Tag Archives: Pentagon

More Police State Surveillance: Courtesy of the Pentagon, by Jeremiah Johnson

Posted on May 24, 2018 | 1 comment

The Pentagon has a plan to use biometric verification to track and identify people from their smart phones. From Jeremiah Johnson at shtfplan.com:

There was an article by Joseph Marks of Nextgov published on 5/16/18 that was neither picked up by the larger news networks nor kept in view for long. The article is entitled The Pentagon Has a Big Plan to Solve Identity Verification in Two Years, and here is a portion of it:

The Defense Department is funding a project that officials say could revolutionize the way companies, federal agencies and the military itself verify that people are who they say they are and it could be available in most commercial smartphones within two years. The technology, which will be embedded in smartphones’ hardware, will analyze a variety of identifiers that are unique to an individual, such as the hand pressure and wrist tension when the person holds a smartphone and the person’s peculiar gait while walking, said Steve Wallace, technical director at the Defense Information Systems Agency.  Organizations that use the tool can combine those identifiers to give the phone holder a “risk score,” Wallace said. If the risk score is low enough, the organization can presume the person is who she says she is and grant her access to sensitive files on the phone or on a connected computer or grant her access to a secure facility. If the score’s too high, she’ll be locked out.

Amazing. The Pentagon’s technical director omitted much in his quest to act as if such actions are “government streamlining” and occurring matter-of-factly, in the interests of securing information for the government and its contractors.

The problem: if it’s in the software of all the commercial smartphones (the ones bought in the stores), that biometric data will be transmitted by all the phones, not just the contractors to the federal government.

We also know where this is heading. The government will back-door everyone’s cell phones and make tracking and surveillance even more ubiquitous than it is now, and that’s saying something. Read this portion:

Another identifier that will likely be built into the chips is a GPS tracker that will store encrypted information about a person’s movements, Wallace said. The verification tool would analyze historical information about a person’s locations and major, recent anomalies would raise the person’s risk score.  The tool would be separate from the GPS function used by mapping and exercise apps, he said. The tool does not include biometric information, such as a thumbprint or eye scans at this point, Wallace said, because DISA judged that existing commercial applications of biometric information are too easy to spoof.

To continue reading: More Police State Surveillance: Courtesy of the Pentagon

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Military, Privacy, Surveillance

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How the Pentagon Devours the Budget, Normalizing Budgetary Bloat, by William Hurting

Posted on March 1, 2018 | 1 comment

The Pentagon has never been subjected to an audit, but Congress has passed two years worth of budgets that give it, and its contractors, huge increases over prior years, everything they could dream of…and more. From William Hartung at tomdispatch.com:

Imagine for a moment a scheme in which American taxpayers were taken to the cleaners to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and there was barely a hint of criticism or outrage.  Imagine as well that the White House and a majority of the politicians in Washington, no matter the party, acquiesced in the arrangement.  In fact, the annual quest to boost Pentagon spending into the stratosphere regularly follows that very scenario, assisted by predictions of imminent doom from industry-funded hawks with a vested interest in increased military outlays.

Most Americans are probably aware that the Pentagon spends a lot of money, but it’s unlikely they grasp just how huge those sums really are.  All too often, astonishingly lavish military budgets are treated as if they were part of the natural order, like death or taxes.

The figures contained in the recent budget deal that kept Congress open, as well as in President Trump’s budget proposal for 2019, are a case in point: $700 billion for the Pentagon and related programs in 2018 and $716 billion the following year.  Remarkably, such numbers far exceeded even the Pentagon’s own expansive expectations.  According to Donald Trump, admittedly not the most reliable source in all cases, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis reportedly said, “Wow, I can’t believe we got everything we wanted” — a rare admission from the head of an organization whose only response to virtually any budget proposal is to ask for more.

