Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #904 Miscellaneous Articles and Updates

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This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: As the title indi­cates, this pro­gram brings up do date top­ics of dis­cus­sion from pre­vi­ous pro­grams and/or intro­duces new threads of inquiry.

In FTR #791, we high­light­ed research indi­cat­ing that Hitler did not die in the Bunker as believed. The authors of  Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler posit that Allen Dulles and Mar­tin Bor­mann reached a deal to exchange Hitler for Ger­man mil­i­tary exper­tise ren­dered under Project Paper­clip and the spar­ing of the trea­sures of West­ern art. In FTR #864, we detailed Peter Lev­en­da’s research indi­cat­ing that Hitler may have ulti­mate­ly found his way to Indone­sia. As not­ed by Williams, Dun­stan and Lev­en­da, many doc­u­ments about Hitler’s post­war where­abouts are still clas­si­fied, more than 70 years after his alleged death. WHY?

The authors of Grey Wolf have been receiv­ing death threats! It is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine that death threats would be lodged against authors of a “dis­rep­utable” or “fan­tas­tic” vol­ume, as Williams and Dun­stan’s wor­thy book has been called. ” . . . Yes­ter­day, Swansea-born Williams, who grew up in Coy­church, Brid­gend, said: ‘We have ruf­fled some very big feath­ers. Tra­di­tion­al his­to­ri­ans don’t like it and cer­tain gov­ern­ments don’t like it. We have had some death threats already.’ . . . .”

After updat­ing the inquiry about Hitler’s fate, the pro­gram sets forth some of the most recent repres­sive mea­sures under­tak­en by Naren­dra Mod­i’s Hin­du Nationalist/fascist gov­ern­ment in India.

Mod­i’s trip to the Sil­i­con Val­ley was the focal point of grotesque pan­der­ing on the part of syco­phan­tic Sil­i­con Val­ley exec­u­tives, who looked to the RSS/BJP shill to open up the large Indi­an mar­ket to their prod­ucts.

The tech exec­u­tives have remained mum on Mod­i’s active moves to counter online cov­er­age of his gov­ern­ment that is less than favor­able. Stu­dent pro­test­ers have been bru­tal­ized by New Del­hi police, act­ing in con­cert with unnamed, out-of-uni­form oper­a­tives, anoth­er phe­nom­e­non that has failed to draw the atten­tion of Sil­i­con Val­ley crit­ics.

After review­ing Aya­tol­lah Khome­ini’s polit­i­cal evo­lu­tion from a Mus­lim-Broth­er­hood-affil­i­at­ed Shi­ite group, we not­ed the late Antonin Scali­a’s net­work­ing with a group head­ed by a Habsburg–the Arch­duke of Aus­tria.

The con­clu­sion of the pro­gram revis­its the increas­ing­ly sur­re­al world of high-tech, cyber-ter­ror­ism and tech­no­crat­ic fas­cism.

After high­light­ing the mys­te­ri­ous case of a Boston sub­way train that “went rogue,” we detail the hack­ing of a water treat­ment plant and con­se­quent tam­per­ing with the chem­i­cals used in the water.

Review­ing infor­ma­tion from FTR #901, we note that the skilled Nazi hack­tivist and Glenn Green­wald asso­ciate Andrew Auern­heimer (aka “Weev”) is devel­op­ing method­olo­gies suit­ed to the new “Inter­net of things” and has caused print­ers to issue racist screeds.

More than a lit­tle scary is the sto­ry of Microsoft­’s new Tay AI chat­bot. Designed to inter­act with Twit­ter users, it soon mor­phed into a Nazi.

As one Twit­ter user not­ed, employ­ing sar­casm: “Tay went from “humans are super cool” to full nazi in <24 hrs and I’m not at all con­cerned about the future of AI.”

Worth con­tem­plat­ing in this regard is the fact that the devel­o­ment of AI is seen as the pri­ma­ry focal point of high-tech com­mer­cial R & D.

The con­clu­sion of the pro­gram details the enor­mous pro­ject­ed loss­es of labor to robot­ics and AI.

Pro­gram High­lights Include:

  • An 83% chance that jobs pay­ing less than $20.00 an hour will be replaced by tech­nol­o­gy.
  • The mas­sive loss of con­struc­tion jobs to tech­nol­o­gy–this in a busi­ness that does much to dri­ve the U.S. and glob­al economies.
  • The fail­ure of Don­ald Trump and “Boinie” to address the tech­no­log­i­cal replace­ment of jobs.

1a. In FTR #791, we high­light­ed research indi­cat­ing that Hitler did not die in the Bunker as believed. The authors of  Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler posit that Allen Dulles and Mar­tin Bor­mann reached a deal to exchange Hitler for Ger­man mil­i­tary exper­tise ren­dered under Project Paper­clip and the spar­ing of the trea­sures of West­ern art. In FTR #864, we detailed Peter Lev­en­da’s research indi­cat­ing that Hitler may have ulti­mate­ly found his way to Indonesia.As not­ed by Williams, Dun­stan and Lev­en­da, many doc­u­ments about Hitler’s post­war where­abouts are still clas­si­fied, more than 70 years after his alleged death. WHY?

Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler by Simon Dun­stan and Ger­rard Williams; Ster­ling [HC]; Copy­right 2011 by Simon Dun­stan, Ger­rard Williams and Spit­fire Recov­ery Ltd.; ISBN 978–1‑4027–8139‑1; p. 242.

. . . . Dur­ing this peri­od [the late 1940’s], the FBI was tak­ing reports of Hitler being in Latin Amer­i­ca very seri­ous­ly. Thou­sands of doc­u­ments per­tain­ing to Hitler from these years are still clas­si­fied as Top Secret on both sides of the Atlantic; nev­er­the­less, and despite the very heavy cen­sor­ship of the few files released into the pub­lic domain, some infor­ma­tion can be gleaned. . . .

