What Adam Curry is reading

VIDEO- WSJ: CIA Collecting Massive Database Of "International" Money Transfers - YouTube
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 15:34
VIDEO- "Al Qaeda Poses A Bigger Threat To Attack Inside U.S. RIGHT NOW Then It Did Before September 11th" - YouTube
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 15:29
VIDEO- Larry Flynt Explains Why He's Fighting To Stop The Execution Of The Man That Shot Him - YouTube
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 15:27
VIDEO- Dressing In Blackface Is A Popular Holiday Tradition In Holland - YouTube
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VIDEO-2 Sailors Injured When Drone Malfunctions - YouTube
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Intocht Amsterdam verloopt rustig, (C)(C)n actievoerder verwijderd
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 15:08
  Bewerkt door: redactie '' 17/11/13, 14:24 '' bron: ANP
  (C) anp. Betogers staan met dichtgeplakte mond met hun rug naar de stoet op de Dam tijdens de intocht van Sinterklaas.
  Onder luid gejuich van duizenden kinderen en hun ouders, zijn Sinterklaas en zijn Pieten zondagochtend feestelijk onthaald in Amsterdam. Het uiterlijk van de Pieten is dit jaar aangepast om de tegenstanders van het kinderfeest tegemoet te komen. Slechts (C)(C)n anti-zwarte pietdemonstrant werd door de politie verwijderd.
  Weinig pietopponenten, weinig politie en veel witte pietjes', vertelt verslaggever Sander van Walsum die aanwezig is bij de intocht in Amsterdam. Hij sprak daar een moeder van drie kleine Zwart Pietjes. 'Ze bekende zich daar een beetje ongemakkelijk over te voelen. Haar jongste verheugt zich er al maanden op om als Zwarte Piet de straat op te gaan, maar de moeder heeft het ongemakkelijke gevoel dat dit verstoon als statement wordt opgevat. Het is vanzelfsprekende is er voor haar wel af. Haar kinderen verkleed als Zwarte Pietjes werden ook opmerkelijk vaak gefotografeerd: ze vormen al de uitzondering op de regel.'
  E(C)n actievoerder verwijderdTijdens de intocht van Sinterklaas in Amsterdam is (C)(C)n actievoerder verwijderd. Een agent plukte de anti-zwarte pietdemonstrant uit de menigte en duwde hem een steegje in. Vlak voor de stoet met de sint de Dam bereikte, ontstond een opstootje. Een anti-zwarte pietdemonstrant ging op de afgesloten rijbaan staan, maar werd met wat duw- en trekwerk snel verwijderd door agenten. Of hij degene is die is opgepakt, is niet duidelijk. Ook is niet bekend wat de demonstrant die werd verwijderd, had gedaan.
  Tientallen demonstranten, van wie een enkeling met een 'Zwarte Piet is Racisme'-shirt, keerden de stoet uit protest met gebalde vuist in de lucht de rug toe. Volgens verslaggever Van Walsum ging het om zo'n 20 demonstranten in een rij op de Dam. 'Ze stonden zwijgend met de rug naar Sinterklaas en zijn gevolg toegewend, omgeven door politieagenten.' Ook hadden mensen hun mond met tape afgeplakt. De politie hield de groep nauwlettend in de gaten, maar greep zoals beloofd niet in.
  De Stichting Nederland Wordt Beter die het protest organiseerde, vindt het hulpje van de goedheiligman racistisch. Tegenstanders van Zwarte Piet probeerden de Amsterdamse sintintocht nog bij de rechter te voorkomen, maar dat was tevergeefs. De organisatie van het kinderfeest heeft wel wat aanpassingen beloofd om de tegenstanders tegemoet te komen.
  De Pieten mogen dit jaar geen goudkleurige oorringen dragen en mogen een andere kleur lippenstift kiezen. Ook mogen ze variren in haardracht.
  AankomstOm tien uur kwam de stoomboot Amsterdam binnen. Vlak voordat de stoomboot van de goedheiligman aanmeerde bij het Scheepvaartmuseum, vuurde het voc-schip naast het museum twee schoten af bij wijze van welkom. Op de kade werd de sint ontvangen door burgemeester Eberhard van der Laan. 'We zijn zo blij dat u er bent. We konden niet ophouden er over te praten de afgelopen weken.'
  Sinterklaas dankte de burgervader voor de sfeervolle ontvangst. 'U bent zo druk geweest met mijn komst. We hebben zwaar weer gehad, maar ik en de pieten zijn heel blij hier te zijn.'
Three foreign investors to bid for Greek national rail carrier.
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 15:06
  Might acquire 100 percent of TrainOSE
  The Greek Fund for Management of State Property (FMSP) has approved the participation of three foreign investment companies in the second stage of the tender for the sale of the country's national railway carrier TrainOSE.
  According to an official press-release of the fund, its board approved three potential investors, that have the right to participate in the second stage of the tender process for the acquisition of 100 percent of the shares TrainOSE.
  Among the selected companies are Russian RZD in consortium with the Greek Gek Terna, the French railway company SNCF, as well as Romanian railway company Grup Feroviar Roman (GFR).
  Tags are like keywords and makes it easy to find similar content. Click and you will see.
Secret Service agents accused of sexual misconduct in 17 countries
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 15:06
  Published time: November 15, 2013 21:12AFP Photo / Tim Sloan
  U.S. Secret Service agents and supervisors have allegedly engaged in sexual misconduct in 17 different countries over the past few years, according to the Washington Post.
  Senator Ronald H. Johnson (R-Wis.), member of the Homeland Security subcommittee, told the newspaper that whistleblowers with knowledge of this behavior have come forward and notified lawmakers about the conduct. Johnson added that the information directly contradicts the agency's claim that it does not tolerate sexual misconduct.
