DHS Promotes Snitch Program ‘To Keep Shoppers Safe’

DHS Promotes Snitch Program ‘To Keep Shoppers Safe’
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Businesses at malls carrying out “training exercises” with government

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
Nov 29, 2013

The Department of Homeland Security is encouraging Americans to snitch on each other if they see anything “suspicious” at malls and shopping centres in New Hampshire this holiday season.

The agency is urging shop owners and shoppers to “report suspicious activity to local authorities”, as well as ramping up display propaganda, as part of its ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ campaign.

“At DHS, homeland security begins with hometown security. We’re all safer when everyone is alert and engaged…” an Orwellian sounding press release from the DHS states.

Several businesses have joined forces with the DHS to promote the snitch program, they include Mall of America, Walmart, Simon Property Group and the Building Owners and Managers Association.

Former DHS head Janet Napolitano announced an expansion of the ‘See Something…’ campaign into shopping centres in 2010.

The press release states that the overall purpose is to “raise public awareness of indicators of terrorism and terrorism-related crime, and to emphasize the importance of reporting suspicious activity to the proper local law enforcement authorities.”

The FBI is also taking part in the campaign, with the businesses also carrying out “training exercises”. It is not clear what the drills consist of.

“We have seen the value of public vigilance in thwarting terrorism and crime time and again, so remember: if you see something that doesn’t look right, report it to local authorities,” writes John Cohen, principal deputy under secretary of DHS for intelligence and analysis and counterterrorism coordinator.

“When we each do our part, we are working together to keep our nation safe, one hometown at a time.” the statement concludes.

As we have previously reported, the ‘See Something…’ campaign has been expanded to all walks of life in America beyond transport hubs, into malls, onto the streets and even into sports events.

For several years now, the DHS has been broadcasting eerie big brother style messages on huge TVs in Walmart at checkout lanes. As Alex explains in this analysis, the expansion is part of the larger takeover of the US.

As we have also highlighted in the past, actually “saying something” to the DHS will pretty much land you in a bureaucratic nightmare. You’ll find it extremely difficult to get hold of a real person and will be pretty much shunted around between federal and local law enforcement.

While the DHS may not be that interested in hearing from people who have “seen something”, they are very interested in anyone who vocally opposes their stasi-style snitch campaign.

Last year hundreds of pages of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that the DHS went out of its way to monitor political opposition to the campaign, as well as tracking Infowars stories and user comments on a myriad of other issues while categorizing the website as “Right Wing Terrorism”.

It doesn’t seem to matter that you are more than a thousand times more likely to die in a car accident than in a terrorist attack. Regardless of the fact that Americans are more likely to die from a bee sting or drowning in the bath than from terrorism, people are suckers for government propaganda. If the government tells them terrorists are a threat, they usually believe it despite the fact dying or even getting injured in a terrorist attack is at best a remote possibility.

America in 2013 is all about being guilty until proven innocent and the complete evisceration of what the country is supposed to stand for in the pursuit of unobtainable “security”.

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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.

This article was posted: Friday, November 29, 2013 at 1:57 pm

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Read more about DHS Promotes Snitch Program ‘To Keep Shoppers Safe’ and other interesting subjects concerning NSA at TheDailyNewsReport.com

Tor Can"t Always Keep You Safe; Just Ask Silk Road

It was the end of an era yesterday when the Internet’s largest (and highly profitable) black market website Silk Road was finally taken down by the feds. Its proprietor Ross William Ulbricht (aka Dread Pirate Roberts) was taken into custody and now we’re learning a lot about the site that offered everything from drugs to assassins. We’re also learning about the limits of online anonymity.

Silk Road
Named for the ancient cross-desert trade route, Silk Road was a marketplace designed to let users sell their wares—particularly, illegal goods and services. According to documents filed in conjunction with the investigation, the service saw billions of dollars pass through it in the form of untraceable Bitcoins.

To protect the site’s users, Silk Road took advantage of the Tor (The Onion Router) anonymity network which bounces your request around to make it harder to track. When you connect to Silk Road, and other websites secured by Tor, your request is bounced through a series of volunteer servers. The request uses encrypted layers, like an onion, so that each relay server can only see where the request has immediately arrived from and where it will go next.

For instance, if you’re on computer A trying to connect to website E, your request is bounced through Tor servers B, C, and D. Server B can see where you are because it’s the first hop in the chain, but it doesn’t know that you’re trying to reach website E. Server D does know what website your request is headed to, but it doesn’t know where you are. Server C doesn’t know much of anything.

It’s a clever system that has protected journalists and human rights activists, in addition to providing a modicum of security to less reputable operations. But like all security technology, it can be beaten.

Breaking Tor
Back when we looked at the Pirate Bay Browser, we highlighted a few of the problems with Tor. The big one, and the one that Tor has always admitted to, is that with careful traffic monitoring and a little math you can figure out who connects to what on Tor.

