A Killer letter from America can only make it into a rare late arvo slot ...

 

There were so many reptiles this morning, what with the return of the Major, JC walking amongst us, and the Caterist in prime black bashing form, that the pond missed out on the chance to catch Killer's letter from Amerikah ...

Better late than never ...

Of course Killer was a little too early to catch all the news ...

But the syndrome's precisely the same. Killer is clearly enraptured by the mango Mussolini, but doesn't want to seem too obvious about it, what with him purporting to be a journalist ...

The reptiles flung lots of snaps at Killer's piece ...best get them out of the way ...

The point of the story, encapsulated in those snaps, is to redeem the Donald and see in him the best hope for Amerikah, as you'd expect from a reptile spruiking a routine bankrupt, con artist, and snake oil salesman ...

After listing a few of the mango Mussolini's flaws, see how Killer gently turns the tide ...

Ah, you see, the American 'leets ... so it's time to worship the king ...

Meanwhile, Killer was holding out hope that the redeemer was at hand, what with institutional bias and such like abroad against the Messiah (no mention of naughty boys) ...

Does Killer care to mention the role that Faux Noise played in all this? Does Killer consider himself a member of the mainstream media? Or is he a wild-eyed maverick, a mask-fearing, vaccine doubting vigilante?

Hush, this is no time for reflection or introspection ... far better to target MSNB ...

Any mention here of the way that the richer have gotten richer by dumbing down America and keeping the hordes in servitude with ample servings of angertainment?

Nah, too hard ... keep venting about the leets and polarisation, and never mind the polarising ways of the Emeritus Chairman's reptiles ...

And so to a classic Killer line ... "Covid-era regulations, imposed by elites..."

He'll never forgive the masks, he'll never get over his Freudian fears, how happy he was back in the day in the killing fields ...

Apropos of that, it's worth noting Jill Lawrence's thoughts on the decline and fall of Ron DeSanctus in The Bulwark, and it's not just his war on the house of mouse and dictionaries ...

Face it, Florida Man Jr. is terminally short and awkward. But he had much bigger problems—even just this month—that made him utterly unsuited to lead his party or the nation.

Leader of the COVID resistance

FOR INSTANCE, THIS SHOCKING January 3 announcement from the Florida Department of Health: “Florida State Surgeon General calls for halt” in the use of the Moderna and Pfizer COVID vaccines. That would be Joseph Ladapo, the discredited and dangerous “doctor” hand-picked by DeSantis to spew disinformation that threatens the lives and health of Floridians. Federal authorities responded with a polite version of Are you nuts? and noted that “misinformation and disinformation” (like Ladapo’s claims) are lowering vaccine uptake and contributing to the ongoing toll of “death and serious illness” from COVID.

A top DeSantis point of pride is his rejection of what he continues to call the government’s “COVID authoritarianism” on masking and vaccines. Back in 2021, when the Delta surge was causing Florida COVID cases and pediatric hospitalizations to set records, then–Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber called DeSantis the “the pied piper leading everybody off a cliff.”

Last September, when U.S. officials approved an updated shot for everyone over six months old, DeSantis and Ladapo (of course!) advised against it for anyone under 65. COVID grandstanding was also a mainstay of DeSantis’s closing argument in Iowa this month, amplified by the public release of Ladapo’s call to stop the vaccines.

Voters paying attention might have noticed the egregious timing. We are now experiencing what is expected to be a major, annual surge of COVID cases. Hospital admissions are not spiking, however, thanks to the updated vaccines that are safe and protective, no matter what DeSantis and Ladapo say about them. Plus, new research publicized this month shows that multiple COVID vaccine doses greatly reduce the risk of debilitating long COVID, which scientists estimate has afflicted tens of millions of people worldwide.

DeSantis, Ladapo, and other anti-vaccine leaders are having a measurable toll of illness and death on their constituents. “The excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters,” according to a study of Ohio and Florida deaths after COVID vaccines became available to all adults in 2021.

In a national study of the Delta-Omicron outbreak of June 2021 to March 2022, rural counties had higher COVID case and death rates than urban counties and “the most remote rural counties” had “COVID-19 mortality rates 52% higher than the most urban counties.” Other studies found a large vaccination gap between adults in rural counties (46 percent) and urban counties (60 percent) in August 2021; and documented that rural residents were less likely to mask up or socially distance.

Resistance to protective behaviors, not surprisingly, “was driven by rural support for former President Donald Trump and other politicians who downplayed the severity of the pandemic, consistently undermined health experts, and politicized COVID-19.”

Yep, it's a Killer every which way, and that's why Killer is out there doing his best for the killing fields ...

Amazingly well played, not a single mention of Faux Noise and the role it's played ... and the pond should probably run that full Rowe cartoon, the source of the nose art featured above ...

Finally the pond just wanted to note a stunning example of the Streisand effect ...

