I’ve decided to share my experience at the Occupy Wall St. solidarity protest known as OccupyLA. For those of you unfamiliar with this site and the associated podcast, allow me to explain. About 10 months ago my long time friend and I started this site and the podcast as a way for us to talk about the things that we felt were important in our lives. Mostly the geo-political stuff that affects us all, but other things as well. We fell off a bit when it comes to posting articles mostly because we don’t typically have the time to write and it would mostly just be duplication of things we said on the show, and re-posting other peoples articles is a waste of time when we can just tell our listeners to check out the same news sources we do.

Occasionally though, the need arises to write something down. This need comes about for various reasons and this time it’s for two reasons, (at least). The first being that I couldn’t fit this into 140 characters and I despise people that use “twitlonger” to type a goddamn essay on twitter. The second being that I feel what I have to say is important, especially to the people who were, and still are, at the core of this movement that has now been dubbed #occupywallstreet. To clarify, I don’t think my opinion is important, (seriously I don’t), but I do think presenting the facts of what I saw is important, especially if anything is to come of this movement. That being said, here we go.

(Keep in mind as you read this that neither I nor my Co-Host has any delusions about the popularity or lack there of with regards to our podcast. I for one think that when someone shows up to volunteer their time and a couple grand worth of studio equipment you should maybe give a shit.)

First, let it be known that we here at Red List Radio have been talking about A99 and Operation Empire State Rebellion for a couple months now. I wasn’t even sure what the hell was going on when AdBusters came on the scene with their OccupyWallStreet slogan. But I will leave that drama for another time, or you can listen to the podcast from 10/6 and we explain the fuck out of it. We attended and did some live streaming to our “RedListRadio” UStream account from the US Day of Rage event held across the street from Union Station in LA on Sept. 17th, the official start of the Occupy Wall St. movement. Not a single one of the “leaders” and “team” members I interacted with at OccupyLA was there on Sept. 17th. Now that’s not to say that none exist, just that the ones I encountered were not one of the easily remembered 25 faces of Sept. 17th’s protest. Not important per say, unless those current leaders/team members treated you like you didn’t belong when you showed up to OccupyLA. I didn’t really think about it though until just now.

I first went to the present LA city hall location on Tuesday Oct. 4th shortly after lunch, with LA traffic it was nearly a 2 hour drive. I first went to the welcome tent and asked who I needed to speak with regarding the issues of power and WiFi. The woman there said that she didn’t handle that and I needed to talk to the MT/”Media Team” and directed me that way. The MT is located near the steps to city hall on the North East side of the building. There are 4 tables inside each with at least 2 laptops on it, most not in use. There is a single generator behind it apparently providing all the power. The first guy I talked to was named Thomas. I introduced myself and told him that I was looking to do my podcast live from the location on the upcoming Sat. and needed some questions answered in order to prepare. He said he didn’t know the answer to my questions and that there wasn’t anyone there who would know. So he said he would take my info and talk to the team at their meeting that night and that they have said meeting every single night. So I wrote my information down and my questions and he disappeared without offering me a way to contact him. This may seem fine to some, but to me, if you’re a member of the media team and someone tells you they have a podcast(form of media your team is not currently employing/deploying) they would like to do live on location and they’ve been involved with the movement for a while the thing to do would be to trade contact information. Unsatisfied, I decided to find someone else to talk with. Enter “B”. This guy immediately knew what was up and wasted no time pointing me to Lisa Clapier. “B”, you were awesome, thank you.

Lisa seems great. Very interested in what I’ve got going on. Trades contact info right away, tells me we can jump on the WiFi no problem, we can set up our stuff right next to them, just shoot her an email and we’ll work out the details. I send an email that day. I send another one the next day. And another Friday morning. By Friday afternoon with no reply I’m getting a little frustrated, I need to know we’re for sure! So I call the number she gave me. No answer leave a message and she calls right back. Once again SUPER nice, I try to explain all I need is a spot to setup and access to the wifi, she once again says yes I remember you, no problem, send me another email to her personal email which she gives me and that she will let me know who on her “inner-circle” will be handling this and that she’d really like to have me and my podcast on her inner-circle as well. I’m a little redflagged by that, we don’t know each other and why do we have an inner-circle? Whatever. I send the email. I get a basic reply with no information in it and she will send me the info later. Cut to Sat. at 11:45 we show up, at almost exactly when I said I would. I have my co-host head up to the media tent and state who he is and that he needs to know who Lisa Clapier put in charge of this. He is rudely asked why, and then is told there is no way we can use the WiFi, they simply can’t spare the bandwidth. There is absolutely no room for us to setup anywhere near them anyway. So I say fuck it, we’ll set up on the other side of the building and I will pay my cell company to turn on mobile WiFi on my phone for 50 bucks. Don’t forget I’m a blue collar dirt worker, and I’m broke as fuck, but since we came all this way I decided fuck it, I’ll figure out how to pay for it later.

