[The Cipher Brief] The man who was Edward Snowden’s boss when the National Security Agency (NSA) leaker fled the United States is now speaking out about his experiences and how to counter insider threats.
Steven Bay, who served as Snowden’s boss when he worked as a NSA contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton from April 1 to May 20, 2013, told The Cipher Brief he has decided to publicly discuss his brief time working with the NSA leaker to fill out a "gap in the history" and combat what he calls a wealth of "misinformation that’s out there."
Along with his recent departure from Booz Allen Hamilton, Bay said the release this week of Oliver Stone’s "Snowden" movie also served as a spur to discuss his time with Snowden.
Bay was speaking Tuesday at the Rock Stars of Cybersecurity conference in Seattle. Speaking to The Cipher Brief he detailed how companies can "protect themselves from both your average employee with no ill-intent as well as your malicious insider." As Snowden showed, Bay said, "the insider threat is real," and although it is rarer, a malicious actor working within a company has the potential to do "far more damage" than an external hacker.
"I wanted to not only be able to tell the story, but apply it to what companies can do to protect themselves," Bay said of his presentation on Tuesday. Businesses need to accept that they can never be totally protected from rogue employees, but Bay said he wanted to highlight that there are a few technical solutions that can help.
Digitally classifying data and tracking its movement, employing network monitoring and building rule sets that send alerts when classified data leaves the network, and blocking file sharing websites that are not specifically approved by the company are three ways to help deal with the challenge of an insider threat, according to Bay. Offering training programs and being open with employees about cybersecurity and malicious activity are also key to helping staffers stay vigilant, he noted.
Bay said he started his career with the Air Force, working as a Persian-Farsi linguist and network intelligence analyst through 2007. He then moved over to Booz Allen Hamilton as a contractor doing intelligence analysis for the NSA in Maryland until 2011, at which point he moved to Hawaii to lead the work there. During that time, he hired Snowden.
Bay said his official title was "lead associate," and he was a network intelligence analyst. There were about 10-13 people on his Booz Allen team in Hawaii, including Snowden, according to Bay, and "we were spread throughout the agency, the facility, with different NSA teams and missions, doing different work."
[PJ] Yesterday, two witnesses who worked for Platte River Networks, the Colorado-based firm that managed the Clinton server after Hillary left the State Department, pleaded the Fifth before the House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing titled "Examining Preservation of State Department Records."
In March of 2015, Paul Combetta and Bill Thornton deleted Clinton's archives even though they were aware of a court order and a congressional subpoena to preserve the records.
The House Oversight and Reform Committee on Tuesday released an email dated August 19, 2015, that was sent between Platte River Networks employees. The email expressed deep concern over the destruction of the records.
Republican Congressman Jim Jordan pulled up the email during the hearing and said it was from either Combetta or Thornton.
The email expressed a keen desire for documentation of Clinton's deletion requests and a sense that maybe they had bitten off more than they could chew when they won the contract to manage Clinton's server.
"Wondering how we can sneak an email in now after the fact asking them when they told us to cut the backups and have them confirm it for our records. Starting to think this whole thing is really covering up a lot of shaddy (sic) sh*t," the worried employee wrote.
[FOX] After German authorities arrested three Syrian migrants suspected of being ISIS members, Lt. Col Ralph Peters [Ret.] discussed the fallout and the ongoing battle against Islamic extremism on the Intelligence Report.
"They’re taking advantage of Germany’s open borders--two days after [Berlin] warned there were 500 ISIS," Trish Regan told Peters.
"There certainly could be...a whole lot more," Peters said.
The three suspected terrorists were arrested in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, along the Danish border.
"Immigration can be a good thing. It’s like water running through the kitchen sink--but you don’t want a flood coming through the window," he said.
"[Chancellor] Angela Merkel briefly opened up the borders [which was] a gift to ISIS and other Islamic groups...and [the terrorists] were able to blend in with the refugees, despite coming in through the Balkans."
"[Americans] have every right and legitimate need to know who enters [our] country--it’s a no-brainer--the terrorists won’t give up."
