You Won’t Believe What Spies On Malaysia Plane Were Doing
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Military intelligence is heavily involved in Malaysia Airlines 370,
but contradicting itself and denying the public from needed information,
thus increasing speculations officials are unauthorized by the military
to disclose the craft’s whereabouts and intel by 25 high-tech
passengers, employed by five major defense contractor technology
companies, was liekly valued enough to seize the plane.
Two Chinese companies represented on the plane’s manifest list are declared U.S. national security risk due to its spying with backdoor computer technology. Congress ousted them from business in the U.S. and warned American companies to halt busines with them, only two of five such companies tight with military.
This Is What Cyber Wars Look Like
A massive military search operation for Malaysia Airlines Boeing
777-200ER has resulted in no credible trace of the aircraft or its 239
passengers and crew. Search and
rescue vessels from Malaysia’s maritime enforcement agency reached
where the plane last made contact, reporting no wreckage sign. Vietnam’s rescue
planes spotted two large oil slicks about 15 km (9 miles) long, and a
smoke column, also false alarms. China and the Philippines sent ships to
help. The U.S., Philippines and Singapore dispatched military planes.
China has more ships and aircraft on standby. The FBI sent agents and technical staff to join the investigation, since four Americans are on the manifest list. Crowdsourcing has been activated, so even the public can help. The search operation, however, has no formal entity to lead it.
Chinese
passengers’ relatives angrily accuse the airline of keeping them in the
dark, and even thrown bottles at officials. Approximately 20-30
families were kept in an airport holding room, guarded by security
officials to keep them away from reporters.
”There’s no one from the company here, we can’t find a single
person,” said a middle-aged man at a hotel near Beijing airport
where relatives were taken. “They’ve just shut us in this room and told
us to wait.”
Malaysian authorities say
they’re working in co-operation with other countries in the
investigation. “Once the location of the airplane is determined,
International Civil Aviation Organization protocols will determine which
country will lead the investigation,” the U.S. National Transportation
Safety Board said. Until then, it’s tough keeping the story straight
with so many fingers in the pie.
Demanding that the military and FBI be honest and open is like trying to
get them to never frame, falsely arrest and detain, harm or kill.
Conflicting and confusing accounts of the plane’s potential whereabouts
and false alarms compound stress and anxiety of passengers’ friends and
family. After days, they were finally ushered unseen out of the airport
to their homes after told to mentally prepare for the worst, According
to Hugh Dunleavy, commercial director at Malaysia Airlines, that’s too
big of an ask. It’s especially difficult when faint signs of life
continued, such as loved ones’ phones still ringing with no explanation
and the “heard but not seen jet,” both long after the plane vanished.
Meanwhile, precious time is still being lost due to a lack of a lead
investigating agency with legal clout in the early days, according to
some aviation industry observers. Others speculate means and motives as
military investigators keep everyone in the dark.
Motive, Means, Iranian Connection
One motive to capture a craft is its highly valued cargo or passengers. MH370 possibly carries both. The
Obama administration and U.S. spymasters have accused China’s
government of using computer hackers to steal American businesses’
secrets to benefit China’s private sector. The world is angry at the
U.S. for its NSA spying. One means an aircraft can seemingly vanish is
with hi-tech military electronic weaponry (EW) designed specifically to
“disappear” crafts. U.S. and Chinese military boast of having
this capacity. The US has used it elsewhere. [Malaysia Plane Hidden With Electronic Weapon? 20 Hi-Tech EW Defense Passengers]
In 2005, an FBI investigation codenamed Titan Rain revealed Chinese
hackers in Guangdong stole from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and
stole flight-planning software from the Air Force. The hackers accessed
systems at defense contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, and the World
Bank. China’s hacking drove Google out of China. WikiLeaks quoted a U.S.
Embassy official saying contacts told the U.S. that the Chinese
government was behind internet hacking attacks on not only Google, but
also Western governments.
Five
major technological communications military contractor companies
have high-tech employees and executives on the MH370 passenger manifest,
two American and three Asia Pacific – each strongly tied to military: China
Telecom, Business Machines Corp., Austin-based Freescale, International
Business Machines (IBM), ZTE Corp., and Huawei Technologies Co.
