Friday, March 18, 2011

Anonymous/WikiLeaks: This Week In Cyber War, March 18, 2011

‘Anonymous’ puts central banks on notice, demands Bernanke resign  Video here, too.  Uh Oh..  I'm going to pop some popcorn..  Excerpts:

..But now, one of the group's members has issued a call for perhaps their most audacious campaign yet: civil disobedience against the private central banking system that underpins all the world's industrial economies.


In a little-noticed video published Sunday, one "Anonymous" calls for the dawning of "Operation Empire State Rebellion": a "relentless campaign of peaceful resistance" against organizations that participate in they termed the "control" of large populations through pieces of paper and bits of data.

Japan earthquake: Japan warned over nuclear plants, WikiLeaks cables show  From The Telegraph.

Japan was warned more than two years ago by the international nuclear watchdog that its nuclear power plants were not capable of withstanding powerful earthquakes, leaked diplomatic cables reveal.

An official from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in December 2008 that safety rules were out of date and strong earthquakes would pose a "serious problem" for nuclear power stations.

The Japanese government pledged to upgrade safety at all of its nuclear plants, but will now face inevitable questions over whether it did enough.

While it responded to the warnings by building an emergency response centre at the Fukushima plant, it was only designed to withstand magnitude 7.0 tremors. Friday's devastating earthquake was a magnitude 9.0 shock.

In India, Leaked Cable About Bribes Sets Off a Furor

 India’s Parliament erupted in outrage on Thursday over a report of an American diplomatic cable that described insiders in the governing Congress Party showing off chests of money and boasting of paying bribes to wavering lawmakers to secure passage of a critical 2008 vote on a landmark civilian nuclear deal between India and the United States.

The revelations, contained in a July 18, 2008, cable obtained by WikiLeaks, portray a large, all-out effort by the Congress Party to win a confidence vote in Parliament that could have toppled the wobbly coalition government and doomed the nuclear deal. According to the cable, written five days before the critical vote, a political assistant to an influential Congress Party lawmaker told a United States Embassy diplomat that one small regional political party had already been paid millions of dollars in bribes for support.

The aide also “showed the Embassy employee two chests containing cash and said that around Rupees 50-60 crore (about $25 million) was lying around the house for use as pay-offs,” according to the cable. Another Congress Party member told an American diplomat that Kamal Nath, a government minister, “is also helping to spread the largesse” and was offering jet airplanes as enticements.

I think the good people of India would like a word with you and your associates, sir..

WikiLeaks founder was warned of CIA “dirty tricks” campaign

According to the article, “Sources within WikiLeaks have told The Age that an Australian intelligence official privately warned WikiLeaks on August 11 last year that Assange was the subject of inquiries by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, and that information relating to him and others associated with WikiLeaks had been provided to the US in response to requests through intelligence liaison channels.”

The Australian intelligence official “specifically warned that Assange could be at the risk of ‘dirty tricks’ from the US intelligence community, including the possibility of sexual entrapment,” the newspaper said.

Hacker group says BofA tried to hide loan information

..The data released by Anonymous appear to contain internal e-mails from Balboa Insurance, which was acquired by Bank of America in 2008 when it purchased Countrywide Financial. In the correspondence, the employees discuss changing loan numbers and maybe even deleting them in their records. In one exchange, an employee said the changes may raise “huge red flags” for auditors. “It just doesn't seem right to me,” the employee allegedly wrote.

Anonymous claims that the changes were tantamount to “knowingly hiding foreclosure information from federal auditors.”  (I hope they can do better than that..  Not that it's not legal, it's not outrageous enough for the public to demand action.  And that's why I don't think these are the main event..  By any stretch..)
And:
WikiLeaks' Julian Assange has repeatedly promised to release documents in early 2011 that “could take down a bank or two” and that the documents will show “flagrant violations” and “unethical practices” at the executive level. Assange has not identified the banks in question but has said in a media interview that he is “sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive's hard drives.”

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