The government has been manufacturing tragedies year by year for decades

 Sat 6:17 pm UTC, 13 Jan 2018  

posted by Tapestry

 

Who is Ted Bundy?
by Miles Mathis

I was led to look again at Ted Bundy after writing my recent exposé of the Tate “murders,” where I showed the whole thing was manufactured by the Intelligence Agencies (FBI, CIA, DIA, ONI). Since Bundy’s alleged killing spree started just five years later, we should ask if this series of events was manufactured as well, and if so, for what reason.
If you haven’t read my 83-page PDF on the Tate “murders,” you are in no position to read further here. You will find my line of reasoning bizarre. But after you have read that paper, you will see everything in a different light.
My first clue that the Bundy murders were all faked was discovering that, like Charles “Tex” Watson, Bundy supposedly fathered a child while on death row. Since that is impossible, we have an early indication that this whole thing is another charade. But what really got me on the right track was looking at Bundy’s earlier life. In 1966, Bundy went to the University of Washington to study Chinese. Big red flag. Those who study foreign languages in college, especially Russian and Chinese, are disproportionately recruited by Intelligence. In addition, we know he worked on Nelson Rockefeller’s Presidential campaign in 1968, and of course Rockefeller was long involved in Intelligence, including being President of the NSC and Chairman of the PCG (Planning Coordination Group—overseeing the CIA) under Eisenhower. Later, Bundy was a spy for Republican Governor Daniel Evans of Washington in 1972, posing as a college student to shadow Evans’ opponent, and—amazingly—this is admitted at Wikipedia. He was then hired as assistant to the State Republican Party Chairman. Bundy was accepted to law school on the recommendation of Evans. Evans was also a staunch supporter of Rockefeller, perhaps losing a Vice Presidential nomination when he refused to endorse Nixon in 1968. We have a series of red flags there, indicating Bundy was already an insider and spy from the beginning.

TO SEE THE PICTURES GO TO – http://mileswmathis.com/bundy.pdf

As for his birth and life as a child, it all looks like a rewrite and whitewash. Every story has three variations, and none of them make sense or are consistent. His biographies read like poor fiction,

written by flunkies at Langley. So who was Bundy, really? Or I should say, who is Ted Bundy?

I got nowhere on that question for about a year, since I wasn’t willing to travel to look up documents. Finally, the answer fell into my lap. We have seen that the elite like to use their own children in their manufactured events, since these children are available and very easy to control. In most cases, they don’t even bother to change any names. Think of Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Susan Atkins, John Phillips, and Jim Morrison. For an example beyond the Tate event, where we saw many children of the elite used, think of John Hinckley, Jr. Hinckley’s father was a close personal friend of the Bushes, and the Bushes were even dining with the Hinckleys the night of the alleged shooting of Reagan. Even that hint didn’t help me until I started studying CIA control of art in the 1950’s and 60’s, through the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other front organizations. In that research, I stumbled across McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor (CIA supervisor) to Kennedy and Johnson and later president of the Ford Foundation. Before that, in 1953 he was appointed Dean of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. He was only 34 at the time of that appointment. That was possible only because Bundy was already CIA at the time. He had been on the Council of Foreign Relations since he was 29. He had been in Intelligence since 1941, when he joined OSS right out of Yale at age 22. He was born into the prominent Boston Brahmin families of Bundy, Putnam, Lowell, etc.
McGeorge’s older Brother William was also a prominent CIA agent, being also a foreign affairs advisor to both Kennedy and Johnson. He had a key role in planning the Vietnam War. Perhaps even more interesting is that after his government service, he became a historian, writing many books. The most famous is A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency. We are told that William had three children: Michael, Christopher and Carol.
Bundy. . .Bundy. Was it that simple? Had they really not even bothered to change the names? Looks like it. Looks like they decided to make it easy on Ted, letting him keep his name. They were so confident from past successes, they figured they could cover up every link afterwards. They would tell everyone Ted had been adopted, was originally named Cowell, and so on. Mark that: Cowell. It is a little joke, since, as we have seen, the CIA loves inside jokes. It is one letter from Lowell. We have just seen that McGeorge’s mother was a Lowell of the famous Lowells of Boston, and she was Ted’s grandmother.
They also hid McGeorge’s children. Notice they are not listed at Wikipedia. His family isn’t even mentioned, and you would think he was gay or a bachelor. I had to go to old obituaries to find out that McGeorge had four sons, Stephen, Andrew, William, and James. If we do a websearch on those names, we find convincing pictures of Stephen, Andrew and James, and none of them look to be Ted. They look somewhat like Ted (enough to be brothers or cousins), but no match. But we find no pictures of William. Was he less well known, hence the lack of web photos, or was there a fifth brother? This will have to be determined by further research.
The fact that they hid McGeorge’s children and his early photographs leads me to suspect Ted is his son, rather than the son of William. But Ted could be the son of a third unknown brother for all I know. The genealogy appears to have been changed, so I have no paperwork to go on for this essay. I have not uncovered documents here, since it is doubtful they exist. I am pursuing facial comparisons, since that is my specialty. That and photo analysis.
To get started, we should first ask if Ted is the right age to be a son of McGeorge or William. He is. William was born in 1917, McGeorge was born in 1919 and Ted was said to have been born in 1946. In 1946, McGeorge was 27, a probable time for a first son. Since McGeorge didn’t marry until 1950, it

is possible Ted was illegitimate. It is also possible they simply changed the dates. This plays into Ted’s faked bio, since in that bio Ted and his biographers tell several stories about finding a birth certificate or being shown one by a cousin. He is supposed to have discovered his grandparents weren’t his real parents, and that his sister was really his mother. That was always beyond belief, and we now see a more likely history for Ted. He may indeed have been a bastard, but he was William or McGeorge’s bastard, not the bastard of some air force veteran named Lloyd Marshall. That name is also a CIA joke, since the CIA was founded as an introduction to the Marshall Plan in 1947. General Marshall would be Secretary of State beginning in 1947 and then Secretary of Defense in 1950. Ted was said to have been born in 1946, when the OSS/CIA was already forming the Marshall Plan to fight Communism in Europe. It is also interesting that Ted was said to have been born in Vermont. Although he is later tied to the West Coast, Vermont is of course just above Massachusetts. Burlington is about 200 miles from Boston.
All this is admittedly speculative and circumstantial, but it is given a very large dose of legitimacy by studying photos of the three men:

The first two are of William Bundy, the last three Ted. I couldn’t find any photos of McGeorge as a young man. At first I thought I had found one, but it was mis-tagged. On further research, all of them turned out to be William. Curious that we don’t have any of McGeorge as a young man. Possibly he looked even more like Ted than William. At any rate, as a professional portrait painter—hired by wealthy people to reproduce their likenesses or the likenesses of their children—I can tell you the match above is quite close. If not for the difference in the upper lip, these people could be clones. Notice they have the same eyebrows, the same jawline, the same head shape (exactly), the same size forehead, the same eye-to-mouth ratio, the same neck size, similar ears, and very nearly the same noses. William tends to squint (probably because of the glasses) while Ted tends to open his eyes wide, but other than that the eyes are the same, too. They are the same width and they tilt up the same. Ted was probably instructed to open his eyes wide, to make him look crazy. They gave the same direction to Manson five years earlier. Ted and William even have the same color hair and part it on the same side. You can see Ted’s natural part in pics 2 and 3, and it matches his father’s. They have parted it on the wrong side for the mugshots, which is why it is flopping over in a weird way. That is what anyone’s hair will do when they part it opposite of the way it naturally grows or is trained. William, McGeorge and Ted were also the same height: 5’9” to 5’10” and the same weight and build.
Another indication is provided by the fact that all three men had blue eyes with brown hair, which isn’t that common in the US. The odds that both men would have this mixed trait is on the order of 1 in a hundred (1/10 times 1/10). It was common in the Bundy family however, since Stephen, Andrew, and James also had the same trait.

