Tag Archives: Mark Lowenthal

February 7, 2022 · 15:21

Relaunching IP

It is a thought plenty of people have and I am no exception. I was contemplating things and then I realised in light of the news I covered in the last week that educating people is always better than telling them how it is. Some people are afraid that THEIR thoughts are all, but I am not the most intelligent person on the planet. I am more intelligent than mot and my IQ is around two point short from the setting that Alan Turing had, so I have that to sulk about. But the station to educate others, to teach them where to look and what to look for remains appealing. So there I was sitting and contemplating an old master called the Balance of Power. I had bought the game on the Atari ST and I loved it. The game was a little shallow, but it was new, it had never been done before and as such it kept my attention for a long time.

Wouldn’t it be great if someone picked up that idea and turned it into something serious? No longer a mere US versus Russia, but geopolitical field that included espionage. The US, EU, Middle East (Iran or Saudi Arabia), Russia, China and Japan? Consider that we have ‘quotes’ like “Problem analysis is the process of understanding real-world problems and user’s needs and proposing solutions to meet those needs. The goal of problem analysis is to gain a better understanding of the problem being solved before developing a solution”, and there is massive support to consider. There is J. J. A. Tacq who gave us Social Science Research From Problem to Analysis (1997), there is From Secrets to Policy by Mark Lowenthal which is now in its 8th edition. Foundational materials that makes us think and consider a much larger picture. There are economic works that could help creating understanding. Even if one book gets implemented in that game it becomes a whole new beast and to get the kitty turned into a behemoth that scares every tiger in Asia work needs to be done. But the game that was meant for a 640Kb Computer now gets 10,000 times the resources and has a setting of a massive data warehouse that could enable larger prototyping than ever considered before. I see some bloggers (journalists too) working the same equation again and again, all whilst they could create something much more explanatory and insightful for all readers. Some might not care and that is OK, yet the Balance of power had appeal to a fair amount of gamers and I believe even now in a new generational setting I believe that this appeal will still be there. And the benefit of streaming implies that you can try and you can see how the pawns fall down, the rooks optionally stand up and the political board shows a lot more than you ever considered.

We seem to think that old is gone, but games and simulators were more advanced because they overcame memory obstacles, I reckon that some programs can still make us turn out heads, especially when some of these programs were created with the limitations that 1985 had and considering that my Abandonware gave the game 4.6 out of 5 gives another reason to consider what was out there. And let’s face it, what do you have to lose?

Does smoke mean fire?

We have all heard the expression before: ‘Where there is smoke, there is fire‘, yet what happens when no fire is found, what happens when certain involved parties are all combined in the need for deception?

That is the question; it is not a direct accusation, as I am not aware of all the facts. I am merely in possession of a whole heap of doubt. The latest is given with: “On Thursday, communications giant Vodafone said it is pausing the deployment of new Huawei equipment in its core networks across the globe. The core networks are particularly sensitive as if they are compromised, mass spying can be conducted across them“, the operative part is ‘if they are compromised‘, there is no evidence, there is no case, it is merely Vodafone sucking the proverbial addendum of America. This comes with the addition of “the University of California at Berkeley and UC San Diego — are removing Huawei equipment and shunning its cash. They apparently don’t want to lose funding under the terms of last year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which banned federal funding recipients from using certain products and services“. The mess is increasing and the whole fiasco is all connected to the fact that there is no evidence. At least with Alex Younger (MI6), the premise was that no government should be allowed to be in an optional point of weakness through foreign technology. I do not believe that was the cleverest step to make, but we can argue that it should be seen as a valid national reason, which is fair enough.

