IRISH BLOG JOURNALIST AUTHOR ASSASSINATION ATTEMPTS

I Brian Clarke author of  the Irish Blog have been the target of British Secret Service Dirty Tricks for quite some time now. A week ago on Facebook, it came to my attention, that a story has been in circulation, that I have asked a young woman to send me her knickers 15 times by message. I do not know this woman and neither is she on my friends lists. 

Nothing particularly surprising there. An obvious Dirty Tricks tactic from MI5 who want to shut Irish Blog down and have been conducting a more subtle censorship on it for quite some time, aside from slowing it down with their intranets. What has been surprising though is the response to it. I still have some very loyal support and solidarity and believe me at times like this I really appreciate it.

I am not going to name people for obvious reasons. I do have transcripts of these conversations and while the individuals concerned may have been under the influence of drugs they may have also been the victims of MI5 hacking, like the poor lady who originally received the abuse by Facebook messaging in a case of obvious text hacking. I personally do not know the precise details.

While I would normally dismiss MI5 dirty tricks as part of the territory but it has been combined, with several recent attempts on my life by contrived road accidents. I have my own ideas on all of this but without evidence I cannot prove anything, other than the transcripts. However all of this has eerie similarities of other organizations, including the Provisionals working with MI5, using other republican, loyalist groups and individuals, as fronts for disinformation and assassination. I believe drugs are playing a leading part in corrupting Irish republicanism. 

Sister of Real IRA murder victim Kieran Doherty hits out at the killers

 If anyone genuinely needs help with recovery from this they will have my full support as I have personal first hand experience of this problem. 

British spies used 'dirty tricks' including 'honey traps and deleting online profiles' to intimidate and trap enemies according to leaked Snowden documents 

• Revelations from documents taken from NSA leaked by Edward Snowden
• Outline techniques used by Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group
• Spy unit whose goal is to 'destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt' enemies

By JILL REILLY 

"British spies employed 'dirty tricks' including 'honey traps' to trap nations, hackers, terror groups, suspected criminals and arms dealers, according to leaked documents. 

The bombshell revelations have been made public through the release of documents taken from the National Security Agency by whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

The Powerpoint slides outline techniques apparently used by the Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG), a British spy unit whose goal is to 'destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt' enemies. 

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British spies employed 'dirty tricks' including honey traps' in a bid to trap nations, hackers, terror groups, suspected criminals and arms dealers

The slides from 2010 and 2012, published by NBC News show that the JTRIG completed their mission by 'discrediting' adversaries through misinformation and hacking their communications.

Two main methods of attack detailed in the 'Effects' campaigns are cyber operations and propaganda campaigns. 

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The bombshell revelations have been made public through the release of documents taken from the National Security Agency by whistleblower Edward Snowden

JTRIG, which is part of the NSA’s British counterpart, the cyber spy agency known as GCHQ, used Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube for deception, mass messaging and 'pushing stories'.

Another strategy is 'false flag' operations - this is when British agents carry out online actions that are designed to look like they were performed by one of Britain’s adversaries.

The main cyber attack is the ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDoS) attack.

This is when computers are taken over by hackers and they bombard a website’s host computers with requests for information causing it to crash - this is a method successfully used by Wikileaks hackers. 

Earlier this week it was revealed that JTRIG agents issued their DDoS on Anonymous chat rooms, preventing its users from communicating with one another. 

In one case, reported the BBC, agents are said to have tricked a hacker nicknamed P0ke who claimed to have stolen data from the US government. They did this by sending him a link to a BBC article entitled: 'Who loves the hacktivists?'

Eric King, an attorney who currently teaches IT law at the London School of Economics, told NBC it is 'remarkable' that the GCHQ has become so adept at launching DDoS attacks without 'clear lawful authority,'  particularly because the British government has criticised similar strategies used by other governments.

'GCHQ has no clear authority to send a virus or conduct cyber-attacks,' he said. 'Hacking is one of the most invasive methods of surveillance.'