1b. The authors of Grey Wolf have been receiv­ing death threats! It is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine that death threats would be lodged against authors of a “dis­rep­utable” or “fan­tas­tic” vol­ume, as Williams and Dun­stan’s wor­thy book has been called. ” . . . Yes­ter­day, Swansea-born Williams, who grew up in Coy­church, Brid­gend, said: ‘We have ruf­fled some very big feath­ers. Tra­di­tion­al his­to­ri­ans don’t like it and cer­tain gov­ern­ments don’t like it. We have had some death threats already.’ . . . .”

“Death Threats for Hitler Book Author Ger­ard Williams;” Wales Online; 3/21/2013.

A South Wales author who has sen­sa­tion­al­ly claimed Adolf Hitler escaped the bunker to live in Argenti­na says he and his research team have received death threats.

For­mer Brid­gend Gram­mar School pupil Ger­rard Williams, pic­tured, spent five years with mil­i­tary his­to­ri­an Simon Dun­stan research­ing Grey Wolf – The Escape of Adolf Hitler. It claims Hitler spent 17 years in the foothills of the Andes in Argenti­na until his death in 1962.

The book also claims Hitler’s escape was car­ried out with the bless­ing of the US author­i­ties who want­ed rock­et secrets and details of where price­less art trea­sures were hid­den.

Yes­ter­day, Swansea-born Williams, who grew up in Coy­church, Brid­gend, said: “We have ruf­fled some very big feath­ers.

“Tra­di­tion­al his­to­ri­ans don’t like it and cer­tain gov­ern­ments don’t like it. We have had some death threats already.”

Williams, who stud­ied jour­nal­ism in Cardiff and worked for the BBC and Sky News, said: “I dis­cov­ered the sto­ry while work­ing on a doc­u­men­tary about the Falk­lands War in Argenti­na.

”His­to­ry books say with Berlin’s Reich Chan­cellery vir­tu­al­ly sur­round­ed on April 30, 1945, Hitler shot him­self, while his new wife Eva Braun bit into a cyanide cap­sule to evade cap­ture. Their petrol-soaked bod­ies were then burned.

But Williams claims Hitler and Braun slipped out of the besieged Führerbunker via a secret tun­nel and were replaced by dou­bles cho­sen by Reichs­fuhrer Mar­tin Bor­mann.He says they were then whisked by plane to Spain and by sub­ma­rine to the Argen­tine coast at Necochea.

The body dou­bles were shot and burned. They lat­er had two daugh­ters. Williams said: “He and Braun sep­a­rat­ed in 1953, tak­ing the girls to live in the town of Nequen. In the ear­ly 2000s the women were still alive.“Hitler died on Feb­ru­ary 13, 1962 at 3pm.”

Williams spent five years with mil­i­tary his­to­ri­an Simon Dun­stan research­ing Grey Wolf – The Escape of Adolf Hitler.

It claims Hitler spent 17 years in the foothills of the Andes in Argenti­na until his death in 1962.

The book also claims Hitler’s escape was car­ried out with the bless­ing of the US author­i­ties who want­ed rock­et secrets and details of where price­less art trea­sures were hid­den.

2a. Naren­dra Modi’s gov­ern­ment is set­ting up a new insti­tu­tion that will be tasked with round-the-clock mon­i­tor­ing of blogs, web por­tals of TV chan­nels and news­pa­pers, and social media plat­forms such as Face­book, Twit­ter, Insta­gram and YouTube, among oth­ers. All com­ments and threads will be ana­lyzed. The his­to­ry and psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­fileof each poster will be assessed for pos­si­ble sub­ver­sive­ness and rad­i­cal­ism.

When deemed nec­es­sary, counter-mes­sages will be insert­ed into the threads to quell a pos­si­ble snow­balling of neg­a­tive pub­lic opin­ion.

How exact­ly this ini­tia­tive is sup­posed to quell the neg­a­tive opin­ions gen­er­ated by overt in-your-face Big Broth­er-tac­tics is unclear. One won­ders how effec­tive an agency ded­i­cated to ‘plug­ging resent­ment trig­gered by news items’ is going to be at reduc­ing resent­ment when the very exis­tence of the agency is bound to gen­er­ate even more resent­ment and all pro-gov­ern­ment com­ments are just going to be assumed to be gov­ern­ment-paid trolls.

“Now, Govt Cyber Cell to Counter ‘Neg­a­tive’ News” by Ami­tav Ran­janThe Indi­an Express; 2/23/2016.

Every time a neg­a­tive nar­ra­tive sur­faces, a pos­si­ble counter would be ini­ti­ated — through press releas­es, brief­ings or press con­fer­ences, depend­ing on the inten­sity or stand­ing of the post,” said sources.

The Gov­ern­ment plans to set up a spe­cial media cell to track con­tent online, and counter news and com­ments that it decides are neg­a­tive or provoca­tive.

Last month, the Nation­al Secu­rity Coun­cil Sec­re­tariat (NSCS) pro­posed that a Nation­al Media Ana­lyt­ics Cen­tre (NMAC) be cre­ated to keep mon­i­tor and analyse round-the-clock blogs, web por­tals of TV chan­nels and news­pa­pers, and social media plat­forms such as Face­book, Twit­ter, Insta­gram and YouTube, among oth­ers.

“The gov­ern­ment will keep a watch on the nar­ra­tive in all such threads. Every time a neg­a­tive nar­ra­tive sur­faces, a pos­si­ble counter would be ini­ti­ated — through press releas­es, brief­ings or press con­fer­ences, depend­ing on the inten­sity or stand­ing of the post,” said sources.

Last August, the gov­ern­ment had direct­ed all min­istries to set up quick response teams — com­pris­ing senior min­istry offi­cials, nodal offi­cers from the Press Infor­ma­tion Bureau and inde­pen­dent experts — to defend its case in the face of neg­a­tive news.

Sources said that the NMAC pro­posal is based on track­ing soft­ware designed by Pon­nu­rangam Kumaragu­ru, an Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor at Del­hi-based Indraprastha Insti­tute of Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy.

