I would say that we are not out of the woods yet. We have until March 1st to see if anything else strange may go down.
All this activity is a sign that the sun is coming back to life after a long, deep solar minimum. Sunspots have returned crackling with solar flares, and coronal mass ejections.
In the Ground Zero Lounge report "That Synching Feeling: Modern Hermetic Arcanum," I reported that last year it was predicted that something like this would happen within the next three years. It wasn’t predicted by some dime store psychic, but NASA Scientists.
The coronal ejection Electromagnetic pulse or EMP from the sun is detailed in the book with a fictitious scenario that happens at Midnight on September 22nd, 2012. In the fictitious account,
“The skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colorful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power. The earth begins to rock and a devastating earthquake is felt over a large area. A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometers away on the surface of the sun.”
The amazing thing is that the report details beautiful flashing lights above the earth before the EMP or CME hits the earth. When the earthquake hit Chile it was reported on MSNBC that a freelance reporter Cecilia Lagos said that before the quake she saw brilliant flashes of light and brilliant colors in the sky over Chile in the wee morning hours before the quake hit.
People may ask, If this coronal ejection was so huge then why was Chile only feeling the effects? Well this is not over yet, but there is a very good reason why Chile and several other areas in the Southern hemisphere may not escape the wrath of the Electromagnetic Tsunami.
There is an area known as the South Atlantic Anomaly which is a dip in the Earth’s magnetic field which allows cosmic rays, and charged particles to reach lower into the atmosphere. This interferes with communication with satellites, aircraft, and the Space Shuttle. While there are theories as to why this occurs, the geologic origin is not yet known. The earth’s magnetic field is there to protect us from threats. A breach in the field leaves us open for danger.
The magnetic field in the south Atlantic Anomaly can leave people that live in these regions vulnerable for a Pulse ejection from the sun. The mainstream media will not report that a filament from the Sun was dangling above us for three weeks before it exploded. People would panic not knowing what to expect. Ground Zero Listeners have been well aware of what is happening on the sun, and what may be happening to the earth. If you would like to hear past shows of Ground Zero you can download them for a buck out of the file store. It is just one small investment for a whole Lot of knowledge. It is also cheaper than a cup of coffee.
According to an aide familiar with the proposal, the bill includes a mandate for federal agencies to prepare emergency response plans in the event of a massive, nationwide cyberattack. The president would then have the ability to initiate those network contingency plans to ensure key federal or private services did not go offline during a cyberattack of unprecedented scope, the aide said.
Ultimately, the legislation is chiefly the brainchild of Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, respectively. Both lawmakers have long clamored for a federal cybersecurity bill, charging that current measures — including the legislation passed by the House last year — are too piecemeal to protect the country's Web infrastructure.
Their renewed focus arrives on the heels of two, high-profile cyberattacks last month: A strike on Google, believed to have originated in China, and a separate, more disjointed attack that affected thousands of businesses worldwide.
Rockefeller and Snowe's forthcoming bill would establish a host of heretofore absent cybersecurity prevention and response measures, an aide close to the process said. The bill will "significantly [raise] the profile of cybersecurity within the federal government," while incentivizing private companies to do the same, according to the aide.
Additionally, it will "promote public awareness" of Internet security issues, while outlining key protections of Americans' civil liberties on the Web, the aide continued.
Privacy groups are nonetheless likely to take some umbrage at Rockefeller and Snowe's latest effort, an early draft of which leaked late last year.
When early reports predicted the cybersecurity measure would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency," online privacy groups said they felt that would endow the White House with overly ambiguous and far-reaching powers to regulate the Internet.
It is unclear when Rockefeller and Snowe will finish their legislation. And the ongoing debate over healthcare reform, financial regulatory reform, jobs bills and education fixes could postpone action on the floor for many months.
from kurt nimmo: CNN rolled out a slick propaganda presentation this evening [feb20]. It is called "Cyber Shockwave" and it posits a cyber attack on the United States... How should the government deal with the threat? Federalize the National Guard to deal with unruly mobs freaking out over the loss of electricity. Nationalize utility companies so the NSA and the government get electricity. The participants also recommended new powers be granted to the president. Not surprisingly, they declared the president has the authority to take unprecedented action against the states and the private sector under the Constitution. CNN and the participants agreed the slick propaganda presentation is aimed at the American people.