Combined, they have 26 high-tech experts on the passenger manifest list,
including two executives. One of these companies refused to identify
its employees onboard, and investigators also withheld those identities.
China Telecom executive Hualian
“Happy” Zhang, network planning vice president for China Telecom
Global, is on the passenger manifest, number 207. Zhang was
reportedly returning from Kuala Lumpur after signing
a construction/maintenance agreement for Sea-Me-We-5, a submarine cable
to stretch 20,000 km from Singapore to Europe. Fiber optic cables are of
prime importance to U.S. military, NSA and intelligence agencies, with
expanding operations requiring more and more bandwidth for spying and
other operations. (Dana Priest, William Arkin,Top Secret America: The Rise of The New American Security State)
ZTE employee Li Yanlin, an engineer who is part of the company’s telecom gear installation and maintenance team boarded the plane. In
May, 2010, India banned telecommunications firms from importing from
ZTE and any other Chinese networking equipment companies due to fears that they were riddled with information-stealing spyware. Two years later, Reuters reported ZTE helped
funnel software and hardware from US firms Oracle, Microsoft and Cisco
Systems to the Iranian government in 2010 to build a $130m nation-wide
surveillance system.
Two
young Iranians are among those on the passenger manifest. Officials say
they would be unlikely to be connected with the plane’s disappearance,
but are leaving no stone unturned. The two Iranians traveled on
passports stolen about a year ago, possibly bought on the black market,
and claimed to be seeking asylum, but asylum from what has
been unreported.
ZTE’s
thievery and spying support to Iran violated an American embargo on
technology sales to the Iranian government. It put ZTE’s U.S. partners
in hot water. In May 2012, Ashley Kyle Yablon, ZTE’s Texas-based general
counsel, gave to the FBI an affidavit alleging the company plotted to
cover up sales to Iran. ZTE then placed Yablon on administrative leave, according to his attorney, Tom Mills.
Huawei
China-based telecom company with military ties has two employees on the
manifest list, but declined identifying them. Not surprising
considering its past spying for Chinese military. Huawei had to ”exit
the U.S. market” last year after Congress’s House Intelligence
Committee accused it of spying in the U.S. for China’s military. Based
in Shenzhen in Guangdong province, China, Huawei is the world’s
largest telecommunications equipment maker, employing 140,000 people
world-wide. It’s a chief competitor
to US-based firms like Cisco Systems, that’s seen Huawei eat into its
market share, especially in developing markets. The
committee investigated Huawei in 2012 due to: 1) it potentially
including surveillance back doors in telecommunications equipment sold
to the U.S. and 2) its CEO Ren Zhengfei having been a military
technologist for the People’s Liberation Army, the military of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
At the same time, the committee investigated ZTE, noting “companies around the United States” had experienced “odd or alerting incidents using Huawei or ZTE equipment.” The report alluded to classified intelligence even more damning. “This highlights a broader mistrust that China-based tech companies are connected with Chinese intelligence,” reported US News last year. “ Internet
companies based in the U.S. may soon face a similar chilly reception in
foreign markets following reports of the National Security Agency
accessing data from American digital networks.” (Emphasis added)
After the investigation,
committee Chair Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Ranking Member C.A. Dutch
Ruppersberger, D-Md., cautioned U.S. companies that “installing Huawei
equipment on telecom networks is a potential risk to national security.”
(US News) Australia and the U.K. invoked national security to impose
limits on deals carriers in their countries could make to purchase
Huawei telecommunications equipment. National security risk concerns might extend to other China-based information technology companies wanting
to enter American markets, according to Stewart Baker, former general
counsel for the NSA and former assistant secretary for policy at the
Department of Homeland Security.
Freescale Semiconductor, a major U.S. defense contractor based in Austin, has 20 employees on the passenger manifest, 12 Malaysian and 8 Chinese.
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), a major U.S. defense contractor, has a passenger on the manifest list, an executive, Philip Wood, 50. He’d been
working in Beijing, was about to start a new assignment in Kuala
Lumpur, and visited his family in the U.S. the week before the missing
plane operation. His family says it’s been communicating with the State
Department and the embassy in Kuala Lumpur, but only knows about as much
as everyone following the story.
