Month: October 2014

Why Is The Media Taking JPMorgan Chase’s Word on their Massive Negligence?

by Spocko

Last night I put up a post over at FDL:  83 Million Reasons We Should Break Up JPMorgan Chase.

I joked a bit about how the media will cover it and just accept what they are told, because hey, it came from the official spokespeople, they wouldn’t lie to us, would they?

Things must remain stable otherwise the terrorists/Russians/hackers win!

If we had actual competition in the industry this breach would be a signal to all the other big banks to start snagging JP Morgan Chase customers.  But none of them want to risk breaking the code of silence.

But that doesn’t mean that other entities can’t start suggesting to people to leave Chase. Credit Unions, smaller banks and mattress companies can all start campaigns to get people to leave JPMorgan Chase.

I told my friends at New York Communities for Change to restart their campaign to get cities to leave JPMorganChase. They had some big successes and I’ll bet those cities are very happy today.

I’ve just read about 15 articles on the story. The press plays dutiful stenographer. ‘Just the facts’ as they are told. A few talked to some security experts. But no one talked to the people who actually worked on this breach. So it’s all second hand guesses how bad it really is.

The stories are now about how a consumer can protect themselves, since JPMorgan didn’t.  Chase is outsourcing the fraud detection to the humans whose accounts were negligently secured. Nice trick! Thanks for the new job!
But none of them suggest this, “Leave JPMorgan Chase.”

I watch lots of mystery shows about big thefts and one thing you notice is how misdirection and social engineering is used.  For example, we have been told that they used an employee password to get in. No genius hacker or massive supercomputer cracking necessary.  “It coulda happened to any bank!” they cry. But with the proper controls in place it never would have gotten this far. That is negligence. If it happened in a smaller bank fewer people would have been impacted.

Trust Us. Have We Ever Lied to You Before? Wait, Don’t Answer That!


The bank is now engaging in their own media blitz and social engineering to keep everyone calm. It’s working so far, the stock had a tiny drop but no big deal. And that is all Wall Street cares about. “Didn’t drop too much? Okay move along, nothing to see here.”

What is the panic they were afraid of? Everyone leaving the bank and going elsewhere. Not just individual accounts, business accounts. And that can still happen. JP Morgan wants you to see them as Jimmy Stewart and the good ol’ Building and Loan. But they are Mr. Potter and we all know it.

What if you want to destroy a big bank, but you didn’t want to directly take away their money? You might start by injecting doubt into the integrity of the bank. You might give people a reason to take their money out of the bank, voluntary. You interrupt the revenue stream, indirectly.

They are blaming the Russians because that is their current tech bad guy. (I’m surprised they didn’t blame ISIS or Occupy.)

What if you wanted to protect a specific bad bank but don’t want to acknowledge it’s just them?  You make it about the entire system. You wrap it in a flag, call it national security.

Any problems then must be seen as bad for America, not just JP Morgan Chase. It’s not an attack on a specific bank with bad security, it’s an Attack on America! That way everyone rallies around the bank! And they get special government help. “We must maintain confidence in the American Banking System!” But it’s not “The American Banking System” it’s JPMorgan Chase. They are the law-breaking-fine-paying, too-big-to-fail-so-we-won’t-prosecute them, bank.

If I was another bank that kept my systems secure, I wouldn’t want to be thrown in the same category as them but I would welcome the government’s protection.

Will This Breach Change People’s Behavior? 

I shop at Target. I pay cash. I know a lot of people who do, even though they probably have a much more solid security system now, it’s just this hangover feeling people have.

Will people start pulling their accounts? JP Morgan Chase is afraid of a run on the bank.  If I wanted to stop a run I would do like they did. I’d write a carefully crafted statement that the media swallows whole with little or no demands to know more. “Trust us,” they say, “have we ever lied to you before?”

