The following is posted to CyberLib under "Norman&Quin-CIA&Drugs". Below
are highlights.
One of the story lines is about CIA use of trapdoors to track all kinds of
transactions throughout the world. We've all thought (and seen movies)
about the awesome powers possible via trapdoors -- why wouldn't the CIA be
in the forefront of hackery? It's very cost-effective compared to agents
and infiltration, and its power is only limited by your imagination.
It reminds me of a story I read in the SF press a few months prior to the
Nicaragua elections in which the Sandinista's supposedly lost. It seems an
NSA team raided an East Bay company that writes the vote-counting software
used almost everywhere. The NSA was purportedly checking for trapdoors --
to keep us all safe. What more perfect opportunity to _emplant_ a
trapdoor, when you've got the software all taken apart on the auditor's
table? Needless to say, no one audited the Nicaragua voting equipment for
trapdoors. Word on the street is they're damn difficult to detect anyway,
if properly installed.
One day back at Xerox Research the conversation turned to trapdoors. We
tried to enumerate all the places you could hide trapdoors: in the
application software (of course), the OS, the disk drivers, the
disk-controller ROMs, the keyboard & communications drivers -- all these
codes get their turn to be arbitrarily devious. We also happened to be
thinking about banks, and how a worm could encrypt the financial data for
weeks, and then suddenly erase itself and stop decrypting. The bank would
be willing to pay millions to avoid losing even one day's transactions.
When communications are involved, the actual worm can be downloaded by a
small trapdoor boot routine, so most evidence would never be present in a
non-running machine.
-rkm
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 1995
From: Phil Agre <•••@••.•••>
To: •••@••.•••
Subject: conspiracy
[This is forwarded by permission. I do not endorse any of it. Jim
Quinn is •••@••.•••. I don't have the original header,
but the editing is by Jon Roland <•••@••.•••>, who tells me
that it's in the public domain. Stuff can be downloaded from
www.warroom.com.]
I have further attempted to edit the interview transcript, cleaning up
spelling, punctuation, and occasionally guessing what was probably taken
down wrong, from context, (and without the benefit of hearing the actual
interview tape).
========================================================================
The following is a Radio Interview between James Norman,
formerly Senior Editor of Forbes Magazine and now with Media
Bypass Magazine and Jim Quinn, DJ of WRRK 96.9 FM in Pittsburgh.
In this interview from December 7th, they discuss issues of
national importance and STUNNING IMPACT. Essentially they give
out the reason for Vincent Foster's Death, and the fact that
the "resignations" of the Congresspersons are NOT for policy
reasons but because they have been caught with millions in
corrupt funds in Swiss Banks. Read this to learn what the
"mainstream media" doesn't ever tell you...
Quinn's Interview with Jim Norman
QUINN: Jim Norman, former Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine, and
currently writing for Media Bypass Magazine after having
uncovered Caspar Weinberger's Swiss bank account (we do get
punished for some of the truths we uncover, do we not?). Jim is
on the phone with us this morning. Good Morning, Jim.
NORMAN: Hi, how are you?
QUINN: Pretty good. I want to give people a chance to get an idea
of what it is we are going to launch into after 8 o'clock, and I
want to give some background into this. Is it fair to say that
since Iran-Contra that the government has sort of been involved
in the drug business?
NORMAN: Yes, it goes way back before then, actually. It goes back
even to the Vietnam War days -- remember the Golden Triangle,
Laos, Cambodia and all that, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it was
always on a much smaller scale. What apparently happened was that
in the 80s we got into it in a big way, basically nationalizing
the wholesale importation of drugs from Central and South America.
The idea was that we control it somehow that way; instead, it has
just become the tail wagging the dog, I think.
QUINN: It's become the funding source for just about anything
that the government covertly wants to do, and for the moneys that
various elements of the government don't want to ask the Congress
for, nor do they want Congress to know about.
NORMAN: Right. And it's an arms business, too. They are kind of
all tied up together.
QUINN: So it's arms and drugs?
NORMAN: Right.
QUINN: Kenneth Starr is currently our Whitewater prosecutor, and
I have long said on this show that I find Ken Starr interesting
but also troubling in that there are many elements to the
Whitewater scandal. Part of the laments have to do with banking
and have to do with Madison Savings and Loan, check kiting, stuff
that went on with the Arkansas Development Financial Authority,
but basically there are really two elements -- there is Whitewater
and then there is all the stuff with Mena Airport, Iran-Contra,
drugs into the country, various unexplained deaths, one of them
Vince Foster, the possibility of espionage on the part of the
first lady, and all of this lies behind a brick wall that Mr.
Starr has been positioned upon to make sure that they get Clinton
but that the fire doesn't burn past that wall; because on the
other side of that wall are Republicans and Democrats. Am I right?
NORMAN: That's right. He is not looking at Mena; he doesn't have
the authority to from Janet Reno. He does have authority to look
at the Vince Foster death, but I think only inasmuch as it relates
to the Whitewater situation. The whole thing is hemmed in and
beyond that is this whole national security blanket that has been
thrown over big parts of this thing that you couldn't touch if you
wanted to.
