The award is judged by a group of retired senior US military and intelligence personnel, and past winners. This year the award to Julian Assange was unanimous.
Previous winners and ceremony locations:
Coleen Rowley of the FBI; in Washington, D.C.
Katharine Gun of British intelligence; in Copenhagen, Denmark
Sibel Edmonds of the FBI; in Washington, D.C.
Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan; in New York City
Sam Provance, former sergeant, U.S. Army, truth-teller about Abu Ghraib; in Washington, D.C.
Frank Grevil, major, Danish army intelligence, imprisoned for giving the Danish press documents showing that Denmark’s prime minister disregarded warnings that there was no authentic evidence of WMDs in Iraq; in Copenhagen, Denmark
Larry Wilkerson, colonel, U.S. Army (retired), former chief of staff to Secretary Colin Powell at the State Department, who has exposed what he called the “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal”; in Washington, D.C.
http://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2010/08/15/can-wikileaks-help-save-lives/
Not sure yet where this year’s award ceremony will be held, but I’ll be there.
“I miss Alfred.”
Well, you know what they say; “If at first you don’t succeed, try a bigger shotgun”.
Haha! Only a Predator drone would reach Canada I imagine.
[In other business, the deafening silence suggests that my idea at 11:09 AM must be very, very bad …]
Ha! The FBI is still paranoid, it seems, even though he’s been dead for 30 years! Says something about the mindset, no? Or perhaps John Lennon was a Jihadist-in-disguise.
‘BOX’ Office, London, by the Thames:
” ‘Yellow matter custard
Drippin from a dead dog’s eye…’ ”
Well, that’s clearly a threat to Paris (and Rome, and Berlin and London… oh, let’s throw in Dublin and Stephen Dedalus while we’re at it!)”
http://new.uk.music.yahoo.com/blogs/behind_the_music/27894/john-lennon-fingerprint-card-seized-by-fbi/
So, in order to dispel any doubts that may have arisen among the slaves aka populace, no doubt anytime soon we will see an amazingly lucky just-in-time ‘find’ of a car packed with cans of fertiliser, a ball of flatus caught from an incontinent cow and a plastic model of Nessie, parked on a double-yellow line right in the middle of Paris/Dublin/Berlin/London/Madrid/Rome. If it’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium.
This will lead (like Theseus and the Minotaur) to some or other group of patsy dupes, all called ‘Pervez Riaz Iqbal’ from Dewsbury/Tewsbury/Roddenberry/Rowanberry who went en masse on ‘charity work’ to Waziristan, where in general, except on very rainy days, they do NOT sing,
“Yellow matter custard
Drppin from a dead dog’s eye…”
Dreoilin,
your 11:09 idea is not bad. I’ve thought of three things that might be happening:
1) People aren’t coming here so much, because Craig hasn’t been posting.
2) People are hoping that Craig is coming back, and that things will carry on as before.
3) Probably other people feel as I do, that no blog of mine could be a worthy replacement for Craig’s.
Clark: I’ve still got my fingers crossed for option 2. I don’t think Craig would disappear for good without leaving a small valedictum.
MJ,
me, too. Moving is very demanding, and moving into a place that needs fixing up is particularly demanding. Maybe a “4:45” link will appear at some random time of day.
Something to talk about?
http://www.mandaba.la/pastor-piragine-alerts-against-workers-party
Clark, MJ,
Option 2 was what I had assumed myself. Maybe we’ll hear soon. I thought an alternative forum was only a last resort.
I agree, me rambling a bit. Good catch Clark.
Suhayl’s remark about the incontinent cow and the patsies reminded me of something I used to do with my brothers. We’d go off and dig for clay, make turds and put them in the hall and wait for my mother to blow her top and take it out on the poor shaking dog.
Suhayl,
“Boy, you’ve been a naughty girl you let your knickers down.”
Sorry, it just came into my head.
Having given a bit of time to establish that other people can bang on about their interests too, I’m not finished with stuxnet. Anybody thinks it’s boooring, the key is “page down” …
A client contacts a webserver, and they’re not talking to who they expect, their traffic is going to an entirely different site that’s spoofing the conversation and making hostile use of the data they give it. Somebody can fiddle with the DNS of a couple of .com sites, and it ends up pointing to sites registered to someone with links to a company with links to [ etc ] CIA/NSA/the alphabet soup … Oh, really ? And no-one even comments ? Nothing to see here, then, move along now. Is this normal ? Does it happen often ?
First they came for the viruses, and I said nothing …
Good thinking Clark – (3) is the one. Although not a comparison it made me think of the time when ‘WebRejects’ was started up to replace ‘WebCameron’ after that blog was suddenly shut-down (the rejects were ‘us mob’ who formed the base commentators and migrated.) Without a ‘front man(woman)’ or in Craig’s case ‘a great front man’ it seems migrations wither and die.