That first pic is McGeorge at about age 45. He looked very much like William, except that McGeorge’s hairline receded much earlier. That makes him appear to have a larger forehead and throws off the similarity somewhat at first look. That is probably why we don’t see pictures of McGeorge in his 20’s or 30’s online. But notice that the mouth and lip match is much closer with McGeorge and Ted than William and Ted. William’s lips turned down at the corners. But McGeorge and Ted both have that nearly perfect cupid’s bow on the upper lip. Ted’s mouth matches McGeorge’s mouth nearly exactly in length, width, and curvature.
We can now run some rough numbers on all these trait matches between the older Bundys and Ted. The odds that two unrelated men would match at that weight and height and hair color aren’t that that low, since after all that is about dead average. But the odds of matching that plus blue eyes, same jaw line, same eyes, same build, same face shape, same nose length, same mouth width, and same last name are extremely low. Even before the last name match, I would estimate the odds being something like 1/100,000. With the same last name (for any stated reason), the odds are more like 1 in 10,000,000. Stated another way, the probability that two men with the same last name who look this much alike are closely related is very high. Again:

In calculating these odds, we have to take into account the closeness of each match. For me, the eyes and jawline tell us all we need to know. Look at how the neck meets the jawline: an exact match.
Of course this isn’t proof. For proof that would hold up in court we would have to have documentary evidence or a DNA test. I assume all documents have been shredded and switched out for fakes, and it is unlikely Ted will come out of hiding for a blood test. So for now this is just being offered here as my professional opinion, based on a hunch and on some photo analysis. Do with it what you will.
No doubt, some will start by saying, “It can’t be. These people wouldn’t allow the famous Bundy name to be dragged through the mud on purpose! The Lowells, Putnams, etc., wouldn’t allow it. The Boston Brahmins wouldn’t wish for a famous serial killer to be linked to their names in any way, but they especially wouldn’t make it happen!” Anyone who says something like that sounds like they are still living in the 1890’s. They should be living in a Henry James novel. The truth is, everyone in the know already knows Ted was used for this program, and they find it amusing. So it doesn’t sully anything for these wealthy families. It is a point of honor, in fact. As for what the rest of us know or think of them, they couldn’t possibly care less. That is why they expend so little energy and time trying to make these scenarios air-tight. They know that neatness doesn’t count. They know most of us can be fooled by a sloppy magician’s trick, and that is all they care for. They don’t need to fool all of us. They only need to fool 95%. If a few fish like me swim out of the net, what do they care?
Think of it this way: say Sherlock Holmes were alive now. Do you honestly think the wealthy families or the CIA would have anything to fear from him? No. No one is going to hire him. As long as no one hires him, any crime he solves will be nothing more than an amusing novella. For it to go beyond literature, the police or the courts would have to get involved, and that isn’t going to happen. The police and the courts have no interest in pursuing wealthy families or the government agencies. Only when wealthy families fight one another do things still happen, but that isn’t what we have here. What we have here is the wealthy families controlling the greater society, and those families have closed all avenues of resistance against them: courts, police, the media, Congress, and so on. All those institutions are defunct.

The question remains, why would Intelligence be interested in faking a serial killer? Simple: to create instability and fear. This was one of the prime goals of Intelligence at the time, and of course it still is. In the 1960’s, the FBI had COINTELPRO and the CIA had CHAOS, and both programs have been partially declassified now, enough so that we know the one of the directives of each program was destabilization. And this was not just destabilization of the “enemy.” This was a general destabilization of the whole society. Since the entire society was seen to be moving left in the 1960’s, Hoover of the FBI, Helms and Angleton of the CIA, and many others felt that general destabilization was necessary to maintain control. Of course they had been creating fear since the end of WW2, but in the beginning that was mainly to keep military expenditures high. They needed to justify continued military spending, as well as spending to expand the Intelligence community, and the best way to do that was to manufacture conflict and fear. The Cold War was manufactured by both sides, since it allowed for massive “defense” budgets both here and in Russia. The Red Scare in the 1950’s was part of that creation of general fear. But by the late 1960’s, the Government had domestic problems to deal with, including an ever-increasing resistance to the Vietnam War.
Communism had been destroyed domestically—everybody knew that—so they needed a different way to create general fear. One of the ways they decided to do that was with manufactured bogeymen of the Manson, Bundy type.* Manson’s bogeyman was created as a hippie in order to destroy the hippie movement, and he was incredibly successful in his role. But by 1975 the hippie movement was also dead, so the bogeymen no longer needed to be of that mold. They now wished to demonize the good- looking white guy. Why? Several reasons. First of all, the charismatic, college-educated white guy was still the most dangerous person in the eyes of Intelligence at that time, since in 1975 he still had the most real power. The good-looking white guy had been the biggest thorn in their side during the hippie movement and the war protest movement. They had been the high-profile speakers with the most bravery, tenacity, and the greatest ability to sway a crowd. Therefore, Intelligence wanted to recruit all the charismatic white guys they could into their agencies, and hog-tie the rest.
Intelligence also wished to create as much sexual dissatisfaction as they could, because they found it helped sales in all areas. The dissatisfied bought more drugs, more liquor, more guns, more magazines, more newspapers, watched more TV, and were generally easier to propagandize on all issues. And this time, the focus was on women. If Intelligence could make women fear all men—especially the good- looking ones—they would immediately create huge levels of sexual dissatisfaction. These women would then watch soap operas and read pulp romances and join feminist groups, where they could be further propagandized. They would suffer from a thousand forms of anxiety and all the mental and physical effects of that anxiety, which would require a million forms of drugging and therapy, legal and illegal. And as the women went, so did the men. If the heterosexual women could be driven nuts, the heterosexual men would be taken down with them. The sexual relationship is like that: if you destroy one half of it, the other half falls as well.
Of course this is still the program, and it seeds Oprah’s empire as well as half the hospitals. It seeds the pharmaceutical industry, the porn industry, Hollywood, the cosmetic industry, radical feminism, women’s studies, men’s studies, postmodern art, and a thousand worthless TV channels.
If you or the CIA wonders why I am researching these things like a fiend, it is because my life has been ruined by these programs. In previous papers you have seen how the CIA’s (now admitted) control and destruction of art during the 20th century would affect someone like me, but these sexual destabilization programs are also ruinous, and I take them personally. Like the rest of the heterosexual male population, I have been forced to try to date these women who have been brought up on a constant fare

of planted stories of the Manson, Bundy type. I can point to many specific instances with real women where Manson, Bundy, or one of the other mainstream figments was brought up in conversation as a source of their anxieties. And it continues up to this day, with the manufactured events we see in the papers daily, many of them aimed directly at young women.

The government has been manufacturing tragedies year by year for decades, and we are now up to several a month, just to keep the patient properly traumatized. It used to be that one fake serial killer every couple of years would do the job, but in this as in everything else, the patient develops a tolerance.
After 911, the audience became more difficult to startle. In addition to your daily dose of shootings, maulings, rapes, suicides, crashes and molestations (most of them also manufactured for your viewing pleasure by the Intelligence agencies), you are now privy to at least one mass shooting or bombing every two or three months. It was found that the serial killer story took too long to unwind, so they ditched that. You don’t get serial killers much anymore. It is mass shootings instead, since they happen all at once. The American public no longer has the attention span required to follow a serial killer. Think about that, please. Don’t you think it is convenient that crazy murderers decided to quit the serial thing and go in for the mass thing instead? So nice of them to change with the times, scripting their madness to fit the demands of the media!
As Ted Bundy goes, so goes Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Kaczinski, David Berkowitz, Richard Ramirez, Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Anders Breivik, and most of the other high-profile murderers.
*For an interesting cloaked exposé of this phenomenon, I recommend you to M. Night Shyamalan’s film The Village. He is telling you that your bogeymen are faked.
http://mileswmathis.com/bundy.pdf

All famous people are placed there to misdirect you – all of them.

Mon 6:53 pm UTC, 15 Jan 2018  

posted by Tapestry

 

I am now almost 51, and it took me this long to figure out how the world really works. This time last year, I didn’t know.
The truth is, I didn’t work on the question much for the first 40 years of my life, so it isn’t really surprising I didn’t discover this sooner.
I am not claiming to understand how ALL of life works. Just this one thing.
This is what I finally understood: all famous people are there to misdirect you. ALL OF THEM. They didn’t accidentally get famous. They don’t accidentally get on TV or in movies or in books or on CDs or on the internet. And they certainly don’t earn their way into these positions, as is now clear. So how did they get there? Why do you have to see them and hear them all the time? Why do you know who they are? Because they were placed there. They were chosen to fill that position, and they were chosen in order to misdirect you from the truth.