There is of course concern in opposition and the Guardian gives is (at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/27/huaweis-problems-deepen-as-western-suspicions-mount) with: “Critics say Huawei’s rapid expansion is suspicious. Founded in 1987 and focused on selling telecom equipment in rural areas of China, it has grown into the world’s largest supplier of telecoms equipment and second largest smartphone maker. It operates in more than 170 countries, employing about 180,000 people“. OK, I am willing to give that thought, because there is suspicion on that level, yet there is also Facebook, it grew to a multibillion dollar behemoth in less than a decade. At least with technology there are supporting investors when they comprehend the technology and it has been clear in the last 10 years that Huawei was ahead of the curve. My initial assessment in 2014 was that Huawei would soon have at least 20% of the mobile market. I was laughed at by several people, now when I remember them of their short sightedness, they seem to react in denial with statements like ‘I don’t know what you mean‘ and ‘Well, you should have communicated it better‘. Although I did state that ‘Huawei will soon have well over 20% of the mobile market‘ seems to have been clear enough. Now they surpass that with a comfortable distance, and they are not done growing. When I initially discussed my $2B IP idea there were only two players. Google and Huawei, now my benefit to only consider Huawei will have a few more tactical benefits as well as leaving me with a larger slice of that cake which I find appealing as well. that is beside the point of me sticking it to Microsoft and Apple to show them how stupid their path of iterative technology was, in addition, if Huawei pulls it off, it will create a very new cloud technology based growth system. they will do so because all these jokers who are hiding behind ‘security concerns‘ will soon learn that evidence is still adamant and the people are finding out that getting sold short for the benefit of specific Telecom operators come with a massive price tag.

So I found a way around it and create a second system that avoids them altogether, that also means that these players will lost on terabytes of data per day making their losses increasingly uncomfortable. I do have an issue with the quote: “Ren went on a media blitz, breaking years of silence to say the company has never engaged in espionage on behalf of Beijing. “China’s ministry of foreign affairs has officially clarified that no law in China requires any company to install mandatory back doors. Huawei and me personally have never received any request from any government to provide improper information,” he said” I have no doubt that Ren Zhengfei is speaking the truth, yet I am also aware that someone like Chen Wenqing will never knock on the door of Ren Zhengfei, he will find a way around it and get what he needs in another way. By the way that same picture applies to Gina Cheri Haspel and General Paul Nakasone and their links to Microsoft, IBM, Facebook and Apple. You better believe that they are very much on the same page when it comes to their national security, your rights be damned (when National security is discussed).

So let’s not have that pot, kettle and black conversation, shall we?

Then we get to the trade secret part of it all. Oh, and before you get any crazy idea’s. Perhaps you have heard of how in the mid 60’s Israel, through Mossad acquired (read borrowed) the blueprints from the French and when the ban for Israel was clear, they producing an uncanny identical likeness of the Mirage 5, I believe it was called the Nesher, with technical specifications for several main parts to be as perfectly identical as a fingerprint. We were not really that surprised when it happened, yet what was less known was that some documents in the mid 90’s implied that the CIA was very aware of it all before the operation was completed, which shines a light on their need of what they regard to be a trade secret.

This part is important when we realise that the accusation reads: ‘conspiring to steal trade secrets from T-Mobile US Inc.‘. The question is: ‘What Trade Secrets?‘ You see Huawei is a lot more advanced than T-Mobile. Perhaps it is what BGR Media LLC claimed with: “unscrupulous T-Mobile sales reps lie to customers and open lines on their accounts without permission, all to meet unrealistic sales goals“, which is interesting as this is not a think Huawei does, they merely sell hardware and services to companies, not to individuals. Or perhaps the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) findings with: ‘EFF Confirms: T-Mobile’s Binge on Optimization is Just Throttling, Applies Indiscriminately to All Video‘, so how is any of that interesting to Huawei? So what exactly is the formal brief for the case? You see, the media does not divulge that, they give us all the innuendo but not the facts. And when it comes to the accusation ”Huawei used a Hong Kong shell company called Skycom to sell equipment in violation of the US sanctions in Iran“, which might hold water (I actually do not know), yet if the US is unwilling to set that stage by “The U.S. has agreed to let eight countries — including Japan, India and South Korea” to let the Iran sanctions be waived, why are they so specific? Is it merely because their financial and economic setting demands it? How is that proper sanctioning? All that, whilst the media at large is not making any mention of the other 5, we need to see that the entire Iran Sanction is to be seen as a cloak of corruption, if that was not allowed, the oil price would suddenly soar and at that point the US economy would be in deep drenching goo, is that not an interesting side as well? Or perhaps a better clue on how Cisco, Sun and HP equipment makes it to Iran without any hassle, an event that has been going on since 2012, so in all this, the entire Huawei discrimination debacle reads like a joke.

to be quite honest, if there was an actual security issue, I would go after Huawei without a moment’s hesitation, I know I can best Director Igor Kostyukov (GRU), yet going after Chen Wenqing, a man who eats, dreams and lives by the Art of War and optionally one of the few people on the planet whose eyes have seen the actual original version, he would be a lovely challenge for the likes of me. I am no Steinitz, Karpov, Kasparov or Carlsen, but I could be a crazy Bobby Fischer, he’ll never see me coming! (OK, that was my ego talking for a second).