We get everything all set up and I’m battling with the cell company trying to get WiFi, I’ve already authorized payment and it’s still not working. Cue Lisa Clapier’s arrival, “So glad you could make it! It’s so awesome to have you here, blah blah blah.” I tell her I’m kinda busy on the phone trying to get wifi. She leaves and about 45 minutes later here comes Thomas, with a wifi they had laying around and weren’t using. I tell him I already got my own, no big deal. He then recognizes me and says, “sorry for not getting back to you, we don’t have our nightly meetings anymore”. So let me get this straight, you can’t talk to anyone on your Media Team unless it’s in a meeting? Glad I went around you and at least got some answers.

We get the show rolling and things are going great, we’re having a blast, we’re putting random people that come up to us on the air and having real discussions about the movement and the system that has caused all these problems. I should probably mention at this time that despite me giving the information and talking with mutiple members of the media team and asking them directly point blank to tweet out to their people that we are doing a live show from the event, not fucking one of them did that. They tweeted the hell out of Danny Glover showing up to give a 3 and half minute motivational speech though. Wait, just wait, I don’t at all compare myself to Danny Glover when it comes to celebrity status, I’m fucking nobody, I get that. But, I am part of a media outlet, and a form of media that was not otherwise represented and should have been welcomed with open arms by the whole team for donating our time and all our equipment to put out the message live on the air. We could have got an RT at least. Now maybe Danny came as a special favor to someone there, if that’s the case fine, whatever. But if he came down on his own, then it was pretty gross how the core members corralled him and put him up on stage and then escorted him out like he was some expensive piece of jewelry on display. He’s just a guy who pretends for a living, he’s got little to nothing in common with any of you. He’s a multi-millionaire and has been for years. If he wants to do something to help maybe he should donate some stuff like Lupe Fiasco did. Or hell maybe he could pull his money out of those Wall St. investments, almost everybody with Hollywood money has a money man investing their money for them in the stock market.

Now, here’s where shit gets weird, the “Security Team” guy that’s been standing around near us all day whispers to us that, “Tom Morelo from Rage Against the Machine is supposed to be here at 4pm, but don’t say it on our show because 30,000 people will show up. “Uh, wouldn’t that be awesome?”, I reply. “No”, he says, “we can ‘t have more than 1600 or the fire marshal will shut us down!”. Let me get this straight. You guys are actively trying to not get more people to show up? Wow. Sure enough that dude shows up around that time and plays acoustic guitar and gets the crowd to sing “this land is my land, this land is your land”. Yay, thanks. During this time “Thomas” comes up to us from inside the stage area with an extension cord in hand asking if he can use our power. Yeah, I’m gonna shut down my broadcast so you can power an amp so some guy can play Kumbaya, no thanks, I’m helping people to hear whats really going on and open their minds and learn some shit.

Is it only glaringly obvious to me that the reason we are in this mess is because so many people over the last 4-5 decades have ignored their civic duty in exchange for entertainment? When refering to the fall of Rome they call it “bread and circuses”, because as long as people had those two things they didn’t give a fuck about what the politicians were doing and their empire was ruined because of it. Maybe you guys need to quit drooling over the celebrities who don’t have anything important to say and let the people who are the philosophers of this age speak to the people and try to educate them on some different schools of thought and enlighten them to the facts about the current situation. Speaking of one of those kinds of folks……

While Tom Morellois on we’re interviewing the founder of the end the fed movement who is telling us how he tried to have a discussion with several occupiers about why his group believes that the central point of all the problems of the 99% is the Federal Reserve Bank. He was drowned out by some apparent leaders who came and stood in front of him and yelled “Mic Check” And then proceeded to instruct the group of people to walk away from the End the Fed Founder. AND THEY LISTENED TO HIM. The end the fed group also tried to get up on the south side steps but as soon as they tried to speak someone from the OccupyLA group got on the PA system they had set up for the band and shouted that no one should listen to this guy and told him to leave. This is pretty fucking sad for many reasons. A: based purely on the facts, the federal reserve banking system is responsible for the oversight of ALL other financial institutions including wall st. the 99% should be pissed at the Fed and already know why, yet they don’t and the leaderfags at OccupyLA don’t even want them to learn. B: The occupiers are apparently sheep if they were led away from him that easily, wow you mindless drones, think for your fucking selves. C: You’re trying to stifle free speech on public property? Really? And especially trying to silence the message of someone who founded a massive movement that has been around for longer than most of you have even given a shit!? You did this in America, in 2011? Fuck you.

