Michael Hastings Dies in Suspicious Car 'Crash'.....

[Keith Millea]

Jan Klimkowski If one leaves out the naive special pleading about the US government, this is the military-multinational-intelligence complex writ large:

Writ larger than we can even imagine.......

Published on Wednesday, July 17, 2013 by Common Dreams

'You Are Being Tracked': License Plate Readers Capture Millions of Innocent Americans' Data

Private companies utilized to capture location info, with little to no oversight

- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer


(Image: ACLU)

Tens of millions of innocent Americans are being tracked by the police through vast license plate scanning systems, according to new documents obtained by the ACLU.

Location records of millions of civilians are logged and updated in roughly 300 police departments nationwide through "rapidly expanding" automatic license plate reader technologies, dispersed throughout cities and communities the group says.

"The spread of these scanners is creating what are, in effect, government location tracking systems recording the movements of many millions of innocent Americans in huge databases," said ACLU Staff Attorney Catherine Crump, the report's lead author.

The report, You Are Being Tracked, which was released by the ACLU on Wednesdayand pulls from 26,000 pages of documents which were obtained through freedom of information requests to 300 police departments and other agencies nationwidealso details how the police utilize private tracking companies, which use the same methods and turn data over to police "with little or no oversight or privacy protections."

One of these private companies, Vigilant Solutions, holds over 800 million license plate location records and is used by over 2,200 law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The report comes on the heels of the growing debate over the National Security Agency and the vast surveillance practices of the U.S. government, Crump added.

She states:

It raises the same question as the NSA controversy: do we want to live in a world where the government makes a record of everything we do because that's what's being created by the growth of databases linked to license plate readers.

"These documents show a dire need for rules to make sure that this technology isn't used for unbridled government surveillance," the ACLU warned Wednesday.

"Few [states] have meaningful rules in place to protect drivers' privacy rights," the group said, including limitations as to how long such data can be stored.

As the documents show, this can result in the police keeping records on innocent people's location information indefinitely, "regardless of whether there is any suspicion of a crime."

"License plate readers are the most pervasive method of location tracking that nobody has heard of," said Crump. "They collect data on millions of Americans, the overwhelming number of whom are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing."

[Magda Hassan]

Michael Hastings National Security Reporting Fellowship, 2013-2014

In an effort to extend the legacy of Michael Hastings, who died tragically on June 18, 2013, BuzzFeed will sponsor an annual, yearlong fellowship for national security reporting that honors Michael's fearless example. The first fellowship will be awarded this fall.
The Michael Hastings Fellowship is aimed at proven journalists with strong sources and major stories to their credit who are interested in focusing for a year on a single subject and producing a series of stories on that topic. Proposed topics may include American foreign and national security policy; federal or local counterterrorism policy; the U.S. military; whistle-blowers; government secrecy; federal law enforcement; the military-industrial complex; veterans; human rights in conflict zones; and other related topics.
The fellow will also have a demonstrated ability to challenge powerful institutions, and a clear vision for a project that tells stories that those in power have no particular interest in having told. The reporter's background may be in investigative journalism; or it may, like Michael's, be in powerful narrative journalism; or it may be a combination of the two.
The product of the fellowship which can be as few as a half dozen stories, or as many as dozens, and which could also ultimately result in a book will appear on BuzzFeed. The reporter will work with BuzzFeed's political team and foreign editor, as well as other editors as needed, and will report to BuzzFeed's editor in chief.
The fellow will receive a stipend of $100,000 and related expenses for one year.
Michael Hastings, who died at the age of 33, wrote stories that would not otherwise have been written, and found emotionally gripping ways tell stories about vital policy decisions. He wrote for a wide range of new and old media outlets, from Newsweek to Gawker to GQ. His best-known piece, 2010's "The Runaway General" in Rolling Stone, raised questions about the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan, prompted the dismissal of the top American commander there, and sped the end of the U.S. engagement in that conflict. He then covered the 2012 election campaign and Hollywood for BuzzFeed. He was the author of three books.

Application Procedure:

Please submit the following materials by September 1, 2013, as attachments or links tohastingsfellowship@buzzfeed.com. Applications will be considered by BuzzFeed's editors and the grant will be awarded by October 1. The fellowship is a full-time position. Current and former BuzzFeed employees may apply but will not be given special preference.

