The Big Business of Fear

 The Paper of Record is running yet another big front page advertisement for the highly competitive private cybersecurity industry, whose stock prices seem to rise every time the Media Industrial Complex announces a new foreign threat.

The New York Times's latest scare piece, written by a crack team of two lead reporters and three contributing staffers, has the FBI and National Intelligence directors using information provided to them by several of these private security firms. The businesses sounded the alarm that Iran and Russia both are "hacking" publicly available voter registration rolls. Iran then supposedly sent spoof emails from "The Proud Boys" to some voters in Alaska and Florida. Vote for Trump, or else! was the threatening message allegedly traced by one Silicon Valley firm to a server in Estonia.

Russia is not doing anything specific or new at this precise moment, but they have "inspired" Iran, the article claims. So why not give them a gratuitous mention?

I don't know why they even bother. I've been getting extortion emails direct from the Trump campaign all week long, warning me that since I have not donated any money to re-elect The Donald, they have officially placed my name on the dreaded Joe Biden Supporter list for all to see. The only way I can get taken off the blacklist is to fork over some cash to Trump.

I also get a lot of emails from the Democrats slugged "Final Notice" in hopes of scaring me into opening them because they so resemble those terrifying cut-off messages from the power or cable company.

But I digress. My main beef with the latest Times fear-mongering is that they buried the unintentionally hilarious lead deep within their thinly-disguised advertisement for Security, Inc. They quote Senator Angus King (I-Maine) as saying:

“This may be the beginning of a more concerted operation. They don’t have to do anything; they just have to make people think they are doing something.” (my bold.)

"They" were intended to mean our alleged foreign enemies.  But it could also be easily interpreted to mean that the public-private partnership which is making tons of money manufacturing and marketing all this fear on a regular basis are the ones who have to make people believe in their endless streams of bullshit.

You probably notice that the Times always tries to feebly cover its ass when writing the propaganda on behalf of the Security-Industrial complex. They put the Big Lie in the headline and in the first few paragraphs, knowing that many if not most readers will not proceed beyond this point.  Then they get on with the disclaimers and the waffling. Such as:

There was no indication that any election result tallies were changed or that information about who is registered to vote was altered, either of which could affect the outcome of voting that has already begun across the United States. The officials also did not claim that either nation hacked into voter registration systems — leaving open the possibility that the data was available to anyone who knew where to look.

The voting rolls throughout the country are with very few exceptions widely available, either online or in physical public office space. How else could our home-grown political candidates know where to send their own fear-mongering flyers about their opponents into people's homes? 

The main qualms that the Times seems to have in spreading the latest fearsome propaganda is that it threatens to directly benefit Trump's own propaganda: that the election results will be rigged against him. That puts Rachel Maddow, the prima donna of the pro-Democratic #Russiagate propaganda franchise into a real quandary. Even Democrats and their wealthy donors invest heavily into these private security firms and profit mightily from them.

So she had Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on her show Wednesday, right after the "authorities" made the latest Big Reveal to assure the liberal audience that despite all Trump's lies about election rigging, his administration is telling the absolute truth when it blames Iran and Russia!

“From the briefing, I had the strong impression it was much rather to undermine confidence in elections and not aimed at any particular figure,” he smarmily told Maddow, according to the Times article.

Although the FBI and Trump's national intelligence director made the announcement of the "threat," the Times then reassures its readers in a rather oblique way that since it was a handful of private companies which provided the information to the government agencies tasked to protect the citizenry, it's all legit. 

Proofpoint is casually mentioned, almost in passing, as the source of information that the fake "Proud Boys" emails emanated from a server in Estonia (which, unlike the secret public voter rolls, apparently cannot be used as a proxy by any average Joe or Jane who goes to an Internet proxy site for purposes of hiding one's identity.) 

Visit Proofpoint's glitzy website and the first thing you learn is that October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month! It includes a quarterly Threat Report to incentivize customers and investors, along with publishing its own Threat Blog. Gary Steele, the company's founder and CEO, lists his main credential as being a "thought leader" who is regularly featured by the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Forbes, Fortune, Fox Business and other media outlets with a concentration on business rather than on national security and foreign affairs. He has a bachelor's degree in computer science.

The New York Times goes on to uncritically quote John Hultquist of the firm FireEye in an attempt to further bolster the credibility of Russian and Iranian election interference. "Their focus is to prey on existing fears that election infrastructure will be subverted and hacked, as well as fears of voter intimidation," he said, before going on to promote his company's big free ad in the Times on Twitter.

FireEye, for its own  part, does not at all prey upon existing fears through its own employee recruitment pitch:

 At FireEye, we fight evil  by bringing together frontline human expertise, nation state-grade threat intelligence and innovative technology – creating a unique innovation cycle that allows us to provide the most effective cyber defense platform for our customers.

As an innovator, thought leader and trusted advisor, you'll relentlessly protect our customers from the impact and consequences of cyber attacks.

Are you ready to join us on our mission?

According to his bio, before spinning through the revolving doors to a career in the rapidly expanding private security industry, Hultquist was a "senior US intelligence analyst" who was "involved in counterinsurgency operations in the US Army."

Don't just take FireEye's word for it, though. In an effort to triple-verify its propaganda message, the Times next turns to the competing Trustwave, which went the extra mile and discovered that those free, publicly available voter rolls were also being offered for sale on the Dark Web! Whether any rube of an adversary was dumb enough to buy information that is there for the legal taking, the Times does not say. But the company's global vice president, Mark Whitehead, told the paper that he had immediately and patriotically notified the FBI of the attempted scam.

“The consumer and voter databases that we discovered hackers are currently selling significantly lowers the barrier to entry for nation-states to execute sophisticated phishing, disinformation and intimidation campaigns,” Mr. Whitehead said.

Trustwave's own team of "ethical hackers" calls itself SpiderLabs. 

As a master's degree graduate of the NSA/Homeland Security "Cyber Defense University," you'd think that Whitehead could easily have accessed the government's very own existing database of every email on the planet, stored in a massive Utah desert warehouse, to get the same information for absolutely free, without the need for spidery ethical hackers spinning their sticky public relations webs for fun and big, big returns to investors.

What is with the fancy two-word names of all these private security companies, anyway? Double the titles, double the fear, double the profits.