#for like rogues obviously id be like here this is who you want as legal rep

[certified-bi]

Rip to most superheroes but if I had to meet my evil counterpart and they started trying to manipulate me, I'd get pissed and do it right back.

Oh you think I'm weak because I'm not willing to burn down the system and instead try to help as many people as I can ? Well I think you're a little scared idiot who's too afraid to work towards reform that would actually help civilians and instead you pull the "People are already being hurt" as an excuse to hurt more people because that proves you have agency and you'd rather be feared than seen. I'm able to work outside the system and help people outside of just the usual super fights. Sounds like a skill issue you can't.

Oh you think I'm a fool for seeing the good in people and not wanting to rule others? Well I'm sorry I healed from my trauma and let others in while you pretended that your pain is unique and no one deserved compassion because you're too much of a little bitch to be vulnerable.

It's somehow my fault that the multiverse started acting up and your universe got hurt? You're the one who's too wrapped up in themself to not see that the lack of infrastructure and support for civilians is what caused that tragedy was far more damning than the alien attack level disastor in [Big City], than some random guy from another universe who shares your face. Maybe come up with evacuation plans and more shelters before building a wholeas machine to kill a guy.

And so on.

[woodsfae]

B5 S04E12 Conflicts of Interest previous chapter - table of contents

Garibaldi isn't wildly succeeding at being a private detective, it seems. This poor father is distraught that he hasn't found his daughter yet but..what's this? The missing daughter with a steel chair! And Garibaldi isn't even charging his full fee because he feels bad. It's nice that he's being charming to make up for his irritating fight with Sheridan.

After Garibaldi dealt with Zack Allen being an bad actor, it's extra annoying that he's joining an anti-Sheridan organization. My hope is that he's doing it to infiltrate. My actual thought is that he was brainwashed into it and is an unknowing sleeper agent for PsiCorps.

Oooh, guest starring Zathras! That ought to be interesting at the least.

Sheridan is annoyed because he doesn't have an excuse to avoid irritating tasks since Delenn is gone.

Wow, Garibaldi hasn't turned in his badge, gun, and et cetera yet. That's such a security risk! And Zack Allen doesn't want to go get them because he thinks Garibaldi will be sad. lol, white men.

Ivanova has been working hard on her broadcast back to earth assigned project. Stephen helps her out with a signal routing problem.

Garibaldi doesn't want to hand in his military issue weapon. He's fine turning in his link and official ID, but he's bummed about the gun, even though he can easily go buy one since he's licensed. Very attached to those weapons in particular. Hilarious dramatic about it. Feels personally betrayed by Zack Allen insisting. Serious amusing. As his his cheering himself up watching more classic Looney Tunes. Truly a man of simple tastes.

The rogue element wants Garibaldi to smuggle someone in and be security for them while they're here. And Garibaldi is apparently fine with it without knowing who it is or what they're doing. Specifically because they took his military sidepiece away, sad boy without his gun (s).

Oh, when Ivanova and Franklin talked about routing the broadcast through Epsilon 5, they meant Draal planet. And Zathras is there, newly revealed to be one of 10, 9 now that one of them in the past with Valen. I wonder if became legendary throughout history to the Zathrases like Sinclair was to the Minbari.

Zathras's costume is hilariously, obviously, some fake raccoon tails over a cloak over a vest over a button-down shirt over another shirt.

The person he's smuggling in is his ex, who refused to move to B5 with him. Who got married after he left and presumably has had her husband's kid by now. Looks like she isn't necessarily thrilled to see him. Ooh, apparently she's gotten divorced and remarried since the last time they talked! Her ex husband screwed her over in Earth courts biased against Mars citizens and hasn't gotten to see her kid in over a year.

Garibaldi, the self-centered man child, is upset she didn't move to B5 to be with him after her divorce instead of staying on Mars and remarrying after knowing him for like six months. And he happens to be one of the wealthiest people on Mars who owns tons of real estate and a medical research facility.

