Astonishing Security Breach at South African Nuclear Facility
December 29th, 2007In which category does this belong?
“Stories to Scare the B-Jesus Out of You”?
“Don’t Read Before Bedtime”?
Via: Washington Post:
An underreported attack on a South African nuclear facility last month demonstrates the high risk of theft of nuclear materials by terrorists or criminals. Such a crime could have grave national security implications for the United States or any of the dozens of countries where nuclear materials are held in various states of security.
Shortly after midnight on Nov. 8, four armed men broke into the Pelindaba nuclear facility 18 miles west of Pretoria, a site where hundreds of kilograms of weapons-grade uranium are stored. According to the South African Nuclear Energy Corp., the state-owned entity that runs the Pelindaba facility, these four “technically sophisticated criminals” deactivated several layers of security, including a 10,000-volt electrical fence, suggesting insider knowledge of the system. Though their images were captured on closed-circuit television, they were not detected by security officers because nobody was monitoring the cameras at the time.
So, undetected, the four men spent 45 minutes inside one of South Africa’s most heavily guarded “national key points” — defined by the government as “any place or area that is so important that its loss, damage, disruption or immobilization may prejudice the Republic.”
Eventually, the attackers broke into the emergency control center in the middle of the facility, stole a computer (which was ultimately left behind) and breached an electronically sealed control room. After a brief struggle, they shot Anton Gerber, an off-duty emergency services officer. Gerber later explained that he was hanging around because he believed (reasonably, in retrospect) that his fiancée — a site supervisor — was not safe at work. Although badly injured, Gerber triggered the alarm, setting off sirens and lights and alerting police stationed a few miles away.
Nevertheless, the four escaped, leaving the facility the same way they broke in.
Amazingly, at the same time those four men entered Pelindaba from its eastern perimeter, a separate group of intruders failed in an attempt to break in from the west. The timing suggests a coordinated attack against a facility that contains an estimated 25 bombs’ worth of weapons-grade nuclear material. On Nov. 16, local police arrested three suspects, ranging in age from 17 to 28, in connection with this incident.
In response to the successful attack, the South African Nuclear Energy Corp. suspended six Pelindaba security personnel, including the general manager of security, and promised an “internal investigation which will cover culpability, negligence and improvements of Security Systems.” It should be noted that Pelindaba’s security was considered to have been upgraded after a break-in there two years ago (one individual was detained shortly after breaching the security fence).
It is still unclear why the two groups of intruders sought to break into this particular facility.
(Love the new pic (massive US military vehicle safeguarding the poppies), btw!)
From the Post piece: “Such a crime could have grave national security implications for the United States or any of the dozens of countries where nuclear materials are held in various states of security.”
It’s so neat to look into a world that has completely banished the idea the western, first world nation states themselves could engage in this type of activity, i.e., stealing nuclear material for some nefarious purpose. It is the world subscribed to by the Post, the Times and the rest of the gateway media, in which, for instance, the CIA is merely an intelligence gathering agency, and the good of the people is the first and foremost priority of our “public servants”. It is great to live in a time where more and more people see that if this is considered premier journalism, then the adventures of Dick and Jane should be considered premier literature.
That is why H.R. 1955/S.R. 1959 (which, of course, weren’t even a blip in the msm) represent probably the most dangerous legislation initiated during the Bush II years. And that, as we all know, is saying a lot.
Yes, the current Afghan banner is the best image to grace the top of Cryptogon by at least an order of magnitude — if not much more. The image of Ben’s helicopter hijinx, as fitting as the portrayal might have been, just doesn’t have the memetic impact of this top-notch replacement.
“In which category does this belong?
1. Stories to Scare the B-Jesus Out of You?
2. Don’t Read Before Bedtime?”
I’m going to go with the answer behind door number 3, Monty: “Stories I’ve been expecting for some time now to see more often in the press”.
The “necessary crackdown” drumbeat has been thumping along at or above 120 b.p.m. since that day in late 2001, and I’ve been wondering aloud for some years now how long it would take for the assymetric “infrastructure wars” that’ll be used to sell it to surface in the popular press.
First, we’re tweaked with the threat of a possibility. The “soft-sell”. Followed by much official hand-wringing and quotes from high-flying security experts like Bruce Schneier. The “hard sell”. Of course, actual planning and preparations have been underway for years. Eventually, news of zombie attacks begins to navigate its way slowly to the surface, until one day we say “hello” to the story waving “goodbye” to the world we all thought we were born into, except for the few who learned their way out of the matrix and sought safer ground.
