‘We Knew Exactly Who We Had to Go Get’
Ever since, there has been great enthusiasm for the West to help freedom advocates from China and Myanmar to Iran, Libya, and Syria gain easy access to Internet networks. This enthusiasm continues, as in this recent essay by Joel Brinkley, in which he argues that “tyrants fear social media more than anything.”
But, as often in warfare, there is a constant flow of advantage between offense and defense. At first, the new media were clearly advantageous to the insurrectionaries, and the Iranian regime, for example, blocked communications when things got hot. Internet was blocked, satellites were jammed, cell networks were shut down. Then, the tyrants got smarter. They learned to track down the users of the social media, with deadly results. They soon knew who they had to go get. One of the first pundits to figure this out was the thoughtful and often delightful Evgeny Morozov, who has waged a relentless campaign against the “cyber utopians” who believe that the new technologies will inevitably make us free. In fact, Morozov pointed out, Bush, Obama, Hillary and Condi were slow to realize that the very use of the technologies carried a risk of disclosure. In the free West, we worry about governmental and corporate penetration of our privacy. In the tyrannies, it’s often a matter of life and death. Just ask the many Iranian bloggers facing death sentences in Tehran’s Evin prison.
At the moment, the tyrants are doing well. A while back, a non-governmental Western organization turned on a cell phone in downtown Tehran, programmed to send out text messages designed to catch the attention of the security forces. The cyber cops found the phone in a matter of minutes, an example of their profound concern and unusual efficiency.
Advocates of the “revolutionary media” insist that the numbers favor the insurrectionaries. “The cats will be well fed, but the mice will win out in the end,” one of them likes to say. Perhaps that is true, but if the mice decide they can’t safely talk to each other, the big cat wins, doesn’t she?
Paradoxically, some of the mice have reverted to ancient methods of communication. I know people who use couriers to carry messages, both internationally and within countries. Sometimes those messages aren’t even written down; they’re memorized. It’s slow, but it works. Ray Bradbury understood this well, as have other science fiction and fantasy writers. It may well be that as the technologies become ever more effective, and the rulers know more and more “who to go get,” their most dangerous opponents will communicate through ancient arts: telling stories, singing ballads, and posting messages and broadsides in public and private places.
In revolutionary Rome in the eighteenth century, there were several “talking statues,” so called because dissidents would post calls to action on the torsos of the statues. One of them, a short block from Piazza Navona, still serves this function.
Maybe we’ll see some of Washington’s many statues used this way in the future. There’s a great Einstein in a small grove at the National Academy of Sciences that’s ideal, if you’re wondering where to start.
Michael, is there really any difference/discernible distinction between radical leftists and their Islamist counterparts? Hardly.
Therefore, is it any surprise, what sounds like words coming from Islamic thugocrats emanates from the lying/revolutionary lips of Obama and surrogates – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/08/19/comrades-in-arms-always-have-each-others-backs-whether-black-white-or-islamic-supremacists-the-redgreen-alliances-common-denominator-seriousness-of-issue-necessitates-its-length-commenta/
Obama won because he lied and the mainstream media reinforced them. Romney lost because he didn’t attack Obama and because he didn’t aggressively address Obama’s lies in any media, especially his commercials.
Your talk about Obama’s people knowing what people Obama had to get is nonsense.
When it comes to the powers of persuasion, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Did it ever accur to you that you could both be right? If you have data to refute his points, let’s hear it.
Obama had to know WHAT lies to tell to get the desired groups in the necessary states. So the author’s dissertation remains true. Obama knew exactly who he had to get and what had to say (true or otherwise) to get them.
Well, put gently, sophisticated software that works, in the hands of people who know how to use it, will certainly help ‘get to’ the votes you need. The GOP’s ‘Orca’ software, by contrast, didn’t. Who had the edge?
The guys on the other side are the new Gramscians, and they are very good. Compare and contrast Huckebee’s goofball evangelicals.
