Wednesday, September 23, 2015

#2459: Hotel Serco's Kiddie-Porn Suites – Carly's 8(a) Tor for Clinton Same-Sex Peers – The VW Hack and Hedge

A Request by United States Marine Field McConnell 
for 
Images Leading To A Proof by Contradiction Of Assertions Below 
Plum City Online - (AbelDanger.net
September 23, 2015

1. AD ASSERTS THAT SERCO EQUIPS SUITES IN ELITE HOTELS FOR GUESTS TO MAKE OR WATCH CHILD PORNOGRAPHY (KIDDIE PORN) in a hawala blackmail and extortion racket where Serco's banker HSBC transfers dirty money without moving it.

2. AD ASSERTS THAT CARLY FIORINA'S HP 8(A) COMPANIES PATENTED THE NAVY'S ONION ROUTER (TOR) TO GIVE HILLARY CLINTON’S SAME-SEX PEERS the privacy they need for hotel sex with children, long-range death-pool betting and hawala money laundering.

3. AD ASSERTS THAT SERCO USED CARLY'S TOR TO HACK VW EMISSIONS SYSTEMS AND HEDGE its shares and that Clinton's same-sex peers at DOJ Pride are now preparing a suit to launder money stolen from VW shareholders, through the DOJ Asset Forfeiture Fund.

United States Marine Field McConnell (http://www.abeldanger.net/2010/01/field-mcconnell-bio.html) is writing an e-book "Shaking Hands With the Devil's Clocks" and invites readers to e-mail him images (examples below) for a proof by contradiction of the three assertions above.

Schematic of 8(a) peer-privacy onion router device with patent assigned to Carly Fiorina's HP

Hillary, the pig had a mouth this big! We kept the hotel kiddie-porn pics and we set up Serco for White'$!

Equipped by Serco with Carly Fiorina's 8(a) Tor for guests' death pool betting on 9/11.

Fiorina plans to put 50 Army brigades, 36 Marine Corps battalions and up to 350 naval ships under the control of HP's 8(a) operatives of Tor on the Navy/Marine Corps Intranet.

Run by Serco since 1994

The Mayfair Set episode 1- Who Pays Wins


"CANADA 
September 21, 2015 5:54 pm Updated: September 21, 2015 6:16 pm Volkswagen reported subject of U.S. criminal probe; class action filed in Canada
By Andrew Russell
Breaking News Reporter Global News TORONTO – The U.S. Justice Department has opened a criminal probe after Volkswagen made the stunning admission that it rigged vehicles to deceive emissions tests for diesel-powered vehicles sold in the U.S., according to multiple media reports.

And a Canadian law firm says it's filing a class action on behalf of VW owners.

Citing to two U.S. officials familiar with the case, Bloomberg reported Monday that investigators will look at whether there was any criminal wrongdoing after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) revealed last week Volkswagen AG used software allowing its diesel cars to release fewer smog-causing pollutants during tests than in real-world driving conditions.

READ MORE: VW Canada suspends sale of some models as emissions probe widens 

Other criminal inquiries into car manufacturers have yielded huge fines and forced companies to change their corporate culture.

Last Thursday General Motors agreed to pay $900 million in a deal with the U.S. officials in which it admitted a problem with ignition switches was hidden from the public for more than a decade, leading to more than 160 deaths.

Last year Toyota agreed to a $1.2 billion penalty from the Justice Department after admitting it hid information about defects that caused Toyota and Lexus vehicles to accelerate unexpectedly, resulting in injuries and deaths.

Volkswagen Canada has suspended the sale of several diesel models amid the revelations the German car manufacturer rigged emissions tests for almost 500,000 diesel cars in the U.S.

"Volkswagen Canada has issued a stop sale order for all vehicles affected by this issue," Thomas Tetzlaff, a VW Canada spokesperson said in a statement.

