US Spying a Threat to Global Climate Deal

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The US government has been at it again spying at all and sundries and this time it is revealed the target were the UN Climate Talks and its participants.

Activists and experts have expressed outrage at the revelations that the US government, through the NSA and its allies, has conducted espionage on participants of UN climate talks.

They are calling for President Obama to commit to no further spying on participants of the talks, accompanied by a drastically increased commitment to climate action on the part of the United States, if the talks are to succeed as they build toward another global summit at the end of 2015.

"The UN climate talks are supposed to be about building trust - that's been under threat for years because of the United States' backward position on climate action - these revelations will only crack that trust further," Meena Raman, negotiations expert from the Malaysian based Third World Network, said.

Brandon Wu, Senior Policy Analyst with development organization ActionAid in the United States, said: "Fighting climate change is a global struggle, and these revelations clearly show that the US government is more interested in crassly protecting a few vested interests - rather than acting ethically by taking responsibility to lead and working cooperatively with others to find solutions."

"This is yet again an underhanded, undemocratic and arrogant use of power by the US government to protect corporate interests. We urge the citizens of the United States to condemn these actions by their government and call for an immediate stop to its blocking progress in the climate talks," said Lidy Nacpil, director of Jubilee South Asia Pacific Movement on Debt and Development, a social movement headquartered in the Philippines.

And Asad Rehman, Head of International Climate at Friends of the Earth EWNI in the UK, said: "If Obama's rhetoric on climate change in the State of the Union is to be believed he must use an executive order to stop spying on climate negotiators and take up a position on pollution cuts that is consistent with the science."

But, let's face it, the United States government and its funders, the industries with vested interest, and those of it allies, have no interest in the success of the UN Climate Talks as that could and would mean that things would have to change. This could not possibly allowed to happen now, could it, as it would cut into the profits of the companies and the “income” of the politicians industry has managed to bribe.

All the United States and most other developed countries do is pay lip service with regards to climate change and the wish to make changes and then they look at (1) buying carbon credits from Third World countries and (2) play with fire by claiming that nuclear power is the answer to a carbon-free future. But I will not start a discourse on nuclear even though it is not the answer. The fact is that the powers that be in the developed countries have no interest in reduction of carbon emissions and reduction of consumption as that does not bring them money; it is as simple as that. And that is why the likes of the US and the UK will spy on the talks in the same way that they declare climate protests acts of terrorism.

There is lots of rhetoric from the sides of the powers that be in the often referred to as “Western” nations but it is but rhetoric as far as climate action is concerned totally missing the point that action is required and total different action that which they are advocating in their speeches and all the papers that are being produced by them.

They wish to have business as usual and further economic growth (and this is not just the way it is seen in the developed world) on a Planet that cannot grow and with ever diminishing resources. How that is supposed to work beats the hell out of me, for sure.

A copy of the leaked document, which concerns the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen, can be found here.

© 2014

Former NSA contractor develops font designed to combat government snooping

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Sang Mun is a former contractor for the NSA. Mun created the font as a response to increasing government incursions on privacy. “I have become dedicated to researching ways to ‘articulate our unfreedom’ and to continue the evolution of my own thinking about censorship, surveillance, and a free society,” he explained to Reason Magazine, after releasing the font online in June 2013.

The font is intended to work by throwing off Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software with the unique and noisy style.

This font is reckoned to be a great weapon in the war on America’s privacy. It is encouraging to see such proactive measures being taken. You can download the font for free, here.

Below is an open letter from Mun explaining his reasoning for disseminating the ZXX font.

I do not know what OCR system the “author” of the fonts has used but in tests of converting documents written in any of those fonts, turned into PDF and then using an OCR extractor in a program the material was read back perfectly. This leads me to believe that it may work as far as letters are concerned but not for emails or other electronic communications. Especially after having used the font to write an email also and upon receipt it was nicely in clear text.

