"We're Under Attack": What The Latest Train Derailments Reveal About The Next Generation of Warfare and Who Is Fit To Lead That Fight
"We're Under Attack": What The Latest Train Derailments Reveal About The Next Generation of Warfare and Who Is Fit To Lead That Fight
It sure looks like the recent train derailments in East Palestine, Enoree, Montgomery are attacks
We like to believe that our data is secure and yet we know it is not. We like to believe that we are safe and yet we know we are not. We like to believe that what happens in Palestine doesn’t visit us again in East Palestine but of course it does and it especially and obviously does. The very American Jews that enriched themselves at public expense must pay a vig to King Bibi and this their wage of silver has perpetuated a regime that dehumanizes Israeli soldier and Palestinian civilian alike.
My friend J.D. Vance, now Senator Vance, can inveigh about how East Palestine is being ignored. It’s good politics and makes for good TV — always important, always essential — but it doesn’t get into the gravity of the moment.
So let us recount quickly the facts: At the same time that the Netanyahu government is falling amid waves of evening protests there is a spat of cyber attacks — industrial sabotage really — and hazardous materials spilling out all over the American landscape. It just so happens that these attacks are occurring in precisely the place where President Biden’s administration hopes to build the next factories. How dare Americans try to build American factories with Americans in the areas of America we’ve seemingly forgotten!
We know our President, whom they could not defeat with a cyber attack on his son or the theft of his daughter’s diary, has stood resolved and ready and that he has directed our Air Force, aged like him, to protect our airspace. Is it too little too late? Did not Bill Barr do all he could to make Israeli and Chinese technology a permanent feature of our landscape? How shall we think of the assassination machines known as Teslas on our highways? How nice it is that the government is finally investigating self-driving cars for the frauds that they are! Why weren't they on this earlier? Sure you’ve heard of this spying balloon but have you heard of prying Chinese graduates? Have you heard of Facebook and its ties to China and Likud?
Are we really not going to talk about how the Columbia shuttle blew up over Palestine, Texas, with an Israeli onboard and how, magically, his diary was found largely intact? How eery! How similar to when they found the passports of the September 11th hijackers in that debris field. “If you can believe that!” I don’t! And neither should you!
My friend Jordan Bloom rightly points out this faking of history and its long antecedents.
If you add a little fake history, you can also add a lot of cyber to really restructure reality. Everyone has computers and everyone is therefore vulnerable.
Nicole Perlroth’s This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race (2021) is among the best books you can read about the current moment in which we find ourselves. Perlroth’s work has been on top of mind as the war for Ukraine has unfolded.
In the early days of the war I noticed, in passing, that “hacktivists” in Belarus — I guess that’s what we are calling Langley these days — allegedly made it impossible for Russian soldiers to invade Ukraine by rail in a move that Wired said marks the first ransomware attack of the war.
Activist hackers in Belarus have reportedly disrupted some of the country’s rail services after breaching computers that control these trains.
This move by Cyber Partisans, as the activist hackers identify themselves, is said to have been made in an attempt to ‘slow down the transfer’ of Russian soldiers that are entering Ukraine.
The purpose of the attack was also to buy additional time for Ukrainians to resist Russia’s assault, reported Bloomberg.
Under the plan, hackers put the train system into ‘manual control’ mode, which will ‘significantly slow down the movement of trains, but not create emergency situations.’
As a result, train movements faced disruption in the cities of Minsk, Orsha, and in the town of Osipovichi.
The railway system’s routing and switching devices were inoperable after the hackers compromised the systems by encrypting the stored data.
Additionally, numerous websites linked to Belarus’s rail network also showed error messages, making it impossible to purchase tickets.
However, Bloomberg News couldn’t authenticate the hacking group’s claims independently.
The move, which couldn’t be authenticated but which ran in the CIA publication known as Bloomberg, clearly worked. That delay, coupled with the key intelligence from the late Denys Kiryeyev, stopped the Russians from seizing Kyiv.
The hacking of troop trains and the use of informants helped make it so that Kyiv didn’t fall.
I believe that there’s a strong case to be made that hacking troops preserved the Ukrainian government and boosted the morale of the Ukrainian army.
I obviously don’t think that was the only successful cyber operation carried out. I think we can look no further than the Stuxnet-like attack on the Nordstream pipelines. No, I’m not persuaded by Seymour Hersh’s rather cartoonish notion that America destroyed the pipelines with divers. I’ve written elsewhere about my views of what really happened.
But what began in Europe has now, I fear, reached America’s shores.
The thing about attacks on train infrastructure is that you get a double effect. Attacking trains makes it so that America drives more, consumes more oil and gas, and puts more things on to the very mobbed up trucking infrastructure.
It would be quite easy to pin the blame on the Russians here but I’m not so sure I buy it.
For one, the distinction between Israeli and Russian attacks is always blurred whenever Netanyahu is in power. The FBI recently released part 1 of Tamir Sapir’s 494 page FBI file. I haven’t read it in its entirety yet. If you want to have a look, though, let me know.