  The senator did not detail any of the allegations by whistleblowers, but ''two people briefed on the accounts'' told the Post they include both agents and managers hiring prostitutes and visiting brothels while overseas. One of the sources also claimed that the Secret Service's senior management knew about the behavior and did not stop it.
  Specifically, one whistleblower detailed an incident in which an agency supervisor had to stay behind in Thailand in order to look for an agent that was eventually found, intoxicated, at a local brothel. He was transferred back to the United States at additional expense, but was not disciplined.
  The allegations come just one day after reports revealed two Secret Service agents '' Ignacio Zamora, Jr. and Timothy Barraclough '' were removed from President Obama's personal security detail, the agency's top post, for sending sexually suggestive emails to a female subordinate. These emails were discovered through an internal investigation, triggered by Zamora's attempts to re-enter the hotel room of a woman after he claimed he had accidentally left a bullet with her.
  What's more, Zamora himself was in charge of conducting the internal investigation of a prostitution scandal that rocked the agency last year as it prepared for Obama's trip to Cartagena, Colombia. Twelve agents were implicated in the incident, nine of which have either been removed from their post, resigned, or retired.
  An inspector general report on that event is scheduled to be released in the coming weeks, but these new allegations of misconduct have led Johnson and Republican House Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah), the chairman of the national security subcommittee of the House Committee of Oversight and Government Reform, to pen a letter asking why the it hasn't been made available sooner. They both stated that the report should've been complete ''within weeks'' of the scandal occurring.
  In a separate statement, Johnson also questioned whether or not the report will be comprehensive enough, saying the Department for Homeland Security has been too easygoing with the Secret Service in the past.
Unintended consequences: US ethanol revolution causes 'ecological disaster'
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 15:06
  Published time: November 12, 2013 19:15Edited time: November 13, 2013 08:35John Moore / Getty Images / AFP
  A new investigation has revealed that the United States' ethanol mandate is severely harming the environment without producing enough tangible benefits.
  Since the Obama administration began implementing the ethanol mandate '' requiring a certain level of the biofuel to be added to the gasoline supply '' the Associated Press found that the damage done by the program has dwarfed any suspected benefits, many of which failed to materialize in the first place.
  Since President Obama took office, roughly five million acres of land set aside for conservation have been lost in the drive to harvest more corn for ethanol, the investigation found. Farmers have plowed into land previously unused for farming, releasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the air that would take native plants decades to reduce naturally.
  Billons of pounds of fertilizer were also used on land, some of which has leaked into drinking water, rivers, and has expanded the Gulf of Mexico's dead zone, which can no longer support life.
  "This is an ecological disaster," said Craig Cox with the Environmental Working Group to the AP. Cox's group, once a White House ally, now opposes the administration's ethanol policies.
  The effectiveness of ethanol as a reducer of carbon dioxide emissions has also been greatly exaggerated, according to the investigation, making it unknown whether or not ethanol could ever be improved enough to help combat the effects of global warming. On top of this, the price of corn has more than doubled since 2010.
  As a result, the ethanol industry has come under fire from a surprising coalition of oil companies who oppose the mandate and green groups who consider corn-based ethanol to be a net harm to the environment.
  The ethanol industry was quick to hit back at the AP investigation, however. "There's probably more truth in this week's National Enquirer than there is in the AP story," said the Renewable Fuels Association's Geoff Cooper on a press call, according to the National Journal.
  The industry denies that the ethanol mandate is the root cause of conservation land loss, and said the data showing more corn going into fuel than food in 2010 is misleading.
  For now, at least, the Obama administration is standing behind the policy, partly to avoid a legislative battle with the agriculture lobby, and partly because it believes that endorsing corn-based ethanol will promote the development of biofuels that are ultimately much cleaner and more efficient.
  "That is what you give up if you don't recognize that renewable fuels have some place here," Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Gina McCarthy said to the AP. "All renewable fuels are not corn ethanol."
  Regardless, the tangible benefits of ethanol have become low enough that the EPA is set to lower the amount of ethanol required in the gas supply. Critics of the mandate are now suggesting the government scrap it entirely, while the Washington Post also published a story today, headlined ''Time to kill the corn ethanol mandate.''
  Though the ethanol mandate was signed into law by President George W. Bush before his second term ended, implementation fell to the incoming Obama administration. The EPA was skeptical from the outset, due to concern that planting and harvesting so much corn would release enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to make the benefits of ethanol uncertain at best.
  "I don't remember anybody having great passion for this," Bob Sussman, who worked on Obama's transition team and recently retired as EPA's senior policy counsel, said to the AP. "I don't have a lot of personal enthusiasm for the program."
  With support from the Department of Agriculture and some of Obama's senior advisers, however, the program went ahead. As a result of inefficient regulations and poor predictions regarding the biofuel's viability as green energy, Obama officials have realized that the ethanol mandate is inadequate policy. Obama himself did not even refer to ethanol in his last major speech on the environment, though whether any action is taken outside of lowering the ethanol requirement for gas remains to be seen.
NSA Asked Linus Torvalds To Install Backdoors Into GNU/Linux - Falkvinge on Infopolicy
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  Infopolicy '' Christian Engstr¶m
  Infopolicy '' Christian Engstr¶m
  The NSA has asked Linus Torvalds to inject covert backdoors into the free and open operating system GNU/Linux. This was revealed in this week's hearing on mass surveillance in the European Parliament. Chalk another one up of the United States NSA trying to make information technology less secure for everyone.
  The father of Linus Torvalds, Nils Torvalds, is a Member of the European Parliament for Finland. This week, Nils Torvalds took part in the European Parliament's hearing on the ongoing mass surveillance, and brought a revelation:
  The United States security service NSA has contacted Linus Torvalds with a request to add backdoors into the free and open operating system GNU/Linux.
