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July 25th, 2013

In his book, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan, Michael Hastings recalled the incident.

“We’ll hunt you down and kill you if we don’t like what you write,” the staffer threatened, according to Hastings, who responded: “Well, I get death threats like that about once a year, so no worries.”

—Michael Hastings Death: LAPD Rules No Foul Play In Journalist’s Crash

See: The Death Card.

Here’s what the death card looks like in the Hastings assassination:

Most people wouldn’t connect these particular dots, but the message isn’t meant for most people. I’d suggest that if you are in a position to take down someone who has tasked an organization like the Joint Special Operations Command, this message is for you.

It’s also interesting that an incident in a garage is mentioned in this Forbes piece:

The soccer-mom mobile barreled through his garage, crushing his lawn mower and inflicting $150 worth of damage to the rear wall.

Does that ring a bell? It should, because there was a curious incident back in 2011 involving a, “soccer-mom mobile,” in a garage. See: Ashley W. Turton: Energy Lobbyist, Wife of Key White House Aide, Dies in Fire:

The wife of a key White House aide was found dead early Monday in a sport-utility vehicle that was heavily damaged by fire in the garage of the couple’s Capitol Hill home, sources familiar with the incident said. The cause of her death is uncertain. Ashley W. Turton, 37, an energy company lobbyist and one-time top aide to former U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), was found dead shortly before 5 a.m. in a burning BMW, the back end of which was partly out of the garage, as if the vehicle had been entering or leaving when the fire started, authorities said Turton was the wife of Daniel A. Turton, 43, the White House’s deputy director of legislative affairs for the U.S. House. As such, he is President Obama’s point man on legislation moving through the House. He and Ashley Turton, who have three children, were a Washington power couple well known in Democratic circles. She was a lobbyist for North Carolina-based Progress Energy, which announced a merger Monday with Duke Energy.

Coincidences, coincidences.

Via: Fortune:

Stomping on the brakes of a 3,500-pound Ford Escape that refuses to stop–or even slow down–produces a unique feeling of anxiety. In this case it also produces a deep groaning sound, like an angry water buffalo bellowing somewhere under the SUV’s chassis. The more I pound the pedal, the louder the groan gets–along with the delighted cackling of the two hackers sitting behind me in the backseat.

Luckily, all of this is happening at less than 5mph. So the Escape merely plows into a stand of 6-foot-high weeds growing in the abandoned parking lot of a South Bend, Ind. strip mall that Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have chosen as the testing grounds for the day’s experiments, a few of which are shown in the video below. (When Miller discovered the brake-disabling trick, he wasn’t so lucky: The soccer-mom mobile barreled through his garage, crushing his lawn mower and inflicting $150 worth of damage to the rear wall.)

“Okay, now your brakes work again,” Miller says, tapping on a beat-up MacBook connected by a cable to an inconspicuous data port near the parking brake. I reverse out of the weeds and warily bring the car to a stop. “When you lose faith that a car will do what you tell it to do,” he adds after we jump out of the SUV, “it really changes your whole view of how the thing works.”

This fact, that a car is not a simple machine of glass and steel but a hackable network of computers, is what Miller and Valasek have spent the last year trying to demonstrate. Miller, a 40-year-old security engineer at Twitter, and Valasek, the 31-year-old director of security intelligence at the Seattle consultancy IOActive, received an $80,000-plus grant last fall from the mad-scientist research arm of the Pentagon known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to root out security vulnerabilities in automobiles.