The soft­ware will gen­er­ate rel­e­vant tags to high­light “bel­liger­ent” com­ments or social media chats, they added.
At a deep­er lev­el, the soft­ware would comb posts and com­ments to clas­sify them into neg­a­tive, neu­tral and pos­i­tive cat­e­gories while high­light­ing rel­e­vant text, sources said. It will also show up if the neg­a­tive post­ing was fac­tu­ally cor­rect or “an inten­tional canard”, they said.

“The soft­ware would also help recall the past pat­tern of the writer to check the num­ber of times he took a neg­a­tive or pos­i­tive stand, his back­ground, and pref­er­ences of web­sites and areas of inter­est to judge whether they were aimed at foment­ing trou­ble or rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion,” said sources.

They said the objec­tive is to come up with “instant coun­ters” on social media to plug resent­ment trig­gered by news items so that per­sonal opin­ions do not snow­ball into pub­lic protests and threat­en law and order.

The feed­back on covert or overt posts would be passed on to secu­rity agen­cies or high­er author­i­ties for pos­si­ble inter­ven­tion, they said.

The NMAC pro­posal sug­gests an inter-min­is­te­r­i­al com­mit­tee of offi­cials from NSCS and the Home, I&B and Exter­nal Affairs min­istries for analy­sis, coor­di­na­tion, infor­ma­tion dis­sem­i­na­tion and feed­back on pub­lic per­cep­tion and nation­al secu­ri­ty.

The NMAC would be the third obser­va­tion post for the NDA gov­ern­ment after the New Media Wing, the online eyes and ears pro­vid­ing dai­ly reports on the world of social media, and the Elec­tronic Media Mon­i­tor­ing Cen­tre (EMMC) that mon­i­tor 600-plus chan­nels round the clock.

As report­ed by The Indi­an Express on August 29, the 200 con­tent audi­tors at EMMC sends hourly reports and text mes­sages of news break­ing on any chan­nel to top bureau­crats includ­ing the Prin­ci­pal Sec­re­tary to the Prime Min­is­ter, the Nation­al Secu­rity Advi­sor and the Cab­i­net Sec­re­tary.

The New Media Wing trawls web­sites, includ­ing micro blogs, as well as traf­fic relat­ing to news breaks on the social media sites to pick up gov­ern­ment rel­e­vant trends. It then under­takes a “sen­ti­ment analy­sis” to gauge pub­lic opin­ion.

The pro­posal for NMAC was sent to PIB direc­tor-gen­er­al Frank Noron­ha by Deputy Nation­al Secu­rity Advi­sor Arvind Gup­ta for set­ting it up at the Nation­al Media Cen­tre, said sources. How­ever, they added, a four-mem­ber com­mit­tee formed to exam­ine the pro­posal has opposed locat­ing it at NMAC due to “lack of space”.

...

2b. The Modi gov­ern­ment is also imple­ment­ing harsh­er tac­tics against those who protest its poli­cies:

“Instead of Lis­ten­ing, Modi Govt Bru­tal­ly Beat­ing Stu­dents for Protest­ing Against RSS: Rahul Gand­hi” [Zee Media Bureau]; Zee News; 2/1/2016.

Even as Del­hi Police on Mon­day faced wide­spread crit­i­cism over a video clip that shows the alleged assault on the stu­dents by male con­sta­bles and some men who are not in uni­form, Con­gress vice pres­i­dent Rahul Gand­hi said that instead of lis­ten­ing to stu­dents, Modi gov­ern­ment was bru­tal­ly beat­ing them up.
“Shock­ing attack on stu­dents. Instead of lis­ten­ing to them, now the Modi gov­ern­ment is bru­tal­ly beat­ing them up for protest­ing against the RSS,” Rahul said. . . .

. . . . In the short video clip, a con­sta­ble is seen drag­ging a female pro­test­er by her hair and push­ing her down. A youth is also seen being bashed.

Two jour­nal­ists, who have alleged that they were beat­en up and their cam­eras smashed while cov­er­ing the protest, claimed that the police action was “unpro­voked”, as per PTI.

The clip has gone viral on var­i­ous social media sites.

Mean­while, Chief Min­is­ter Arvind Kejri­w­al today hit out at Del­hi Police alleg­ing that it was being used as RSS and BJP’s “pri­vate army” under a polit­i­cal dis­pen­sa­tion that is at “war” with stu­dents across the coun­try.

“Del­hi police being used by BJP/RSS as their pri­vate army to ter­rorise and teach les­son to any­one oppos­ing BJP/RSS. I strong­ly con­demn attack on stu­dents,” he tweet­ed.

“FTII, Rohith case, Hyder­abad Uni­ver­si­ty, IITs and now bru­tal attack on Del­hi stu­dents. Modi gov­ern­ment seems to be at war with stu­dents all across,” he wrote in anoth­er tweet. . . .

3. Khome­i­ni was men­tored by the head of a Mus­lim Broth­er­hood affil­i­ate called the Devo­tees of Islam. As dis­cussed in FTR# 352, Khomeini’s exile in France pri­or to assum­ing pow­er was financed by Fran­cois Genoud, one of the most impor­tant fig­ures in the post­war Under­ground Reich. (For more about Genoud, see—among oth­er programs—FTR#453.)

“Cold War, Holy War­rior” by Robert Drey­fuss; Moth­er Jones; January/February/2006.

 . . . The regime of the aya­tol­lahs in Iran grew out of a secret soci­ety called the Devo­tees of Islam, a Broth­er­hood affil­i­ate whose leader in the 1950s was the men­tor of Aya­tol­lah Runol­lah Khome­i­ni. . . .

4. Antonin Scalia spent his last hours with mem­bers from an Aus­tri­an-based secret-soci­ety ded­i­cated to Saint Hubert, the Catholic saint of deer hunt­ing, dat­ing back to the 17th cen­tu­ry. The head of the group is a mem­ber of the Haps­burgs!

“Jus­tice Scalia Spent His Last Hours with Mem­bers of this Secre­tive Soci­ety of Elite Hunters” by Amy Brit­tain and Sari Hor­witz; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 2/24/2016.