  The entire inquiry is available here on YouTube (uploaded by Hax).
  Nils Torvalds' revelation was presented in an episode which started (at 3:06:58) by me pointing out to the Microsoft representative in the panel, that in a system like GNU/Linux, built on open source, you can examine the source code to see that there aren't any back doors. In Microsoft's systems, this possibility is absent, since the source code is secret to outsiders.
  My question to the Microsoft representative was whether she'd be allowed to disclose if there are deliberate back doors in their systems, in the event that there are. She never responded to that question, but obviously, she didn't have to. From other sources, we know that the NSA always prohibits the private companies they force into cooperation from disclosing any of it.
  Nils Torvalds spoke after me, and starting at 3:09:06, he said,
  When my oldest son [Linus Torvalds] was asked the same question: ''Has he been approached by the NSA about backdoors?'' he said ''No'', but at the same time he nodded. Then he was sort of in the legal free. He had given the right answer, [but] everybody understood that the NSA had approached him.
  The story does not tell us how Linus Torvalds responded to the NSA, but I'm guessing he told them he wouldn't be able to inject backdoors even if he wanted to, since the source code is open, and all changes to it are reviewed by many independent people. After all, that's the whole point of open source code, and the reason that open source is the only kind you can trust when it comes to security.
  Still, it's very interesting to hear confirmation that the NSA has tried to attack Linux at its lead developer, too.
  You've read the whole article. Why not subscribe to the RSS flow using your favorite reader, or even have articles delivered by mail?About The Author: Christian Engstr¶mChristian Engstr¶m is a Member of European Parliament (MEP) for the Swedish Pirate Party. He has previously been an activist in FFII in the fight against software patents, and has a background as an entrepreneur and a coder.
  This article is also available in other languages: French, Swedish.
VIDEO- EP LIBE #EPinquiry 11 November 2013 - YouTube
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 15:01
French truck blockade
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 14:52
  PARIS (AP) -- Between 2,000 and 4,000 freight trucks closed off major French highways and slowed traffic to a crawl on nine roadways to protest a proposed environmental tax on heavy loads.France's Socialist government in late October suspended the tax, which initially was the focus of sometimes violent demonstrations in the region of Brittany, where opponents donned red caps and torched the still-unused payment kiosks.France's Interior Ministry estimated 2,100 trucks took part in Saturday's "snail operation"; the protest's organizer, OTRE, which represents truckers, counted 4,000. The group pledged not to attack the kiosks but said it wants the tax canceled entirely. The protest ended with no reports of violence.At a Friday night demonstration in Arles, hundreds of famers tried to reach a kiosk but were blocked by police.
FACT SHEET: New Administration Proposal To Help Consumers Facing Cancellations
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 14:24
  The White House
  Office of the Press Secretary
  For Immediate Release
  November 14, 2013
  ''I've assigned my team to see what can we do to close some of the holes and gaps in the law, because my intention is to lift up and make sure the insurance that people buy is effective, that it's actually going to deliver what they think they're purchasing. Because what we know is, before the law was passed, a lot of these plans people thought they had insurance coverage and then they'd find out that they had huge out-of-pocket expenses or women were being charged more than men. If you had preexisting conditions, you just couldn't get it at all.
  ''And we are proud of the consumer protections we've put into place. On the other hand, we also want to make sure that nobody is put in a position where their plans have been canceled, they can't afford a better plan even though they'd like to have a better plan. And so we're going to have to work hard to make sure that those folks are taken care of.'' '' President Barack Obama, November 7, 2013
  Today, the majority of Americans have employer-based health insurance that is already providing them quality health care coverage. The Affordable Care Act strengthens employer coverage while creating new protections for people in the individual market '' preventing them from being charged more because of a pre-existing condition or getting fewer benefits like mental health services or prescription drugs.
  The new Health Insurance Marketplace will help millions of hard-working Americans find affordable health insurance. Premiums are, on average, 16 percent below what was originally projected. Nearly one in four insurers offering health plans through the Marketplace are selling to individuals for the first time. And a recent study found that an estimated 17 million Americans can get discounts on their premiums through the Marketplace, through tax credits.
  The law aimed to make Marketplace coverage optional for the less than 5 percent of Americans who have individual market coverage that they want to keep. Health plans that consumers had when the law was passed in 2010 are ''grandfathered'' in and do not have to adopt most of the new consumer protections. But, in order to provide consumers with better protections and coverage, health insurers in the individual and small group markets have to adopt consumer protections for any new plans purchased after 2010. In some instances, they are adopting those protections by canceling current policies and replacing them with new and sometimes more costly plans.
  Many consumers receiving these cancellation letters will be able to find a better deal with financial assistance or better coverage through the Health Insurance Marketplace, but we know a small slice of these consumers may not be eligible for a plan at a more affordable price. Last week President Obama directed his team to explore administrative actions that could be taken to help these consumers who are receiving cancellation letters.
  To meet that commitment, today, HHS is using its administrative authority to:
  Allow insurers to renew their current policies for current enrollees without adopting the 2014 market rule changes. This will give consumers in the individual and small group markets the choice of staying in their plan or joining a new Marketplace plan next year. HHS will consider the impact of this transitional policy in assessing whether to extend it beyond 2014.
  Require insurers offering such renewals to ensure consumers are informed about their options. Specifically, insurers offering these renewals must inform all consumers who either already have or will receive cancellation letters about the protections their renewed plan will not include and how they can learn about the new options available to them through the Marketplaces which will offer better protections and possible financial assistance.
