THE SECRET SPACE PROGRAM IMPLICATIONS OF THE JEDI CONTRACT
This has been a week when my normal routine of blogging and pre-scheduling blogs has been thrown right out the window. I've had to reschedule a couple of blogs, and just throw out a couple (which I've never done before), to blog about things that readers have sent me that had to go immediately to the top of the list.
Well, that's the case here, when S.H. found an article about the Pentagon's (or as we like to call it here, the Pentagram's) much-hyped JEDI contract. JEDI, in case you didn't know, stands for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. And if you've been following all this, you've been breathlessly waiting to see if the US government would award the contract to Mr. Gates - who has officially "apologized" for the Common Core fiasco - or to Mr. Bezos, who wants to burn books, move everything to "the cloud", and let the Clowns In America control it all. In short, JEDI is about moving the defense communications (and, one might add, archives) from "down here" to "up there." Now, everyone knows what I think about ebook platforms and the dangers they pose, so I won't rehearse that again here.
But if you're like me, or indeed, like S.H. who shared the article, you've probably had this uneasy queasy feeling in the pit of your stomach about this whole JEDI contract business, without really knowing why. It's like trying to grab a bar of wet, lathered-up soap with wet hands; whatever "it" is that is disturbing about it, it seems constantly to elude our grasp.
But when S.H. shared this article, something in it popped out, and many things that were blurry and nebulous came into clear focus, so much so that I abandoned my original blog schedule to blog about this one:
There were four paragraphs in this article that brought many - though not all - of my misgivings about this subject into focus. Three of them are right up front, and one of those paragraphs comes a little later. Here they are:
At a heavily attended industry day, top defense officials from the Pentagon’s Cloud Executive Steering Group described the acquisition process for the massive cloud migration that will stretch across the entire expanse of DOD, focused primarily on commercial platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings. The 10-year contract will likely be worth billions, though a specific price ceiling hasn’t been floated publicly yet.
The time has come for the Pentagon to flip the expectations about its use of cloud, said Chris Lynch, director of the Defense Digital Service team leading the procurement.
“We want to bend the Department of Defense around the commercial cloud,” Lynch said, meaning the department wants to adapt to embrace the existing strengths of the expansive commercial cloud and not limit that with excessive customization. “I can’t make that point enough. We want it here, and we want it out in those austere environments. We want to bring this to the warfighter.”
...
The cloud is “the type of technology driving the change that we in the DOD need to embrace,” Lord added. “It’s driven by the private sector globally at a scale which the DOD cannot compete with. … If we leverage commercially available cloud solutions, we will have the foundational technology in place that we need to deliver better software to our warfighters faster, with better security and at a lower cost. And that software will be easier to maintain.” (Emphasis added)
Now there's a couple of things to note here:
(1) The Pentagram is turning even more of its communications functions over to corporations 'in the cloud', or to put it in their terms, they "want to bend the Department of Defense around the commercial cloud."
(2) Those functions are a component of its warmaking capability.
It's that "bending around" that grabbed my attention, for it is a euphemistic admission for something that I've been maintaining all along that would inevitably come with the commercialization of space: the weaponization of space. It's an admission that those assets "up there" need to be defended, and this language is meant both to reveal, and conceal, that purpose at one and the same time.
But I also strongly suspect this language implies something else much more significant, namely, an admission that the capability already exists to protect those assets. The reason for this conclusion is that the Pentagon would hardly move much of its C4 capability - command, control, communications, and cyber-warfare - to "the commercial cloud" if the means of protecting those capabilities were not already operational. Otherwise, the whole venture would simply expose the American military to a single unprotected point of failure - the cloud - jeopardizing strategic and operational capabilities on a global basis, and waste a lot of money in the process. To draw somewhat clumsy analogies, it would be like building a dreadnought during the First World War, putting the best and most capable ordnance on it, and leaving the entire expensive ship completely unarmored, or like building an unarmored tank. That "bending" of the Department of Defense around the cloud is thus, in my high octane speculative opinion, a tacit admission that the protection problem is, from the Pentagram's point of view, "solved" and that the technologies to do the protecting are already operational, hence, Mr. Trump's "space force."
In other words, this whole move to "the cloud" is thus a major component of the secret space program.
And there's another disturbing implication, for the cloud is about information, and its control. And if the technologies are extant and operational, then that means information has been put into lock down.
See you on the flip side...
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The plus side of the Jedi Contract, from a security standpoint, is decentralization. I would imagine that the US government “white side” as well as the “black side” is subject to a near continuous and growing cyber threat. The Cloud based storage design, similar to blockchain, is spread out and redundant, as opposed to limited to only a few server farms. Most of what I said is pretty obvious to most readers on here.
However, lets sprinkle in the “High Octane®” speculation here and consider the tech that Google for example has indirectly shown the public. There has to be some sort of extremely exotic data storage tech behind YouTube, alone. From what I can find, over 400hrs of video, mostly high-def these days, are uploaded to YT every minute. The amount of horsepower under the hood of YT, is staggering.
Perhaps, big tech, has grossly usurped the US Gov’s own capability?
I tend to align with @goshawks on this. The Borg are here among us, and they want to streamline and control the flow of data on the inlet side AND the output side of things. Buy books, typewriters, ink, writing utensils and buy paper, soon they will be antiquities.
um. why am i getting links at such synchronous times:
www dot youtube dot com/watch?v=Fsr8P2VNF-E
Technology Is Becoming Indistinguishable From Reality
my first thoughts are about how my perspective can be and is manipulated. but what about entire systems out there on the cloud waiting to be picked up and taken in whole as though real. makes me think of stuxnet slipped into fukushima daichi systems (which btw were off the net). does this redefine computer virus problems?