If you really want to avoid government snooping it would appear that we need to develop codes, like the spies of old did, using numbers derived from books that the sender and the recipient use as base, that is to say the book cypher. And, the book cypher is almost impossible to crack by electronic means as the finding of a message still attached to a dead carrier pigeon of WWII showed. The code cannot be broken without knowing the relevant book or books used to generate the code and not even the most sophisticated computers that the NSA or GCHQ use cannot do it.

Whether this font will be able to throw off the scanning software intend for storage of intercepted material will remain to be seen. The one that scanned from PDF to text that I used, a free program, did it with ease and even with the version with the greatest amount of “noise” of this font.

The jury is still out on this, I am sure. Thus, if you want to securely communicate use a good book cypher and change the books used all the time.

You should have at least six different books from which to generate the cypher – though you don't use those books all at the same time – and your communications will be uncrackable. You then use a number code, either five or six digits, corresponding to page number, number of line, and word in that line. Simple but basically uncrackable.

Use the font by all means if you want. I will do too. By mixing the font versions, as indicated in the picture, however, throwing the system off may be possible. But real important stuff will be sent in code.

© 2014

NSA: Everyone is automatically guilty until his or her innocence is proven

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

NSA Monitoring Station at RAF Menwith Hill, UK

According to the NSA (National Security Agency) everyone in the US and elsewhere is being considered guilty until he or she can prove his or her innocence. Security has become somewhat of a state religion and everyone is being monitored with absolute religious zeal.

The current form of government in the USA (and let me add to that the UK and the majority of states of the European Union) is turning into a soft form of tyranny.

Anyone who questions this state religion of security in the USA and the UK (other countries I cannot speak of) has his or her loyalty to the state automatically questioned and may be considered an “enemy of the state”. Am I exaggerating? I don't think so.

To speak and write the truth and to question the actions of the state is beginning to become a dangerous thing, at least in the USA, so it would appear, and journalist who do so are considered to be aiding and abetting terrorists and terrorism because, so it is said, they make their messages available to the public.

Every investigative journalist automatically ends up in the sights of the secret services simply because they could make public the fact that someone of the authorities has broken laws. The search after the truth is being seen by the secret services nowadays equated to a criminal activity.

Officers of the services and others who remind those agencies that they are bound by the Constitution and other conventions are equated with terrorists, in the same way as, nowadays, anyone who dares to peacefully protest against environmental destruction or government excesses.

Even people who decide to live a frugal live and advocate such a life to others are equated with terrorists as they are not helping to restart the economy by buying our way out of the downturn. As if the latter would be possible in the first instance.

The US President, as to whether he has a right to be or not to be shall not be discussed here, has now issued a number of Executive Orders (law by decree) (and now tell me again that the US do not have an elected king) which are restricting the rights of the citizens of the country no end.

One of those deals with the interception and retention of all Internet traffic, as well as other communications – not that the NSA stations, such as Menwith Hill in the UK with Echelon and Carnivore would not be doing that already, though in that case only working with “key words” - including cell phone.

A similar act has been signed into law in the UK which will have the government monitor and retain all email traffic, Internet searches, downloads, and all cell phone traffic. Rumor has it that landline phone traffic will also be included and the possibility of general mail too.

But, we are told, anyone who is not doing anything that they shouldn't has nothing to fear. Really? So what was Ian Tomlinson's misdeed for which he was murdered by a Metropolitian Police cop? He was simply a newspaper vendor in the wrong place at the wrong time during a demonstration that they were told they had to smash. And people have the audacity to speak about the German Democratic Republic and the USSR.

We are headed down a very slippery slope with fear being used to silence any dissent, inside and outside of the services and government.

Fear is used as a weapon, also to silence the ordinary citizen in that they are being told that this is all necessary to keep them safe. Really? Safe from who? Non-existent terrorism? Threats from communism?

Come on, let's get real. This is all fear-mongering so that the powers that be can control us.

Wake up everyone!

© 2012