Bust Reveals Government Runs Hacking Groups

Infowars contributor Kurt Nimo covers the FBI's provocateur project to infiltrate and instigate rogue civil society crackers.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 6, 2012
(Source link)

The establishment media has characterized the leader of LulzSec ratting out his hacktivist comrades as betrayal, but the incident reveals something far more sinister – government is responsible for creating and unleashing computer hacker groups.

Hector Xavier Monsegur, said to be the leader of LulzSec, worked for the FBI, according to news reports. He was reportedly arrested in Puerto Rico last June, pleaded guilty to hacking charges, and then began working with the FBI – or so the cover story would have it.

Monsequr, aka Sabu, decided what targets to attack and who would participate in the attacks, more than likely at the direction of this FBI handlers. It is believed he participated in the Anonymous effort to hack HBGary, the security firm that works closely with the CIA, NSA, FBI, and the Pentagon.

Sabu’s Lulz Security, commonly abbreviated as LulzSec, claimed responsibility for taking the CIA website offline. It also attacked Fox News, PBS, Sony, and a number of gamer sites. LulzSec claims to have hacked local InfraGard chapter sites, the organization affiliated with the FBI, and released the emails and passwords of a number of users of senate.gov.

LulzSec and Anonymous attacks have provided the government with an excuse to push their cyber security agenda and propaganda campaign, including the proposal for a “kill switch” that would have allowed Obama to shut down the internet (due to public outrage, the proposal was dropped from a House bill in February).

Government and corporate groups cited LulzSec and Anonymous lawlessness last June to push the so-called Protect IP Act (known as PIPA). The introduction of a House version of the bill, dubbed SOPA (Stop Online Privacy Act), was met with public outrage and widespread activism that forced Congress to reconsider the legislation.

In October, Mother Jones revealed that the FBI is notorious for
creating supposed terrorist groups from scratch and then framing patsies in
order to claim the government is protecting the United States from terrorists
and also breathe life into an otherwise moribund war on mostly nonexistent
terrorism.

Sabu’s role as an FBI provocateur working inside LulzSec reveals the government is attempting to do the same in order to push its so-called cybersecurity agenda. The establishment is eager to pass a raft of legislation to closely regulate the internet, strip the medium of its anonymity, and close it down as an activism and alternative media tool.

Internet Reformation

By The Daily Bell
Retrieved 9 October 2011

The Internet Reformation is the culmination of the power and glory of Western civil society and free-market thinking. It is the apogee of all that is best in a sweep of history that began with the ancient Greeks and has culminated in the hearts and minds of millions of young men and women who industriously add to its impact every day via additional code, non-mainstream news or fundamental scientific commentary.

It is NOT an "Internet Revolution." The Internet Revolution is a standard "pat" phrase of the powers-that-be about the so-called empowering effects of technology. The Internet Reformation is a much more deeply disruptive concept. It is truly a revolutionary one, affecting every aspect of human society and human relationships with modern elites. It is focused around the insights generated by the Internet itself.

This concept is based on what happened during the era of the Gutenberg press. Almost from the beginning, the Gutenberg press was a revolutionary technology. As soon as people used the press to print Bibles, readers began to discover that the Holy Word differed considerably from what they'd been taught by the Catholic Church.

Until then, Bibles had been fairly rare. They were printed in Latin or Greek, and copied down by hand with elaborate engravings. The Catholic Church and its important functionaries and bureaucrats possessed Bibles. Priests performed Mass with their back to the congregation. The ceremony was a highly Romanized one, as the West had come to conceive of Rome within its most corrupt and centralizing phase, and highly controlled.

But printing Bibles in moveable type changed the power relationship entirely. Now, anyone could own a Bible and they were easily reproduced and increasingly inexpensive. Almost immediately, then Bibles began to be translated into "vulgate" and eventually the King James Version (English) would become a dominant variant. But in the meantime, the damage was done. First came the Renaissance and then the Reformation and finally the Age of Enlightenment, three powerful rolling waves of free-thinking that transformed the face of human society, first in the West and then around the world.

The changes ushered in by the Gutenberg press were fundamental. The Renaissance began the reconfiguration by allowing for the rediscovery of the scientific orientation of Greece and Rome. This set in motion a series of events that has not yet ceased to reverberate.