The public reaction to such staggering Pentagon budget hikes was muted, to put it mildly. Unlike last year’s tax giveaway to the rich, throwing near-record amounts of tax dollars at the Department of Defense generated no visible public outrage.  Yet those tax cuts and Pentagon increases are closely related.  The Trump administration’s pairing of the two mimics the failed approach of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s — only more so.  It’s a phenomenon I’ve termed “Reaganomics on steroids.”  Reagan’s approach yielded oceans of red ink and a severe weakening of the social safety net.  It also provoked such a strong pushback that he later backtracked by raising taxes and set the stage for sharp reductions in nuclear weapons.

To continue reading: How the Pentagon Devours the Budget, Normalizing Budgetary Bloat

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Pentagon Worried about Hackers Causing Stock Market Crash, by Wolf Richter

Posted on October 16, 2017 | 2 comments

Governments and central banks are fine with equity markets being manipulated upward. However, manipulation downward would be a national emergency. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

The Pentagon?! But no one’s worried when stocks get manipulated higher.

It’s funny, the all-out government effort to prevent a major decline of the stock market, or of individual stocks, via manipulation or hacking. Now even the Pentagon is looking into it.

What’s funny is that everyone cheers when manipulation, hacking, and other shenanigans cause the market or individual stocks to soar. It’s just declines they’re worried about at these precarious levels.

Manipulating stocks higher is a time-honored game that routinely receives kudos from all around. The Fed printed nearly $4 trillion and cut rates to zero for eight years – no matter what the damage to the real economy – for the sole purpose of manipulating up asset prices including stock prices. “Wealth effect,” Ben Bernanke called it. Corporate executives and analysts exaggerate future earnings only to deflate them at the last minute, because stock prices are “forward looking” and fake future earnings is all that matters, even if reality now sucks. And on and on. Whatever it takes to push stock prices up, by hook or crook, is cool. These are our heroes.

But when some lonely dude might hack into high-speed stock trading systems or spook the trading algos, quant-fund managers, and high-speed traders and throw algorithmic trading off track to where prices might actually fall in a major way, all heck breaks loose, and the Pentagon feels empowered to step in.

Trading by automated systems, such as used by quant funds and high-speed traders, is beginning to dominate stock trading. The risk of hacking into those systems or manipulating those systems in other ways is a real issue – but it should cut both ways. And the systems themselves are designed to manipulate prices, so….

Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), is working with “dozens” of high-speed traders, quant-fund managers, “people from exchanges and other financial companies,” executives, and “others” from Wall Street to figure out how hackers “could unleash chaos in the US financial system.”

To continue reading: Pentagon Worried about Hackers Causing Stock Market Crash

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In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA, by Nibih Bulos, W.J. Hennigan, and Brian Bennet

Posted on March 28, 2016 | Leave a comment

You can’t make this stuff up! From Nabih bulos, W.J. Hennigan and Brian Bennet at latimes.com:

Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter five-year-old civil war.

The fighting has intensified over the last two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other while maneuvering through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.

In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east.

“Any faction that attacks us, regardless from where it gets its support, we will fight it,” Maj. Fares Bayoush, a leader of Fursan al Haq, said in an interview.

Rebel fighters described similar clashes in the town of Azaz, a key transit point for fighters and supplies between Aleppo and the Turkish border, and on March 3 in the Aleppo neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsud.

The attacks by one U.S.-backed group against another come amid continued heavy fighting in Syria and illustrate the difficulty facing U.S. efforts to coordinate among dozens of armed groups that are trying to overthrow the government of President Bashar Assad, fight the Islamic State militant group and battle one another all at the same time.

To continue reading: In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Military, War

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Pentagon Concludes America Not Safe Unless It Conquers The World, by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on July 10, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Paul Craig Roberts, on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

The Pentagon has released its “National Military Strategy of the United States of America 2015,” June 2015. http://news.usni.org/2015/07/02/document-2015-u-s-national-military-strategy
The document announces a shift in focus from terrorists to “state actors” that “are challenging international norms.” It is important to understand what these words mean. Governments that challenge international norms are sovereign countries that pursue policies independently of Washington’s policies. These “revisionist states” are threats, not because they plan to attack the US, which the Pentagon admits neither Russia nor China intend, but because they are independent. In other words, the norm is dependence on Washington.