You see, I look beyond the data, beyond what people and politicians hide behind and the entire Huawei mess is a political play of nepotism and fear, because those getting momentum in 5G will set the pace and win the race, that is what America fears it was that simple all along. That truth is easily found, the orchestration (read: rigging) of what would be global 5G rules and the FCC of setting a different stage, the non-accountability of AT&T in all this and that list is growing almost on a daily basis, it gets to be more interesting now that the Democrats from the “Leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission today demanding information concerning possible coordination between FCC officials and carriers in an ongoing legal fight” (source: the Verge) and a few more like them. In the last 15 days we have seen more orchestration and the setting of the stage with specific judges, to get a more appealing situation, when we see that part, we see that the technology gap in America is a lot larger than we think and it is setting the stage of fear against an advanced players like Huawei on an almost exponential growing path. America has seemingly no other optional left. That is why I saw from the beginning that places like Saudi Arabia could fuel exponential growth in 5G and making Huawei larger by the day. It also fuels the growth path back to Europe, because the moment Huawei proves that they have the good stuff, the EU will chose profit over short sighted American policies, because those policies do not pay the bills, profit does and the EU is desperate for any profit it can get.

Consider the billions of value of those networks and the billions of revenue that these networks make in addition through information, advertisement and data collection. America is starting to lose out because they were asleep at the wheel for close to 3 years, it is enough to miss out on an entire technology generation. That is the danger that iterative technology brings. For now I merely wonder what Google can do to stay ahead of it all, because their lives depend on the technologies that Huawei has, when Google search becomes less and less at the point of the spear, merely to be laughingly called Bing v2.1, how do you think Google will react? They optionally have the path to equal Huawei in a new network facilitating stream giving them additional revenue in a new dimension. We might initially think Saudi Arabia and Neom city in the pilot stage, yet that could so one thereafter evolve towards London, Paris and other places to grow strong and fast, because in the end all these policies sound nice, but they all forget the number one clause required. It all requires users and that is the part both Google and Huawei figured out a decade before the sheep (read: IBM and Microsoft) started to get a proper clue.

Too many intelligence wannabe’s focussed on Mark Lowenthal’s Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, which is an awesome book, and when you consider the simple: “on how the intelligence community’s history, structure, procedures, and functions affect policy decisions“, which is also an absolute truth, yet behind what you would like to have, these people all forgot about the consumers and what they demanded to be their right, that is where their gravy train became another Titanic and the greed driven path went not by one iceberg, but it steered towards one every other hour making it a wreck in the making, the entire 5G debacle in the US is no difference in that regard and I will be around to laugh at those in denial thinking and parroting ‘security concern‘ on all the media without any proper cause or evidence to show for it. Oh, and I am not the only one, a whole score of cyber experts are on that same path, so I am not alone in seeing through the media stupidity, merely seeing on how much bigger experts like me are totally ignored on several levels giving merely the rise and early expectation to someone screaming in some policy department ‘Iceberg dead ahead‘, whilst none of them are qualified or sanctioned to alter course, going straight for the natural Whiskey coolant.

Life can be exceedingly entertaining at time, but for all the tea (and Huawei mobiles) in China, I never expected them to be this hilarious. Sometimes smoke is not fire, it is the steam of a ship striking an iceberg and going down. For those on that ship do not worry, the direct path to land is only 3800 meters away (straight down).

A mere warning

The Washington Post gives us an interesting article today. It is not really about Jamal Khashoggi, even if it is about him. You see, the headline gives us: ‘U.S. spy agencies sued for records on whether they warned Khashoggi of impending threat of harm‘, with that stage the University of Columbia is being set up for a rather weird trip. When we get “The Knight First Amendment Institute on Tuesday sued the U.S. government to learn whether agencies complied with what the institute asserted was a duty to warn journalist Jamal Khashoggi that he faced a threat of harm. Khashoggi, who lived in Northern Virginia, was killed Oct. 2 by a team of Saudi operatives soon after entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents for his impending marriage.” They were kind and accurate enough to add the text, oh they actually were not. You see, Journalist or not, Jamal Khashoggi is a Saudi Arabian citizen. In addition, he was not in America at the moment it happened, which might be merely a consideration. The third part of the equation is that the alleged act was done on Saudi soil, making it an internal Saudi matter, so, where do we stand?