Application Materials:

1. Résumé or CV
   
2. Five stories you feel are representative of your best work
   
3. Project proposal. Please explain in detail, in separate sections:
   
   1. The broad outline of the topic you propose approaching.
      
   2. The specific stories you intend to write, how many, and on what schedule.
      
   3. Why this project will consume a full year.
      
   4. How this project can be completed in only a year.
      
   5. Why you are qualified and capable of doing work others haven't or can't.
      
   6. How this project is consistent with Michael Hastings' legacy.
      
4. Three letters of recommendation. Please have your referees email their letters directly to us at%20Reference]hastingsfellowship@buzzfeed.com using the subject line "Candidate's Last Name Reference." Your referees should attest to your knowledge of your subject matter and your professional abilities, and your capability to do work that enlarges readers' understanding of the chosen topic.
   

http://www.buzzfeed.com/hastingsfellowship

[Peter Lemkin]

That's a very honorable thing for BuzzFeed to do...or whoever is behind it!....there should be more funds set up like that - just like that! Wouldn't it be nice if there were some similar for, say, JFK research; 911 research, bankster research...and I could go on, and on.

Sadly, I'm sure the winner of such a stipend, if they are as good as they likely will be could well also be 'wearing a target on their backs'. Hopefully, this won't deter them, but it is getting more dangerous doing cutting-edge reporting and research on the growing National Security State beast.

May it set a pattern and start a trend; for methinks if we don't turn this 'ship' around very soon, we all shall 'be lashed to the mast' together - the captain and his mates are drunk with power and hubris, and headed with 'all sheets to the wind' towards terra fascista.

[Magda Hassan]

Reports are beginning to surface about a connection between the reporter Michael Hastings and a mysterious cybersecurity firm known as Endgame.

Hastings has been linked to Barrett Brown, who the government alleges is the leader of the hacker group Anonymous. Brown is in jail and is being held without bail. The web site Free Barrett Brown reports:

Having previously been raided by the FBI on March 6, 2012 and not charged with any crime in relation to that incident, on September 12, 2012 Barrett Brown was again raided and this time arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation while he was online participating in a Tinychat session. He was subsequently denied bail and detained without charge and adequate medical treatment for over two weeks while in the custody of US Marshals. In the first week of October 2012, he was finally indicted on three counts.

These charges are related to alleged activities or postings on popular websites such as Twitter and YouTube, in which he postured for the return of property which was taken from him in March, and expressed frustration at the targeted campaign against him and a member of his family. The Department of Justice issued a press release at the time.

On December 4, 2012 Barrett was indicted by a federal grand jury on twelve additional counts (see: DOJ press release) related to data from the Stratfor breach.

Also, according to the web site, Hastings was planning to interview Brown:

Before his untimely death, Hastings was working on a story about Barrett, announcing mysteriously to his followers "Get ready for your mind to be blown." Hastings had been in touch with Barrett's lawyers, and intended to interview him in June for the story. Barrett has been in prison for 281 days pending trial, and faces over a hundred years imprisonment for what Hastings called "trumped up FBI charges regarding his legitimate reportorial inquiry into the political collective known sometimes as Anonymous."

Before his suspicious death in a fiery car crash, Hastings seemed to confirm this planned interview, in a tweet and hinted it was relative to a very big story:

@ronbryn @BarrettBrownLOL working on it. there was an election, and still a few wars going on. but get ready for your mind to be blown.
Michael Hastings (@mmhastings) January 24, 2013

Barrett, at the time he was arrested,was studying Endgame. The Nation reports:

Brown began looking into Endgame Systems, an information security firm that seemed particularly concerned about staying in the shadows. "Please let HBGary know we don't ever want to see our name in a press release," one leaked e-mail read. One of its products, available for a $2.5 million annual subscription, gave customers access to "zero-day exploits"security vulnerabilities unknown to software companiesfor computer systems all over the world. Business Week published a story on Endgame in 2011, reporting that "Endgame executives will bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices. The executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems." For Brown, this raised the question of whether Endgame was selling these exploits to foreign actors and whether they would be used against computer systems in the United States. Shortly thereafter, the hammer came down.