NSA Compromising National Security, Risking American Lives
In the
cyber warfield arena, of course China’s not alone. From U.S. and Israeli
interests creating Stuxnet computer worm to damage Iran’s nuclear
development, to NSA’s global spy scandal, the U.S. is angering people
globally and putting Americans at risk of retaliation. News today of the
advancement of NSA’s spying is even more disturbing, as seen below.
The “most significant revelations to date,” “This is huge, in scale and in implications,” and “Disturbing” are people’s respondes today after reading a report by journalist Glenn Greenwald and his colleague at The Intercept, Ryan Gallagher on documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, in their news story, ‘How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware.“ Greenwald
and Gallager explore internal NSA slides and documents showing the
agency dramatically ”expanding its ability to covertly hack into
computers on a mass scale.” The report shows NSA has ”aggressively
accelerated its hacking initiatives” by supplanting operations once done
manually by human operators with automated systems that “reduce the
level of human oversight.” NSA us using a series of sophisticated hacking programs, malware for targeted infiltrations of computers and even broader mass surveillance over entire networks.
International concern about NSA’s
digital spying could compromise U.S. companies’ ability to gain
customers in the growing cloud-computing business, possibly costing them
up to $35 billion through 2016, an Information Technology and
Innovation Foundation think tank reported. Greenwald and Gallagher revelations today would add to foreign nation’s hostility that already exists against Top Secret America’s spy machine.
MH370 official reports changed
The fate
of flight MH370, its crew and passengers remains a mystery since last
communicating with air traffic control over four days ago, early
Saturday morning, so the military tells the public. MH370′s
flight path scheduled the plane to depart from Malaysia’s capital Kuala
Lumpur, head north over the Gulf of Thailand, fly over Vietnam, and
then onward to Beijing where scheduled arrival was at 6.30am.
What the world’s been told is that after departing at 12:41 a.m. Saturday, the plane’s first radar appearance was at 12:43 a.m. Malaysia
Airlines reported air traffic control lost contact about two hours
later, at 2:40 a.m. That time, however, later got changed (or
“corrected”) to 1:30 a.m., just short of an hour after departing. The
timing is important. To help track the missing plane, authorities
needed to have pinpointed the last reported contact, as the Globe and
Mail reports.
The
Boeing 777′s transponder and other tracking systems were either shut off
or malfunctioning when communications with air traffic control ended,
the story goes. That would have prevented secondary radar used by
civilian authorities from identifying it, but not primary radar used by the military. For example, Phnom
Penh military sight’s radar would have capacity to make proper
identification under any circumstance – unless not authorized to do so.
John
Goglia, former board member of the National Transportation Safety Board,
the U.S. agency that investigates plane crashes, said the lack of a
distress call suggested either the plane experienced an explosive
decompression or was destroyed by an explosive device.
It is speculated that Malaysian
officials are under a gag order by a military or other nefarious entity.
Numerous militaries are now involved in the event, as is the FBI – all
of whom remain silent about their involvement and findings other than
they are floating around on ships or on planes “searching.” Criticism of the Malaysian military’s and other investigators’ refusal to reveal all they know continues mounting.
Yesterday, Vietnam announced it was discontinuing its involvement in
the search, but alas, that changed today. China claims to
be intensifying its resources in the investigation. Malaysian
authorities insist they’re doing their best to solve the mystery of
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. They might also be doing their best to
inform the public. Malaysia government,
including the military, and airline officials, however, have offered
imprecise, incomplete and inaccurate information, with civilian
officials, contradicting military leaders.
Monday
in the United States, the public learned that Malaysian Air Force (RMAF)
chief General Tan Sri Rodzali Daud said the military received “signals”
Saturday showing after the aircraft’s last communications with ground
controllers, it sharply changed course from heading northeast to heading
west. According to the military account, the last sign of the plane was recorded at 2:40 a.m. Saturday when the aircraft was near Pulau Perak, a tiny island over 160 kilometres off the western shore of the Malaysian Peninsula. [Read: Malaysia Airlines 370 In New Location, Military Intel Adds Puzzle Piece (Photos)]
Officials had already said, however, that they were expanding their search to include the western vicinity. Gen.