Richard,
I get your point – but ‘stuxnet’ is of course ‘state sponsored’ part of the ‘war of terror’ and if one can ever imagine Obi-Wan on the side of the Emperor this becomes relevant:
Stormtrooper: Let me see your identification.
Obi-Wan: [with a small wave of his hand] You don’t need to see his identification.
Stormtrooper: We don’t need to see his identification.
Obi-Wan: These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
Stormtrooper: These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.
Obi-Wan: He can go about his business.
Stormtrooper: You can go about your business.
Obi-Wan: Move along.
Stormtrooper: Move along… move along.
I hope Craig resumes – although I’d hate to see the group break up I think Mark is right about migrations. It does make one notice that there is no obvious place to go if Craig does call a halt – but have you noticed Sibel Edmond’s new blog, promisingly billed as the Irate Minority Club?
http://www.123realchange.blogspot.com/
Is DNS redirection information publicly available? Does anyone know where to look it up?
Vronsky,
Thanks for that link. All the recent posts seem to be at a new blog linked from there:
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/
I think there could be some people here who would wish to sign this petition.
http://newsnetscotland.com/general/767-campaigners-launch-lockerbie-inquiry-petition
Ruth, that was very naughty of you! But also very funny!! Your mother must have been incandescent! INCANDESECENT! Did she ever find out that they weren’t real, but rather, creative soft-scuptures? Modern Art, indeed. Canine concrete poetry, you might say. Woof-woof!
For Mark:
“Mother Superior jumped the gun…”
You’ve all been at the cider. And Ruth pulled the wings off flies. I can tell.
(Or is the fashionable version “off of”?)
“Is DNS redirection information publicly available? Does anyone know where to look it up?”
whois, etc ? http://knowledgebase.demon.net/article/internet-tools.html gives a web front-end to some.
But I don’t think there’s much to see after the event, is there ? It’s only a row in a database.
“You’ve all been at the cider”
Only Beer, and loud music down the local pub. My head hurts, but it was fun at the time.
Richard Robinson,
thanks for that. Re: your post October 9, 2010 1:20 AM. So Stuxnet had two URLs that it communicated with, recorded as plain text within Stuxnet. These URLs led to servers in Malaysia. But when the anti-virus companies discovered this, they had Stuxnet’s traffic re-routed elsewhere. How, and where? Is it done by changing the DNS entry for those URLs? If so, surely this creates a record somewhere, of what the entry was, what it was changed to, who made the request, etc.
Plus, there must have been some piece of software on those servers to handle Stuxnet’s traffic. I have seen no news about this, but it could be a big clue to the origin of Stuxnet.
Vronsky,
Succinct link on Megrahi – note Cameron made it clear in his conference speech that it was very wrong to let this ‘scapegoat'[my word] go home to celebrations. It upset the American Senators and these are the people of course who decide whether we can upgrade our nuclear deterrent with a Trident replacement which Cameron has made clear will go ahead as planned.
America has told us not to cut the defence budget so Cameron the eternal ‘yes’ man has introduced a ‘rolling review’ of defence spending.
On the one hand the ‘huge’ deficit must not affect our ability to fight and maim, one the other Cameron must keep the ‘Big Society’ in check by screwing down the social thumbscrews, by invoking ‘fear,’ cutting essential services for the poor and weak and pretending to ‘fuck’ the ‘well-off’ with child benefit cuts while introducing ‘Mother’s benefit’ that will provide extra tax breaks to cover up the loss of the child benefit.
A case of Cameron spending £1.1 Billion to save £1 Billion – so much for the Tory manifesto – you lied Cameron and you are a slave to your masters as we found out when you booted WebCameron into the gutter.
It is about time ‘Nick’ you grew some decent balls, that is what the British people expect and that is why there is a coalition.
Clark – yes, those are the questions.
“Is it done by changing the DNS entry for those URLs”. That’s the assertion the reports make, yes. I don’t see how there can be any other way ? If the code has a name wired in, that needs to be resolved into the underlying numerical address that all ‘net transactions actually use, and the DNS database is what does that; it’s where that mapping information is stored. When they say that the name has been redirected, they’re saying that the relevant DNS entry has been rewritten by someone other than the owner, to point somewhere other than expected. This is, surely, not normal ? If just-anybody can do this to just-anybody else’s address, the entire ‘net is broken beyond any hope of repair. If there are exploits out there that can do this to .com, which probably represents more big money than any other section of the ‘net, surely that’s a much stronger contender for OMGEvilHackOfTheCentury!!! than anything about the construction of a virus ? There are mafias, governments, etc, that would pay fortunes for that …
But this doesn’t happen every day. It’s not the way things are, what we all expect to happen. Yet there’s no fuss. It’s okay. It disables an evil virus, it’s on the side of the good guys, there’s nothing out of order. It was done by the Legitimate Authorities, that’s so obvious nobody even bothers to mention it.
So, I’m asking, who are they ? Who has that power ? How often is it used ? The Symantec dossier leaves us to think, without ever quite saying so (“the passive voice was used to avoid discussion of agency”) that they did it. A private corporation ? I’d be suprised, and even more disturbed.