As a result of the mess I saw at OccupyLA this Sat. and being presented with the information that they are actively trying to keep the number of people there at 1600, I sure hope you folks in New York have your shit together otherwise this is already over and wasted a bunch of fucking time trying to push it only to have a bunch of co-opting power hungry losers ruin it.

Edit 9:50pm 10/13/11

We have learned some things regarding the background of the Media Team Leader at OccupyLA, Lisa Clapier.

The following links are provided so that you may draw your own conclusions. We have done this in the same interest that we support WikiLeaks and open governments. If someone is going to assume a leadership role at an “Occupy” protest it is in their best interest and the best interest of those involved to know who these people are. I will say here again, my experience with Lisa was pleasant, she was very nice, but their was something strange about the mention of the inner-circle.

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July 11th, 2011

We at Red List Radio thought the following information was important and decided to post it. While many “news” organizations have posted stories on the recent slaughtering of Booz Allen Hamilton by Anonymous, not one has posted the information contained in the BOOZ_RELEASE.txt file contained within the torrent.  Since we know not all concerned citizens understand how to acquire torrents, let alone open a .rar file we decided to post the contents of the BOOZ_RELEASE.txt for all to see. Enjoy.

Today we want to turn our attention to Booz Allen Hamilton, whose core business is contractual work completed on behalf of the US federal government, foremost on defense and homeland security matters, and limited engagements of foreign governments specific to U.S. military assistance programs.
So in this line of work you’d expect them to sail the seven proxseas with a state- of-the-art battleship, right? Well you may be as surprised as we were when we found their vessel being a puny wooden barge.
We infiltrated a server on their network that basically had no security measures in place. We were able to run our own application, which turned out to be a shell and began plundering some booty. Most shiny is probably a list of roughly 90,000 military emails and password hashes (md5, non-salted of course!).We also added the complete sqldump, compressed ~50mb, for a good measure.
We also were able to access their svn, grabbing 4gb of source code. But this was deemed insignificant and a waste of valuable space, so we merely grabbed it, and wiped it from their system.
Additionally we found some related datas on different servers we got access to after finding credentials in the Booz Allen System. We added anything which could be interesting.
And last but not least we found maps and keys for various other treasure chests buried on the islands of government agencies, federal contractors and shady whitehat companies. This material surely will keep our blackhat friends busy for a while.
A shoutout to all friendly vessels: Always remember, let it flow! #AntiSec
/**********************************************************************************                BONUS ROUND: BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON KEY FACTS                *** *******************************************************************************/
For the Lazy we have assembled some facts about Booz Allen. First let’s take a quick look of who these guys are. Some key personnel:
* John Michael “Mike” McConnell, Executive Vice President of Booz Allen and former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and former Director of National Intelligence.
* James R. Clapper, Jr., current Director of National Intelligence, former Director of Defense Intelligence.
* Robert James Woolsey Jr, former Director of National Intelligence and headof the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
* Melissa Hathaway, Current Acting Senior Director for Cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils
Now let’s check out what these guys have been doing:
* Questionable involvement in the U.S. government’s SWIFT surveillance program; acting as auditors of a government program, when that contractor is heavily involved with those same agencies on other contracts. Beyond that, the implication was also made that Booz Allen may be complicit in a program (electronic surveillance of SWIFT) that may be deemed illegal by the EC.

http://www.aclu.org/national-security/booz-allens-extensive-ties-government-raise-more-questions-about-swift-surveillanc

https://www.privacyinternational.org/article/pi-and-aclu-show-swift-auditor-has-extensive-ties-us-government *

Through investigation of Booz Allen employees, Tim Shorrock of Democracy Now! asserts that there is a sort of revolving-door conflict of interest between Booz Allen and the U.S. government, and between multiple other contractors and the U.S. government in general. Regarding Booz Allen, Shorrock referred to such people as John M. McConnell, R. James Woolsey, Jr., and James R. Clapper, all of whom have gone back and forth between government and industry (Booz Allen in particular), and who may present the appearance that certain government contractors receive undue or unlawful business from the government, and that certain government contractors may exert undue or unlawful influence on government. Shorrock further relates that Booz Allen was a sub-contractor with two programs at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), called Trailblazer and Pioneer Groundbreaker.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/12/151224

