₦airaland Forum

PassingShot:
You're just too ignorant not to know that the man Keita who promised to make Nigeria ungovernable for Jonathan was a PDP member who later became close to GEJ.

Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) National Leader, Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, has criticised the declaration of state of emergency in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe States and the subsequent military offensive against the Boko Haram Islamic sect.
Buhari, who featured on the “Guest of the Week,” a Hausa programme of the Kaduna-based Liberty Radio, yesterday said the federal government’s action was a gross injustice against the north.

modath:
I am an unapologetic PMB stan but Ogbeni Dipo should buy himself brain if his political leanings have melted the one he came with....

I live in FCT & know all the neighborhoods, the tweet is a slap on the face of well meaning Nigerians...

Others slated to face trial for varying degrees of fraud and money laundering are: Transfigura which is unable to account for $80million, Ontario Oil which defrauded the oil sector of $135million, Aiteo $150million, Sahara Energy $120million. Those linked to the companies are: Tonye Cole, Tope Osinubi, Ade Odunsi, Tunde Ayeni.

PassingShot:
SMH at some imbecilic comments up here. Leaders of tomorrow my foot.

mightyhaze:
lmao! ''Ibos' ruined gej govt'. 'They lov corruption' bla bla blaaaa .now we knw d ppl dat siphoned d nations commonwealth under d last dispensation,makin poor jona look soo bad

zionglory:
God knows,I must settle down in europe

fulanimafia:
You're completely right, unfortunately I am in the diaspora and can do little directly, El-Rufai's silence in particular is puzzling.

The focus right now should be in unravelling the real identities of these criminal murderers masquerading under the toga of "fulani herdsmen".

mightyhaze:
dey look like yo robbers 2 me

kernel501:
Poor Brown roofed region always looking to dispense lies since 1967. You couldn't write against Boko Haram or Fulanis who kidnapped your elder statesman kept him on the floor for four days. Even when he told you it was Fulani herds men, you asked him to deny it... Coward.

Newest cyber threat
will be data
manipulation, US
intelligence chief says

US intelligence chiefs are warning
Congress that the next phase of
escalating online data theft is likely to
involve the manipulation of digital
information. A “cyber armageddon”, long
imagined in Washington as a
catastrophic event of digitally
triggered damage to physical
infrastructure, is less likely than
“cyber operations that will change or manipulate data”, the US director of
national intelligence, James Clapper,
told the House intelligence committee
on Wednesday. More on this topic CIA to make sweeping structural
changes with focus on cyber
operations Clapper, backed by the director of
the National Security Agency, Admiral
Michael Rogers, said that while such
efforts had yet to manifest
themselves, US business and
governmental agencies had entered an era of persistent “low-to-
moderate level cyber-attacks from a
variety of sources”. Yet both indicated that US digital
networks are currently threatened
by wide-scale data theft, like the
recent intrusion into the networks of
the Office of Personnel Management, not destruction or compromise. Rogers and Clapper warned that a
mutated phase of malicious digital
penetrations would undermine
confidence in data stored and
accessible on US networks, creating
an uncertainty that could jeopardize US military situational awareness. “I believe the next push on the
envelope is going to be the
manipulation or the deletion of data
which would of course compromise
its integrity,” Clapper told the House
panel. Rogers testified that while the NSA
and its military conjoined twin, US
Cyber Command, had clear rules for
protecting US networks, its
authorities to engage in offensive
action online were murkier. In 2013, the Guardian published a secret directive on US digital offensive capabilities and a framework for their
use, thanks to the whistleblower
Edward Snowden. There is “still uncertainty about what
is offensive and what is authorized”,
Rogers said. “That’s a policy
decision.” While noting that offensive cyber
attacks were “an application of
force” akin to conventional military
conflict, Rogers suggested that NSA or Cyber Command require a freer
hand, warning: “A purely defensive
strategy is not going to change the
dynamic we find ourselves in now.” Rogers also urged new international
norms that would prohibit
“extracting mass personally
identifiable data”, although the
Snowden document hoard
demonstrates that to be the NSA’s practice worldwide. Nor should the global community
accept data destruction as a national
practice, Rogers said – a cyber
practice the US and Israel arguably
inaugurated by allegedly creating the
Stuxnet worm that hijacked and damaged industrial controls for
Iranian nuclear centrifuges. The FBI director, James Comey,
joined by Rogers, reprised his plea
for surreptitious access into end-to- end encrypted data. Comey argued that technologists had not truly tried
to find a mathematical solution that
would allow the US government
access without subjecting sensitive
data to increased insecurity. Though leading cryptographers
have likened Comey’s effort to
“magical thinking”, Comey said: “My reaction to that is, really? Have we
really tried?” Clapper testified that there was no
consensus within the intelligence
agencies as to the ultimate culprit in
the mass exfiltration of federal
employees’ data at the Office of
Personnel Management. Rogers said the NSA had provided
the office with “19 specific
recommendations” to forestall a
future hack, but did not indicate why
the US agencies tasked with
protecting government networks did not spot the vulnerabilities before 4
million personnel records were
stolen, reportedly by China. “I don’t think anyone is satisfied with
the environment we find ourselves in
right now,” Rogers said.