Conditioning is a slow, methodical process, at which the Tavistock set and their ilk have increasingly excelled for several decades now. Those responsible for maintaining the thin skin, the appearance of normality, atop the always bubbling cauldron of highly-refined newspeak in today’s society are the very media barons our favorite scaly Rockefeller scion thanks for their cooperation in keeping the CFR agendas in the kitchen cabinet, out of signt and out of mind.
I see this story as marking yet another stepping stone along the not-so-circuitous path to justifying security checkpoints in the “Homeland”, walled cities (or countries) and the tagging and/or full-time tracking of populations, coming soon via large-scale beta testing with farm animals, justifying the ongoing rural “wireless” build-out. And as our “nutty” compatriot points out, the passage of yet another piece of legislation seemingly written by Zamyatin himself.
The dissent window is closing in America. I could already feel the chill winds when I was still stateside sorting out the details of our impending departure back in 2002. Of course, in reality, what I was sensing tangibly in a very personal way at that point was never unique to my time. The grand circus in which we’re all expected to happily participate has been performing almost non-stop throughout the course of human history.
What’s changed — and what makes the present so truly scary to this dissident mind — is the sheer scale of the controlling technology being unleashed upon the planet by its taskmasters. What we are actually allowed to see of this technology trumpeted in the press is the marketing campaign, advertising “safety” and “security” for everyone who plays team ball.
On the surface, much of what is used as progress fodder for the lemmings who truly believe in the ambivalence and fairness of the popular press often turns out to have nefarious intentions. Meanwhile, in the deepest, darkest realms of DARPA defense research, the emotionally-stunted dwarves we think of as “regular people” continue to proudly perfect some atomized fragment or another of Moloch’s latest dental work — without the slightest consideration of who and what he might be chewing on next.
For all of our high-minded independent thought, we remain socialized animals with a strong herd instinct. Those who can’t/don’t/won’t recognize any reality outside the comprehensive model so thoughfully provided by our loving government will likely suffer a similar fate to the bird that flew right in front of and under our vehicle last week as I was driving home from the weekly supply run into town. Tragic, ignominious death.
…or perhaps worse.
Life as one of billions of expendable cogs under The Shield, cowering in carefully programmed fear between doses of the (orexin A) “work meds” provided by the Company.
Is it just me, or does it feel like we’re living a waking dream inside an apocalyptic Ursula K. LeGuin novel?
For what it’s worth, I also have a curious item I thought worth passing along.
As a regular viewer of George Ure’s “Urban Survival” website, I grow ever more curious about the semantic approach of the “time monks” he often refers to in his daily reports. What really gets my attention is the concept they’ve put into action, which occured to me back in 2003 or so: sampling and modeling the semantic trends in our contemporary digital hyperspace, mining the data fed to the global head for trends and patterns.
Are you aware of these guys efforts, Kevin?
Are you aware of these guys efforts, Kevin?
I remember hearing about that project several years ago. This webbot thing:
http://urbansurvival.com/simplebots.htm
Having worked on several black box projects related to the stock market, my guess was that those guys would not be able to produce a single piece of actionable intelligence with their approach.
I’m not saying that there isn’t weird phenomena out there, but it’s really slippery. The harder you try to focus and quantify shit like this, the more diffuse and vague it becomes.
You might have already seen my response to a reader’s email about the gold call I put out recently.
https://cryptogon.com/?p=1796
Same thing. * shrug shoulders * There’s weird stuff out there. No doubt about it.
There’s a google tool anyone can use to observe meme saturation over time. It’s interesting stuff.
http://www.google.com/trends
Maybe .mil/.gov has a way of excluding the influence of crap culture and media induced noise. That would be critical. You’d have to have some kind of structured set of popculture memes to exclude from the tasking package. Otherwise, how do you know that you’re not just picking up on some crap that millions of idiots saw on a TV show the night before?
Hmm.
Actually, internally, google has the capability to spot semantic weirdness appearing out of the ether.
Look at the lower part of the graph on their Trends thing. It plots news reference volume.
In a few minutes, a program could be written that would look for spikes in searches for terms with no corresponding increase in news story references.
They could also load, say, recent closed captioning data into their system to create the right mass idiot base line. For example: Say some popular TV show runs an episode about nuclear weapons. Google’s all seeing eye tool would expect to see some rise in nuclear weapon related searches. But what about a large spike in nuclear weapon related searches, outside of the established moving averages that consider stimuli from mass media, etc…
Hmm.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/6135736.stm
Also
Sibel Edmonds of “Kill the Messenger” fame also hinted at South Africa in weapons and nuclear trading.
Re the wanting to “stole a computer”?
Whats on it? Past names, present names of workers?
Software for – long-term environmental monitoring 🙂
A “safe” storage site might have the history/back up of past projects? Vela Incident/Operation Phenix?
