Puppet Masters
As a followup to our report about the US government's recent illegal raid of Gibson Guitars Corp., a major US based manufacturer of musical instruments, Gibson's CEO Henry Juszkiewicz has openly announced that the US government actually advised him in a pleading that if he simply were to move his workforce to Madagascar, he could avoid his current quandary entirely.
This shocking, written admission by government agents, which was expounded upon by Juszkiewicz himself during a recent interview on KMJ AM's The Chris Daniel Show, clearly illustrates what the federal government is up to these days. By targeting a US-based company with a US-based labor force -- which is an amazing rarity in today's globalized world, by the way -- for no legitimate or legal reason, it is obvious that an ulterior motive is at work.
"Mr. Juszkiewicz, did an agent of the US government suggest to you that your problems would go away if you used Madagascar labor instead of American labor?" Daniel is quoted as asking Juszkiewicz in a recent Redstate report. After responding that the suggestion was, indeed, made in a written pleading, Juszkiewicz confirmed insinuations by the government that if Gibson would simply outsource its labor force, Juszkiewicz's problems would "go away."
The problem with US manufacturing is not that it has been shrinking - despite the "offshoring" of textile and electronics manufacturing to China, US manufacturing output rose by 3.9 per cent a year between 1997 and 2007. However productivity grew 6.8 per cent annually in the same period, so millions of jobs were lost. If manufacturing carries along the same path, McKinsey estimates that it could shed another 2.3m jobs by 2020, while the economy needs to create 21m more jobs to return to full employment. The mini-recovery in manufacturing jobs - 164,000 were added in the six months to April - recently stalled. John Gapper - Financial Times
Over time, advanced economies will need to invest in human capital, skills and social safety nets to increase productivity and enable workers to compete, be flexible and thrive in a globalized economy. The alternative is - like in the 1930s - unending stagnation, depression, currency and trade wars, capital controls, financial crisis, sovereign insolvencies, and massive social and political instability. Nouriel Roubini - Project Syndicate
A dual US-Israeli citizen working as an FBI translator was sentenced to 20 months in prison after he was caught passing on recorded conversations from FBI wiretaps of the Israeli embassy in Washington, the New York Times reported Monday. The report brings to light US efforts to spy on its allies.
The documents that were leaked included conversations with "US supporters of Israel and at least one member of Congress," the report said.
According to the Times, Shamai K. Liebowitz, a lawyer who was working as a Hebrew language translator for the FBI, passed on the sensitive information out of fears that Israel may have been planning an attack on Iran, and was aggressive in its influence of the US Congress and public opinion.
Chertoff fears 'dangerous intrusions'
Cyberattacks are the top threat to future national security, according to the former head of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Michael Chertoff.
It's well known that Chertoff, who is now the co-founder and managing principal of private security consultancy the Chertoff Group, has a healthy respect for the power of technology. Investments by the DHS during his tenure there included SBInet (known here at The Reg as the Eye-o-Sauron stare-towers); handheld lobster spy-beam scanners; and Project Hostile Intent, a non-invasive mind probe to separate the dastardly from the law-abiding.
However, Chertoff now worries that power will be used more and more often to attack financial and political systems, as we've already seen happen in Estonia and Georgia.
In April 2007, websites of the Estonian parliament, banks, ministries and the media were the victims of a number of cyberattacks while the country rowed with Russia over Soviet-era war memorials in its capital Tallinn. The following year, websites in Georgia were attacked before and during the military action with Russia. Russia denied being behind either attack and experts were unable to come up with the culprits, highlighting the difficulty of tracing many cybercrimes.
Streaming trials on the internet will help people have confidence in the British justice system, Sky News boss John Ryley claimed in an open letter to the Justice Secretary today.
Justice Secretary Ken Clarke promised to open up British courts to cameras eight months ago in a meeting with Sky, the BBC and ITN - but as yet only dealings in the Supreme Court are filmed and published online.
John Ryley, Head of Sky News, has decided to hustle Clarke along with an open letter where he states that:
"I believe that if television cameras were allowed to broadcast the remarks made by judges when they pass sentence, it would go a long way to making the process more transparent and would dramatically improve public confidence in the system."
Ryley adds a claim that Sky News's Supreme Court Live feed, which started in May 2011, gets 90,000 visitors a day. (Though obviously only when the court is in session - it's currently off till October when the legal term starts again.)
The Dutch government has revoked trust in Diginotar and released a list of over 500 fraudulent certificates issued by the hackers who broke into the company's infrastructure last month. Some of them are for the domains of the CIA, Mossad and the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
The Diginotar breach was discovered a week ago when a rogue *.google.com certificate issued by the certificate authority (CA) was used in attacks against Gmail users in Iran. The company admitted suffering an intrusion back in July which resulted in fraudulent certificates being issued for a number of domains.
The browser vendors reacted promptly by removing the Diginotar CA root certificate from their products, but kept the one for Diginotar's PKIoverheid sub-CA, which was used to sign Dutch government certificates.
The investigation into the incident is ongoing, but the security lapses identified are so serious that the Dutch minister of internal affairs announced in an urgent press conference at 1:15am on Saturday that the PKIoverheid sub-CA should no longer be trusted either.
Ever since the company's first public statement about the incident, the security community has wondered how many rogue certificates were issued and what domains were targeted. The Dutch government has now shed some light on this by releasing a list of 531 fraudulent certificates associated with Diginotar.
Foreign Ministry officials told Haaretz on Monday that over the past year, there were dozens of complaints on the part of Turkish citizens who claimed they were humiliated by Israeli security personnel at Ben-Gurion airport.
The officials also said that almost every Turkish citizen who arrives at Ben-Gurion airport undergoes a routine procedure of extensive, humiliating examinations that also include undressing to one's underwear.
"Turkish citizens are always separated from the rest of the passengers at the airport," said a Foreign Ministry official.
"When their luggage is thoroughly examined and they undergo extensive questioning they understand it comes from security needs, but when they get to the strip search part it breaks them and they are humiliated. Many Turkish businesspeople and tourists have complained about this in the past. This humiliation ceremony of Turkish citizens is a routine matter."
Recent revolutions in the Arab world and the deteriorating ties with Turkey are raising the likelihood of a regional war in the Middle East, IDF Home Front Command Chief, Major General Eyal Eisenberg warned Monday.
"It looks like the Arab Spring, but it can also be a radical Islamic winter," he said in a speech at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
"This leads us to the conclusion that through a long-term process, the likelihood of an all-out war is increasingly growing," the IDF general said.
The contents of the memorandum is undisclosed. Panos Beglitis said that the two governments are intend to cooperate closely.
The past ten years have seen the growth of a national security industrial complex that melds government and business
Charles Smith always enjoyed visiting US troops aboard. Though a civilian, he had worked for the army for decades, helping to run logistical operations from the Rock Island arsenal near Davenport, Iowa.
He helped keep troops supplied, and on trips to Iraq made a point of sitting down with soldiers in mess halls. "I would always ask them: what are we doing for you?" Smith told the Guardian.
Smith eventually got oversight of a multibillion-dollar contract the military had struck with private firm KBR, then part of the Halliburton empire, to supply US soldiers in Iraq. But, by 2004, he noticed problems: KBR could not account for a staggering $1bn (£620m) of spending.













