Having entirely unexpected cause to become acquainted with the subject, I learn that all main railway stations in Germany have their own police stations. At Bochum, you have to walk round the outside to find a door with a buzzer, which nobody answers.
Heading back into the station, I approach the first pair of policemen I come across (the visible police presence on German stations is also remarkable). I explained to them I had a bag stolen and they walked me round to the police station which, once inside, is full of policemen, all carefully ignoring the buzzer.
I am ashamed by my lack of German and very impressed by the police language skills. But unlike his colleague in Frankfurt, this policeman made no pretence at all of interest in actually finding the thief.
He laughed nervously at my suggestion I was being targeted, having had two laptops stolen in four days. He looked at me suspecting I was not quite sane, and said it happens all the time. He just shook his head when I suggested the CCTV on Duisburg or Bochum stations might show the thief with the laptop bag.
He very quickly completed the theft report and gave it to me. I think he suspected I was engaged in a repeated insurance fraud he could not be bothered investigating, and just wanted me out of his hair.
We were staying in a particularly barren Mercure Hotel in a high block just opposite the station. I was on the 12th floor. Once checked in I decided that despondency would not help, and that I should turn the situation around by embracing the chance for laptop shopping.
Bochum is a city with dreadful problems. Leaving the next day we passed on the train a vast Opel plant which extended for miles and was in varying stages of decay. It closed down five years ago. Shortly before that Nokia closed a major plant in the city. Before that the mines closed.
If you go back further, three quarters of all the buildings of Bochum were destroyed by allied bombing in the Second World War. This was ironic because the city was predominantly Polish, one of those isolated populations left stranded by the tides of European history.
Large numbers of Poles were sent to the concentration camps alongside the Jewish population (many of whom were also Polish) and the rest put to forced labour. Additional slave labour was brought from Poland by the Nazis to keep the industries going.
As a centre of Ruhr heavy industry, Bochum was largely obliterated by the allies but most of the victims were Polish. With this horrible history, it seems churlish to note that the current shopping centre is just horribly modern and ugly.
I went to a large chain shop called Cyberport near the hotel. It had a great range of laptops but the prices were very inflated. Every laptop was marked not just with its price but with an interest free credit offer and the price of monthly instalments.
This explained the prices – it was a rip off, never never shop for computers. It was also an indicator of Bochum’s economic woes.
I next went to a flashy store called Gravis, where a very keen and polite assistant was all over me, but sadly they only sold Apple. I explained to him politely that I didn’t use Macs and was too old and tired to want to learn new systems. He replied they sold accessories not specific to Macs, like mouses and keyboards. I politely declined this rather random offer, and went in search of my next shop.
The streets of the centre were closed off for the Christmas Market, with little illuminated wooden kiosks everywhere and crowds it was difficult to get through.
These were in every city we visited, and great fun. But they had changed since I first saw them in Germany in the 1990’s, with much less selling of handicrafts and decorations, and a much higher percentage of alcohol and sausage stalls.
Bunches of people stood around in the freezing temperatures for hours eating and drinking. Bochum was a bit rowdier than most. It was snowing, and I was very much regretting that the thieves had got the Gore-tex gloves that had been a Christmas present from my sister.
Call me a grinch, but half an hour below zero with the Gluhwein is enough for me. Give me a nice warm pub.
Anyway I pushed my way through to Saturn, Germany’s big chain computer store. It was a huge shop, but the actual range of product surprisingly limited and customer service almost non-existent.
They had no model like the one just stolen. Then my eyes were drawn to a laptop with a glowing back and illuminated keys which constantly changed colour.
Colour-changing keys! I had to have it! It was a brand I had never heard of – Captiva – and it was half price because you were buying the display model.
Niels had helped me set up the Laptop of the Four Days with massive security, so I couldn’t even start up the damn thing. (The first stolen laptop had once been secured by Julian Assange with a process involving a gold plated USB stick. That too had been totally beyond me to get into, and much of that had to be removed).
Niels was horrified by my choice. It was a gaming laptop, he said. The money had all gone into graphics. It absolutely was not what I required.
