Posts Tagged with "national-security"

The Cost of Freedom

April 15th, 2007 at 4:44 pm by Zacque
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While the name of this blog may bring of thoughts of something racy, I am not talking about what is going on in Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan or Central and South America. I am speaking more in terms of visual pollution in the forms of endless websites, unyielding amounts of bumper stickers, and hours of wasted media coverage. Wasted on whom you ask? Local, homegrown, good ol’ American terrorists.

The first of these are those people who want you to realize, “Meat is no treat for those you eat.” Yes, it is the crazed vegetarians, who would rather you become sickly and dwindle to nothing rather than harm animals. Therein lies the problem. They put the well being of the animals they protect above their own. Kind of ridiculous in concept design alone, but they also have to spread their propaganda all over the Internet with websites like Peta and Peta2, not to mention all over Myspace pages and in e-mail.

The other major organization that we can collectively not care for is AIM, or the American Indian Movement, who keep a list of “U.S. Political Prisoners,” which is primarily a list of American Indians who have been incarcerated by the U.S. government for various reasons. The most illustrious of these, Leonard Peltier, is currently serving two consecutive life sentences for killing two FBI Special Agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. They are also major supporters of the “Sure you can trust the government, just ask any Indian” mentality, bringing forth their message of individual sovereignty for tribal groups in protests, writings, poetry and art.

That alone is not a major problem, but the way these groups spread their message like a disease (or the Baptist church) is the issue. The way they distribute propaganda, you will hear them out or go to hell: do not pass go, do not collect $200 dollars. Well, of the latter that is for sure, since it will go directly into their never ending, yet always almost empty coffers. Besides, someone has to start a large bumper sticker campaign. This is most popular amongst teenagers and adults who haven’t grown out of their activist past, which should have been left in the past (also see: the 60’s), and we would all say thank you.So, grow out of years gone by, as we have new ways of changing things other than just bitching now. You can always run for political office (see: Ben Campbell) and use the tools change things set forth by our founding fathers.

Department of Dell-fense

January 31st, 2007 at 2:55 pm by Mark
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     You won’t believe this

…the Dell rep shows up and goes to work, and all goes well. … As he’s walking out the door, he says “by the way, it looks like the hard drive they (Dell) sent you wasn’t a new one …”

Dell actually gave me a hard-drive straight from the Department of Defense.

     Un-freaking-believable.  This means that, at some point, one of three things occurred:

  • A Dell rep walked out of a DoD facility with a hard drive, ignoring the usual disposal procedures
  • A DoD employee sent their laptop to Dell, ignoring the usual disposal procedures
  • The DoD upgraded a series of leased laptops, ignoring the usual disposal procedures

     A little over a week ago, a law enforcement official called me to hack into a seized notebook.  In under thirty seconds, I found the Administrator account (they had changed it — just like the DoD does), erased its password and reset the account protection on the file system.  I then logged into Safe Mode as the Administrator, deleted the passwords on the client accounts, handed it back to said law enforcement official and said, “Have fun with that.”  I got my $125, and went my merry way.

     Sure, not everyone can do it that quickly, but I know there are plenty of people out there who are perfectly capable of doing what I did.  Distributing Department of Defense hard drives to people with that kind of know-how could certainly be a serious risk to National Security.

     In my book, at least three people need to be held accountable for that kind of screw up.

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