Buy A Rockefeller Vote
This is hilarious:
Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) is reportedly steering the secretive Senate Intelligence Committee to give retroactive immunity to telecoms that helped the government secretly spy on Americans.
Top Verizon executives, including CEO Ivan Seidenberg and President Dennis Strigl, wrote personal checks to Rockefeller totaling $23,500 in March, 2007. Prior to that apparently coordinated flurry of 29 donations, only one of those executives had ever donated to Rockefeller (at least while working for Verizon).
Is there a viable model that would allow us co-opt this underground Congressional economy?
Regional Energy Flows And Geographic Choke Points
Cool map from The Washington Quarterly which has been focusing on “Energy Interdependence” lately.
Hacker Shopping List
Six Items On the Hacker’s Holiday Shopping List
- Build a Storm botnet
- Rent-A-Bot for a few hours
- Malware Variants for when off-the-shelf just won’t cut it
- Drop Addresses to send packages bought via stolen CC data
- Escrow/Reputation services to prevent inter-hacker conflict
Tracing The Russian Business Network
This blog is doing just that.
On Replacing Blackwater
WSJ – Quite frankly, given the focus on security clearances, there isn’t anyone else.
Blackwater’s security work for the State Department in Baghdad is up for renewal in May, and U.S. officials say it would take at least that long to arrange for another private contractor to take over. Even a new company would have to rely heavily on hires from Blackwater’s employee base of about 1,000 in Iraq. Hiring and training new guards, all of whom must be Americans with classified-security clearance, would otherwise take months.
To build competition into the American PMC ecosystem, you would have to blow it wide open. Which can’t happen because of security clearances. Convenient “competition” ensues:
Blackwater and two other U.S. security companies, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy Inc., are working under a global contract with the State Department that gives them a total of $571 million a year to protect officials in countries like Israel, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Iraq alone accounts for $520 million.