Review: README.txt by Chelsea Manning

Readme.txt

I remember back in the days when Bradley Manning had become famous for outing secrets of the abuse of power by powers that be. However, some time later, it was Chelsea Manning who was being named. In those days, I had no idea of trans issues and was sort of confused that why is Bradley being called Chelsea and what’s with this ‘transition’? How can a man transition into a woman by growing long hair? Identities are complex and had no idea about transitioning and other related topics.

Nevertheless, README.txt is an important chronicle of how Bradley grows up in a broken household, struggles to find a footing in life, and often disdains authority. His experiences of longing for belonging and growing up in a conservative America and then experiencing homelessness are touching and makes one understand the struggles he had to go through. Somehow he ends up joining the U.S. Forces after walking into their recruitment camp. But his struggles don’t end there. He tells you how, as a trans person, he constantly faced harrassment. He was good with computers from a very young age, and that’s what propelled him to be in Intelligence in Iraq. However, the journey wasn’t as straightforward.

The interesting bits of the story for most readers would be where he starts uploading classified war material onto Wikileaks, including the infamous Collateral Damage video from Iraq. He writes about the lax information security practices which exist, like the ability to copy data just by plugging in a USB, or writing data to DVDs which could just be carried over to one’s personal barracks. He was however outed as someone who was uploading these secrets by Adrian Lamo, the disgraced hacker who was contacted by Bradley to garner support and advice for making these acts of the U.S. in Iraq more visible to the world. Lamo told the agencies about this and Bradley was arrested. Bradley’s arrest is painful to read to put it mildly. He writes about this cage in Kuwait where he is put in solitary.

After years of struggle and intentional bureaucratic wrangling, he is sentenced. However, Obama, the same guy who doubled down on dissenters and leakers, pardons Bradley (now Chelsea), probably in an effort to burnish his own image, apparently fearful how he would be remembered. Chelsea however is not bereft of biases against Trump and conservatives. He clubs his own sufferings and then goes on an unintelligent tirade that all minorities of colour, gender, religion are being persecuted.

It’s an important book to be read to understand how authoritarian U.S. works when something doesn’t suit it.

Review: Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

Permanent Record

I was quite surprised that Edward Snowden wrote this book. Because he had categorically stated, when he had exposed spying by American agencies like NSA, CIA etc., that he wanted the focus on the various programs of surveillance and spying and not on him. He had purposefully kept himself out of spotlight by giving very few interviews. The writing of this book may have been motivated by financial reasons because Snowden’s assets had been frozen by the US authorities.

Snowden is not only intelligent but also courageous. He exposed the evil ways in which NSA and the likes went unhindered in their assault on freedom of regular citizens like you and I.

This book provides details of Snowden growing up and being a computer geek right childhood due to his dad. And then he decides not to continue his education beyond high school. However he did get a job as a security guard and due to lax intake requirements back then and the overwhelming open positions, he was taken in later in a technical position. Snowden exposes not only the various different programs used by the government to spy, but also how embassies worldwide have become only spots for surveillance and nothing more. He writes how he went to Switzerland and Japan to strengthen the data collection practices. He also is unabashedly critical of the main stream media (not as much as Greenwald though).

Towards the end, Snowden recounts his escape from Hong Kong and how, while at Moscow airport, is interrogated by the Russian agents and asked to cooperate with them so they could take care of him. Ultimately he refused and stayed there for many months. Finally, because he was attracting too much attention at the airport, he was given permit to exit the Moscow airport. He has lived in Russia since then.

‘Permanent Record’ is a must read book. It should be made mandatory in schools and colleges and I wish it becomes a manifesto of sorts for our freedom and tyranny of governments and technology.

Review: No Place to Hide by Gleen Greenwald

No Place To Hide

Edward Snowden is one othe bravest men in recent history. He risked his lifestyle, life, and even his family to reveal the dark truths of surveillance by the United States government machinery via NSA, FBI, CIA, MI6 and what not. No wonder Snowden has always been and will be treated as a pariah. Anybody who pays the slightest attention to the mainstream media cabal would understand that it (the cabal) is just an arm of the government and sometimes the agencies which not always be aligned to the government. As Greenwald writes in some of the pages of his book, often the journalists are just stenographers who take instructions from the powers that be and put it out as news, or, even better, ‘breaking’ news.

When Snowden had exposed the ill intentions and wrong-doings more than a decade ago, I wasn’t that interested in the topic except that it was being broken as a big news item by Guardian and it was trending for few days on Twitter back then. I really didn’t show much interest in it. Over the last few years, it is clear that I can no longer ignore it myself and am always aware that there is absolutely nothing which the govenment doesn’t want to know about me: my websites, my contacts, my passwords, my WiFi, my location, my calls, my metadata, my data. Nothing is left to being unknown. I have zero trust in governments. I am good as long as I stand straight or even bend over backwards. The moment I lean forward and show the finger to the government or agencies, I am done. Their technological arsenal is going to be bombarded at whatever they have collected of me, and even more collection would be done through zero-day exploits, no-click URLs, remotely activated cameras/microphones, and even through means I may be completely unaware of. Your so-called smart devices, smart TVs, automatic robot vaccumm, microwave, light fixtures can all be turned into spying devices by someone sitting in Maryland, or New York (33 Thomas Street Building), or anywhere in the world for that matter. And it is not just the US who is doing it, it is definitely all the developed countries, five eyes, fourteen eyes, and many more which may be hidden from us, including many others like India, China, Japan, Brazil, Russia etc.

If Barry Meier’s book was a shocker, Greenwald’s is even more so. It begins with Greenwald getting an email, asking him to setup a PGP for his email communication. And, I hate Greenwald for this, for months he did not do that! For months! All the while Snowden was waiting to communicate with him and show what he had got out of the surveillance state for the world to see. It was Laura Poitras who ultimately got the lead and made things happen by planning a trip to Hong Kong to meet Snowden. Had it been left to Greenwald, it would have taken years and maybe Snowden himself might have been caught before he could expose the uninhibited spying.

The book focuses on lot of technical programs which the NSA and the likes had developed to collect and analyze information from all sorts of networks around the world, not just within US. However, the more important aspect of the book is the details revealing how Laura had been treated by the US immigration authorities everytime she entered her own country, how Greenwald himself had become bête noire of the mainstream media cabal, and how this very cabal had known to some extent almost a decade ago about illegal spying by the agencies but kept mum under the instructions of the state. Those pages are telling and should worry us to no end that the ‘courageous free enterprise’ called media is not so free after all and is just a mouthpiece.

Recently examples have shown it. Countless books have been written about Trump, all in negative light. Elon Musk is suddenly the ‘bad guy’ because he bought Twitter and often rants against Democrats. ‘Elon bad’ is the new coke out there. If Seymour Hersh could not be spared, with his article – exposing that it was the US behind the destruction of Nord Stream pipeline – being called a ‘blog’!, what authority and credibility do you and I have? This is the new world we live in, where either you comply and bend, or you will be under fire from the powers, the agencies, the media cabal. Seymour has written how the movie Zero Dark Thirty was a work of fiction and was released to boost Obama’s ratings before the elections so that Democrats could bank on it and make lady Clinton win! Greenwald also writes how Obama, who is workshipped by New York Times, and the mainstream media cabal, was one of the most undemocratic presidents who went after the media to punish them for supporting Snowden and anybody who exposed the dystopian clog of the machinery.

Comply or die is the new adage.

This is a must-read book. Just drop everthing that you are doing and pick this up.

Review: Sandworm by Andy Greenberg

Sandworm

I was chatting on some group chat on Yahoo messenger around 2000 / 2001. Then some argument ensued and one person (probably a guy) started sending some messages like ‘this port accessed’, ‘that port accessed’ in an attempt to scare me away and move out of that room. I having no idea of what those things meant, restarted my computer without bothering to rejoin that group chat. Then I heard about Stuxnet in 2010 / 2011 and how the Iranian centrifuges were destroyed. Andy’s book is quite entralling if you restrict yourself to the technical details and the jaw-dropping skills the hacker community has honed over decades. I use the word ‘community’ with a pinch of salt because how would club a Iranian hacker with an American hacker? The book talks about Stuxnet, WannaCry, Petya, notPetya and few others. My own experience, of having absolutely no work in 2014 when working for a big film studio which was hacked due to a controversial movie, gives me a smile.

However, that’s where the good part of this book ends. Andy is a typical leftist woke-type American who says Trump had so little understanding of computers that he never bothered to issue a critique of Russian ‘interference’ in U.S. elections of 2016. However, this theory is so unworthy that any person believing in the narrative of these leftist wokes deserves to be jailed. The political bias of the baldhead author is clear. I wish the author had stuck to writing on the stories of the hacking operations rather than ignoring the lack of skills of Obama when it came to computers. That’s the problem with all these publishers and authors nowadays. They have hijacked the complete narrative by taking over major publishers, news channels, magazines, blogs, and whatever else you can name.

I would read this book for the mayhem various cyberhacking operations have caused, but wouldn’t trust this author and this book even for a second when they just go on and on with blaming Russia / GRU / Putin without any evidence whatsover, except rudimentary statements like ‘the coding patterns matched’ and the ‘design looked similar’. I would rather stomp on this book and trash it in the bin for the political naivety and amateurish conclusions in this book.