Is my money at JPMorgan Chase safe?
Yes. There is no evidence that financial data such as account numbers, passwords, user IDs, dates of birth or Social Security numbers were accessed, acquired or compromised.
As always, you are not liable for any unauthorized transaction on your account that you promptly alert us to. We have not seen any unusual fraud activity related to this incident.

I just watched an episode of Crossing Lines in which the issue of “evidence” of a crime on a computer was erased. The crime happened, they just didn’t have evidence.

Just like the bank was wrong earlier about how many accounts were compromised, they could be wrong on “the evidence” or they could be lying. Do they have to make any of these statements under oath? Can anyone see those? How about the SEC? Any non-captured regulators? How about that new-fangled Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?

What the hackers might do with the data isn’t clear YET.  Maybe they are waiting. Maybe this is exactly what they wanted to accomplish.

In this hilarious FAQ JPMorgan Chase tell people they don’t need to change their passwords and the bank doesn’t offer to buy you a credit monitoring service.

Note the wording, they don’t “believe” it’s necessary to change passwords. They don’t “think” customers should get new cards.

Besides working with computer software security experts, I’ve also worked with someone in the fraud part of the credit card industry. He explained that it is cheaper for the banks to just let the fraud happen than issue new cards. Sure they cover any fraud purchases, but what of the people whose identities were stolen? Ooopie. What is that line from Animal House? “You f’ed up you trusted us!”

The  media is still absorbing this story. Action News 7 will run the, “What can you to protect yourself?” stories. But “Five on Your Side” will never state the obvious, leave JPMorganChase. Because that would be attacking an advertiser.

During the upcoming media, PR blitz I expect this attack on JPMorgan Chase will morph into “It’s your patriotic duty to stick with this bank or the terrorists win.” You all can start asking your cities, businesses and groups,  “Why are you still with JPMorgan Chase?”

Starting today they don’t need a “political” reason to leave them like they did because of their previous horrible acts in the mortgage and foreclosure business. They can use the good ‘ol, “It’s in your best self interest!” reason to leave them. You know, the magical hand of the market!

For the kids, here’s the hashtag. #LeaveJPMorganChase

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From the Tweety files: He’s baaack

by digby

Those who’ve read my blog over the years know that I’ve been dogging Chris Matthews for years over his coverage of Iraq and the 2008 election. In the past few he moderated his approach a bit and became a little less obnoxious. Well, the old Tweety is back, and he’s loaded for bear.

Yesterday he spelled it out in the terms that make the most sense to him. After rending his garments over Ebola and suggesting that America start quizzing all travelers in the Israeli style just to make them sweat, he wondered if President Obama was up to the job:

Let’s get tough here. Is this the problem of a second term that presidents get lazy, intellectually lazy and cut off from the country, and they start picking deputies for jobs instead of looking for the best people? The lazy thing to do is, somebody leaves, you promote their deputy. This is, I think, a big part of the endemic problem of second terms. They don`t get out and mix with people, find new people, new hot shots to fill these jobs. They just keep promoting the person whose sort of turn it is, and they`re not as good as the person they picked the first time…

Realizing that he had evoked a racist stereotype, he corrected himself. And then went right ahead with a patented Matthews sexist comment:

I want to straighten out something I said to Roger before you get me accusing him, accusing this president of being physically lazy. I think there`s a social kind of laziness, the refusal to reach out and meet a lot of new people and check a lot of possibilities. Don`t just go with the next person in line. And I really think this second term cabinet is not up to the first term cabinet because they never are.

And you know that, Roger. They just never are. Kennedy went out and met people like McNamara and Rusk and people went looking for them, and he put them in the best slots he could. He talked them into it. He recruited people he didn`t even know, he recruited them. Presidents should go out and look for people. They should be practicing affirmative action all the time in leading, or else they get atrophied into that little world of people around him like Valerie and Mrs. Obama and people — you`re just listening to the same voices all the time. You`ve got to be Protean in the White House. And I know it`s a rigorous demand, but it`s a real one, or else you`re going to get smaller as your presidency goes on, and therefore more vulnerable to surprises.