Disagreements over whether the federal government or private companies should take the lead in developing cybersecurity protocols is making the situation worse, McConnell testified before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
"If the nation went to war today in a cyber war, we would lose ... We will not mitigate this risk. We'll talk about it, we'll wave our arms, we'll have a bill, but we are not going to mitigate this risk," McConnell said. "As a result, we will have a catastrophic event."
McConnell said he strongly favors the government playing a large role in cybersecurity because a major cyber attack could cripple commerce and shake consumers' confidence in the financial markets and the federal government, rivaling "the damage of a nuclear attack to the country."
"When transactions involve billions of dollars or route trains up and down the East Coast … the basic attributes of security must be endorsed," McConnell said.
Others argued that the government should spur the markets and private companies to develop solutions because the government moves too slowly.
"If the government tries to mandate standards, they will be out of date and an actual impediment to better security before they can be applied. This is not like fire codes in building construction, where the big changes can take decades. We don't know what the minimum code for cybersecurity should look like four years from now," said Scott Borg, director and chief economist at the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, an independent, non-profit cybersecurity research group.
But the federal government can't trust companies to have the goodwill to protect their systems, said James Lewis, director and senior fellow for the Center for Strategic and International Studies' technology and public policy program.
"If 10 percent [of companies] don't do the right thing, 100 percent will be vulnerable," he said.
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and ranking member Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, introduced a cybersecurity bill in March 2009 that would create a Senate-confirmed, Cabinet-level national cybersecurity leader. Snowe said the current cyber czar, Howard Schmidt, lacks accountability and the power to make game-changing policy.
Their bill, S 773, is one of several cybersecurity bills lingering in Congress. The House passed a cybersecurity bill earlier this month expanding cybersecurity research programs.
from pcworld: In case you haven't been following the plot of Webcamgate, starring the Lower Merion School District in Southeastern Pennsylvania and a cast of thousands, here's the skinny: Last week the Robbins family, whose son Blake attends LMSD's Harriton High, filed a class-action suit against the district alleging that it's been spying on its students via webcams on school-supplied MacBooks.
from allgov: The creators of PleaseRobMe.com really aren’t out to steal from people, they insist. Rather, they want to educate people about the dangers of posting too much information on social networking sites before they become victims of unscrupulous types.
In other words, a handful of well-placed corporations stand to make a fortune on the prospect of a cyber attack. In addition, a message will be sent to the Senate warning that it should pass “cybersecurity” legislation (a 2009 Senate bill would have given Obama the authority to shut down the internet).
General Dynamics is a leading death merchant at the very heart of the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about a few decades ago during the contrived so-called Cold War. “When it comes to military spending, the tradition of the ‘iron triangle’ — Congress, the Pentagon, and defense industries — joining to push costly weaponry is nothing new,” Brad Knickerbocker wrote for The Christian Science Monitor. BPC directors hail from Lockheed Martin, L-3 Communications (a spook merchant), JPMorgan Securities, and the Rockefeller connected Aspen Institute...
It is business as usual — the government and large corporations setting off fire alarms in order to stampede the American people into the government’s high-tech surveillance and control grid, an operation that will reward the likes of General Dynamics and L-3 Communications handsomely.
The BPC’s Cyber ShockWave will take place on February 16, 2010 at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, DC. The simulation will begin at 10:00AM followed by a question and answer session with the participants, the audience and media. Concerned citizens may want to attend and ask why the government and an insider think-tank stacked with neocons, neolibs, death merchants, and spook corporations are pushing a largely contrived threat on the American people.
from bbc: Researchers say the Sun is awakening after a period of low activity, which does not bode well for a world ever more dependent on satellite navigation. The Sun's irregular activity can wreak havoc with the weak sat-nav signals we use. The last time the Sun reached a peak in activity, satellite navigation was barely a consumer product. But the Sun is on its way to another solar maximum, which could generate large and unpredictable sat-nav errors.