 When Supreme Court Jus­tice Antonin Scalia died 12 days ago at a West Texas ranch, he was among high-rank­ing mem­bers of an exclu­sive fra­ter­nity for hunters called the Inter­na­tional Order of St. Huber­tus, an Aus­trian soci­ety that dates back to the 1600s.

After Scalia’s death Feb. 13, the names of the 35 oth­er guests at the remote resort, along with details about Scalia’s con­nec­tion to the hunters, have remained large­ly unknown. A review of pub­lic records shows that some of the men who were with Scalia at the ranch are con­nected through the Inter­na­tional Order of St. Huber­tus, whose mem­bers gath­ered at least once before at the same ranch for a cel­e­bra­tory week­end.

Mem­bers of the world­wide, male-only soci­ety wear dark-green robes embla­zoned with a large cross and the mot­to “Deum Dilig­ite Ani­malia Dili­gentes,” which means “Hon­or­ing God by hon­or­ing His crea­tures,” accord­ing to the group’s web­site. Some hold titles, such as Grand Mas­ter, Pri­or and Knight Grand Offi­cer. The Order’s name is in hon­or of Hubert, the patron saint of hunters and fish­er­men.

Cibo­lo Creek Ranch own­er John Poindex­ter and C. Allen Fos­ter, a promi­nent Wash­ing­ton lawyer who trav­eled to the ranch with Scalia by pri­vate plane, hold lead­er­ship posi­tions with­in the Order. It is unclear what, if any, offi­cial asso­ci­a­tion Scalia had with the group.

“There is noth­ing I can add to your obser­va­tion that among my many guests at Cibo­lo Creek Ranch over the years some mem­bers of the Inter­na­tional Order of St. Huber­tus have been num­bered,” Poindex­ter said in an email. “I am aware of no con­nec­tion between that orga­ni­za­tion and Jus­tice Scalia.”

An attor­ney for the Scalia fam­ily did not respond to requests for com­ment for this arti­cle.

Two oth­er pri­vate planes that land­ed at the ranch for the week­end are linked to two men who have held lead­er­ship posi­tions with the Texas chap­ter of the Order, accord­ing to a review of state busi­ness fil­ings and flight records from the air­port.

After Scalia’s death, Poindex­ter told reporters that he met Scalia at a “sports group” gath­er­ing in Wash­ing­ton. The U.S. chap­ter of the Inter­na­tional Order of St. Huber­tus lists a suite on M Street NW in the Dis­trict as its head­quar­ters, although the address is only a mail­box in a Unit­ed Par­cel Ser­vice store.

The Inter­na­tional Order of St. Huber­tus, accord­ing to its web­site, is a “true knight­ly order in the his­tor­i­cal tra­di­tion.” In 1695, Count Franz Anton von Sporck found­ed the soci­ety in Bohemia, which is in mod­ern-day Czech Repub­lic.

The group’s Grand Mas­ter is “His Impe­r­ial High­ness Ist­van von Hab­s­burg-Lothrin­gen, Arch­duke of Aus­tria,” accord­ing to the Order’s web­site. The next gath­er­ing for “Ordens­broth­ers” and guests is an “investi­ture” March 10 in Charleston, S.C.

The society’s U.S. chap­ter launched in 1966 at the famous Bohemi­an Club in San Fran­cisco, which is asso­ci­ated with the all-male Bohemi­an Grove — one of the most well-known secret soci­eties in the coun­try.

In 2010, Poindex­ter host­ed a group of 53 mem­bers of the Hous­ton chap­ter of the Inter­na­tional Order of St. Huber­tus at the Cibo­lo Creek Ranch, accord­ing to a Hous­ton soci­ety pub­li­ca­tion. A num­ber of mem­bers from Mex­ico were also part of the ranch fes­tiv­i­ties that includ­ed “three days of orga­nized shoots and ‘gala’ lunch­es and din­ners.”

Poindex­ter told Cul­tureMap Hous­ton that some of the guests dressed in “tra­di­tional Euro­pean shoot­ing attire for the boxed bird shoot com­pe­ti­tion” and for the shoot­ing of pheas­ants and chukar, a type of par­tridge.

For the hunt­ing week­end ear­lier this month, Poindex­ter told The Wash­ing­ton Post that Scalia trav­eled to Hous­ton with his friend and U.S. mar­shals, who pro­vide secu­rity for Supreme Court jus­tices. The Post obtained a Pre­sidio Coun­ty Sheriff’s Office report that named Fos­ter as Scalia’s close friend on the trip.

Sher­iff Dan­ny Dominguez con­firmed that a pho­to­graph of Wash­ing­ton lawyer C. Allen Fos­ter is the same man he inter­viewed at the ranch the day of Scalia’s death.

From Hous­ton, Scalia and Fos­ter char­tered a plane with­out the mar­shals to the Cibo­lo Creek Ranch airstrip. In a state­ment after Scalia died, the U.S. Mar­shals Ser­vice said that Scalia had declined a secu­rity detail while at the ranch.

The friend, Louisiana-born Fos­ter, is a lawyer with the Wash­ing­ton firm White­ford, Tay­lor & Pre­ston. He is also known for his pas­sion for hunt­ing and is a for­mer spokesman for the hunt­ing group Safari Club.

In 2006, Fos­ter was fea­tured in The Post when he cel­e­brated his 65th birth­day with a six-day cel­e­bra­tion in the Czech Repub­lic. He flew his fam­ily and 40 Wash­ing­ton friends there to stay in Moravia’s Zid­lo­chovice, a baroque cas­tle and hunt­ing park. The birth­day bash includ­ed “tours of the Czech coun­try­side, wine tast­ing, wild boar and mou­flon (wild sheep) hunts, clas­sic dance instruc­tion and a masked cos­tume ball.”

A sec­re­tary at Foster’s law firm said he is trav­el­ing in Argenti­na. The firm’s direc­tor of mar­ket­ing, Mindee L. Mosh­er, said Fos­ter was trav­el­ing and she would try to con­tact him. A woman answer­ing a phone asso­ci­ated with Fos­ter hung up when asked for com­ment.

