Meet the IDF-Linked Cybersecurity Group “Protecting” US Hospitals ‘Pro Bono’

 

Anonymous “volunteers” from an opaque group founded by a former commander of Israel’s Unit 8200 have been granted access to some of the most critical private and public networks in the US’ healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors, with the help of a US federal agency now run by a former Microsoft executive.

Since the Coronavirus crisis began in earnest earlier this year, the strain on hospitals in the US and around the world has been the subject of a considerable number of media reports. However, hardly any media attention has been given to the dramatic and unsettling changes that have been made to hospital and healthcare information technology (IT) systems and infrastructure under the guise of helping the US healthcare system “cope” with the surge in data as well as an unsettling uptick in cyberattacks. 

Over the past several months, 80% of healthcare institutions in the US have reported being targeted by some sort of cyberattack, ranging from minor to severe, with an uptick in phishing attempts and spam specifically. Most of these attempts have been aimed at illegally acquiring troves of patient data, including the recent hacks of hospitals in Chicagoand Utah. About 20% of the hacks and cyberattacks reported by hospitals and medical facilities since March directly affected the facilities’ capacity to function optimally, with a much smaller percentage of those including ransomware attacks.

One of the reasons for the increase in the success of these attacks has been the fact that more healthcare IT workers are working remotely as well as the fact that many IT staffers have been laid off or let go completely. In several recent instances, the removal of entire hospital system IT staffs have been tied to a larger effort by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to consolidate control over patient data, including Coronavirus-related data, with the assistance of secretive government contractors with longstanding ties to HHS.

The surge of cyberattacks combined with major budget cuts has made hospitals even more vulnerable as many are compelled to do more with less. As a result, there has been a renewed push for the improvement of cybersecurity at hospitals, clinics and other healthcare institutions throughout the country over the course of the Coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis.

Amid this backdrop, an odd group of “cyber threat intelligence” analysts with ties to the US government, Israeli intelligence and tech giant Microsoft have “volunteered” to protect US healthcare institutions for free and have even directly partnered with US federal agencies to do so. They have also recently expanded to offer their services to governments and social media platforms to target, analyze and “neutralize” alleged “disinformation campaigns” related to the Coronavirus crisis.

While these analysts have claimed to have altruistic motives, its members who have identified themselves publicly have notably dedicated much of their private sector careers to blaming nation states, namely Iran but also China, for hacking and, most recently, for cyberattacks related to the Coronavirus crisis, as well as the 2020 presidential campaign. These individuals and their employers rarely, if ever, make their reasons for assigning blame to state actors available to public scrutiny and also have close ties to the very governments, namely the US and Israel, that have been attempting to gin up hostilities with those countries in recent years, particularly Iran, suggesting a potential conflict of interest.  (more...)

Meet the IDF-Linked Cybersecurity Group “Protecting” US Hospitals ‘Pro Bono’

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Steve Bannon’s Band of Bookworms: Avatars of the Pre-Modern Promise

 

Steve Bannon made headlines this past week when he was arrested on the 150-foot mega yacht of a fugitive Chinese billionaire and business associate, Guo Wengui, and was charged with conspiring to cheat hundreds of thousands of donors for a private fundraising effort, “We Built the Wall” by falsely promising that their money had been set aside for new sections of the wall.

Bannon’s arrest, combined with the growing popular backlash against the extremism of President Donald Trump, makes War For Eternity, Benjamin Teitelbaum’s excursion into Steven Bannon’s mind and social milieu, very timely.

Prior to his arrest, Bannon was known as the free-thinking gadfly who co-founded Breitbart News, a major platform of the alt-right. He is also a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, filmmaker, and was White House chief strategist for the first seven months of the Donald Trump presidency.

Teitelbaum is an anthropologist and professor of ethnomusicology at UC Boulder who has written for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic on Nordic nationalism and the ultra-right. The course of his research over several years has acquainted him with a century-old “philosophical and spiritual school with an eclectic if minuscule” following known as Traditionalism “—with a capital T—” he adds. His interest increased during the 2016 campaign season when Bannon began dropping names that he, Teitelbaum, knew were associated with Traditionalism, a sign that this obscure and underground movement was now surfacing in real-world politics.  (more...)