As the wise man said, if things don’t change, they will remain the same. Had enough yet?
“Had enough yet?”
It’s strikingly apparent that for most voters, the answer is a strong, resounding “No.” We’re all going to have to be in a lot more pain before any type of change can take place. It’s bad enough that we live with media outlets that are so strongly & unabashedly on the liberal side of the political ledger; it helps not at all that the Republican Party doesn’t attract enough people with the skill sets to properly break through the veritable communications force field that so well protects leftist interests.
Romney clinched the GOP nomination on May 29. He had 5 months to beat an incumbent president – supported by 90% of the media, 90% of the entertainment industry and 90% of academia – whose campaign had been organizing for 5 years.
I have to disagree with you on this point. When you consider the fact that the hard core Obama supporters are very similar to the Jim Jones contingent who drank the original “KoolAid”, you have to believe that they were more than willing to use the available technology and information about voter’s habits in order to specifically target selected small groups that eventually turned into a sufficient majority to carry the election. Obama won in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the other so-called “swing states” because he concentrated on winning what he had to win.
The selected targeting of low information voters was at the top of the list. Voters who would sign a pledge card with Obama’s picture on it and when the election day got closer, they were called and reminded. Instead of questioning and asking, they did as any good lemming would, they went to the polls and mindlessly voted for Obama. They had no idea of the issues, only what they were told by the volunteer who rang their doorbell after getting their name from a list. Many of the voters who pulled the lever for Obama never watched anything but MSM news and TV Land, a network showing old Andy Griffith shows, I Love Lucy, and so on. They could care less but when they were approached, it made them feel “special” and they rewarded Obama by voting for him.
If you want to know how closely you are monitored in your daily life and shopping habits, think about it the next time you use a “store card” to make a purchase in a supermarket. The transaction is recorded under your name and the corporation will send selected specials they know will appeal to you. Now, expand that by all retail outlets with their own discount cards and then look at the junk mail you receive.
Obama used the same technique to target specific groups and subsets of voters. It worked and Romney never had a chance. The election was over before he won the nomination. I read this same information a few weeks ago but it was in more detail. No, don’t blame Romney, even if unemployment had been at 10%, Obama would still have won the election. Think about one other incident that happened well before the election when Obama was talking to the president of Russia and told him he would have more freedom after he was re-elected. Think he didn’t know already?
Education is throwing out a tremendous amount of data on what students value and where their pressure points are. What creates frustration causing people to reconsider their Worldviews is now readily available. At least to one campaign.
People forget Outcomes Based Education never went away in most states. It just got renamed when it became controversial. But if you happen to have friends in the NEA, you get to know precisely what attitudes, values, and beliefs were targeted in K-12. And build on it. Those urban schools are deliberately kept weak for a reason. It makes community organizing a la Saul Alinsky easier. It has become the norm almost unnoticed. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/keep-urban-schools-weak-to-force-economic-and-social-justice-then-make-the-suburbs-close-the-gap/
The National Research Council is planning on using Big Data and the tech companies to gather the info to redesign and then centrally plan and run the economy based on the premise of Sustainability and Low Carbon Fuels. That’s a lot of revenue and power. Hard to imagine some of those reams of data were not used to insure there was a Second Term to see if Big Data and supercomputers were all the central planners ever really needed.
I can figure things out with how they work. Plus I usually track down a list of participants in various conferences or meetings. I look at the list and realize how widespread knowledge can be without ever making it into mainstream appreciation.
The Obama campaign has access to a great deal of that kind of information. The Reps just do not seem to get the electorate at that level. Probably because they may pander but they do not exist to create dependent clients in quite the same way. Are they even attending these various conferences I have seen in the last month on using Big Data for planning for the future? And it has become a Proper Noun capitalized just like that in every publication I see.
Data on exactly how to tighten the noose around somebody’s neck in order to force them to be dependent on Big Daddy Government.