According to notes on the 2012 documents, a computer virus called Ambassadors Reception was 'used in a variety of different areas' and was 'very effective.'

More...

• 'We do not serve FBI and CIA agents': The Sochi restaurant that bans American spies (no word on whether they'd seat Edward Snowden)
• Reports: NSA gets under 30 percent of phone data
• Russia taunts US with bugged diplomats chat

When sent to adversaries, says the presentation, the virus will 'encrypt itself, delete all emails, encrypt all files, make [the] screen shake' and block the computer user from logging on.

One of the ways to block a target communicating reads: 'Bombard their phone with text messages, bombard their phone with calls, delete their online presence, block up their fax machine.'

The slide details examples of how this was used in Afghanistan including significantly disrupting the Taliban, sending targets a text message 'every 10 seconds or so' and 'calling targets on a regular basis'.

The British cyber spies also used blog posts and information spread via blogs in an operation against Iran.

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One of the ways to stop a target communicating reads: 'Bombard their phone with text messages, bombard their phone with calls, delete their online presence, block up their fax machine'

The same 2012 presentation describes the 'honey trap' method of discrediting a target commenting it is 'very successful' when it works. 

The individual is lured 'to go somewhere on the internet, or a physical location' where they are then 'met by a friendly face.'

It does not give any examples of when the honey trap has been used by British agents, but the same slide also details how 'paranoia' can be heightened by changing a target's photo on a social networking website - the slide reads 'You have been warned JTRIG is about!' 

A programme called 'Royal Concierge' took advantage of hotel reservation systems to track the  location of foreign diplomats and the slides encourage agents to monitor targets through 'close access technical operations'.

It also suggests they question 'Can we influence hotel choice? Can we cancel their visits?'

According to reports in Der Spiegel last year, British intelligence tapped the reservations systems of over 350 top hotels around the world for the past three years to set up the programme. 

Using the GCHQ’s SIGINT (signal-intelligence) program it was used to spy on trade delegations, foreign diplomats, and other targets with a taste for the high life.

NBC news reported GCHQ would not comment on the newly published documents or on JTRIG’s operations. 

In a statement it told them: 'All of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework,' said the statement, 'which ensure[s] that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All of our operational processes rigorously support this position.' "

TO WHOM IT CONCERNS, THERE IS A DOSSIER THAT WILL BE MADE PUBLIC REGARDING ALL DIRTY TRICKS CONDUCTED ON MYSELF BRIAN CLARKE, BY ALL BRITISH SECRET SERVICE AGENTS, SINCE FIRST I MET GERRY CONLON IN LONDON MANY YEARS AGO, THAT WILL BE MADE PUBLIC IN THE EVENT OF MY UNTIMELY DEATH

CLONTARF 1014 CONTINUITY IRA 2014

We know from our history that Brian Boru was about 73 years old on Good Friday, 1014, so it was his oldest son, and not he, who led the Irish legions into the battle of Clontarf while the aging High King prayed in his tent. We further understand that Brian Boru gave a rousing address to the assembled troops from horseback, before the bloody battle, with a cross in one hand and a sword in the other. This is the moment described in the Annals of Innisfallen. Commemorate Clontarf 2014 today.

The Battle of Clontarf was a success beyond understanding, without being familiar with keeping the Faith and the love of Ireland, that has motivated Irishmen and women, warriors all like King Brian, to pick up the sword, the sling or the cross, praying for the courage to defend and liberate their island from foreign invader as they continue to do today in British Occupied Ireland.

CONTINUITY IRA DRONES TO TARGET LONDON?

A "hacked" RQ-170 drone close to Bobby Sands  street in Iran, 

Bobby Sands Street, in Tehran. Iran, was originally called Winston Churchill Street. The locale has a politically influenced history. A former Iranian student, Pedram Moallemian, wrote an article which is posted in the Bobby Sands Trust website. Moallemian recounts back to 1981 when he and his friends, active in the turbulent politics of Iran, moved to rename Winston Churchill Street to Bobby Sands Street.