The FBI acquired a warrant for Brown's laptop, gaining the authority to seize any information related to HBGary, Endgame Systems, Anonymous and, most ominously, "email, email contacts, chat', instant messaging logs, photographs, and correspondence." In other words, the FBI wanted his sources.

So what is Endgame? According to Darker Net:

Endgame [is] a company that specialises in hacking on behalf of NSA. Endgame also offers its intelligence clients e.g. Cyber Command, NSA, CIA and MI6, etc a unique map, called Bonesaw, showing exactly where targets are located. Both Bonesaw and Endgame were exposed in a recent article as part of the fallout from the Snowden revelations[...]"White hat" in this context means defensive Internet security fighting the "black hat" attackers. We write this in part to show that Rouland and his company Endgame have in fact gone back to "black hat" with the approval of the Federal government, doing (and facilitating for others) the sorts of attacks that the Pentagon, the NSA and the like don't want their fingers found in.[...]One key member of the board of directors at Endgame is retired Lt. General Kenneth A. Minihan (8) whose claim to fame is that he was the 14th director of the National Security Agency/Central Security Service. He is a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a founder of the National Information Assurance Program which is a United States government initiative to meet the security testing needs for information technology for both consumers and producers that is operated by the NSA and was originally a joint effort between the NSA and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). [...]

The "services" offered by Endgame include offensive and defensive vulnerability research including software called Bonesaw supporting the detection and mitigation of cyber threats. This basically means that they cover both offensive and defensive aspects of computer security. What they can do is show what computers exist at specific locations and show the user of "Bonesaw" what software vulnerabilities are on those computers, making attacks easy against citizen, business or government systems across the planet.(18) Bonesaw has information in it about both threats and targets and can connect the two, for the low, low price of $2.5million per customer per 25 exploits according to Emails found by Anonymous in 2011.

Does the mysterious Endgame have any role in the ending of Hastings' game? Who knows? Like a good murder mystery there is more than one possibility as to who may have wanted Hastings dead. His reporting did, after all, take down a high ranking general. But, keep in mind that there is no direct public evidence that Hastings was even murdered. That may be, though, only because evidence is being destroyed. Hastings' body was cremated, even though this was not the desire of the family.

In other words, we have a great mystery,which now includes a firm with the name, Endgame.
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/201...s-and.html

[Phil Dragoo]

We recall the McDill request for software enabling multiple credible online persona. Now come the simulant Agents Smith & Jones crashing real investigators in planes, trains, and automobiles.

This process could also allow corporations and the financial and political elites to create acts of war that appear to have come from the US Government due to the severely interconnected nature of the intelligence community, split between private companies and actual government agencies with alleged oversight of sorts. Edward Snowden's access to NSA data while an employee of a private company for only four months (Booz Allen Hamilton, owned in large part by the Carlyle group which has long ties to the Bush family) illustrates the extent of the problem.

From the Fed to the Kill Switch on the fulcrum at fifty
Snowden outed BAH
(don't make Dick Cheney angry--
--you won't like him when he's angry. . .)

Soylent Green
from AmCham-Carlisle
"Toxic bytes from your backdoor men"

[Magda Hassan]

Things that make you go "Mmmmm....."

Hackers Reveal Nasty New Car Attacks--With Me Behind The Wheel (Video)

This story appears in the August 12, 2013 issue of Forbes.
Charlie Miller (left) and Chris Valasek behind their Prius' dismantled dashboard. Credit: Travis Collins