The Thugocracy just can’t resist being thugs.
This gives “Going Galt” a whole new look…I am certainly very careful of what info I allow to be exposed to cyberspace.
If you don’t want anyone to know about it don’t even think about releasing it into cyberspace. Doesn’t matter where. Assume every line is tapped and monitored and that all records are permanent and publicly available.
Paranoia isn’t a mental illness… it’s a way of life… and you aren’t paranoid if you’re right.
Michael, as always I am elated when I see one of your posts appear. I agree with you whole heartedly. These people… “social media will bring democracy”… “computers will fix educations” are always looking for, and worse, finding, the silver bullet that will take care of everything the easy way. If only.
May I suggest something else to consider; this idea advanced by Simon Sinek because you know I couldn’t state with certainty three things, hell, one thing, that Romney believed about anything. I’ve spent decades now voting ‘against’ someone in presidential elections and long to vote ‘for’ someone who believes what I believe. It’s late but a quick thumbnail of the latter would be the First Ten of the Constitution along with the Declaration of Independence. It’s what all humans believe if they think about it. Yeah, the same docs that have gotten in the way of Wilson, FDR, Johnson and Obama.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4
“…..and long to vote ‘for’ someone who believes what I believe.”
If you were the “low-information voter”, which surely you are not, how would you know that a candidate’s true beliefs match yours when the mainstream media is filtering the information? Do very many voters know the reality of Obama’s actual beliefs and predictable consequences of Obama’s re-election? No, of course not or he never would be elected in the fist place. As long as the MSM is standing guard at the gate of information for the casually engaged and the true-believers we are going to continue to get the Obamas of this world. That is the wall that must be broken through and I don’t see anyone capable of doing it. Name one.
“the left og out there an hustled, while the right got complacent… the left is evil for having out-hustled you?”
The left has always been evil, regardless of the latest election or bill or unconstitutional actions.
Michael L and peter38a have the right of it.
The left did not “hustle”; their turn-out was lower than 2008, and they won by a very small margin.
We had a couple decent (not great, just decent) candidates hidden in the 3rd party weeds (including Virgil Goode and Gary Johnson), and a list of good candidates who were eliminated from the running in the primaries. Don’t ask me what the voters in the Republican primaries were thinking; I’m not even sure they were Republicans.
Meanwhile, Mittens kept rushing to surrender, just like former Speaker Boehner (may the announcement of his replacement be heard soon throughout the land, and let it be someone with a brain and a back-bone for a change). Striving to be Obummer light, as Obummer slides further down the extreme leftist cliff every day, is no way to win enthusiastic support from the right. It didn’t work for McCain and it didn’t work for Mittens.
We didn’t have anyone to hustle FOR, no candidate with principles and positions on the vital issues we could enthusiastically support.
So…the left og out there an hustled, while the right got complacent, elieving their own press, sat on their butts and let the election get away from them.
Now, somehow, the left is evil for having out-hustled you? They may be evil for a lot of reasons, but getting off their duff and using their heads to out-hustle and out-smart you isn’t one of them.
You picked up some wins at the state and local level around the nation. Focus on what you did right in those cases and duplicate it at the national level. Not opinions: Do some research, polling, dig into the numbers and politics of the voters and the issues that brought them to the polls in those cases.
Time to put off the sackcloth and ashes, stop the blame shifting, and get back to work.
Warren B: could not agree with you more. The GOP is as addicted to “entitlement” as the lefties. They thought it was “their turn” and trusted the whole thing to “wizards.” The incompetence demonstrated during the reigns of Bush I and Bush II is now a permanent condition of the GOP. Time to find a Conservative Party where THE ONLY ARISTOCRACY IS THE ARISTOCRACY OF THE BRAINS.
Luckily,(for the president)Sandy came along and gave him a chance to appear Presidential!Life happens when your busy making other plans.America needs a leader in troubled times,don’t give a MACHINE all the credit.
