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10/18/2003



Diebold Internal Documents Banned Under DMCA :.

The ISP will fight:

Defending the right to link to controversial information about flaws in electronic voting systems, EFF announced today it will defend an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and a news website publisher against claims of indirect copyright infringement from the electronic voting machines' manufacturer.

On October 10, 2003, electronic voting company Diebold, Inc., sent a cease-and-desist letter to the nonprofit Online Policy Group (OPG) ISP demanding that OPG remove a page of links published on an Independent Media Center (IndyMedia) website located on a computer server hosted by OPG.

Diebold sent out dozens of similar notices to ISPs hosting IndyMedia and other websites linking to or publishing copies of Diebold internal memos. OPG is the only ISP so far to resist the takedown demand from Diebold.

"What topic could be more important to our democracy than discussions about the mechanics and legitimacy of electronic voting systems now being introduced nationwide?" said EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer. "EFF won't stand by as corporations like Diebold chill important online debate by churning out legal notices to ISPs that usually just take down legitimate content rather than face the legal risk."


More: Mirrors of Banned Diebold Documents

This is why we mirror early and often!

Cryptogon local

Indymedia

Scifience.net

Here's a mirror of Black Box Voting, by Bev Harris. (If it dies, let me know.) I will mirror the full text myself if it becomes necessary.

I'll add more if these go away. I doubt Diebold can manage to put this genie back in the bottle, but save local copies and prepare to mirror if necessary.





House Bill for Compulsory Military Service :.

108th CONGRESS, H. R. 163:

To provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes.





Thirty Dead After Massacre in El Alto, Bolivia :.

Armed thugs---working for U.S. corporations---were trying to steal Bolivia's fuel for export to the U.S. and Mexico. What would you do? Ask the woman pointing the rifle with the baby on her back:

In the past three days, in the city of El Alto, a prolonged confrontation between security forces and protesters resulted in thirty dead over one hundred wounded, the great majority from bullet wounds. Protesters in El Alto have been maintaining the most intense road blockades in the country for weeks, cutting off the main route to La Paz. As a result, La Paz has been experiencing a severe shortage of gasoline, food and other supplies.

The worst of the confrontations took place on Sunday, October 12, when heavily armed military and police, escorting gasoline tankers tried to pass through the blockades in Alto to get to La Paz, where the shortage of gasoline, paired with blockades, brought transportation to a standstill. The protesters in El Alto would not permit the trucks to pass through the blockades and at 10 am, the confrontation with security forces began.

The security forces, armed with high caliber weapons, indiscriminately fired on the protesters and into homes, as they circled the city in helicopters and shot into the crowds from the ground. Some protesters carried sticks and slingshots, and some of the people killed and injured were children. Of the twenty-eight people killed that day, one was a soldier, from the Charagua Regiment, indicating that army reinforcements had been shipped in from distant regions. Press coverage of the sustained violence included desperate pleas from local hospitals for blood donors and medical supplies, as they were unable to tend to the constantly growing numbers of wounded. Health care professionals begged protestors to let ambulances through the blockades. Security forces frequently transport troops, ammunition and tear gas in ambulances, creating the suspicion of the crowds.





'Beware Mad Max World of U.S.' :.

United States foreign policy would lead Australia into a "Mad Max world" where the US would shield itself behind missiles, the former prime minister, Paul Keating, said yesterday.

He criticized the US policy of pre-emptive strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he said was giving other countries the signal to walk away from multilateral agreements and treaties.

He said small nations like Australia had a vested interest in a rule-based system around multilateral agreements.

"There is every chance that the American policy will lead us into a Mad Max world, while the US seeks to cocoon itself behind a screen of national missile defence," Mr Keating told the 2003 CPA Australia congress in Melbourne.

He also warned against sole reliance on the US for security and trade. It was not a "smart policy" because China would soon eclipse the US as a superpower.





Margin: Betting the Farm and Then Some :.

I laugh at people who are long this thing. This rally is so obviously fake. I'm surprised that state and federal pigs haven't shut down the NYSE and various ECNs for racketeering. The most terrifying aspect of this rally is the almost universal belief amongst investors that the corner has been turned and that things are improving. HAHAHAHA! It's 1999 all over again! Get out the putty knife and spackle, we have to patch up the Money Honies on CNBC because NASDAQ 6000 is just around the corner! Yeee HAAA!

Or not...

The shorts will wind up having the last laugh on this swindle:

In the past three months, bullish sentiment among all classes of stock market participants has reached historic extremes.

And, the stronger the public�s confidence in stocks � the more chances they'll be willing to take to catch the surf up.

The latest craze to hit the investment community is margin debt, or borrowing cash to buy stocks.





Blood Back In Our Tanks :.

Your car could be running on gasoline made from Iraqi oil.

ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips both imported Iraqi crude to California in August, according to a filing Tuesday by the Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Energy.