Well, the WP gives us the Directive 191 reference, so that is where I will go next. The directive in the definitions do tell us “Duty to Warn means a requirement to warn U.S. and non-U.S. persons of impending threats of intentional killing, serious bodily injury, or kidnapping.” There is one issue that I cannot comment on as F.10 of the directive has been redacted; as such I am not certain if the situation had changed. You see, it is the implementation regarding an optional targeted person that matters now. From my point of view, the onus is now on the Washington Post to show part of F2, where we see: “IC elements shall designate senior officers responsible for reviewing threat information initially determined to meet duty to warn requirements to affirm whether the information is credible and specific, so as to permit a meaningful warning. IC clements shall also designate senior officers responsible for making waiver determinations based on criteria identified in this Directive. The senior officers designated for affirming that duty to warn information is sufficient for a meaningful warning and for making waiver determinations should not be the same individual.” It is the Washington Post that needs to prove at this point that ‘threat information’ was clearly available with the senior intelligence officer(s). Merely the notion that a journalist’s life might optionally have been in danger does not hack it. If so, let Martin Baron be a kind boss and give the world notice on the 214 media people in Turkish prison, please please, pretty please?

And then we get the good stuff, the reason why the University of Columbia has signed on for a see-it-all tour of the ocean floor on the USS Titanic (drinks on the rocks will be served). The wavers are almost passed; there is no setting where we see that Jamal Khashoggi was any of that by the American definition. It is the ‘almost’ that gets us to F3e. Here we see: “The information resulting in the duty to warn determination was acquired from a foreign government with whom the U.S. has formal agreements or liaison relationships, and any attempt to warn the intended victim would unduly endanger the personnel, sources, methods, intelligence operations, or defense operations of that foreign government;” How was the clear and present danger to Jamal Khashoggi acquired? Was it ever acquired? More important, if CIA clandestine services got the intelligence as part of internal Saudi acquisition, we might actually stumble on the waver activated through section F3d.

If we go by the innuendo, a group of a little over a dozen flew in, were ALL those people tracked? If there was a call for execution, how did it come into the hands of the intelligence agency? All elements that cannot be answered, so unless the University of Columbia has a clear inside source, the entire exercise was debunked in 414.2 seconds (roughly). All this is even before F8 is seen. The mention of: “Communication of threat information to the intended victim may be delivered anonymously if that is the only method available to ensure protection of U.S. government personnel, sources, methods, intelligence operations, or defense operations.” implies that anonymous delivery would not have been an option, making matters more compromising for the intelligence individual given this part of canine excrement (a paper shaped one mind you). So not only are we in a stage where anonymous delivery is not an option, there is the clear requirement that the intelligence had been weighted, disseminated for wavers and at that point this point would be acted on. Also, we see 63 million articles on Jamal Khashoggi, yet which ones give us a timeline of his whereabouts from September 1^st, to October 2^nd? At what stage and exactly when was there a credible threat to his life? I am not saying that this was not the case; I am saying that I do not know and whilst we have millions of articles from all kinds of sources playing parrot on innuendo, yet the entire timeline is not shown, as far as I was able to tell, not even in the Washington Post, the American paper he worked for.

The one part that we do not look at is the purpose in all this. When we consider the purpose where we see: “This Directive establishes in policy a consistent, coordinated approach for how the Intelligence Community (IC) will provide warning regarding threats to specific individuals or groups of intentional killing, serious bodily injury, and kidnapping” we need to wonder if the intelligence agencies have any chance of getting anything done, basically any journalist and opposition of drugs in Latin America is basically in danger at this point. For me, I see the entire University of Columbia action academically sound, yet loaded with political oppositional premise. The action in opposition comes from “The lawsuit states that before Khashoggi’s killing, “U.S. intelligence agencies apparently intercepted communications in which Saudi officials discussed a plan to capture Khashoggi.”” This is indeed part of the directive. Yet the timeline is not clear. The intelligencer section of the New York Magazine (at http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/report-the-u-s-heard-saudis-talk-about-capturing-khashoggi.html) gives us: “The Saudis wanted to lure Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia and lay hands on him there, this person said. It was not clear whether the Saudis intended to arrest and interrogate Khashoggi or to kill him“. We need to consider two parts, Jamal Khashoggi was on Saudi soil (consulate when the events happened), in addition, there is also still mention that we see the optional ‘the Saudis intended to arrest and interrogate Khashoggi‘, which also implies that danger to life was not a given and Saudi Arabia has every right to arrest its citizens, especially on Saudi ground. We cannot merely state after the fact that it was ‘to kill him‘, there were too many unknown parts and intelligence agencies acting on too many unknown parts tend to drop the ball, foil their own plot and moreover tend to imply more controversies on themselves. Oh, and did I mention that part of it happened in Turkey, a place that has arrested and jailed well over 200 journalists?