Spies, sleepers and
hitmen: how the
Soviet Union’s KGB
never went away Vladimir Putin’s background as a
Soviet spy means there can be little
surprise at the blatant resurgence of
an aggressive surveillance state in
modern Russia

Vladimir Putin was never an especially distinguished spy. In the
1980s, the KGB dispatched him not
to a glamorous western capital but to
provincial East Germany. It was here,
in Dresden, that he sat out the
collapse of the Soviet Union, an event that filled him with horror and rage. For a brief moment in the 90s, the
KGB – now re-branded as the FSB,
the Federal Security Service – was on
the back foot. Since becoming
president in 2000, however, Putin
has transformed Russia into a giant spy state. He has brought back many
of the cold war espionage
techniques he first learned as a
young recruit in Leningrad’s KGB spy
school. Not that they ever quite went
away. FSB spies are a paranoid,
conspiratorial and deeply
xenophobic bunch. They see
themselves as the direct descendants
of the Cheka, Lenin’s feared, terrifying secret police. They are
obsessed, as in cold war times, with
finding and defeating Russia’s
“enemies”. Some of these so-called
“enemies” are foreign, some are
homegrown. In the 70s, the KGB employed a
wide repertoire of operational tricks.
Typically, they would eavesdrop on
western diplomats, harass British and
American journalists (slashing the
tyres of their cars was a favourite) and carry out break-ins and
buggings. Writing about Soviet
dissidents or Jewish emigration got
you into trouble When I got to Moscow in 2007 as
the Guardian’s correspondent I was surprised to discover that such
ancient KGB practices were back. For reasons that are still mysterious, the
FSB decided that I was one of its
enemies. Unpromising young men in
black leather jackets trailed me
round Moscow’s icy streets. This time,
the reporting taboos were Putin’s money, top-level Kremlin corruption
and the vicious war in the north
Caucasus. As well as demonstrative surveillance
– always more Inspector Clouseau
than John le Carré – Putin’s spies
made it clear that they were listening
to my calls. They pulled the plug, for
example, whenever I made a joke about Russia’s president. Like other
despots, Putin doesn’t have a sense
of humour (though he can do
sardonic repartee). The FSB also revived another old
KGB/East German Stasi tactic: what
the exasperated American
ambassador in Moscow calls “house
intrusions”. Over a period of nearly
four years FSB agents frequently broke into the Moscow flat where I
lived with my wife and two small
children. They left a series of
ridiculous clues to show that they
had been there. These included open windows, central heating wires cut,
family photos deleted from laptops,
and – most amusingly – a sex
manual in Russian, helpfully left
beside my bed. The British embassy politely advised
us that our flat was bugged. There
was little we could do about it, it said.
The same low-level psychological
techniques are used against British
and US diplomats in Moscow, as well as against Russian embassy staffers,
opposition activists, and many
others. In 2011, I was chucked out
of Moscow. This was another tactic
used repeatedly by the Soviet Union
against troublesome western correspondents who annoyed the
state, or tried to dodge censorship,
from the Bolshevik 1920s onwards. The FSB’s special wrath, however,
is directed not at foreigners but at
Russians it regards as fifth columnists
and traitors. In 2006, an alleged KGB
hit squad murdered the Russian
dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London. It poured radioactive
polonium-210 into his tea. He died in
agony three weeks later. The British
government believes that only a
Russian state agency could have got
hold of polonium, a rare and unstable isotope. The row over
Litvinenko’s death plunged London
and Moscow into a very cold war
stand-off, with a tit-for-tat expulsion
of diplomats. US diplomatic cables leaked in
2010 reveal that Whitehall is deeply
concerned about the number of
Russian spies – formal and informal –
now based in London. When the
west was preoccupied with 9/11, al- Qaida and the Middle East, Putin
stealthily ramped up the number of
Russian agents working abroad.
They included the glamorous
Russian US-based sleeper agent
Anna Chapman, exposed and later swapped. Russia’s foreign
intelligence agency, the SVR, keeps
close tabs on Russian exiles in
London. It also seeks to influence
British politicians. Some observers, meanwhile,
have expressed surprise at Moscow’s
takeover of Crimea and its covert
invasion of eastern Ukraine. In fact,
the “little green men” – undercover
Russian soldiers who seized Crimea – come straight from the KGB
playbook. Putin’s actions in Ukraine
follow a classic KGB doctrine known
as “active measures”. The phrase
encompasses disinformation,
propaganda, political repression and subversion. The goal, then as
now, is to weaken the west, create
divisions between Nato member
states, and to undermine the US in
the eyes of the world, especially the
developing world. These days, Russian propaganda
comes in the shape of the English-
language channel Russia Today and
via an army of Kremlin online trolls
who post comments on western
newspaper websites, including the Guardian’s. The production values
are modern, but the thinking entirely
Soviet. Russian television is under
the Kremlin’s thumb; one of the
lessons of the Ukraine crisis is that
propaganda, as in Soviet times, is highly effective. There are a few differences. In the
USSR, the KGB was under the direct
control of the Communist party. It
was subordinate to the Politburo.
Now, however, the FSB is
subordinate to nobody; it operates with impunity according to its own
secret rules. It has become Russia’s
most powerful and unaccountable
institution. On the eve of becoming president in
2000, Putin – then head of the FSB – gave a speech to his colleagues. “A group of FSB operatives,
dispatched undercover to work in
the government of the Russian
Federation, is successfully fulfilling its
task.” Like most of Putin’s “jokes”,
this one was mostly true.

mightyhaze:
nah! Sounds like an igbo guy 4m ohafia

Obiagelli:
i hear you

doublewisdom:
Oh, that's the meaning!
While the Yorubas focused their attention on the Igbos in Lagos, the Fulanis have taken over Oyo, Ondo etc.

ERODEDEAST:
Where are the silly YAMS.

fulanimafia:
www.nairaland.com/attachments/2910812_screenshot20150930at10_27_30am_jpegf8b230219e00e1b686219ab54a894447

fulanimafia:
You're completely right, unfortunately I am in the diaspora and can do little directly, El-Rufai's silence in particular is puzzling.

The focus right now should be in unravelling the real identities of these criminal murderers masquerading under the toga of "fulani herdsmen".

mightyhaze:

Obiagelli:
You have been listening to radio biafra?