If it hadn't been for this story in Politico, How a Judge in India Prevented Americans From Seeing a Blockbuster Report, the pond would never have known that the report had been taken down from the Wayback Machine, or ended up visiting the two links left up on the Wayback Machine about the sorry saga (links in the Politico story), or visited this blog, or returned to an old story in The New Yorker, Annals of Crime, A Confession Exposes India’s Secret Hacking Industry.

The pond had long been fascinated by India's scamming industry, but hadn't paid much attention to the hacking industry, and then the Streisand effect kicked in ...

If that New Yorker story is behind the paywall (the pond can never tell, because of the auto log in), this is how it began...

In the summer of 2020, Jonas Rey, a private investigator in Geneva, got a call from a client with a hunch. The client, the British law firm Burlingtons, represented an Iranian-born American entrepreneur, Farhad Azima, who believed that someone had hacked his e-mail account. Azima had recently helped expose sanctions-busting by Iran, so Iranian hackers were likely suspects. But the Citizen Lab, a research center at the University of Toronto, had just released a report concluding “with high confidence” that scores of cyberattacks on journalists, environmentalists, and financiers had been orchestrated by BellTroX, a company, based in New Delhi, that was running a giant hacking-for-hire enterprise. The operation had targeted numerous Americans. Burlingtons wondered: could Rey try to find out if Azima had been another BellTroX victim? He said yes.

Researchers at Citizen Lab had learned of BellTroX’s activities from someone that the company had tried to trick with “spear phishing”—sending a bogus message to trick a recipient into providing access to personal data. Citizen Lab spent three years investigating BellTroX, including by analyzing Web sites used to shorten and disguise phishing links, combing through social-media accounts of BellTroX’s employees, and contacting victims. Reuters, in coördination with Citizen Lab, published an exposé on BellTroX the same day as the report. But BellTroX’s owner denied any wrongdoing, the Indian authorities never publicly responded to the allegations, and the accusations remained unconfirmed.

Rey’s investigation into the Azima case shed new light not only on BellTroX but also on several other outfits like it, establishing beyond dispute that India is home to a vast and thriving cyberattack industry. Last year, Rey secured the first detailed confession from a participant in a hacking-for-hire operation. In court papers, an Indian hacker admitted that he had infiltrated Azima’s e-mail account—as had employees at another firm. Moreover, there were countless other Indian hackers for hire, whose work was often interconnected. John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, who helped lead the BellTroX investigation, told me that the admissions Rey obtained are “huge” and “move the whole conversation forward.” He added, “You know how in some industries, everybody ‘knows a guy’ who can do a certain thing? Well, in hacking for hire, India is ‘the guy.’ They are just so prolific.”

Rey, whose firm is called Athena Intelligence, recently met with me at a Geneva coffeehouse. Over espresso, Rey, who has short black hair and a neatly trimmed beard, told me that he is not a programmer himself. But, when Burlingtons hired him to look into whether an Indian company had hacked Azima, he remembered hearing that, about a decade earlier, private intelligence firms across Europe had been approached by an Indian entrepreneur named Rajat Khare, who ran a company called Appin Security. “From what I have learned in this investigation, he e-mailed everybody,” Rey told me. Khare had pitched what he called “ethical hacking.” An Appin slide presentation, which was later published by Reuters, promised that the company could obtain “information that you imagine and also one that you didn’t imagine.” Some examples: “Get remote access to Email, Computers, Websites, devices which are not accessible. Collect confidential Information/Evidences and give your customers real satisfaction.”

“Everyone’s hackable,” one slide promised. The company charged twenty-five hundred dollars for a month of work by a single hacker, and the presentation said that it had taken less than two weeks for Appin to obtain confidential e-mails and photographs confirming a husband’s suspicion that his wife had cheated on him (“even though she was using an updated Norton 360 antivirus”). Other cases were more complicated: the company said that it had taken forty-seven days to unearth evidence of money laundering and criminal contacts from the e-mail account of a chief executive in Russia. Appin’s slides said that its clients included the Indian Army and the Indian Ministry of Defense. (A lawyer for Khare said that he did not remember the presentation and that his activity had been limited to “ethical hacking and robotics training.”)

Rey ran across Appin’s name again a few years later, while working in India to help a conglomerate upgrade its information security. In the course of this project, he befriended an Indian cybersecurity consultant named Aditya Jain. One day, Jain mentioned that, earlier in his career, he’d worked for Appin. They stayed in touch, and Jain later helped Rey test another client’s digital security. When Burlingtons hired Rey to take on the Azima case, he called his old friend, who was living near New Delhi. Did Jain have any ideas about who might have done the hacking?

Jain indeed had some ideas: he had hacked Azima himself...

And so on, and so thanks to an Indian judge, and the Indian hacking industry wanting to play mushroom, the pond found itself fully down the Indian hacking industry rabbit hole and fully in the grip of the Streisand effect ...

Now just for fun ...