It is also reflective as they quote the WP in this. That article gives us again: “Before Khashoggi’s disappearance, U.S. intelligence intercepted communications of Saudi officials discussing a plan to capture him“, yet a clear timeline is missing. How much time was there and consider that the intercepted information does not imply killing, more important, when a government takes a person into custody it is not kidnapping, it is called arresting nullifying Directive 191. What is interesting that no one in that entire intelligence structure decided to act by themselves (or directed to do so), walking up to Martin Baron (sometimes doubled by Liev Schreiber) and tell him that there is a credible issue with one of their journalists. As the issue at that part was not national security. That one call and his rapid ‘relocation’ to: İstinye Mahallesi, Poligon Cd. No:75, 34460 Sarıyer/İstanbul, Turkey where quick travel arrangements could be made. Is that absence not interesting too? So when we consider that part, was there any time at all?

I am not saying that this is the case; I am merely framing the questions.

So when we see all that, I am considering that this in the end goes nowhere, yet the activity to open Directive 191 to scrutiny was not wrong, not wrong at all. I reckon that the Law Faculty of the University of Columbia will have handed out, or soon will hand out to their freshman students an essay assignments of 1,500 words asking them: “Argue the situation where Directive 191 could have preventive, or would be ineffective in preventing the alleged killing of Jamal Khashoggi“. I think that Martin Baron should publish the best entry as a column entry in the Washington Post with a supporting by-line by Gillian Lester the Dean of Law of Columbia Law School. Scrutiny is always good, especially when it has the option to become an exercise to educate people. I wonder what the take by Mark M. Lowenthal is, the man behind ‘Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy‘, and is it not interesting that he is (or was) an adjunct professor in that very same University? This part is actually important as the entire setting is precisely the stage that we saw in 2009 (at https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/us/09cia.html), it is a different stage quoted as: ““If Panetta starts trying to feed people to that commission, his tenure at C.I.A. will be over,” said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former senior C.I.A. official and an adjunct professor at Columbia University. “If it happens, C.I.A. people are not going to start plotting against the president, but they are going to withdraw from taking risks, and then the C.I.A. becomes useless to the president,” Mr. Lowenthal said.“, yet the impact of Directive 191 becomes a near identical spotlight and it might end up setting exactly the same premise that Mark warned us for in 2009. My idea that someone gets a whisper to talk to Martin Baron and give him the heads up would have been the zero pain and least effort required solution. It is my idea, yet I am 99.3224% certain (roughly) that there are people more clever than me in the Intelligence branch who would have had that very same idea leaving me with the speculation that there merely might not have been enough time; with tens of thousands intelligence snippets arriving at https://www.cia.gov/cgi-bin/forlang_form.cgi every hour (and many more intelligence snippets from all over the world, as well as from Flat 3b, 3 Hans Crescent, London SW1X 0LS) there is every chance that the message might not have been read in time, or merely that other matters mattered more and in that we should optionally thank the University of Columbia for their optional assistance of upping the CIA budget by a speculative 42.3% (minus $7.49 for my venti cappuccino and a toasted blueberry muffin).

Could I be wrong? Of course I could be, but I added the directive for you to consider yourself and in the end when you put the elements on a row, how likely was the fact that there was a clear plan in place from the beginning? the entire Khashoggi mess, and the nonstop innuendo and lack of evidence given to the media and others, whilst we see a lack of scrutiny and a lack of commitment form the governments in all this gives rise to a lot more issues than the one I showed, making me wonder whether Jamal Khashoggi was important or merely became important after he allegedly died, showing the additional pressures that Iran is trying to push for via Turkey, oh and all those Turkish imprisoned (and optionally alive) journalists, how much media coverage are they still getting at present?

Did I oversimplify the matter for you?

Cool bananas and have a great Thursday!

Directive 191

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Relaunching IP

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A mere warning

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