If you can imagine somebody saying “Colour changing keys” in the voice of Homer Simpson saying “Donuts”, that is how I replied. We bargained them down further from a half price 790 euros to 750 euros, and here I am! The keys were a sexy turquoise when I started that sentence and now they are the deepest ocean blue. What bliss.
Orange! They’ve gone orange!
We then had to get a taxi to the cinema, which was right on the semi-rural outskirts of the city, a lovely little independent venue in an old railway station building. It was a joint screening with Amnesty International, the cinema was full and the audience was not only comprised of committed activists.
I was also pleased to meet Bibi, who had been coordinating these events, and with Irmtrud Wojak, a local campaigner who has written a fascinating biography of Fritz Bauer. He was a great prosecutor who went after not just Eichmann, but the “respectable” Nazis and their enablers, particularly in the legal profession. She gave me an English copy which was to make train journeys pass faster.
The only problem with the location was that it was a long walk to the nearest restaurant and very cold and snowy outside. Niels and I had eaten no lunch or dinner so we were keen to eat while the film was showing, and we ordered pizza delivery.
I was just tucking in to my Hawaiian pizza, amid general comments on my bad taste, when my phone started pinging incessantly. There was a whole stream of codes for two factor identification. They were from my various email accounts, from Facebook, Twitter, my bank, shops – a plethora of accounts. All coming through almost simultaneously.
This meant that somebody had got past the password and fingerprint protection on one of the two stolen laptops, and then got through the passwords on the individual accounts (which had all been changed after the first theft).
The question was, had they access to my phone?
I will confess this put me in a state of some shock. I had been trying very hard not to let the laptop thefts get to me. On the first laptop, I had convinced myself some random thief may have just pinched it when I was in the toilet, even though it was obviously outdated, filthy, cracked and in poor condition.
But the theft today was inexplicable. We had changed into that train at Frankfurt airport station, and that first class compartment was absolutely heaving with expensive luggage.
There were many choices to steal that looked much more potentially valuable than my twenty year old, large and very battered laptop bag. The luggage racks right by the exit doors were overflowing with expensive bags of all shapes and sizes.
The risk and technique required to lift my old bag from the overhead rack right above our heads in the middle of the carriage made no sense as a random theft, when many almost risk free thieving options were available.
At the micro level my bag was next to Niels’ camera bag. The contents of that were ten times more valuable and the bag looked like that would be the case. But it was not taken.
When I blew the whistle in 2005 on extraordinary rendition and torture, I was for a time subject to the very close and obvious attentions of the security services. That died down, but at times flared up again, particularly around interactions with Wikileaks.
In the Spanish case against UC Global for spying on Julian, on his lawyers and on others in the Ecuadorean Embassy, which included spying on me and hacking my phone, and following and burgling several people, Julian’s Spanish lawyer Aitor Martinez has told me that the evidence shows the CIA were “obsessed with” me as a target.
So none of this was new to me. Let me put it this way.
I am an admitted whistleblower of Top Secret information (to compare, nothing Chelsea Manning disclosed was above Secret). I collaborate with Wikileaks. I am at the most hardline end of supporters of Scottish Independence. I reject NATO, nuclear weapons, Israel and neo-liberalism. I have high level friends and contacts across the globe. If the security services are not targeting me, what are they doing?
I know the capabilities of the security services, and I have always assumed that they have access to the entire contents of my laptop anyway. Encryption may work for avoiding some mass surveillance, but not for individual targets when the state are prepared to put in the resource.
I also choose openness to my fellow man. I have no desire to view the world through a fug of suspicion. I have read the comments on previous instalments from the wise people who tell me that they never travel without a moneybag around their waist and their laptop bag tied to their legs.
Well, that is simply not who I am. The seven year laptop that was first stolen had been with me everywhere for hundreds of thousands of miles. It had traveled over much of Africa several times. It had been to the United States more than once. It had been simply all over Europe.
I had left it unattended while going to the loo on a train or in an airport lounge, many scores of times. I had left it sitting in hotel rooms in Washington DC. Once or twice I have checked it in to a flight. It had sat at the back of a bar at Doune the Rabbit Hole. It has hung from restaurant coat racks. It has sat in the back of a pick-up in Ghana.
