Opinion: who was at fault for January 6 failures?

"If there was a security failure on January 6, and demonstrably there was, it was probably Nancy Pelosi's fault, and after looking at thousands of hours of footage, we came to the conclusion that many others have reached, which is the Capitol Police were not prepared for what happened, and that's fascinating when you think about it, because there was ample warning. The federal intel and law enforcement agencies knew perfectly well there could be a massive disturbance at the Capitol, but the frontline officers on duty that day didn't know and yet the people who kept that information from the frontline officers were overwhelmed by thousands of people milling around the Capitol building? The people who fell down on the job, who didn't do their job, they were not punished. They were rewarded, and you have to ask yourself, why is that? " Tucker Carlson, March 7, 2023 Fox News

Walls, fences, passwords, locks and security systems

I don't know if Meryl Streep’s mansion has a fancy wall around it or not (saw a photo on the internet, but you just never know), but I do know the "open border" liberals I know are not compassionate about others invading their space or belongings. They have locks on their doors, windows, phones; they have fire walls, security systems, passwords; they have their pets tattooed, locks on their bikes, fences made of steel, brick, concrete or even an electric wire to keep out the neighbors' dogs and burglars; they have play pens to keep an eye on their kids, a cloud to take care of their computer documents, a safe to hold their jewelry and guns; they use a fingerprint to open their I-pad, or their office elevator, they have garage door openers--which btw--don't open without the gizmo; they have safe deposit boxes and pin numbers on their library cards and credit cards. My open border friends want aliens to vote, but they personally don't want to pay the taxes if they don't live in my township/city/state which have boundaries. Some open border liberals, particularly the young ones, think there are "safe spaces" with imaginary boundaries where no conservative, Trump supporter, or Republican can wear a red MAGA hat.

Churches are easy targets

For the past half year, I’ve noticed armed policemen in the lobbies of both Mill Run and Lytham Road locations of Upper Arlington Lutheran Church on Sunday morning and at special events.  Today our on-line news announced:

“UALC is pleased to announce that our plain clothes security teams will be trained and in place at both the Lytham Road And Mill Run campuses on January 27. We are thankful for the assistance that we have received from the uniformed officers while we were building and training our teams. We will still use uniformed officers during our larger events but will be moving to a more subdued security presence at our Sunday services. Our teams will consist of armed and unarmed volunteers who have been carefully selected and vetted. They will be trained to respond to all security and safety issues that may occur at our buildings.”

A sign of the times.  Sadly.

The Facebook flap

Everyone is upset about Facebook sharing our data. Our carelessness in exchange for convenience has been going on a long, long time. Read the DSNB disclaimer that comes with your credit or debit card. To have the convenience of a piece of plastic in your wallet, you agreed years ago to share your personal information in any transaction the bank needs to maintain your account, including legal investigations and credit bureaus; you agreed they could use your personal information for marketing purposes; for uses with other financial companies; for their affiliates (whoever that is) to perform their "everyday" business purposes; for those affiliates to use your personal data for their business purposes, and for those affiliates to market to you using your own information you supplied when you applied for credit.

In 1967 when we moved to Columbus we had to request service from the utility companies. On ONE form there was a small error where a number took the place of a letter in my husband's name. That error continued to appear in all sorts of advertising we received for years because all that is sold. And resold.  Same with the BMV. So although the FB theft and misuse of our data is much bigger, we've been carefully eased into this lobster bath of warm water heating up for over 50 years.

https://www.itsecurityguru.org/2018/04/09/facebooks-data-scandal-impact/

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/12/19/facebook-used-data-from-chinese-security-threat-huawei-for-site-feature/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-privacy.html

“This was not a deliberate attempt to breach the security of NSA.”

No, of course not.  It was just two drug dealing prostitute transgenders stealing a car from the man they were having sex with and then they drove the wrong way.  No problem.  Nothing to see.  Move on. Definitely not terrorism.

Washington Post story to beat all stories.

It does make one wonder how intruders can make it all the way into the White House after jumping a fence, when they get shot making a wrong turn into the NSA.  What is going on there that is more important than the security of the President?

Baltimore Sun

John Vogel

National Operations Center Media Monitoring Initiative

Facebook friends you make
TV news they fake,
Every half you bake,
Every claim you stake,
They'll be watching you.

Every link you make,
Every tweet you take,
Every blog you fake
When you do update,
They'll be watching you!

Every single day,
Every word you say,
Every game you play,
Every night you stay,
They'll be watching you.

Oh can't you see?
You belong to NOC!
How your poor head aches,
With every tweet you make.

News source

Facebook--again

Don't blame the Secret Service. They are non-political. Political appointees are not.

