IT – praag.org

Bilderberg follows ANC in jamming signals

Cellphone signals were being jammed at South Africa’s Parliament ahead of the State of the Nation address, journalists and MPs reported. Now Bilderberg seems to have followed the move.

After visiting one of the closest spots to the InterAlpen hotel that is still accessible, Infowars filmed a communications truck owned by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport and Technology.

Large antennas are also visible on top of the hotel, as well as a giant newly erected mast in the forest near the hotel.

Infowars spoke to an informed local in the immediate vicinity who confirmed that cellphone coverage in the area around the hotel had died since the tower was erected. The individual had also met with police and security near the hotel.

Cellphone jammers work by preventing cellular phones from receiving signals from base stations. The jammers are technically illegal in European Union countries.

This triangulated jamming system would explain why Infowars reporters Rob Dew and Josh Owens have been unable to broadcast live via Skype anywhere near the InterAlpen hotel.

Apparently, Bilderberg is so afraid of media coverage, that police checkpoints miles away from the hotel are not enough, now they have resorted to installing expensive devices which shut down communications, presumably at taxpayer expense.

Media attending the State of the Nation address (SONA) at Parliament in Cape Town on 12 February 2015 reported that cellular phone signals (including mobile data) in the National Assembly had been jammed.

“Shocking: Parliament has scrambled all 3G and cell reception in the House,” tweeted Report editor Waldimar Pelser.

“Please help us Sanef, FXI, Right2Know. There’s a jamming device in the parly chamber next to media bay. We can’t work at SONA 2015,” an online editor posted to Twitter.

State Security Minister David Mahlobo said a ruling in the Western Cape High Court yesterday had clarified that the State Security Agency can own and operate cellphone jamming devices and use them at major events.

No fewer than three serving European prime ministers will be attending, from the Netherlands, Finland and Belgium. They will be discussing “European strategy” with the head of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, and the president of Austria, Heinz Fischer. Two European finance ministers are on the list: one Dutch, the other from Britain.

Bilderberg 2015 has an extremely high-powered participant list, featuring a large number of senior politicians and public figures. With participants this powerful, and an agenda containing this many hot topics.

Bilderberg is actually where the big guns go, not the G7. They will be covering issues from Europe to terrorism and IT the policy conference.

The next banking crisis

Many senior banking executives today still view IT as a superfluous cost. As such, a number of banks still use technology that date back decades, with minor upgrades and maintenance over the years. The IT systems that hold up our every financial move are a disaster waiting to happen.

A KPMG report warned last year that the next systemic shock to UK banking could come from an as yet unforeseen event, such as a massive payment outage or a cyber attack. Since the IT systems in most banks are complex and some essential parts of these systems are very old, a system outage is almost inevitable. The IT systems that hold up our every financial move are a disaster waiting to happen.

A Few Days To Disaster

In the summer of 2012, a routine software update in India caused an IT meltdown at the Royal Bank of Scotland. As a result, 17 million customers were locked out of their accounts for days. This was followed by a hardware failure in March 2013 that prevented millions of customers from accessing online services and ATMs for hours. While the bank is still under investigation by the Financial Conduct Authority over these incidents, it suffered a third embarrassing system outage on the busiest online shopping day before Christmas last year, followed by yet another IT failure a few days later

Catastrophic IT failures such as these can lead to financial chaos, create financial hardship for both businesses and families and, if not quickly addressed, may even lead to social breakdowns. If employers are unable to pay employees and people are unable to pay their rents, buy their groceries and medicine or pay for their transport, utilities and credit card bills, social unrest may ensue.

Due to the enormous number of transactions that take place every day in the financial sector, a major bank only has a matter of days to recover after suffering a catastrophic IT failure. If it fails, the backlog of financial transactions would simply become unmanageable, and the bank would be overwhelmed. This is of course an Armageddon scenario, but it is highly probable given that some of the core IT systems used by all UK banks were developed in the 1960s and 70s. We should be prepared for more problems like this to strike in the coming years. – economywatch.com

British Intelligence wastes $140m on failed data project

British Secret Service Headquarters in London, along the Thames

UK intelligence agency MI5 reportedly terminated a failed multimillion-dollar IT project to centralize the agency’s data stores. The system was supposed to be ready ahead of last year’s London Olympics, but the consultants hired by MI5 failed to deliver.

The new digital records management (RM) system was supposed to allow for search queries and returns of various MI5 data and records, from intelligence reports to older paper archives. The RM was intended to replace the existing system, which the agency has deemed outdated and unfit in light of the threats the country currently faces.

The new RM was supposed to go online by time the Summer Olympics began in London last year, in order to help the UK’s intelligence agencies identify possible terrorist threats to the games. But in July 2012, only weeks before the event, MI5 fired the IT consulting firm responsible for the system’s development, as it had failed to meet deadlines.

Then-director of MI5 Sir Jonathan Evans said the system would be implemented at a later date, and the agency hired new IT consultants to finish the job.

But according to the Independent, the project failed to play out, and earlier this year Evans decided to scrap it altogether and restart from scratch with a new generation of IT specialists. The newspaper reported that the abandonment of years of progress means the loss of about £90 million pounds (about $140 million). The UK’s Home Office would not comment on either the fate of the project or the reported loss figure.

In 2012, when the RM’s troubles were first revealed, some British media estimated the cost of the project to be considerably lower; the Daily Mail believed the program’s cost to be about £1 million (over $1.5 million). – RT.COM