Steve Bannon’s Band of Bookworms: Avatars of the Pre-Modern Promise

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ROGUE AGENTS - Habsburg, Pinay and the Private Cold War 1951-1991

 

The Cercle Pinay was founded in the early 1950s as an elite clandestine forum to promote the vision of a Catholic and conservative Europe and to oppose the threat of Communism. Shrouded in secrecy, the Cercle brought together statesmen such as Antoine Pinay, Konrad Adenauer, Franz-Josef Strauss, Giulio Andreotti, Otto von Habsburg, Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller, as well as top figures from the American and European intelligence services.

Following the rise of student counter-culture in the 1960s, the Cercle focused on domestic subversion, using its network of propagandists and intelligence operatives to smear progressive politicians such as Willi Brandt, François Mitterrand, Harold Wilson and Jimmy Carter and to promote their favoured candidates: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Giscard d’Estaing and Franz-Josef Strauss. Throughout the 1970s, the Cercle also worked to defend apartheid South Africa and Franco’s Spain. After the electoral victory of the Right in 1979-1980, the Cercle targeted peace campaigners and the new Soviet regime under Mikhail Gorbachev, playing a key part in the fall of the Iron Curtain and then ensuring the integration of Eastern Europe into the European Union.

In a groundbreaking twenty-five year investigation, the author lifts the veil of secrecy to reveal the unseen rôle played by the Cercle and its allies in shaping the Western world as we know it today.

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The Spies Among Us

 

This month marks the 100th anniversary of America’s entry into World War I on April 6, 1917. But nearly two years earlier, Detroit was the target of a plot to blow up a local manufacturing company plus a railroad tunnel to Canada and several targets in Windsor.

German immigrant and Detroit resident Albert Carl Kaltschmidt organized and paid a small group of fellow immigrants to destroy the Detroit Screw Works, which was manufacturing shrapnel for the Allied troops; the St. Clair Tunnel between Port Huron and Sarnia, Ontario; Peabody Co. in Walkerville, Ontario, which was manufacturing soldiers’ uniforms; and the Windsor Armories in Windsor. Other Windsor companies manufacturing munitions and supplies also were targeted.

Only the Peabody Co. was destroyed on June 21, 1915. Dynamite planted at the Windsor Armories, where Kaltschmidt hoped to kill 100 Canadian soldiers while they slept, failed to detonate.

According to a 1940 Detroit Free Press article looking back on the event (before the U.S. entered the Second World War), the plan was to wreck a gondola inside the tunnel, or “to send an explosive-laden ‘devil car’ into the tunnel ingeniously coasting on roller skates, one of the skates being produced as evidence” in the 1917 trial against Kaltschmidt and his co-defendants.

As for the Detroit Screw Works, “… guards and fences at factories and railroads thwarted most of Kaltschmidt’s daring plans.”  (more...)

The Spies Among Us

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The Windsor Armories was the site of my Canadian Forces Reserve service. One of my senior NCOs had fought in the Battle of Ortona during WWII.

Aginter Press and the Strategy of Tension

 

AGINTER PRESS was a Lisbon-based, neo-fascist-controlled, pseudo news agency that serviced the Cold War interests of various Western secret service agencies working to neutralize African and Asian anti-colonial liberation movements. At the time, a principal concern in western strategic thinking was the need to counter nascent national liberation movements in Africa and Asia in such a way that while it might not be possible to prevent the emergence into sovereign statehood of the old colonies and dependencies it should be possible to keep them within the western “sphere of influence” by securing the eclipse or demise of the more virulently nationalist or socialist leaders and their replacement by “friends of the west,” avowed champions of private enterprise and staunch anticommunists who would take whatever steps were necessary within their countries to prevent the colonialist interests being replaced by Russian and Chinese ones.

The principal vehicle used to this end was the “plausibly deniable” intelligence front, Aginter Press, whose declared aims were “to focus the attention of an anxious elite upon the perils of insidious subversion which slowly infiltrates through everyday reports, to denounce its methods and the mechanics of its manoeuvres…” It was not until many years later, however, following Portugal’s “Revolution of the Flowers” in May 1974, that investigators from the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement discovered Aginter Press’s true function.