"you broke my heart three times and that's one more time than you're entitled to," is soooo funny. Why was she entitled to twice? What's three after two? Why be mad that she didn't leave the solar system and abandon her legal pursuit to see her daughter to live somewhere she definitely couldn't see the kid? Classic Garibaldi reaction though.

Londo's back! And now he's welcome in allied ranger leadership meetings for some godawful reason. Make the man prove himself with a few good decisions first.

Sheridan wants to deploy the rangers to go hang out in allied space if the allies are cool with it and give them information and the permission to operate in their space. And Sheridan proposes, much to Londo's disagreement, that they start out on the border of Narn and Centauri space. Which is, I think, a great idea. It very well may reduce Centauri aggression against the Narns.

omg, Garibaldi didn't even wipe his accessing the secured area with his cloned security badge so the first time Zack Allen reviewed security access it came up with his name attached. Dumbass.

Garibaldi's ex's new husband apparently thinks there's a telepath-gene related virus. Oops, that'd get Ivanova if so.

This mission is basically legit. It's medical research, if she isn't lying or misinformed. There's no reason she couldn't just visit B5. But since they're being shot at and attacked, perhaps there's another motive.

I find it hard to be interested in Garibaldi plot, so it's a pity there's so much of it lately.

Garibaldi's not so annoyed anymore, and his ex has to tell him she misses him right before she flees. Flees from…dun dun dun! Telepaths. Different angle than I thought the telepaths would be coming from. Telepaths who kill themselves with poison teeth when captured! That's hardcore and old fashioned. Cyanide is a terrible, painful choice. They've got to have better poison in the future.

William Edgars, Garibaldi's ex wife Lise Hampton-Edgar's husband, likes Garibaldi's style and wants to hire him to come to Mars and work for him. Go Garibaldi! Be free!

Susan Ivanova's first broadcast! It's a good teaser. I definitely want to see her full, regular broadcast. That unstoppable (?) broadcast is definitely going to piss off Earth! I foresee retaliation.

B5 must be a leaky sieve! Two telepaths on board chasing and shooting at a billionaire's wife smuggling genetic information on a telepath-gene viral illness. That sounds like way more of an interesting plot than it actually was, though, sigh.

[fmservers]

Khashoggi’s fate shows the flip side of the surveillance state

It’s been over five years since NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden lifted the lid on government mass surveillance programs, revealing, in unprecedented detail, quite how deep the rabbit hole goes thanks to the spread of commercial software and connectivity enabling a bottomless intelligence-gathering philosophy of ‘bag it all’.

Yet technology’s onward march has hardly broken its stride.

Government spying practices are perhaps more scrutinized, as a result of awkward questions about out-of-date legal oversight regimes. Though whether the resulting legislative updates, putting an official stamp of approval on bulk and/or warrantless collection as a state spying tool, have put Snowden’s ethical concerns to bed seems doubtful — albeit, it depends on who you ask.

The UK’s post-Snowden Investigatory Powers Act continues to face legal challenges. And the government has been forced by the courts to unpick some of the powers it helped itself to vis-à-vis people’s data. But bulk collection, as an official modus operandi, has been both avowed and embraced by the state.

In the US, too, lawmakers elected to push aside controversy over a legal loophole that provides intelligence agencies with a means for the warrantless surveillance of American citizens — re-stamping Section 702 of FISA for another six years. So of course they haven’t cared a fig for non-US citizens’ privacy either.

Increasingly powerful state surveillance is seemingly here to stay, with or without adequately robust oversight. And commercial use of strong encryption remains under attack from governments.

But there’s another end to the surveillance telescope. As I wrote five years ago, those who watch us can expect to be — and indeed are being — increasingly closely watched themselves as the lens gets turned on them:

“Just as our digital interactions and online behaviour can be tracked, parsed and analysed for problematic patterns, pertinent keywords and suspicious connections, so too can the behaviour of governments. Technology is a double-edged sword – which means it’s also capable of lifting the lid on the machinery of power-holding institutions like never before.”