The affected diesel models in Canada include: 

The VW Jetta — model years 2009-15. 
The VW Golf — from 2010-15. 
The VW Beetle — from 2013-15. 
The VW Passat — from 2012-15. 

The EPA found several lines of code, or "defeat devices," in the diesel-powered VWs, allowing them to bypass emission controls.

"A sophisticated software algorithm on certain Volkswagen vehicles detects when the car is undergoing official emissions testing, and turns full emissions controls on only during the test," the EPA said in its violation notice.

READ MORE: VW chief 'deeply sorry' for rigging cars to violate U.S. pollution laws

Volkswagen stock plunged by more than 17 cent Monday amid news that VW could face fines of up to $18 billion US, according to the EPA.

CEO of Volkswagen Martin Winterkorn apologized on Sunday "for breaking the trust of our customers and the public."

On Monday, the Merchant Law Group LLP, with ten offices across Canada, announced it's filing a national class action over the emissions scandal. "VW had marketed its diesel-powered cars as being better for the environment," the law firm said in a statement.

"The EPA indicates the VW cars under investigation seemed to pass emissions tests but in the real world were actually emitting up to 40 times the national standard for nitrogen oxide, which is linked to asthma and lung illnesses."

Lawyer Tony Merchant said VW owners who have contacted the firm are "furious."

"They paid a premium price intending to buy vehicles that were better for the environment and now find out their cars are among the dirtiest of polluters.""

"Guitarist Stephen Coronel, who once played with Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley in KISS precursor Wicked Lester, has been arrested and accused of uploading child pornography from his home, according to the Charlotte Observer. Coronel was charged with five counts of sexual exploitation of a minor by South Carolina’s Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office. WJCL reports that he was discovered broadcasting or streaming pornography through a peer-to-peer webcam program, and that information was sent to the National Center For Missing And Exploited Children, who tracked his location through his IP address. Coronel was kicked out of Wicked Lester after Epic Records said they wouldn't sign the group with him still attached to the band. They never released a debut album (it was rejected by the label), but Coronel received co-writing credits on the KISS songs "Going Blind" and "She." No other details about the case have been revealed yet, pending further investigation."

"FBI refuses to cooperate in Hillary Clinton email server probe
By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Monday, September 21, 2015
The FBI refused to cooperate Monday with a court-ordered inquiry into former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's email server, telling the State Department that they won't even confirm they are investigating the matter themselves, much less willing to tell the rest of the government what's going on.

Judge Emmet G. Sullivan had ordered the State Department to talk with the FBI and see what sort of information could be recovered from Mrs. Clinton's email server, which her lawyer has said she turned over to the Justice Department over the summer.

The FBI's refusal, however, leaves things muddled.

"At this time, consistent with long-standing Department of Justice and FBI policy, we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any ongoing investigation, nor are we in a position to provide additional information at this time," FBI General Counsel James A. Baker wrote in a letter dated Monday — a week after the deadline the Justice Department had set for the FBI to reply.

Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm that is pursuing at least 16 open records cases seeking emails from Mrs. Clinton and her top aides, said at this point it's not even clear what Mrs. Clinton provided, since all that's been made public at this point are the former secretary of state's public comments and some assertions, made through her lawyer, to the State Department.

Judicial Watch is prodding the courts to try to delve more deeply into Mrs. Clinton's emails, and the group said a number of questions persevere about both Mrs. Clinton and top aides such as Huma Abedin, who did public business on an account tied to the server Mrs. Clinton maintained.

"We still do not know whether the FBI — or any other government agency for that matter — has possession of the email server that was used by Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Abedin to conduct official government business during their four years of employment at the State Department," Judicial Watch said.

"We also do not know whether the server purportedly in the possession of the FBI — an assumption based on unsworn statements by third parties — is the actual email server that was used by Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Abedin to conduct official government business during their four years of employment at the State Department or whether it is a copy of such an email server. Nor do we know whether any copies of the email server or copies of the records from the email server exist," the group said in its own court filing Monday afternoon.