Re “The insurrections against the tyrants, in the Middle East today ” Huh? I am sorry to say that Mr Ledeen appears to be like the liberal commentators who go gaga whenever groups take to the streets.
Arab insurrectionists that make up the various Arab Springs are the left, or are those the left is allied with – sharia Islamists.
One can decry the despotism of some Arab leaders – Syria for example. But whatever else you may say of them, they aren’t Leftists. And Leftism is the enemy.
Lebanon, for example, is a country we lost that had for years and years been a stable government with Christian participation. All those years, as today, Lebanon was surrounded on three sides by Syria. And never once was Syria a problem for them.
But along come the revolt in the streets and now what have we?
Like an old car this sort of stuff backfires on me.Free stuff commercials and attractive prices send up a red flag,a reflexive NO,don’t click on
that.Snuck out from my work sight with a friend to my favorite bar.The talk went from Football to politics like i’ve never seen before,as if everyone (else)just got out of a movie theater showing “Blame Big Business”.Not only are we too easily led,but the momentum is scaring me!True,from a bar in a welfare city but in Massachusetts,home of the Tea Party!
The narrative on political discussions in a blue collar bar is spot-on to those reasons we collectiviely face exstinction as a Republic. Our “average guy” voting population is driven by an idological void. These guys maybe graduated from high school with a passing set of grades (or not), might have gone to a semester or two of community college, and see religeon as a sucker’s activity. As “low-information voters” they are using a less complex rationale in selecting when and whom to vote for. Somewhere between the sports report and Letterman these voters are easily influenced, and obviously are.
When the iconic Archie Bunker expressed views longing for a better and socially conservative time, the Communist left that had already infiltrated Hollywood/New York media management set those values up as a straw man and chewed them to pieces on a weekely basis. As the remaining media centers (PBS, etc.) were systematially infiltrated and co-opted by the left, the bashing of Archie’s value system continued and spread into even the pre-school level, with Big Bird and the Disney channel’s “inclusive” programming to instill useless values at the lowest levels of perception. Now a leftest national social vlaue system is preached in the home (crib to commedy channel), and in the schools, on the web, on social media, and… 24×7. What opt-out options exist today from this overwhelming broadcast of Communist dogma? Only a few, and and you individually must seek them out as they are generally derrided in all other media outlets.
When you talk to the “average” guy, the guy who’s source of information outside of the work-site or watering hole is a Communist sypathetic media, what would you expect? Sloganeering and repeated dogma are how Communists have come to power in every instance. I think you are seeing the result of that “talking statue” referenced in another post, but the talking statue is all around you. Hence the immediate and predictable response by the masses.
…..sure obama and his minions had all kinds of wizards polling the electorate.
WHAT BOTHERS ME IS THE CONSERVATIVES WHO SAY IT WAS THE VOTES OF THIS ROUP OR THAT …OR THE CONSERVATIVE PUNDITS SOURED THE MOOD ETC.
WHEN WILL THE CONSERVATIVES CALL IT FOR WHAT IT IS …THE DEMOCRATS CHEATED …MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD / DENIED VOTES TO OVERSEAS MILITARY / CONSERVATIVE POLL WATCHERS REMOVED FROM THE POLLS /INTIMIDATION ETC.
obama didn’t win and still hasn’t proven eligibility! yet conservatives keep saying it was this or that while ignoring the truth.
Digital technology is in the hands of the young and understanding the digital generation is key to assessing its outsize impact on the election (if such it was).
I know some very bright and accomplished young computer scientists. They hold advanced degrees in mathematics and computer science and they raise millions for their start-ups with remarkable ease. But their reading, if any, is light and they know nothing of history. Their primary media are visual rather than literal. They learn about politics from snatches of television news and from late night comedian/talk show hosts. A slick, shallow, BS artist like Obama is catnip for these kids.
