Recon’s Black Ops

this one, I’d say our country is headed for the crapper.

Seriously, what on earth was she smoking?

Beware of the bank that seeks for you to refinance your mortgage. While this may be a very equitable option, I am going to relay this firsthand experience, with Suntrust Bank.

The other day, I received an offer for their “No Cost to Close” refinancing program. Given that this could potentially be a good deal, I gave them a call.

The telemarketer on the phone immediately pulled up my loan information, and–told me that, according to the data he had available, that my house was worth $5,000 more than I bought it for 3 years ago.

Needless to say, my BS meter jumped off the scale. This is because (a) prices have gone DOWN–not up–in my neighborhood, (b) there are no less than 13 abandoned houses in my immediate vicinity, and (c) there are no small number of homes for sale with listing prices at the same as that was quoted, and yet the ones that are selling, are selling for less.

Then, he said that in order to start the underwriting process I would need to cough up about $600, none of which is refundable, and that the loan approval would be contingent on

(a) my credit being what I said it was (no problem, as my score is just north of 800)
(b) my income being properly verified (fair enough)
(c) that my home is actually worth what their estimates tell them.

There is no way in hell that (c) would pass muster. And if their appraiser came back with such an approval, it would be unadulterated fraud in the first degree.

So why am I calling this a scam?

SunTrust Bank is engaging in a crafted version of churning to generate cash flow.

(1) They are falsely inflating the appraisals to give the illusion that your equity is worth more than it is, in order to inflate an asset on their balance sheet that is already inflated, which allows them to issue even more loans.

(2) They are lying to the investors about the quality of their assets.

(3) They are lying to the borrowers about the “equity” that they have.

(4) They are lying to their depositors about the safety of their funds.

(5) They are lying to the public about their assets, and–because depositors are guaranteed by the FDIC and many of these home loans are guaranteed by gubmint–putting taxpayer money at serious risk.

(6) It’s a classic game of “heads I win…tails you lose”. They can always take the $600 and run.

Anyone wanna bet that SunTrust is not the only one doing this crap?

…this one, need to have a come-to-Jesus meeting. Pilgrim and I would love to arrange the meeting and save the Alabama taxpayers lots of money.

Color me skeptical, but then again this would be impressive if independent investigators determine that this wasn’t a hoax.

Finding a massive boat at 13,000 feet up in the mountains, with carbon dating going back about 4800 years (a find that would be a boon for the young-earth Creationist types), would be eyebrow-raising indeed.

Then again, we have had scandals and hoaxes before. I’ve always recommended the Christian novel A Skeleton in God’s Closet, for insight into matters such as these.

Still, it’s an interesting story.

A former winner on the “Dating Game”, was in fact a serial killer.

Thankfully, though, the girl who “picked” him–Cheryl Bradshaw–never went out with him.

While there was some initial concern over the possibility of this being more hype than real concern, it is now looking like the complaint has substance.

School district officials say the only time they ever turn on the webcams is when one of the school-issued laptops have been reported lost, stolen or missing, so that they can try to track them down. They concede that the wording in the laptop policy was not sufficient, and did not explain the security feature, but insist that they never spied on students. Lower Merion officials say that they turned the cameras on 42 times in the past 14 months, which helped them recover 28 missing laptops.

Aside from the obvious problem–Lower Merion, by their own admission, embarked on a policy that ran afoul of the 4th Amendment–Karl Denninger points out that this story is on the same level as an 8-letter word rooted deep in our agricultural heritage.

There is a hell of an attempt at misdirection in here that may lead people to believe that the school “only” accessed machines when they were reported lost or stolen.

That is a technological impossibility.

In fact the school accessed, at least to trace the location of, each and every machine each and every time it was connected to The Internet.

That is, they were (and are, if the software is still on those computers) in fact spying, to at least the knowledge of location, on each and every one of those 2,300 machines, whether they “activate” the cameras or not.

Let me explain a few things for those who are reading this Ticker yet do not understand how The Internet operates.

Let’s presume that I have one of these “school-issued” computers because I stole said machine.

I then take it home and turn it on, connect to The Internet via my cable modem, and surf away.

Can the school locate the machine?

It cannot unless the school has previously installed on that computer spyware that intentionally has the computer “phone home” whenever it is connected to The Internet, thereby providing the school with a location trace each and every time it is used, whether it is stolen or not.

This is due to how The Internet works. There are 4 billion “IP Addresses” that exist in the IPv4 space. You could almost literally show up with your machine on any one of them. Now this isn’t quite true in practice, because for routing reasons ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers) and their cohorts RIPE, APNIC and similar attempt to congregate the numbers used in various regions and by various internet providers into contiguous blocks. This is done so that the Internet’s routing table does not require 4 billion entries. As a consequence a “/16″, or 65,536 IP addresses, might be assigned and routed in “one block” to a given cable company. Larger aggregates are assigned “en-masse” to nations and regions of the globe.

