RUSH: Speaking of that, we mentioned during the program yesterday Twitter and YouTube accounts for the US military Central Command were hacked on Monday, and pro-ISIS messages were posted by the unknown hackers before the accounts were taken down for hours. CENTCOM said the sites were compromised for about a half hour.
The sites reside on commercial nondefense department servers, and both sites have been temporarily taken down while they look into the incident further. CENTCOM’s operational military networks were not compromised, and there was no operational impact of the US Central Command. So this is just the stuff I guess that they put out there for the low-information crowd to have some contact with the military, but it really doesn’t mean anything.
They post pictures of tanks and missiles and stuff so the low-information crowd can know what we’re doing, but no battle plans, strategies, or any actual news is there, so whatever got hacked was essentially cartoon stuff. The hackers posted tweets in which they claim to have broken into US military computers and extracted information about service members and their families, the generals and the majors and the sergeant majors and the colonels, their addresses, home addresses, wives and spouses and kids’ addresses and so forth.
And they did. They posted spreadsheets that purported to list the names and addresses of top officers. Now, Twitter said that it does not comment on individual accounts, but that the company was helping the Pentagon resolve an account security issue. Now, as I say, we mentioned this during the program yesterday, and it’s clear the Regime is trying to play this down, understandably so. I don’t care what it is about CENTCOM, something there got hacked, from the article.
“So this is clearly embarrassing but not a security threat,” one defense department official said. “The hack came the same afternoon President Obama spoke to the Federal Trade Commission about the importance of corporate cyber security –” (laughing) I’m sorry. We’re not supposed to laugh anymore. This is like the Sony hack. So the minute Obama is out there talking about cyber security, some punks are taking out CENTCOM’s Twitter account. Okay.
Anyway, I don’t understand why the Drive-Bys are so concerned, but they are. I noticed it yesterday afternoon watching it on TV. They were really wringing their hands and terribly upset about this. They thought it was a very serious breach and I don’t understand why they’re so concerned. I remember when the Drive-Bys and the media thought it was cute when those hackers at a group called Anonymous hacked the Ferguson police department website. Remember that?
The hacker group Anonymous posted the names and addresses of Ferguson police department officers and so forth, and the Drive-Bys applauded that and the New York Times thought that was wonderful. Oh, that was great. And remember when the New York Times published addresses of people they thought needed to have some attention paid to ’em. Everyone thought that was cool. But now all of a sudden this is a problem.
Oh, by the way, speaking of, have you heard what David Cameron has suggested, the prime minister of the UK? Well, now, help me out. Cameron is not the Labor Party, or is he? Right, okay, he’s supposed to be a Tory, a Whig, conservative, so to speak. Well, as you know many chat apps, such as WhatsApp, iMessage, there’s all kinds of ’em out there, supposedly they are all so well encrypted the NSA can’t crack it. Nobody’s been able to crack the encryption of the chat programs. If you have an iPhone or an iPad you use messages, iMessage. Not SMS. We’re not talking about cellular texting. We’re talking about actual message apps, like WhatsApp and others.
David Cameron said that unless the government is given back door access to all of these encrypted message services, he’s gonna outlaw them. He said, “Are we gonna allow a means of communication which it simply isn’t possible to read?” Meaning, governments and law enforcement. Are we gonna allow a means of communication in which it simply isn’t possible to monitor? He said this Monday, Cameron did while campaigning. And again he talked about WhatsApp, Snapchat, iMesssages. He said, “My answer to that question is no, we must not.” He said these bad guys can a get hold of these programs and start chatting all day long, sending photos, messages, text messages, and nobody can decrypt it.
I remember years ago, it has to be way back, Jim Kallstrom was still the head of the New York FBI office. And he was worried about all this back then, about computer text messaging, e-mail, all this kind of thing. The Bureau was gonna make a big push to be able to get search warrants and decryption when necessary, and it was gonna be controversial. And it was. But for some reason these programs, they are encrypted on both ends. You and the person with whom you’re chatting, what you send is encrypted, what they receive, whoever you’re talking to, the app has a means of decrypting what is sent, but it’s strictly from conversation to conversation.
It includes group chats. Everything back and forth apparently has such a great level encryption that law enforcement hadn’t found a way in. And Cameron is telling the manufacturers, like Apple and like the people that own Snapchat and WhatsApp, if you don’t give us the decryption key, we’re gonna make these services illegal. I don’t know if he can do that just with a wave of his wand, but it looks like too many people are watching the way Obama operated.