That was just that one laptop. I have used a succession of laptops for around thirty years and always acted in the way I describe. I have lived in Russia and Poland and Ghana and left my laptop bag on seats when I go dance, or on a table in a conference while I have some lunch. None had ever been stolen.
I could have spent thirty years with my laptop tied between my legs, but that would not be me.
If you choose to live that way, do what makes you feel happy and safe. But let me point out the logical fallacy that because you obsessively tie yourself to your laptop, it does not follow that anybody would have stolen it had you not done so.
Anyway, while two random thefts of laptops in four days was not impossible, I do not believe it was that, particularly given the quite extraordinary circumstances of the second theft.
This was also particularly annoying because of the loss of the other contents. The gloves I have noted. I had also lost my reading glasses, which are very essential, my phone charger, my bank verification machine, all the receipts from my trip and a variiety of other letters and documents.
With all those two factor verification notices coming through, I needed to get back to the hotel, set up my new laptop and change every password I have. But the audience was now waiting to hear me speak.
I am nothing if not an old trouper, so I went on. I believe it went very well. But frankly my mind was so frazzled I do not remember anything that evening after the phone started pinging.
Back at the hotel, Niels started setting up my new laptop with dizzying layers of disc encryption and self-destruct mechanisms.
Everything now had passwords of enormous length and complexity, containing characters I had no idea existed, from an external random generator.
Presumably, like the monkeys, if you kept it going infinitely you would get the complete works of Shakespeare.
It was 2am before I could actually start getting into my accounts.
There was no evidence that anybody had got past the two factor identification and actually been inside anywhere. As I say, I had always assumed they can remotely anyway, and I suspect most likely the whole thing is just an attempt at intimidation.
Most importantly of all, none of Niels’ security installations had stopped the keys from changing colour.
Merry Christmas Everybody.
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Of course you were targeted. Trust your instincts and commonsense. I commented under your last instalment that it may well have been the Germans themselves. Their hatred of anybody who advocates for Palestinian human rights knows no bounds. A new report by German ministers and senators this week seeks to outlaw pro-Palestinian groups altogether, and even ban maps of historic Palestine.
https://www.972mag.com/germany-interior-ministers-report-palestinians/
You are probably on their list of undesirables and they were triggered into action as soon as they became aware you were in the Fatherland.
Merry Christmas, Craig.
I’m glad your sense of humour keeps you going.
Well done!
A gamer laptop is better ventilated internally than normal ones and is therefore less sensitive to high temperatures. This can be an advantage.
Happy holidays and all the best Craig
There is probably a programe on that laptop that allows you to play with the colours and patterns of light on the keyboard. When you get a bit drunk sometime have a play with that. I have a similar desktop keyboard 😀
Thanks Mr Murray for reports. All best class journalism, If I may so, from Saughton to Bochumised Europe.
Credit to the good hearts you work with. Go canny as they say. Have a good Christmas
As the saying goes “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.” Seriously though, I would not be at all surprised if the intelligence services orchestrated the laptop thefts to harass you or because they saw it as an opportunity to get at your private files. That is exactly the kind of thing they would do.
Stay safe out there Mr Murray and a Happy Christmas to you and yours.
Wait until you learn how you can map colours to taste instead of random swirling patterns…
Quite frankly someone in your position should eschew both Windows and macOS, and go for something more secure. I’d recommend the Qubes OS, where the OS treats each app windows as its own isolated island and prevents a breach of one (typically a malicious web app via the browser) from compromising the rest. Even if you are unwilling to dip into paranoia, keep in mind you are also exposing your correspondents to danger.
Your phone is also of course a juicy target. If you use an iPhone, Apple recently added a feature whereby it disables all sort of mostly useless bells and whistles that have been used as entry points for spyware like NSO’s Pegasus. Most Android phones are grossly insecure, but those that use the de-googles GrapheneOS or LineageOS variants of Android are tolerable.