~--<snip>--~
NORMAN: Yeah, and even before that. Let's start with the early
80s when Bill Casey came into office in the CIA under Ronald
Reagan. That's when our government decided to embark on this
amazing and extremely unbelievably successful effort to spy on
the world's banks. We did it! We have been spying on world
banking transactions for more than a dozen years. The way we do
it is by basically forcing foreign banks, wittingly or
unwittingly, to buy bugged software and bugged computers that
let our NSA (National Security Agency) which is the intelligence
arm of the government, to basically surveil wire transfers all
over the globe.
QUINN: Let me ask you this. How do you sucker the rest of the
banking community around the globe into buying the software
that you are selling?
NORMAN: First of all you sell to front companies like this
company Systematics in Arkansas, now called Alltel Information
Services. They had another company called Boston Systematics,
an affiliate based in Israel mainly. There is Robert Maxwell, the
UK publisher, who is fronting this stuff. There are a whole bunch
of people fronting this.
QUINN: Wait a minute, Robert Maxwell -- isn't he dead?
NORMAN: Yeah, he is now.
QUINN: Didn't he have an unfortunate accident?
NORMAN: Fell off his yacht in the Atlantic Ocean somewhere.
QUINN: Why, isn't that amazing!
NORMAN: The tinkering of it was mainly putting back doors, just a
few lines of code, that would allow somebody to dial into a
computer without leaving any footprints, any audit trail that
you were in there. Then you could go around and look around in
files or you could collect information from a system without the
user even knowing it
QUINN: Now this software, which was originally called Promis,
was stolen from a company called Inslaw by the Justice
Department. It ended up somewhere, probably at E-Systems
or somewhere, and it was converted into banking software. It
Started out as software designed to track prosecutorial cases
around the country. My question is -- why didn't Ed Meese just
pay the damn bill, and none of this would ever have come to
light! Danny Casolaro was chasing the stolen software when he
stumbled on what it was being used for.
NORMAN: Well, the trouble with it was that they bought it for use
in the Justice Department, but they were going to use it all over
the place. If they were paying royalties on it, Inslaw would know
just how extensive the use was of the software, and they didn't
want people to know how extensively it was going to be used.
QUINN: I see...
NORMAN: Plus, a lot of the profits from the resale of this went
back into private profits. It was customized and resold to the
intelligence community. It became sort of a basic platform
database tracking system for most of our intelligence agencies
and many of those abroad. The idea was "Well, we can all talk to
each other now." In fact what it has allowed us to do is
basically rifle through other people's data files abroad too,
because the stuff was apparently being sold to foreign
intelligence agencies and it was also bugged. We have other ways
of basically surveilling and downloading foreign electronic
databases. The whole computer world is much more porous and
transparent than anybody wants you to believe.
~--<snip>--~
QUINN: Yeah, the BCCI thing.
NORMAN: Stevens was fronting for the BCCI crowd and trying to
take over this Washington Bank Holding Co. The SEC blocked him at
the time, partly because one of the things he was insisting on
was that this company Systematics, which at that time was a tiny
little thing in Arkansas, he was insisting that they be brought
in to do all of the data processing for this multistate bank
holding company in Washington. Hillary represented Systematics
in that. Now the thing about Systematics at the time -- it was
before they even got involved with the bank spying stuff. Abroad
for many years, they had been what amounted to a laundromat for
covert funds for the CIA and the intelligence community, quite
legally, probably. It was done for the national interest.
Somebody had to move this money around and Systematics was in a
perfect place to do it because they owned the computers and a
whole bunch of small banks. They could move this money around
electronically without the bankers even knowing about it
necessarily, and it wouldn't go through the normal clearing
houses. The regulators wouldn't see it. It would just crop up
wherever the CIA needed it in whatever bogus front company
account, and it was all just bits and bytes; it was a cyberbank
-- it still is.
~--<snip>--~
NORMAN: Well, I think that they had been... look the Israelis were
key partners with us in this bank spying effort. This is a joint
allied government effort, and the Israelis were one of the key
front people in this, in selling and supporting this software all
over the world, so that people weren't thinking they were getting
the software directly from the U.S. You know, there was an
Israeli front company used to sell this stuff to foreign banks.
QUINN: Well, they sold it to the Moscow bank. I know that.
~--<snip>--~
QUINN: So, the CIA empties Vince Foster's Swiss bank account of
its ill-gotten money.
NORMAN: Yeah, actually it wasn't the CIA. It was this sort of
renegade vigilante group of guys they called the Fifth Column
that has been out doing this stuff. They don't take any of the
money for themselves. The money goes to the...
QUINN: They just do it for fun?
NORMAN: The CIA only gets the money. It is escrowed for use by
the CIA but only when the CIA gets rid of a bunch of its bad
apples there who've got dirty hands from drug kickbacks, arms.
~--<snip>--~
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~--~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~
Posted by Richard K. Moore <•••@••.•••>
Wexford, Ireland | USA citizen | Editor: Cyberjournal
CyberLib: http://www.internet-eireann.ie/cyberlib
Cyber-Rights: http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/nii/cyber-rights/
You are encouraged to cross-post list materials for non-commercial use,
in their entirety, with all headers, signatures, etc., intact.
~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~--~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~
Share: