NEWS AND VIEWS FROM THE NEFARIUM OCT 23 2014

Posted on October 23, 2014 by Joseph P. Farrell • Filed Under: Fireside Chats •http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/10/news-views-nefarium-oct-23-2014/

CEO of French oil giant Total, Christophe de Margerie, killed in Moscow plane crash
Joseph comments on the possibilities behind the recent death of the CEO of France’s big oil combine, Total, M. Christophe de Margerie:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iFrF-Yl7Fc
     

CEO of French oil giant Total, Christophe de Margerie, killed in Moscow plane crash

By AFP | 21 Oct, 2014, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/ceo-of-french-oil-giant-total-christophe-de-margerie-killed-in-moscow-plane-crash/articleshow/44894839.cms

The CEO of French oil company Total, Christophe de Margerie died in a plane crash at a Moscow airport after his private jet struck a snow plough on takeoff.

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MOSCOW: The CEO of French oil company Total, Christophe de Margerie died in a plane crash at a Moscow airport after his private jet struck a snow plough on takeoff.

Total confirmed the death of the 63-year-old early on Tuesday. "The Total Group confirms with great and profound sadness that its CEO Christophe de Margerie died last night shortly after 10pm (Paris time) in an air crash at Vnukovo airport in Moscow following a collision with a snow removing machine," Total said in a statement.

Just hours earlier De Margerie had met Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev at his country residence outside Moscow to discuss foreign investment in Russia, Vedomosti business daily reported.

The Vnukovo airport said in a statement that the Falcon Dassault business aviation jet crashed as it prepared to take off for Paris with one passenger and three crew on board.

"During run-up at 11:57 pm, there was a collision with the airport's snow plough. As a result of the crash, the passenger and all the crew members died," the airport's statement said.

The airport said that visibility was at 350 metres at the time of the accident. Moscow saw its first snowfall of the winter on Monday.

The airport said its rescue services were sent to the scene and "immediately started extinguishing a fire that had broken out".

TASS news agency also said four people had died. "There was one passenger registered on the plane, French citizen Christophe de Margerie. The three crew members were also French citizens. They all died," the TASS news agency cited an aviation source as saying.

A spokeswoman for transport investigators, Tatyana Morozova, told Interfax that three men and a 39-year-old woman died .

The crash is being investigated by the Interstate Aviation Committee, which probes all Russian air crashes, and experts from Russia's federal aviation agency, the airport said.

The head of the federal aviation agency, Alexander Neradko, has taken charge of the investigation, the Interfax news agency reported.

The plane's black boxes have been removed, airport spokeswoman Yelena Krylova told RIA Novosti news agency.

Moscow transport investigators said in a statement that they had opened a criminal probe into breaches of aviation safety rules causing multiple deaths through negligence, which carries a maximum jail term of seven years.

French experts were set to take part in the investigation, Interfax reported, citing a source in the rescue operation.

"The French side is informed. They should send experts. This will happen very soon," the source was cited as saying.

The airport was closed temporarily to clear up the scene of the accident but resumed normal operations at 1:30 am.

De Margerie had been chief executive of Total, Europe's third largest oil company, since 2007.

He had worked for the company for 40 years, spending his entire career there, and was known affectionately as the "Big Moustache" because of his prominent facial hair which was his most striking feature.

The son of diplomats and business leaders, he was the grandson of Pierre Taittinger, founder of Taittinger champagne and the luxury goods dynasty.

Married with three children, he was known for his good humour but De Margerie had steered Total through tough times including defending the company against allegations of corruption during the UN "oil-for-food" programme in Iraq.

Highly regarded within the oil industry, De Margerie admitted the allegations had taken their toll on the company.

"Most people, when they speak of Total do not know what it is, but know it is not good," he said in 2009.

Total said in September that work on constructing a new natural gas liquefaction plant in Yamal in northwestern Siberia was continuing despite EU and US sanctions on Russia over its role in the conflict in Ukraine.

Total is developing the plant with Novatek of Russia and Chinese oil group CNPC.

Total also announced in May that it had signed a deal with Russia's second biggest oil firm Lukoil to explore and develop shale oil deposits in western Siberia. But De Margerie told the Financial Times last month that the project had been halted due to Western sanctions.

