Big Brother Running Amok: NSA/GCHQ Hack Huge SIM Card Producer

Stories of the NSA drive to in the words of retired boss General Keith Alexander “Collect It All”, have lately gone the way of “Deflategate” in the mainstream media but Big Brother never sleeps. We all need to understand that we live in the waning days of having any expectation of privacy and it is only a matter of time until big government is trying to get at what is inside our skulls too. This week there were two major reports of what the secret police have been up to yet the domestic media has largely stayed focused on the political rat race and various and sundry celebrity tales. This failure to engage in serious investigative journalism is exactly why guys like Brian Williams are able to land multi-million dollar jobs as the gatekeepers in the McNews industry.

The story with the most far reaching consequences is the allegation that the NSA and their counterparts across the pond in jolly old England - GCHQ - hacked into the world’s largest provider of SIM cards. Those are those little things inside everyone’s smartphones that allow for the protection of private data when communicating and engaging in financial transactions. Billions of cellphones worldwide could possibly be affected by this massive breach of encryption - maybe even yours.

As reported by Reuters in the story “NSA, British spies hack Gemalto to tap mobile calls: Intercept”:

Digital security company Gemalto NV was hacked by American and British spies to steal encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications, news website Intercept reported, citing documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The hack by the National Security Agency (NSA) and UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) allowed the agencies to monitor a large portion of voice and data mobile communications around the world without permission from governments and telecom companies, according to the report.

A GCHQ spokesperson said the agency did not comment on intelligence matters. NSA could not be immediately reached for comment.

Gemalto makes smart chips for mobile phones, bank cards and biometric passports and counts Verizon and AT&T Inc among its 450 wireless network provider customers around the world.

The hack story was broken by the website The Intercept in a huge expose entitled “The Great SIM Heist:  How Spies Stole The Keys To The Encryption Castle” which is a long and detailed piece that is well worth the time spent reading it. Many will of course dismiss this out of hand because the documents about the hacking were provided by former government contractor turned NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden who is a controversial figure to put it mildly. However, in the days of a rogue government and the Obama regime’s ongoing war on journalists and whistleblowers it takes bold action to expose the scale of government criminality.

The other story, which is easily dismissed because it can simply be denounced as Putin propaganda is that of Russian computer security firm Kaspersky identifying the ability to embed spyware deep inside computer hard drives. According to the Reuters story “Russian researchers expose breakthrough U.S. spying program”:

The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.

That long-sought and closely guarded ability was part of a cluster of spying programs discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker that has exposed a series of Western cyberespionage operations.

Kaspersky said it found personal computers in 30 countries infected with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria. The targets included government and military institutions, telecommunication companies, banks, energy companies, nuclear researchers, media, and Islamic activists, Kaspersky said.

The firm declined to publicly name the country behind the spying campaign, but said it was closely linked to Stuxnet, the NSA-led cyberweapon that was used to attack Iran's uranium enrichment facility. The NSA is the agency responsible for gathering electronic intelligence on behalf of the United States.

A former NSA employee told Reuters that Kaspersky's analysis was correct, and that people still in the intelligence agency valued these spying programs as highly as Stuxnet. Another former intelligence operative confirmed that the NSA had developed the prized technique of concealing spyware in hard drives, but said he did not know which spy efforts relied on it.

NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines declined to comment.

These stories are perfect examples of how the surveillance industrial complex has run amok and will continue to do so until lawmakers do their jobs. Our elected 'representatives' should subject the NSA to the type of rigorous oversight needed to prevent the ongoing digital rampage. The spooks and data vampires whose activities are funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars are not only gutting the Constitution but doing immense and irreparable damage to American tech businesses, especially in the new era of cloud computing.

Silicon Valley high-rollers understand this too and have been highly critical of the potential financial damage to their industries and have taken their concerns directly to Emperor Barack Obama himself. But Obama is a defender of the status quo and there will be no effort to reign in the data grabbers and snoopers on his watch. Don't look for it from Jeb Bush either if he is the next one to sit on the throne, especially since he just defended his brother's mass surveillance programs that "keep us safe".

One day Americans will be made to face the consequences of their complicity in allowing the wolves to be the ones charged with guarding the hen house and that day is rapidly approaching.

High Crimes and Hogwash

President Barack Obama just did what he does best which is to piss down the backs of Americans and tell them that it is raining. Fresh off one hell of a week of his spree of smacking close associates of the newest "New Hitler" Vladimir Putin with sanctions, hyping the Russian military presence on the border of Ukraine as though were the Wehrmacht itself and for good measure kicking the Russians out of G8 our vainglorious leader shifted to the NSA.  With much pomp and circumstance Obama has proposed ending the bulk collection of telephone data by the government with a yet to be explained set of "reforms" to the existing electronic dragnet. In a statement that bordered on sheer parody El Presidente spoke of winning back trust over the now fully integrated massive surveillance machine which he and his Democratic party water carriers and legions of authoritarian right-wing hacks have so ardently defended despite the flagrantly un-American and illegal nature of the programs. 

