British Source for ISIS Twitter with Saudi Financial Support
Hackers have claimed that a number of Islamic State supporters' social media accounts are being run from internet addresses linked to the Department of Work and Pensions.
A group of four young computer experts who call themselves VandaSec have unearthed evidence indicating that at least three ISIS-supporting accounts can be traced back to the DWP's London offices.
Every computer and mobile phone logs onto the internet using an IP address, which is a type of identification number.
The hacking collective showed Mirror Online details of the IP addresses used by a trio of separate digital jihadis to access Twitter accounts, which were then used to carry out online recruitment and propaganda campaigns.
At first glance, the IP addresses seem to be based in Saudi Arabia, but upon further inspection using specialist tools they appeared to link back to the DWP.
"Don't you think that's strange?" one of the hackers asked Mirror Online. "We traced these accounts back to London, the home of the British intelligence services."
VandaSec's work has sparked wild rumours suggesting someone inside the DWP is running ISIS-supporting accounts, or they were created by intelligence services as a honeypot to trap wannabe jihadis.
However, when Mirror Online traced the IP addresses obtained by VandaSec, we found they actually pointed to a series of unpublicised transactions between Britain and Saudi Arabia.
We learned that the British government sold on a large number of IP addresses to two Saudi Arabian firms.
Read more: ISIS Encyclopedia of Terror: Who's behind it, what it's used for and how 'keyboard warriors' can become killers
After the sale completed in October of this year, they were used by extremists to spread their message of hate.
Jamie Turner, an expert from a firm called PCA Predict, discovered a record of the sale of IP addresses, and found a large number were transferred to Saudi Arabia in October of this year.
He told us it was likely the IP addresses could still be traced back to the DWP because records of the addresses had not yet been fully updated.
The Cabinet Office has now admitted to selling the IP addresses on to Saudi Telecom and the Saudi-based Mobile Telecommunications Company earlier this year as part of a wider drive to get rid of a large number of the DWP's IP addresses.
It said the British government can have no control over how these addresses are used after the sale.
A Cabinet Office spokesperson said: "The government owns millions of unused IP addresses which we are selling to get a good return for hardworking taxpayers.
"We have sold a number of these addresses to telecoms companies both in the UK and internationally to allow their customers to connect to the internet.
"We think carefully about which companies we sell addresses to, but how their customers use this internet connection is beyond our control."
The government did not reveal how much money was made from selling the IP addresses to the pair of Saudi firms, because it regards this information as commercially sensitive.
Tech Bubble is About to Pop
The tech sector is no longer the hottest place to be on the stock market. Initial public offerings (IPOs)have plummeted in tech in 2015, putting the sector behind health care and financial companies.
TechCrunch is calling is the “worst year for tech IPOs since 2009.”
The U.S. IPO market has remained strong in 2015, with a total of 169 companies raising $29.9 billion from new public offerings, according to Renaissance Capital’s data base.
But unlike the last few years, the tech sector only made up 14 percent of IPOs in 2015, down from an average of 25 percent per year from 2009 to 2014. Unlike the 55 new tech IPOs in 2014 that raised over $35 billion, there have only been 23 new tech issues, raising a paltry $4.2 billion in 2015.
The total return from investing in new tech deals this year has only been 1 percent. But that has still been better than investing in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock Index, which fell by -3.79 percent for the week ending December 11, and is down about 2.26 percent for 2015.
About half of the tech companies that went public in 2015 are tracking for negative returns on their stock price,–including Etsy, which slumped by 41 percent. A number of other highly anticipated tech IPOs in 2015 had to cut their expected offering prices substantially to complete their launch. Box and Square both had to cut their new issue price to below what venture capital investors had paid when the companies were still private.
Health care dominated 2015 by taking a 46 percent market share, with 78 successfully completed deals raising over $6.7 billion. Finance raised the second largest amount of cash, with 23 deals generating $5.1 billion in proceeds.
Some analysts claim that tech companies have been able to raise all the cash they need through private venture capital deals, such as the 131“unicorns”that report having billion-dollar-plus private equity valuations. But that seems to be countered by the fact that 57 companies that were trying to go public cancelled their IPOs in 2015 after they had already paid the expenses to register with the Securities & Exchange Commission.
According to the Gartner Group, the tech sector may be in the late stages of a “Hype Cycle,” similar to how tech IPOs began shrinking 1999 and 2007 just before the tech markets plunged.
The Grass is Always Greener When it’s Stolen
Greg Corombos
As world leaders hail a climate-change agreement they say will preserve the planet for future generations, one of the leading critics of the movement behind the deal says the plan is simply a massive transfer of wealth that will have no impact on the climate and is calling attention to warming when the earth is clearly in a cooling phase.
Officials from nearly 200 nations reached agreement over the weekend in Paris to move forward in a commitment to reduce carbon emissions, but with no way to enforce the standards. Secretary of State John Kerry says the deal requires all nations to report on their emissions every five years. Kerry says public exposure will keep nations on the straight and narrow.
That approach is nothing more than a fantasy for Tim Ball, former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg. He is also the author of “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science.”
Ball said the main accomplishment of COP 21, the meeting in Paris that involved the political officials working in concert with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IGCC, was to establish the Green Climate Fund.
“They decided that developed nations had developed by using fossil fuels and the fossil fuel byproduct, CO2, was causing climate change or initially global warming,” Ball said. “Therefore, those 23 developed nations had to pay for their sins.”
He added, “They had to put money into a fund which was then going to be distributed to the developing nations that were being punished or penalized by those developed nations.”
This goal is nothing new. Ball said the climate fund has been a goal of the COP meetings for years, dating back in large part to the Kyoto Protocol in the late 1990s. It was supposed to the be the focal point of COP 15, but it was scuttled after the East Anglia email scandal revealed emails that critics said were proof of climate science being doctored for a political agenda. He said activistssimply waited a year and began pushing again.
“At COP 16, they introduced what’s called the Green Climate Fund. That’s what they were approving in Paris, which is a bank account set up in South Korea under the International Monetary Fund, at which all of these developed nations have to put money in to give out to the developing nations,” said Ball, noting that 23 nations will essentially be bankrolling 175 others
The agreement from COP 21 calls for nations to strive for zeroing out carbon emissions by 2050 and certainly 2070. That means nations have agreed to keep their carbon emissions at or below what the earth is absorbing by that time.
What frustrates Ball the most is what he calls the "corruption of climate science, includingthe statistics on carbon dioxide.
"They talk about the CO2 that humans emit," he said. "They don't put into the formula the amount of CO2 we are currently absorbing. For example, of the total we emit (using IGCC data), we remove 50 percent of it through agriculture."
Ball further noted even the most ardent proponents of the climate agenda have admitted the wealth transfers and carbon standards don't make any difference in the health of the planet.
"One of the key scientists involved in the corruption was a guy by the name of Tom Wigley," Ball said. "He said at the time that if we introduce the Kyoto Protocol in its original form, that is every country reduced to the amounts that we want, nobody would be able to measure the difference.
"In other words, you could take everybody off the planet, leave one scientist behind and say, 'OK, measure and tell us how much the CO2 in the atmosphere's reduced.' He wouldn't be able to do it."
Ball said Secretary Kerry has admitted the same thing.
"He said this is not going to make any significant difference in terms of CO2, but it's important in terms of political policy and sharing the wealth," Ball said. "So it's a scam from top to bottom."
In addition to that admission, Kerry stated over the weekend to Fox News Sunday that there is no way to force any nation to abide by the new deal.
"If there had been a penalty, we wouldn't have been able to get an agreement," Kerry said, confident that mandatory emissions reporting requirements would keep everyone on target.
Ball is stunned.
"There's absolutely no point putting in rules and regulations if you can't enforce them," he said.
In addition to layers of what he believes to be misguided policies, Ball said the climate delegates are about to inadvertently double their donations to developing nations because they're not paying attention tothe fact the climate is really in a cooling period.
"They've got people preparing for completely the wrong thing, which means that cost of preparing for warming will be doubled because then they'll have to turn around and offset and prepare for the cooling, which is a much greater threat to humanity and food production and energy costs and so on," he said.
Ball said the U.S. is also voluntarily placing itself at a global disadvantage with nations that don't really buy into the climate alarmism, namely Russia, India and China.
"Those three nations all came out before Paris and said that the global-warming science is a fraud. Putin said it publicly," said Ball, who arguedthat those nations, along with Brazil and South Africa, are poised to economically exploit the U.S. and others who are buying into the alleged threat.
"They have already set up a fund to counter and replace the International Monetary Fund, so there's a whole economic and power grab going on here," Ball said.
Meanwhile, the Climate is Damned
China, India and the rest of the developing world are already undermining the Paris global warming agreement by building new coal plants, according to analysis released Monday by the Institute for Energy Research.
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“No matter how the Obama administration or the United Nations tries to spin it, there is nothing historic or monumental about the Paris climate agreement. It is non-binding, underfunded, and unenforceable,” Chris Warren, a spokesperson for the Institute for Energy Research, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Developing nations like China and India will continue to increase their coal use because they recognize that it is the best generation source to help grow their economies and lift people out of poverty. Wind and solar just don’t cut it.”
Over 2,400 coal-fired power plants are under construction or being planned around the world, 1,171 of which will be built in China. Indiais building 297 and planning another 149 coal plants. Even the close American ally ofJapan is building 45 new coal plants.
In China alone,consumption of coal grew by a factor of three from 2000 to 2013. Itnow consumes approximately half of all coal used worldwide. In 2012,coal produced 66 percent of all Chinese electricity, according to the Energy Information Administration.
China is, by far, theworld’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide and has beensince 2006, whileIndia has long accounted for thelargest shareof global emissions growth.According to a 2014study by the European Union, Chinaemits 29percentof the world’s carbon dioxide while the US isonly responsible for15percentof the world’s emissions. The European Union itself only accounts for 10percentand India accounts for another 6percent.
The growth of coal power overseas means that,mathematically, Americancarbon dioxide reduction schemes are futile without global participation.
Attempts to reduce theemissions of developing economieshave proven very ineffective,as they wouldinevitably be costly and reduce economic growth.For example, inexchange for a commitment by the United States to reduce its carbon emissionsby26 to 28percentby 2025, China only agreed tostop increasingits emissions footprint by 2030. Even supporters of the Paris global warming agreement say itis “very unlikely to keep future warming below 2 [degrees] Celsius”, thebenchmark beyond which they say climate change will be “dangerous.”
Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency haseffectively bannedthe construction of new coal power plants.
Meanwhile, over a thousand heat records, and a thousand heavy snow records were broken this week, just in the US alone. It is not the polar vortex, yet. It is not sunspots. It is not anything mankind seems to be doing. But we are having weird weather. Now, the strange thing is that this is the winter of 2015, and I had a very strange experience in 2007 which I want to share. I was writing my book, Remembering the Future, and I had some very good meditation going one day. I saw the year 2015.
There were three things, among many, that I saw in this daytime experience. First, I saw that the presidency would collapse. Not the president, but the office would collapse. It would appear to be impossible for one man to win the office. It would be three. There would be one president and two vice presidents, one handling the domestic issues, and one handling the foreign issues along with the president.
The other thing that happened was an incredible snow storm in the Northwest that would close the passes. It would snow so deep that it would not melt in the summer. The 2015 winter’s snow would be snowed upon in 2016. The glaciers would grow, and there would be global cooling begin in earnest.
The other thing that would occur would be a collapse of the cash supply. Plastic and credit would be preserved, but the ability to buy significantly in cash would be ended for security reasons. Already, you cannot buy anything over $10,000 in cash without submitting your SSN and having some good reason to have that cash. It will be confiscated by the State if you are caught with it. Any quantity over $500 will be taken from you by local police under civil forfeiture laws, and you will never see it again.
It was just strange that these obscure things that I saw in this daytime vision were actually coming to pass.
Cell Service Kill Switch
People live their lives on their cell phones these days – more and more even are cutting off their land lines as an unnecessary expense and relying solely on their wireless links to the rest of the world.
But what happens when the government decides – for whatever reason – to shut down that network?
What if it just pulls the plug on Americans’ cell service?
Among other impacts, people wouldn’t even be able to call 9-1-1 in an emergency, according to new documents filed with the U.S. Supreme Court by officials with Electronic Privacy Information Center,
The organization has been fighting a campaign to gain access to the policy established by the federal government for shutting down cell-phone networks for whatever reasons may arise.
The organization notes that the government did exactly that during a peaceful protest at a Bay Area Rapid Transit system station in 2012.
It says it got a redacted copy of the federal plan some time ago, but that essentially answered none of the significant questions.
Is the government getting bigger and more powerful? Read the prognosis in “Police State U.S.A.: How Orwell’s Nightmare is Becoming our Reality.”
It had requested that the U.S. Supreme Court review the contentious subject, and now after the government argued that it should be allowed to keep details suppressed, EPIC has filed an answer that calls again for transparency.