“The way we generally explain it is that Tor tries to protect against traffic analysis, where an attacker tries to learn whom to investigate,” reads a 2009 blogpost from Tor. “But Tor can’t protect against traffic confirmation (also known as end-to-end correlation), where an attacker tries to confirm a hypothesis by monitoring the right locations in the network and then doing the math.”

Basically, if you think that person A is connecting to website E, you can sit at the entry to the Tor network and at an exit point, you can eventually infer the path of travel. But you have to know who to watch before you start your investigation.

Alternatively, you can be infected with malware while on a Tor site and have your computer’s identifying information sent off to an observer. This is how the FBI was reportedly able to crack a notorious child pornography ring and bring charges against its operator, Eric Eoin Marques.

In that investigation, it appears that the FBI took control of Freedom Hosting—which hosted Marques’s site—and used them to display an error message. Within the error message was an iFrame which in turn injected code onto the computer of anyone who visited a Freedom Hosting site. Wired writes that this code captured the infected computer’s MAC address and Windows host name. This information was then packaged up and sent back to an unidentified server somewhere in Northern Virginia.

Plain Ol’ Detective Work
In the case of Silk Road, the investigation appears to have relied on more traditional policework than breaking Tor. Wired reports that the feds simply looked around for the earliest mention of Silk Road on the Internet. That led to a posting on a magic mushroom forum, which in turn led to Ulbricht’s Gmail account.

That’s not the whole story, and in fact there are a lot of gaps in the chain of events. Police somehow got a hold of several fake IDs with Ulbricht’s face on them during a border check, and somehow were able to trace Silk Road’s servers. But the initial connection to Ulbricht appears to have required no special hacking, just some persistent Googling and subpoenas.

The lesson here is that behind all the encryption and obfuscation is a person. A person who makes mistakes, a person who leaves clues, and a person who is now facing serious charges. As long as people are still people, they’ll always be vulnerable.

Image via Wikipedia

Security Watch

Tor Can"t Always Keep You Safe; Just Ask Silk Road

Tepco “deeply apologizes for mistake” — Admits ‘sprayed’ Fukushima workers actually exposed to 5 times ‘safe’ radiation limit — Radioactive dust to blame, not water spray? — Just In: Worker taken urgently to hospital in ‘bad condition’ (VIDEO)

Published: August 12th, 2013 at 11:48 pm ET By ENENews  Email Article 3 comments

TEPCO Press Release, Aug. 12, 2013: Alarm Went off at the Dust Monitor Installed in front of the Main Anti-earthquake Building at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (Revision) [...] We would like to correct the content of the follow-up information No.2 of an alarm indicating high radiation dose went off at the continuous dust monitor installed in front of the Main Anti-earthquake Building at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station today (On August 12) as follows. After revision: “Since the maximum dose of approx. 19Bq/cm2 was detected from heads and faces of 10 people who were found to be contaminated” [...] Before revision: “Since the maximum dose of 10Bq/cm2 was detected from heads and faces of 10 people who were found to be contaminated”  [...] We deeply apologize for the mistake.

‘Revised’ Tepco report on contamination incident

AP, Aug. 13, 2013: 10 exposed to radiation at Japanese nuclear plant [...] Tokyo Electric Power Co. said it is still investigating how the workers were contaminated at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, but that it may have been from radioactive dust. [...]

NHK, Aug. 12, 2013 (h/t MsMilkytheclown1): Workers at Fukushima plant suffer radiation [...] Ten workers at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have been found exposed to radiation above the safe limit. [...] TEPCO officials say the workers were exposed to radiation at a level of 19 becquerels per square centimeter. That’s 5 times the limit set by the utility. The officials say the workers are showing no unusual symptoms. [...] They say radiation detectors were sounding in the area. [...]

TEPCO Press release, Aug. 12, 2013: Physical Disorder of a Worker at Resting Place of the Registration Center at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station [...] At around 3:10 PM today (on August 12), an associated company worker [...] complained of his bad condition (headache, nausea), so he received an aid such as drip infusion, etc. at emergency medical room of the Entrance Control Building. However, since no sign of recovery was found, a doctor was judged that he needs to be transported urgently to the hospital, and an ambulance was called around 4:00 PM on the same day. As a result of medical examination at the hospital, he was diagnosed with a mild symptom of dehydration. Currently, he is on a drip and will return home soon after a sign of recovery is found.

Watch NHK’s broadcast here

Published: August 12th, 2013 at 11:48 pm ET By ENENews  Email Article 3 comments Like ENENews on Facebook Follow ENENews on Twitter Subscribe to the ENENews RSS Feed Sign up for daily email updates

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

Tepco “deeply apologizes for mistake” — Admits ‘sprayed’ Fukushima workers actually exposed to 5 times ‘safe’ radiation limit — Radioactive dust to blame, not water spray? — Just In: Worker taken urgently to hospital in ‘bad condition’ (VIDEO)