What I Finally Understood
by Miles Mathis

You will say, “C’mon, Miles, that can’t be true. All of them? I mean, they disagree with eachother. How can they all be placed there?”
Look at it this way: say you wanted to control everyone in the world. Well, people are at different levels. They have different interests and beliefs and levels of intelligence. So if you want to control everyone, you have to place your guys at all these levels, on all possible paths.
If you are a football coach setting up a defense on the field, you don’t put all your tacklers in the middle of the field, or all on one side. You spread them out. You want to block all possible paths to the goal. You have to defend against the run and the pass, the short ball and the long ball.

It is the same with government. If you want to govern people, you have to keep them on the path you have chosen for them. That is how the governors understand government. You may think government is about keeping people employed and building highways and educating children, but it isn’t. It is about “governing” them. Moving them around at will. Think of a governess. She keeps the kids out of trouble and molds them into the sort of adults her employer or her society requires. Same thing with the governors. They keep you from troubling them and mold you into someone who can make them richer. That is what our society requires, and very little else.
With that goal in mind, the last thing the governors want is “enlightened” people or “self-actualized” people. Those people might make money for themselves, think for themselves, and govern themselves. People like that make very poor clients. People like that are just trouble. So the governors have to head them off.
Since people take many different paths, the governors have to place their blockers and tacklers everywhere. They have to have blockers for smart people and dumb people, lazy people and ambitious people, caring people and uncaring people, progressive people and conservative people, men and women, young and old.
And they have to have blockers and tacklers up and down the field, on the fifty-yard line as well as on the five-yard line. If you get past one line of tacklers, they have to have another line ready for you.
To switch the visualization, no matter how high up the mountain you climb, they have to have some guru on a goat-ledge positioned there to shunt you off on the wrong path.
No matter how deep down the rabbit hole you have climbed, they have to have some bearded caterpillar waiting for you to give you bad advice in solemn tones, recommending you eat the wrong cake or try the wrong door.
I admit it took me a while to figure this out. Over the past decade I have lost more and more of my old heroes. I got around them and moved on up the mountain. But then I came to another set of heroes perched up there, and instead of learning from my past mistakes and looking at these heroes with suspicion, I instead protected them from questions like that. I didn’t want to lose them, so I didn’t look closely at them. I nodded politely in the old ways and knelt down for the next lesson.
But eventually they said something that didn’t fit the script, and the curtain was torn. I then felt like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, when his car radio accidentally picks up the director’s channel. I was forced to pick up my bamboo mat and kettle of fish and move further up the mountain.
No matter how high I got, I was always met by a new expert, pointing sideways along a path and smiling knowingly.

Finally, I figured out the game. I figured it out by noticing that all these guys popped up there like jack-in-the-boxes, rising up from underground tunnels dug centuries earlier by an army of evil moles. They knew I would come eventually—me or someone like me—and they had made plans. The entire mountain and rabbit hole had been trapped and mined, and I began to look around for David Bowie in the Labyrinth. Like Bowie, these pretend sorcerers gave themselves away to a keen eye, since they got more desperate the nearer you got to the truth. The longer I stayed on the right path, the less likely I was to be fooled by the next trap, and they knew that.
That doesn’t mean any of this is easy. Maybe the hardest part is that you have to pass through a treacherous middle level on the mountain. Once you pass the halfway point on the mountain, the gurus get more clever. You already know a lot by that time, so they have to take that into account. They have to lead the lesson by re-teaching you a lot you already know. This makes you trust them. One of their greatest tricks is unmasking gurus on lower levels, although those gurus are really their colleagues. They say, “Oh, by the way, you know that the gurus at level 42, 43, and 44 are working for the man, right? They were trying to keep you from climbing up to this level, because they are jealous of the view I have from here. Beautiful, isn’t it?” Guru 45 then subtly suggests his view is superior to views from even higher, and that you have no need to climb up further. He has to say that in just the right way, though, at the right speed, with the right inflections, or you remember that guru 44 just told you pretty much the same thing.
You hit another hard part when you realize all the gurus are planted. As soon as that sinks in fully, they stop sending you gurus. The jack-in-the-boxes stop popping up from the mountain ledges, and you find yourself alone with the birds and the bears. That is scary not only because you have no one to talk to, but even more because your trick of doing the opposite of what you were told no longer works. You can no longer wait for the guru to point left and then move right. You have to decide on your own, without the help of negative evidence.
I know some of you are laughing, but do you understand how hard that is? If you are a good ways up the mountain, just think how many of your decisions were decisions of avoidance. Compare the number of paths you refused because they looked bad to the number of paths you chose because they looked good. If you are like me, most of your progress has been due to the former. Given ten paths, you chose number 7 because 1-6 and 8-10 all stank. And they all stank because you could see lots of stinky people clogging up those paths. The choice was easy.
But once you get past the gurus, you no longer have stinky people showing you how not to live. Up above you are only empty paths, none of them either beckoning you or offending you. All is silent. With the mountaintop draped in cloud, how do you know which way to go?
Let us transport ourselves back down the mountain some ways, where the gurus are as thick as flies on a summer dunghill. At this level, I will not find many who wish to learn my lesson. The students are in thrall to the teachers, and do not wish to fall out of thrall. These students will tell me that one side or the other must be right. Given a certain question, they can’t all be wrong, can they?

Well, if they are all paid to be wrong, they can. This is easiest to see from the so-called debates we watch on TV. Whether it is political debates between candidates or manufactured debates on news programs, we always see the question divided two ways, and the people on both sides speaking nonsense. The truth is always avoided by both sides, as if it is a virus. Let’s take a topic, say, gun control. This is probably the hottest topic of the past two years. My knee-jerk reaction is to be against gun control, if only because the governors are for it. If the government is trying this hard to sell me something, I know it is not worth buying. The government has proven over and over it can’t be trusted, so I do the logical thing and refuse to trust it. But that doesn’t mean I have gone out and bought a gun. I am not a hunter so I have no use for a gun. I don’t really think a gun is going to even my chances against the government. But this is exactly what the pro-gun side seems to be arguing. And it seems to be what the audience is hearing, since the audience is going out and buying guns like they are about to be discontinued.
Here is what you never hear in the gun control debate from either side. This is what I would say to the government when it sent in some stuffed shirt to promote gun control:
Look, I have no need for guns. Most of my neighbors have no need for guns, unless they are hunters. If you want us to quit buying guns and ammunition in such outrageous numbers, why don’t you quit scaring the shit out of us with all these faked murders like Sandy Hook and the Boston Marathon? Why don’t you quit arming the police with tanks and machine guns? Why don’t you quit using the army and National Guard to run suspicionless checkpoints? Why don’t you quit running drills in schools and small towns, with black helicopters and live ammunition? Why don’t you quit tasering people to death for minor infractions? Why don’t you quit building private jails to house people who have done next to nothing? Why don’t you quit turning the DHS into a Gestapo? Maybe if you guys quit acting like Nazis, we would quit buying so many guns. Has that ever occurred to you?
But you never hear that. You often hear some variation of the argument that the Constitution gives people the right to have arsenals of AR-15’s, to protect themselves from the government. That isn’t any more sensible than the government line. If we are going to debate the topic (rather than just allow that what is, is what must be), we might want to make some rational suggestions, such as that it isn’t necessary for the government to be at war with its own people. We got along fine as a country for 225 years without a Department of Homeland Security, and it wouldn’t be that hard to turn back the clock just 14 years, to before 2001. None of this is necessary, neither the arming of the citizenry nor the militarizing of the police force. If we got rid of a few bad people at the top, it would all end tomorrow.
As it goes with that topic, it goes with most others. Neither side is ever telling you the truth, because they are both trying to make a buck off of you. The gun control people are trying to get more taxes for “Homeland Security,” while the gun advocates are hoping to sell you a gun. Just imagine the total market for domestic arms sales in the past five years. It boggles the mind. Which means the government is probably playing both sides, as usual. I would be willing to bet that most of the money spent on guns in the US since Obama took office has gone into the pockets of the same billionaires who are profiting from Homeland Security. It is doubtful that most folks have ever thought of that.