But digital and impulse technology are in their infancy. As you point out, there is an interplay between offense and defense. And these nerdy kids will will get gray–and perhaps wise, in their turn. Whether they still enjoy the freedoms we do will have been of their own making.
You hit the nail on the head…having been in that industry for years, there appeared to be a purge of folks (like me) that actually understand the implications of the technology (in a historical context). As I ponder the layoffs that began in the 90′s and persist today, I really wonder about the selection criteria for layoffs, notwithstanding early retirement programs….Most IT companies have always favored the left (and the youth today are fully indoctrinated — see Robin’s links).
“having been in that industry for years, there appeared to be a purge of folks (like me) that actually understand the implications of the technology”
I think the big shift happened between 1985 and 1987. There were some changes in the late 1970s or early 1980s which encouraged domestic bodyshopping and it started to noticeably shoot up at the beginning of 1983, according to articles I found in the Montly Labor Review. There were tax changes which removed breaks for the costs of flying people in from around the USA for interviews, relocating employees, and training which suddenly made it much harder for US citizens to get or even keep jobs. There were a couple statutory and regulatory changes that went into effect in 1987 which encouraged bodyshopping, discouraged free-lancers (because they’re harder for the government extortionists to target), and reduced privacy.
Of course, at the same time the shift from old iron main-frames and super-computers plus intelligent terminals to micro-computers was under way. OO approaches which started in Scandihoovia in the 1960s were beginning to catch on in the USA for real work in the 1980s, but didn’t really catch fire widely until the late 1990s. AT&T turned loose UNIX in the mid-1980s and that helped push the work-station boom around 1986 (and set back the OS state of the art by nearly a decade; CP/M and then the various DOSes had copied parts of the UNIX command set in the 1970s, too).
Of course, the H-1B visa was hatched in 1990 as a result of NSF lobbying which began in the mid-1980s for a plentiful supply of cheap PhD candidates and PhDs to work as indentured grad students and post-docs, but shifted and spread under political pressure to more broad-based targeting of STEM, fashion models, and nurses, then shifted again later to included school-teachers and such.
And, of course, the flood of cheap, young labor from countries which lacked American cultural ethical foundations (places where, for instance, law school students rioted for the “right” to cheat on finals; where students collaborated to formulate and post “best” answers to SAT questions on-line) meant that massive data-warehouse projects and “social networking” scams and search engine use tracking and filtering and medical data digitizing and nationalization have been much easier to carry out. (And what’s this about mega-bucks from Google and Yahoo! and other privacy violation firms going into Obummer campaign coffers? And remember Ellison offering a national ID kkkard system?) Hence my objections to the worsening flood of cheap, young, pliant foreign labor with questionable ethics.
And, of course, the excess labor supply also encouraged age discrimination (at both ends, BTW).
I fortunately never worked for a left-biased hardware or software firm.
Good point, but I am not sure that we are that close to Iran conditions yet. The statues method seems more European than American.
This is the land of Paul Revere and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is more likely that we see something like couriers between committees of correspondence or churches quietly but massively putting together various operations.
Or maybe we will develop something new. I do not consider social networks to be new beans, unless you consider a telephone network as “new.”
Yes Mr. Ledeen, I do know where to start and I had my picture snapped there over 30 years ago. When I read the tease to your article my first thought was that “they” meant our enemies knew who to “go get” into the oval office in order to fulfill their plans. And everytime I see that picture of Obama bowing down to those Saudi Arabian rulers I am even more convinced that they did go get him. Another nice read Mr. Ledeen.
tks. lots more to do on this subject. we’re just beginning to sort it out, i think.
The only technology that mattered was the vote counting software in swing-states.
The most discouraging aspect of America today is that our inttellectual ‘betters’ just can’t come to grips with the possiblity that we are dealing with monstrous evil; that stealing an election was within the motivation and capability of the radical left, and is prompting the disintegration of faith and truth in precisely the way Soros would want. But our betters won’t go there for fear of being ridiculed.