The fundamental motivating force of the Renaissance was to emphasize natural observation, and this can be seen in the obsession with great artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci who returned to the original source of knowledge whenever possible. This led both artists to dissect corpses rather than to rely on the standard anatomy books of the day, such as they were. Da Vinci's great scientific speculations were based on first-hand observation not sterile theory argued in debating halls.

The Reformation launched a second wave of attacks on the West's business as usual. But it actually involved the same animation. The Gutenberg press allowed readers to examine source material by making the sources available. This was the revolutionary act. The Renaissance emphasized conclusions derived from that fundamental inspiration. The Reformation in its way emphasized sources too. It sought, in its most radical incarnations, to strip out the interpretative layer of Church doctrine by emphasizing the Word of the Bible itself.

Martin Luther began this process in 1517 by publishing his Ninety-Five Theses attacking much of the ecclesiastical structure of Catholic Church. Interestingly, the Reformation's initial phase is seen as ending in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia that put a stop to the religious wars by emphasizing the primacy of the nation state. The Treaty of Westphalia was overturned by the Security Council of the United Nations in 2005, when that body adopted R2P, which mandates that the "West" in aggregate interfere with a nation's sovereignty to "protect" citizens. The powers-that-be have therefore launched a counterattack on national sovereignty even as the Internet Reformation begins to gather power and undermines business as usual.

The Reformation was also known as the Protestant Reformation because despite its formal end-date of 1648, its ripples continue to spread and ultimately gave rise to the establishment of the New World, and the American and French Revolutions. Each wave of the so-called Protestant Revolt further deconstructed the formalized church and suggested doctrine that brought man closer in touch with God.

This process eventually led to the most radical sects such as the Quakers and "Shakers" that did away with Church trappings entirely and simply allowed the individual worshipper to communicate with God as he or she saw fit. The Quakers sometimes used to shed their clothes and worship nakedly in a penultimate effort to remove barriers to the spiritual conversation.

All across the world, the modern Internet Reformation is beginning to reshape the way people relate to power in the modern age. While it is not so obvious as during the era of the Gutenberg press, there is formal doctrine accepted by Western societies that is beginning to shatter. That formal doctrine may be termed regulatory democracy and it has been leavened with numerous assumptions that on closer inspection turn out not to be true. It is the Internet itself that allows for information to spread that undermines the various precepts of regulatory democracy.

Every social order needs a formal elite to organize and animate it. In the high Middle Ages, the hierarchy consisted of the Catholic Church leaders along with Royal families throughout Europe, as well as powerful merchants and bankers. In the modern era, the hierarchy is much less obvious and consists, from available evidence of the great banking, modern banking families led by the Rothschilds based in the City of London along with attendant Zionist influences and abetted by corporate interests and the so-called Dark Nobility and Dark Church.

It is this hierarchy that promulgates regulatory democracy and its various dominant social themes – the fear-based promotions that the Western power elite uses to control the conversation and to further centralize power and authority worldwide. Just as the Catholic church leaders dreamed of one Pax Romana around the world, so does today's power elite dream of one world order driven by regulatory democracy.

The fear-based themes are many and include many scarcity memes among them. The world is commonly held to be running out of food, water, oil and energy. It is in imminent danger of plagues, unusual weather and asteroid strikes. In these and many other instances, the solutions that are heralded are focused directly on additional governmental agencies, preferably global ones. An entire global infrastructure is gradually being erected that includes an international court, a global legislature (UN), a global military (NATO) and various international agencies to adjudicate trade disputes and the like.

At the center of the new global order is central bank itself, printing money-from-nothing, perpetually devastating the economies of nation states through monetary (and price inflation) and through its ruin, creating the necessity for a global currency and a single global central bank, presumably the IMF. Within this latter meme, gold and silver are held to be barbaric elements, not needed anymore in a fiat money world.

In fact, what the Internet is increasingly showing us is a way to return to basic freedoms. The Internet in its various incarnations has already distributed information showing many of the precepts of regulatory democracy to be false. There is likely plenty of oil and gas around the world and it may be abiotic and reoccurring as well; its availability has simply been manipulated by the powers that be. Alternative sources of energy have likely been suppressed, but over the next decades may become available. Global warming has been shown to be another elite promotion and does not exist as popularly promulgated. Food and water, also supposedly in short supply, are being manipulated by the power elite within its highly controlled global markets. The War on Terror that the elites have begun is an evident and obvious falsity and the Internet reveals this in various ways every day.