If you haven’t heard about Pioneer Groundbreaker, we recommend the following Wikipedia article:
“The NSA warrantless surveillance controversy (AKA “Warrantless Wiretapping”) concerns surveillance of persons within the United States during the collection of foreign intelligence by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) as part of the war on terror.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Groundbreaker

* A June 28, 2007 Washington Post article related how a U.S. Department of Homeland Security contract with Booz Allen increased from $2 million to more than $70 million through two no-bid contracts, one occurring after the DHS’s legal office had advised DHS not to continue the contract until after a review. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the contract characterized it as not well-planned and lacking any measure for assuring valuable work to be completed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/27/AR2007062702988.html

* Known as PISCES (Personal Identification Secure Comparison and Evaluation System), the “terrorist interdiction system” matches passengers inbound for the United States against facial images, fingerprints and biographical information at airports in high-risk countries. A high-speed data network permits U.S. authorities to be informed of problems with inbound passengers. Although PISCES was operational in the months prior to September 11, it apparently failed to detect any of the terrorists involved in the attack.
Privacy advocates have alleged that the PISCES system is deployed in various countries that are known for human rights abuses (ie Pakistan and Iraq) and that facilitating them with an advanced database system capable of storing biometric details of travelers (often without consent of their own nationals) poses a danger to human rights activists and government opponents.

http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2002/02march/march02corp3.html

/**********************************************************************************                   BONUS ROUND TWO: ANONYMOUS INTERESTS                   *** *******************************************************************************/
Back in February, as many may recall, Anonymous was challenged by security company HBGary. One month later – after many grandiose claims and several pages of dox on “members” of Anonymous which were factually accurate in no way whatsoever – HBGary and its leadership were busy ruing the day they ever tangled with Anonymous, and Anonymous was busy toasting another epic trolling. And there was much rejoicing. However, celebration soon gave way to fascination, followed by horror, as scandal after scandal radiated from the company’s internal files, scandals spanning the government, corporate and financial spheres. This was no mere trolling. Anonymous had uncovered a monster.
One of the more interesting, and sadly overlooked, stories to emerge from HBGary’s email server (a fine example to its customers of how NOT to secure their own email systems) was a military project – dubbed Operation Metal Gear by Anonymous for lack of an official title – designed to manipulate social media. The main aims of the project were two fold: Firstly, to allow a lone operator to control multiple false virtual identities, or “sockpuppets”. This would allow them to infiltrate discussions groups, online polls, activist forums, etc and attempt to influence discussions or paint a false representation of public opinion using the highly sophisticated sockpuppet software. The second aspect of the project was to destroy the concept of online anonymity, essentially attempting to match various personas and accounts to a single person through recognition shared of writing styles, timing of online posts, and other factors. This, again, would be used presumably against any perceived online opponent or activist.
HBGary Federal was just one of several companies involved in proposing software solutions for this project. Another company involved was Booz Allen Hamilton. Anonymous has been investigating them for some time, and has uncovered all sorts of other shady practices by the company, including potentially illegal surveillance systems, corruption between company and government officials, warrantless wiretapping, and several other questionable surveillance projects. All of this, of course, taking place behind closed doors, free from any public knowledge or scrutiny.
You would think the words “Expect Us” would have been enough to prevent another epic security fail, wouldn’t you?
Well, you’d be wrong. And thanks to the gross incompetence at Booz Allen Hamilton probably all military mersonnel of the U.S. will now have to change their passwords.
Let it flow!

/**********************************************************************************                                 INVOICE                                  *** *******************************************************************************/
Enclosed is the invoice for our audit of your security systems, as well as the auditor’s conclusion.
4 hours of man power: $40.00

Network auditing: $35.00

Web-app auditing: $35.00

Network infiltration*: $0.00

Password and SQL dumping**: $200.00

Decryption of data***: $0.00

Media and press****: $0.00

Total bill: $310.00

*Price is based on the amount of effort required.

**Price is based on the amount of badly secured data to be dumped, which in this case was a substantial figure.

***No security in place, no effort for intrusion needed.

****Trolling is our specialty, we provide this service free of charge.

Auditor’s closing remarks: Pwned. U mad, bro?

We are Anonymous.

We are Legion.

We are Antisec.

We do not forgive.

We do not forget.

Expect us.

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