I’m not a security expert, but I’ve taken some courses on computer security and talked to some real experts, and can tell you that Craig is right. If the State specifically targets you, they will be able to read all your files, email, encrypted voice communications – everything. They just have too many resources, and there are more ways of getting at your computer than most people realise.
For individuals like you and me who have done nothing to attract the attention of the State, some of your advice is good. We can – if we are very careful – keep our stuff private. I don’t agree with you about Apple, though, I think Apple phones may well have NSA backdoors built in. Apple made a song and dance about not providing local police with a way to get at its customers’ data, but the NSA is a different and much more capable beast.
Hey, Roger, that is defeatism.
If yourt machine isn’t connected to the internet, then you’re safe from everyone except Evil Maids. Of course, Craig is connected; so you keep your confidential stuff on an encrypted stick. I have a PC that fails catastrophically every six months; so I keep nothing valuable on it – just software that I can replace easily.
Craig has good advisors; I assume he’s safe, in terms of data.
The NSA can easily defeat that in just 3 steps. (1) NSA installs program X on the machine when it’s connected to the internet. (2) when it’s disconnected, X looks for removable devices that weren’t there before, and copies their data to its private stash. (3) when the machine is connected again, X transmits the contents of its stash to NSA in Utah (in several iterations if necessary).
This is kid stuff for the NSA. They can crack much harder nuts. Countermeasures that might work for you or me will not work for someone like Craig who is targeted. Nobody – and I mean nobody – can keep Craig’s data safe if there is a computer that sometimes connects to the internet and sometimes has access to his data. He is right to assume – as he does, having presumably consulted real experts – that the deep State has access to all his data.
“Am I being paranoid?” is the wrong question now. The right question to ask yourself is, “Am I being paranoid enough?”
There are operating systems (puppy linux is one) that keep no changes upon shutdown. The system is essentially kept in a pristene state on a removable hard drive.
How did you manage to get a laptop with an English keyboard layout in a German computer store? I’ve only ever seen laptops with German keyboards (QWERTZ instead of QWERTY) in German shops.
It’s a Qwertz keyboard.
I have one too and have got used to using the ‘wrong’ keys. I’ve set the layout to English (QWERTY) in Windows, so the marking on some of the keys do not corrospond with the letters that they output. I could try swapping around the Y and Z but that might risk breaking them. I don’t know if you can order keys as spare parts. Another solution would be to just stick some stickers on the non-matching keys to mark them as QWERTY, but that would look messy, and I’ve got used to the keyboard layout anyway.
On some laptops you can just pop the keycaps out and rearrange them.
For programmers, most continental keyboards are almost unusable – I worked in Switzerland, and the Swiss keyboards are completely unusable for a programmer, they have ä ö ü for German and é ê è à for French, creating space for these by making [ ] { } awkward multi-key combinations. They also eliminate ~ to make space for §. In all the offices where I worked (in Zurich) all the programmers insisted on US keyboards.
(Of course if you live in Switzerland you sometimes need the accented letters, but in Linux it’s dead simple to program some of the function keys to add accents to the next letter you type, so that by allocating just 4 function keys to accents you can get any accent on any letter than can have that accent, including some rather strange ones like ÿ and ý. I don’t know about Windows or Mac.)
Hold down the relevant key on a Mac and you’ll be offered the full range of accents and umlauts: è é ê ë ē ė ę for example.
Cheers to ye Craig, thanks.
Dear Craig,
It’s indeed interesting to read your report about your trip to Germany. Apart from the unpleasant experience of stolen laptops, which could happen at any time in Germany and it’s useless to speculate who and what was the reason for that, except my criticism to your company, acquainted with german circumstances, not to advise you about common risks in german trains, I’d like to draw your attention to an error just for the sake of historical correctness: The migration from polish people to the Ruhr area is not related to the Nazis an forced labour at all. It started mainly from 1870 onwards due to the developing mining and steel industry over there and reached its climax from 1900 till 1910 (other nationals, too were migrating to the area, i.e. people from South Tyrol). Starting from 1920 onwards there was in fact a strong remigration back to then independent Poland and to the mining areas in Northern France and in the 1930s the Nazis had more the Problem how to deal ideologically with an assimilated population with partially polish roots, however still catholic confession.