  To protect against the potential impacts this change will have on premiums, HHS will adjust the temporary risk corridor program which is designed to stabilize premiums as changes are implemented. Whether an individual can keep their current plan will also depend on their insurance company and State insurance commissioner '' but today's action means that it will no longer be implementation of the law that is forcing them to buy a new plan. Turnover is high in the individual market, with 50 to 67 percent of enrollees staying for a year or less. This means that the number of people in these bare-bones policies will decrease over time. As such, this action provides a smoother transition in a market that's generally used as a bridge by most consumers. And, this action will not allow these older plans to be sold to new customers in 2014, which would undermine the Marketplace and drive up premiums for millions of hard-working Americans. In short, this administration solution will give consumers more information and choices, including keeping their old plans. As he has said since he signed the bill into law, the President is willing to work with members of Congress in either party on good-faith, constructive solutions that strengthen the law by pursuing the same goals as this Administrative action and do not seek to undermine or repeal the law as a whole.
Presidential Proclamation -- America Recycles Day, 2013
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 14:24
  The White House
  Office of the Press Secretary
  For Immediate Release
  November 14, 2013
  AMERICA RECYCLES DAY, 2013
  - - - - - - -
  BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
  A PROCLAMATION
  During the First and Second World Wars, Americans showed their patriotism by participating in scrap drives and salvage collections. A committed citizenry gave up their personal typewriters, joined in volunteer efforts to harvest oil-producing peanuts, and donated old tires in a nationwide push to conserve and repurpose resources vital to our common welfare. Today, we face new threats -- to our environment, our health, and our climate -- that require all of us to do our part. On America Recycles Day, we carry forward a great national tradition and enlist a new generation of environmental stewards.
  A typical American produces more than four pounds of waste each day, and some of this waste, including old computers and cell phones, could damage our health and harm our environment if not recycled properly. Recycling not only reduces pollution, but also saves energy, preserves valuable raw materials, and reduces emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. In addition, it spurs economic growth, generating billions of dollars each year and supporting local manufacturers who depend on recycled materials to make their products.
  America Recycles Day offers an opportunity for each of us to reflect on the ways our habits shape the world around us. In our homes, offices, and schools, let us strive to make recycling a part of our daily lives. We should reuse or donate when possible, and recycle or compost as much as we are able. Students can get involved by championing waste-free lunches, recycling programs, and collection drives to repurpose resources like used shoes, water bottles, and digital cameras.
  Our environmental legacy will not reflect any single policy or initiative; it will be the sum of millions of small actions, the decisions we make each day. Today, let us join with family, friends, and neighbors to make that legacy a strong one.
  NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim November 15, 2013, as America Recycles Day. I call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate programs and activities, and I encourage all Americans to continue their reducing, reusing, and recycling efforts throughout the year.
  IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourteenth day of November, in the year of our Lord two thousand thirteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-eighth.
  BARACK OBAMA
VIDEO- TN Student Speaks Out About Common Core, Teacher Evaluations, and Educational Data - YouTube
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 14:17
Arne Duncan: 'White suburban moms' upset that Common Core shows their kids aren't 'brilliant'
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 13:58
  Education Secretary Arne Duncan (Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)
  (Update: Adding more on opposition to Core, where Duncan spoke)
  U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a group of state schools superintendents Friday that he found it ''fascinating'' that some of the opposition to the Common Core State Standards has come from ''white suburban moms who '-- all of a sudden '-- their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were.''
  Yes, he really said that. But he has said similar things before. What, exactly, is he talking about?
  In his cheerleading for the controversial Common Core State Standards '-- which were approved by 45 states and the District of Columbia and are now being implemented across the country (though some states are reconsidering) '-- Duncan has repeatedly noted that the standards and the standardized testing that goes along with them are more difficult than students in most states have confronted.
  The Core was designed to elevate teaching and learning. Supporters say it does that; critics say it doesn't and that some of the standards, especially for young children, are not developmentally appropriate. Whichever side you fall on regarding the Core's academic value, there is no question that their implementation in many areas has been miserable '-- so miserable that American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, a Core supporter, recently compared it to another particularly troubled rollout:
  You think the Obamacare implementation is bad? The implementation of the Common Core is far worse.
  New York was the first large state to implement the standards and give students new standardized tests supposedly aligned with the Core. Test scores plummeted earlier this year. State officials had predicted the scores would drop 30 percent '-- and that's exactly what happened. (How they could predict that with such accuracy was addressed in a previous Answer Sheet post.) Opposition to the standards, both their content and their implementation, has been growing in New York (and other states) among teachers, principals, superintendents and parents, some of whom have refused to allow their children to take the exams.
  On Friday, Duncan spoke in Richmond, Va., about the growing opposition to the Common Core State Standards and their implementation in states around the country before a meeting of the Council of Chief State Schools Officers Organization. Education Department communications chief Massie Ritsch said in an e-mail that he does not believe that there is a full transcript of Duncan's remarks, but he referred to the following write-up from Politico's Libby Nelson, who was at the event:
  Education Secretary Arne Duncan told an audience of state superintendents this afternoon that the Education Department and other Common Core supporters didn't fully anticipate the effect the standards would have once implemented.
  ''It's fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who '-- all of a sudden '-- their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were, and that's pretty scary,'' Duncan said. ''You've bet your house and where you live and everything on, 'My child's going to be prepared.' That can be a punch in the gut.''
  Overcoming that will require communicating to parents that competition is now global, not local, he said.
  Ritsch said in an e-mail that Duncan was observing that the higher standards that states have adopted to better prepare their students for college and careers are revealing that some ''good'' schools aren't as strong as parents in those areas have long assumed.
  When confronted with the truth through lower test scores and other indicators, the unhelpful response, in Arne's view, is to say, ''Let's lower standards and go back to lying to ourselves and our children, so that our community can feel better.'' The more productive response for a community or a state is to ask, ''What can we do to get better, so our students can graduate from high school, succeed in college and be competitive for good jobs?'' Because other communities and states are asking themselves that question and making smart improvements to their schools and education systems.