Real men don’t listen to the “little world” of “Valerie” and “Mrs Obama,” especially when terrorists and deadly diseases are involved. (Maybe they could be consulted on the birth control mandate or something like that.) That’s obtuse enough. But nothing can equal the sheer daftness of Chris Matthews evoking the architects of the Vietnam war as great examples of presidential cabinet choices. Perhaps if President Obama is lucky, he too will find someone as good as the men who mired this nation into the worst foreign military quagmire it’s ever known.

That’s from my Salon piece this morning. You can read the rest here.

Your astonishingly stupid right wing quote ‘o the day

by digby

Andrea Tantaros:

I think we know that we can’t rely on people for human intelligence. We can’t. We know that humans are going to have breakdowns. As we saw this when he let himself out of the hospital and exposed himself to children.

So I don’t think we can trust them to give us the accurate information. We may see people getting off flights saying they haven’t come in contact with anyone and maybe they have and are seeking treatment in the US. We are not equipped to handle this and at the time when we should be preparing, the president was dancing in Martha’s Vineyard and assuring us that this would never happen.

I said it before and I’ll say it again, in these countries they do not believe in traditional medical care. So someone could get off a flight and seek treatment from a witch doctor that practices Santeria. We’re hoping that they’ll come to the hospitals in the US. They might not.

Look at each sentence in her comment. Every single one is either contradicting another one, is factually incorrect or is just plain stupid. You have to step back, however, admire the confidence with which she spews her ignorant cretinism. She clearly has no doubt in the world that she is making sense and she truly believes she knows something even as she babbles unintelligibly about “human intelligence.”

Video here.

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Find out how much you don’t know

by digby

Pew has put together a news quiz. It’s not hard. You can take it here.

I’m a full time news junkie by profession so it stands to reason I would get them all right. Still, it’s kind of depressing that more people didn’t get most of them right.

There is a demographic breakdown that shows old people are more likely to know this stuff than young people and men are more likely to know it than women. But you can’t help but notice that the one thing young people and women get right that nobody else does is the current minimum wage and the poverty level …

I don’t think this really measures much except for the reality that young and working people have better things to do with their time than keep up with the news. I’ve always been a news junkie but even I was far less likely to tune into a lot of this when I was younger. There are huge gaps in my memory of news events when I was traveling or working odd hours or just hanging out with my friends. Still, it just shows how disengaged Americans are. I can’t imagine that’s a good thing overall. Even most of the college grads and old people like me are pretty clueless.

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“Considerably more serious”
by Tom Sullivan

JPMorgan Chase got its computers hacked this summer, compromising personal information from 76 million households. Like oil spills, the size of these breaches always seems to grow after the early low-ball estimates from company spokes-flacks. And nobody seems to have a statement from current chairman, president, and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. The NY Times reports:

Operating overseas, the hackers gained access to the names, addresses, phone numbers and emails of JPMorgan account holders. In its regulatory filing on Thursday, JPMorgan said that there was no evidence that account information, including passwords or Social Security numbers, had been taken. The bank also noted that there was no evidence of fraud involving the use of customer information.

Whew, that’s reassuring. Probably just some Matthew Broderick-style Russian kids wanting a sneak peak at Dimon’s newest release of Global Financial Meltdown. Heaven help us if they were real cyber criminals.

Noting that the attack may have begun when hackers breached the computer of a bank employee, the Guardian recounts other recent cyber attacks:

In September, Home Depot confirmed its payment systems were breached in an attack that some estimated impacted 56 million payment cards. Last year’s attack on Target impacted 40 million payment cards and compromised the personal details of some 70 million people.

But the Guardian describes the JPMorgan hack as “considerably more serious.” In addition to the size of the leak, banks hold much more sensitive personal information than retailers.

In his annual shareholder letter, Dimon wrote of cyber security, “We’re making good progress on these and other efforts, but cyberattacks are growing every day in strength and velocity across the globe.”