Judicial Watch did release more than 50 pages Monday of emails it obtained from Ms. Abedin's account on Mrs. Clinton's server, and said it was clear she was talking about "sensitive" topics that shouldn't have been discussed on an insecure account. Many of those were details of Mrs. Clinton's movements overseas, such as [the Serco surveilled] hotels she was staying at.

"These emails Judicial Watch forced out through a federal lawsuit show that Huma Abedin used her separate clintonemail.com account to conduct the most sensitive government business, endangering not only her safety but the safety of Hillary Clinton and countless others," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

He questioned what reason Ms. Abedin — who did maintain an account, huma@clintonemail.com, on State.gov servers — would have for using the other account for important business. Mrs. Clinton said she kept only one account, the one on the clintonemail.com server, because it was more convenient, but that reasoning does not appear to apply to Ms. Abedin.

The State Department is making all of Mrs. Clinton's emails public under order of Judge Rudolph Contreras. But the department has said it won't make all of the emails public from Ms. Abedin or other top Clinton aides Cheryl Mills or Philippe Reines. Instead the department only plans to release those messages specifically requested in open records demands.

Mrs. Clinton turned over about 30,000 email messages in December, while her aides turned over more than 100,000 pages between them, with the final set only being returned, by Ms. Abedin, earlier this month, the department said in court filings.

Without those documents in hand, the State Department has been unable to do full and complete searches in response to subpoenas, congressional inquiries or Freedom of Information Act requests."


"Increasing peer privacy 
US 7865715 B2 
ABSTRACT 
In a method for increasing peer privacy, a path for information is formed from a provider to a requestor through a plurality of peers in response to a received request for the information. Each peer of the plurality of peers receives a respective set-up message comprising of a predetermined label and an identity of a next peer for the information. The information is transferred over the path in a message, where the message comprises a message label configured to determine a next peer according to the path in response to the message label matching the previously received predetermined label.
Publication number: US7865715 B2
Publication type: Grant
Application number: US 10/084,499
Publication date: Jan 4, 2011
Filing date: Feb 28, 2002
Priority date: Feb 28, 2002
Fee status: Paid
Also published as: US20030163683
Inventors: Zhichen Xu, Li Xiao
Original Assignee: Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.
Export Citation: BiBTeX, EndNote, RefMan
Patent Citations (6), Non-Patent Citations (6), Referenced by (2),Classifications (6), Legal Events (4
External Links: USPTO, USPTO Assignment, Espacenet"
"HP broadened our definition of a minority business in 2009. The main category of businesses our supplier diversity program supports are minority-owned, woman-owned, veteran-owned and small businesses. For the first time, we have included lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender-owned (LBGT-owned) businesses in the definition. Through our new sponsorship of, and collaboration with, the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC), we will maintain a pipeline of potential LBGT-owned suppliers. In 2009, we also increased our sponsorship of women-owned businesses."


"Tor Isn't A Child Porn Enthusiast's Best Friend, No Matter What The DOJ Claims 
from the willful-distortion-of-facts dept Anything that makes law enforcement's job slightly more difficult is swiftly turned into a pariah. And usually the worst kind of pariah: a child molestor.

Apple and Google both announced encryption-by-default going forward on their mobile phone operating systems. Law enforcement officials swiftly gathered to talk loudly about all of the dead and molested children that would result from this decision.

The same goes for Tor. The use of Tor can obscure criminal activity -- by hiding the perpetrator and the activity itself. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to use Tor (like many internet services and platforms hoovering up tons of data themselves), but because it makes chasing "bad guys" a little harder, it too must go.

The best way for government agencies to get rid of something they don't like is legislation. When a law enforcement official says something like the following, they're not hoping to sway the intelligent and informed members of the public. They're saying it to sway those who can actually do something about it: tech-clueless legislators and those who vote for them. At the State of the Net conference in Washington on Tuesday, US assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell discussed what she described as the dangers of encryption and cryptographic anonymity tools like Tor, and how those tools can hamper law enforcement…

"Tor obviously was created with good intentions, but it's a huge problem for law enforcement," Caldwell said in comments reported by Motherboard and confirmed to me by others who attended the conference. "We understand 80 percent of traffic on the Tor network involves child pornography."