  Duncan has slammed Core opponents before. At a Sept. 30 appearance at the National Press Club in Washington, he said that opposition to the Core standards had been fueled by ''political silliness.'' In June, he told a convention of newspaper editors that Core critics were misinformed at best and laboring under paranoid delusions at worst. Duncan said:
  The Common Core has become a rallying cry for fringe groups that claim it is a scheme for the federal government to usurp state and local control of what students learn. An op-ed in the New York Times called the Common Core ''a radical curriculum.'' It is neither radical nor a curriculum. '... When the critics can't persuade you that the Common Core is a curriculum, they make even more outlandish claims. They say that the Common Core calls for federal collection of student data. For the record, it doesn't, we're not allowed to, and we won't. And let's not even get into the really wacky stuff: mind control, robots, and biometric brain mapping.
  There are people on the political fringe, right and left, who oppose the Core initiative for different reasons, but that's not where most of the substantive opposition is coming from. Educators and researchers questioned the way the standards were written (whether, for example, there was any or enough input from K-12 classroom teachers) and some criticized the content of the standards (while others praised it). Some critics don't believe in standards-based education, and others felt it usurped local authority. More recently, tea party members have accused the administration of a federal takeover of public education, extreme right-wing rhetoric that clouds a real discussion about the Core. This year some states led by Republican governors began to pull away from the standards.
  Protests by educators, parents, students and others began to grow as it became clear that the Core implementation was being rushed, and some students were being given tests said to be Core-aligned even though teachers hadn't had enough time to create material around the standards. That's why Duncan announced in June that he was giving the 37 states plus the District of Columbia, which had won federal waivers from the most egregious mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act, an extra year to implement teacher evaluations linked to new assessments that are supposed to be aligned to the new Common Core State Standards.
  Duncan has repeatedly said the new Core-aligned standardized tests '-- being designed by two multistate consortia with some $350 million in federal money '-- would be light years ahead of the current tests. As it turns out, neither the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium nor the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers have had enough time or money to develop truly ''game-changing'' exams in terms of how they can really measure the broad range of student abilities, according to a report by Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education, a panel of educational leaders, which said:
  The progress made by the PARCC and Smarter Balanced consortia in assessment development, while significant, will be far from what is ultimately needed for either accountability or classroom instructional improvement purposes.
  Here is the way that Politico reporters tweeted out Duncan's remarks to the state superintendents meeting on Friday. Nelson, who covers higher education for Politico, was there, and she tweeted, along with Stephanie Simon, a K-12 reporter. Here are the relevant tweets:
  Correction: An earlier version mistakenly swapped the first and last name of Massie Ritsch.
Exclusive: FBI warns of U.S. government breaches by Anonymous hackers | Reuters
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 13:43
  By Jim Finkle and Joseph Menn
  BOSTON/SAN FRANCISCOFri Nov 15, 2013 6:04pm EST
  The word 'password' is pictured on a computer screen in this picture illustration taken in Berlin May 21, 2013.
  Credit: Reuters/Pawel Kopczynski
  BOSTON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Activist hackers linked to the collective known as Anonymous have secretly accessed U.S. government computers in multiple agencies and stolen sensitive information in a campaign that began almost a year ago, the FBI warned this week.
  The hackers exploited a flaw in Adobe Systems Inc's software to launch a rash of electronic break-ins that began last December, then left "back doors" to return to many of the machines as recently as last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a memo seen by Reuters.
  The memo, distributed on Thursday, described the attacks as "a widespread problem that should be addressed." It said the breach affected the U.S. Army, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, and perhaps many more agencies.
  Investigators are still gathering information on the scope of the cyber campaign, which the authorities believe is continuing. The FBI document tells system administrators what to look for to determine if their systems are compromised.
  An FBI spokeswoman declined to elaborate.
  According to an internal email from Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz' chief of staff, Kevin Knobloch, the stolen data included personal information on at least 104,000 employees, contractors, family members and others associated with the Department of Energy, along with information on almost 2,0000 bank accounts.
  The email, dated October 11, said officials were "very concerned" that loss of the banking information could lead to thieving attempts.
  Officials said the hacking was linked to the case of Lauri Love, a British resident indicted on October 28 for allegedly hacking into computers at the Department of Energy, Army, Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Sentencing Commission and elsewhere.
  Investigators believe the attacks began when Love and others took advantage of a security flaw in Adobe's ColdFusion software, which is used to build websites.
  Adobe spokeswoman Heather Edell said she was not familiar with the FBI report. She added that the company has found that the majority of attacks involving its software have exploited programs that were not updated with the latest security patches.
  The Anonymous group is an amorphous collective that conducts multiple hacking campaigns at any time, some with a few participants and some with hundreds. In the past, its members have disrupted eBay's Inc PayPal after it stopped processing donations to the anti-secrecy site Wikileaks. Anonymous has also launched technically more sophisticated attacks against Sony Corp and security firm HBGary Federal.
  Some of the breaches and pilfered data in the latest campaign had previously been publicized by people who identify with Anonymous, as part of what the group dubbed "Operation Last Resort."
  Among other things, the campaigners said the operation was in retaliation for overzealous prosecution of hackers, including the lengthy penalties sought for Aaron Swartz, a well-known computer programmer and Internet activist who killed himself before a trial over charges that he illegally downloaded academic journal articles from a digital library known as JSTOR.
  Despite the earlier disclosures, "the majority of the intrusions have not yet been made publicly known," the FBI wrote. "It is unknown exactly how many systems have been compromised, but it is a widespread problem that should be addressed."