It is a lie of course. The phone metadata is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg and Obama and the rest of the criminals in Congress would make that deal in a second to “end” it all and start to close the lid on the Pandora's Box of high crimes and misdemeanors that former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden threw open. What Americans should be really concerned about though is that they are collecting content as well, note the recent story that the NSA was recording all calls in an unnamed country (more than likely numerous countries including this one) for future retrieval and playback. Welcome to Precrime with the "crime" as yet to be defined by the corrupt gangster state that has taken root in The Homeland. The metadata is just a pea in the shell game and what is really the problem is the content. What about the emails, webcam videos, purchase transactions, financial information, political affiliations, three hop relational query results etc. The NSA and other intelligence services both foreign and domestic as well as their millions strong army of top secret clearance carrying contractors employed within the surveillance state Gomorrah are collecting it all.

This latest new way of doing things is just more of Obama’s standard horseshit, just like all of that false hope and chump change that the Teflon coated snake oil salesman peddled during his initial run for office. He is lying as surely as Bill Clinton did when wiggling his finger in the faces of Americans and denying having had “sex” with that woman or George W. Bush about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction or Poppy about "read my lips". But the game is rigged, none of the hypocritical asshole Republicans will call him on it either nor has any of this NSA surveillance ever ended up as the subject of one of Darrell Issa's grand inquisitions. The GOP and the demographics that they pander to despite their parroting of the talking points actually love big government when it comes to war, passing laws to discriminate and the use of the police state to spy upon and punish their long list of enemies. They choose instead to wage doomed rushes at windmills like exposing Obamacare as a some communist form of conquest replete with “death panels” or squealing like stuck pigs about the Benghazi hoax. The man’s head is on the block here with these high crimes over the NSA unconstitutional spying and none of those rotten chickenshit bastards will wield the ax. That shows exactly how far that we have descended into the trench of a star-spangled banana republic populated largely by liars, idiots, Jesus freaks and lemmings. The real regime change needs to take place in Washington and it needs to be a complete enema of the entire fucking system that does not discriminate between the asinine my team vs your team ongoing scrum between Team Red Elephant and Team Blue Jackass that keeps the rest of Americans on the sidelines.

The puffy, squawking degenerate who is gerrymandered into East Lansing as snug as a blood-sucking tick has his own bill to “reform” the NSA and guess what? It is just one more step closer to full blown fascism. This guy will never be satisfied until everyone in America is under constant surveillance and just whiling away their time until the black vans roll. People in Mr. Roger’s neighborhood, the Eighth Congressional district in Michigan have been sticking it to the rest America for over fourteen years now and will surely return this sick pathological liar to office once again in November.  It would be too much to ask the high-rolling America haters who are Congressman Rogers’ actual constituents to actually stand up for what is right for the country instead of their own selfish asses and hit the flush button on this turd, not only from office but more importantly from his exalted position of Grand Poobah of the House Intelligence Committee.

Rogers’ malodorous bill with the obligatory Orwellian name of the “End Bulk Collection Act is being foisted off as a “bi-partisan” effort being that it is co-sponsored by Democratic party Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland. What is conveniently left out is that good ole Dutch happens to preside over the very district that includes the Fort Meade headquarters of the NSA Stasi, a hive of scum and villainy if there ever were one. Note that the only time that true “bipartisanship” occurs is when it comes to sticking an ungreased broomstick up the asses of powerless Americans  and then breaking it off.  The very act that a man like Mike Rogers is able to lord it over the entire country with only the true backing of a minuscule fraction of the national population to whom he delivers the bacon calls into question the very concept of American democracy itself. As the legendary  H.L. Mencken once put it: “Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven” and the thorough collapse of the American political system as a functional entity shows the wisdom of his words. We currently reside in a land where the scum has truly risen and where 49 percent of the populace could be stripped of all of their rights, property and liberty by 51 percent – of whom are primarily the same sort of low-information, mean-spirited, bigoted dumbasses who send forth miscreants like Mike Rogers as their local warlord to shit upon the tens of millions of voters who had absolutely no say so in the matter. Just stick a fork in the ass of American "democracy", at the end it is truly not much more legitimate than the un-elected gaggle of rabble that was just installed in Ukraine.  The obvious blind spot of such a concept is that it fails to account for either a thoroughly corrupt political class nor a population that is to be kind largely comprised of willfully ignorant slobs whose idea of “democracy” is Dancing With the Stars or American Idol. 

We get the government that we deserve.