The shipments mark the first time that Iraqi oil has reached California shores since the United States launched its invasion to unseat Saddam Hussein in March. It also represents a big step toward normalcy for California drivers.

Before the war, Iraq had been California's biggest source of foreign oil. It accounted for 20.1 percent of all the state's imports in 2002, or 6.09 percent of total supplies.





U.S. General: We're On a Mission from God :.

This is one of the most frightening articles ever posted on Cryptogon:

The Pentagon has given the job of hunting down and eliminating Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and other high-profile targets to a general who believes he is on a mission from God.

Lieutenant-General William "Jerry" Boykin, the new deputy under secretary of defence for intelligence, has made it clear that he sees the war on terrorism as a clash between Judeo-Christian values and Satan.

The much-decorated veteran of covert military operations also believes that radical Muslims who resort to terror are not representative of Islam and compares them to Ku Klux Klan members.

In June, General Boykin told a religious group in Oregon that radical Islamists hated the US "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian . . . and the enemy is a guy named Satan".

Of his role in the battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, he told another audience: "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

Last year, he said: "We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God, have been raised for such a time as this." He has also said of President George Bush: "He's in the White House because God put him there."





Wi-Fi Shopping Cart :.

For evildoers, the acme of skill is convincing people to imprison themselves. So, in addition to working like a slave for penury and paying 30%-40% of that income to Cheney and his pals, it's desirable to get people to utilize cutting edge technology to surveil their every move and to get them to not only do work for free, but to pay a corporation for that work. Notice how They induce the consumer to adopt this ridiculous technology. Try it, and you'll get $5 to buy more government cheese. Hmmm. I wonder how these Wi-Fi systems will stand up to portable electromagnetic pulse weapons, stun guns, hammers, bats?

The evil supermarket chains want to fire as many employees as possible. The argument goes like this:

"Employees are expensive, if we fire them, we can pass the savings on to you."

What happens is that everything keeps getting more expensive and the CEOs and the PHBs get richer while the rest of us wallow around in the muck. The technology enables the swindle:

Stop & Shop Supermarket Co., a Quincy company owned by Dutch retail giant Ahold, is the first US grocery chain to offer shoppers their own wireless computer terminals for in-store use. Since April, the company has been testing whether consumers who have accepted do-it-yourself checkout lines are ready to take the next step, and total their purchases even before they reach the payment counter.





Ethernet Network Built Out of Human Beings :.

Researchers from NTT Docomo Multimedia Labs and NTT Microsystem Integration Labs in Japan have demonstrated a 10-megabits-per-second indoor network that uses human bodies as portable ethernet cables.

The network, dubbed ElectAura-Net, is wireless, but instead of using radio waves, infrared light, or microwaves to transmit information it uses a combination of the electric field that emanates from humans and a similar field emanating from special floor tiles.

The network is faster than commercially available personal area networks like the 1-megabit-per-second Bluetooth radio wave system, and tops the 4-megabits-per-second infrared standard set by the Infrared Data Association (IrDA).

The system could eventually provide high-speed wireless communications indoors among portable electronic devices whose positions constantly change.





Classic Israeli False-Flag Op :.

Three U.S. security men died and a fourth was injured in the roadside bombing just a few kilometres inside the heavily fortified Erez crossing from Israel. The attack prompted universal loathing, and fears the three-year Palestinian intifada has boiled over from more than simply an uprising against Israel, to a war on the Americans as well.





Halliburton Accused of Overcharging for Oil :.

Imagine my shock:

A US Democratic lawmaker has accused Halliburton, the Texas oil services company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, of overcharging the government for gasoline the firm imports into Iraq.

Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), which defends its pricing as fair, has a contract with the US Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild Iraq's oil sector. This has included importing gasoline products which are in short supply to the oil-rich nation.


10/14/2003



Don't Look Down :.

I wasn't going to update because I have to run out the door, but this one needed to go up:

During the 1990's I spent much of my time focusing on economic crises around the world � in particular, on currency crises like those that struck Southeast Asia in 1997 and Argentina in 2001. The timing of such crises is hard to predict. But there are warning signs, like big trade and budget deficits and rising debt burdens.

And there's one thing I can't help noticing: a third world country with America's recent numbers � its huge budget and trade deficits, its growing reliance on short-term borrowing from the rest of the world � would definitely be on the watch list.

I'm not the only one thinking that. Lehman Brothers has a mathematical model known as Damocles that it calls "an early warning system to identify the likelihood of countries entering into financial crises." Developing nations are looking pretty safe these days. But applying the same model to some advanced countries "would set Damocles' alarm bells ringing." Lehman's press release adds, "Most conspicuous of these threats is the United States."






The Pharmaceutical "Business with Disease" :.