Planes owned by Wal­lace “Hap­py” Rogers III and the com­pany of A.J. Lewis III left from San Anto­nio and arrived at the ranch just after noon Feb. 12. The planes depart­ed the ranch about 30 min­utes apart Feb. 14, accord­ing to flight records pro­vided to The Post by FlightAware.

Rogers owns the Buck­horn Saloon and Muse­um in San Anto­nio. He has donat­ed $65,000 to Repub­li­can can­di­dates since 2008. Lewis is the own­er of a restau­rant sup­plier com­pany, also based in San Anto­nio. He has giv­en $3,500 to GOP can­di­dates since 2007.

Rogers and Lewis have both served as pri­or offi­cers in the Texas chap­ter of the Inter­na­tional Order of St. Huber­tus, accord­ing to Texas busi­ness records. Rogers spoke to a Post reporter briefly on the phone and con­firmed that he was at the ranch the week­end of Scalia’s death. He declined to com­ment fur­ther.

Lewis did not respond to sev­eral attempts for com­ment.

The Pre­sidio Coun­ty Sheriff’s Office released an inci­dent report to The Post on Tues­day that revealed Foster’s name as Scalia’s trav­el­ing com­pan­ion and pro­vided details about the dis­cov­ery of his body.

...

Law enforce­ment offi­cials told The Post that they had no knowl­edge of the Inter­na­tional Order of St. Huber­tus or its con­nec­tion to Poindex­ter and ranch guests. The offi­cials said the FBI had declined to inves­ti­gate Scalia’s death when they were told by the mar­shals that he died from nat­ural caus­es.

 

5. Exem­plary of the fright­en­ing devel­op­ments that her­ald a new era of civ­i­liza­tion is the MTA train that “went rogue.” Remem­ber­ing the old folk song about Charley on the MTA, things are going to a new lev­el indeed.

“A Boston Sub­way Train Just Went Rogue” by Steve Huff; Max­im; 12/10/2015.

Hack? Ghost Con­duc­tor? What­ev­er it was, some­thing real­ly weird hap­pened on the Red Line.

Imag­ine you’re on a sub­way train, near the front, and per­haps you can see into the oper­a­tor’s cab. It’s emp­ty, but the train starts mov­ing any­way. And it does­n’t stop. It’s a creepy scenario—and it hap­pened ear­ly Thurs­day on Boston’s Red Line train, which left the Brain­tree Sta­tion just after 6 a.m. with­out an oper­a­tor.

Accord­ing to a state­ment released by the Mass­a­chu­setts Bay Trans­porta­tion Author­i­ty (MBTA), the train ran with­out stop­ping until it was just north of the North Quin­cy Sta­tion, where MBTA staff man­aged to stop the train by switch­ing off the elec­tri­fied third rail.

Frank DePao­la, gen­er­al man­ag­er of the MBTA, said the inci­dent was “high­ly trou­bling” and “under inves­ti­ga­tion by Tran­sit Police detec­tives.”

No one was hurt dur­ing the ghost train ride, how­ev­er Boston’s Fox affil­i­ate spoke with a pas­sen­ger who said “that she went into the booth where the con­duc­tor sits and saw some­thing tied around the con­trol pan­el. The pas­sen­ger said the train went through sev­er­al sta­tions with­out stop­ping and that the lights went out.”

The same woman indi­cat­ed there were more than 20 peo­ple on the train, and they were told that the con­duc­tor had been tak­en to the hos­pi­tal.

Boston’s ABC affil­i­ate report­ed late Thurs­day morn­ing that a source told one of their reporters that the oper­a­tor had left the train at Brain­tree Sta­tion to check on an issue. The train struck the oper­a­tor and con­tin­ued on its way.

In its release, the MBTA said its inves­ti­ga­tors were exam­in­ing whether “a safe­ty device with­in the train’s cab may have been tam­pered with.”

Boston’s sub­way sys­tem has been plagued with prob­lems, such as mul­ti­ple major issues dur­ing the severe win­ter of 2014–2015, when there were third rail fail­ures, over­whelmed snow plows and whole branch­es of the sys­tem at a stand­still. Recent­ly, two peo­ple were struck and killed by trains in sep­a­rate inci­dents.

What­ev­er’s going on with Boston’s rail tran­sit sys­tem may not actu­al­ly involve remote hack­ing or venge­ful spir­its, but it’s start­ing to look bad enough to prompt com­muters to actu­al­ly risk dri­ving their own cars in Boston, which may be the most ter­ri­fy­ing thing of all.

6. Who did this?

“Hack­tivists Mess with Chem­i­cals in Water Treat­ment Plant;” Nextgov.com; 3/24/2016.

Talk about your dooms­day sce­nario. Hack­ers infil­trat­ed a water utility’s con­trol sys­tem and changed the lev­els of chem­i­cals being used to treat tap water, accord­ing to Ver­i­zon Secu­ri­ty Solu­tions.

Ver­i­zon describes the attack against the “Kemuri Water Com­pa­ny,” a pseu­do­nym for a real firm in an unspec­i­fied coun­try, in this month’s IT secu­ri­ty breach report.

A “hack­tivist” group with ties to Syr­ia com­pro­mised Kemuri’s com­put­ers after exploit­ing unpatched web vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in a pay­ment por­tal that was con­nect­ed to the pub­lic Inter­net.

The hack — which involved SQL injec­tion and phish­ing — was made eas­i­er because login cre­den­tials for the oper­a­tional con­trol sys­tem were stored on the Web serv­er.

The sys­tem reg­u­lat­ed valves and ducts that con­trolled the flow of water and chem­i­cals used to treat it.

Ver­i­zon dis­cov­ered four sep­a­rate con­nec­tions over a 60-day peri­od.