Those who haven’t should study the recent history of Smith&Wesson. Did you know that Smith&Wesson was bought out in a hostile takeover in 2001, and that the government was involved? Remember, 2001 was also year one of DHS. Coincidence? Did you know that the $200 million company was bought for $15 million, and that this rock-bottom price was due to fire-arm regulation by President Clinton? Did you know that after an initial plunge due to the Clinton regulation, their sales have since skyrocketed?
Just a coincidence, right? Did you know that the buyer of Smith&Wesson was a start-up company named Saf-T-Hammer? We are told it was a maker of gun locks, but it wasn’t. It was a start-up company with no history of making anything. “Saf-T-Hammer never manufactured that lock independently before buying out S&W, and does not now manufacture it separately from the guns.” This brings up the question of who does own Saf-T-Hammer. Well the company changed names to Smith and Wesson Holding Group, which now has 83% Institutional Ownership. What does that mean? It means the company is owned by institutions, mainly investment firms and banks. The two biggest owners are the Vanguard Group and Fidelity Investments, but other owners include the Royal Bank of Canada, ING, and Barclays. So my suspicion is proved true once again. The billionaire investors are making money off you both ways: they tax you for Homeland Security, which scares you into buying guns, and the money you spend on guns also goes to them.
This list of institutional investors of Smith&Wesson rings a bell, since the top two appear on Project Censored’s 2013 list of the world’s top investment firms:
1 BlackRock US $3.560 trillion
2 UBS Switzerland $2.280 trillion
3 Allianz Germany $2.213 trillion
4 Vanguard Group US $2.080 trillion

5 State Street Global Advisors (SSgA) US $1.908
6 PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Company) US $1.820 trillion 7 Fidelity Investments US $1.576 trillion
8 AXA Group France $1.393 trillion
9 JPMorgan Asset Management US $1.347 trillion
10 Credit Suisse Switzerland $1.279 trillion
11 BNY Mellon Asset Management US $1.299 trillion
12 HSBC UK $1.230 trillion
13 Deutsche Bank Germany $1.227 trillion
The number is managed funds. Notice that Vanguard and Fidelity are high on the list. Blackrock bought out Barclays Investments in 2009, but Barclays still has company assets of over 2 trillion. Note, that is company assets for Barclays, not managed funds.
Beyond that, all of these companies have been caught up in illegal activities in the past decade, including the gigantic LIBOR and ISDAfix scandals, in which these people were caught fixing the prices of just about everything. Many of them have been fined hundreds of millions of dollars, but they still refuse to obey the laws. Most of them have been caught laundering huge amounts of money, but again, they have just been slapped on the wrist and gone on as before. Vanguard was prosecuted by the government under the RICO Act for illegally investing clients’ monies in offshore gambling sites. They bought off the court.
You might also be interested to know that Vanguard and Blackrock are invested in Sturm, Ruger &Co., a competitor of Smith&Wesson. No matter what brand of gun you buy, they are raking in the money.
The gurus are screwing you from both ends. The people they are hiring to debate gun control in the media on both sides are working for the banks. The escalation benefits them from all directions.
So make a list of all the famous people selling both sides of this argument. No, really. Make an actual list. Write down all the people you love to hate who are on the other side. Then write down all the people that you think are on your side. Then ask yourself, “Are any of them speaking any sense?” Or are they all promoting this escalation one way or the other?
This is how it goes, on all topics.
So what pushed me over the edge on the greater question of famous people? What was the AHA moment? You may laugh, but it was Lyndon LaRouche. Someone said to me recently, “You know, what is weird is how right Lyndon LaRouche was.” And I got to thinking. Yes, he was right about a lot of things, and he was even right about the “out there” stuff, like the government pushing drugs [see Dope, Inc.], laundering money, fluoride, the financial meltdown, pedophilia, and so on. So I went back and studied his writings across the board. Do you know what I found? A higher-level guru, placed fairly far up the mountain to misdirect the most avant of the avant garde conspiracy theorists. I found he was a Marxist until he was almost 60, which of course I saw as a red flag. No one over thirty was still a Marxist in the US in 1970, except a few dupes and a few small-time spooks working the campuses. No true intellectual could stomach Marx’s prose, much less his theory.

I say that not as a champion of capitalism or of the US system in general, but only as a champion of reason. It should now be clear that Marxism was never anything else but a disguised replacement for Republicanism, created to appeal to the idealistic youth of the West who were disenchanted with their own failed institutions. That is, Socialism was dressed from the beginning to look like a fairer sister of Democracy/Republicanism, but it was actually a crone in poor make-up. It was purposely created to break down immediately into fascism, the way plastic is now made to break down when exposed to light. Marxism borrowed the egalitarian platitudes of Republicanism, and even outdid it in its flattering of the lower classes; but the theorists conveniently left out any of the hard facts of government, like constitutions or courts or human nature. And by resting the whole theory on the workers, Marx and his buddies knowingly built their edifice on sand. Though top-down governance is often or usually predatory, bottom-up governance is simply a contradiction in terms. You are just as likely to successfully run a country from workers’ cooperatives as you are to run your house from the kids’ bedroom.
I am all in favor of trade unions and worker-owned companies; but at the same time I would not like to see a co-op of Walmart, McDonald’s, and USPS employees running the country. While the system we have doesn’t put the best people at the top, Marxism wouldn’t either.
But there were many other red flags with LaRouche, including his promotion of Leibniz, Abe Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, NAWAPA, SDI, and so on. It may seem strange to say it, but LaRouche was a gatekeeper like Chomsky, placed pretty far down the road to catch those who got too far ahead. Like Chomsky, LaRouche was instructed to admit to a large percentage of US and British crimes, to appeal to progressives and good researchers who had already discovered them. And also like Chomsky, LaRouche was there to prevent deeper truths from being discovered. Ironically, perhaps, LaRouche was—in most ways—positioned further up the mountain than Chomsky. LaRouche could admit to 911 where Chomsky couldn’t. LaRouche could talk about outre crimes that wouldn’t appeal to Chomsky’s audience. And they were instructed to blow a very different smoke regarding Kennedy. While Chomsky pretended to be above the whole discussion, LaRouche was instructed to tell a new variant of the Oliver Stone story, intellectualizing it with the Yalta system and a new player, Mortimer Bloomfield. Notice in that link that LaRouche suggests Kennedy was killed for believing the US could win a war [“war-winning capability”] with the USSR. You have to be kidding me! Talk about muddying the waters with an absurdity. Do you really believe a US President could be too hawkish for the financiers behind him? This should only serve to remind us that LaRouche is himself a hawk, even hungrier for confrontation and new weapons systems than his colleague (I mean archenemy) Kissinger.
Which brings up LaRouche’s web of contacts. We are told that LaRouche traveled the world, having