There is an entire industry with an innate economic interest to obstruct, suppress and discredit any information about the eradication of diseases. The pharmaceutical industry makes over one trillion dollars from selling drugs for ongoing diseases. These drugs may relieve symptoms, but they do not cure. We have to realize that the mission of this industry is to make money from ongoing diseases. The cure or eradication of a disease leads to the collapse of a multi-billion dollar market of pharmaceuticals.





Interesting Cryptogon Hit From UK Government Site

Someone at the Defense Science and Technology Labortory was reading this page and clicked on the Dead Microbiologists link.

Here's the log info:

Tue Oct 14 03 03:11:34 AM main_page www.contrarianthinker.com/Boxed Sets/CT Dealth.htm 192.5.29.10 warlock.dstl.gov.uk <--- Anyone care to light that thing up with nmap?

Hmm. For some reason, I don't feel like scanning a British Ministry of Defense machine named warlock that was looking at information about murdered microbiologists. Maybe later.





PHBs Get Secret Help in How to Find the Any Key :.

This story gave me an idea of how you guys can help contriute to Cryptogon. Refer me to PHBs that need computer help. I'll show up anywhere in Orange County or San Diego. $35 per hour, minimum of two hours. You can let your PHB know that they'll be carvin' it up in no time without having to call IT.

Do you know any small business owners who need IT help, but can't afford it? I can help them with Internet access for the entire office, LANs, file servers, firewalls, network printing, VPNs, network security audits, wireless LANs, backup, simple web sites, etc. $35 per hour, minimum of two hours. You can't beat that with a stick, unless someone figures out how to teleport Indian IT workers over here...

�YOU�D BE SURPRISED by what they don�t know,� Shaheen says. �And they�re not comfortable asking the IT person in their company because then they show weakness to their staff.�

Now that the computer revolution is over � and it�s clear the computers won � some senior executives are in the embarrassing position of being perched atop the corporate ladder without knowing their apps from their elbows.


Comments from TR

TR, a long time Cryptogon reader and contributor, comments on the state of the PHB:

I just read that news article and I was blown away. I know she's half-right. These managers don't know shit about computers. But the other half of the equation is that they don't know shit about managing a company either. I mean if you don't have the mental capacity to figure out on your own how to add an email attachment, you sure don't have the mental capacity to run a company. That's just it. Most of these companies are run by boot-licking con artists that have rat-fucked their way to the top of the pyramid. They've bamboozled people with undeserved or faked credentials. They've given snow job power-point presentations; but it's all fiction. It doesn't have to work. It just has to con people. Then they run into a REAL problem, they actually have to add an email attachment. It HAS to work for REAL. You can't fake it. And so they can't do it. But they don't want everyone else to know how grossly incompetent and stupid they are, and how they are unfit for their position of authority. And so, typical of their slimy, deceptive ways, they sneak someone in to show them some tricks so they look like they know what they're doing. These people are the absolute lowest forms of life. I'd say charge them $1000 an hour.


10/13/2003



Pump and Dump: Insiders Selling Into "Strength" :.

Since March, investors have bid up share prices almost consistently, apparently convinced that the economy is improving, corporate earnings are growing again and the market rally is real.

Corporate insiders apparently don't agree.

Stock purchases by insiders was at its lowest level in a decade during the third quarter, according to Thomson Financial, which tracks market trends.

Insider buying totaled $239 million, the lowest quarterly level since the fourth quarter of 1994.

Meanwhile, Thomson said, corporate executives combined to sell $8.7-billion worth of stock during the third quarter, the highest quarterly volume since the second quarter of 2001.

Put simply, executives disposed of $36 worth of their own stock for each $1 in purchases.






Monkeys Control Robotic Arm With Brain Implants :.

A robotic arm!? What's the big deal? A chimp already runs the Unites States:

Scientists in North Carolina have built a brain implant that lets monkeys control a robotic arm with their thoughts, marking the first time that mental intentions have been harnessed to move a mechanical object.

In the new experiments, monkeys with wires running from their brains to a robotic arm were able to use their thoughts to make the arm perform tasks. But before long, the scientists said, they will upgrade the implants so the monkeys can transmit their mental commands to machines wirelessly.

"It's a major advance," University of Washington neuroscientist Eberhard E. Fetz said of the monkey studies. "This bodes well for the success of brain-machine interfaces."






Total Information Awareness Flash Animation :.

This is pretty good. If you need Flash, get it here.





Boneheaded PSYOP: Iraq GIs' Letters to Newspapers Are Identical :.

Incredible:

Letters from hometown soldiers describing their successes rebuilding Iraq have been appearing in newspapers across the country.

And all of the letters are the same.

A Gannett News Service search found identical letters from different soldiers with the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment, also known as "The Rock," in 11 newspapers.

The five-paragraph form letter talks about the soldiers' efforts to re-establish police and fire departments and build water and sewer plants in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

It describes people waving at passing troops and children running up to shake their hands and say thank you.




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