"People familiar with the inquiry into how the Salahis were able to attend Tuesday's gala, even though they weren't on the official guest list, said the Salahis exchanged e-mails with Michele S. Jones, special assistant to the secretary of defense and the Pentagon-based liaison to the White House. It was unclear how well the Salahis know Jones, but Jones includes the Salahis' lawyer, Paul W. Gardner, as one of her 50 friends on Facebook.

Several people familiar with the Jones-Salahi correspondence, including some who requested anonymity because it's part of an ongoing investigation, said the e-mails support the Salahis' case that they were cleared to attend Tuesday night's gala." WaPo

I've talked to Columbus school teachers who've told me they are not allowed to have Facebook accounts. Sounds like a good idea for anyone in public education, academe, or government. Why do you want to tell nosy people who your friends and associates are? Especially reporters from the Washington Post who are good at gossip but not tracking down global warming myths and document screw ups? I looked up Michele S. Jones. She's another "first," and a two-fer, and maybe she just wasn't carefully vetted or wasn't given enough instruction and training on security and the importance of protecting the president from friends of friends. Or then again, perhaps she had nothing at all to do with this and the e-mails to her went nowhere.

Incidentally, far removed from this story but about social networks, have you heard of the book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler (Little, Brown, 352 pp., $25.99). It's reviewed at City Journal--go take a look. It's not about electronic social networks but the old fashioned type--like the brother-in-law of your best friend.

"Controlling for environmental factors and the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together—happy people prefer hanging out with other happy people—Christakis and Fowler found that we really do emulate those we care about, whether we mean to or not. Being connected to a happy person, for instance, makes you 15 percent more likely to be happy yourself. “And the spread of happiness doesn’t stop there,” they note. It radiates out for three degrees of separation, so that, say, your sister’s best friend’s husband’s mood exerts a greater influence on your personal happiness than an extra $10,000 in income would. If he gains 50 pounds, it will be that much harder for you to stay slim, as the frame of reference for what’s “normal” changes through your network. Or, on the positive side, if he quits smoking, your chances of kicking the habit improve, too, even if you’ve never met him."

Sounds like a title for next year's book club, and that maybe I've put on 10 lbs because my friend's husband can't lose weight.

Security at the White House

It's so odd, isn't it, that the media goes crazy over Michele and Tareq Salahi who went to Obama's first state dinner without an invitation? All this hubbub from the folks who totally ignored the Climategate story (except for Fox) which is HUGE and should bring down the cap and trade scam to tax us into oblivion (but probably won't with the media's complicity), and couldn't figure out if Maj. Nadil Hasan was crazy or a terrorist. ABC was just outraged. Did it even mention the release of 10 years of e-mail and data that showed manipulation in the climate change research? At least Mrs. Salahi had on an attractive dress that covered her lovely figure as would be fitting considering the culture of the honored guests. After all, they did pass the security check--they weren't armed, or a threat, they just weren't invited. Besides, with a name like Tareq Salahi perhaps Security didn't want to be insensitive and ask questions. Look how far that attitude got Maj. Hasan in the military.

Aren't you afraid?

Our cruise to the Holy Land and sites of the early Christian church (Cairo, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Galilee, Antioch, Tarsus, Antalya, Aspendos, Perga, Ephesus, Athens and Corinth) is coming up, and as recently as last Thursday was revised and rescheduled. I have no idea what's going on, but I do know that I don't remember a time in my life when there wasn't something scary going on in that area of the world.

It's been a year since a lone gunman killed five women working at a Lane Bryant store near Chicago. He's never been caught. And yet every American is less safe than a year ago when they were shot, but the President has a 70% approval rating. He's weak, apologetic and a puppet of the left within our country and abroad--and so don't tell me it's not safe to go to Israel or Turkey! There might be dangerous waters in the Mediterranean Sea, but those Illinois women simply went to work in a quiet suburb of Chicago minding their own business and not looking over their shoulders. Just like us today.

More thoughts on volunteerism

My mother was a volunteer for 30 years at the nursing home in my home town. However, over the years she saw many changes--particularly in the amount of contact the volunteers had with the patients. Early in her "career" she carried food trays to the room and tenderly fed some of the patients--some her contemporaries whom she'd known in college or in a young mothers' group. As rules and regulations changed, there was less and less of the satisfying personal contact. Today I chatted a few minutes with a woman working the produce table at a supermarket. She was quick, efficient, attractive, funny, and in a word. . . classy. When she said something about her shift, I asked her where she had worked before. "I'm a recent divorcee," she said, "and I've had to go to work due to my situation--this is my second job, my primary job is with (a home health care agency). She described to me her other job, the one with the benefits, which was helping a woman in an assisted care wing of a nursing home get back and forth to the dining room and attending a few personal needs in her apartment--but no bathing or dressing--a different paid assistant did that. These are jobs that may be "low pay," but they use to be "no pay"--they were volunteer jobs. As I noted in the entry about "outreach" ideas for church groups, there are layers and layers of laws and regulations dealing with health, safety, education, liability, and environment that relegate volunteers to almost "stand aside" status. And then if your group or activity takes government money, you are even further restricted, especially in matters of religion, even if you are representing a church and providing the service because of your religion.

