one and it lead to no shortage of arguments, that was for sure. Those arguments mysteriously stopped when, in one of my high school civics classes (it's important to …
First, I'd like to give special thanks to I/Oerror who's been keeping a hawk's eye on this. I found a couple of the articles for this post on his Twitter feed during my daily news crawl. I wish I had the time to dedicate to scanning feeds constantly for stuff like this.
I haven't been posting about this for two reasons: first, because hearing that stuff like this is going on within the United States of America to decent people who haven't done anything upsets me greatly. There is simply no reason to mistreat people like this, all it …
It seems that the US federal government has been busy lately - a pair of news articles released last week show the lengths they're going to so that they can get their way while seeming to be on the up and up. As you'll recall, back in July of 2005 the city of London, England was rocked by a number of explosions which were placed by suicide bombers to maximally disrupt the public transportation system of the city. The British government probably asked the FBI to assist in the investigation (as suggested by a number of documents obtained through the Freedom …
Every once in a while a news article about attempts to crack US military and government systems coming out of China or the Middle East hits the 'wires; rumors of groups of systems crackers belonging to the Air Force/United Nations/Department of Homeland Security/Microsoft/the Illuminati regularly make their rounds at hacker conventions. Military data nets are increasingly becoming targets of crackers from abroad, safe from prosecution and extradition because it's so difficult to start legal proceedings against someone you don't even know, let alone can grab by the scruff of the neck (police dramas and MLATs to …
As one might expect, it's been a busy couple of days (a week, really), which has kept me from being able to post anything. I got back from Philly around 1700 EST5EDT last Friday, and I've been offline pretty much the entire weekend because I've been too tired to do much of anything. After I got back, Lyssa made a wonderful hot dinner (all the more special because temperatures in the tri-state area have been averaging in the mid-twenties Fahrenheit), and then we decided to get together with some friendly faces to hang out for the evening. To that end …
It has come to the attention of the news media that documents that really shouldn't be getting out (like blueprints of high-security military installations) are being stashed on publically accessible web and FTP servers around the net, sometimes on the networks of the subcontractors themselves where anybody with the time and patience to go digging has a chance at finding it. During research for this article, reporters working for the Associated Press found dozens of sensitive documents that weren't even protected with a basic password. Moreover, sometimes you …
Ever since 9/11, the US government has been an informational vacuum cleaner that sucks up information on just about everyone in this country, or who happens to enter or leave the country (as some people with laptops have discovered). What they do with it and where they put it all is a matter of some speculation; suffice it to say that the network attached storage system companies are making a killing selling RAID systems to them... at any rate, it's come to light that they're mining more than just terrorism-related information to generate profiles on people. In fact, there …