Its founder and chief was ex French army officer Captain Yves Guillou, better known by his adopted name Yves Guerin-Serac, a veteran of the Korean war (1950-53) and the Indochina war (1945-54), in which he had served as French liaison officer with the newly formed CIA. In 1962, he commanded the 1st Battalion Parachutist de Choc (an elite parachute unit that worked with the French intelligence service, the SDECE) in Algeria. A founder member of the OAS (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète) in 1962 he fled to Lisbon following the defeat of the Generals’ putsch and the Évian Accords that ended the Algerian War. He later claimed, in a November 1974 interview with Paris Match, that he came to Portugal to offer his services to the last remaining colonial empire which could provide the final bulwark against communism and atheism: “The others have laid down their weapons, but not I. After the OAS I fled to Portugal to carry on the fight and expand it to its proper dimensions– which is to say, a planetary dimension.”  (more...)

Aginter Press and the Strategy of Tension

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Sound like any traditionalist "councils" to you?

Hiding behind a Bush: Family of Secrets

 

How did the deeply flawed George W. Bush ascend to the highest office in the nation, what forces abetted his rise, and-perhaps most important-have those forces really been vanquished by Obama's election? Award-winning investigative journalist Russ Baker gives us the answers in Family of Secrets, a compelling and startling new take on the Bush dynasty and the shadowy elite that has quietly steered the American republic for the past half century and more. Baker shows how this network of figures in intelligence, the military, oil, and finance enabled-and in turn benefited handsomely from-the Bushes' perch at the highest levels of government. As Baker reveals, this deeply entrenched elite remains in power regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

Family of Secrets offers countless disclosures that challenge the conventional accounts of such central events as the JFK assassination and Watergate. It includes an inside account of George W.'s cynical religious conversion and the untold real background to the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. Baker's narrative is gripping, sobering, and deeply sourced. It will change the way we understand not just the Bush years, but a half century of postwar history-and the present.

About avatars: Caveat emptor!

 

Even before the buzz began building for James Cameron's sci fi blockbuster Avatar, today's "millennial generation," the film's biggest fans, knew what the word meant. Few knew the classical definition of "avatar" as "the incarnation of a Hindu diety" that people my age learned in the 1960s taking comparative religion courses or reading Hermann Hesse. To current-day collegians, the word is the self-definition of a hi-tech kid who manipulates an image of himself projected in a computer game. Commentators on Cameron's special effects tour-de-force are virtually all enthralled by the 3-D visual pyrotechnics, but are deeply divided along ideological lines. The environment-friendly Left embraces Avatar as a love poem to (extraterrestrial) nature's wonders and a cautionary tale about what will become of our planet and species if we don't reform posthaste.

Enviro-skeptics on the Right deride the film as a misanthropic revenge fantasy in which the soulful planet Pandora and its race of blue, 10-foot-tall noble savages - the Navi - all but annihilate humanity's advance guard, portrayed as a rapacious, futuristic military-industrial complex. Ultimately in Cameron's film, the only good humans are dead - or rather, resurrected as "good Navi" by projection of their astral selves into alien bodies. They are the "avatars" who have "gone native" -first by taking on an alien persona, then by totally identifying with the Navi even if that means the end of the human project back on Earth. WHAT UNSETTLED me was not Cameron's Romantic primitivism - which, after all, goes back at least as far as Rousseau - but the uncanny resonances of Avatar with a recurrent theme in Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (NYU Press, 2002). A fascinating excavation of the extreme Right's post-World War II literary underworld, this book explores a subject much less well-known than the prewar nexus between the Nazis and the occult. Goodrick-Clarke catalogues fantastic tales - extraterrestrial Atlanteans who burrowed under Tibet to escape Noah's flood, only to reemerge now as potential architects of a Fourth Reich; and SS "miracle weapons" (including "W-7" flying saucers) based in Antarctica, where the Fuhrer and Eva Braun are said to have taken refuge - but he also analyzes how, in the post-World War II era, myths of Aryan racial superiority found a home in the world of New Age spirituality and environmental consciousness  (more...)

About avatars: Caveat emptor!

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