meetings with top people in many countries, including the Soviet Union. So how did he manage that? In 1967, at age 45, we are told he was teaching at New York City’s Free School, but there is no listing anywhere for that. We are told a group of students from Columbia and City College came to his classes and suddenly the National Caucus of Labor Committees was born. But if LaRouche was charismatic enough to start this movement on his own, why didn’t he start it earlier? Why did he wait until 1968, when he was 46? We must ask not just why his movement caught fire then, but how. How were all the magazines and books and travel funded? How did LaRouche manage to schedule meetings with important people, seeing that up to 1968 he was not one and had no contacts? Some would say I have some far-out ideas like LaRouche had in the 1970’s. Do you think I can use those ideas to schedule meetings with the heads of state in Europe, Russia and Asia? Of course not. Revolutionary or non- mainstream ideas are precisely what prevent one from doing that. LaRouche’s entire biography is a contradiction, since we are being sold the idea that he was attacking the mainstream leaders viciously, while at the same time taking meetings with them.
You will say I am implying that SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) or parts of it were infiltrated by the government, but LaRouche himself tells us that. His NCLC was originally a faction of SDS, and although “it was originally a New Left organization influenced by Trotskyist ideas,” it was “opposed to other New Left organizations which LaRouche said were dominated by the Ford Foundation, Institute for Policy Studies and Herbert Marcuse.” If you can accept what he says—that other New Left organizations were dominated by these government think-tanks and foundations—why not his NCLC? LaRouche’s organization has all the earmarks of late 1960’s government programs, including brainwashing, violence, cultism, and created confusion, so why not ask the question?
“LaRouche writes in his autobiography that in 1971 the NCLC formed ‘intelligence units’, and the following year started training members in paramilitary tactics.” Intelligence units? Does that sound like the language of a Marxist professor, or of a CIA agent?
So if he is an agent, why did they later throw him in jail? Are you sure they did? I have shown you in recent papers that several famous people you thought were in jail probably never were, including Ezra Pound and Charles Manson. LaRouche’s alleged time in jail simply glosses up his resume even more in the eyes of those who would follow him.
Notice that LaRouche has always been encouraging confrontation. In the early years we are told his followers beat their Marxist foes with pipes and bats. I think it is just another planted story, but the form of the story is crucial. They want you to think there is a lot of political violence going on, even though there isn’t; just as now they want you to think there are mass murders every month, although there aren’t. The billionaires love a manufactured world of fear and chaos, because fear and chaos keep all markets brisk. In a world of love and satisfaction, all sales would plummet.
This is why we saw George Bush telling people to go out and buy stuff after 911. They found that they had overplayed that one by a tad, and that people were so shocked they had stopped buying. You want to scare people just enough to make them buy stuff to decorate the bunker, but not enough to send them down into it. They learned their lesson there, and they keep the security level at a constant bright orange now, instead of blinking red. At orange, most people will be at Walmart every other day stocking up on toilet paper, baking soda, and camouflage pants; at red they will have pad-locked the shutters, armed the booby traps, and lit the candles.

Some will say, “What about you? How do we know you aren’t another posted guru, planted to misdirect us?” Well, I’m not famous, am I? I am not on TV, am I? I am not promoted by some studio or consortium or publisher or think-tank. No one is sending you here: if you got to these pages you got here on your own, probably by lucking out in a websearch. That is another difference between me and someone like LaRouche. Although most of the US articles about him over the years have been negative, they still wrote about him. You should find that curious in itself. Coverage is coverage, you know, positive or negative. As they say, all press is good press as long as they spell your name right.
None of the articles on LaRouche over the years made any sense, because if LaRouche really were what the articles were claiming—a crazy cultist out to defame America and England—why were they writing about him? Why would the mainstream give someone like that the publicity? Remember, LaRouche was right about some things, and one of the things he was right about was the CIA’s total control of the press. We didn’t need him to tell us that, since we got proof of it from the Senate hearings in the late 1970’s (see the Church Committee hearings). Well, given that, why would this controlled press want to publicize LaRouche at all? Why not just ignore him completely? That’s what they do to people they really wish to bury, like me for instance.
I don’t even have a Wikipedia page. Go try to build a Wiki page for me, and see how long it lasts. By contrast, study LaRouche’s Wikipedia page. Not only is it extremely long, it is not nearly as black as you might think it would be, given his professed stance against the mainstream. Normally, Wikipedia blackwashes people it doesn’t like unmercifully. Although we see large parts of his page spun negative, we see surprisingly large parts spun positive. You will say those parts were written by his acolytes, but that is to ignore how Wikipedia normally works. Normally, if you go on a page of someone the institutions hate, you will find a complete blackwash. If you try to add any positive remarks or correct the negative ones, your comments will be deleted immediately. But we don’t see that with LaRouche. That in itself is a sign I am right about him.
I am not saying you should trust me. You shouldn’t trust anyone, especially someone you haven’t met in person. You should read everything closely and make a decision based on continuity and logic, not on trust.
So how far back does this rule go, you will ask. Is every famous person in history a plant, or just the living ones? I intend the rule to apply to only the living ones, and the recently dead. I have shown in recent papers that we can take the rule back to the Civil War, but the further back we go the more exceptions there will be. My research is limited, of course, so I can’t address every famous person who ever lived. But any famous person from the past who is still promoted heavily should immediately fall into your bag and ring a bell. I saw Alan Watts being promoted in strange ways in the film Her recently, and had I not already known he was an agent, I would have been alerted to him in that way. Going further back, I showed in a recent paper that Walt Whitman was being promoted in the film Kill Your Darlings. This was one of the red flags that outed him for me.
Since the broad control of media didn’t take effect until recently, there will no doubt be many exceptions to the rule even in the late 19th century and early 20th century. There may be some few exceptions still. But don’t make the mistake of assuming that just because you have gone back before 1947 that the control no longer exists. It was less perfect and less broad, but it has existed for many centuries, and perhaps forever.

http://mileswmathis.com/guru.pdf

 TAP – Yes even the guy whose music is selling family breakdown, drugs and spirits.  It’s all the control system working to box you in to your confusion.

Teen Pokemon Go players robbed at gunpoint in London park

The teenagers were playing the game in Whittington Park in Islington on Tuesday night

A group of teenagers playing Pokemon Go in a north London park were robbed of their phones at gunpoint, police have said.
Three young people were playing the popular mobile phone game in Whittington Park near Upper Holloway station on Tuesday evening when they were approached by three men who demanded them to hand over their smartphones.
One of the suspects drew what appeared to be a handgun from his waistband and pointed it at the victims.


The teenagers, aged 15, 16 and 18, handed over their phones and were left shaken but unharmed after the incident, which took place at around 10:30pm.
Pokemon Go, an “augmented reality” game which allows users to catch the cute fictional characters in real life, launched in the UK two weeks ago.
Politicians concerned about phone thefts urged Scotland Yard last week to deploy community officers, dubbed “Pokemon plod”, to locations where players gather to collect items and battle each other.

Three students were robbed of their phones as they played the game in Manchester just days after its release.
In America it was reported that armed robbers in Missouri were using the game to target victims in secluded areas.
And a player in Glouestershire was criticised for wasting police time after they called 999 to report someone had “stolen their Pokemon”.
Half an hour before the incident, police believe the same three suspects robbed a 24-year-old man as he entered the park on foot.

 Katie Forster
@katieforster 
Saturday 30 July 2016

Google Offers Webform To Comply With Europe’s ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Ruling

Live in the European Union and want some old, irrelevant info about you deleted from search results? Google has now implemented a search removal request mechanism for people living in Europe who believe it has indexed information about them that they have a right to remove.
The arrival of the webform — which was put online earlier this morning — for users to request data be removed follows a European Court Of Justice ruling earlier this month which said that Google must respect a “right to be forgotten” and, at the request of private individuals, remove “irrelevant” and outdated information that contravenes an EU privacy directive concerning the way personal data is processed.
The ruling was triggered by a complaint by a Spanish man who was seeking to have results related to his name and a property closure removed from the search engine.
Earlier this month, following the Court of Justice ruling, it emerged that Google was already receiving requests for search content removal — albeit, the listed examples were from a convenient trio of what sounded like unsavory types: an ex-politician looking to be re-elected and wanting links detailing bad behavior in office removed; a doctor wanting to erase negative reviews from patients; and a convicted paedophile wanting details of his court conviction for possession of child abuse images taken down.
Which does rather smell like a controlled leak on Google’s part, in an effort to generate negative publicity about the Court of Justice ruling.
The ruling is certainly controversial, though — with outspoken critics including freedom of speech rights groups such as the Open Rights Group, and Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, to name a few.
Wales dubbed it “ridiculous” and “very bizarre”, pointing out that it could lead to a scenario where a newspaper can publish information but a search engine can’t link to it. Or that a smaller search engine with no business footprint in Europe is able to display information that a larger search engine such as Google can’t. Censorship of information is the specter that critics of the ruling are invoking.
On the other side of the argument are the privacy rights of individuals, which have often been trampled over by companies in the rush to build increasingly lucrative digital businesses by amassing and storing mountains of data about users.
The sophistication of the technology tools that automatically sift data means that personal information that might have naturally faded into the background in previous eras, when, for instance, old copies of a newspaper became harder to come by, ends up hanging around in the public domain for far longer than it perhaps should. Hence the ‘right to be forgotten’.
For now, the Court ruling has sided with the latter argument — and its judgement is immediately enforceable, explaining why Google has needed to act quickly to put a process in place to deal with requests made under the ruling.
There is also evidently an appetite among Europeans to edit their Google search history, with the company telling TechCrunch it has already received “a few thousand” requests.
Google’s compliance mechanism for the ruling is a webform where users in the European Union can provide details about the information they believe they have a right to remove under European Data Protection Law.
The form notes that Google will then make a judgement on whether a request meets the specification of the law.

