Obama to extend his powers to launch ‘preemptive’ cyber attacks

The latest power grab enables the President of the United States to launch pre-emptive attacks on anyone suspicious of planning to attack U.S. infrastructure.

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | FEBRUARY 5, 2013

President Barack Obama will have the authority to order preventive cyber attacks if the U.S. detects a potential threat from abroad. Officials consulted by several U.S. media say the administration wants to take action against the increasing number of attacks on computer networks in the country.

According to main stream media reports, Obama will sign a new executive order to take on new powers that enable him to start a new phase in American history: cyber wars. The Obama administration has recently studied the use of the available computer arsenal and its conclusion is that the president may assume such jurisdiction if a computer attack is sensed.

The Obama administration has worked on model legislation that would have passed both these powers as a framework of security standards to supposedly protect the country’s infrastructure as well as how the nation would respond to a cyber attack. The bill backed by the White House was rejected by the opposition in Congress, so the president, as he has done since his first day in office, will use an executive order to expand his power.

Remember the talk of a presidential internet kill switch? This is it, and the power to turn it on and off will now be put on paper.

Obama’s gesture coincides with recent reports of attacks by Chinese hackers to several U.S. media, so one of Obama’s justification to sign a new executive order that gives him unlimited power to launch a cyber attack is that his propaganda machine must be spared from any attacks so that it can continue lying to people about Obama’s real intention to grab the web. As it is widely known, no part of the United States sensitive infrastructure is ‘online’.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta used scare tactics last fall when he warned about a new “cyber Pearl Harbor” that could cause massive damage to American infrastructure. He mentioned that hackers could “derail passenger trains or cargo trains loaded with deadly chemicals” and that “there are cases in which intruders have gained access to control systems “of various parts of U.S. infrastructure. The Obama administration argues that any such attacks would be treated as an “act of war”.

The U.S. Department of Defense already created a new cyber command and ordered some sectors to increase its budget within the Army. Current legislation states that the U.S. can only carry out anti terrorist missions in those countries where it is involved in a war, but the new rules would allow the president and intelligence agencies to access foreign networks in order to detect possible attacks targeting the U.S. or  introduce computer viruses into their systems to prevent operation. That is exactly what the United States and Israel did to Iran last year even though there wasn’t any legislation approved neither by the Congress nor the president. What politicians in Washington are doing right now is simply coding what they’ve been doing for a long time. Of course any and all details about the so-called preemptive cyber attacks will remain secret.

The U.S. used cyber war to carry out an offensive against Iran, focusing exclusively on the infrastructure of its uranium enrichment plant, which in itself could have cause a massive nuclear accident. The project, inherited from the Bush administration, managed to block the operation of Iran’s nuclear program by introducing a computer virus in their systems, which showed that a nation’s infrastructure can be disabled or destroyed without previous warning and without bombarding buildings or civilian populations.

Experts say cyber warfare could cause serious damage to attack targets such as the U.S. financial system or transport networks. What those experts don’t point out is that very few nations, a dozen or less, have the technical capability to carry out such attacks, and that in the military community everyone knows who those countries are. Therefore, no preemptive strikes are needed. All it is needed is to remain vigilant instead of granting the president even more power than he already has.

What the United States is essentially saying is, do as we say, not as we do. The idea that the Americans intend to establish cooperation and exchange of information with governments and private entities in order to prevent a cyber Pearl Harbor, is as real as Santa Claus. The U.S. is simply announcing to the world that its next battlefield for conquest will be the world wide web, a territory rarely seen as the next stage in global warfare.

According to news reports, Obama’s main focus will be to prevent intrusions into the systems that manage the energy, finances chemical and basic services networks, none of which are ‘online’ or need to be online. The Obama Administration has publicly defended the U.S. response to cyber warfare, saying that it should focus both on preventing attacks as well as strengthening their computer systems to reduce the potential consequences of such an attack.

Since the supposed cyber attacks may not come from a nation, but could come from so-called terrorists groups, it is unlikely preemptive cyber attacks will be a real solution to them. The new power grab led by the Obama administration is mostly about grabbing the web to conduct its own terror plots, much like the United States has done in the physical world up until today. U.S. military dominance will extend itself from the ‘real’ world to cyber space.

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Another Cyber False-Flag to Lock down the Internet

First came Stuxnet, then Flame and Duqu. Now, prepare for Gauss

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | AUGUST 13, 2012

The efforts to bring about full control of the free internet are about to receive another jolt, as a new cyber bug known as Gauss is fast spreading around the world collecting information from banking institutions, commercial transactions and other data.

Gauss was discovered by Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based computer security firm. According to its workers, Gauss is from the same making as Stuxnet and Flame, two computers viruses launched by the US and Israel to disrupt Internet services, especially in the Middle East.

Gauss is then a new form of cyber false-flag launched by governments that have an interest in kidnapping the web to make it of their own while curtailing access and free speech. The virus has been targeting banks, social networks and e-commerce, among others. It has been stealing login and password information as well as email and instant messaging data.