Superb Guardian hand-wringing about the recent elections in Croatia that changed nothing, removed no one, and changed the course of the country not a jot, which means that fascism is once again landing on the poor land...
Posted by: Steve White ||
09/14/2016 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[17 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Shortly following the incipient crack-up of Yugoslavia that followed the death of Tito, many of the most vicious members of the "Ustashi", a Croatian murderous fascist Movement outlawed after 1945, made their way from asylum in South America to the homeland. Those Ustashi, notorious in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil for their anti-Serb, anti-Semite and pro-fascist ideology blended quite well in post-Yugoslavia Croatia. And the remnants of the Ustashi remains entrenched to this date.
[Breitbart] Following up a Donald Trump assassination joke on Saturday, liberal talk show host Bill Maher said Monday that he would rather vote for a "dead" Hillary Clinton over her Republican challenger Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
In a tweet Monday afternoon, the host of HBO’s Real Time dismissed concerns about Clinton’s newly diagnosed pneumonia, arguing that he’d prefer a deathly ill Clinton to what he called the "tangerine nightmare" of Trump.
#11
If Mahar would be honest, he'd say he would vote for Jill Stein or Atison Seiuli.
I find it fascinating this statement. TV we now expect to put another story onto the Tower of Babble, but Mahar is supposedly of the smart set, and he winnows, "Vote for Zombie Hillary."
[DAWN] The Cultural Revolution came to an end in 1976 with Mao’s demise but by then the book had already been translated into over 20 languages in 117 countries.
The book was a consequence of a power tussle in the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC). On the one side of the wrangle were pragmatists who had criticised some of Mao’s sweeping economic policies which had caused famine and mass starvation in China’s countryside. On the other end of the tussle were those who had accused the ’lingering presence of the bourgeoisie and feudal mindset in the country’ for ’sabotaging’ Mao’s communist initiatives.
Mao was the main ideologue and architect of China’s 1949 communist revolution. But in 1960 during a large CPC convention he was almost sidelined by the party. However by 1962 he had managed to return to the fore and regain control of the CPC. He launched a purge and ousted hundreds of CPC members who he believed were ’counter-revolutionaries’. It was during this period that the Little Red Book first appeared.
The book contains hundreds of quotes culled from Mao’s writings, lectures and speeches. These quotes cover various ideological, economic and social issues, commented on by Mao in the framework of how he understood Marxism-Leninism in the context of Chinese culture and polity, and also of the revolution in general.
In 1966 during a session of the CPC supporters of Mao insisted that counter-revolutionaries had infiltrated the party and state institutions. They said that the only way to identify them was through ’the telescope and microscope of the Mao Tse-tung thought.’
It was decided that a cultural revolution will be launched to completely eradicate the ’counter-revolutionary mindset’. Soon after, Mao and his supporters willingly allowed large groups of young Chinese students and youth to begin undermining the authority of state institutions and enact an anarchic and fanatical reign of terror in which teachers, professors, doctors, actors, authors, civil servants and sometimes even one’s own parents were beaten up and publicly humiliated by gangs of youth. These young Chinese went around doing this while profusely mouthing quotes from the book.
Millions of Chinese men and women perished in the chaos. All of them were accused of being counter-revolutionaries after being tried in spontaneous ’peoples courts’ through ’the telescope and the microscope of the Mao Tse-tung Thought’ (basically the Little Red Book).
China plunged into anarchy. But it was madness engineered from the top of the CPC hierarchy where Mao sat navigating the cleansing of the Chinese society.
Once he was able to use the chaos to oust his possible rivals in the party and drown the memory of his disastrous economic policies, he suddenly brought in the powerful Chinese military and sent thousands of his fanatical followers to the countryside to work on farms. Thus the Cultural Revolution began to lose its intensity from the early 1970s and came to a complete halt when Mao passed away in 1976.
By 1980, leaders damned and ousted by the Cultural Revolution were brought back into the party fold. The Little Red Book that had fuelled the imagination and ambitions of so many revolutionaries in the 1960s and 1970s came to be seen as a lethal instrument of propaganda and after the end of the Cold War, a curious ideological artefact of a bygone age.