We’re now seeing some of the impacts of this surveillance technology cutting both ways.

Tech-enabled exposés revealing the modus operandi of brutal regimes — e.g. @bellingcat IDing the GRU agents who poisoned the Skripals or Turkish surveillance leaking graphic details of Khashoggi's fate — keep reminding me of this piece I wrote 5yrs ago https://t.co/CTGUf956s7

— Natasha (@riptari) October 18, 2018

With attention to detail, good connections (in all senses) and the application of digital forensics all sorts of discrete data dots can be linked — enabling official narratives to be interrogated and unpicked with technology-fuelled speed.

Witness, for example, how quickly the Kremlin’s official line on the Skripal poisonings unravelled.

After the UK released CCTV of two Russian suspects of the Novichok attack in Salisbury, last month, the speedy counter-claim from Russia, presented most obviously via an ‘interview’ with the two ‘citizens’ conducted by state mouthpiece broadcaster RT, was that the men were just tourists with a special interest in the cultural heritage of the small English town.

Nothing to see here, claimed the Russian state, even though the two unlikely tourists didn’t appear to have done much actual sightseeing on their flying visit to the UK during the tail end of a British winter (unless you count vicarious viewing of Salisbury’s wikipedia page).

But digital forensics outfit Bellingcat, partnering with investigative journalists at The Insider Russia, quickly found plenty to dig up online, and with the help of data-providing tips. (We can only speculate who those whistleblowers might be.)

Their investigation made use of a leaked database of Russian passport documents; passport scans provided by sources; publicly available online videos and selfies of the suspects; and even visual computing expertise to academically cross-match photos taken 15 years apart — to, within a few weeks, credibly unmask the ‘tourists’ as two decorated GRU agents: Anatoliy Chepiga and Dr Alexander Yevgeniyevich Mishkin.

When public opinion is faced with an official narrative already lacking credibility that’s soon set against external investigation able to closely show workings and sources (where possible), and thus demonstrate how reasonably constructed and plausible is the counter narrative, there’s little doubt where the real authority is being shown to lie.

And who the real liars are.

That the Kremlin lies is hardly news, of course. But when its lies are so painstakingly and publicly unpicked, and its veneer of untruth ripped away, there is undoubtedly reputational damage to the authority of Vladimir Putin.

The sheer depth and availability of data in the digital era supports faster-than-ever evidence-based debunking of official fictions, threatening to erode rogue regimes built on lies by pulling away the curtain that invests their leaders with power in the first place — by implying the scope and range of their capacity and competency is unknowable, and letting other players on the world stage accept such a ‘leader’ at face value.

The truth about power is often far more stupid and sordid than the fiction. So a powerful abuser, with their workings revealed, can be reduced to their baser parts — and shown for the thuggish and brutal operator they really are, as well as proved a liar.

On the stupidity front, in another recent and impressive bit of cross-referencing, Bellingcat was able to turn passport data pertaining to another four GRU agents — whose identities had been made public by Dutch and UK intelligence agencies (after they had been caught trying to hack into the network of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) — into a long list of 305 suggestively linked individuals also affiliated with the same GRU military unit, and whose personal data had been sitting in a publicly available automobile registration database… Oops.

There’s no doubt certain governments have wised up to the power of public data and are actively releasing key info into the public domain where it can be poured over by journalists and interested citizen investigators — be that CCTV imagery of suspects or actual passport scans of known agents.

A cynic might call this selective leaking. But while the choice of what to release may well be self-serving, the veracity of the data itself is far harder to dispute. Exactly because it can be cross-referenced with so many other publicly available sources and so made to speak for itself.

Right now, we’re in the midst of another fast-unfolding example of surveillance apparatus and public data standing in the way of dubious state claims — in the case of the disappearance of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who went into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2 for a pre-arranged appointment to collect papers for his wedding and never came out.

