Tag Archives: Stalker

Spinning US atrocities, words matter: shooting sprees & shopping rampages

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Headlines about Sunday’s midnight massacre in Kandahar transformed quickly from NATO FORCES RAID to become LONE GUNMAN KILLS 16, as the attributed sources shifted from Afghan locals on the scene to US military spokesmen. One might argue it’s in the interest of national security to attribute the murders in Balandi and Alkozai to a solitary stalker, to tamp the swelling anger of the Afghan populace, but what’s the truth? Making a rare concession, the NYT has revised its headline a 3rd time to read LONE SOLDIER SAID TO BE KILLER OF 16 AFGHANS, and the BBC puts “ACTED ALONE” in quotes. (UPDATE: AP adds “allegedly” and LA Times “apparently”)
 
Pundits stroke our soldiers’ egos by asking could one special forces soldier alone kill so many (?!), but more difficult to imagine is how a rogue fighter can equip himself and pass through multiple security defenses unobserved. Also doubtful is how and why a stealth assassin would burn the victims’ bodies as he moved about. Easier to believe is that damage control decided it best that one man take the fall for his comrades, God and country, probably the one too drunk to object.

Tea party klan patriot thug Jim Kross circulates fliers to incite mob violence

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OccupyAfghanistan vets Jeremy and Brittany Westmoreland attracted Patriot Shop teabag Jim Kross to their vow to destroy our local occupy. I’d like to say as little as possible about this lamentable development, except to document today’s escalation.


Occupy Colorado Springs held forth on the sidewalk in front of Memorial Hospital this Saturday, making a plea for UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE. Across the street once again were our threat-making stalkers, fortunately not reprising their Westboro Baptist tauntings, but sitting in their truck as OCS’s original heckler Jim Kross finished his cigar.


We weren’t many, but of course the recent news stories didn’t help recruit participants, claiming that OCS is so against the troops, that it kicked out members because they were soldiers. And not more accurately, because they initiated a witch hunt against occupiers who weren’t showing solidarity with the US military’s occupy movement, OccupyIraq, OccupyAfghanistan, OccupyLibya, veni, vidi, vici.


We were in the unusual position of trying not to elicit honks of support from the passing traffic, in view of standing outside a hospital, but drivers signaled their enthusiasm in friendly ways. We discussed repeating this healthcare action soon, it was such an easy sell.


Eventually Patriot Kross came over to film us as he made his best taunts. The Westmorelands watched from the truck and after Kross was through, they drove back and forth flipping us off.

At first Kross denied any knowledge of the dozen fliers we’d found taped and pinned around the hospital’s perimeter.


The fliers were “wanted” posters which offered a bounty for the eviction or firing of certain occupiers. The fliers bore Kross’s email address and website. He conceded they were his, or belonged “to one of [his] identities,” whatever, and then he named the reward, said the amount may have grown since he looked online, and then solicited the occupiers present.


We had already removed the fliers he’d circulated around the hospital, from trees, street signs, walls and doors.


We had found some fliers downtown on our way to the action. This one was taped to the office building door.


Jim Kross’s animosity for Occupy goes back to the original GAs, when he used to videotape from the circle’s center and exploit the opportunity it gave him to counter everyone’s statements. He hadn’t been harassing OCS actions until last week when OCS held its NO WAR ON IRAN event. Kross made a gleeful reappearance with Raven Martinez counter-protesting what she considered an anti-troop message.

Speaking of Raven, I received this Facebook message on Friday, from her daughter’s account which Raven uses when she finds her account blocked…


Are those the words of an 11-year-old? “WATCH UR BACK”?

Neither Raven nor the Westmorelands seem to understand the line they cross with their threats. On Tuesday Raven defended her comment on NMT asking me what I’d do if my home went up in flames. She said I needed to take it in the context of her talking about soldiers, police and first responders, ignoring the context Soldier Westmoreland had created with his vow to burn NMT down.


Patriot Kross says he’s a veteran of the police force. You’d think he’d understand that distributing wanted posters charging his own personal complaints is a call for vigilante justice. To begin with, posting fliers is against city code, and these incite violence.


Kross came across our noon bannering at Acacia on Friday, mocking Patti for standing on her lonesome, Occupy reduced to just herself. He didn’t like the color of her flags.


I caught this priceless photo as Kross stepped quickly back when he saw that reinforcements were coming.


The bright side of this story is that when I went to take a picture of Jim Kross’s store, the Patriot Shop, it was gone, in retreat, to within another store, on Academy. Bye Jimbo.

Better to cloak SSID? Google won’t say

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WirelessWiFi users who opt for the convenience of broadcasting their SSIDs, versus cloaking their wireless networks, based on the security strategy that a privacy measure calls attention to itself, were shocked last week to learn that Google’s Street view vehicles were mapping neighborhoods, logging their open WiFi signals, including the data flowing across the networks.

Google was quick to explain and apologize, but further revelations suggest the extent of the data mining went beyond even tracking computer MAC addresses on the networks. Google appended its mea culpa / won’t-do-it-again to detail the network activity it may have recorded, and now between the lines netizens familiar with sniffing technology can surmise the privacy stalker was taking in quite a bit more.

Here is how Google explained the initial anomaly when news emerged from a German Government probe of their alarming information sweep:

In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.

Who is to say what is “publicly broadcast data?” Users could presume it means unencrypted transmissions, but not necessarily. The real revelation was the suggestion of “payload data.”

Google had to follow up their FAQs when their customers fielded some tougher questions:

…it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.

We’re getting over the shock of Google ads targeted at us based on where we’ve surfed, subjects about which we’ve emailed, and social network conversations. Get ready for profiling based on file and folder names on our desktop.

Homeless stalkers in white motorcades

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COLORADO SPRINGS- Cleanup operations continued this morning under the Highway 24 interstate overpass. The “Green Team” crews are distinguished by their white pickups and vans which transport Community Service parolees to bag homeless possessions under the supervision of the CSPD H.O.T. officers in unmarked white cruisers.

Not to begrudge the poor their fancy motorcade, but you might think a cash-strapped city needn’t expend so much automotive bling in its poverty flushing efforts. Colorado Springs takes great pride obviously in its street cleaning.

The procession of pickups and vans are marked by magnetic signs denoting them as the Colorado Springs “Green Team.” What are we to make of the police cars being unmarked? They are not undercover vehicles, merely police cruisers without the decals, standing out like detectives in trenchcoats, as I imagine the intimidating police apparatus of authoritarian states. These officers are projecting all the authority without the flashing lights, projecting unfortunately all the menace which law enforcement inherently presents to the poor, without the trappings of official function of “to protect and serve.”

As friendly as their campside manner might be, these officers are enforcing regulations which have criminalized joblessness and dispossession into defacto “vagrancy.” What are the poor to do, invent jobs? Conjure houses and property? Move along folks, we don’t want to see your personal problems in public places. Nothing personal.