[SecurityRatty] tag: vietnam

Latest linking of Senator Obama to a '70's terrorist may damage his reputation.

Sun, 11 May 2008 20:12:00 +0000

We all know how important it is to have a good reputation and the price we pay when it becomes damaged. The latest reports linking Senator Obama with the 70's radical, William Ayers, can not help him in his nomination bid.

William "Billy" Ayers was a member of the '70's domestic terrorist group: Weather Underground Organization (WUO). WUO were opposed to the Vietnam war and pledged to bomb the Capitol, The Pentagon and Police Stations after issuing a "declaration of a state of war" against the United States Government in 1970.

These days, Ayers is a professor at UIC. Apparently, Ayers and the Senator have served jointly on various Boards and have appeared on discussion panels together. Most likely Senator Obama failed to do the proper due diligence on his co-host and was unaware of his terrorist affiliations and involvement. Unfortunately for the Senator, many voters may not be so forgiving, especially when they realize that Ayers has recently made comments to the effect that he does not regret planting bombs and thinks he did not do enough. He even went so far as to state that he can not entirely dismiss the idea of planting a bomb today.

Last week during training of an Executive Protection class in Baltimore, I spoke about the need to keep an open mind when it comes to terrorism and to realize that terrorists come in all shapes, sizes and colors. I even discussed domestic terrorism and drew their attention to the Weather Underground. We should remember that terrorists will not always arrive looking as they do in television footage.

For instance, Timothy McVeigh could walk down any street in the U.S. prior to the bombing in Oklahoma and not one single person would ever have suspected him of being a home-grown terrorist. Everything (and everybody) is not always what it seems.

Our Inherent Capability for Evil

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 02:40:29 +0000

This is interesting:

What took place on a peaceful Californian university campus nearly four decades ago still has the power to disturb. Eager to explore the way that "situation" can impact on behaviour, the young psychologist enrolled students to spend two weeks in a simulated jail environment, where they would randomly be assigned roles as either prisoners or guards.
Zimbardo's volunteers were bright, liberal young men of good character, brimming with opposition to the Vietnam war and authority in general. All expressed a preference to be prisoners, a role they could relate to better. Yet within days the strong, rebellious "prisoners" had become depressed and hopeless. Two broke down emotionally, crushed by the behaviour of the "guards", who had embraced their authoritarian roles in full, some becoming ever-more sadistic, others passively accepting the abuses taking place in front of them.

Transcripts of the experiment, published in Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, record in terrifying detail the way reality slipped away from the participants. On the first day Sunday it is all self-conscious play-acting between college buddies. On Monday the prisoners start a rebellion, and the guards clamp down, using solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and intimidation. One refers to "these dangerous prisoners". They have to be prevented from using physical force.

Control techniques become more creative and sadistic. The prisoners are forced to repeat their numbers over and over at roll call, and to sing them. They are woken repeatedly in the night. Their blankets are rolled in dirt and they are ordered painstakingly to pick them clean of burrs. They are harangued and pitted against one another, forced to humiliate each other, pulled in and out of solitary confinement.

On day four, a priest visits. Prisoner 819 is in tears, his hands shaking. Rather than question the experiment, the priest tells him, "You're going to have to get less emotional." Later, a guard leads the inmates in chanting "Prisoner 819 did a bad thing!" and blaming him for their poor conditions.

Zimbardo finds 819 covering his ears, "a quivering mess, hysterical", and says it is time to go home. But 819 refuses to leave until he has proved to his fellow prisoners that he isn't "bad". "Listen carefully to me, you're not 819," says Zimbardo. "You are Stewart and my name is Dr Zimbardo. I am a psychologist not a prison superintendent, and this is not a real prison."819 stops sobbing "and looks like a small child awakening from a nightmare", according to Zimbardo. But it doesn't seem to occur to him that things are going too far.

Guard Hellmann, leader of the night shift, plumbs new depths. He wakes up the prisoners to shout abuse in their faces. He forces them to play leapfrog dressed only in smocks, their genitals exposed. A new prisoner, 416, replaces 819, and brings fresh perspective. "I was terrified by each new shift of guards," he says. "I knew by the first evening that I had done something foolish to volunteer for this study."

The study is scheduled to run for two weeks. On the evening of Thursday, the fifth day, Zimbardo's girlfriend, Christina Maslach, also a psychologist, comes to meet him for dinner. She is confronted by a line of prisoners en route to the lavatory, bags over their heads, chained together by the ankles. "What you're doing to these boys is a terrible thing," she tells Zimbardo. "Don't you understand this is a crucible of human behaviour?" he asks. "We are seeing things no one has witnessed before in such a situation." She tells him this has made her question their relationship, and the person he is.

Downstairs, Guard Hellmann is yelling at the prisoners. "See that hole in the ground? Now do 25 push-ups, fucking that hole. You hear me?" Three prisoners are forced to be "female camels", bent over, their naked bottoms exposed. Others are told to "hump" them and they simulate sodomy. Zimbardo ends the experiment the following morning.

To read the transcripts or watch the footage is to follow a rapid and dramatic collapse of human decency, resilience and perspective. And so it should be, says Zimbardo. "Evil is a slippery slope," he says. "Each day is a platform for the abuses of the next day. Each day is only slightly worse than the previous day. Once you don't object to those first steps it is easy to say, 'Well, it's only a little worse then yesterday.' And you become morally acclimatised to this kind of evil."

