"When he was running the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, [Gen. Keith] Alexander brought many of his future allies down to Fort Belvoir for a tour of his base of operations, a facility known as the Information Dominance Center. It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a "whoosh" sound when they slid open and closed.
Lawmakers and other important officials took turns sitting in a leather "captain's chair" in the center of the room and watched as Alexander, a lover of science-fiction movies, showed off his data tools on the big screen.
"Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard," says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits."
Can't say I recognize the ubiquitous logo though. Anyone?
Meanwhile, up here in Canada - there's this morning's G&M :
"For nearly two decades, Ottawa officials have told telecommunications companies that one of the conditions of obtaining a licence to use wireless spectrum is to provide government with the capability to bug the devices that use the spectrum...
... including eavesdropping, reading SMS texts, pinpointing users’ whereabouts, unscrambling some encrypted communications, phone logs and keystrokes. ...
Carriers that help their customers scramble communications must decrypt them. "Law enforcement requires that any type of encryption algorithm that is initiated by the service provider must be provided to the law-enforcement agency unencrypted."This in addition to Canada's CSEC partnering up with the NSA to weaken Internet encryption standards.
Yet somehow the real Pierre Poutine still eludes them.
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7 comments:
These people are insane. So little change: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/08/jfk-vs-the-military/309496/
How the cops watch your tweets in real time
btw all the links to the fantasy logo have gone down. Hope you capped it.
I feel so old - when I think of the captain's chair, of course I think of Kirk in it, not Picard.
no more big attacks on America is because they aren't really necessary now
Hoo-Hah, Alison!
Good one . . . .
At least Americans have a FISA court to set on stun - we just have Peter MacKay and the RCMP.
Boris : Yes. And at the same time all that was going on, up here in Canada the RCMP and CIA were *interrogating* Canadian diplomat John Watkins to death in a Montreal hotel room.
Anyway, I'll see your Operation Northwoods and raise you a Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov.
Anon@4:05 : I don't understand - do the cops not know how to follow a hashtag on twitter? ;-)
Holly : Tell me again about this peculiar Earth custom called kissing. ;-)
Bob : Sadly, homegrowns always were the bigger threat.
Anon@9:27 : We also have CSEC seconded to CSIS at the stroke of the minister's pen.
Lux ex Umbra has a post up on yet another G&M article today : "Ottawa sought broader access to smartphone user data, records show."
Hmmmmmm, A Star Trek "Command and Control Room" proof , once again that the lunatics ARE running the asylum.
Whats next?
Get Smarts "Cone of Silence"?
Nonconfidencevote.
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