In implementing this decision, we will assess each individual request and attempt to balance the privacy rights of the individual with the public’s right to know and distribute information. When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials.

Google’s wording suggests it is continuing to kick against the judgement — as it flags up the “public interest” argument, by giving examples where “outdated information” may still be pertinent in the eyes of the general public (fraud, malpractice, misconduct in public office and so on).
The difficulty of making such assessments also suggests the process could become extremely unwieldy for Google if the number of information take-down requests grows further — since, by nature, the process requires a case-by-case approach and can’t be automated.
Those requesting information removal are required to verify their identity by submitting a copy of an identity document such as a driver’s licence, national ID card or other photo ID.
Google’s process allows for acting authorized agents to submit requests on behalf of others provided they are in possession of the requisite identity and authorization documents — which does open up the possibility that a cottage industry of search removal request businesses could spring up offering to comb through your search history and submit requests on your behalf.
In an emailed statement provided to TechCrunch, Google revealed that as well as working with local data  protection authorities in European countries, it is creating an “expert advisory committee” to help it navigate the judgement process. Which probably means more lucrative work for privacy lawyers.
Google’s statement follows below:

“To comply with the recent European court ruling, we’ve made a webform available for Europeans to request the removal of results from our search engine. The court’s ruling requires Google to make difficult judgments about an individual’s right to be forgotten and the public’s right to know. We’re creating an expert advisory committee to take a thorough look at these issues. We’ll also be working with data protection authorities and others as we implement this ruling.”

Update: Google has named the following as confirmed members of its expert advisory committee so far:

• Frank La Rue (UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression)
• Peggy Valcke (Director, University of Leuven law school)
• Jose Luis Piñar (former Spanish DPA, now an academic)
• Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia)
• Luciano Floridi (information ethics philosopher at Oxford Internet Institute

It’s worth emphasizing that Google’s expert committee is entirely self selected, so while advisors are being drawn from outside Mountain View, their views are likely to align with Mountain View’s.
Or, to put it another way:
Update 2: Commenting on Google’s move to comply with the Court of Justice ruling, European Commission VP Viviane Reding noted that it was long overdue, given that the core data protection law dates back to 1995.
“It is a good development that Google has announced that it will finally take the necessary measures to respect European law. It was about time since European data protection laws exist since 1995. It took the European Court of Justice to say so. The right to be forgotten and the right to free information are not foes but friends,” she said in a statement.
“The move demonstrates that fears of practical impossibility raised before were unfounded,” Reding added.

Data protection is the business model of the future.

— Viviane Reding

She went on to emphasize that the law is about striking “the right balance” between freedom of expression and data protection.
“It’s not about protecting one at the expense of the other but striking the right balance in order to protect both. The European Court made it clear that two rights do not make a wrong and has given clear directions on how this balance can be found and where the limits of the right to be forgotten lie. The Court also made clear that journalistic work must not be touched; it is to be protected,” she said.
Reding also talked up the opportunity for startups to “build strong and innovative businesses on the basis of offering true data protection”.
“Legal certainty and empowering consumers to manage their data can yield steady revenues and profits. Data protection is the business model of the future. There is a whole world of business waiting for companies wishing to seize this opportunity,” she said.
 by Natasha Lomas (@riptari)

It’s okay for Pikachu to watch you — as long as you want it to

Millions who downloaded the new Pokémon Go app are living in a brave, new, augmented reality world. For the early adopters (meaning apparently everyone you know) on iOS devices, it meant unknowingly granting Pokémon Go the permission to fully access their Google accounts.

You’ve got to risk it all to catch ‘em all, right?
Wrong. Thankfully Niantic, the company that developed Pokémon Go, acknowledged the mistake and issued a fix. Pokémon Go modified its implementation to request only “basic profile data” — user ID and email address — from Google accounts.
This brings me some peace of mind as my 15-year-old roams the park, my office, the supermarket and the park again in search of furry creatures. Yet, although the company’s privacy policy is thorough, I am left with the lingering sense of unease I feel with almost every other app. I am okay with their treatment of my son’s data today, but it’s up to the company if they want to change the way they use or share his data tomorrow.
Developers need to collect data from users to create apps and experiences like Pokémon Go, but we often feel resigned to choose between Pikachu or privacy. A University of Pennsylvania study published last year found that 58 percent of Americans have come to accept that they have little control over what companies can learn about them, even though they would like to be in control.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Businesses must be intentional, responsible and clear about the data they collect, and provide their customers with real choices. Powerlessness breeds mistrust, and a system based on mistrust benefits no one. On the other hand, earned trust drives adoption and lasting success.
There are three simple steps companies can take to earn trust:

• Stay lean. Do you need to know when someone is scheduled for a doctor’s visit? Do you need access to their 27 selfies in front of a national monument? Focus on the data you need and leave the rest alone.
• Build in security. There is no one-size-fits-all security solution. The volume and type of data to which your company has access will determine the appropriate security measures.
• Engage your consumers. Help people see the value you’re bringing to them by using their data. Chances are they will be happy to trade in their data for a customized experience.

This doesn’t mean consumers are off the hook. We shouldn’t just shrug and breeze through privacy notices accepting whatever permission levels are required. We don’t realize just how powerful we can be if we take full ownership of our data. Replace “data” with the word “dollars” and the value exchange becomes a lot more tangible. Indifference and inaction toward data collection become a lot more absurd. Information is currency.
As the lifeblood of any business, consumers have a unique opportunity to leverage their trust as a way to regain control of their data. Opting out is the most direct path, but not necessarily the right one for you (or the most fun).
Here are a few other things people can do to take back control of their data:

• Learn about and use the privacy and security settings on your computer and phone and help others to understand how they work.
• Take it to social media and spread the word about the companies that do great things, as well as those that do “bad things” around data.
• Support organizations that advocate for better privacy, and use products built with a focus on privacy.

Today I am choosing to trust Pokémon Go with my son’s data, because I have read and understood the terms. But I am just one person, and I happen to be a lawyer. In the long term, we need a commitment from both companies and consumers to make conscious choices about data.

 by Denelle Dixon-Thayer

Facebook begins tracking non-users around the internet

Company begins displaying cookie warnings for European users after expanding ad network

Facebook will now display ads to web users who are not members of its social network, the company announced Thursday, in a bid to significantly expand its online ad network. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Facebook will use cookies, "like" buttons, and other plug-ins embedded on third-party sites to track members and non-members alike. The company says it will be able to better target non-Facebook users and serve relevant ads to them, though its practices have come under criticism from regulators in Europe over privacy concerns. Facebook began displaying a banner notification at the top of its News Feed for users in Europe today, alerting them to its use of cookies as mandated under an EU directive.
"Publishers and app developers have some users who aren’t Facebook users," Andrew Bosworth, vice president of Facebook’s ads and business platform, tells the Journal. "We think we can do a better job powering those ads."
"we have a greater opportunity than other companies."
Targeted advertising has become commonplace across the internet, but Facebook believes it can more accurately target non-members using the vast amounts of data it already has on the nearly 1.7 billion people who use the site. The company says it can use that data to make inferences about the behavior of non-members, an approach known as "lookalike" targeting. "Because we have a core audience of over a billion people [on Facebook] who we do understand, we have a greater opportunity than other companies using the same type of mechanism," Bosworth tells the Journal.
Facebook and Google continue to dominate targeted online advertising, as a report from Princeton University showed last week, though Facebook's use of cookies has come under fire from European regulators who say it violates consumer privacy laws. An independent report from the Belgian Privacy Commission last year criticized Facebook for tracking users who had logged out, as well as those who didn't even have an account. (Facebook disputed the report's findings, and attributed the tracking to a bug.) Earlier this year, the French data protection agency ordered the company to allow users to opt-out of sharing their personal data with advertisers, and to better inform non-users that their behavior was being tracked when visiting Facebook pages.
Facebook updated its cookies policy page on Thursday to reflect the changes to its ad network. Users with a Facebook account can opt-out of the ad scheme by adjusting their settings, while non-Facebook members can opt-out through the Digital Advertising Alliance in the US, the Digital Advertising Alliance in Canada, and the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance in Europe.