It is not just car sat-nav devices that make use of the satellite signals; accurate and dependable sat-nav signals have, since the last solar maximum, quietly become a necessity for modern infrastructure. Military operations worldwide depend on them, although they use far more sophisticated equipment.
Simple geometry The satellite navigation concept is embodied currently by the US GPS system and Russia's Glonass network, with contenders to come in the form of Europe's Galileo constellation and China's Compass system. It depends on what is - at its root - a simple triangulation calculation. A fleet of satellites circling the Earth are constantly beaming a radio signal with two bits of exceptionally precise information: where exactly they are, and at exactly what time.
A sat-nav receiver on Earth - or on a ship or plane - is equipped with a fairly precise clock and the means to collect signals from the satellites that happen to be in its line of sight. It then works out, based on how long it took those signals to arrive, how far it is from each of those satellites. Some simple geometry yields its position.
1. Satellites advertise their exact position & the precise time at which they are sending it 2. The signal travels through the outer atmosphere, the ionosphere; its speed depends on how much the Sun's radiation and particle winds are affecting the ionosphere's composition 3. A receiver on Earth determines how long the signals took to arrive from a number of satellites, calculating the position from the time differences
But those signals are incredibly weak and, as researchers have only recently begun to learn, sensitive to the activity on the Sun. Solar flares - vast exhalations of magnetic energy from the Sun's surface - spray out radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, from low-energy radio waves through to high-energy gamma-rays, along with bursts of high-energy particles toward the Earth.
The radiation or waves that come from the Sun can make sat-nav receivers unable to pick out the weak signal from satellites from the solar flare's aftermath. There is little that current technology can do to mitigate this problem, with the exception of complex directional antennas used in military applications. Sat-nav receivers will be blinded for tens of minutes, probably a few times a year at the solar maximum.
Charged up A further complication comes from the nature of the outermost layer of the Earth's atmosphere, the ionosphere. That is composed in part of particles that have ionised, or been ripped apart by radiation from the Sun, with the composition dependent on how much radiation is coming from the Sun at a given time.
The problem comes about because sat-nav technology assumes that signals pass through at a constant speed - which in the ionosphere isn't necessarily the case. "The key point is how fast the signals actually travelled," said Cathryn Mitchell of the University of Bath.
"When they come through the ionosphere, they slow down by an amount that is actually quite variable, and that adds an error into the system when you do the calculations for your position," Professor Mitchell told BBC News.
The amount of solar activity runs on many cycles; the ionisation will be different on the sun-lit side of the Earth from the night side, and different between summer and winter; each of these cycles imparts a small error to a sat-nav's position.
will recent successes in fighting internet controls be enough to stave off tyranny? it depends largely on public outcry... from corbett report: The focus is back on Internet censorship this week as a pair of articles from Time Magazine and The New York Times came out almost simultaneously advocating for licences to operate web sites. These articles were skillfully skewered by Paul Joseph Watson as lame attempts to shore up a disintegrating establishment media in the face of a blogosphere that is increasingly replacing them.
The articles follow on calls by Craig Mundie—Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer—for an Internet licencing system. Introducing the idea, he said "We need a kind of World Health Organization for the Internet." Evidently unaware of the ongoing investigation into the WHO's role in manufacturing the H1N1 pandemic hoax to line the pockets of Big Pharma, Mundie added that an international Internet authority should be given the same kind of authority that the WHO has in dealing with a pandemic. "When there is a pandemic, it organizes the quarantine of cases. We are not allowed to organize the systematic quarantine of machines that are compromised." These calls are worrying because they represent only the latest instance of influential figures proposing increasingly tyrannical controls on free speech on the Internet.
The Obama presidency has seen an increase in hype over cybersecurity threats, with the influential CSIS "think tank" having written white papers proposing cybersecurity as a key issue for the 44th president. As we reported last July, CSIS argued for "minimium standards for securing cyberspace" because "voluntary action is not enough." Shortly after Obama took office last year, Senator Jay Rockefeller introduced a Senate bill (S.773) that would give the president the power to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" and shut down the Internet. The bill would also require network administrators in the private sector receive licencing from the federal government after taking a federally-mandated certificagtion program. During Committee hearings, Rockefeller went so far as to say that it would have been better if the Internet had never been invented.
