February 12, 2011
Stuxnet has four main components. The first spreads the virus through a print network, another to distribute the virus by loading itself onto USB drives, and the other two are root kits for giving it administrator-level access to the system and to alter code being written to PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers), which is a bank of processor-controlled virtual relays that link control systems to industrial machinery. The PLC has a processor-based central unit that runs an event-driven program to control the switching. This program can be entered manually on the PLC’s keypad, but in the case of Iran’s facility, it’s created using the editor software on a laptop and copied to a USB drive that was later plugged in to the PLC’s central unit.
In order to conceal its actual intent, the worm initially spreads indiscriminately, but in the Iranian case, included a highly specialized malware payload that was designed to target only Siemens Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems that are configured to control and monitor specific industrial processes.
Byres Security believes the people behind Stuxnet were trying to achieve something bigger by extensively reworking the PLC’s code. This, of course, is in line with inside information that Obama, through Cass Sunstein, is attempting to find a way to shut off any part of the Internt that he and his people deem as “overly revealing,” or “harmful to National Security” (here read ‘the government’s wishes.’) Shutting down the Iranian centrifuges was a joint American/Israeli project, via the CIA and its ally, SAIC but planned future attacks are purely domestic and reflect both the enemies of the White House and the CIA.
The entire operation is controlled, firstly by the CIA and through them, a company named SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) which, in turn, has set up another front called the Cipher Exchange Corporation. This is run by a former Indian naval intelligence officer and code specialist, Raj Mohindir Srivastava. But this entire operation is heavily involved with some former CIA lunacy called “Operation Stargate” which once was termed “Remote Viewing.” This was the child of one Ingo Swann, a mountebank and close friend of the even crazier L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology infamy! Turns up the fact that it is a Port Coquitlam address used by a company called Cipher Exchange Corporation. Their web-site: www.cipherkey.com is that of a typical CIA front organization. It says nothing.
SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), is an American technology applications company headquartered in the United States and who works for a number of U.S. federal, state, and private sector clients. It works extensively with the United States Department of Defense, the United States Department of Homeland Security, and the American domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, as well as other U.S. Government civil agencies and selected commercial markets. From 2001 to 2005, SAIC was the primary contractor for the FBI’s unsuccessful Virtual Case File project. SAIC relocated its corporate headquarters to their existing facilities in Tysons Corner in unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia, near McLean, in September 2009. As part of its outsourcing solution, SAIC has development centers in Noida and Bangalore, India. Scicom Technologies Noida was acquired by SAIC in September 2007.
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) transitioned a Remote Viewing Program to SAIC in 1991 and it was renamed Stargate Project. STARGATE was one of a number of “remote viewing programs” conducted under a variety of code names, including SUN STREAK, GRILL FLAME, and CENTER LANE by DIA and INSCOM, and SCANATE by the eccentrics at the CIA. These efforts were initiated to assess foreign programs in the field, contract for basic research into the phenomenon, and to evaluate controlled remote viewing as an intelligence tool.
The program consisted of two separate activities. An operational unit employed remote viewers to train and perform remote viewing intelligence-gathering. The research program was maintained separately from the operational unit.
This effort was initiated in response to CIA concerns about highly unreliable reports of Soviet investigations of ‘psychic phenomena.’ Between 1969 and 1971, US intelligence sources erroneously concluded that the Soviet Union was engaged in “psychotronic” research. By 1970, it was suggested that the Soviets were spending approximately 60 million rubles per year on it, and over 300 million by 1975. The money and personnel devoted to Soviet psychotronics suggested that they had achieved breakthroughs, even though the matter was considered speculative, controversial, and “fringy.” Using a declared, but fictional ‘Soviet threat,’ the CIA and other agencies have successfully deluded Congress, and often the White House, into heavily funding projects that the agencies consider to be ‘cash cows.’
