The NSA watches you poop.

Beef Supreme_sl said:

http://rt.com/usa/michael-hastings-cyber-car-218/

Coming from Richard Clarke, this is pretty interesting.

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I guess the Governmnet decided they'd had enough scandals coming out...

Come on now. I'm all behind trying to get rid of PRISM and shit, but if you think that someone hacked a journalists car to kill him, you are way into crazyland.

khalid_sl said:

Come on now. I'm all behind trying to get rid of PRISM and shit, but if you think that someone hacked a journalists car to kill him, you are way into crazyland.

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Dude, I don't know what to think anymore. Our Government is fucking nuts these days - and I mean all branches and all levels.

Oh I don't know. My state government is pretty sane.

Corrupt as shit and not generally serving the interest of the people, but sane.

The true crazy comes out of the federal authority, and most of that from the Congress. The executive has been pretty fucked up for our entire lives (unless we've got some 70 year old lurkers). The courts haven't succumbed yet but it doesn't seem like they're making any valiant stands either. Of course that's not easy for them to do even if they had a mind to.

Iannis_sl said:

Oh I don't know. My state government is pretty sane..

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Just read today that a California State Judge is refusing to let a guy who protested Bank of America by writing crap in water-soluable chalk in front of BoA offices raise First Amendment defenses. So he's charged with vandalism and could face up to 13 years.

So no, I think most public officials are taking crazy pills these days.

It seems like it would be. But it also seems like people are willing to believe any crackpot theory that sounds cool, for whatever reason.

Don't the polls show that most people don't care anyway? Or are there lots of people freaking out?

I think the number of people who care is increasing, but no, most people don't. Which is sad, you would hope more people would.

khalid_sl said:

Come on now. I'm all behind trying to get rid of PRISM and shit, but if you think that someone hacked a journalists car to kill him, you are way into crazyland.

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Well, the guy who says it could have been a car hack murder was a cybersecurity advisor for both Bush(s) and Reagan. But then again, those regimes did have some fucking nutjobs working for them.

Drive-by-wire steering is a very new thing though; cars with that are just coming out this summer. So unless the supposed assassins used a very sophisticated device, they would have had to of settled for hacking the electronic throttle control, and merely speed the car up and hoped he would crash without steering it for him. Of course doing that much wouldn't be very difficult. You wouldn't hack into the car via some wireless signal, or even control it wirelessly. You'd just replace the ECU when he wasn't around, and program it to trigger at a time and place (GPS), or when it received a wireless on/off trigger signal that would be pressed. I could imagine the CIA having that in their arsenal of plausibly deniable assassination tools.

It would be dumb to have the FBI make any overt moves right before doing it though, as it obviously raises suspicion. Of course assassinating a journalist is such a serious offense, that I would expect the number of people knowing about this supposed plot to be rather small, and therefore they might not be able to control the FBI. If it ever got out, it would be riots in the streets time.

There is plenty of motive though. If Hastings doesn't top the list of journalists that the military dislikes, then he's pretty damn close to it. He wrote the article that got McChrystal fired which obviously burned some bridges. His last article was very critical over the domestic spying, and no doubt his next story involved that. He had a relationship with Wikileaks-- which is an organization classified as an 'enemy' by the US government. I could imagine some sort of twisted logic they might use involving justification in order to protect the programs that protect us from terrorism, and that the ends would justify the means in their minds; similar logic was used to torture and invade a country that had done nothing to us.

I seriously doubt foul play was involved though.

I'm expecting that following Russia's snub on not turning over Snowden we're going to have Iraq 2.0 in Syria just to spite the Russians.

But maybe this time we'll focus on blowing shit up versus "Democracy!"

Here's a guess: Hastings was meeting his source in the middle of the night, notices he was being followed by the FBI who wanted to know his source, he gunned it to try and lose them, and lost control at high speed.

Only no one was following him. Eye witnesses say he shot through the red and several minutes passed, no cars followed.

Nah, that doesn't make sense. Obama definitely hit the killswitch. Much more plausible.

Sounds pretty far-fetched to me, but the facts make it highly suspicious also. I want to know where his notes are. If he was working on something big, certainly he was collecting information...Where's all that at?

The killswitch also deploys ninjas to retrieve any notes. It's kind of like The Bourne Identity with more action.