“Shortly after the revolution of 1979, Iranians were busy changing names,” writes Moallemian. “Names of thousands of streets, buildings and even cities that had been named after the Shah, his family or others close to the former regime needed to be changed and replaced by new idols and symbols of the revolution.”

Moallemian and his friends created their idea in March 1981 when they heard the news that Bobby Sands had died as a result of his hunger strike while in a British Occupied Ireland prison. I met several Iranians at Bobby's funeral in Belfast myself. Bobby Sands quickly became a name for all teens to connect with rebellion and wanted to pay homage to him and his fight for Irish freedom.

One of the friends apartment overlooked the British Embassy in Tehran which was on Winston Churchill Street.The Iranian teens knew to pay homage to Bobby Sands that this would be the perfect place to do it. They hoisted a flag bearing the letters ‘I.R.A,’ but it was too heavy for the flag to fly so they decided to rename Winston Churchill Street as Bobby Sands Street.

“The plan wasn’t as exciting and adventurous, but we were desperate at this point. We all agreed and had soon bought large white construction paper and navy magic markers to make signs. I was the most graphically gifted of the bunch, so I’d draw the shape of the actual signs, copying the real ones made by the city and the rest of the gang would colour and cut them. We made about twenty of them and got out when it got dark to cover the old signs.”

“Next evening we returned to see if any of them were left and to our surprise there were a few new ones made by others too and, thanks to the glue we had used, even the ones very close to the embassy compound had remained in place. However, the occasional missing corner was proof someone had tried to remove them. Soon the entire street had new signs and the city officially changed the name also.The larger victory, however, was when we discovered the embassy had been forced to change their mailing address and all their printed material to reflect a side door address in order to avoid using Bobby’s name anywhere.”

After Winston Churchill Street was renamed Bobby Sands Street, the British Embassy put a door on the opposite side of the building so its mailing address wouldn’t read Bobby Sands. All of which leads to the question will Iran give its drone technology to the Continuity IRA to attack central London and its stock exchange again? Below is an article in today's BBC with regard to the matter,



"Military and civilian drones have a crucial weakness that means they can be hacked, Katia Moskvitch discovers, so what might a stolen drone be used for?


If you were watching Iranian state TV in early December 2011, you would have seen an unusual flying object paraded in front of viewers. Windowless, squat, with a pointed nose, its two wings made it the shape of a manta ray. The trophy on show was an RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone, a key weapon in the intelligence gathering arsenal of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Standing in a hangar on a military airfield, the drone was seemingly undamaged. Indeed, Iranian officials insisted that it had not been shot down; rather, they claimed an unusual coup: to have hacked the drone while it was flying near Iran’s border over Afghanistan and forced it to land.

Outside Iran, many snorted in disbelief at hearing such claims. Todd Humphreys, assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas in Austin, US, was one of the sceptics. Soon, though, he would prove himself wrong.

So, how easy is it to hack a drone? Along with the military, could police and private citizens also lose control of their aircraft? And if so, what might a hacker do with a stolen drone?

One way to hack a drone involves messing with the system it uses to navigate. US military drones use encrypted frequencies of the Global Positioning System (GPS), and this was the RQ-170’s Achilles heel, said the Iranians. They first jammed its communications links, which disconnected it from ground controllers and made it switch to autopilot; it also interrupted the secure data flow from the GPS satellites. The drone was forced to search for unencrypted GPS frequencies normally used by commercial aircraft. At this point, the Iranians said, they used a technique called “spoofing” – sending the plane wrong GPS coordinates, tricking it into believing that it was near its home base in Afghanistan. And so it landed on Iranian territory, directly into the welcoming arms of its kidnappers.

The US rejected the hacking scenario, insisting that its flying robot simply had malfunctioned. Military drones usually have a back-up system to guide them home automatically if contact with operators is lost. But that clearly didn’t work.



Military reconnaissance drones carry camera footage that the IRA want. 



The more Humphreys thought about the incident, the more he felt that such an attack might work, at least in theory. Together with students at his university’sRadionavigation Lab, which he directs, he invited the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to watch how his team could spoof a civilian drone mid-air.

