Author: Jason Ditz

The White House has announced today that a long-standing plan to roll out a federal “Internet ID” authentication scheme that would be used to log in to all websites across the Internet will move forward, and the service will launch in six to twelve months.

“We simply have to kill off the password,” insisted White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel. The initiative began in 2011, with an eye toward public-private plans, but seems now to be centering on wearable authentication bracelets that Americans would apparently get instead of passwords.

Private multiple site authentication systems like OpenID have been around for years, and logging in to websites with a Facebook or Twitter account is also becoming popular. The downside to this, from the administration’s perspective, seems to be that they don’t have direct control over the backbone of such a system.

Given the huge privacy implications of such a federally-run scheme, it’s hard to imagine eager adoption. Distrust in the wake of the NSA surveillance leaks, along with the federal government’s other fiascos in the webspace, like the disastrous rollout of the Obamacare website, make this a recipe for monumental failure.

Details are scant, and in the past the administration insisted the program would be “purely voluntary,” though if the goal is really to “kill off the password” nationwide, it clearly will not remain voluntary for long, and full-scale government control over your ability to log in to websites seems to be the ultimate goal.

A week and a half ago, I blogged about an ongoing story in Oakley, Michigan, which is not that far from here and which I’ve been keeping an eye on. People are apparently picking up the story now outside of the local news, and it’s getting some new info.

For those who don’t remember, the village has 290 people and a massive police department that is funded through secret “donations.” The names of the police are a secret, including from the village government, and when they approved the release of the names, police claimed ISIS might kill the police if they knew who they were.

Vocativ has a great piece on it now, which includes an admission from the village’s part-time police chief Robert Reznick that the ISIS threat might be “far-fetched,” but that that “doesn’t matter” and that the names should remain secret.

Reznick all but admits that he’s selling badges in a money-making scheme, but insists that it’s not illegal, and that the village needs the money. The Vocativ report includes claims that not only are people buying badges for the higher-end gun permit, but because they can use it to access police records in a way that civilians could not. The number of police is still unknown, but is believed to be at least 100.

The village council has shut the police down, and the courts have finally ordered them to stay shut down, at least until next week’s election installs a new council which could restore them. The council has also requested the police to return all their equipment, which they’ve refused to do, and which has led the council to asking the Michigan State Police to try to recover the property “stolen” by former police.

Yet the village has no record of what all that property consists of, let alone who these former police are, so the request to recover the gear is an exercise in futility, and will likely remain unresolved while the state investigates the department for selling badges and decides whether or not that’s actually something anyone can just do.

Though Antiwar.com covers the vast majority of English-language news sites 7 days a week, and 365 days a year, it’s inevitable that sometimes we miss stories that received sparse coverage.

On Sunday, October 19, an Israeli settler ran over a pair of 5-year-old Palestinian girls returning home from kindergarten. One of the girls was killed. The story was mentioned on only a handful of sites, and went basically unreported in Europe, North America, and indeed Israel itself.

The hit-and-run story would’ve been particularly important, contextually, because just a day later a Palestinian driver crashed into a crowd of Israelis in East Jerusalem, killing an Israeli infant and wounding eight others.

Though we still don’t know if the Monday incident was intentional or not, coming just a day after a similar incident on Palestinian children would’ve been a much different story, and it makes it more likely the incident was the sort of revenge we see so often in the region.

Though Israel’s media always covers Israeli deaths more substantially than Palestinian ones, the fact that there was no coverage at all, and no mention of it in the context of the Monday incident, is extremely unusual.

It is impossible to confirm, naturally, but such a lack of coverage typically means the Israeli military is using its censorship powers to try to bury the story. As of Sunday the settler responsible had not been caught, and there is no indication one way or another if he has been since.

The tiny village of Oakley, Michigan looks fairly unremarkable as you drive through it. Located along the M-52 highway, it consists of little more than a single traffic light, with a bar on one side and a gas station on the other. It’s a village of secrets, however, or so it would seem.

Oakley has 290 residents. They also have over 100 police, for some reason. Those police are also, more or less entirely anonymous.

Who those police are or what they are doing is a mystery, even to the village trustees, who say they don’t even have a proper list of their own of who all these people are, though they have been assured by the police chief that many of them have never even been to Oakley, and likely never will.

So what’s the game underpinning all this? There’ve been a series of lawsuits in recent years aiming to find out exactly that, leading the village to shut the police force down last month.

Here’s where it gets crazy. The village council shut the police down for not having any insurance, because they’re constantly getting sued. Days later, the police showed up again, announcing they’d bought their own insurance and didn’t need the village’s permission to continue to operate. They fund themselves through secret donations from secret benefactors. Weird, right?

Last week, after village council members filed a lawsuit, a judge finally ordered the police to shut down again. Days later, the council voted to finally respond to years of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and release the names of all those secret police. The list has yet to be released, and the council itself is waiting on the police chief to do that, since they don’t have any complete lists.

Today, letters showed up at the doors of the council members’ houses, on the letterhead of a high profile Detroit lawyer. The letters demanded that they recind the decision and stop the release of the FOIA documents, insisting that the police had been promised anonymity, and claiming that ISIS, yes that ISIS, was a potential threat to the police if their names were made public.

The letter went on to warn that because everyone knows ISIS is a thing, and knows ISIS would want to get ahold of Oakley police, releasing their names would be a malicious act, one for which punitive damages could be awards.

The story is nominally “embargoed” until Thursday morning, but the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) is preparing to release letters from the State and Defense Departments detailing a $7.2 million waste on communications towers built in Afghanistan which nobody wanted or used.

The plan initially started in 2010 as an effort to enhance cell phone and TV broadcast reception in southern Afghanistan, and the initial limit set for the cost was $2 million. The plan was delayed when all the bids came in dramatically higher, and in August of 2011, the State Department cancelled the project. It was immediately uncancelled and they were eventually built in 2012 for $7.2 million.

By then, however, Afghan companies had already built a bunch of smaller, but perfectly servicable, towers and had no need for the US ones, which the State Department quickly dumped on the Pentagon as “surplus” equipment. The Pentagon didn’t really want them either, and complained about the costs of fuel to power the generators if the towers were ever used.

Not that they were. The six towers, four in Helmand, one in Kandahar, and one in Ghazni have effectively just sat there ever since, and the only time any of them “did” anything was in May, when a US helicopter careened into one and crashed, killing a NATO soldier and wounding three US soldiers.

In what may well be the single most tactless comments he’s made yet, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, in open testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he believed the parents of slain US hostages James Foley and Steven Sotloff should feel more grateful to the Pentagon for its botched rescue attempt.

Dempsey declared the failed mission “the most complex, highest risk mission we’ve ever undertaken,” and that the attempt “should give the family some solace.”

Though Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel had referred to the mission as a “flawless operation” in previous comments, the reality is that it was an unmitigated disaster from the word go, with US officials wandering around Antakya, Turkey, just across the border from the ISIS capital, asking random people if they knew where the hostages were being held.

By the time the military was ready to go in, ISIS knew they were coming and had plenty of time to relocate the hostages. When the ground troops got to the jail and found no one inside, they attacked some ISIS forces elsewhere in town, then set the jail on fire and left.