Sometimes I take a bag (I still use plastic) and walk around the grounds and along the street and pick up trash. People throw an awful lot out of car windows, plus some of it blows off trucks. But, gosh, I wonder if I'm putting someone out of work! As far as I know, we're still allowed to do this, although if I were to get hurt or hit by a car (a teen-ager crashed into our condo street entry lamp post the other day and totalled his dad's new car), I suppose I could sue someone for NOT keeping the area clean and inspiring me to do it as a volunteer.

Use a land line for important presidential-type talk

"President-elect Barack Obama may not find it that hard to give up his BlackBerry after all. Verizon Wireless has announced that some of its employees accessed his personal cell phone account records. The wireless provider apologized to the president-elect and said it would discipline the employees involved." Story here. Read the DNS story in the December Wired, and you may switch to land line anyway. Maybe the Verizon employees will just get a wrist slap like Gov. Strickland's
pro-Obama employee who plumbed the depths of Joe the Plumber's records in our state data bases. Routine, she says, for people in the news!

Obama's trifecta

Before I choose a title (about which I know little), I usually google it. Sure enough, this one has been used a number of times--concerning the primaries, concerning his relationships with shady characters, and his showing in the debates (his followers always thought he won). But I was referring to what has happened since he became the president elect, not even waiting for Joe Biden's threat which was supposed to come during his presidency, not before: 1) Continuing melt down of the stock market which gave us the biggest 2 day drop since 1987 after he was elected on a platform of higher taxes on business and investors; 2) Russia's deploying missiles near the Polish border before the votes were dry on November 5; 3) quickly increasing violence in Iraq after he was elected since Iran figures he won't do much, or will withdraw the troops. I'm not surprised that he's backing down or running for cover or from some of his most ardent leftist supporters and leaning so heavily on the Clinton team. The man must be scared sh witless with what he has rot wrought.

The squeaky shoe gets the boot

The current flap isn't a security breach, unless someone wants to steal the identity of Barack Obama or John McCain. But it certainly shows the problem of the vast amounts of information that can be mishandled by employees of hospitals, libraries, schools, banks, insurance companies and all manner of federal, state, county and local government sub-contractors to which we send our personal information. My personal information has been stolen about 3 times in security breaches at Ohio State University. It's always been an error of a low level, poorly trained employee. I don't even report it on that form they suggest. Why should I trust those companies any more than Ohio State? The founder of Facebook is a billionaire because he first hacked his university's student records. And look where it got him. He's not as rich as Warren Buffet, but he's only 23 and not far off.

But what idiot would use Hillary's passport information in a training session? I sure hope they fired that mental midget. That's definitely a little peon trying to act important for all the new employees. I'm sure there are folks who want Condi micromanaging this, but it sounds as though the security flags worked as they were supposed to. It's the person who reported it to WaPo we need to be concerned about.

When I was a librarian in the agriculture library in the early 80s--and that's the stone age as far as information storage and retrieval goes--one of our student assistants who was gay thought it would be funny to run up a phony circulation record of lascivious homosexual titles on the library director's record and have them sent to his office. He was the best night time supervisor we ever had, but it wasn't hard to track it back to the terminal, time and date. Kid was a genius, but not smart. Have you seen that new book on sex by Mary Roach, "Bonk"? Another wise guy, and we don't know who it was, created a catalog record for a dummy book called, "Sex life of the cockroach," and made the previous director the author. It was probably in the catalog for about 15 years before I came across it when I worked in the Veterinary Medicine Library and got suspicious. Maybe others had seen it and thought Hugh really did write about cockroaches, or just chuckled and moved on.

Some of the student employees were way ahead of the librarians at a fraction of the salary, especially on anything dealing with computers (in those days we had a dedicated system). I don't think that has changed.

So about security breaches: always look to your lowest paid, newest, youngest employee, or the old timer who never had to sign anything because they were grandmothered in before 2001 and has had a couple of slow days with nothing to do but browse.

4707

I love Google, but. . .

this plan was really dumb. High tech route to terrorism and treason.