That's a scary number. And it's not even close to accurate.

Wired's Andy Greenberg explains how Caldwell took a statistic from Tor research and twisted it to further the government's agenda. [A] Department of Justice flack said Caldwell was citing a University of Portsmouth study WIRED covered in December. He included a link to our story. But I made clear at the time that the study claimed 80 percent of traffic to Tor hidden services related to child pornography, not 80 percent of all Tor traffic.

Which is a big difference. "Hidden services" is not just another term for "Tor traffic." Caldwell conflated the two to further the DOJ's push for the end of anything that presents an obstacle to easy access.

The real number is much lower. Greenberg says that most Tor traffic doesn't route to darknet sites. Only about 1.5% of Tor traffic accesses hidden services, and 80% of 1.5% is a number that wouldn't even trouble the most tech-addled Congressperson or the retirement community that repeatedly votes him or her back into office.

At most, a little over 1% of Tor traffic is related to child pornography. That very low number would seem resistant to improvement. How much money and effort should be thrown at 1% of a service in limited use? The answer would appear to be "not very much," but that doesn't tear down Tor's walls or approve budget requests. So, "80% of all Tor traffic" it is, according to the DOJ.

And that 1.2% may even be overstating it. Nick M at the Tor Project Blog points out how some hidden service traffic may over-represent the number of people actually searching for certain illicit goods.

A Tor client makes a hidden service directory request the first time it visits a hidden service that it has not been to in a while. (If you spend hours at one hidden service, you make about 1 hidden service directory request. But if you spend 1 second each at 100 hidden services, you make about 100 requests.) Therefore, obsessive users who visit many sites in a session account for many more of the requests that this study measures than users who visit a smaller number of sites with equal frequency... The greater the number of distinct hidden services a person visits, and the less reliable those sites are, the more hidden service directory requests they will trigger.

He breaks this down later with a hypothetical situation. 1000 people use Tor to access chat rooms while 10 conspiracy theorists use it to dig for information. Chat users may only log in once or twice a day and hang out at the same handful of venues. The ten conspiracy theorists may visit dozens of sites looking for more crazy, while entering and exiting multiple times. To an outside observer, this activity would appear to indicate that 10 conspiracy theorists make up a larger portion of Tor traffic than 1000 chat room users.

Child porn, like regular porn, is generally not one-stop shopping, unlike a favorite chatroom. Multiple site visits and multiple entrances/exits would inflate the percentage of child porn-related traffic relative to the (observable) whole.

Users who use it for obsessive behavior that spans multiple unreliable hidden services will be far overrepresented in the count of hidden service directory requests than users who use it for activities done less frequently and across fewer services. So any comparison of hidden service directory request counts will say more about the behavioral differences of different types of users than about their relative numbers, or the amount of traffic they generated.

In addition, law enforcement and anti-child porn agencies' own investigative efforts could very well be adding to this 1.2% figure.

Also, a very large number of hidden service directory requests are probably not made by humans! See bug 13287: We don't know what's up with that. Could this be caused by some kind of anti-abuse organization running an automated scanning tool? So, there's a good chance that the non-scary 1.2% number is too high. Sure, the ideal would be 0.0% but law enforcement agencies should actually be pleasantly surprised the number is so low, rather than misquoting stats to make it appear as though anonymization services are child porn enthusiasts' playgrounds.