From warzones to strip clubs, the truth comes out for a former First Lady and a Pastor.

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:57:00 +0000

Last week in the Washington Post, "The Fact Checker" awarded former first lady, Hillary Clinton, four "Pinocchios" (real whoppers)for claiming to have come under sniper fire during a photo op. in Bosnia. On Thursday, Michael Dobbs once again awarded Senator Clinton another "poker" of Pinocchios.

This time she took heat for claiming that her trip to Bosnia was the first visit to a "war zone" by a first lady since World War II. Her claim is considered completly inaccurate, since Pat Nixon made a trip to Saigon in July 1969. At the time, South Vietnam was an actual, not a "potential" war zone in the aftermath of the 1968 Tet offensive.

The article also made mention of Barbara Bush's visit to Saudi Arabia in 1990, two months before the Persian Gulf war began. Speaking about Senator Clinton's claim that her aircraft made a tactical landing back in 1996, the pilot of the aircraft had a different memory. Retired Air Force Col. William Changose said that it was not true that they took evasive measures to avoid sniper fire. The Colonel went on to say that: "not only were there no bullets flying, there wasn't even a bumblebee flying around".

It seems that Senator Clinton is not the only one in the public eye to suffer from Pinocchioitis. Apparently the Police in Riverside, Ohio found a Pastor who had gone missing from his home in western New York, since Wednesday the 26th of March, after telling his wife that he was going to Best Buy to have his computer fixed. Officers found the Pastor at a strip club called the "K.C. Lounge", partying like a New York Govenor.

We often hear people in the media complaining about the negative effects that Rap music has on our youth. One wonders why we are now not hearing more complaining about the so-called role models getting caught with their pants down, so to speak. At least with the likes of rappers and other "bad boy" entertainers, what you see, is what you get. It's little wonder that so many people are comfortable telling lies during interviews and embellishing resumes in order to get hired and get ahead.

When I was going to school, the "dog ate my homework" excuse was used but not believed. Also, it tended to get used by children who had not yet reached their teens. I think that even children of that age these days will be able to see through these poorly constructed falsehoods that our "role models" would have us believe.

Unbelievable.

The Nukes of October: Richard Nixon's Secret Plan to Bring Peace to Vietnam

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 02:00:00 +0000

Newly released secret documents reveal Giant Lance, a Nixon-Kissinger plan to win the Vietnam War by bluffing the Soviet Union with nuclear bombers aimed for Moscow.

Blue Box #73: SIP security issues at IETF 70, Skype security, vulnerabilities in Cisco and Nokia phones, Vietnam's cyberdissidents, VoIP security news

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 16:08:58 +0000

Synopsis: Blue Box #73: SIP security issues at IETF 70, Skype security, vulnerabilities in Cisco and Nokia phones, Vietnam's cyberdissidents, VoIP security news, listener comments and more...

Welcome to Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast #73, a 44-minute podcast from Dan York and Jonathan Zar covering VoIP security news, comments and opinions.

Download the show here (MP3, 20MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically.

You may also listen to this podcast right now:

NOTE: This show was recorded on December 11, 2007.

Show Content:

00:20 - Intro to the show, contact information and how to provide comments. Welcome to all the new listeners - and to all those listeners who have been here for so long!
Voice of VOIPSA: Skype fixes flaw in Windows version
Cisco 7940 Denial of Service
Nokia N95 Remote Denial of Service using the SIP Stack
Network World: VoIP Security Lessons Microsoft OCS Can Learn From Vonage and Others pointing over to series of posts on the Telecosm blog and the start of a series on VoIP security including DoS and anonymity
VoIP News: Not Waiting For the Big One
TechWorld: VoIP is the next big hack (follow up on Peter Cox)
Globe and Mail: Cyberdissidents weaving along new path
National Security Agency Certifies New Sectra vIPer Phone by General Dynamics for Top Secret Communications (sent in by Peter Thermos)
Websense Predicts 2008???s Top Ten Security Threats
International Telephone Services Company Deploys Secure Computing???s Sidewinder to Protect VoIP Communications
Feature ??? IETF 70
- IETF 70 Agenda
- Security a major discussion point
- Media control ??? requirements and architecture to need more security work
- SPEERMINT - Saverio Niccolini will bring security document back through
- SIPPING - Spam Score and SRTP Key Disclosure and Updates to Asserted Identity ??? also covered in SPITting in your general direction
- SIP - Media Identity and DTLS Framework
- MMUSIC - big news was that ICE is now in the queue to be issued as an RFC
- BEHAVE - TURN
- P2PSIP ??? interesting discussion on NAT in P2P SIP and security in P2P SIP
Comment (email) from Frank Leonhardt
Comment (email) from Rhodri Davies
Comment (email) from Peter Thermos
Comment (email) from Ben Penson
Review of the last week's traffic on the VOIPSEC public mailing list
Wrap-up of the show
44:28 - End of show

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com. Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and will be played in future shows. You may also call the listener comment line at either +1-415-830-5439 or via SIP to 'bluebox@voipuser.org' to leave a comment there.

Thank you for listening and please do let us know what you think of the show.