Here’s how it was done: “Master Plan to Steal an Election” at http://www.brushfires-of-freedom.com/steal-an-election.html
David Axelrod told Holder what to do to Gallup for one fundamental reason: the path for stealing the election depended on pre-election polls being close. Otherwise, forget our betters…the real people of America would have stood up and stopped this criminal regime and its rigged election results. But he got the polls he needed, and now good and decent people like Michael Ledeen go looking for explanations for the election results everywhere but the obvious place.
‘Otherwise, forget our betters…the real people of America would have stood up and stopped this criminal regime and its rigged election results.’
But they didn’t. The real people of America voted for the status quo. They apparently weren’t interested in stopping this criminal regime. It shouldn’t have mattered how close the polls were. If they cared that much then they would have gone out and voted against Democrats. They didn’t. Why? Apparently they just didn’t care all that much.
That guy stole my scenerio. I teach that exact story in my law classes (called “Hacking the Vote”) – notice Congresspeople are present – Rep Gerold Nadler (D-NY). like Stuxnet, the code self destructs. Add SCYTL and then void the military votes? MObama stole the election, no doubt.
Think I’ll have some more ice cream. Gov’ts don’t like this sort of talk.
I already fear my views are ending up on someones list who disagrees with me.
What they plan on doing to me or my family to “persuade” Us to do it their way remains to be seen.
Four years from now we all may meet physically in some FEMA camp surrounded by the black helicopters and all for what we have posted today.
Just so you know it, My McAfee sends out a warning every time I visit a website that is conservative.
PJMedia had a warning today when I went to this page, it said,
Warning: Dangerous Site
Whoa!
Are you sure you want to go there?
http://iluv.clickbooth.com/?E=WMj0QUNWpMdNhjuQmrio… may be risky to visit.
Why were you redirected to this page?
When we visited this site, we found it exhibited one or more risky behaviors.
It also appears at JAWA, Michelle Malkin, SDA, ACE you name it and it gets this same warning.
Ah, this is a favorite topic of mine, and something I’ve thought a lot about over the last few years. As the article points out, I think the “digital utopians” are vastly deluded and the ultimate result will be far more sinister. To put it simply, information is power, the more someone knows about you the more easily they can control you, either through blackmail, manipulation, force, etc. I think the lefties drool over the “Big Data” future because to them all this data on everyone’s life represents the ultimate in central planning and total state control. They think the technocrats can finally craft the “perfect” system.
And here’s the biggest thing: The prevalence of social media has drastically shifted society’s conception of privacy. Go look up some of Zuckerberg’s speeches on the “death of privacy” over the last 5 years or so. I’m in my mid 20s and among only 2% of my generation without a social media presence. I’ve watched the attitudes of my generation change to where photos ind information that would’ve formerly been considered private are posted publicly, almost by default. The faces in these photo are then “tagged” to be fed into facial recognition software. That cannot end well. I increasingly run into the attitude that people who don’t have anything to hide shouldn’t be afraid to reveal all these intimate details, anybody who doesn’t play the game is regarded with a great deal of suspicion. That attitude is extremely dangerous for obvious reasons. People a few years younger than I who grew up in this environment will be hard pressed to explain the value of things like the 4th amendment.
I don’t see these things as benign communication tools, rather as the beginning of the digital panopticon where information is increasingly gathered without consent, enabled by cultural shifts that devalue privacy. A feedback loop if you will.
In 2006 the FBI scanned a camera over the crowd at the super bowl and arrested several people with outstanding warrants, using facial recognition software. I shudder to think how much better the technology’s gotten since then, fueled by tens of millions of photos uploaded daily, all with the faces neatly marked to help train the computer. The NSA recently constructed a facility capable of handling an exabyte of information. They know exactly how much power this information bestows, and they are mining it. When complete digital dossiers exist of every citizen we will truly be at a turnkey totalitarian state (probably are already) where a government could identify and round up all the people likely to be subversive before the shooting even starts.