It isn't just child porn the government is after. There's a whole host of darkweb activities it wants to indict people for. But child porn "sells" better than drugs or prostitution or even the US's latest public enemy no. 1: terrorism. The number the DOJ is using to sell its attack on Tor is blatantly false, as anyone with a minimal amount of Google skills would quickly discover. But the DOJ doesn't care whether you or I believe it. It only needs enough people in Washington DC to believe it. The DOJ doesn't speak to the citizens. It only speaks to those who can assist it in stripping away what minimal personal data-shielding options we have left."

"Super Serco bulldozes ahead 
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER UPDATED: 23:00 GMT, 1 September 2004 
SERCO has come a long way since the 1960s when it ran the 'four-minute warning' system [a dial-a-yield defence] to alert the nation to a ballistic missile attack.

Today its £10.3bn order book is bigger than many countries' defence budgets. It is bidding for a further £8bn worth of contracts and sees £16bn of 'opportunities'.

Profit growth is less ballistic. The first-half pre-tax surplus rose 4% to £28.1m, net profits just 1% to £18m. Stripping out goodwill, the rise was 17%, with dividends up 12.5% to 0.81p.

Serco runs the Docklands Light Railway, five UK prisons, airport radar and forest bulldozers in Florida.

Chairman Kevin Beeston said: 'We have virtually no debt and more than 600 contracts.'

The shares, 672p four years ago, rose 8 1/4p to 207 1/4p, valuing Serco at £880m or nearly 17 times earnings.

Michael Morris, at broker Arbuthnot, says they are 'a play on UK government spend' which is rising fast."

"White's is the oldest and most exclusive gentleman's club in London.[1] It is based at 37 St. James's Street in London.
Yemen meeting
White's was the venue for a meeting in around April 1963, which led to an unofficial British covert operation against the Egyptian-backed government of the Yemen. Those present included Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home, Aviation Minister Julian AmeryNeil McLean and Brian Franks.[2]
Current and former members
Alfred Duff Cooper - Former chairman.[3]
Ian Cameron - Former chairman.[3]
David Cameron - resigned his membership.[12]"
 
"A dead pool, also known as a death pool, is a game of prediction which involves guessing when someone will die. Sometimes it is a bet where money is involved.[1] The combination of dead or death, and betting pool, refers to such a gambling arrangement.[clarification needed] …

In the early 20th century, death pools were popular in dangerous sports such as motorsport, for example the first edition of the Indianapolis 500.[2] Variants[edit] A typical modern dead pool might have players pick out celebrities who they think will die within the year. Most games start on January 1, and run for 12 months although there are some variations on game length and timing.[citation needed] 

 In 2000, website Fucked Company claimed to be a "dot-com dead pool" which invited users to predict the next Internet startups to fail during that era's dot com bust.[3] The site itself folded in 2007 after a long history as a target for strategic lawsuits against public participation by companies.[4]"

"Claim 1 — Trump: Fiorina's management of HP "led to the destruction of the company" There were a lot of sparks between the two CEOs on stage — Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump. Trump went after Fiorina's record as a business executive, especially the five years she spent as head of Hewlett-Packard about a decade ago:

"Today, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, they fired another 25- or 30,000 people, saying we still haven't recovered from the catastrophe. When Carly says the revenues went up, that's because she bought Compaq, it was a terrible deal, and it really led to the destruction of the company. Now one other company before that was Lucent. Carly was at Lucent before that. And Lucent turned out to be a catastrophe also. So I'll only say this — she can't run any of my companies."

Fiorina's track record at HP was certainly controversial. The company cut about 30,000 jobs during her tenure, and when Fiorina herself was fired in 2005, she got a severance package worth more than $20 million.

The merger with Compaq also put her at odds with some people at HP, including the son of the founder, Walter Hewlett. In her defense, Fiorina notes that her tenure was a wrenching time for the whole industry — the tech bubble had just burst, and while HP continues to struggle, many other iconic companies from that period went out of business altogether.

As Fiorina noted during the debate, she's won the endorsement of a former HP board member, who says they were wrong to get rid of her."
   