  (Reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco and Jim Finkle in Boston; Additional reporting by Valerie Volcovici and Alina Selyukh; Editing by Tiffany Wu and Tim Dobbyn)
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2 injured when drone malfunctions, crashes into Navy ship - CNN.com
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  Archived Version
  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 13:15
  From Joe Sutton, CNN
  updated 4:51 AM EST, Sun November 17, 2013
  The USS Chancellorsville was testing combat weapons system off the coast of Southern California when the accident occurred.
  STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  The drone was being used to test the ship's radar trackingThe soldiers were treated for minor burns(CNN) -- Two sailors were hurt when a drone malfunctioned and crashed into a guided missile cruiser off the coast of Southern California.
  The sailors were treated for minor burns in the Saturday afternoon incident, said Lt. Lenaya Rotklein of the U.S. Third Fleet.
  The ship, the USS Chancellorsville, was testing combat weapons system off the coast of Point Mugu.
  The drone was being used to test the ship's radar tracking when it malfunctioned, veered out of control and struck the cruiser, she said.
  The ship suffered some damage and will return to San Diego for assessment.
  The Navy is investigating the cause of the malfunction.
The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 13:09
  I've always known this, and I'm sure most of you do too, but we never really talk about it. Every smartphone or other device with mobile communications capability (e.g. 3G or LTE) actually runs not one, but two operating systems. Aside from the operating system that we as end-users see (Android, iOS, PalmOS), it also runs a small operating system that manages everything related to radio. Since this functionality is highly timing-dependent, a real-time operating system is required.
  This operating system is stored in firmware, and runs on the baseband processor. As far as I know, this baseband RTOS is always entirely proprietary. For instance, the RTOS inside Qualcomm baseband processors (in this specific case, the MSM6280) is called AMSS, built upon their own proprietary REX kernel, and is made up of 69 concurrent tasks, handling everything from USB to GPS. It runs on an ARMv5 processor.
  The problem here is clear: these baseband processors and the proprietary, closed software they run are poorly understood, as there's no proper peer review. This is actually kind of weird, considering just how important these little bits of software are to the functioning of a modern communication device. You may think these baseband RTOS' are safe and secure, but that's not exactly the case. You may have the most secure mobile operating system in the world, but you're still running a second operating system that is poorly understood, poorly documented, proprietary, and all you have to go on are Qualcomm's Infineon's, and others' blue eyes.
  The insecurity of baseband software is not by error; it's by design. The standards that govern how these baseband processors and radios work were designed in the '80s, ending up with a complicated codebase written in the '90s - complete with a '90s attitude towards security. For instance, there is barely any exploit mitigation, so exploits are free to run amok. What makes it even worse, is that every baseband processor inherently trusts whatever data it receives from a base station (e.g. in a cell tower). Nothing is checked, everything is automatically trusted. Lastly, the baseband processor is usually the master processor, whereas the application processor (which runs the mobile operating system) is the slave.
  So, we have a complete operating system, running on an ARM processor, without any exploit mitigation (or only very little of it), which automatically trusts every instruction, piece of code, or data it receives from the base station you're connected to. What could possibly go wrong?
  With this in mind, security researcher Ralf-Philipp Weinmann of the University of Luxembourg set out to reverse engineer the baseband processor software of both Qualcomm and Infineon, and he easily spotted loads and loads of bugs, scattered all over the place, each and every one of which could lead to exploits - crashing the device, and even allowing the attacker to remotely execute code. Remember: all over the air. One of the exploits he found required nothing more but a 73 byte message to get remote code execution. Over the air.
  You can do some crazy things with these exploits. For instance, you can turn on auto-answer, using the Hayes command set. This is a command language for modems designed in 1981, and it still works on modern baseband processors found in smartphones today (!). The auto-answer can be made silent and invisible, too.
  While we can sort-of assume that the base stations in cell towers operated by large carriers are "safe", the fact of the matter is that base stations are becoming a lot cheaper, and are being sold on eBay - and there are even open source base station software packages. Such base stations can be used to target phones. Put a compromised base station in a crowded area - or even a financial district or some other sensitive area - and you can remotely turn on microphones, cameras, place rootkits, place calls/send SMS messages to expensive numbers, and so on. Yes, you can even brick phones permanently.
  This is a pretty serious issue, but one that you rarely hear about. This is such low-level, complex software that I would guess very few people in the world actually understand everything that's going on here.
  That complexity is exactly one of the reasons why it's not easy to write your own baseband implementation. The list of standards that describe just GSM is unimaginably long - and that's only GSM. Now you need to add UMTS, HSDPA, and so on, and so forth. And, of course, everything is covered by a ridiculously complex set of patents. To top it all off, communication authorities require baseband software to be certified.
  Add all this up, and it's easy to see why every cellphone manufacturer just opts for an off-the-shelf baseband processor and associated software. This does mean that each and every feature and smartphone has a piece of software that always runs (when the device is on), but that is essentially a black box. Whenever someone does dive into baseband software, many bugs and issues are found, which raises the question just how long this rather dubious situation can continue.
  It's kind of a sobering thought that mobile communications, the cornerstone of the modern world in both developed and developing regions, pivots around software that is of dubious quality, poorly understood, entirely proprietary, and wholly insecure by design.
MONSANTO-In a Bean, a Boon to Biotech - NYTimes.com
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  Archived Version
  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 12:56
  A new federal push to purge artery-clogging trans fats from foods could be just what the doctor ordered '-- not only for public health but for the unpopular biotechnology industry, specifically, two developers of genetically modified crops.
  The developers, Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer, have manipulated the genes of the soybean to radically alter the composition of its oil to make it longer-lasting, potentially healthier and free of trans fats.
  ''In essence we've rebuilt the profile,'' said Russ Sanders, director of food and industry markets at DuPont Pioneer. ''It almost mirrors olive oil in terms of the composition of fatty acids.''