Hi,
regarding:
In 2006 the FBI scanned a camera over the crowd at the super bowl and arrested several people with outstanding warrants, using facial recognition software.
I’d love your source (or sources) for this information. Is that something you might have handy? Thanks in advance,
– FF
I don’t have a specific source, I jest remember that it was a real event that generated controversy at the time when it came out. Here’s one article discussing it, including an ACLU response:
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2001/02/41571
People in general do not appreciate how accurate this technology has become, and I doubt the public is being fully informed as to the prevalence of its use. Some localities are instructing people not to smile for drivers license photos for example, so that the image may more readily be used in facial recognition software.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/09/new-jersey-bans-smiling-in-drivers-license-photos/
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the way the photo tagging system on Facebook works, but users drag a box around the portion of an image containing a user’s face and link it to that user’s profile. I don’t use facebook myself but I have watched friends and relatives using it, and when a new image is uploaded it will suggest people to tag. I’ve seen photos containing strangers uploaded and facebook responds with remarkably accurate suggestions linking back to their profile. If you forget your password it will ask you to identify previously tagged images of your friends. This is the PERFECT way to train a facial recognition program, as in a programmer for a facial recognition software company couldn’t design a better system. We already know that their database is fairly extensive and accurate, as evidenced by the accurate suggestion of unknown people in images. This database already encompasses probably a majority of US adults, and the VAST majority of people my age. Facebook makes its money selling this sort of data to customers, including the government.
Look up the ANPR system in the UK.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANPR
It is a camera system that uses computerized recognition software to detect the numbers from license plates and then stores a complete record of the dates and times and locations where a plate was spotted. This gives the police the ability to find the real time location of, and retrace the movements of, every vehicle in the country since the system was implemented. Now imagine a system like that but with CCTV and facial recognition software. That’s where we’re headed, and most of the fools in my generation won’t even blink.
Sorry, I got the dates mixed up, the super bowl incident was from 2001, not 2006, I don’t know why I remembered it as 2006. Anyway, if you’re interested in the topic there are a host of examples of the technology being used at high profile events since then. The technology has gotten much more accurate since then.
Michael, I picked up a book the other day, “OSS;The Secret History of America’s First Intel Agency”. Into it ist’s looking polemical. Can you, would you, make even the shortest comment on this book?
have not read it. am awaiting new book on Aldrich Ames, and finishing an old book on MI 6
Well, using message couriers certainly seemed to work for us, in terms of getting Osama. Yep, that worked…Good thing Osama was a media hound…
“We knew exactly who we had to go get.”
interesting tactic……..someone tell the Israelis
they may get the hint
“That last quotation grabs me by the throat and drags me to the question of digital communications, including email, texting, Facebook, and Twitter, in the global turmoil on whose outcome our own destiny now depends.”
Mr. Ledeen, what you fail to understand is that killing people does not win votes. Have you learned nothing from your god provolone the cheese? Obama is as big a liar as you have ever wanted. Obama is Jewish, Christian, Muslim, all though I haven’t heard him call himself a Buddhist or Hindu Monk. And what of the fake Dalai Lama? Another who should be slapped in his face.
The reason you put him there was get at the people of middle east. Look a Messiah! You need the blacks to support you. Blacks didn’t support you before. Mr. Ledeen, you might wish to tell your Jewish friends one thing, You are not chosen! You may have been but you are not!
I never fail. I have a sense of humor too.
i don’t worship provolone. sometimes a great mozzarella, tho…
Such dishonesty and such ignorant and nonthinking voters.
We are in for a very long and rough ride before this is over.
This “high tech” strategy involved a well orchestrated voter fraud effort.