Like the radical information that spawned from the Gutenberg press, the impact of the information available to counteract elite modern memes is not immediately visible but over time has a devastating effect. Human beings do have a kind of Hive Mind (via intimate communications between families and friends and various cultural exchanges) and once additional information is made available, that Mind incorporates it.

There are downsides. The power elite profits from the centralizing effects of technology. Spymasters and dictators profit from aspects of technology as they always have. And yet the positive elements are likely unstoppable as well. There is little possibility at this point of the Internet being shut down as simplistic formulations might have it. Instead, as with the Reformation itself, the Internet Reformation will continue to advance, undermining the memes of the powers-that-be and even creating, perhaps, a critical mass of decentralizing influences.

It is decentralization that the modern power elite fears most because decentralized spheres of influence are impossible to control. Unfortunately the Renaissance and Reformation were all about the decentralization of control built on the availability of real knowledge and a return to primary sources that undermined the "experts" of church and state.

The same process is occurring today. It may not be that any one Martin Luther emerges to create a formal Reformation but the larger evolution continues. (There is apparently some evidence that Luther himself was sponsored by a Venetian banking faction of the day to split the power of the church.) Essentially, however the power of the information being unleashed is what will carry the day in numerous manifestations. It is impossible for power elite memes to stand against the availability of information now presented online. It is beyond control, beyond collecting, beyond dampening.

Tomorrow's knowledge base may look much different than todays – and in fundamental ways. Ironically, the 20th century so celebrated by the centralizers must at least to some degree give way to a decentralized Renaissance in the 21st. Yes, the powers-that-be will fight back as they already are via wars and social chaos, just as the Catholic Church responded with its Counter-Reformation; but eventually they may be forced to take a step back as they have before.

Ironically, the proverbial dye was likely cast when America's DARPA dark-technologists invented the Internet but did not foresee, apparently, the evolution of the personal computer that would utilize it to allow average individuals to gain access to all the knowledge of the world. This may stand as one of the great miscalculations of the modern elite. It helped create a second wave of modern information technology that has already begun to undo a myriad of world-centralizing plans.

A new city (predicted in ancient Indian prophecies) has been discovered underwater off the coast of India – though the news has been much suppressed. Humankind is thousands of years older than the Western powers-that-be maintain. The current apogee of human achievement may not be the current one and certainly not the best-of-all-possible worlds. As the underlying certainties crumble, so do the building blocks of the modern elite themes – and the certainty of ongoing centralization.

In fact, the European Union is failing, various serial wars of conquest are not going well, the fear-based memes of the elite are continually being debunked by an Internet that adds more to humankind's real knowledge base every day. It will take decades if not centuries to control the damage that has already been done (from an elite standpoint), and what has been done cannot be undone.

There is a new Reformation taking place throughout the world, led by electronic communication technology. It is not being commented on by the nightly news, nor written about in the mainstream medial. But if you understand the trends and look closely, you can see it playing out every day in every part of human culture. It is already convulsing the world. Out of these labor pains a new and freer society is being born.

A new enlightenment is taking place – a fundamental reforming of societies' knowledge base. It is far more important and fundamental than a "technology revolution." It is rewriting the basic relationship that human beings have with their knowledge base and with its impact on their lives. The centralizing architecture erected by the Anglo-American elites is even now being undermined. The darkness is lifting as it lifted long ago during the Renaissance. An Internet Reformation is coming. It will have numerous unpredictable ramifications. In fact, its dawn is already here.

Britannica: Thinking about the French Revolution

The following is a copy and paste of a post made on the Britannica blog by David Boaz about the triumph of liberty and liberalism over feudalism and other forms of regimes, marking the 222nd anniversary of the French Revolution.
July 11, 2011
David Boaz

On Thursday the French will celebrate the 222nd anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, the date usually recognized as the beginning of the French Revolution. What should libertarians (or classical liberals) think of the French Revolution?

