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Musings Report 2017-10 3-12-17 The Tragi-Comedy of Vault 7 (the CIA's Hacking Tools)
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An Apology to Email Correspondents
I have been consumed by home-based work projects the past four months, and as a result my email correspondence has suffered as a direct result of working 7 days a week, 12 hours a day on these deadline-heavy projects. My sincere apologies to those who were kind enough to write me and have not yet received a reply. I hope to catch up over the next few months, on the theory "better late than never." Thank you for your patience.
The Tragi-Comedy of Vault 7 (the CIA's Hacking Tools)
To my surprise, my Friday blog post on the open conflict in the Deep State (a disunity I've been writing about for three years) set records for readership: over 250,000 on Zero Hedge alone, 40,000 on my servers, and thousands more on sites that republish my blog posts I(Max Keiser, Washington's Blog, etc.)
What prompted my essay was of course Wikileak's release of Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed, which I suggested could be fruitfully seen as a counter-strike by the "progressive" elements of the Deep State against the neocons who have the backing of the Establishment.
The neocons have made unremitting efforts to sell the U.S. public on the "Russia hacked the US elections," "Trump is a Russian patsy" and "Russia is evil and our mortal enemy" narratives for many months, and they're not getting traction for the simple reason there is little evidence to support these far-fetched claims.
Indeed, the Vault 7 revelations make it clear that the CIA had the tools and the intent to create fake trails back to fictitious "Russian hackers" (the UMBRAGE program).
Various commentators have responded by saying they prefer the CIA Deep State and its dismantling of of civil liberties to Trump's leadership. My question to these people: please explain how Trump could do anything more destructive than the CIA Deep State, which appears intent on fomenting a war with Russia and has effectively destroyed civil liberties and meaningful oversight of the Security Agencies.
Vault 7 is full of ironies and tragi-comic revelations. The greatest irony, of course, is the claim that "we had to destroy civil liberties to save them," much like the famous line from the Vietnam War (apocryphal, as it turns out) that "we had to destroy the village in order to save it."
Many observers noted the eerie synchronicity between the CIA's ability to turn "smart TVs" into listening devices and the passage describing the TV-like devices in George Orwell's novel 1984.
My Facebook feed sported numerous instances of humor, with people "worrying" that the CIA would see how much instant ramen they consumed, and so on.
I posted on FB that the CIA would have to buy me a new car of they wanted to insure Internet access to my vehicle.
The conventional rationalization of these capabilities is: there's nothing to worry about, these tools are only being used against "enemies of the state," i.e. terrorists and criminals.
But who gets to define who is an "enemy of the state"? If there is no active oversight, that is, oversight that has access to everything marked "secret" in the CIA, then the CIA itself has the power to decide who is an "enemy of the state."
The mainstream political and media response has made it abundantly clear that the Establishment and the neocon Deep State view anyone who releases information about the CIA's ability to moot civil liberties as an "enemy of the state."
So anyone who objects to the use of these hacking tools is an "enemy of the state" and thus they become an "authorized" target of surveillance (and perhaps worse).
Another irony is the most powerful elements pushing back against the CIA's essentially unlimited powers (its own killer-drone fleet, its own NSA, its own covert operations and army, and so on) is the U.S. military, specifically, the services (though there may be significant resistance within the civilian leadership Pentagon as well).
Hollywood has typically portrayed the CIA in a blazingly positive light (a result we now know of longstanding CIA media efforts), while the portrayal of the U.S. military is often negative--people in uniform are war-mongering unbalanced wackos, and so on.
The irony is that military personnel may well be far more cognizant of the value of what we're supposed to be defending--civil liberties and civilian-led democracy--than the globalist neocons in the civilian Deep State.
As correspondent Dave P. noted on Facebook, the consequences of the CIA's playing fast and loose with the Vault 7 toolkit extend far beyond the ironies already noted. What could go wrong, he asks, if you distribute these hacking tools to 5,000 authorized users? They leak out, of course.
And so hackers around the world can exploit these tools for their own purposes, thanks to the vulnerabilities resulting from CIA management of US technology.
And what happens to American technology once people become aware that the CIA has intentionally maintained security flaws in widely used software to enable their easy access? What does this do to trust in US technology? What are the financial implications of these CIA-enforced security flaws?
Clearly, the CIA, its political allies and its subservient Security Agencies have over-reached.
Strip the oversight and civilian limits on a secretive, hubris-prone agency and give that agency an unlimited budget, and the only possible output of these inputs is over-reach and the immense destruction implicit in Vault 7.
Centralize power, and this is what you get: over-reach.
One positive will emerge: a much more secure Internet. As I have speculated in previous Musings, I foresee an "Internet v2" with an entirely different backbone of protocols that are much more secure as a result of their intrinsic design.
The Internet we have was designed for a handful of nodes in research universities and government labs. It was not designed to be secure, so it isn't. I suspect that is about to change.
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
The Conflict within the Deep State Just Broke into Open Warfare 3/10/17
Are Central Banks Losing Control? 3/9/17
Why I Have to Agree with Tim Geithner on This 3/8/17
The Next Domino to Fall: Commercial Real Estate 3/7/17
It's What's Happening Beneath the Surface That Matters: Moral Decay and Rising Inequality 3/6/17
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
A neighbor gave us a big Japanese pumpkin (kabocha) and it was magically transformed into pumpkin pies by the Home Team (my wife and her cousin).
Market Musings: Checking in on Oil
Oil is the master commodity, as the current version of industrialized civilization quickly breaks down without it. (Natural gas is a substitute that can be turned into liquid fuel, but the infrastructure is set up to process and distribute crude oil in bulk.)
Given this pre-eminence, it's important to keep tabs on the oil/natty gas markets.
Oil has been trading above the 50-week moving average (MA) for about a year. (One brief spike below in July quickly bounced back up above the 50-week MA.)
The weekly charts suggests two scenarios: a continued drop to the lower Bollinger band at $44, followed by a sharp rebound back above the 50-week MA, or a decline that breaks below $44.
If MACD drops below the neutral line on this decline, this opens the door to a revisit to the congestion zone between $25 and $35.
The daily chart doesn't look quite as benign as the weekly chart. The drop is severe, and MACD is free-falling below the neutral line. Next technical levels appear to be $44-$45 and then $42.
If $42 fails, a round-trip to $25 becomes a possibility. That could offer an opportunity to build long-term positions in the oil complex.
From Left Field
Japan Declares Crisis As Fukushima Reactor Begins Falling Into Ocean And Radiation Levels Soar (5:22)
The Internet Is Overreacting About Fukushima's Radiation, Here's Why (4:32)
How Europe became so rich -- state competition, fluid borders for ideas, books and intellectuals -- long-form, worth a read...
With the latest WikiLeaks revelations about the CIA – is privacy really dead? (The Guardian)
What income inequality is doing to Americans' life spans -- that and income insecurity and junk food...
The US Will Lose Tens of Millions of Jobs in the Next 20 Years--so what's new?
Retail CEO says the wave of stores closings 'may even accelerate'--file under Painfully Obvious...
It’s Not Just America—Rents Are High Everywhere (via Joel M.)
The Hungry Microbiome: why resistant starch is good for you (4:03)
How to Curb Hunger and Boost Weight Loss with Resistant Starch
The US Motorist Is Unwell: Miles Driven Suffer Biggest Slowdown In Over 2 Years
Oil Industry Suppliers Face Years of Restructuring (via Joel M.)
France's Death Spiral--largely unreported....
"There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it." George Bernard Shaw
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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