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| "Your God Wears Combat Boots" |
We do this in the spirit of remembering "History repeats itself, and that's one of the things that's wrong with history", said Clarence Darrow.
With all of this military NSA "spying on the world" news going around for several months now, I thought it would be interesting for regular readers to reflect on the history of a Dredd Blog post, which noticed that the military was spying on American blogs.
How many read that post about four years ago, then thought: "Dredd you are just being paranoid!"?
Anyway, here is the post from that date:
The post about the CIA yesterday generated more visits from USAISC [United States Army Information Systems Command], HQ, and other Pentagon subordinates than usual.
Like the photo to the left, all we can see are their boot tracks, we cannot see who they are or why they came; but here are two different times and locations:
16:43:05 (4:43 PM) from Lawton, OK (155.219.241.10) [Newsweek 1]The dot quad IP address is not the same for the two visitors, nor were the Newsweek pages Dredd had made comments on the same Newsweek pages (the location the soldier spies came to Dredd Blog from).
17:23:25 (5:23 PM) from Lawton, OK (131.92.133.22) [Newsweek 2]
What was the same was the Dredd Blog post here that caught their eye, the post about the CIA linked to above.
Thus, it is possible that different soldiers watch different Newsweek correspondents.
In light of that, it seemed appropriate to inform you of some of the unclassified operations (ops) that they are involved in.
There are indications that the military is again spying on anyone they think advocates peace:
CIFA's similar collection and retention of data on peace groups and other activists has promoted parallels to be drawn between the two programs by civil rights groups like the ACLU, and intelligence officials who find the prospect of the military tracking peace groups again to be worrisome.(Wikipedia, emphasis added). Some of the paranoid types in the military who would allow their minds to consider "anti-enlistment action" to be a "threat", would certainly also allow their paranoid minds to consider Dredd Blog posts to be threats too. After all, they have even put U.S. Senators on the terrorist watch list haven't they?
After ACLU filed multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests regarding information gathering on peace groups and NBC did a report citing a Quaker group planning an anti-enlistment action that was listed as a "threat", a review of CIFA activities was ordered by then Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone, who stated at the time that it appeared that there had been several violations.
Nevertheless, somebody has to be the free press, and that certainly is not going to be the military's media lackeys who are bought and paid for by the Pentagon.
UPDATE: The two dot quad addresses referenced in the 2009 Dredd Blog post above, came from the United States Army Information Systems Command (USAISC), at a physical location of Lawton, Oklahoma, as was mentioned in the post above. Fort Sill is located there.
Here is more information about "where they are coming from":
IP Address: 155.219.241.10"BLUECOAT" may refer to a software company by that name:
Domain: BLUECOAT.sill.army.mil
IP Address: 131.92.133.22
Domain: generichost.fsed.army.mil
On March 12, 2013, Reporters Without Borders named Blue Coat Systems as one of five "Corporate Enemies of the Internet" and “digital era mercenaries” for selling products that have been or are being used by governments to violate human rights and freedom of information.(Wikipedia). The Army was putting out requests for bids for Blue Coat proxy servers during that time frame (Army RFP).
"generichost.fsed.army.mil" is a generic host terminal at an FSED (Full-Scale Engineering and Development) site. Software development goes on at Fort Sill, Oklahoma (Fort Sill, OK – Fire Support Software Engineering, Battlespace System Support. Local area information) according to the Army SEC website.
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