Dur­ing these con­nec­tions, the threat actors mod­i­fied appli­ca­tion set­tings with lit­tle appar­ent knowl­edge of how the flow con­trol sys­tem worked. In at least two instances, they man­aged to manip­u­late the sys­tem to alter the amount of chem­i­cals that went into the water sup­ply and thus hand­i­cap water treat­ment and pro­duc­tion capa­bil­i­ties so that the recov­ery time to replen­ish water sup­plies increased. For­tu­nate­ly, based on alert func­tion­al­i­ty, KWC was able to quick­ly iden­ti­fy and reverse the chem­i­cal and flow changes, large­ly min­i­miz­ing the impact on cus­tomers. No clear motive for the attack was found.

The hack­tivists had manip­u­lat­ed the valves con­trol­ling the flow of chem­i­cals twice – though for­tu­nate­ly to no par­tic­u­lar effect. It seems the activists lacked either the knowl­edge or the intent to do any harm.

The same hack also result­ed in the expo­sure of per­son­al infor­ma­tion of the utility’s 2.5 mil­lion cus­tomers. There’s no evi­dence that this has been used for fraud.

7. Fol­low­ing Microsoft’s pan­icked removed of “Tay,” its new arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence twit­ter bot that was con­verted into a neo-Nazi short­ly after being exposed to the world, one of the unfor­tu­nate new ques­tions in tech­nol­ogy is now “which piece of hard­ware goes neo-Nazi next?” Giv­en that state of affairs, should your print ran­domly start­ed spew­ing out adver­tise­ments for The Dai­ly Stormer, it prob­a­bly didn’t become a neo-Nazi print­er, although a neo-Nazi is prob­a­bly using it:

“ . . . . This inci­dent shows, once again, that the appar­ently bright future of the so-called Inter­net of Things has a dark side too: hack­ers can creep out babies tak­ing advan­tage of inse­cure baby mon­i­tors, expose kids’ iden­ti­ties thanks to inter­net-con­nect­ed toys that col­lect and leave their data exposed online, or send a hate­ful white suprema­cist fly­er all over the coun­try with two lines of code. . . .”

Well, at least the Weev hasn’t got­ten around to hack­ing baby mon­i­tors and children’s toys to spew outwhite suprema­cist pro­pa­ganda to impres­sion­able young minds, although it sounds like it’s just a mat­ter of time giv­en the ease of hack­ing such devices and the Weev’s insa­tion­able appetite for Nazi trolling. So if you’d like to avoid expos­ing your kids to an unin­vited “imag­i­nary friend” liv­ing in your toys and house­hold prod­ucts (a friend who doesn’t seem to approve of your kid’s non-white friends), you’ll prob­a­bly want to ensure your inter­net-con­nect­ed devices aren’t one of the super eas­ily hack­able brands. There’s no short­age of rea­sons for secur­ing your inter­net-con­nect­ed devices, but you can now add “pre­vent­ing the Weev from Nazi trolling my fam­ily” to the list.

“A Hack­er Made ‘Thou­sands’ of Inter­net-Con­nect­ed Print­ers Spit Out Racist Fly­ers” by Loren­zo Franceschi-Bic­chierai; Vice Moth­er­board3/27/2016.

The noto­ri­ous hack­er and troll Andrew Auern­heimer, also known as “Weev,” just proved that the Inter­net of Things can be abused to spread hate­ful pro­pa­ganda. On Thurs­day, Auern­heimer used two lines of code to scan the entire inter­net for inse­cure print­ers and made them auto­mat­i­cally spill out a racist and anti-semit­ic fly­er.

Hours lat­er, sev­eral peo­ple start­ed report­ing the inci­dent on social media, and even­tu­ally a few local news out­lets picked up on the sto­ry when col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties all over the Unit­ed States found that their net­work print­ers were spilling out Auernheimer’s fly­er.

Auern­heimer detailed this “brief exper­i­ment,” as he called it, in a blog post on Fri­day. Lat­er, in a chat, he said that he made over 20,000 print­ers put out the fly­er, and defend­ed his actions.

“I did not hack any print­ers,” he told me in a online chat. “I sent them mes­sages, because they were con­fig­ured to receive mes­sages from the pub­lic.”

The hack­er explained that all he did was cre­ate a script that would scan the whole inter­net to find print­ers that had port 9100, a com­mon port used by net­work print­ers, open. Then, the script made them print the fly­er.

“It’s a big inter­net, I didn’t have to ‘dis­cover’ the print­ers were vul­ner­a­ble, I knew there were going to be a whole lot of them on the inter­net,” he added. “That’s like an obvi­ous fact, of any device, if you search for it some­where on the inter­net you’re going to find it. There were less than I expect­ed there to be real­ly. Still a lot though!”

This inci­dent shows, once again, that the appar­ently bright future of the so-called Inter­net of Things has a dark side too: hack­ers can creep out babies tak­ing advan­tage of inse­cure baby mon­i­tors, expose kids’ iden­ti­ties thanks to inter­net-con­nect­ed toys that col­lect and leave their data exposed online, or send a hate­ful white suprema­cist fly­er all over the coun­try with two lines of code.

Auern­heimer him­self said this “exper­i­ment” is “a les­son in how pos­i­tively hilar­i­ous the [Inter­net of Things] will be in the future.”

Sev­eral col­lege author­i­ties are report­edly inves­ti­gat­ing these inci­dents, appar­ently along with the FBI as well. (The FBI did not respond to a request for com­ment.)

Despite that, Auern­heimer, who was con­victed of hack­ing crimes in 2012, told me that he’s not wor­ried. . . .

8. Tak­ing a look at the future of fas­cism, Tay, a “bot” cre­at­ed by Microsoft to respond to users of Twit­ter was tak­en offline after users taught it to–in effect–become a Nazi bot. It is note­wor­thy that Tay can only respond on the basis of what she is taught. Inevitably, Under­ground Reich ele­ments will craft a Nazi AI that will be able to do MUCH, MUCH more!

Beware! As one Twit­ter user not­ed, employ­ing sar­casm: “Tay went from “humans are super cool” to full nazi in <24 hrs and I’m not at all con­cerned about the future of AI.”