Merry Christmas!
Cheers!
Johannes,
Yes, I think if you read the article carefully I do think I clearly make the point that Bochum was largely Polish, and the Nazis brought in additional Polish forced labour.
«the city was predominantly Polish, one of those isolated populations left stranded by the tides of European history»
That seems surprising: that may be using “polish” to mean “slavic”, as for example the sorbs.
Frohe Weihnacht Craig. Thank you for updating/ downgrading my understanding and expectations of the racket tha is DB and or our privatised railways in Europe. CCTV on trains is easy to arrange and it is vital to deter all variants of criminals.
Railcompanies are not keeping their customers safe, period. Well Switzerland might be an exception.
best to you all.7
Bochum like agglomerations such as northern France and Englands’ Black Country were among those areas whose population expanded fastest in the 19th ct. and pre-WW1 and have basically stagnated ever since. Though there is a pre-history to the mining operations, as Bochum itself was a small market town on the Hellweg which followed a topographical ridge (German wiki has an excellent summary, might work with automatic translate: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westf%C3%A4lischer_Hellweg ). Hellweg itself was a major route for foreign and long-distanced trade, and this was a main route from the river Rhine to eastern Europe to Leipzig – Berlin was an unremarkable swamp until the Prussians got going.
Btw Bochum has been extensively documented when it comes to development policies for post-mining communities. Bochum was the first new post-WW2 university in (West-)Germany. Until then and quite remarkably for such a university-filled country there were no universities in the Ruhr area and none between Bonn/Cologne and Münster in an area of 7-10 million inhabitants. The university has quite a good reputation, but unfortunately for the city it is mostly a “drive in-drive out”; most academics commute there and live elsewhere. If you use the (only) subway in rush hour it is very appearent.
Merry Christmas Craig to you and your family from the communist outpost of Graz
Thank you. It was a real pleasure to meet you and your partner. Sorry I got carted off for a media interview before we could speak longer.
Welcome to the fold! Just goes to show it’s never too late to become a gamer 😉
While I wouldn’t recommend Dark Souls as a starting point, if you can find a copy of, say, Peggle, I’m sure you’ll have a blast.
Merry Christmas!
It occurred to me that in Soviet times, students of linguistic universities were by default trained as intelligence officers, agents of the KGB. Perhaps I would think that Mr. Murray’s experience during his time in then Russia convinced him to distrust those Russians who studied languages professionally. Unfortunately or fortunately, my university was just one of the new post-perestroika educational institutions that taught everyone who wanted to, for money.
Happiness and prosperity to all on this planet and Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it.
For those who dream of peace – I wish peaceful sky above their heads.
Off topic I know, but… merry Christmas and custard, comrades. From the socialist outpost of Portugal, and the most south-western part of Europe.
glenn
Are you forgetting us here in the Canary Islands?
Merry Christmas, comrade.
The Canary islands may be part of the political entity called the European Union, but that does not make them part of the geographical entity called Europe.
Happy New Year
Merry Christmas to you and family.
Happy Christmas and peace on Earth!!
Shiny thing! ;O)
I assume if the nsa are interested in you they will probably have a key stroke logger – assuming they don’t also use the microphones and webcams on devices. There is probably a danger also in assuming the nsa are 12 feet tall, but I guess they are probably 9 or 10 feet tall.
I tried to think up an nsa way of communicating once. Basically it involved a pair of tablets, one which would have no networking card and contain a series of one time pads for encryption. The second tablet would use its webcam and OCR to read the encrypted text on the first tablet. The second tablet would send the encrypted text to another pair of tablets – one of which was networked disabled and contained the matching one time pads. Those two would also transfer data by ocr and webcam. Moving encrypted text by USB would probably work as well, but possibly people could come up with ways to smuggle spyware through if they thought long and hard, whereas the optical stream would be unhackable. Printing paper copies of encrypted text and then scanning them to air-gapped devices would work too. The essence is secure use of one time pads and have devices that physically can’t connect to a network.