This has the looks of yet more privatization of the military. Instead of using their own (proprietary thus expensive) systems, they move it to the “private” (Ha!) cloud. The private cloud which is now global in its scope with multiple data centers spread geographically around the globe for redundancy reasons. The one that sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb is of course the CAI’s AWS, masquerading as the Amazon Web Services Cloud.
The Pentagon will probably piggy-back onto that one (they probably already do). Imagine the massive amount of data they will have instant access to.
All that to be fed into their “warfighter” AI and instantly distributed wherever their latest war theater may be located.
(Joseph: “To draw somewhat clumsy analogies, it would be like building a dreadnought during the First World War, putting the best and most capable ordnance on it, and leaving the entire expensive ship completely unarmored, or like building an unarmored tank. ” That was called a WWI battlecruiser. Three British ones exploded during the sea-battle of Jutland, killing 3,320 crew – more than half of Britain’s fatal casualties at Jutland. German plunging-shellfire went right through inadequate armor and into the magazines. Gone, instantly. A fourth, Lion , almost went the same way before emergency flooding of her magazines.)
On the DoD ‘cloud’, I put this into the AI camp. An AI needs to have access to everything in real-time to control/manipulate it. Paper records, or even stove-piped computer systems, do not hack it (sorry). In Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. , there was even a ‘depository’ of paper records that were not allowed to be digitized in any way. Too ‘sensitive’ to risk hacking.
So, I would put this ‘effort’ into the subsumed-by-AI quadrant. The big question then becomes: Do the folks in charge think that they are riding the AI (i.e., in control), or is this yet-another ‘reaching-out’ by an AI already in charge?
The Space “Craft” with infinite qubit processing power still no match for 2 or 3 Divine Beings with a common purpose. As fate would have it, apparently we are in for a heck of a ride through the multiverse to find that out . . . ad infinitum.
Yikes!
JEDI is about creating new infrastructure to meet new necessities in a new age. It is a joint enterprise to create an integrated C4 capability for operations both on planet and off planet for the space and terrestrial forces. No doubt there are/will be security vulnerabilities. Like the poor, they will always be with us. Cyber security, like the whole of cyber-warfare, is constantly evolving.
Will the servers be on Earth, presenting a moving target in space, or buried underground on, say, The Moon?
No undertaking (probably especially the DoD) is a perfect fit for off-the-shelf software; but I can understand the desire to keep customization to a minimum. Not only is it expensive in time and money, it also tends to lead to all sorts of future complications and unintended consequences. Even though money is probably not much of an issue, I suspect that time is. I wonder whether that urgency is in response to an off-planet threat (mineral or biological), or a rush for commercial profit?
Cowardice of the fortified Roman soldier is hiding behind walls, dropping bombs on Dresden by joystick.
Fortifying bunker off-world or underground, and remote controlling destruction from a safe place, is Roman cowardice.
Online Pac-Man players in fantasy land are not human. They are orcs, with no love of daylight, made in USA.
Quite right. Warfare is yet another area where the machines are taking over from humans. Humans “fighting” a modern war tap at keyboards while looking at a screen, while drones and autonomous vehicles deliver the death they program from a safe distance. The testicular fortitude required to thrust a bayonet into an enemy is less of a job requirement than it used to be.
Driven by the private sector[profited by] globally; which the DOD can’t pay for[the public can’t pay for?]; but if we leverage[commit legal fraud] the public gets screwed more efficiently/economically. This makes the transmission from a public military to a private corporately owned & operated military more easily rendered. The corporately owned space resources are more easily protected on the high black seas of space by the alchemically new clouded versions of the East India Company flotillas.
Information warfare…
to infinity & beyond?
How many backdoors can you access?
Whose 5G is in your backyard?
‘Scuse me, but doesn’t “cloud” mean the data is hosted on a 3rd party server here on Earth, not in “space”?
In any case, I don’t think this is a good idea at all. I get nagged all the time by Windows to “put it in the cloud”. No way they’re getting control of my data.
Given all the hardwired back doors in virtually every processor manufactured over the last two decades, the laughable “security” around bit coins, and the release of the NSA’s hacks into the wild, among countless other “security” failures; I fail to see how anyone can conclude that the Pentagon has “locked down” the security of its “war fighting” information by “wrapping it around” a virtual security sieve. If anything, it will expose it to both State and non State actors once uploaded to the corporate controlled cloud.
Convince me otherwise, if you can. This is insanity.
Two things are out there that may have brought us to this place. WikiLeaks and the Weiner laptop. Both are direct conduits to much higher levels of intelligence and are now in the hands of Team Trumpo. There is now news that Assange is in a prison hospital getting some of the finest medical treatment in the tradition of Forestall, Regan, and others.
How these two pieces of intel, allowed the current regime to leverage themselves into this position of power is a story. If Engdahl is right about the origins of Team Trumpo, look where they are now. Allied with the Zapatas, doing deals in space.
We need to get those Bong Sphere Alliance t-Shirts asap.
RWP
Long Live The Sphere Bong Alliance!
The purpose of breaking “seals”, is to produce a super soldier, that can defeat any Roman gladiator anywhere, anytime. Thus mind altering is weaponizing, when upgrading psychological warfare into spiritual warfare.
A super soldier can only be controlled through concept of God, induced by nation and tradition. Nature of shape-shifting outranks all ranking systems, making it impossible to contain. Samurai with no master is Ronin.
Ambitious senators, who conspire with greedy moneylenders, to invade ancient Britain, rely on imperial industry, to outnumber courage and honour. A Roman empire in the clouds is just that. A pie in the sky moon landing.