/08

Kevin Mitnick on ’Ghost in the Wires’ and the Rise of the Hacktivists - The Daily Beast

The Godfather of Hacking

►http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/19/kevin-mitnick-on-ghost-in-the-wires-and-the-rise-of-the-hacktivists.h

The 48-year-old security consultant, once known to America as the world’s most notorious computer hacker, has finally returned home to Las Vegas after a three-week vacation in Spain—his first in 11 years—and there’s no time to reboot.

He was eventually sentenced to 46 months in prison—a portion of which was served in solitary confinement a result of the government’s overblown fears that he could whistle nuclear-missile launch codes into a phone—and ordered to pay thousands of dollars as reparation.

In recent months, hackers have been making headlines around the world. Groups like Anonymous, which burst onto the scene by famously taking down banks and online services that refused to do business with WikiLeaks last fall, followed soon thereafter by LulzSec, which spent the early summer months on a rampage hacking the systems at Sony, AT&T, and the CIA. From behind faceless avatars from unknown locales, they taunt their targets, the media, and the feds.

The only difference between Mitnick and the current generation, he explains, are the motives.

“I was never after the media attention when I was doing hacking. I didn’t want to be detected, to be honest with you, being caught,” he admits. “When I was in my juvenile years I never spoke to the media about it. These guys are loving the media attention, they have a completely different driver, and I don’t think it’s curiosity or intellectual challenge. I think it’s media attention, and the love, for a better word, to fuck with people. ”

#anonymous #hacker

On apprend un nouveau mot : « dominionisme ». Et on joue à se faire peur très fort.

Dominionism : Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry’s Dangerous Religious Bond - The Daily Beast
►http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/14/dominionism-michele-bachmann-and-rick-perry-s-dangerous-religious-bon

With Tim Pawlenty out of the presidential race, it is now fairly clear that the GOP candidate will either be Mitt Romney or someone who makes George W. Bush look like Tom Paine. Of the three most plausible candidates for the Republican nomination, two are deeply associated with a theocratic strain of Christian fundamentalism known as Dominionism. If you want to understand Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, understanding Dominionism isn’t optional. 

Put simply, Dominionism means that Christians have a God-given right to rule all earthly institutions. Originating among some of America’s most radical theocrats, it’s long had an influence on religious-right education and political organizing.

[...]

We have not seen this sort of thing at the highest levels of the Republican Party before. Those of us who wrote about the Christian fundamentalist influence on the Bush administration were alarmed that one of his advisers, Marvin Olasky, was associated with Christian Reconstructionism. It seemed unthinkable, at the time, that an American president was taking advice from even a single person whose ideas were so inimical to democracy. Few of us imagined that someone who actually championed such ideas would have a shot at the White House. It turns out we weren’t paranoid enough. If Bush eroded the separation of church and state, the GOP is now poised to nominate someone who will mount an all-out assault on it. We need to take their beliefs seriously, because they certainly do.

September 11th Anniversary: Richard Clarke’s Explosive CIA Cover-up Charge - The Daily Beast
►http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/11/september-11th-anniversary-richard-clarke-s-explosive-cia-cover-up-ch

With the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks only a month away, former CIA Director George Tenet and two former top aides are fighting back hard against allegations that they engaged in a massive cover-up in 2000 and 2001 to hide intelligence from the White House and the FBI that might have prevented the attacks.

The source of the explosive, unproved allegations is a man who once considered Tenet a close friend: former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who makes the charges against Tenet and the CIA in an interview for a radio documentary timed to the 10th anniversary next month. Portions of the Clarke interview were made available to The Daily Beast by the producers of the documentary.

In the interview for the documentary, Clarke offers an incendiary theory that, if true, would rewrite the history of the 9/11 attacks, suggesting that the CIA intentionally withheld information from the White House and FBI in 2000 and 2001 that two Saudi-born terrorists were on U.S. soil—terrorists who went on to become suicide hijackers on 9/11.