Big Data and the Internet of Things: Implications in the Intelligence Community

October 22, 2014 • http://www.dataversity.net/big-data-internet-things-implications-intelligence-community/

by Gil Allouche
Rumor has it that if you’re lucky enough to visit Bill Gate’s home on Lake Washington, upon your arrival you’ll be given a microchip to keep with you everywhere you go. As you navigate the mansion you’ll discover that the lighting and climate respond to your presence, the artwork on the walls changes to suit your tastes, and your favorite music follows you from room to room. Welcome to the Internet of Things (IoT), a world of web-connected devices that is drawing the attentions of Billionaire philanthropists and, as it turns out, the intelligence community.
According to a recent article on Informationweek.com, the Internet of Things—defined simply as “the accelerating expansion of data-gathering devices that are connected to the Internet”—has the potential to “completely change the intelligence community.”
That’s a bold statement, supported in part by a panel of experts that recently convened at the Intelligence & National Security Summit in Washington, D.C. According to the article the panel concluded that, “the explosion of data is generally a good thing when it comes to meeting the mission of the intelligence community.”   
Speaking on the role of technology in the intelligence community, Lewis Shepard, director and general manager of the Microsoft Institute, said, according to the Informationweek article that, “the classic mission of the intelligence community is understanding the outside world, not just the adversary and his capabilities. We cannot understand the world if we do not understand how the world is changing, including broader cultural, social, and demographic changes.”
As for just how the intelligence community might use the IoT, a 2012 article on wired.com titled, “We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher”, offers a glimpse of what the CIA has planned. According to the article, all of these web-connected personal and household devices, such as smart appliances, car navigation systems, and light switches, can be used to spy on us. And CIA director David Petraus intends to use the IoT to do just that. According to the article, physical “bugs” that once had to be planted in order to listen in on conversations will soon be replaced by the ability to intercept tagged geo-location data sent out from web-connected devices in real-time. “If you’re a ‘person of interest’,” the article states, “All those new online devices are a treasure trove of data to the spy community.”
Expounding on that theme, Petraus offers that, “Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation Internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing, the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.”
As Petraus indirectly points out, all of this information streaming in from Internet-connected devices and networks will require sophisticated Big Data analytics tools to make sense of it all. The Informationweek article also addressed how the IoT “raises concerns about how to sift through useful information from the vast quantities of data generated, as well as issues of privacy.”
Commenting on the big analytics challenges presented by IoT information—such as selecting and prioritizing data—Chris Reed, the program manager in the Office of Smart Collection at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) offers in the Informationweek article that the lack of interoperability of web-connected devices is a real hurdle. “Each of these have their own ways of collecting, transmitting, [and] using data,” Reed says, “A lot of times you purchase a device and you’re locked into a proprietary silo… Particularly on government procurements, we need to make sure we can unlock the value of the data.”
Clearly, with the rapid proliferation of Internet-connected devices, Big Data analytics platforms—particularly cloud-based Hadoop similar to Amazon Elastic MapReduce—will play a major role in helping the intelligence community and commercial enterprise to capture, manage and make sense of astronomical volumes of data flowing in from the Internet of Things.  http://www.dataversity.net/big-data-internet-things-implications-intelligence-community/

German Intelligence Claims Pro-Russian Separatists Downed MH17

Posted by George Freund on October 20, 2014 at 10:25 AM

10/19/2014

Deadly Ukraine Crash

German Intelligence Claims Pro-Russian Separatists Downed MH17

Germany's foreign intelligence agency says its review of the crash of a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 in Ukrainian has concluded it was brought down by a missile fired by pro-Russian separatists near Donetsk.

After completing a detailed analysis, Germany's foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), has concluded that pro-Russian rebels were responsible for the crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 on July 19 in eastern Ukraine while on route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

In an Oct. 8 presentation given to members of the parliamentary control committee, the Bundestag body responsible for monitoring the work of German intelligence, BND President Gerhard Schindler provided ample evidence to back up his case, including satellite images and diverse photo evidence. The BND has intelligence indicating that pro-Russian separatists captured a BUK air defense missile system at a Ukrainian military base and fired a missile on July 17 that exploded in direct proximity to the Malaysian aircraft, which had been carrying 298 people.

Unambiguous Findings

Evidence obtained shortly after the accident suggested the aircraft had been shot down by pro-Russian militants. Both the governments of Russia and Ukraine had mutually accused each other of responsibility for the crash. After a Dutch investigative commission reviewed the flight recorder, it avoided placing any blame for the crash. Some 189 residents of the Netherlands perished in the downing of Flight MH17.

BND's Schindler says his agency has come up with unambiguous findings. One is that Ukrainian photos have been manipulated and that there are details indicating this. He also told the panel that Russian claims the missile had been fired by Ukrainian soldiers and that a Ukrainian fighter jet had been flying close to the passenger jet were false.

"It was pro-Russian separatists," Schindler said of the crash, which involved the deaths of four German citizens. A spokesman for the German Federal Prosecutor's Office told SPIEGEL that an investigation has been opened into unknown perpetrators because of the possibility that the crash had been a war crime.

URL:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/german-intelligence-blames-pro-russian-separatists-for-mh17-downing-a-997972.html