Anything of any real use should be dismantled during verification at the state level.
While I agree 100% about the level of “actionable” intel, in terms of specifics, I remain attracted by the methodology and the distinct lack of claims to be predicting the future. My thinking remains focused on the predictive possibilities such data mining efforts might afford, in an era where the vast majority of “news” and “information” originate with — or are funneled through — institutionalized sources.
Indeed, the very “bots” article you linked to at Urban Survival clearly states that THEY are still trying to get their heads around what sorts of meaning might be nested in the vast data sets that their aggregation processes creates. Even lacking such “actionable” specifics, I find that their approach resonates with my own instinctive sensibilities.
As you have also said, in our position the odds of securing real, hard data pertaining to world-shaping events — and those who make a living orchestarting them as best they can — are between slim and none. So, if there are serious programming types out there with the coding capabilities to crack open a semantic window offering even the occasional glimpse at the outlines and shadows moving surreptitiously behind the veil, that strikes me as better than nothing whatsoever.
Since it is difficult to form a clear picture of the big game and the big lies that make it go ’round based on available sources, I’m all for anyone who might happen to be turning the tables on the technocrats. The very idea of using data mining tools and techniques ultimately designed for regimentation, standardization and control to undermine and/or subvert those very forces brings a Sun Tzu smile to my face.
It is, after all, much harder to shock someone who has already mentally prepared themselves for the arrival of said shock. The long-established and well-organized use of shock as a socio-political tool was most recently demonstrated in Naomi Klein’s latest, “Shock Doctrine”. As is usually the case with prominent anti-establishment types, though I mention her work affirmatively here, like other key figures Klein ultimately fails my baseline credibility test by her key avoidance of certain themes.
Though the sentiment I am about to express aligns me with folks I am not at all certain I like being aligned with ideologically, I feel that Klein falls into the “gatekeeper” category much like Mr. Chomsky. She feeds the intellectual needs of those who form what would be the truly dangerous set — if they were thinking everything through for themselves and then pursuing their individual epiphanies as a call to group action. Sadly, I have similar doubts about Mr. Palast.
This may be easily-won cynicism shining through, but I have never stopped thinking of the “left” establishment as anything but bought and paid for since high school (’81-’84), as my awareness of the world grew large enough to support such conclusions. The bulk of these so-called dissidents of the “left” would have us misdirect our anger at the “right”, successfully playing the divide & conquer game, even as they act in what many believe is a sincere fashion.
Who’s a shill and who isn’t? While we may never know for certain with folks like Chomsky or Klein, my outlook hasn’t relied on their ilk for anything other than on-scene reportage for over twenty years. Like Kucinich and Paul, their long-standing paid position within the system compromises them in my eyes. Marks them as “not dangerous enough”, if you will. The truly dangerous, those who lift the veil and describe to the outsiders what they see, are not usually Long for this world.
Is every dissident with a prominent voice in the media consciously bought and paid for? I doubt it. But the still-advertised fallacy that they are offering us objective opinion, untainted by influences beyond their own system of understanding and thought, is one of the great triumphs of the twentieth century propagandists, at least equal in scope and scale to the “government vs. corporations” fallacy. Anyone who’s delved even slighty beneath the surface of history knows that one side is funding everybody. It all comes down using any and all means required to maintain the appearance of dissent — and therefore the illusion of “democracy” — in the single-minded pursuit of empire.
However, I do suspect that many of the compromised individuals are unconsciously or subconsciously aware of what they are doing and who they are ultimately doing it for; an expense account and the creature comforts afforded by a sizeable and steady paycheck, not to mention the prestige of position, goes a long way towards convincing all but the most crochety of intellectuals and individualists that maybe working for the empire ain’t so bad after all.
So, while the time monks could be pulling my leg, it doesn’t feel that way. The prognostication data doesn’t appear to serve any agenda beyond that of individual choice. In this day and age, that’s something. For what it’s worth, I haven’t subscribed to their program as yet.
In the end, we must remember that in the balance we are all in this both together AND separately, and that objectivity is like perfection; an unattainable myth. This myth is used to sell us ll manner of ideas, including the concept of “objective” journalism. When viewed as the detached utopian/dystopian construction it is, one begins to realize that much more than our physical health has been damaged by the planet’s industrial monsters and the vast bureaucracies that feed their blackened souls.
I just wanted to say that I recently glanced at my daughter’s junior college “Organized Crime” textbook and noticed that nuclear theft is a common crime and that underground trade in nuclear material is as common as underground trade in drugs, children, and weapons. No need to panic–at least no more need to panic than, say, the dodo bird needed to panic back when it was still around to panic.