The Chinese premier Zhou Enlai is famously (but apparently inaccurately) quoted as saying, “It is too soon to tell.” I like to draw on the wisdom of another deep thinker of the mid 20^th century, Henny Youngman, who when asked “How’s your wife?” answered, “Compared to what?” Compared to the American Revolution, the French Revolution is very disappointing to libertarians. Compared to the Russian Revolution, it looks pretty good. And it also looks good, at least in the long view, compared to the ancien regime that preceded it.

Conservatives typically follow Edmund Burke‘s critical view in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. They may even quote John Adams: ”Helvetius and Rousseau preached to the French nation liberty, till they made them the most mechanical slaves; equality, till they destroyed all equity; humanity, till they became weasels and African panthers; and fraternity, till they cut one another’s throats like Roman gladiators.”

But there’s another view. And visitors to Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, get a glimpse of it when they see a key hanging in a place of honor. It’s one of the keys to the Bastille, sent to Washington by Lafayette by way of Thomas Paine. They understood, as the great historian A.V. Dicey put it, that “The Bastille was the outward visible sign of lawless power.” And thus keys to the Bastille were symbols of liberation from tyranny.

Traditionalist conservatives sometimes long for “the world we have lost” before liberalism and capitalism upended the natural order of the world. The diplomat Talleyrand said, ”Those who haven’t lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution do not know the sweetness of living.” But not everyone found it so sweet. Lord Acton wrote that for decades before the revolution “the Church was oppressed, the Protestants persecuted or exiled, . . . the people exhausted by taxes and wars.” The rise of absolutism had centralized power and led to the growth of administrative bureaucracies on top of the feudal land monopolies and restrictive guilds.

The economic causes of the French Revolution are sometimes insufficiently appreciated. In his book The French Revolution: An Economic Interpretation, Florin Aftalion outlines some of those causes. The French state engaged in wars throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. To pay for the wars, it employed complex and burdensome taxation, tax farming, borrowing, debt repudiation and forced “disgorgement” from the financiers, and debasement of the currency. Lord Acton wrote that people had been anticipating revolution in France for a century. And revolution came.

Liberals and libertarians admired the fundamental values it represented. Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek both hailed “the ideas of 1789” and contrasted them with “the ideas of 1914” — that is, liberty versus state-directed organization.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man, issued a month after the fall of the Bastille, enunciated libertarian principles similar to those of the Declaration of Independence:

1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. . . .

2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. . . .

4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. . . .

17. [P]roperty is an inviolable and sacred right.

But it also contained some dissonant notes, notably:

3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation. . . .

6. Law is the expression of the general will.

A liberal interpretation of those clauses would stress that sovereignty is now rested in the people (like “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”), not in any individual, family, or class. But those phrases are also subject to illiberal interpretation and indeed can be traced to an illiberal provenance. The liberal Benjamin Constant blamed many of France’s ensuing problems on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, often very wrongly thought to be a liberal: “By transposing into our modern age an extent of social power, of collective sovereignty, which belonged to other centuries, this sublime genius, animated by the purest love of liberty, has nevertheless furnished deadly pretexts for more than one kind of tyranny.” That is, Rousseau and too many other Frenchmen thought that liberty consisted in being part of a self-governing community rather than the individual right to worship, trade, speak, and “come and go as we please.”

The results of that philosophical error—that the state is the embodiment of the “general will,” which is sovereign and thus unconstrained—have often been disastrous, and conservatives point to the Reign of Terror in 1793-94 as the precursor of similar terrors in totalitarian countries from the Soviet Union to Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

In Europe the results of creating democratic but essentially unconstrained governments have been far different but still disappointing to liberals. As Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty:

The decisive factor which made the efforts of the Revolution toward the enhancement of individual liberty so abortive was that it created the belief that, since at last all power had been placed in the hands of the people, all safeguards against the abuse of this power had become unnecessary.

Governments could become vast, expensive, debt-ridden, intrusive, and burdensome even though they remained subject to periodic elections and largely respectful of civil and personal liberties. A century after the French Revolution Herbert Spencer worried that the divine right of kings had been replaced by “the divine right of parliaments.”

Still, as Constant celebrated in 1816, in England, France, and the United States, liberty

is the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death or maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practice it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives or undertakings. It is everyone’s right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which they and their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is most compatible with their inclinations or whims.

Compared to the ancien regime of monarchy, aristocracy, class, monopoly, mercantilism, religious uniformity, and arbitrary power, that’s the triumph of liberalism.

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