Reporter Ben Schreckinger wrote about the ties between Kushner-Putin-Trump and Russian-Israeli organized crime figures like Sapir in 2017. Afterwards Schreckinger wound up getting his computer hacked and never touched the story again. Totally normal stuff folks. I once asked him about and he demurred, seemingly ashamed of his own cowardice.
It’s increasingly clear that the line between Israeli and Russian hacking outfits is in point of fact a distinction without a difference. Tel Aviv is effectively a suburb of Moscow, especially when it comes to “cyber, a real source of power.”
This video is worth watching in its entirety.
Netanyahu clearly understood cyberweapons and their use as an instrument of perpetuating his power. He gave a speech about that power in 2019. In it, he laid out a vision of a post-Five Eyes world. He celebrated the binational security state whereby Israeli technology companies would get embedded in major American companies.
“What this revolution is doing — big data, AI, and connectivity — is allowing small countries to be big countries,” he said.
Netanyahu compared Unit 8200 to the NSA. “You know the five eyes?” he asked his largely Israeli crowd. “Israel’s the sixth eye? No. Israel is the second eye.” Israel is “one of the five cyber powers of the world,” he said while promising that there would be more investment in that effort.
If you create these products you must also create a demand for them. And to create a demand for them, you must show them in action. And more sinisterly: you have to experiment.
What’s interesting to me, though, is how many of the same people who prattle on about cybersecurity or American incompetence are totally cool with attacks on America.
I track these things very closely and I must say I’m somewhat surprised.
What should we think about Steinman’s role as a cyber security person at the National Security Council? What exactly qualifies Steinman to be a cyber security expert at the NSC? He did write a spirited neoconservative column as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and perhaps that passes for rigor in elements of our security establishment. I don’t know. At least there’s the requisite “Let’s go to war with Iran” missive. Some things never change and the conservative movement never really grows up.
In probing Steinman’s background I did find a few interesting tidbits. There’s this write up in Politico in the early days of the Trump presidency.
TRUMP REPORTEDLY STARTS HIRING CYBER STAFF — Joshua Steinman, a Navy Reserve officer who spent time at the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley innovation outpost, will take a top cyber job in Trump’s National Security Council, multiple sources told Eric. It’s unclear what Steinman’s exact title will be as Trump may reorganize the NSC bureaucracy.
One source said Steinman will be senior director for cybersecurity, while another said his responsibilities will mirror those of former cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel. “Roles, structure, and responsibilities remain unclear for most of the NSC, the cyber directorate included,” according to one source.
Asked about the NSC staff at his first briefing on Monday, White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters that national security adviser Michael Flynn “has been working diligently” with his deputy, K.T. McFarland, “to make sure that that’s filled out and ready to go.” Steinman is currently a strategy executive at the security firm ThinAir Labs, and since 2015 he has been a liaison between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon as part of the military’s Defense Innovation Unit Experimental program. The White House did not respond to multiple inquiries about Steinman’s hiring.
Curiously the only mention of Thin Air Labs I can find is a venture fund, backed with Chinese cash, based in Calgary of all places.
As for DIUX, well, the Biden government was worried it was being compromised. I myself encountered some strange characters with Emirati, Israeli or Indian intelligence connections when I spoke before them.
I quote from Wikipedia.
On September 24, 2018, Michael Brown took over as DIU's Managing Director.[5] In April 2021, Brown was originally going to be President Joe Biden's nominee for chief weapons buyer for the Department of Defense when news broke that he was under investigation by the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General over alleged breaches of federal hiring rules at the DIU. Brown withdrew his name from consideration shortly afterwards. Brown left his position as managing director on September 2, 2022.[6][7] On September 9, 2022, the DoD Inspector General found the allegations to be unsubstantiated.[6]
Your guess is as good as mine what’s really going on there or if there even still is a DIU but I suspect it may also have something to do with Project Maven, the military’s flagship AI operation moving from the DoD to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
Steinman’s social ties are a bit more revealing. During the Trump Administration Josh Steinman attended parties at the home of Barbara Ledeen. The Ledeens are known Chisraeli agents operating in the United States as this article about Michael Ledeen makes very clear. Barbara Ledeen was close with Peter Smith, who died in very mysterious circumstances and, until recently, worked for Senator Chuck Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Their son, Dan, was involved with the Federalist Society. The Ledeens were consiglieres of a sort with none other than General Michael Flynn of Q Anon fame.
Now it’s no doubt true that a number of companies have deferred safety at the expense of their shareholders. The stock buybacks have put profits over people. But isn’t this a form of attack too — albeit a very American greed enabled effort?
We should be asking what are the best ways of protecting this infrastructure and not wholesale giving it away to the Israelis. We should make them sweat a bit for it and make it clear that we will hold them personally responsible for attacks upon us. That is, if we even dare to do a full and thorough investigation.
And as I finish writing this, there’s another incident — this time a Hazmat warning issued after a Tuscon freeway crash.
According to an emergency alert, those within a one mile radius of Kolb Road and Rita Road, those east to Houghton Road, west to Kolb Road, north to Valencia Road and south to Voyager Road should shelter in place.
The alert also advises the public to turn off heaters and air conditioning units that bring in outside air.
Great stuff charles! You’ve been a huge contributor to shaping my insight on these underwings of these hidden factions with wielding strategies to monopolize their bidding