But yes it is too much bother. A bit of 2 Corinthians 12 9-11 about it
But you probably want a steganography layer as well – you don’t want to send naked encrypted text. You could code into a jpg by altering slightly he pixels RBG code ( even is 1, odd 0) then just send the jpg by twitter. The receiver then extracts the encrypted text from the image and transfers it to the air gapped machine.
But humint is more powerful than sigint. If the US government had tried to extradite Assange in 2011, there would have been storms of protests. It took a long slow decade of Assange slowly trashing his reputation with his natural allies – hiding from rape charges, damaging Hillary Clinton’s election bid, to make it possible.
Each of the individual decisions is defensible, line them all up in a row it looks odd. Presumably there must have been an element of social engineering at play.
What rape charges?
Squeeth: thank you. There was indeed never any rape charge against Julian Assange, although many people, such as, apparently, Sean_lamb, have been unwittingly brainwashed into supposing otherwise.
The people who are brainwashed are those incapable of taking a step back and realising that Assange has spent over 10 years in confinement with the only substantive charge being a procedural one of skipping bail.
The US plans seem to have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams
yes the US succeeded with propaganda, and by breaking laws, not with Assange “trashing his reputation”.
Clinton damaged Clinton’s election bid. but keep repeating the lies, maybe that will make them true.
Bochum sure had its influx of Polish labour, but it never “was predominantly Polish”, and I think every fair minded reviewer on that point would prove me right. Germany has acknowledged that it used slave labour from the East (“POWs etc.)” ages ago. What is your point?
It was a noble acknowledgement, any fair-minded person would agree. Let’s hope the Poles were grateful for it.
But will it take equally as long for Germans to acknowledge that in this year 2022 they sabotaged their own economy and standard of living in order to bolster US power? And to acknowledge that Germany’s fabulous reward from Washington for this noble service was .. zero (or substantially minus-zero)?
Time will tell.
My point is that history is always much more complex than the simple narrative we are taught, and the allied bombing of Bochum killed a lot of Poles, including both inhabitants and forced labourers.
I’m not entirely sure where the dividing line is. I guess Poles are those people who speak Polish; but I’m not sure that linguistic boundaries are the same as national boundaries. This distinction seems to be an issue in Ukraine.
Poland’s a mess. A fairly big chunk of it is historically Prussia. Another big chunk was assimilated by Ukraine after WWII.
I’m glad I live on an island.
Poland has shifted geographically, but is remarkably ethnically and linguistically homogeneous. The post 1945 ethnic cleansing of the former Prussian lands was comprehensive. Poland of course lost an equivalent amount of territory to the East including the great Polish city of Lvov.
Yes, and in a sense, Stalin made the Polish nation stronger in the long run. After he was done with his rather nasty ethnic cleansing, practically everyone who lived in Poland thought of themselves as Polish and spoke Polish. The nation closely coincided with the borders of the country, making it very cohesive. There were no divided loyalties. That hadn’t been true of Poland before and it isn’t true of many countries today. (Arguably it’s becoming less true of Poland now, with an increasing Polish diaspora and a large influx of Ukrainians … but that’s further off-topic).
“Poland of course lost an equivalent amount of territory to the East including the great Polish city of Lvov”
It lost more than just territory.
Between 50,000 and 100,000 Poles were massacred in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia by Stepan Bandera’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army, with the support of parts of the local Ukrainian population. Most of the victims were women and children. Many of the Polish victims regardless of age or gender were tortured before being killed; some of the methods included rape, dismemberment or immolation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia
That massacre of Polish women and children is not the only atrocity for which Bandera has been canonized by Ukraine’s present-day political class. After the coup in 2014 Bandera’s holocaust of Kiev’s Jewish population at Babi Yar ravine was honoured by the city government by renaming the road to the holocaust site Stepan Bandera Avenue.
Celebrations all over Ukraine today honouring the birthday of their national hero, a nazi mass murderer.
Meantime British politicians and media pretend to be horrified by the scourge of antisemitism.
Happy Christmas Craig and all fellow blog readers.