  It's too soon to tell if food companies and restaurants will embrace the oils, which are now available only in limited quantities. But the policy proposed last week by the Food and Drug Administration to eliminate trans fats could make the marketing job easier.
  Russ Sanders of DuPont Pioneer holding a genetically modified soybean. His company's version, he says, produces oil that ''almost mirrors olive oil in terms of the composition of fatty acids.''
  Brian C. Frank for The New York Times
  The new beans could help the image of the biotechnology industry because they are among the first genetically engineered crops with a trait that benefits consumers, as opposed to farmers. Despite industry promises to create better-tasting or more nutritional foods, virtually all the biotech crops introduced since 1996 have been aimed at helping farmers control weeds and insects. That has made it easier for various consumer interest groups to oppose the crops.
  ''We have been told if we have a product that is beneficial to consumers it will be much more acceptable,'' said John Becherer, chief executive of the United Soybean Board, which funds research using money collected from farmers.
  The board is putting $60 million into the development and marketing of the altered beans in an effort to stem losses that soybean oil has suffered to palm oil and canola oil as concerns about trans fats have mounted. Its market share could decline even further if the F.D.A. proposal takes effect.
  Soybean oil turns rancid relatively quickly, limiting the shelf life of foods containing it and requiring restaurants to change their frying oil frequently. To make it last longer, and also to solidify it for use in baked goods, the oil can be treated with hydrogen gas. But that process, partial hydrogenation, also creates trans fats.
  A field of DuPont Pioneer's Plenish soybeans in Ohio.
  DuPont Pioneer
  In 2003, the F.D.A. announced that food products containing artificial trans fats would have to be labeled starting in 2006. And some cities, starting with New York in 2005, have told restaurants to avoid trans fats.
  The use of edible soybean oil fell to 12.3 billion pounds last year, from an estimated 15.5 billion pounds in 2005, of which half was partly hydrogenated, according to Richard Galloway, a consultant to the United Soybean Board.
  Mr. Galloway estimated that about two billion pounds of partly hydrogenated soy oil were still in use, mainly in baked goods, where a more solid consistency is needed and the amounts used can be small enough to avoid the labeling requirement.
  But the F.D.A.'s proposal would require food companies to prove that partly hydrogenated oils were safe. That should pretty much eliminate their use.
  Both Monsanto's Vistive Gold soybeans and DuPont Pioneer's Plenish soybeans are engineered to silence the gene for an enzyme that converts oleic fatty acid into linoleic acid.
  The resulting oil has very low levels of linoleic and linolenic acids, which are polyunsaturated and responsible for soybean oil's short shelf life. By contrast, about 75 percent is oleic acid, three times the level in a conventional soybean. Oleic acid is a monounsaturated fatty acid that is the main component of olive oil.
  Monsanto's beans have a second genetic modification that lowers the level of saturated fats, which are also bad for health.
  There are no plans yet to sell the new oils in supermarkets, since conventional vegetable oil is fine for consumer use and would be cheaper.
  ''You don't sit there and fry with oil day in and day out,'' said Robb Meeuwsen, director of edible oils at Zeeland Farm Services, which is marketing Vistive Gold oil.
  A question now is whether the oils are coming to market too late, since many restaurants and packaged food companies have already eliminated trans fats.
  Because the new oils are liquids, they could not easily replace the partly hydrogenated oils used in baked goods, unless they are blended with other fats. So the best hope for Monsanto and DuPont might be to try to win back share that has been lost to palm, canola or other oils.
  They and their distributors argue that the soy oil flavor is more familiar to Americans and lower in saturated fats than palm oil. Soybeans are grown on far more land than canola, providing more security of supply and potentially larger economies of scale.
  People involved in the new soybean oil say that many food companies and restaurant chains, including the giants, are now testing the new oils.
  ''We're sold out in 2013 and 2014,'' said John Jansen, vice president for regulatory, quality and innovation at Bunge, an oil manufacturer working with DuPont and Monsanto.
  But there are grounds for skepticism. It has been more than three years since the Agriculture Department approved DuPont's Plenish soybeans for commercial planting and nearly two years since it approved Vistive Gold soybeans. Yet the crops are grown on only limited acreage, though that is partly by design until Europe grants permission to import the beans. And neither the seed companies nor the oil processors, citing confidentiality agreements, would name a single customer who is either using or testing the oils.
  A representative for one of the country's largest food companies said that the company had already removed trans fats from some 90 percent of its products in part by using high-oleic canola oil. ''These products work well and are easy to get, so I'm not sure why we would need to switch to these other products,'' this person said, insisting on anonymity for competitive reasons.
  Moreover, Monsanto's and DuPont's previous attempts to market soybeans that would produce no trans fats, some of them developed with conventional breeding, faltered.
  ''I don't think high-oleic soybean is a slam dunk,'' said Walter Fehr, a soybean breeder at Iowa State University.
  Monsanto and Dow could also face competition from a high-oleic soybean developed through conventional breeding, not genetic engineering, by researchers at the University of Missouri and the Agriculture Department.
  Critics of biotech crops question whether the new biotech crops will benefit consumers, since most food companies have already eliminated trans fats.
  Bill Freese, a researcher at the Center for Food Safety, said the crops should have undergone more extensive safety testing because the genetic engineering changed the levels of many components, not just the targeted fatty acids. Both Plenish and Vistive Gold soybeans underwent a voluntary safety review by the F.D.A.
  By contrast, Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which has campaigned against trans fats but is not against genetic engineering, said the biotech oils could be an ''excellent substitute'' for partly hydrogenated oils.
  Monsanto, DuPont and oil processors say that the fact that the new beans are genetically engineered has not deterred potential customers. That could be because almost all soybeans and canola are already genetically engineered, to provide herbicide tolerance.