In November of last year it was reported that an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) being negotiated by the world's leading economies would force ISPs to cut off subscribers who were found to have shared copyrighted content on more than two occasions. Recent reports indicate that this proposal was not discussed at an ACTA meeting last month, but the so-called "three-strikes rule" has already passed in France.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that Obama's information czar, Cass Sunstein, has blamed the blogosphere for spreading anti-government sentiments and advocated that the government actually employ people to infiltrate online communities and spread information favorable to the government in an effort to destabilize them. As remarkable as such a proposal may seem from a high-ranking government official, it is only one aspect of an official Pentagon strategy to fight the net as if it were an enemy weapons system.
All of these proposals and numerous other stories we have reported on the past (e.g. here and here) represent only the latest attempts to stifle free speech on the Internet. Although groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been fighting such moves for a long time, the explosive power of the online community in derailing the carbon eugenics agenda and exposing the Federal Reserve has awakened many to the nascent medium's potential...and its value. The value of the Internet is directly tied to freedom of speech, a principle that is opposed solely by the establishment media who thrived for decades in a virtually competition-free era before the rise of the Internet. As one commenter on the Time Magazine puff piece calling for Internet licencing notes, "There is NO grass roots movement anywhere calling for government intervention in the internet. It is not broken. It works too well, that is a problem for tyrants."
As with everything related to the Internet, however, the collaborative efforts of concerned citizen in opposing Internet censorship is paying off in positive developments. The newfound awareness of the Internet's power and importance is raising awareness that online liberties are in fact fundamental rights that cannot be taken away. Even China was forced to back down from an Internet licencing scheme (exactly like that proposed at Davos) because of public pressure. A draconian Australian law that would have required all online political comments to be accompanied by the commenters full name and address is likely to be repealed by the Attorney General.
Whether or not these individual successes in fighting back the approach of online tyranny will ultimately derail the establishment's agenda remains to be seen. It depends largely on public outcry over the loss of online liberties becoming a genuine grassroots movement.
The new law will create a mega-agency to “represent the government in negotiations over international standards and orders the White House office of technology to convene a cybersecurity university-industry task force to guide the direction of future research,” according to Slashdot. Michael Arcuri, a New York Democrat who sponsored the bill, called cybersecurity the “Manhattan Project of our generation” and estimated the U.S. needs 500 to 1,000 more “cyber warriors” every year in order to keep up with potential enemies.
The National Security Agency is widely understood to have the government’s biggest and smartest collection of geeks — the guys that are more skilled at network warfare than just about anyone on the planet. So, in a sense, it’s only natural that Google would turn to the NSA after the company was hit by an ultra-sophisticated hack attack. After all, the military has basically done the same thing, putting the NSA in charge of its new “Cyber Command.” The Department of Homeland Security is leaning heavily on the NSA to secure .gov networks.
But there’s a problem. The NSA and its predecessors also have a long history of spying on huge numbers of people, both at home and abroad. During the Cold War, the agency worked with companies like Western Union to intercept and read millions of telegrams. During the war on terror years, the NSA teamed up with the telecommunications companies to eavesdrop on customers’ phone calls and internet traffic right from the telcos’ switching stations. And even after the agency pledged to clean up its act — and was given wide new latitude to spy on whom they liked – the NSA was still caught “overcollecting” on U.S. citizens. According to The New York Times, the agency even “tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant.”
All of which makes the NSA a particularly untrustworthy partner for a company that is almost wholly reliant on its customers’ trust and goodwill.
from clyde lewis: The Large 8.8 earthquake that hit Chile was not a product of HARRP but it very well could have been a result of a direct hit from the snapping of a solar filament. All last week pictures had been issued from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory of an enormous magnetic filament that hung suspended above the surface of the sun’s southern hemisphere. It was estimated to be I million Kilometers or 621,371 miles long. The filament could wrap itself 24 times around the earth. SOHO did say that the Filament did snap around the 25th of February. It produced clouds and a coronal mass ejection. It was unknown what effect it would have had on the earth.