I have just finished reading my xmas present…’The Trial of Julian Assange’ by Nils Melzer in which, unsurprisingly, Craig is mentioned and quoted from. Even if you consider yourself relatively informed about the ongoing travesty of justice that Assange is still being subjected to, I can guarantee you will still be shocked by the relentless abuse of process exposed by the author.
Reading it I could not help but see the similarities of the approach taken by the Scottish executive/judiciary against Craig as that experienced by Julian from Sweden, UK, Ecuador and American governments.
I honestly wonder Craig whether your intended legal fight with the NUJ is worth it from a physical and mental health perspective. Do your experiences to date with the legal system give you any true hope that being ‘right’ matters a jot in this increasingly distopian reality?
I will support your legal fund if you decide to take on the NUJ, but at least enter the fight with eyes wide open. You are persona non grata with the authorities and are likely to be denied natural justice…just like Julian.
(Note, I am not trying to equate the cases in terms of potential consequences but simply the abuse of natural justice)
I’m going to get that book, right now I’m reading Secret Power by Stefania Maurizi, which I learned about here, and would also highly recommend.
Could not agree more with Barry R. Im reading Nils book as well at present and have my eyes on Stefania Maurizios findings in this case.
Historians in future will be well surprised how much they missed, not to speak of the connective tissue between Julians case and the treatment of anyone who so much speaks up for him, such as Craig, John Pilger and Wikileaks. Kristin Hrafnasson.
Julian should be with his wife Stella and his two boys at Christmas, but we have a new, even more hardline Cruella Braverman to decide his fate. Mind she enjoys Rishi ‘s full support, poor chap, he is all high finance and remoteness to real life and does not much understand the implications of working like within the third Reich.
As a confirmed nobody, I understand your position and outlook.
Resources are not for the lumpen, they are there for the effective greediest.
Morality, does not pass their mind
They can know everything, but we can always say fuck that.
“If the security services are not targeting me, what are they doing?” LOL, priceless! While my mother’s maiden name was McNeil, I assume my Scottish forbears were either slave owners, overseers, or indentured servants sent to Jamaica after the English destroyed the Highlanders in the 18th century. All to say I have no attachment to Scotland or Scots, but I read your work with interest and, occasionally, much merriment. I’m really sorry for your stint in prison. Old people and imprisonment don’t go together.
I’d be very interested in what you think of Brexit and the new monarch in London. For me these were both remote things, being a died in the wool New Yorker with a dislike of the Brits based on two trips to Blighty. Yet I recently met a woman who follows news much, much more carefully than I do. Her take on King Charles and Camilla was eye opening to me. I didn’t realize the king was so unpopular.
The Brexit thing is more serious. To me the geo-political implications were and are grave. I believe the Brits left the E.U. because they couldn’t dominate it. Some of them must have believed they could drum up some pale ghost of their empire – a trading bloc of White English countries, but it hasn’t happened due to lack of interest on the part of the former colonies. Living standards seem to be falling faster in Britain than in Europe. The scenes in Parliament and Downing Street are increasingly like a Pythonesque skit. It’s amazing to me that it has taken a man of S. Asian extraction to bring some order and respectability back to the British gov’t.
What’s your take? Do you truly believe there’s a chance for any British posession to break off from the descent into the maelstrom which England seems to be in? I’d guess N. Ireland has the best chance even though the crow half the Ulsterers would have to swallow in uniting with the Irish nationalists would choke an ox.
I’d really love to read more about your time in the foreign service. It was eye opening and most amusing.
Happy New Year and best wishes!
Looks like the role of the site’s on-duty-comedian is mine forever:-)
Happy holidays, people! Look what I’ve digged for you!
KGB interrogates Santa Claus:
https://youtu.be/n4g-gus5baY
Love it! Happy New Year.
And here am I thinking that Santa was tired this year and was vacationing in the Caribbean.
Come to think of it – his philosophy of giving is a bit communistic.
Ha…ha…
Good for Santa, and Jesus was a socialist.
…and look what happened to him.
Interesting comment by Richard Murphy: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2022/12/23/the-radical-economics-of-christmas/ Very worth reading. Happy New Year.