"The Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) was a United States Department of the Navy program which provides a vast majority of information technology services for the entire Department, including the United States Navy and Marine Corps. …

On October 6, 2000, the NMCI contract was awarded to Electronic Data Systems (EDS), now HP Enterprise Services (HP).[11] Secretary of the Navy Gordon England summed up the Navy’s IT Environment prior to the commencement of NMCI: "We basically had 28 separate commands budgeting, developing, licensing, and operating IT autonomously. It was inefficient and from the larger Department perspective, produced results that were far from optimal."[12]

NMCI consolidated roughly 6,000 networks—some of which could not e-mail, let alone collaborate with each other—into a single integrated and secure IT environment. HP updated more than 100,000 desktop and laptop PCs in 2007.[13] The program also consolidated an ad hoc network of more than 8,000 applications to 500 in four years and 15,003 logistics and readiness systems to 2,759 over a two-year period.[14] Sub-contractors to HP include:

Apple Inc., Cisco, Dell, McAfee, Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, Sun Micro systems, and Symantec[15] Harris Corporation (which acquired Multimax formerly known as Netco Government Services and WAM! NET), which provided enterprise network infrastructure design and support until its contract expired in 2014.[16]

Verizon, which provides wide area network (WAN) connectivity.

HP also provides the security services once provided by Raytheon.

HP also has worked with more than 400 [8(a)] small businesses, with 5 percent for small disadvantaged businesses, 5 percent for women-owned small businesses and 1.5 percent for HUBZone small businesses. Since its inception, NMCI has exceeded the minimum 40% small business objective set for the contract.[17] NMCI quickly suffered some widely publicized setbacks, including rollout delays that caused HP financial losses.[18] Today, NMCI is described in documents from the Navy’s Chief Information Officer as “the core enterprise network for Navy and Marine Corps forces in the United States and Japan, providing secure access to integrated voice, video and data communications."[19]

In 2009 NMCI became the first network to deploy the Global Address List (GAL), a multiservice address list that increases interoperability by enabling Navy and Marine Corps users to access the Defense Information Systems Agency's Joint Enterprise Directory Services (JEDS) contact list.[20] Additional improvements to network performance are also underway with the deployment of the Network Operations Common Operating Picture (NetOps COP). The tool helps provide enhanced situational awareness via increased information sharing and collaboration to commanders by giving them a common picture of network performance. Commanders can see scheduled maintenance tasks and other issues impacting the network, giving them the option to defer work that might affect the flow of critical information from the battlefield.[21]

Work in 2008 has increased NMCI's ability to respond to security issues and the program was the first network to implement fully the Department of Defense information assurance standards in both classified and unclassified environments. Among the enhancements were the deployment of Websense content filtering, an information assurance tool designed to inspect and block inbound Web traffic containing malicious code with little impact to the user. According to NMCI public affairs, "Websense allows the Network Operational Commands to set a tailored blocking policy by content such as gambling, hate speech or adult content, rather than blocking specific sites or URLs only. This allows the network operators to block sites much more efficiently and outsources the fight against the growing amount of inappropriate content."[22]

According to the Navy, Websense enables users to block or unblock sites, based on emerging and/or dynamic threats. The NMCI blocking policy is determined by various operational commands, such as the Naval Network Warfare Command, and enforced by the Global Network Operations Center, based in Norfolk. Blocked sites are redirected to a notification page which then links to a page on NMCI's homeport Web site. On this site, a user can submit a request that a site be unblocked in order to support mission requirements.[22]

In addition, NMCI is upgrading existing servers with Bluecoat proxy servers, which provides better capacity and traffic management functions. According to NMCI's own data, a few users account for the majority of NMCI's bandwidth usage, mostly attributed to streaming internet radio and video. New servers will allow bandwidth usage monitoring, down to a command or user level.[22]

The security upgrades have been well received by the Navy. On March 31, 2009, Rear Admiral (Ret.) John A. Gauss, Acquisition Director for the NGEN System Program Office (SPO) said during a press conference that "NMCI is the most secure network within the Navy."[23]