Stomping on the brakes of a 3,500-pound Ford Escape that refuses to stopor even slow downproduces a unique feeling of anxiety. In this case it also produces a deep groaning sound, like an angry water buffalo bellowing somewhere under the SUV's chassis. The more I pound the pedal, the louder the groan getsalong with the delighted cackling of the two hackers sitting behind me in the backseat.
Luckily, all of this is happening at less than 5mph. So the Escape merely plows into a stand of 6-foot-high weeds growing in the abandoned parking lot of a South Bend, Ind. strip mall that Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have chosen as the testing grounds for the day's experiments, a few of which are shown in the video below. (When Miller discovered the brake-disabling trick, he wasn't so lucky: The soccer-mom mobile barreled through his garage, crushing his lawn mower and inflicting $150 worth of damage to the rear wall.)
"Okay, now your brakes work again," Miller says, tapping on a beat-up MacBook connected by a cable to an inconspicuous data port near the parking brake. I reverse out of the weeds and warily bring the car to a stop. "When you lose faith that a car will do what you tell it to do," he adds after we jump out of the SUV, "it really changes your whole view of how the thing works."
This fact, that a car is not a simple machine of glass and steel but a hackable network of computers, is what Miller and Valasek have spent the last year trying to demonstrate. Miller, a 40-year-old security engineer at Twitter, and Valasek, the 31-year-old director of security intelligence at the Seattle consultancy IOActive, received an $80,000-plus grant last fall from the mad-scientist research arm of the Pentagon known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to root out security vulnerabilities in automobiles.
The duo plans to release their findings and the attack software they developed at the hacker conference Defcon in Las Vegas next monththe better, they say, to help other researchers find and fix the auto industry's security problems before malicious hackers get under the hoods of unsuspecting drivers. The need for scrutiny is growing as cars are increasingly automated and connected to the Internet, and the problem goes well beyond Toyota and Ford. Practically every American carmaker now offers a cellular service or Wi-Fi network like General Motors' OnStar, Toyota's Safety Connect and Ford's SYNC. Mobile-industry trade group the GSMA estimates revenue from wireless devices in cars at $2.5 billion today and projects that number will grow tenfold by 2025. Without better security it's all potentially vulnerable, and automakers are remaining mum or downplaying the issue.
As I drove their vehicles for more than an hour, Miller and Valasek showed that they've reverse-engineered enough of the software of the Escape and the Toyota Prius (both the 2010 model) to demonstrate a range of nasty surprises: everything from annoyances like uncontrollably blasting the horn to serious hazards like slamming on the Prius' brakes at high speeds. They sent commands from their laptops that killed power steering, spoofed the GPS and made pathological liars out of speedometers and odometers. Finally they directed me out to a country road, where Valasek showed that he could violently jerk the Prius' steering at any speed, threatening to send us into a cornfield or a head-on collision. "Imagine you're driving down a highway at 80 ," Valasek says. "You're going into the car next to you or into oncoming traffic. That's going to be bad times."
A Ford spokesman says the company takes hackers "very seriously," but Toyota, for its part, says it isn't impressed by Miller and Valasek's stunts: Real carhacking, the company's safety manager John Hanson argues, wouldn't require physically jacking into the target car. "Our focus, and that of the entire auto industry, is to prevent hacking from a remote wireless device outside of the vehicle," he writes in an e-mail, adding that Toyota engineers test its vehicles against wireless attacks. "We believe our systems are robust and secure."
Anatomy of an auto hack: With just a laptop connected to its diagnostics port, Valasek and Miller turned an innocent Prius into the world's worst amusement park ride. Here what they could do.(Click to enlarge)

But Miller and Valasek's work assumed physical access to the cars' computers for a reason: Gaining wireless access to a car's network is old news. A team of researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego, experimenting on a sedan from an unnamed company in 2010, found that they could wirelessly penetrate the same critical systems Miller and Valasek targeted using the car's OnStar-like cellular connection, Bluetooth bugs, a rogue Android app that synched with the car's network from the driver's smartphone or even a malicious audio file on a CD in the car's stereo system. "Academics have shown you can get remote code execution," says Valasek, using hacker jargon for the ability to start running commands on a system. "We showed you can do a lot of crazy things once you're inside."
One of the UCSD professors involved in those earlier tests, Stefan Savage, claims that wireless hacks remain possible and affect the entire industry: Given that attacks on driving systems have yet to be spotted outside of a lab, manufacturers simply haven't fully secured their software, he says. "The vulnerabilities that we found were the kind that existed on PCs in the early to mid-1990s, when computers were first getting on the Internet," says Savage.
As cars approach Google's dream of passenger-carrying robots, more of their capabilities also become potentially hackable. Miller and Valasek exploited Toyota's and Ford's self-parking functions, for instance, to hijack their vehicles' steering. A car like the 2014 Mercedes Benz S-Class, which can negotiate stop-and-go traffic or follow a leader without input, may offer a hacker even more points of attack, says Gartner Group analyst Thilo Koslowski. "The less the driver is involved, the more potential for failure when bad people are tampering with it," he says.
In the meantime, Miller and Valasek argue that the best way to pressure car companies to secure their products is to show exactly what can be done with a multi-ton missile on wheels. Better to experience the panic of a digitally hijacked SUV now than when a more malicious attacker is in control. "If the only thing keeping you from crashing your car is that no one is talking about this," says Miller, "then you're not safe anyway."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenber...eel-video/