In Pakistain, the book had first arrived in 1967. It was translated into Urdu and thousands of copies were distributed by the Chinese embassy between 1968 and 1973.
What I have with me is an English version of the book but which was printed in China in 1966. A late friend of mine, Irfan Malik, had gifted it to me in 1986, when both of us were young Marxist pretenders.
The book belonged to Irfan’s father who bought it in 1966 after a trip to China. Since his father had gone on to become a successful businessman, Irfan believed that the book would look better sitting on my bookshelf!
The book was initially inspired by History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a propaganda textbook that was widely published and distributed in the Soviet Union in the 1940s. It was largely based on the thoughts and theories of Soviet communist dictator, Joseph Stalin. It was also translated into Chinese and a copy of it had landed in the hands of Mao while he was leading communist forces in pre-Revolution China. Though the publication of the book was halted after Stalin’s death in 1953, it was kept in circulation in China by Mao.
The Little Red Book in turn inspired Libyan dictator Muammar Qadaffy ...a reminder that a single man with an idea can change an entire nation, usually for the worse... to author his Green Book in 1975 in which he presented his theories on Islam and Socialism. Just as the Red Book had become compulsory reading in China (till 1976), Qadaffy’s book became compulsory reading in Libya. In fact it remained so till the fall of his regime in 2011.
In 1974 the PPP published Quotations of Chairman Bhutto, a book containing quotes of Z.A. Bhutto on democracy, socialism and Pak nationalism. I have this book too but I don’t think it would fetch 13,000 dollars today.
A colleague of mine advised me to put my copy of the Red Book for sale on eBay. I told him I found that to be a rather distasteful idea. But only until he emailed me a picture of a portrait of Mao nonchalantly hanging inside a McDonald’s restaurant in Beijing. Oh, well, in that case ...
Posted by: Fred ||
09/14/2016 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[27 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
I had a copy in my student days. About as perceptive as what you find inside fortune cookies.
#2
On the Cultural Revolution, one of the most chilling books ever written on Mao's purge, or on Communism in general, is "Life and Death in Shanghai" by Nien Cheng.
#7
What phil_b said. Mr. Wife brought home a copy from a trip to China in the late '90s -- picked up from a street vender alongside the knock-off designer purses. A Taiwanese friend leafed through it one day and burst out laughing.
"It's written in the level of a five year old," she said, which explains why all the quotes I've seen sounded deficient instead of profound.
[DAWN] A CONSPIRACY theory claims the mainstream account of a major incident is deliberately misleading and that the incident was actually planned by powerful forces to undermine common people’s interests.
The key difference between unearthing a conspiracy, eg, Watergate, and a conspiracy theory is evidence. In the former, brave souls take much risk to collect evidence ultimately accepted by authorities. But the latter are the result of armchair analysis and never produce concrete evidence.
Rather, conspiracy theories thrive on finding minor gaps in mainstream accounts, blowing them out of proportion to claim they are false and providing an alternative conspiracy-based account. They rely on raising doubts that go beyond the realms of reasonable doubt.
Ironically, while subjecting mainstream accounts to endless tests of logic and evidence, conspiracy theorists fail to subject their own account to the same rigour. Finding minor anomalies in mainstream accounts is seen as sufficient by itself to not only disprove it but to also automatically prove alternative accounts. Such theories rely heavily on motivational analysis by claiming that if an entity benefits significantly from a negative incident this in itself is sufficient proof that it must have caused it. This is like arguing that if a husband inherits the wealth of a murdered woman he should be convicted for her murder without the need for further evidence!
But why do so many people become conspiracy theorists? Firstly, claiming to have inside news absent in mainstream media helps people project importance and smartness. Secondly, for powerless people smarting from the unfairness of daily lives, spreading conspiracy theories helps in relieving anger.