Be sure to grasp the point: The threat is the existence of sovereign states, whose independence of action makes them “revisionist states.” In other words, their independence is out of step with the neoconservative Uni-power doctrine that declares independence to be the right of Washington alone. Washington’s History-given hegemony precludes any other country being independent in its actions.
The Pentagon’s report defines the foremost “revisionist states” as Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. The focus is primarily on Russia.Washington hopes to co-op China, despite the “tension to the Asia-Pacific region” that China’s defense of its sphere of influence, a defense “inconsistent with international law” (this from Washington, the great violator of international law), by turning over what remains of the American consumer market to China. It is not yet certain that Iran has escaped the fate that Washington imposed on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Ukraine, and by complicity Palestine.

The Pentagon report is sufficiently audacious in its hypocrisy, as all statements from Washington are, to declare that Washington and its vassals “support the established institutions and processes dedicated to preventing conflict, respecting sovereignty, and furthering human rights.” This from the military of a government that has invaded, bombed, and overthrown 11 governments since the Clinton regime and is currently working to overthrow governments in Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina.

In the Pentagon document, Russia is under fire for not acting “in accordance with international norms,” which means Russia is not following Washington’s leadership.

In other words, this is a bullshit report written by neocons in order to foment war with Russia.

Nothing else can be said about the Pentagon report, which justifies war and more war. Without war and conquests, Americans are not safe.

Washington’s view toward Russia is the same as Cato the Elder’s view toward Carthage. Cato the Elder finished his every speech on any subject in the Roman Senate with the statement “Carthage must be destroyed.”

This report tells us that war with Russia is our future unless Russia agrees to become a vassal state like every country in Europe, and Canada, Australia, Ukraine, and Japan. Otherwise, the neoconservatives have decided that it is impossible for Americans to tolerate living with a country that makes decisions independently of Washington. If American cannot be The Uni-Power dictating to the world, better that we are all dead. At least that will show the Russians.

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2015/07/10/pentagon-concludes-america-not-safe-unless-it-conquers-the-world/

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Sequester the Empire: The Pentagon Is A Swamp Of Waste And Its Bombs/Drones A Fount Of Blowback, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on February 4, 2015 | 1 comment

From Justin Raimondo at davidstockmanscontracorner.com:

The fake debate over the misnamed “defense” budget underscores everything that’s wrong with our foreign policy, our political system, and the crooks who rule the roost in Washington.

This Washington Post piece on the politics surrounding the issue tells us everything we need to know about how the political class – and its journalistic camarilla – operates. Although the authors cite a figure – $561 billion – nowhere do we read that this is an all-time high. Yet that’s just the beginning of what’s wrong with Washington.

In any debate, one would reasonably expect the two sides to disagree, but not in this case. Both the President and his Republican opposition agree that the military budget must be radically expanded – and that the Congress needs to break its own sequestration law in order to do it. As the Post puts it:

“There’s broad consensus in both parties that the military needs more money to modernize its forces and meet its responsibilities in a world that seems to have grown more chaotic and dangerous in the past 12 months. It’s unclear, however, how Congress and the White House can come to an agreement on where to find the additional funds.”

No one in Washington is willing to admit that the rising chaos is a direct result of the US “meeting its responsibilities” to conquer Iraq, occupy Afghanistan, and undertake regime change operations in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. That’s because they all had a hand in it.

Instead of facing reality – a political no-no in the District of Columbia – an elaborate fantasy is constructed within the framework of an illusory partisan “debate.” “The battle over the budget that President Obama will submit Monday,” the Post breathlessly informs us, “is emerging as a preview of the 2016 presidential election on national security, an area that for now appears to be the greatest vulnerability of Obama and the Democrats.”

http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/sequester-the-empire-the-pentagons-a-swamp-of-waste-and-its-bombsdrones-a-fount-of-blowback/

To continue reading: Sequester the Empire: The Pentagon Is A Swamp

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Posted in Economics, Foreign Policy, Government, Military, Other Views

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