If those kids want to play Global Financial Meltdown that badly, they can probably get funding from Americans for Prosperity.

As low as it gets

by digby

There is literally nothing these people won’t say:

Conservative media outlets, including Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham, are fanning the flames of Ebola panic and anti-immigrant sentiment by highlighting the unfounded opinions of fringe medical expert Dr. Elizabeth Vliet, the former director of an organization that claimed that undocumented immigrants caused a leprosy epidemic.

After news outlets reported the discovery of an Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States, radio host and Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham hosted Dr. Elizabeth Vliet to inform listeners about the disease. Vliet used the platform to accuse President Obama of “underplaying the risk” of Ebola and suggested the disease could be transmitted through the air, an opinion that runs contrary to widespread medical opinion.

To make her case, Vliet cited a debunked study from 2012 that studied transmission of the virus between pigs and monkeys…

Vliet’s medical degree and penchant for hyping anti-immigrant myths has helped develop her reputation as the far right’s go-to expert for medical conspiracy theories. In August, Vliet wrote an exclusive column for WND.com titled, “Illegals Bring Risk Of Ebola.” In her article, the Vliet parroted other anti-immigrant voices by suggesting undocumented immigrants crossing the southern border were spreading Ebola and that the government was concealing their diagnoses.

Despite “zero evidence” that migrants have carried Ebola through the U.S.-Mexico border, Vliet’s opinion was cited by Breitbart, Infowars, and Newsmax, a continuation of a long conservative tradition of smearing immigrants as dirty or diseased.

Vliet is also the former director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a group of far-right conspiracy theorists with a history of making false claims about undocumented immigrants carrying disease. Mother Jones reported on the organization’s connections to the Tea Party and examined the contents of the AAPS’ publication Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, noting “the journal erroneously claimed that illegal immigration had caused a leprosy epidemic in the US”:

The publication’s archives present a kind of alternate-universe scientific world, in which abortion causes breast cancer and vaccines cause autism, but HIV does not cause AIDS. Cutting carbon emissions represents a grave threat to global health (because environmental regulation would make people poorer and, consequently, sicker). In 2005, the journal erroneously claimed that illegal immigration had caused a leprosy epidemic in the US, a claim that was reported as fact in more mainstream outlets such as Lou Dobbs’ show.

This is such a low and despicable lie, even for Ingraham. I’m not sure what she expects to get out of this but it’s hard to see how it could be anything other than panic — and violence. She’s not dumb. She knows what she’s saying and she know who her audience is.

Wow.

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Hey nobody told us this could happen to white people too

by digby

You just have to laugh:

Arkansas Attorney General candidate Leslie Rutledge is crying foul over the cancellation of her voter registration form. Rutledge, the Republican nominee for Attorney General, was kicked off the voter rolls after it was discovered that she failed to cancel previous voter registrations in Washington, DC and Virginia, and re-register in Pulaski County when she moved. Pulaski County Clerk Larry Crane, a Democrat, said he was legally obligated to remove her after receiving a letter flagging this issue.

Rutledge and Republican groups are calling the removal a “dirty trick” that was politically motivated. But what happened to Rutledge is in fact very common, and becoming even more common after the state implemented a number of strict voter restrictions, including a controversial voter ID law being litigated in court Thursday.

That’s right. It’s protecting legitimate voters from vote fraud when it’s done to the you-know-whos. It’s a “dirty trick” when it happens to a nice Republican lady.

Arkansas’ strict voter ID law caused chaos during the May primary. Voters were inappropriately grilled on their personal information at the polls. Many absentee ballots from legitimate voters were discarded because they did not include proof of ID.
Rutledge argued that she tried to register to vote in Pulaski County, but that the clerk’s office gave her a “change of address” form instead. “I don’t know if I made any mistakes except listening to the clerk and I should have insisted they accept my form when they refused it,” Rutledge told ArkansasMatters.com.