The Navy and HP measure end user satisfaction through a series of quarterly satisfaction surveys. End user satisfaction has steadily improved, reaching a high of nearly 86% in February 2008, as compared to 80% in December 2006. This is largely due to the upgrade of nearly 112,000 desktop and laptop computers in 2007, and a combination of network enhancements that are improving speed and reliability. HP is on track to upgrade another 120,000 seats in 2008 at Navy and Marine Corps bases in the US and Asia.[3]

Working in tandem with the technology refresh are the virtualization efforts on the network. NMCI is on track to move from 2,700 servers down to roughly 300. The efforts are expected to save more than $1.6 million per year in electricity costs.[24] Additionally, the decrease in the number of servers being refreshed will lower the cost of updating the equipment, leading to a potential savings of at least $1.5 million over four years.[25]

A highlight of the Navy’s virtualization efforts was its win of InfoWorld's 2009 Green 15 Award, which honors 15 companies and/or organizations for their green IT projects.[26] Ted Samson, Senior Analyst for InfoWorld said of the honorees, "This year's Green 15 winners demonstrate, once again, that green IT projects can be a win-win proposition. These organizations have not only helped the planet by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, preserving trees, and keeping e-waste out of landfills. They've also reaped measurable business benefits, such as significantly lower electricity bills, fewer hardware refreshes, and postponed data center-expansion projects -- along with gains in efficiency and productivity."

In 2006, the NMCI program office was criticized for its annual customer-satisfaction surveys. Officials refuse to release the raw data, leading to accusations that their conclusions are overly sunny. One NMCI director, Rear Admiral James B. Godwin III, said releasing the results would challenge the "integrity of our data."

The Department of the Navy has shown no desire to scale back or cancel the program. On 24 March 2006 the Navy exercised its three-year, $3 billion option to extend the contract through September 2010.[1]

In April 2006, users began to log on with Common Access Cards (CACs), a smartcard-based logon system called the Cryptographic Log On (CLO). In October 2008, NMCI's prime contractor HP posted a set of procedures so Apple Mac users can access NMCI's public-facing Web services, such as the e-mail and calendar functions, using their CAC readers with their Macs. The workaround also works with other Defense Department CAC-enabled networks.[27] Alternatively, NMCI and all other CAC-authenicated DoD websites may be accessed using LPS-Public.

After early challenges, the Navy is pleased with the performance and security of the NMCI network. According to Capt. Tim Holland, program manager for the Navy’s Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN), "NMCI is very robust today—we have good security with it, very good performance."[19] In an interview the DoN CIO Robert J. Carey stated, "The plan is that NGEN will be in place before the NMCI contract expires because it is not a renewable contract. According to the Navy, NMCI will serve as the baseline from which it will transition to NGEN.[19]

The Navy's confidence in NMCI today marks a significant turnaround from the challenges cited in the GAO's report of December 2006. The report states that " NMCI has not met its two strategic goals—to provide information superiority and to foster innovation via interoperability and shared services." The document also goes on to evaluate HP’s performance, "GAO's analysis of available performance data, however, showed that the Navy had met only 3 of 20 performance targets (15 percent) associated with the program's goals and nine related performance categories."

In contrast are the more recent comments from Vice Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., deputy chief of naval operations for communication networks (OPNAV N-6) and deputy chief information officer, Department of the Navy. "I believe that NMCI in 2008 is achieving much of what we had hoped NMCI would achieve. It's leveled the playing field for security. It's allowed us to do things like push security patches that go through the whole enterprise that’s on NMCI. If you look at NMCI historically, it was probably the first step for the Navy to move into what was then called Joint Vision 2010 and now is Joint Vision 2020. It's actually done that, and it's moving the Navy toward the U.S. Defense Department's goal of information superiority. So, I see a lot of good things with NMCI."[28]

NMCI works today and it continues to improve as user needs evolve and technology opportunities arise. During the final two years of the contract, technology initiatives included new hardware, applications, and services to support the Navy and Marine Corps’ advanced IT needs. HP will install more than 110,000 new laptops and desktops, and will push more upgrades to improve end-users' IT capabilities through upgraded machine capacity, new operating systems, and new service lines.[3]

 

"Colonel Sir Archibald David Stirling, DSO, OBE[2] (15 November 1915 – 4 November 1990) was a British mountaineer, World War II British Army officer, and the founder of the Special Air Service.