"The Pentagon has put the kibosh on Google Street View's access to military bases. The access restriction surfaced after a Google street mapping team took photos on the grounds of Fort Sam Houston in Texas and posted them to the site. U.S. Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, chief of the U.S. Northern Command, reportedly said the images compromised security by showing the location of guards, details about barrier operation and building portals. Google removed the images at the Department of Defense's request." Story at TechNewsWorld by Jim Offner, 3/7/08

I think that some of these companies like Facebook, AOL, Google, Yahoo, etc. who claim they are "sensitive" to privacy concerns are run by people too young to understand security--personal or national. For instance, if I wanted to, I could purchase a site tracker for my blog that could probably figure out exactly where your computer is, then what you're buying from AOL, and then through a subscription to another program where your medical records are; but there's no cost to find out what you look like, and how close the 2nd story window of your house is to an access road. I occasionally wander into a website by accident that tells me more about me and my behavior on the computer than I remember, including a comment I made on a listserv or usenet bulletin board 13 years ago and who my grandparents were! (I don't post my genealogy on the web, but others do.)

I won't even go into what I could uncover about your hospital records--I spent some time fiddling with that a few years ago and was so frightened, I just stopped. I really didn't want to know--and I was just using the limited, "free" access to find out the profit of "non-profit" hospitals. Before my husband retired (sole proprietor with me as the staff), I used our county auditor's website extensively--it saved us the time of driving to the property, taking photographs and measuring the set backs and access. What? You think criminals don't use computers?

One time I alerted our church pre-school director about how much information I could track about families of her staff in just a few minutes, using completely free things like Google mapping, on-line local newspapers, and the image feature. Most of my e-mails to the church are ignored or don't address my concerns, so I don't know if anything was done. For years I would suggest to the OSU Libraries that our SS# not be our library access number--I don't know if that has been changed, and God only knows what else it is linked to. Here's my real concern: the university runs on low paid, student labor much more knowledgeable about computers than the faculty or administrators--if it (and other universities) had to find staff that smart and at those wages, they'd have to close down (many are foreign, non-citizens, btw, and all our universities have become dependent on foreign governments to pay their tuition costs).

Just a note about Facebook--no, two notes: The creator, Mark Zuckerberg, is now 23 and has a personal worth of 3 Billion dollars, and Facebook is valued at 15 Billion, according to WSJ. He started at age 19 by illegally hacking into the university's database of student records. The second question: did either of the 2 college women whose murders have recently been saturating the cable news networks have their photos and activities on an internet social networking site, like Facebook?

3725

Doing my part for the environment

You've heard the expression, "Think globally, act locally." Yesterday on my walk I picked up some trash along the way. Now, that does slow me down, but if I don't do it who will?

At one spot I found both the letter and the envelope. I don't know if it was tossed out of a car window, or if it had blown out of the garbage truck because we've had some really windy days with our very cold spring, or perhaps it blew out of a trash recepticle placed for pick up. When I looked at the addressee I thought someone had listed a fake name and address which got into database--it was just too classic. The first name was of a well known painting of a woman with an enigmatic smile; the surname phonetically was "mall walker;" and the house number was 1234. Obviously, I have way too much time on my hands, but I actually googled the person, and yes, the family lives in a nearby neighborhood. Then I found the vita of one of the residents (recent MBA from Ohio State looking for a job), with e-mail and phone number, reviewed his job history, and of course, Google showed me a map of where the family lived, and the letter from ADT told me that they didn't have a security system and that 1 in every 5 homes will experience a problem with security. If I wanted to, I could have pulled up a floor plan of the house from the county auditor site showing me the location of windows and doors, drive-way's relation to feeder streets and main arteries to the free-ways.

Trash is so informative. Don't let anything go in the trash intact that you wouldn't want someone else to find, because there are just too many ways to find you.

3651

My new Wal-Mart scoop

Yesterday I bought a long sleeve light-weight t-shirt at the Port Clinton Wal-Mart. It has a scoop neck, and is just about the most poorly made item I've ever found made in China. But at $5, the price was right, and our weather indoors and out is so changeable, I thought the sleeves were a good idea. This morning I put it on with my $1 loden green jeans I bought at a yard sale in 2001. Looked nice. Then I took a second look. You know what? This is the same design as long underwear, I kid you not. Oh well.

Today I saw another "expose" about Wal-Mart scoop. This time about how it investigates threats to its business. In the old days, retailers just sent shopping snoops into the stores of the competition, or restaurants send spy customers into the restaurants of its rivals to check on the menus or even to its own stores to check on quality and service. The stakes are a bit higher now, and being the biggest retailer in the world, saving Americans billions and single handedly financing the governments of third world countries, Wal-Mart gets tough. So here's my poem about the latest Wal-Mart story in the WSJ in which some of its own snoops gave scoops to the media on the inside security poops.

Tell me why
Wal-Mart can't spy
on the workers it pays
to sleuth in ways
to snoop
for its Threat Research and Analysis Group.