$500 Million to Keep Cheney Out of Nigerian Prison?
December 10th, 2010I keep thinking that someone is taking the piss out of all of us with this one, but…
Via: Global Post:
Halliburton is planning to make a plea bargain in former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s corruption case, Nigerian officials told GlobalPost.
Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency charged Cheney as the head of Halliburton when its engineering subsidiary, KBR, allegedly paid bribes totaling $180 million to secure contracts worth $6 billion.
KBR has admitted to bribing officials. Last year the company pleaded guilty in a U.S. federal court to paying the bribes to Nigerian officials prior to 2007, when it was a subsidiary of Halliburton. KBR, which is now independent from Halliburton, agreed to pay $597 million in fines, according to the Associated Press.
Cheney’s lawyer dismissed the new Nigerian charges as “entirely baseless.”
However, Halliburton is in talks with Nigerian officials to make a plea bargain in the case, said Femi Babafemi, spokesman for Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the agency which has pressed the charges against Cheney.
“The companies are asking for a plea bargain, we are reviewing their request, we are talking with them, but we have not gone far with the talks yet,” Babafemi told GlobalPost.
Although Babafemi did not give further details, other sources within the agency said the plea bargain might involve a $500 million settlement.
Babafemi did not confirm whether the anti-corruption agency will ultimately settle for a plea bargain. But similar deals have been reached with other foreign multinational companies that have recently been charged with corruption in Nigeria.
cryptogon.ch
December 10th, 2010I’ve registered cryptogon.ch with the Swiss registrar Switchplus.
I don’t know how well .ch will hold up going forward, but it seemed prudent to at least have an alternative if I should lose control of the cryptogon.com domain for any reason. At a minimum, .ch appears to be far, far more desirable than the U.S. controlled top level domains, where arbitrary takedowns and DNS hijackings are now occurring.
Cryptogon.ch currently points to a BlueHost box (inside the U.S.). If the shit hits the fan (the American fascist regime hijacks my domain name, for example, or the U.S. imposes some kind of Chinese-style firewall or something, who knows?), I can redirect cryptogon.ch to a host in a more free country.
I don’t anticipate any particular action against Cryptogon, but the fact is that it has already happened to some site operators. No due process. Arbitrary, fascist whims. That’s it. And if it can happen to _______ (fill in the blank) it can happen to me or you, or anyone who uses .com, .net or .org.
Anyway, this is just a quick announcement, cryptogon.ch, let’s hope we never have to use it.
Ron Paul, Author of ‘End the Fed,’ to Lead Panel Overseeing Central Bank
December 10th, 2010Hell, at this late stage of the game, why not?
Via: Bloomberg:
Representative Ron Paul, Texas Republican and author of “End the Fed,” will take control of the House subcommittee that oversees the Federal Reserve.
House Financial Services chairman-elect Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican, selected Paul, 75, to lead the panel’s domestic monetary policy subcommittee when their party takes the House majority next month, the committee chairman said today.
Video from London Riots
December 10th, 2010Related: Looks Like Prince Charles Soiled His Union Suit
Ex-WikiLeaker Explains His Spinoff Group, OpenLeaks
December 10th, 2010Daniel, it’s like I said before: I’m hopeful and skeptical at the same time.
Via: Forbes:
Former WikiLeaks staffer Daniel Domscheit-Berg has always considered Julian Assange’s whistle-blowing site a two-pipe operation: One pipe takes submissions in from anonymous leakers, another publishes them out to an uncensorable web site.
But since defecting from WikiLeaks in September and watching the global controversy build around the secret-spilling organization, he’s taking a different approach with his own leak-focused project: Keep the anonymous submissions channel. Ditch the controversial and resource-draining publishing piece altogether.
The German Domscheit-Berg, along with several other former Wikileaks staffers, plans to launch a website they’re calling OpenLeaks as early as next week, Domscheit-Berg told Forbes in an interview. Like WikiLeaks, the new site will allow leakers to anonymously submit information to a secure online dropbox. But unlike its parent site, it won’t publish that information itself. Instead, it will allow the source to designate any media or non-governmental organizations he or she chooses and have that information passed on for fact-checking, redaction and publication. That difference, argues Domscheit-Berg, will allow OpenLeaks to accomplish much of the transparency achieved by WikiLeaks, without drawing the same political fury and legal pressure.
“To constrain the power of the site, we’re splitting submission from the publication part. We won’t publish any documents ourselves. The whole field is diversified,” says Domscheit-Berg. “No single organization carries all of the responsibility or all of the workload.”
Resource constraints, as Assange told me in an interview last month, have forced WikiLeaks to choose only its “highest impact” material for publication. But those constraints have also politicized WikiLeaks and forced it to make subjective decisions about its targets, Domscheit-Berg argues. “We want to be a neutral conduit,” he says. “That’s what’s most politically sustainable as well.”
OpenLeaks will integrate with the organizations it passes information to, functioning as a secure tip box on their sites. Those organizations can choose to store leaked information on their own servers or leave it in the hands of OpenLeaks, Domscheit-Berg says. “All this is cryptographically separated in a fashion that everyone has their own dedicated part of the system,” he says.
The project will initially partner with five newspapers worldwide, but soon expand to anyone who wants to participate. “Newspapers, NGOs, labor unions, anyone who wants to receive information from anonymous sources, we enable all these people to run something like this,” says Domscheit-Berg.
Anonymous Running Attacks on Anti-Wikileaks Sites with Low Orbit Ion Cannon
December 9th, 2010LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) is a network stress testing application, written in C# and developed by “praetox”. It attempts a denial-of-service attack on the target site by flooding the server with TCP packets, UDP packets, or HTTP requests with the intention of disrupting the service of a particular host. The program was exploited during Project Chanology to attack Scientology websites, and is currently being used by Operation Avenge Assange (Organized by Operation Payback) to attack the websites of companies and organizations that have opposed WikiLeaks.