Serpent-like malware targets your bank account

GozNym stays 'asleep' until you access your money.

If you think you can rely solely on your bank’s internet security to protect you, think again. Researchers at IBM Security have uncovered new malware that targets consumers in order to steal money from their accounts.
“We already know of $4 million that was stolen by this malware,” said Etay Maor, an executive advisor with IBM Security. The worst part: It's still out there.
Maor led the Israel-based team that discovered the malware, which has already been used against undisclosed banks in the U.S., Canada and Europe.
The virus, known as GozNym, is a combination of two pieces of malware — one that infects the computer and the other that waits silently like a serpent until the user visits the website of a financial institution.
“The criminal is sitting on the other end obtaining that info in real time,” Maor said.
What’s really different about this malware, according to Maor, is that it’s hard for researchers to even analyze because hackers doubled the encryption.
“When we first saw it, we were saying something bad is happening here but we’ve never seen this before … there are so many layers, we had to break in just to understand what it was,” said Maor.
It’s also much harder for anti-virus software and other solutions to detect it — leaving the end user completely in the dark.

Consumers' computers typically get infected with GozNym by clicking on links in emails. (Right now, the virus appears to be limited to PCs.) The email might be a message about a security solution or update. If you click the link — you might think nothing happened, but from that point on you are exposed.
Maor and his team believe the hackers behind the new virus are located somewhere in Eastern Europe.
“Don’t get this wrong, we are up against professional programmers … not kids," he said.
While GozNym represents a new level of sophistication, viruses targeting financial institutions are not new.
Just last year, 20 million financial records were stolen by malware, Maor said. While exact losses are hard to tally, by some estimates it could run into the billions of dollars.

Rafe Swan | Getty Images

How to protect yourself

To guard yourself from GozNym and other viruses, do not click on links in any suspicious emails.
Also, keep your operating system and anti-virus software up-to-date. Software providers are in the process of releasing updates that hopefully will disable GozNym.
Another best practice is to avoid reusing passwords as this can let hackers into multiple accounts.
You should also have two ways to check your account balances, such as using paper statements, ATM receipts or a mobile app in addition to online banking.
The criminals behind GozNym are so sophisticated they can change online banking websites to show full balances even after funds have been transferred out.

Catching the criminals

Meanwhile, banks are working to protect consumer accounts.
"The financial services industry takes this very seriously," said Bill Nelson, president and CEO of the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a group set up by the industry to share threat information, and which has 7,000 members.
And while banks have tools in place to battle against GozNym, "cybersecurity is a shared responsibility between customers and the banks," according to Doug Johnson, senior vice president for payments and cybersecurity at the American Bankers Association.
Law enforcement would like to bring the criminals to justice.
"The FBI — along with our federal, international and private sector partners — will continue to combat cybercrimes, including those involving malware," a spokeswoman explained in an email.

How to stay safe online: 15 ways to avoid being hacked

Every month or so there is a new hack that affects millions of regular people. Last year it was the TalkTalk hack. In 2016, the LinkedIn leak.
Then there's malicious software, snooping eavesdroppers and small time scammers that are targeting us on a daily basis through phones, Wi-Fi and USB sticks. Staying secure online can feel like crossing a minefield - and is daunting to many of us. But by mastering some simple steps you can drastically improve your online security.

Never use the same password more than once

Many of us are guilty of having had the same password for every account for years and, even worse than that, the most common 25 passwords include "123456", "password", and "abc123". The best way to keep your online accounts - from your internet banking to social media - secure is to never use the same password more than once.

Use the above tips to pick a strong password that people won't be able to guess and run it through a password tester.

Create a different password for each online account that you have and store them in a password manager, such as DashLane, 1Password or LastPass. These services store passwords securely, save time from endlessly typing them out when you log in, and can randomly generate keys for you.
Once you've set up a secure set of account logins make sure you don't share your passwords with anyone.

Check if you've been hacked

Credit: have i been pwned

If you're worried that you might have been hacked or had any of your personal details compromised, it would be wise to change your usernames and passwords immediately. Before coming up with a string of new keys, though, you can use a service such as have i been pwned to find out if you have an account that has been compromised in a data breach.
Enter an email address or username into the search bar and it will tell you if you've been a victim.

Stay up to date

Downloading software updates as and when they're available is a good way to protect yourself. Software updates for computers, phones, tablets, and other devices generally include improved security settings and patches that fix vulnerabilities. This is also true of updates to any apps or programs that you have installed on those devices.
To make sure you receive the updates as soon as they're available you can enable automatic updates on your devices, often by looking in Settings.

Check before you download

Before downloading apps onto your phone or software on your computer do some research - check what it's asking for access to (look for apps permissions in Settings), check an apps' rating in the iOS or Google Play story, read reviews online, and make sure you're downloading the official version.

Internet security: The five worst ever cyber hacks Play! 02:06

Use anti-virus software

If you use a Windows computer you should protect it using anti-virus software, such as AVG or Sophos. Make sure you regularly install the updates and scan for malware.  

Keep it private

Check the privacy settings on all of your social media accounts so that only the people you want to share your information with can see it. You can restrict what others see about you in the Setting sections of your account.
For example, you can make your posts private on Facebook, and restrict what Google can know about you. Use a site like Ghostery to find out what websites are tracking you and easily block them.

Look for the padlock

When using secure online services, such as email, online shopping or banking, and social media, always check there is a padlock symbol in front of the URL, and that the web address begins "https://" before you log in or register. Websites must pass certain security tests to be accredited with the padlock, and the ‘s’ stands for ‘secure’.

Watch what Wi-Fi you connect to

Make sure your home WiFi is protected with a strong password that only you and your family know. When out and about never use a hotspot that may be unsecured, especially when what you’re doing is personal or private.

Beware of public mobile charging points

It's possible to hack into a smartphone that is charging via USB in a public place, such as an airport, cafe or on public transport. To avoid being a victim, only plug your phone into trusted computers when using a USB cable.

Use encrypted messaging apps

End-to-end encrypted messaging apps such as WhatsApp, iMessage and Telegram protect your privacy by masking the contents of your messages from would-be eavesdroppers.

Be suspicious of your messages

Never open or forward a suspicious looking email, or respond to a social media message from someone you don't know. Watch out for phishing emails and text messages that ask you to log in or provide bank details.
Companies, such as Apple and WhatsApp, and government services will never email or text you to ask you to log into your account, provide bank details or download a program.

Type out web addresses

It's good practice to be suspicious of hyperlinks (particularly shortened links) that come from outside sources, such as unknown senders in an email. If you're asked to log into an account or provide payment details, type out the URL yourself and go directly to the legitimate site to make sure that you're not on a fake site that's designed to look like the official one.

Post in haste, repent at leisure

What goes online stays online so never say anything that could hurt, anger or endanger yourself or someone else.

Log off, log out

Always make sure you log out of your accounts when you’ve finished with them and log off a computer when you’ve finished using it.

Be a clever dater

With hundreds of thousands of us turning to dating apps every day in the quest to meet potential partners, there are a few ways to make sure you don’t put yourself in a compromised position.
Try to avoid disclosing private information when using online dating sites, and take every precaution that profiles you are looking at are genuine. Never be tempted to send or transfer money to people you meet online, however unfortunate their story.

Use your common sense

If an email offer looks too good to be true, the prices on a website are abnormally low or you receive an unsolicited telephone call offering computer support, it's probably a scam.