The initial research program, called SCANATE [scan by coordinate] was funded by CIA beginning in 1970. Remote viewing research began in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute [SRI] in Menlo Park, CA. This work was conducted by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, once with the NSA and a later-identified Scientologist. The effort initially focused on a few “gifted individuals” such as the very eccentric Ingo Swann, an OT Level VII Scientologist. Many of the SRI “empaths” were from the Church of Scientology. Individuals who appeared to show potential were trained and taught to use talents for “psychic warfare.” The minimum accuracy needed by the clients was said to be 65%, and proponents claim that in the later stages of the training effort, this accuracy level was “often consistently exceeded.”
Ingo Swann, born in 1933 in Telluride, Colorado, has been heavily involved with the bizarre Scientology movement from its onset and is best known for his work as a co-creator (according to his frequent collaborators Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff) of what has been called ‘remote viewing,’ specifically the Stargate Project.
Swann has described himself as a “consciousness researcher” who had sometimes experienced “altered states of consciousness.” In other words, Swann actually believed that “special” individuals can leave their body and travel through space.
Swann helped develop the process of remote viewing at the Stanford Research Institute in experiments that caught the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency. He proposed the idea of Coordinate Remote Viewing, a process in which ‘remote viewers’ would see a location given nothing but its geographical coordinates. This bizarre project was developed and tested by Puthoff and Targ with CIA funding. Details and transcripts of the SRI remote viewing experiments themselves were found to be edited and even unobtainable.
A Dr. Silfen and Swann prepared an unofficial report of later out-of-body experiments and circulated it to 500 members of the ASPR, before the ASPR board was aware of it. According to Swann, Dr. Silfen has ‘disappeared’ (or, like so many other Scientology stories, never existed) and ‘cannot be located.’ Swann claimed he searched diligently for her and begged help from all his Scientology friends. According to Swann, in April 1972 a move was made at the ASPR in New York to discredit him and throw him out because he was a Scientologist.
GONDOLA WISH was a 1977 Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) Systems Exploitation Detachment (SED) effort to evaluate potential adversary applications of remote viewing.
Building on GONDOLA WISH, an operational collection project was formalized under Army intelligence as GRILL FLAME in mid-1978. Located in buildings 2560 and 2561 at Fort Meade, MD, GRILL FLAME, (INSCOM “Detachment G”) consisted of soldiers and a few civilians who were believed to possess varying degrees of natural psychic ability. The SRI research program was integrated into GRILL FLAME in early 1979, and hundreds of remote viewing experiments were carried out at SRI through 1986.
In 1983 the program was re-designated the INSCOM CENTER LANE Project (ICLP). Ingo Swann and Harold Puthoff at SRI developed a set of instructions which theoretically allowed anyone to be trained to produce accurate, detailed target data and use this new collection methodology against a wide range of operational and training targets. The existence of this highly classified program was reported by columnist Jack Anderson in April 1984.
In 1984 the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council evaluated the remote viewing program for the Army Research Institute. The results were unfavorable.
When Army funding ended in late 1985, the unit was redesignated SUN STREAK and transferred to DIA’s Scientific and Technical Intelligence Directorate, with the office code DT-S.
Under the auspices of the DIA, the program transitioned to Science Applications International Corporation [SAIC] in 1991 and was renamed STARGATE. The project, changed from a SAP (Special Access Program) to a LIMDIS (limited dissemination) program, continued with the participation of Edwin May, who presided over 70% of the total contractor budget and 85% of the program’s data collection.
Over a period of more than two decades some $20 million was spent on STARGATE and related activities, with $11 million budgeted from the mid-1980’s to the early 1990s. Over forty personnel served in the program at various times, including about 23 remote viewers. At its peak during the mid-1980s, the program included as many as seven full-time viewers and as many analytical and support personnel. Three psychics reportedly worked at Fort Meade, Maryland for the CIA from 1990 through July 1995. The psychics were made available to other government agencies which requested their services.
Participants who apparently demonstrated psychic abilities used at least three different techniques various times:
* Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV) – the original SRI-developed technique in which viewers were asked what they “saw” at specified geographic coordinates
* Extended Remote Viewing (ERV) – a hybrid relaxation/meditative-based method
* Written Remote Viewing (WRV) – a hybrid of both channeling and automatic writing was introduced in 1988, though it proved controversial and was regarded by some as much less reliable.