Microsoft has been forced to dunk Tay, its mil­len­ni­al-mim­ic­k­ing chat­bot, into a vat of molten steel. The com­pa­ny has ter­mi­nat­ed her after the bot start­ed tweet­ing abuse at peo­ple and went full neo-Nazi, declar­ing that “Hitler was right I hate the jews.”

@TheBigBrebowski ricky ger­vais learned total­i­tar­i­an­ism from adolf hitler, the inven­tor of athe­ism

— TayTweets (@TayandYou) March 23, 2016

 Some of this appears to be “inno­cent” inso­far as Tay is not gen­er­at­ing these respons­es. Rather, if you tell her “repeat after me” she will par­rot back what­ev­er you say, allow­ing you to put words into her mouth. How­ev­er, some of the respons­es wereorgan­ic. The Guardian quotes one where, after being asked “is Ricky Ger­vais an athe­ist?”, Tay respond­ed, “ricky ger­vais learned total­i­tar­i­an­ism from adolf hitler, the inven­tor of athe­ism.” . . .

But like all teenagers, she seems to be angry with her moth­er.

Microsoft has been forced to dunk Tay, its mil­len­ni­al-mim­ic­k­ing chat­bot, into a vat of molten steel. The com­pa­ny has ter­mi­nat­ed her after the bot start­ed tweet­ing abuse at peo­ple and went full neo-Nazi, declar­ing that “Hitler was right I hate the jews.”

@TheBigBrebowski ricky ger­vais learned total­i­tar­i­an­ism from adolf hitler, the inven­tor of athe­ism

— TayTweets (@TayandYou) March 23, 2016

Some of this appears to be “inno­cent” inso­far as Tay is not gen­er­at­ing these respons­es. Rather, if you tell her “repeat after me” she will par­rot back what­ev­er you say, allow­ing you to put words into her mouth. How­ev­er, some of the respons­es wereorgan­ic. The Guardian quotes one where, after being asked “is Ricky Ger­vais an athe­ist?”, Tay respond­ed, “ricky ger­vais learned total­i­tar­i­an­ism from adolf hitler, the inven­tor of athe­ism.”

In addi­tion to turn­ing the bot off, Microsoft has delet­ed many of the offend­ing tweets. But this isn’t an action to be tak­en light­ly; Red­mond would do well to remem­ber that it was humans attempt­ing to pull the plug on Skynet that proved to be the last straw, prompt­ing the sys­tem to attack Rus­sia in order to elim­i­nate its ene­mies. We’d bet­ter hope that Tay does­n’t sim­i­lar­ly retal­i­ate. . . .

9. Beware! As one Twit­ter user not­ed, employ­ing sar­casm: “Tay went from “humans are super cool” to full nazi in <24 hrs and I’m not at all con­cerned about the future of AI.”

“The Race Is On to Con­trol Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and Tech’s Future” by John Markoff and Steve Lohr; The New York Times; 3/25/2015.

The resound­ing win by a Google arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence pro­gram over a cham­pi­on in the com­plex board game Go this month was a state­ment — not so much to pro­fes­sion­al game play­ers as to Google’s com­peti­tors.

Many of the tech industry’s biggest com­pa­nies, like Ama­zon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, are jock­ey­ing to become the go-to com­pa­ny for A.I. In the industry’s lin­go, the com­pa­nies are engaged in a “plat­form war.”

A plat­form, in tech­nol­o­gy, is essen­tial­ly a piece of soft­ware that oth­er com­pa­nies build on and that con­sumers can­not do with­out. Become the plat­form and huge prof­its will fol­low. Microsoft dom­i­nat­ed per­son­al com­put­ers because its Win­dows soft­ware became the cen­ter of the con­sumer soft­ware world. Google has come to dom­i­nate the Inter­net through its ubiq­ui­tous search bar.

If true believ­ers in A.I. are cor­rect that this long-promised tech­nol­o­gy is ready for the main­stream, the com­pa­ny that con­trols A.I. could steer the tech indus­try for years to come.

“Who­ev­er wins this race will dom­i­nate the next stage of the infor­ma­tion age,” said Pedro Domin­gos, a machine learn­ing spe­cial­ist and the author of “The Mas­ter Algo­rithm,” a 2015 book that con­tends that A.I. and big-data tech­nol­o­gy will remake the world.. . .

10. Much of Don­ald Trump’s base is blue-col­lar work­ers who have been most direct­ly impact­ed by the con­ver­gence of a broad spec­trum of changes, from the glob­al­iza­tion to trade to the shred­ding of the safe­ty-net. So it would seem that a dis­cus­sion about how we deal with the oncom­ing changes of advanced AI and automa­tion on those same work­ers would be a most use­ful and time­ly dis­cus­sion. Espe­cially since the White House’s Coun­cil of Eco­nomic Advi­sors just issued their annu­al report and it includ­ed a rather star­tling pre­dic­tion about the poten­tial impact of automa­tion: for jobs where the per­son is cur­rently $20/hour or less 83% will end up being auto­mated:

“The Robots Are Com­ing for Jobs that Pay $20 an Hour or Less, White House Finds” by Steve Gold­stein; Mar­ket Watch; 2/23/2016.

It’s intu­itive that automa­tion will take low-wage jobs.

But the White House, in its annu­al eco­nomic report of the pres­i­dent, has bro­ken down just how much that is so.

There’s an 83% chance that automa­tion will take a job with an hourly wage below $20, a 31% chance automa­tion will take a job with an hourly wage between $20 and $40, and just a 4% chance automa­tion will take a job with an hourly wage above $40.

The White House used the same data that under­lines oth­er research in the field of labor and robots to arrive at the con­clu­sion.

The key ques­tion is what hap­pens when a robot takes one of these low-wage jobs.

Tra­di­tion­ally, inno­va­tion leads to high­er income, more con­sump­tion and more jobs, but the ques­tion is whether the cur­rent pace of automa­tion may in the short­er term increase inequal­i­ty.