Life under curfew for American teens: ‘it’s insane, no other country does this’

Around 11 pm, on a temperate Friday last August, Officer Troy Owens was patrolling south-eastern San Diego. Peering through his driver’s side window into the darkness, he scanned the streets until his eyes stopped on the corner of 47th and Market. “Somebody trying to hide from me?” he wondered aloud. “Yup,” he answered, swinging the SUV around, and turning on the flashing lights.
Owens, who has worked for the San Diego police department for nearly 20 years, pulled toward the curb and got out of his car. As he approached, three teenagers slowly slunk out from behind an electrical box: a boy, David, 15, whose identity, along with those of other minors, is being protected, and two girls. Heads hanging, shoulders slouched, they knew they were caught. All three were soon searched, handcuffed, and put in the back of cars for the ride to the command post – a local Boys & Girls Club.
Were the teenagers picked up for using drugs? No. Drinking? No. Had they fled a store without paying for their goods? Hardly. Their crime: being out past curfew.
In San Diego, it’s illegal for anyone under the age of 18 to be out past 10pm. And, that night, Officer Owens was part of a “curfew sweep”, where teams of officers fan out and enforce the law en masse. The city runs these details roughly once a month in each of its nine districts, sometimes arresting dozens of kids a night. David and his friends said they were just walking home. But that isn’t one of the exceptions – like a school sports game or a job – so Owens read him his Miranda rights.
Conceived as a crime-reduction tactic, curfews were promoted during the “tough on crime” era of the 1990s. In 1996, President Bill Clinton flew out to Monrovia, California – among the first cities to claim curfew success – to publicly endorse the idea at the local high school. From there, they spread like wildfire and remain in place decades later.
From Baltimore, which has one of the strictest curfews in the country, to Denver, where curfew enforcement ramps up every summer, the laws are on the books in hundreds of cities across the US. According to available FBI data, there were 2.6m curfew arrests from 1994 and 2012; that’s an average of roughly 139,000 annually. Philadelphia alone reported 16,079 violations in 2014 – among the highest in the country.
As the curfew laws and arrests proliferated, however, the debate about their impact simmered largely out of view. Congress left curfews unaddressed in pending juvenile justice legislation and, today, the question remains: are they the best approach?
“It’s insane. No other country does this,” said Mike Males, a senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice and curfew critic who would like to see the practice come to an end. In his research, he says he hasn’t seen “any evidence” that they’re effective; instead chalking up their use to political expediency. “Curfews became this way of responding that both blamed young people and didn’t affect adults.”
An American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) case study of Minneapolis found the city’s curfew to be racially biased – with 56% of curfew charges coming against black youth compared with 17% for their white counterparts, despite the city being majority white. Males says that he’s found a similar pattern nationally. “They’re always racially discriminatory,” he said. “We have not found a single exception to that.”
Tau Baraka owns the Imperial Barbershop just down the road from the Boys & Girls Club. He’s lived here in south-east San Diego for years and views curfew sweeps as part of a broader police assault on the predominantly non-white community. “I worry,” he said, emphasizing that between curfew sweeps and gang enforcement details, “we see our youth being harassed daily.”
Proponents, however, argue that curfews help prevent young people from becoming either perpetrators or victims of nighttime crime. “This is an important way of helping kids stay safe and stay out of trouble,” said San Diego city council member Marti Emerald. “If we can help one child in their struggle then I think that we have to say the program is at least a partial success.”
When they arrived at the command post, police took down David’s name, age and contact information. Two new cadets were in charge of logging his possessions, and putting them in a bag for safekeeping. After Officer Owens filled out a police report, he swapped David’s metal handcuffs for plastic ones and moved him to a chair in the middle of the auditorium. Girls on one side, boys on the other; all waiting for a “responsible adult” to pick them up.
As for punishment, curfew violators are offered a diversion program, upon completion of which their case is dropped. “We try to do a proper assessment of the whole situation,” said Lt Evan Ziegler, with the department’s juvenile administration. When kids come to class, police can also connect them to social services, job training or activities that aim to keep them otherwise engaged.
In the south-eastern division, free diversion classes are held on Tuesday evenings and range from a juvenile judge talking about the court system to corrections officers detailing what life in “the hall” is like. The six-week course finishes with a visit from the coroner, whose slideshow from the morgue paints a grisly picture of the worst-case scenario. Parents are required to attend a separate set of classes, which are held in both English and Spanish.
“At least [the police] got them,” said one mom, as week two of the diversion program let out. Two of her sons were picked up for breaking curfew. “They’re with them. They’re not out there,” she said in support of curfews before rushing off to pick up her other child – a move that alludes to what can often be the complex reality of curfew violations.
Police have stopped three of Michelle Ruiz’s kids. One got a ride home, another was offered diversion and the third was sent to court and fined. “I understand that they’re doing it for our kids’ safety,” said Ruiz. “[But] it makes it harder for us.” She says that multiple jobs, single parenting and a myriad of other challenges can make it difficult to monitor kids’ adherence to curfews or complete subsequent diversion programs. The inconsistency has left Ruiz unsure whether curfews are having a net-positive effect.
Kids in San Diego seem to be conflicted about curfews as well. Even though she’s been caught twice, Ashley, 19, generally endorses the law. “What’s there out after certain times?” she asked, rhetorically. “Trouble.” But, she notes, her interactions with police were far from enjoyable and she still gets stopped sometimes just because she looks underage. “It was really kind of scary to have them treat you like a hardened criminal.”
Brian and his friend Demareé, both 16, are fairly indifferent. They were waiting for the trolley at about 9pm but weren’t nervous about the looming curfew. “I do my best to stay inside,” said Brian. “But, for the most part, no one really cares.” In common refrain, Demareé adds that he hadn’t even known there was a curfew law until he got stopped coming home from a party. Officers let him off with a ride home.
Tonight though, leniency was in short supply. “Happy hunting,” was how commanding officer, Sgt Jay Moser, kicked off the sweep at the Boys & Girls Club. By 10.13pm four kids were under arrest and six more came in throughout the night. That’s an average number, says Moser. Some nights it’s higher – the division record is about 50. Others it’s lower, especially recently. “That’s not a failure,” Lt Ziegler says of the decline in numbers, which is probably a combination of police getting the word out about curfews and kids becoming more savvy at avoiding sweeps. “Basically it means that we’re doing our jobs.”
Bardis Vakili with the ACLU of San Diego questions the premise that curfews, and curfew sweeps, are the best tactic. Calling the approach “very heavy-handed”, he says that it has a lasting effect on kids. “[What is does] is cite them, offer diversion programs that are difficult to complete, and ends up in involvement in the criminal justice system,” he said, suggesting expanded after-hours options for youth instead. At the very least, he would liked to see “a real dialogue” around the topic.
One problem is that analysis of curfews is relatively scant, and opinions often fall in the more emotional realm. “It’s a gut-level sort of response,” said Councilmember Emerald, when asked about her support for the laws. “It’s not real scientific, is it?” The data though, does exist, with the California Criminal Justice Statistics Center (CJSC) keeping detailed statistics stretching from 1980 to 2014.
While officials in San Diego reject the notion of racial bias in the city’s curfew law, a Guardian analysis clearly shows that it has a disproportionate impact on minorities, especially Hispanics. In 2010, Hispanic youth accounted for 59% of all curfew arrests, as opposed to 16% for white youth. Comparatively, census figures for the same year put the city’s population at 28.8% Hispanic and 45.1% white. The data also shows that diversion programs are indeed keeping more kids of all races out of the courts. In 2011, a majority of curfew cases were handled within the department for the first time in decades. That trend has continued, with only about a third of curfew cases going to juvenile probation 2014.
As to whether the curfew actually reduces crime, critical findings like Males’s are often countered with University of California professor Patrick Kline’s research, which concludes that “curfews are effective at reducing both violent and property crimes.” The Voice of San Diego took perhaps the closest look at the situation locally.
A  2012 article challenges the alleged benefits, finding that “neighborhoods without the sweeps have reported greater drops in crime in the last five years than those with them.” Males says that, again, he’s seen a similar, broader, pattern in his research. Noting that between truancy laws and curfews kids could conceivably only be allowed outside for a few hours a day, he says, “the underlying assumption [is] that most youth are criminals.”
For the officers and volunteers at the Boys & Girls Club, however, there’s a palpable sense of accomplishment. Packing up and turning off the lights, they head home for the night with a hope that they’ve helped “just one kid” – even if the public is more skeptical. “What are the results?” asks one agitated patron at the Imperial Barbershop. “When you come over here with a heavy police presence – a military presence – the community deserves to know.” Regardless, with summer vacation on the way, curfew enforcement is soon set to ramp up again across America.