Gauss’s actions have been felt more strongly in the Middle East, in countries such as Lebanon, while in the West, the virus attacked computers at CitiGroup Inc.’s and Paypal. The specificity of the attacks already has many people buzzing about whether this virus could be used to create glitches that would cause a financial disaster, something of the kind seen in Wall Street, where financial transactions were affected by a ‘malfunction’ which caused great pain to investors. No need to emphasize that Wall Street is also connected to the World Wide Web, and that any strong attack on financial business could at the very least shut down the exchange.

People at Kaspersky Lab, among other computer technology companies are still trying to determine the reach that this virus has had so far and whether it is a bug carrying out surveillance in order to later execute a massive attack, or if it will start spreading its own poison around the financial world. The only information that has now been confirmed, is that Gauss is indeed a state- sponsored cyber-espionage tool. “Researchers from the security software manufacturer Symantec Corp, confirm Kaspersky Lab’s summation that Gauss is related to previous government-created cyber warfare viruses,” reports Occupy Corporatism.

Previous to Gauss, Stuxnet and Flame were used to attack technological infrastructure linked to the production of nuclear energy in Iran by entering the online systems and installing surveillance and .exe programs in an effort to slow down and destroy Iranian infrastructure. “After looking at Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame, we can say with a high degree of certainty that Gauss comes from the same ‘factory’ or ‘factories.’ All these attack toolkits represent the high end of nation-state-sponsored cyber-espionage and cyber war operations,” said Kaspersky Lab in a communiqué.

A common reason given by governments in order to justify these kind of attacks is the need to be vigilant when it comes to Middle East threats, especially movement of monies between what the US and Israel consider dangerous governments or traditional terrorist groups. Of course this is a lie, as the US government itself has, in numerous occasions authorized terrorist groups to carry out financial transactions in order to support their operations. This happened in Libya and is now happening is Syria, where the US Treasury has officially announced their support for the terrorist rebel groups who are fighting the Syrian Army.

While the US government congratulates itself for its fight against terrorism and money laundering — which is in itself questionable — its Treasury Department is publicly enabling terrorists in Syria to fund their operations against the local government. Back in November 2011, a report on Pravda revealed how US and other global baking entities were being used to hide dirty money from the drug trade. In that specific case, banks around the world allowed the circulation of $352 billion dollars in drug cartel money. According to the same report, billions more in drug money had been injected into the economy in previous years.

These cyber attacks are examples of double false-flags, not only because they cause disruption in transactions and commerce, but also because they have the intended purpose of being used as excuses to ramp up the corporate power-grab of the Internet. Something similar has been happening in the United States in the realm of the Second Amendment and gun rights in general, where two mass shootings have brought the calls for gun regulations back onto the main stream.

According to Kapersky Lab, the makers of Gauss went to a great deal of trouble to hide the purpose of the virus by using sophisticated encryption codes that may take a few months to break. International organizations interested in controlling the web, such as the United Nations, has warned governments worldwide about the threat posed by Gauss. Paradoxically, there isn’t anything more threatening to the Internet than the management of its infrastructure by one single entity, which is what the UN wants. The UN’s cyber security coordinator, Marco Obiso, said in a statement that “we don’t know what exactly it does. We can have some ideas. We are going to emphasize this.”

Parallel to the UN’s efforts to divert attention from its intent to manage the web all by itself, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is said to be studying any possible threat that Gauss may present to the country. “The department’s cyber security analysts are working with organizations that could potentially be affected to detect, mitigate and prevent such threats,” said DHS’ Peter Boogaard.

The same kind of attacks now being conducted by the US and Israel against other nations’ infrastructure, are the reasons why highly advanced technological states such as Russia, the United States and China have called for the adoption of harsher cybersecurity policies in order to defend their own countries. Is it because they intend to keep on causing cyber attacks in order to call for more Internet control, or is it because they know that their infrastructure will be the subject of attacks in response to their non-stop terror attacks on other nations?

One fact is clear. The only cyber attacks the world has witnessed so far haven’t come from fringe terrorist organizations, crazy individuals with the technology to send out a massive attack on sensible systems or rogue governments in the traditional sense. All of the major attacks have come from the collaboration of very advanced countries who publicly call themselves the victims of attacks, but that privately are the ones carrying out such attacks.

Could the next attack be one that will enable governments like the US, China or Israel to justify an even more dangerous attack on inoffensive nations? Or perhaps it will be a chance to cause a major financial attack in addition to imposing significant restrains on those who access the Internet and what can be uploaded or downloaded, for example. A worldwide attack of major proportions on the financial industry would certainly be a handy tool to carry out more financial terrorism of the kind being conducted right now against developed and developing nations.

We will have to wait and see. Meanwhile, it is clear that any attempt to curtail Internet freedom will not go unnoticed by the public because we already know the cyber terrorists’ modus operandi.