By 1995 the program had conducted several hundred intelligence collection projects involving thousands of remote viewing sessions. Notable successes were said to be “eight martini” results, so-called because the remote viewing data were so mind-boggling that everyone has to go out and drink eight martinis to recover. It is now believed that they drank the martinis before the sessions.
Reported intelligence gathering failures include:
* Joe McMoneagle, a retired Special Project Intelligence Officer for SSPD, SSD, and 902d MI Group, claims to have left Stargate in 1984 with a Legion of Merit Award for providing information on 150 targets that were unavailable from other sources. There is no support for the Legion of Merit story and less on the so-called ‘150 targets.’
* One assignment included locating kidnapped BG James L. Dozier, who had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades in Italy in 1981. He was freed by Italian police after 42 days, without help from the psychics. [according to news reports, Italian police were assisted by "US State and Defense Department specialists" using electronic surveillance equipment, an apparent reference to the Special Collection Service.
* Another assignment included trying to hunt down Gadhafi after the 1986 bombing of Libya, but Gadhafi was not injured in the bombing. One remote viewer said that the Libyan dictator was in Morocco but he was not. The “target” supplied by another government ‘remote viewer’ was a hospital.
* In January 1989, DOD asked the SAIC project about Libyan chemical weapons work. A remote viewer reported the ship named either Patua or Potua would sail from Tripoli to transport chemicals to an eastern Libyan port. Subsequent investigation by legitimate agencies disclosed that there was no such ship registered under any flag and that no chemicals had been transported to an eastern Libyan port.
* During the Gulf War remote-viewers suggested the whereabouts of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, but their information was not accurate and, at best, “confused” and “an obvious attempt to please” the DoD officials.
* The unit was tasked to find plutonium in North Korea in 1994, but the results were “totally incorrect” and “worthless.”
* During the US attack on Belgrade, a remote viewer “positively identified” the Chinese Embassy as an ‘important Serbian military headquarters.’ The U.S.immediately attacked it with serious diplomatic repercussions.
* Remote viewers also vainly attempted to find SCUD missiles and secret biological and chemical warfare projects, and tunnels and extensive underground facilities in Iraq as the justifying evidence for an invasion. None of this material “had the slightest worth” and was “completely delusional.”
The US STARGATE program was sustained through the support of Sen. Claiborne Pell, D-R.I., and Rep. Charles Rose, D-N.C., who were convinced of the program’s effectiveness. However, by the early 1990s, the program was plagued by uneven and “often bizarre” management, poor unit morale, divisiveness within the organization, poor performance, and few, if any results that could be considered accurate.
The FY 1995 Defense Appropriations bill directed that the program be transferred to CIA, with the CIA instructed to conduct a retrospective review of the program. In 1995 the American Institutes for Research (AIR) was contracted by CIA to evaluate the program. Their 29 September 1995 final report was released to the public 28 November 1995. It was highly negative in nature. The final recommendation by AIR was to terminate the STARGATE effort. CIA concluded that there was not a single case in which ESP had provided data used to guide intelligence operations.
In June 2001 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) paid SAIC $122 million to create a Virtual Case File (VCF) software system to speed up the sharing of information among agents. But the FBI abandoned VCF when it failed to function adequately. Robert Mueller, FBI Director, testified to a congressional committee, “When SAIC delivered the first product in December 2003 we immediately identified a number of deficiencies – 17 at the outset. That soon cascaded to 50 or more and ultimately to 400 problems with that software. We were indeed disappointed.”
While Ingo Swann is obviously niether normal nor rational, the head of the Vancouver project, Raj Mohindir Srivastava, is a former Indian navy cryptographer with past connections to SAIC Srivastava, who lives in Coquitlan, British Columbia, Canada, and is officially listed as working for a firm called FSS International operating in Vancouver, BC. This firm was founded by Srivastava himself and has no address or telephone number listed in that city. Technical papers authored by Srivastava listed as from his “Vancouver office.” It should be obvious that this firm is a shell or front.