2012 was a fraud and these fabricated lies that try to convince us it was honest is part and parcel of the lie. with electronic voting machines replacing all of the manual machines,extended voting days,millions of illegals granted amnesty a couple months prior,the AG going after voter I.D. states,advertising in Mexico on how to get food stamps and voting instructions and on and on….not to mention Obamas doubling of food stamp recipents,slacking of welfare work requirements,obama phones,this election was bought and paid for by the tax payers! Obama is NOT the anti christ, just a communist street organizer.he is not brilliant,just following the communist 10 planks and Alinsky tactics and Marx ideology as taught by his great mentor frank marshall davis,Obama is a tyrant advancing statism.
I believe Romney lost because he “dissed” the ardent supporters of: Ron Paul, Newt, Sarah Palin, Santorum; to the point they stayed home on election day…Also, other people decided that if Romney would do that to his own colleagues…he could not care less about them.
The Iranian dictators that parade as religious are finally, after 33 years, expendable: Now that the US has brought Sunni terrorist to power in countries that formally had perfectly stable brutal, but secular, dictatorships. Now we do not need Iran to keep the war on:” free speech to criticize Islime” going.
“Nice long lasting war and sell lots of weapons” c me 1991
If we wanted to win, which we do not, we would ban oil imports from OPEC and blockade the Gulf of Hormuz and embargo all mid-east oil until the price is $10/bbl and all incitement against the west stops in OPEC countries. We would embargo all food, oil, and steel going into OPEC countries. We would impose no fly zones on all OPEC countries; until they unconditionally surrender; including women’s rights in those countries. We would convert all US trucks to North American produced natural gas.
War ends in 5 days. Maybe 20 days. No invasion needed, no bombs needed.
But no, like a heroin addict, I can’t stop using oil even one day! So feel me off at airports, take away all my rights, tax me…anything but please please please…do not stop my oil!
Had an interesting contact with Obama campaign….being a conservative I went to an Obama site and offered to donate $1 to get my name on the list…I was informed that the minimum amount from a donor was $3…so I went to another site…for the next week I received maybe 6-9 emails per day from different Obama operatives thanking me profusely for my “generous” donation and giving me advice as to how I could work for Barack to help get him elected…until the election I got at least ten emails a day encouraging me to donate more money or sign up for campaign duties…needless to say, I was not impressed with the integrity of his campaign but had to realize that for the uninformed it might influence their vote to get this kind of attention for absolutely no reason…now that the election is over, Obama is on the road again, campaigning, because that’s what he knows best to do…governing and making tough decisions are not his forte
This article came to mind as I was sitting on the pot reading the following from H.L. Mencken re The New Deal:
“The More Abundant Life brethren now face the first stirring of serious doubt in their customers. They have been assailed by naughty skeptics since the day of their emergence from primeval chaos, but persons of a congenitally believing turn of mind, which is to say, persons of normal human stupidity, have hitherto gone along with them pretty docilely. But now they find themselves confronted by rising dubieties, and it is necessary for them to do something to hold on to their soft and glorious jobs. The half of what they do consists in shoveling out more and more billions of the taxpayers’ money. The other half consists in beating the woods for new coveys and classifications of suckers.”
This is an always told story, the security systems always were and are and will be on their duty! But explain for me please, why those hijackers al-Qaeda easily could pass and go in front of security cameras! And get into flights with guns!
Do you know why? Because C.I.A “exactly knew who they had to let to go and let them *uck the twin towers”. Before Allen Dallas, the C.I.A never couldn’t its brain reach to those satanic plots!
I always cry for John Kennedy, that noble and gentle man. Peace be upon him, and damn to Allen Dallas, *ucker Mother.
America is the Greatest Satan. Death to America, Death to America. America just knows how to *uck itself and other places
Iran must put its nuclear warheads into Americas asshole until america get a good moral. How much America’s asshole eat the Iran’s nukes? that is the question, how much more, its better.