Rodzali Daud’s new information about this stunned the world, from
aviation experts to China officials, who’d been repeatedly told that
authorities lost contact with the plane over an hour earlier, when it
was on course over the Gulf of Thailand, east of the peninsula. Berita Harian reported the general had confirmed
that RMAF Butterworth airbase detected the location signal of the
airliner as indicating it turned back from its original heading
toward Kota Bharu, Kelantan and was believed to have passed through the
airspace of the East Coast and Northern Peninsular of Malaysia.
Had the aircraft made it all the way to just off Thailand’s coast, and
then changed course 270 degrees toward Malaysia and as far as Pulau
Perak, it would have been the exact same distance as the first leg of
the flight, 432.4 miles. Not only that, Gen. Rodzali Daud’s new military account seemed to fit with an unexplained decision the day before, Monday, to expand the search to waters west of the peninsula.
Pulau Perak, Malaysia
Malaysia government seems evasive
and confused, as David Learmount, operations and safety editor at
Flightglobal, an aviation news and data service, says. If remarks
attributed to Gen. Daud Rodzali were true, why did the Malaysian
government wait so long to reveal evidence about a western flight path?
he questions, echoing millions of people globally watching the
disastrous humanitarian event.
Then,
Tuesday, Gen. Rodzali Daud denied he’d ever said MH370 was last detected
near Pulau Perek. He rejected the report that said he’d confirmed the
RMAF base in Butterworth had detected the location signal of the missing
MH370 flight near Pulau Perak in the Straits of Malacca at 2.40am
Saturday. He claimed the report in Malay-language daily Berita Harian on Tuesday misquoted him.
“I wish
to state that I did not make such statements,” Gen. Rodzell Daud said in
a written statement Tuesday. “I request this misreporting be amended
and corrected to prevent further misinterpretations of what is clearly
an inaccurate and incorrect report.”
According to Gen. Rodzali Daud, the Berita Harian reporter asked if
such an incident occurred as detailed in their story, but he did not
answer the question: “What I said to the reporter was to refer to the
statement which I have already made on March 9, 2014 during the press
conference with the Armed Forces Chief at the Sama-Sama Hotel, Kuala
Lumpur International Airport,” he said.
At the
press conference, Rodzali said: “The RMAF has not ruled out the
possibility of an air turn back on a reciprocal heading before the
aircraft vanished from the radar and this resulted in the Search and
Rescue Operations being widened to the vicinity of the waters off
Penang.”
His confusing statements, however, do not correspond with another military official’s statement: “[T]he
aircraft changed its course after passing Kota Bharu. It then descended
to a lower altitude and flew over the Straits of Malacca,’ a ”senior Malaysian armed forces officer” briefed on investigations reported to Reuters.
The
media report Tuesday indicated inconsistencies from the first Malaysia
Airlines statement a few hours after its Boeing 777-200 disappeared from
the radar screens. According to its March 8 statement, flight MH370 was
last detected in South China Sea, close to Vietnam’s shores. Its last
contact with air traffic controllers was when it was 120 nautical miles
off the east coast of the Malaysian town of Kota Bharu. Flight tracking
website flightaware.com showed it flew northeast after takeoff, climbed
35,000 feet and was still climbing when vanishing from tracking
records. Residents along the plane’s route claimed to have seen a low-flying aircraft around the time it disappeared.
Then, eight people near Marang,
on Malaysia’s eastern coast filed police reports stating they heard a
loud and frightening noise approximately nine hours after the plane took off, but could not see the source.
They heard a “loud and frightening noise” for about two minutes
Saturday, ran toward the odd sound. Whatever made the roar, however,
seemed invisible. (See: Malaysia 370 Sound Of Life: Heard But Invisible, Police Reports Say]
The plane remains invisible, if not to military operatives somewhere, at least to the public.
Photos: Asia Sentinel, Wikipedia
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