Saudi authorities first tried to claim Khashoggi left the consulate the same day, though did not provide any evidence to back up their claim. And CCTV clearly showed him going in.

► VIDEO: CCTV footage shows journalist Jamal Khashoggi walking into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul before he disappeared https://t.co/cHGjwmNT4a pic.twitter.com/ML4aItvOuP

— Irish Times Video (@irishtimesvideo) October 10, 2018

Yesterday they finally admitted he was dead — but are now trying to claim he died quarrelling in a fistfight, attempting to spin another after-the-fact narrative to cover up and blame-shift the targeted slaying of a journalist who had written critically about the Saudi regime.

Since Khashoggi went missing, CCTV and publicly available data has also been pulled and compared to identify a group of Saudi men who flew into Istanbul just prior to his appointment at the consulate; were caught on camera outside it; and left Turkey immediately after he had vanished.

Including naming a leading Saudi forensics doctor, Dr Salah Muhammed al-Tubaigy, as being among the party that Turkish government sources also told journalists had been carrying a bone saw in their luggage.

Men in the group have also been linked to Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, via cross-referencing travel records and social media data.

“In a 2017 video published by the Saudi-owned Al Ekhbariya on YouTube, a man wearing a uniform name tag bearing the same name can be seen standing next to the crown prince. A user with the same name on the Saudi app Menom3ay is listed as a member of the royal guard,” writes the Guardian, joining the dots on another suspected henchman.

A marked element of the Khashoggi case has been the explicit descriptions of his fate leaked to journalists by Turkish government sources, who have said they have recordings of his interrogation, torture and killing inside the building — presumably via bugs either installed in the consulate itself or via intercepts placed on devices held by the individuals inside.

This surveillance material has reportedly been shared with US officials, where it must be shaping the geopolitical response — making it harder for President Trump to do what he really wants to do, and stick like glue to a regional US ally with which he has his own personal financial ties, because the arms of that state have been recorded in the literal act of cutting off the fingers and head of a critical journalist, and then sawing up and disposing of the rest of his body.

Attempts by the Saudis to construct a plausible narrative to explain what happened to Khashoggi when he stepped over its consulate threshold to pick up papers for his forthcoming wedding have failed in the face of all the contrary data.

Meanwhile, the search for a body goes on.

And attempts by the Saudis to shift blame for the heinous act away from the crown prince himself are also being discredited by the weight of data…

Here is Saud al-Qahtani – advisor to MBS who has been sacked and blamed for the murder of Jamal #Khashoggi – saying a year ago he only acts on the orders of King Salman and the Crown Prince MBS “Do you think I’m acting on my own without guidance?”(correction on date) https://t.co/mN2NEkbihX

— Bel Trew (@Beltrew) October 20, 2018

And while it remains to be seen what sanctions, if any, the Saudis will face from Trump’s conflicted administration, the crown prince is already being hit where it hurts by the global business community withdrawing in horror from the prospect of being tainted by bloody association.

The idea that a company as reputation-sensitive as Apple would be just fine investing billions more alongside the Saudi regime, in SoftBank’s massive Vision Fund vehicle, seems unlikely, to say the least.

Thanks to technology’s surveillance creep the world has been given a close-up view of how horrifyingly brutal the Saudi regime can be — and through the lens of an individual it can empathize with and understand.

Safe to say, supporting second acts for regimes that cut off fingers and sever heads isn’t something any CEO would want to become famous for.

The power of technology to erode privacy is clearer than ever. Down to the very teeth of the bone saw. But what’s also increasingly clear is that powerful and at times terrible capability can be turned around to debase power itself — when authorities themselves become abusers.

So the flip-side of the surveillance state can be seen in the public airing of the bloody colors of abusive regimes.

Turns out, microscopic details can make all the difference to geopolitics.

RIP Jamal Khashoggi

Via Natasha Lomas https://techcrunch.com