If Santa was actually a communist, everybody would get a voucher for a piece of coal; and when they went to the mine to redeem it, an official would hand them a shovel and point them towards the pit. And when they re-emerged clutching their precious lump, the official would take it off them and tell them to go back down and keep working. It’s a gift that keeps ’em giving!
Пусть Дед Мороз принесет вам побольше подарков!
May Santa Claus bring you more gifts!
have fun, my friends, have fun 🙂
Am I alone to expect Mr. Murray to write on Twitter files? I recall he was angry with shadow banning.
Do they cover the news on Elon Musk and his new policy, in UK? On Twiiter and Trump? On Twitter and Hunter Biden real laptop story? On Twitter management getting “consultations’ with the FBI?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
ah, instead of ‘shadow ban’ I should have used ‘visibility filtering’ – that’s the term Twitter actually used 🙂
Mr. Murray, in case you’re interested to see the Twitter Mod’s blacklist button, you may like visit Pikabu for the screenshots. I guess it’s what you were suspecting some time before
https://pikabu.ru/story/delo_tvittera__the_twitter_files_chast_ii_chyornyiy_spisok_4_minutyi_chteniya_9788021
part 1 with Biden’s laptop is here
https://pikabu.ru/story/delo_tvittera__the_twitter_files_chast_i_noutbuk_syina_baydena_10_minut_chteniya_9783485
Musk is not some renegade taking on the ruling class. He’s an extremely rightwing Republican mu!ti-billionaire and a big cog in the murderous MIC. He thinks Joe Biden of all people is not right-wing enough.
https://scheerpost.com/2022/06/01/elon-musk-is-not-a-renegade-outside-hes-a-massive-pentagon-contractor/amp/
Your enemy’s enemy is hardly ever your friend.
I lost a briefcase in Bangkok and a kind person turned it into the police station who, when I reported it missing, tried to blackmail me.
I told them to keep it.
«and I suspect most likely the whole thing is just an attempt at intimidation»
Perhaps:
* Someone is trying to find some “dirt” on you: that’s why they were trying to access all your accounts (e.g. a message or a donation from Khamenei or Trump or Kim praising you for your work for Satan :->).
* The someone is a second-tier (or even third-tier) organisation: UK (and thus USA) security services obviously know already everything about your accounts.
Where’s Craig gone?
Should we be worried??
No, I don’t think we need to worry. He posted on Twitter today: https://nitter.nl/CraigMurrayOrg/with_replies
Thanks!
Another tweet I didn’t receive.
Blissex@29th 17.58
I think you are absolutely right. The security services GCHQ et al and within the five eyes will be able to monitor every computer that connects to the internet. Ditto every telephone call. And with voice prints, facial recognition, social media, clustering, it will be difficult if not impossible to hide your communications or information if the state takes an interest.
The theft of Mr Murray’s lap tops is in the circumstances beyond coincidence and has all the hallmarks of somebody making things difficult for him whilst sending a message.
Not, ‘will be able to ‘, but are already able to. It’s no coincidence that GCHQ has a facility in Cornwall where the international communication links come ashore. Their equipment is embedded in the Internet and communication infrastructure in the UK and elsewhere in the world, and has been for years. All communications is swept up and sent back to their supercomputers for ‘analysis’. The NSA are involved as well, directly and indirectly. The only safe assumption is that your communications are not secure.
They wouldn’t have released the internet to the public all those years ago if they hadnt had total control over it from the start.
Nah, it wasn’t like that. I remember the early days of the world wide web, and it was the wild west compared to today. Nobody knew what the possibilities were, and you could do things you can’t today. There’s been a steady process of increasing control, which others here know much better than me. It was the WWW that changed things, and that wasn’t a government “release”.
Agree 100%. I’ve been programming since 81 so saw all of those developments first hand. Jeezo we used to get faxed customer support requests..
The technology was way ahead of the security guys, possibly by a year or so, which was essentially an eternity. Really wish I’d kept the old technology and magazines of the time, though did see my first graphics terminal in a ?? museum.
Changed days indeed.