Oh boo hoo hoo. This is happening to people all over the country because of these incomprehensible election laws the Republicans are passing in order to make sure people who don’t like their plutocratic policies aren’t allowed to vote. Unfortunately for them, these laws can catch their own voters in the same net.

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And now for some good news

by digby

They’re engaged:

More than 3,000 people have registered to vote in Ferguson, Mo., since the death of Michael Brown — a surge in interest that may mean the city of 21,000 people is ready for a change.

Since a white police officer shot the unarmed black 18-year-old on Aug. 9, voter registration booths and cards have popped up alongside protests in the city and surrounding neighborhoods. The result: 4,839 people in St. Louis County have registered to vote since the shooting; 3,287 of them live in Ferguson.

The city’s population is two-thirds African American but five of its six city council members are white, as is its mayor.

I assume that most of you think this is a great idea. I’m going to guess that this is also inflaming the right wing. Actually, I’m sure of it. This is seen as inherently illegitimate for some reason although I’m quite sure they’ll gather themselves to complain that all the new voters are engaged in “vote fraud” and set about invalidating their votes if they can.

As you can see, when African Americans protest, they are treated like rioters and when they try to vote they are treated like criminals. If I didn’t know better I’d think that the right doesn’t believe that black people have right to participate in our democracy.

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The right man for the job

by digby

In this earlier post I referenced a piece I wrote about an ex-Secret Service agent and obvious right wing extremist who wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post proposing that his fellow right wing extremist Allen West should head the Secret Service. I wondered how many wingnuts like him are among the president’s protectors. It seems to me that’s a reasonable question considering what Allen West has said about this president:

“Barack Hussein Obama has an Islamist sympathy … I don’t understand where this president’s loyalties lie, and I have to ask the question, whose side is he on?”

He’s also called for the military to openly defy presidential orders that West defines as illegal. I’m sure President Obama would feel very secure with that man by his side.

Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade thinks it’s a wonderful idea. He asked Allen West if he’d take the job and West said that he had no idea that he was up for it but that he’d be honored to take it. He also wants the US military to pretty much take over the government. So there’s that …

But why not Attorney General? Who better to reassure the public that Barack Hussein Obama won’t have us all killed in our beds?

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You see, we’re a civilized nation

by digby

… unlike all those “bad guys” we’re fighting over there so we don’t have to fight them over here:

Today, former Chicago police commander Jon Burge, who was convicted of lying about torturing over 100 African-American men at stationhouses on Chicago’s South and West Sides, will walk out of the Butner Correctional Institution, having been granted an early release to a halfway house in Tampa, Florida.

Burge’s 2010 conviction for perjury came nearly 20 years after his reign of racist terror finally ended. From 1972 to 1991, he led a torture ring of white Chicago detectives who routinely used electric shock, suffocation with plastic bags and typewriter covers, mock executions and brutal attacks on the genitals to obtain confessions from their victims. A team of lawyers at the People’s Law Office, including myself, documented 118 such cases. But a series of police superintendents, numerous Cook County prosecutors and a cover-up that implicated former Mayor Richard M. Daley (during his time as both mayor and state’s attorney) protected Burge and his men from prosecution until well after the statute of limitations had run out on their crimes of torture.

Like Al Capone, Burge could only be prosecuted for lying about what he and his men did, not for the deeds themselves. He was sentenced to the maximum term of four and a half years, and ended up serving three and a half before being released to a halfway house—a stark contrast to the fates of his victims, many of whom received death sentences or life in prison on the basis of confessions that were tortured from them.

Despite his felony conviction, Burge continued to collect his pension (now at $54,000 per year) while serving his time, and the Illinois Supreme Court recently decided four to three that he may continue to do so in the future. But the nearly $700,000 that Burge has already collected is little compared to what Chicago, Cook County, the State of Illinois and federal taxpayers have already expended as a result of the Burge torture scandal.

It seems you just can’t prosecute any government official for torture in America. Perhaps we should ask ourselves why that is?

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