Using equipment costing less than $2,000, Humphreys mimicked the unencrypted signals sent to the GPS receiver on board a small university-owned drone. With DHS officials watching, he managed to fool the drone in a matter of minutes to follow his commands. “I first dismissed the Iranians’ claims as extremely unlikely, but have since revised my estimate to ‘remotely plausible’,” he says.

Confused drone

Jamming GPS satellite signals “so the drone's sense of its own location begins to drift away from the truth” is quite doable for both military and commercial drones, he says, because these signals are so weak. “The US military is scrambling right now to reduce their drones' susceptibility to GPS jamming, but it's going to take some time before they've got a satisfactory fix.”

There are other vulnerabilities, too. Intercepting data links from the drone, such as knowing precisely what the plane is looking at, is also easy to do if the feeds are not encrypted. In 2008, Iraqi militants intercepted unencrypted video feeds from unmanned US spy planes. And in 2012, drones at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada were reportedly infected with malware after an operator apparently had used a drone’s computer to play “Mafia Wars” – and in the process installed a virus on the PC.

A military drone hacked by criminals is obviously a dangerous scenario. But what if hackers were to gain control of civilian flying robots? Drones are already being exploited for search and rescue organisations, police authorities for surveillance, or for crop or wildlife monitoring, for example, and they may soon be joined by postal services and online retailers.



An IRA engineer can make Parrot AR drones target each other or the Stock Exchange in London again.



Independent IT security analyst Samy Kamkar showed that taking control of a civilian drone was possible in December 2013. He equipped a Parrot AR Drone 2.0 with a tiny Raspberry Pi computer, a battery and two wireless transmitters. The microcomputer ran a simple piece of software, which directed the drone to search for the wi-fi signals used to control nearby Parrot drones. Once his drone had found a victim, the program used the wireless transmitters to sever the target drone’s link to its owner and took control. According to Kamkar, a handheld computer on the ground can do the trick too.

Humphreys calls Kamkar’s work “a clever hack” and predicts that “it won't be the last one against commercial drones; hackers will find flaws and exploit them.”

David Mascarenas, who works for the National Security Education Center at Los Alamos National Labs, agrees. As drones are nothing but flying computers, he says they “have the potential to exhibit never before seen security flaws that couple both cyber and physical security concerns.”

Yet what would be the motivation for a hacker to take control of a civilian drone?

“The reason to hack a drone would be like any other reason people hack,” says Peter Singer, director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings Institution, a think-tank based in Washington DC. “It might be to cause an act of terror, an act of mischief, to carry out some kind of crime, or the “white hat” type, to show that it can be done in order to warn others of the vulnerabilities.”



Delivery drones carry cargo that the IRA may hack to deposit elsewhere.


Delivery drones could be hacked to steal their cargo, the expensive machine itself, or even to encourage black market activities. “If a drone can deliver a book, it can also be used to deliver "IRA Bombs” or sneak guns into Maghaberry concentration camp, says Mascarenas. Indeed a drone has already been used for smuggling cigarettes into a prison yard .

Another example might be military espionage. A drone that normally operates within an army base could be redirected and tagged with a tiny broadcasting camera, allowing an IRA technician to spy on sensitive military information.

Then there may simply be people who don’t want drones spying on them. One town in Colorado has already proposed drone “hunting licences” that would allow people to shoot down drones.The anti-surveillance sentiment behind it is real as one continuity IRA volunteer in South Armagh put it. “If I saw an unfamiliar Brit drone snooping around my back yard, you can bet I'd jam its GPS receiver to shoo it away or bring it down like we did with British  Army helicopters before,” he says. “GPS jammers can be purchased for less than 40 Euro online and they're quite effective.”


Such methods will likely prove to be the start of an arms race between IRA technicians and the British Occupation Forces in Ireland who wish to stop them. “The bottom line is that a drone is a flying computer. And computers can be hacked,” say the Continuity IRA

'Top Secret' Drone BBC Link