However, ars longa, vita brevis... individual needs may not be the most important causes behind conspiracy theories today. They also serve powerful institutional interests. Thus, many such theories are deliberately spread by national spy agencies to further national security and foreign policies, as common in Pakistain and many other places. Fortunately for conspiracy theorists, analytical skills are so weak among so many even educated people that they blindly accept conspiracy theories without reviewing the evidence against mainstream, and for alternative, accounts. Such theories find a ready audience since they claim to reveal the hidden agendas of powerful, evil forces working against weaker people.
Thus, they have a certain populist appeal for people living under unfair political systems. They create the illusion of empowering common people, for unearthing hidden agendas could become the basis for ultimately defeating them. Finally, conspiracy theories also liven up social events by providing fun stories full of intrigue to discuss as a way of digesting a heavy meal.
These antecedents are vividly on display in the mother of all conspiracy theories in recent times, ie, the 9/11 one which continues to thrive even on the 15th anniversary of 9/11. There are various versions of it, some blaming CIA, some Israel, some both; others portraying Al Qaeda as a US pawn.
Thus, the first giveaway clue of a conspiracy theory is the lack of a clear, consistent and coherent story. The theory claims to rely on expert opinion that flying planes cannot destroy massive structures like the World Trade Centre. But who the experts are is rarely revealed.
Probing often reveals that the expert is the nephew of the friend of an uncle who is into constructing small plazas. But skyscraper construction and demolition is such a specialised field that even many qualified civil engineers may not know about it sufficiently to disprove the mainstream 9/11 account, let alone builders of small plazas. I have yet to see a detailed, quantitative treatise which conclusively disproves the mainstream 9/11 account.
Finally, the theory relies on irrelevant motivational analysis by pointing to the massive increase in US power globally after 9/11 and its attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. It defies logic to say that the US, a global hegemon which has repeatedly attacked smaller countries without provocation, would suddenly have to kill 3,000 of its citizens, that too Wall Street elites, to justify attacking others.
Such faulty logic leads to the ridiculous conclusion that the army arranged the APS attack since its powers have increased so much since then. Ironically, the massive recent leaks the US has suffered have unearthed no clues related to the supposed 9/11 conspiracy!
Posted by: Fred ||
09/14/2016 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[18 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
#1
I'm reminded of a saying in scientific circles.
'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.'
Rather topically illustrated by the many who were denouncing the 'conspiracy theories' about HRC's health, right up to the point she has a seizure and collapses.
And that evidence came from a random passerby who happened to take a video.
BLUF: [PJ] ...... in Imperial Hubris, Scheuer wrote:
At this point in history, we need worry little about the threat of an offensive and expansionist jihad meant to conquer new lands for Islam and convert create new democrats peoples to the faith (page 7).
Really?
Tell that to the terrorized non-Muslims and non-Sunnis -- Christians, Yazidis, Druze, Shia -- who have been enslaved, raped, slaughtered, even burned and buried alive as the caliphate expanded into their territories over the last couple of years.
All of this was enabled by the West's embrace of the tragically false "grievance" theory. Enbrace? The theory was given birth here.
The "grievance" theory was the cause of abysmal policies meant to pacify aggrieved Muslims, such as wholesale support for the "Arab Spring," which saw the Obama administration turn its back on 30-year-long allies such as Egypt’s secular dictator Mubarak.
The"grievance" theory is partially responsible for why, a decade after the U.S. started bringing "freedom and democracy" to this and that Muslim nation -- Iraq, Egypt, Libya, ongoing in Syria -- specifically by ousting secular dictators experienced at suppressing jihadis, all the most powerful and freedom-loving nation in the world has to show for our efforts is the creation of the Islamic State.
Even so, the impervious hubris continues!
Instead of accepting the hard fact that Islamic hostility is a product of Islamic teachings, U.S. President Obama continues invoking the "grievance" meme concerning ISIS. What could one expect from a lifelong community organizer ?
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that it’s important to:
... [show] respect even for one’s enemies, trying to understand and insofar as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view.
Clinton said this at Georgetown University, which is fitting. Scheuer, who did not have to wait for our "grandson's lifetimes" to see just how much he got wrong, has parked himself where all who excel at denying Islam has any connection to violence have been congregating. He now teaches a future generation of "terrorism experts" at Georgetown.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.