But the point remains – it is not possible for the school to “scan” for missing computers – that is, it can’t “ask the Internet to turn on the camera in machine #2323.”

That is technologically impossible.

So what the school has loaded on these machines – what it has to have loaded on these machines – is in fact much more nefarious than is being disclosed.

These systems have to have software on them that “phones home” and checks in on a regular basis with some fixed IP address (belonging to the school.) This function then gives the school the “at that instant” IP address where the machine is located. Once the student’s computer has “phoned in” the school system can then tell it to do various things – for example, capture the keyboard, turn on the web cam and take a picture, or even load and run an arbitrary piece of software (say, to look for a given file or transmit the contents of a file to the school’s site.)

The key here is that the machine must phone in for each separate IP address it connects through before any such remote command can be given to it, because otherwise the “home base” has no possible way of knowing to what Internet address it should direct the command it wants to have the remote machine execute.

This isn’t conjecture, this is fact given the how The Internet operates. It cannot be otherwise.

As such the location of each and every one of these machines is being traced at all times by the school district, whether they claim they are using the “remote camera” feature or not!

They didn’t disclose that in these interviews and articles, did they?

It gets better. In essentially every case all that is necessary to locate a “missing” or “stolen” computer is the “ping” from the remote location to the central site. Armed with the IP address that a stolen or missing machine is on, the person can use a simple command to determine where it is. For instance, my home computer is at 70.169.168.7 – if I use “dig -x xxxxxx” I get back:

7.168.169.70.in-addr.arpa. 17409 IN PTR wsip-70-169-168-7.pn.at.cox.net.

This tells me that the machine is on a network operated by COX Communications. I can then call COX (or ask the police to call COX) and they can tell me (or the cops) the exact location where that IP address is. Many home services “move addresses around”, but given an IP address and a time virtually all Internet providers can tell you who owned the account or circuit that was in use. MCSNet, when I ran it, commonly was subpoenaed for this information by various law enforcement authorities for perfectly legitimate reasons (e.g. tracking down someone engaged in child pornography distribution.) We, like essentially every Internet provider, kept this information on a session-by-session basis because it was necessary to do so in order to generate bills to customers – that is, it is and was an ordinary business record that was necessary for the operation of our firm.

So all the school really needs to track a lost or stolen laptop is the IP address from a “phone home” application. They thus have little if any reason to take control of said machine, or to activate the camera – unless they intend to act as Stasi-style spies.

I would have expected Vox Day to report this first, but Denninger beat him to the punch.

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

If the allegations are true, then every one of these “administrators” should be prosecuted for civil rights abuses, and more.

I concur with Denninger’s take on this:

Any official or employee at an “educational institution” that ever attempts anything similar to this with regard to my daughter better like gay sex a lot because I will do everything in my power to see that they receive lots of it in the state prison system for as many years as I can manage to get them confined for.

While I have no qualms with couples opting to practice contraception, when they have risks for diseases–such as cystic fibrosis and Tay Sachs Disease–abortion in such cases is, well, murder.

And yet, why is it that I am not surprised that–due to genetic testing–these diseases are being all but wiped out? Why, one might ask, is that a bad thing?

What good is it, if you make a major advancement, and yet the cure ends up being worse than the disease?

I could apply this sort of “solution”, and solve a myriad of problems. As William Bennett once said,

If you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down.

That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.

What Bennett said regarding crime, is exactly what MSNBC is tacitly promoting for diseases. The difference is what?

If aborting babies that stand to be severely handicipped is ok, then why is it not ok to abort babies that stand to be a severe threat to civil society?

I’m not advocating either–remember, I’m of the opinion that killing both is wrong–rather wondering why one is permissible over the other.

Karl Denninger reports on this wonderful piece of work by a taxpayer-funded financial institution.

Yes..you are reading that correctly: Bank of Amerika–knowing that they had the wrong house–foreclosed anyway.

To answer Denninger’s question, no. If these taxpayer-funded burglars attempted to enter the Larijani house, our only moral dilemma would be which cleaning crew to call to clean up the mess. And we would send the bill to Bank of Amerika.

Between Uncle Mossberg, Uncle Springfield, Uncle Ruger, and–yes, Triton–Uncle Kalashnikov, it would suck to be a bankster.

These criminals have committed an act of treason against the United States, and have stuck the taxpayer with the bill. Now, they are foreclosing on homes on which they have no right to foreclose. Even though they knew they had no right.

Perhaps the new American revolution needs to begin with a clear, threefold message to the banksters:

(a) we will not support any further political efforts to bail out your K Street funded criminal syndicates.

(b) We reserve a nuclear option–collective strategic default–to put an end to your paper empire. Keep up your antics, and you are more likely to get bludgeoned to death, than you are to collect a dime of your bonuses.

(c) Attempts to encroach on our Fourth Amendment rights, may result in our exercise of our Second Amendment rights. At your expense.

Their sex education is bad enough, but they also are well-known for helping teenagers kill children, all behind their parents’ backs. In this case, a PP clinic in Alabama got caught with its collective panties down.