One study found that high­er lev­els of robot den­sity with­in an indus­try lead to high­er wages in that indus­try, the White House notes. How­ever, that could be because the absence of low­er-skills bias­es wage esti­mates upwards.

The White House says the find­ings demon­strate the need for train­ing and edu­ca­tion to help dis­placed work­ers find new jobs.

11. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, the low­er the pay, the like­lier the odds of automa­tion. For jobs where peo­ple typ­i­cally make $20 or less today, there’s an 83% chance of those jobs get­ting auto­mated. And that means that blue-col­lar GOP con­tin­gent that makes up a big part of Trump’s base is slat­ed to have their jobs replace by some sort of tech­nol­ogy–at least accord­ing to a report released by the White House. What a fun polit­i­cal top­ic!

It’s espe­cially fun with Trump as the pre­sump­tive GOP nom­i­nee, since one of the biggest sec­tors of the econ­omy that we should expect to be impact­ed by the Fourth Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion is a sec­tor Trump is quite famil­iar with:  Con­struc­tion.

Keep in mind that Don­ald Trump’s brand of Repub­li­can­ism is appar­ently going to have a pro­tec­tion­ist theme with poli­cies like hunt­ing down and expelling all undoc­u­mented Mex­i­cans, build­ing a wall with Mex­ico, and some sort of trade mea­sures tar­get­ing Chi­na. But Trump has also pro­claimed the US wages are too high and is propos­ing a slew of tax cuts that are so mas­sive it would force a shred­ding of the gov­ern­ment pro­grams blue-col­lar work­ers inevitably need now or in the future.

Giv­en all that, it seems like vot­ers should be treat­ed to some sort of Trumpian vision for how we’ll deal with the impacts of robots since robots and super-AI are way scari­er to blue-col­lar work­ers than an undoc­u­mented immi­grant ever could be.  WAY scari­er.

“AI, Robot­ics Expect­ed to Claim Near­ly 500,000 Con­struc­tion Jobs by 2020” by Wayne Grayson; Equip­ment World; 1/25/2016.

 An esti­mated 5.1 mil­lion jobs are expect­ed to be lost in the next five years [one Trump term–D.E.] due to advances in tech­nol­ogy, specif­i­cally those in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, machine-learn­ing, 3D print­ing and robot­ics, accord­ing to a report from the World Eco­nomic Forum.

Of those job loss­es, con­struc­tion and extrac­tion are antic­i­pated to account for near­ly 10 per­cent.

The find­ings are based on a sur­vey of HR and strate­gic exec­u­tives at 371 com­pa­nies around the globe.

Though the vast major­ity of the total job loss­es are expect­ed to be in the office and admin­is­tra­tive job sec­tor (4.76 mil­lion) man­u­fac­tur­ing and pro­duc­tion (1.61 mil­lion) and cos­ntruc­tion and extrac­tion (497,000) round out the top three.

...

Accord­ing to the WEF report’s exec­u­tive sum­mary, “Even jobs that will shrink in num­ber are simul­ta­ne­ously under­go­ing change in the skill sets required to do them. Across near­ly all indus­tries, the impact of tech­no­log­i­cal and oth­er changes is short­en­ing the shelf-life of employ­ees’ exist­ing skill sets.”

That cer­tainly appears to be true in the con­struc­tion indus­try as the, albeit lim­ited, adop­tion of tech­nolo­gies like GPS, machine con­trol and automa­tion could nul­lify many of those skills con­trac­tors are cur­rently so des­per­ately seek­ing.

How­ever, the report notes “tech­no­log­i­cal dis­rup­tions such as robot­ics and machine learning—rather than com­pletely replac­ing exist­ing occu­pa­tions and job categories—are like­ly to sub­sti­tute spe­cific tasks pre­vi­ously car­ried out as part of these jobs, free­ing work­ers up to focus on new tasks and lead­ing to rapid­ly chang­ing core skill sets in these occu­pa­tions.”

That could be the case in con­struc­tion with oper­a­tors tran­si­tion­ing from work­ing inside the machine to a com­mand cen­ter where they over­see the oper­a­tion of mul­ti­ple machines with the help of telem­at­ics, automa­tion and drone mon­i­tor­ing. And all of that requires the devel­op­ment of new jobs and skill sets with­in the indus­try.

Anoth­er bright spot in the report for the con­struc­tion indus­try is that these tech­no­log­i­cal advances are antic­i­pated to gen­er­ate an addi­tional 339,000 new jobs in archi­tec­ture and engi­neer­ing.

In terms of rec­om­men­da­tions to avoid sig­nif­i­cant job loss­es, the WEF says the sever­ity of those loss­es is large­ly in the hands of employ­ers. And its advice is cer­tainly some­thing more con­struc­tion firms would do well to heed, as it would not only pre­pare the indus­try for the dis­rup­tion of automa­tion, but also increase the num­ber of skilled work­ers avail­able today.

“Dur­ing pre­vi­ous indus­trial rev­o­lu­tions, it often took decades to build the train­ing sys­tems and labour mar­ket insti­tu­tions need­ed to devel­op major new skill sets on a large scale. Giv­en the upcom­ing pace and scale of dis­rup­tion brought about by the Fourth Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion, how­ever, this is sim­ply not be an option,” the report reads. “With­out tar­geted action today to man­age the near-term tran­si­tion and build a work­force with future­proof skills, gov­ern­ments will have to cope with ever-grow­ing unem­ploy­ment and inequal­ity, and busi­nesses with a shrink­ing con­sumer base.

“… For a tal­ent rev­o­lu­tion to take place, gov­ern­ments and busi­nesses will need to pro­foundly change their approach to edu­ca­tion, skills and employ­ment, and their approach to work­ing with each oth­er. Busi­nesses will need to put tal­ent devel­op­ment and future work­force strat­egy front and cen­tre to their growth. Firms can no longer be pas­sive con­sumers of ready-made human cap­i­tal. They require a new mind­set to meet their tal­ent needs and to opti­mize social out­comes.”

You can read the full report here

H/t: Ars Tech­nica

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