.. Life before the war[edit]

Stirling was born at his family's ancestral home, Keir Housein the parish of Lecropt, Perthshire. He was the son of Brigadier General Archibald Stirling, of Keir, and Margaret Fraser, daughter of Simon Fraser, the Lord Lovat, (a descendant of Charles II, King of Scots). His cousin was Simon Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat, and his grandparents were Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, 9th Baronet and Lady Anna Maria Leslie-Melville. Raised in the Roman Catholic faith of his mother, he was educated at the Benedictine Ampleforth College and Trinity College, Cambridge. A tall and athletic figure (he was 6 feet 6 inches (1.98 m) tall). He was training to climb Mount Everest when World War II broke out.
…. 

In North Africa, in the fifteen months before Stirling's capture, the SAS had destroyed over 250 aircraft on the ground, dozens of supply dumps, wrecked railways and telecommunications, and had put hundreds of enemy vehicles out of action. Field Marshal Montgomery described Stirling as "mad, quite mad" but admitted that men like Stirling were needed in time of war. According to John Aspinal, Stirling reputedly personally strangled 41 men.[5] Private military company[edit]

Worried that Britain was losing its power after the war, Stirling organised deals to provide British weapons and military personnel to other countries, like Saudi Arabia, for various privatised foreign policy operations.[5] Along with several associates, Stirling formed Watchguard International Ltd, formerly with offices in Sloane Street (where the Chelsea Hotel later opened) before moving to South Audley Street in Mayfair.

Business was chiefly with the Gulf States. He was linked, along with Denys Rowley, to a failed attempt to the overthrow Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi in 1970 or 1971. Stirling was the founder of private military company KAS International, also known as KAS Enterprises.[6]

Watchguard International Ltd was a private military company, registered in Jersey in 1965 by Stirling and John Woodhouse. Woodhouse's first assignment was to go to Yemen to report on the state of the royalist forces when a cease-fire was declared. At the same time Stirling was cultivating his contacts in the Iranian government and exploring the chances of obtaining work in Africa. The company operated in Zambia and in Sierra Leone, providing training teams and advising on security matters, but its founders' maverick ways of doing business caused its eventual downfall. Woodhouse resigned as Director of Operations after a series of disagreements and Stirling ceased to take an active part in 1972.[7]

Great Britain 75[edit]

In mid-1970s Great Britain, Stirling became increasingly worried that an "undemocratic event" would occur and decided to take action. He created an organisation called Great Britain 75 and recruited members from the aristocratic clubs in Mayfair; mainly ex-military men (often former SAS members). The plan was simple. Should civil unrest result in the breakdown of normal Government operations, they would take over its running. He describes this in detail in an interview from 1974, part of which is present in Adam Curtis's documentary "The Mayfair Set", episode 1: "Who Pays Wins".[5]

In August 1974, before Stirling was ready to go public with GB75, the pacifist magazine Peace News obtained and published his plans, and eventually Stirling – dismayed by the right-wing character of many of those seeking to join GB75 – abandoned the scheme.[citation needed]"

Yours sincerely,


Field McConnell, United States Naval Academy, 1971; Forensic Economist; 30 year airline and 22 year military pilot; 23,000 hours of safety; Tel: 715 307 8222

David Hawkins Tel: 604 542-0891 Forensic Economist; former leader of oil-well blow-out teams; now sponsors Grand Juries in CSI Crime and Safety Investigation

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