“NewEraCracker” updated LOIC for the Operation Payback protests to fix a few bugs and added new features.
As of Version 1.1.1.3, LOIC has incorporated a new “Hive Mind” feature which allows the user to relinquish control of the LOIC application to the operator of an IRC channel. This has been likened to a “voluntary botnet”.
This updated version works on Windows XP or later, and requires Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1. It also works on Linux with Mono or Wine with .NET Framework 2.0.
An option to start the program hidden as a background service is also available in these later versions.
I don’t know if these attacks are part of some kind of PSYOP, but they certainly play into the pre-existing script for curtailing freedom on the Internet. Mike McConnell, former NSA Director, former Director of National Intelligence and now, Booz Allen Hamilton Senior Vice President, has said that we need to re-engineer the Internet:
We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same.
…
He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded. Or the tech could be useful if a computer got hijacked without your knowledge and used as part of a botnet.
And now…
Via: BBC:
The data war between companies that have refused to do business with Wikileaks and the online activists keen to defend it is getting more intense.
The tool through which attacks are carried out against websites perceived to be anti-Wikileaks has now been downloaded more than 31,000 times.
Security experts warned people to avoid joining the voluntary botnet.
Targets of the loose-knit group Anonymous have so far included Visa, Mastercard and Paypal.
Amazon is expected to be among firms targeted next using the Anonymous attack tool known as LOIC. When a person installs the tool on their PC it enrols the machine into a voluntary botnet which then bombards target sites with data.
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are illegal in many countries, including the UK.
Social network Facebook confirmed that it had removed Operation Payback – as the campaign is known – from the site because it was promoting its attack tool.
Government Steals $190,040 from Brothers
December 9th, 2010Via: Chicago Tribune:
The government is attempting to keep a little more than $190,000 it seized from two brothers after one of them was pulled over in a traffic stop that didn’t even result in a traffic ticket.
Jesus Martinez, 27, had $190,040 in his possession when his pickup truck was stopped by an Aurora police officer about 8:30 p.m. Oct. 18 near Indian Trail and Timberlake roads.
The police officer confiscated the cash, and the city has informed Martinez and his brother, Jose, 34, that Aurora will seek to keep it through civil forfeiture, a procedure that allows police agencies to seize property where the legal standard is lower than proof needed in a criminal forfeiture.
The brothers are home remodelers. Neither has been charged with a crime in this case, and neither has a criminal record, according to Kane County court records.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in 30 years of practice,” said Aurora attorney Patrick Kinnally, who is representing the brothers.
This Is No Ordinary Bank
December 9th, 2010Via: Ventura County Star / AP:
This is no ordinary bank: The ATMs are in Latin. Priests use a private entrance. A life-size portrait of Pope Benedict XVI hangs on the wall.
Nevertheless, the Institute for Religious Works is a bank, and it’s under harsh new scrutiny in a case involving money-laundering allegations that led police to seize €23 million ($30 million) in Vatican assets in September. Critics say the case shows that the “Vatican Bank” has never shed its penchant for secrecy and scandal.
The Vatican calls the seizure of assets a “misunderstanding” and expresses optimism it will be quickly cleared up. But court documents show that prosecutors say the Vatican Bank deliberately flouted anti-laundering laws “with the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the capital.” The documents also reveal investigators’ suspicions that clergy may have acted as fronts for corrupt businessmen and Mafia.
The documents pinpoint two transactions that have not been reported: one in 2009 involving the use of a false name, and another in 2010 in which the Vatican Bank withdrew €650,000 ($860 million) from an Italian bank account but ignored bank requests to disclose where the money was headed.
U.S. Treasuries Sell Off
December 9th, 2010Monitoring…
Via: Reuters:
Treasury prices plunged on Wednesday for a second straight day, pushing benchmark yields to a six-month high, after a deal in Washington to extend tax cuts fueled fears of inflation and a swelling budget deficit.
The sharp dip in prices brought some buyers to the table in an auction of $21 billion of reopened 10-year notes, which was part of $66 billion of coupon-bearing securities sales this week. Bond prices rebounded somewhat from their lowest levels of the day following the sale, which analysts said saw about average demand.
Still, sentiment remained strongly bearish heading into the sale of $13 billion of reopened 30-year bonds on Thursday.
U.S. Tells Uganda: Consult Us Before Using Intelligence to Commit Atrocities
December 9th, 2010Via: Guardian:
The US told Uganda to let it know when the army was going to commit war crimes using American intelligence – but did not try to dissuade it from doing so, the US embassy cables suggest.
America was supporting the Ugandan government in its fight against rebel movement the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), providing information and $4.4m (£2.8m) worth of military hardware a year.
But a year ago officials became concerned that the Ugandans were guilty of war crimes in the long-running battle against Joseph Kony’s rebel movement, which is famed for its brutal atrocities and abduction of children.
Jerry Lanier, the US ambassador to Kampala, reported on 16 December to Washington that the country’s defence minister, Crispus Kiyonga, had verbally assured him that American intelligence was being used “in compliance with Ugandan law and the law of armed conflict. This pledge includes the principles of proportionality, distinction and humane treatment of captured combatants.”
But Lanier continued: “Uganda understands the need to consult with the US in advance if the [Ugandan army] intends to use US-supplied intelligence to engage in operations not government [sic] by the law of armed conflict. Uganda understands and acknowledges that misuse of this intelligence could cause the US to end this intelligence sharing relationship.”
Nowhere, though, does it appear that the ambassador directly told the Ugandans to observe the rules of war.