“surely this creates a record somewhere, of what the entry was, what it was changed to, who made the request, etc”
Well, yes. It’s a distributed system, records are updated all the time, for most of the nameservers it would have been a perfectly unremarkable transaction. The key point would be the toplevel .com nameserver, that tells the world which server is in charge of answering questions about the subdomains; that’s where the change must have entered the system. And, yes, surely they keep an audit trail. I’m guessing they won’t publish it in a hurry …
“Plus, there must have been some piece of software on those servers to handle Stuxnet’s traffic. I have seen no news about this”. No. Quite. There’s next to no info. on what conversations the spoofed servers have been having with the worm (a remark somewhere that most of the instances they’ve been talking to have Iranian addresses, I think, and that’s all). One imagines they’d be, um, “interesting”.
The theory that the originators of the virus are, perhaps, not a million miles away from the Authorities who are now spoofing these conversations, leads to some curious possibilities, as well.
Either I’ve misremembered the names, or they’ve changed again. No Dublin, now; Arizona and Florida.
Mark,
Yup, the security of ordinary people is too expensive but, as ever, WMD are supplied by the Tooth Fairy.
Do help to get the Megrahi petition going viral – people outside Scotland and the UK are eligible to sign. You can even have fun sending it to people you know it will render apopleptic (anyone got Cameron’s email?). If Labour return to power in Scotland next year there will be no chance of a review and the matter (and probably Megrahi) will be dead.
worth reading: letter posted on medialens board:
From: Jim
Sent: 08 October 2010 09:32
To: Guardian
Cc: Media Lens
Subject: ‘US accused of exaggerating terror threat’
Dear Sir,
‘US accused of exaggerating terror threat’ we learn from your front page headline (8.10.2010).Tragically the British government also vastly exaggerates the terror threat to its citizens. Since we started the ‘long war’ in Afghanistan 9 years ago 52 UK citizens have been killed by terrorists in England. In the same period tens of thousands of Afghan people have been killed. At a recent vote in the House of Commons a tiny 16 out of the 650 MPs voted to end the war. The view that government foreign policy represents the will of the British people is absurd. We can only assume this vote was the result of the vicious combination of a colonel blimpish hankering after the ‘glory days’ of empire and a craven willingness to do the bidding of the party whips. The government’s blatant contempt for the will (and intelligence) of the people is further illustrated every time Mr Fox, the Secretary of Defence, makes an utterance on our ‘independent deterrent’.
Would also add the recent ramping up of the ‘Real IRA’ terror threat over here, denied by Dublin, the designation of environmental protestors as ‘eco-terrorists’ and on.
The Lessons of Stuxnet
Stuxnet (from Symantec W32.Stuxnet Dossier – http://tinyurl.com/stuxnet-dossier) contains features such as:
(1) Self-replicates through removable drives exploiting a WINDOWS vulnerability allowing auto-execution.
[Microsoft Windows Shortcut ‘LNK/PIF’ Files Automatic File Execution Vulnerability]
(2)Spreads in a LAN through a vulnerability in the WINDOWS Print Spooler.
[Microsoft Windows Print Spooler Service Remote Code Execution Vulnerability]
(3) Spreads through SMB by exploitation [Microsoft WINDOWS Server Service RPC Handling Remote Code Execution Vulnerability].
(4) Copies and executes itself on a Microsoft WINDOWS network of remote computers through network shares.
(5) Copies and executes itself on remote computers running a Microsoft WinCC database server.
(6) Escalation of Microsoft WINDOWS privilege vulnerabilities that have yet to be
disclosed by Microsoft.
(7) Contains a WINDOWS rootkit that hide its binaries.
In 2005 and again in 2008 in response to coia.org.uk my computers were attacked by exploiting a vulnerability to corrupt the hive or WINDOWS registry. Without this information the operating system cannot load and an error is thrown that tells you:
WINDOWS XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM
The registry information can get corrupted for instance by a disk read/write error so therefore Microsoft stores a backup copy that the loading process will use if the normal file is missing or corrupt. An ‘attack’ of this nature therefore involves deleting or corrupting two files in different locations.
So much for the ‘techie’ bit but what do these so called ‘exploits’ tell us about Microsoft WINDOWS? It has been proved that even Windows 7 can be attacked in a number of ways, two of which we DON’T EVEN KNOW ABOUT!
Therefore if you use the WINDOWS operating system your data, your information IS NOT SAFE unless you have a full backup that can be loaded back into a ‘clean’ install of the Windows operating system on a reformatted drive.
Or in two simple words – WINDOWS sucks!
Ironic, init? In the US, the military all jump up and down because Gary McKinnon ‘hacked’ into their Windows systems. In Iran, we see the following error message at a nuclear reactor:
http://www.upi.com/enl-win/b00bf188f7671cf2f939d18b1453852f/