[Peter Lemkin]

Journalist Michael Hastings' Body Cremated by Authorities Against Family's Wishes

By Michael Allen inShare

R

" … For unknown reasons, the LAPD and Los Angeles firefighters were told not to talk to the media about Hastings' death. … "

Journalist Michael Hastings' body was reportedly cremated by Los Angeles authorities against his family's wishes, destroying possible evidence of his mysterious death in a car accident on June 18.
Hastings was killed when his Mercedes crashed into a tree at a high speed and exploded.
Only hours earlier, Hastings sent an email to friends at Buzzfeed.com stating that he was "onto a big story" and had "to go off the radar for a bit." He also warned his colleagues that they might be questioned about him by authorities.
"A close family friend did confirm that Michael's body was sent home in an urn, meaning he was cremated and it wasn't the request of the family … in fact the family wanted Michael's body to go home," said San Diego 6 reporter Kimberly Dvorak on Sunday (video below). According to Dvorak, Hastings spoke with an unidentified attorney before his death who has all the details about the story Hastings was working on when he died.
Hastings had not told his wife about the story "because he said he wanted to protect her from knowing anything so if anything were to happen to him nothing could happen to her," said Dvorak.
"Despite the LAPD's categorization of the Hasting fatal accident as a no [evidence of] foul play,' LAPD continues to ignore FOIA [CPRA in Calif.] requests made by San Diego 6 News for the police report, 9/11 call, autopsy, bomb squad and toxicology reports, or make the Mercedes available for inspection which only fuels conjecture," added Dvorak.
Dvorak also claimed that she has been threatened for investigating Hastings' death.
For unknown reasons, the LAPD and Los Angeles firefighters were told not to talk to the media about Hastings' death.
Former White House counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke stated in June that Hastings' car crash was "consistent with a car cyber attack," in which an automobile is actually controlled by a third party electronically. :wavey:

Source: San Diego 6

[Jan Klimkowski]

Journalist Michael Hastings' body was reportedly cremated by Los Angeles authorities against his family's wishes, destroying possible evidence of his mysterious death in a car accident on June 18.

Hastings was killed when his Mercedes crashed into a tree at a high speed and exploded.
Only hours earlier, Hastings sent an email to friends at Buzzfeed.com stating that he was "onto a big story" and had "to go off the radar for a bit." He also warned his colleagues that they might be questioned about him by authorities.
"A close family friend did confirm that Michael's body was sent home in an urn, meaning he was cremated and it wasn't the request of the family … in fact the family wanted Michael's body to go home," said

It is not for the state, nor the deep state, to decide whether a body should be buried or cremated.

It is for the family.

This is an obscene act, and most likely a deep political act too.

[Peter Lemkin]

Journalist Michael Hastings' body was reportedly cremated by Los Angeles authorities against his family's wishes, destroying possible evidence of his mysterious death in a car accident on June 18.

Hastings was killed when his Mercedes crashed into a tree at a high speed and exploded.
Only hours earlier, Hastings sent an email to friends at Buzzfeed.com stating that he was "onto a big story" and had "to go off the radar for a bit." He also warned his colleagues that they might be questioned about him by authorities.
"A close family friend did confirm that Michael's body was sent home in an urn, meaning he was cremated and it wasn't the request of the family … in fact the family wanted Michael's body to go home," said

It is not for the state, nor the deep state, to decide whether a body should be buried or cremated.

It is for the family.

This is an obscene act, and most likely a deep political act too.

True! I don't believe they asked the bin Laden family, either.
They obviously feel they can decide about life and death and disposition of the bodies re: those they label as 'terrorists'......and enemies of the Empire.

[Jan Klimkowski]

It is not for the state, nor the deep state, to decide whether a body should be buried or cremated.

It is for the family.

This is an obscene act, and most likely a deep political act too.

True! I don't believe they asked the bin Laden family, either.
They obviously feel they can decide about life and death and disposition of the bodies re: those they label as 'terrorists'......and enemies of the Empire.

Except, Peter, the official story is that Hastings was the innocent victim of a car crash.