  DuPont expects only 100,000 to 300,000 acres of Plenish soybeans to be planted next year, mainly in Indiana and Ohio, a tiny fraction of the nation's roughly 75 million acres of soybeans.
  Mr. Becherer of the United Soybean Board said the goal was to have 18 million acres of high-oleic soybeans growing by 2023.
  Monsanto is also working to introduce a different genetically engineered soybean, one with high levels of omega-3 fatty acids, similar to those found in fish oil and generally considered good for heart health.
  If the high-oleic soybeans do not catch on with food companies, all might not be lost. The same properties that make them last in the fryer could also make them desirable for industrial uses, perhaps as lubricants.
  Stephanie Strom contributed reporting.
Typical Neocon Smear '' LewRockwell.com
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 12:34
  DIGG THIS
  This originally appeared in the March 1994 issue of TheRothbard-Rockwell Report.
  On December16, President Clinton named retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman to fillthe post of secretary of defense. To say that the nominee was universallyhailed would be a masterpiece of understatement. To pundits, mediapeople, politicians, and leading ''well-informed sources'' insidethe Beltway, Bobby Ray Inman could walk on water. He was the perfectchoice to bring order and prestige to Clinton's troubled and screwed-upforeign and military policies. Bobby Ray was brilliant, sober, knowledgeable,the Insiders' Insider, Mr. Intelligence. When Bobby Ray retiredfrom many years of public service in Washington in the early 1980s,and returned to Texas, the reporters at Austin put on an affectionateshow in his behalf, singing, to the tune of ''Jesus Christ, Superstar'':''Bobby Ray, Superstar/Are you the messiah that they say you are?''Clearly, Washington greeted his return on December 16 with the ferventanswer. Yes!
  Moreover, Inmanhad come highly recommended. The main person pushing for his appointmentwithin the administration was Clinton's First Friend in the TrilateralistEstablishment, Rhodes Scholar and Oxford roomie Strobe Talbott,now deputy secretary of state, and secretary of state-in-waiting.Inman's coronation seemed secure.
  And yet, injust three weeks from that date, on January 16, Bobby Ray Inman,reeling from bitter attacks by New York Times columnist BillSafire, attacks seconded by a couple of other media people, decidedto withdraw from the fray. He waited a couple of weeks to tell thepresident, until Clinton's mother's funeral and his Russian tripwere out of the way, and then Inman went out in a blaze of fury,in a remarkable televised press conference on January 18, less thana week before his Senate confirmation hearings were slated to begin.
  Thealmost monolithic response by the media was the most instructiveand revealing aspect of the Inman Affair. Almost exclusively, themedia focused on speculations of the supposedly odd psychologicalstate of mind of Admiral Inman. How could Inman retreat just becauseBill Safire and a couple of other columnists were criticizing him?How could he possibly conjure up a ''conspiracy'' between Safire andSenator Dole to attack him and besmirch his character? Inman talkedabout ''sources'' but he couldn't prove his charges, couldhe? Inman was denounced as remarkably ''thin-skinned,'' his behaviorin charging conspiracy treated as ''weird'' and ''bizarre,'' and thegeneral reaction echoed that of Senator Dole: that someone harboring''fantasies'' of this sort was not really equipped to be the captainat the helm of America's defenses. In the psychobabble beloved bythe media, it was noted (which Inman had never denied) that Inmanwas always reluctant about taking the job, and that therefore thesefantasies and this thin skin were really excuses for Inman's nottaking the position.
  Amidst allthe stress on Bobby Ray's supposedly fragile psyche, it was overlookedthat very little space was devoted to the content of the chargesthat Safire and the others were leveling against Bobby Ray; andvirtually no space to Bobby Ray's explanation of the hostilitythat Safire and the others had long harbored against him, and whichled to their anti-Inman campaign.
  The media accountsall stress that no Senators were opposing the Inman nomination;but the Senate staffers were preparing detailed and thorough ''scrutiny''of Inman's affairs. The media all imply that Inman was ''paranoid''and engaging in fantasies. But if Bobby Ray, formerly Deputy Directorof the CIA and head of the National Security Agency, is not equippedto distinguish between ''paranoia'' and genuine conspiracies, whois? Surely, ''Mr. Intelligence'' is better equipped for this taskthan reporters for the New York Times or the Wall StreetJournal.
  So let's stopthe juvenile psychoanalyzing of Bobby Ray and cut to the content.The charges about to surface against Inman in the hearings includedpossible financial and even criminal peccadilloes in the privatesector, centering around two companies. One was Inman's role asa member of the board of International Signal and Control, a firmfound by a federal district judge to be a criminal enterprise engagedin illegal arms dealing, money laundering, and business fraud ona massive scale. The other firm was Tracor, Inc., an Austin, Texasmilitary contractor of which Bobby Ray was chief executive, butnot before Inman received nearly $1 million in executive compensation.Then, of course, there was Inman's Nannygate, in which he hastilypaid $6,000 in back Social Security taxes for an aged part-timehousekeeper only after he had been nominated for secretaryof defense.
  Furthermore,Bill Safire was not above ridiculing Inman's name in his widelyinfluential column. Brushing aside the knowledge that a name like''Bobby Ray'' is common in Texas and throughout the South, Safireridiculed such a name for a grown man.
  There was alsoa particularly ugly side to the media campaign against Inman. Oneof the points dredged up against Inman was that, while a high officialin intelligence in 1980, he had acted to keep a gay in the NationalSecurity Agency from being fired from his post. Part of the anti-Inmantactic was a vicious whispering campaign to the effect that Inmanhimself, though married, is a secret gay. Before he dropped out,Inman told friends that no less than four reporters had called himup to ask him if he is gay.
  Is it any wonderthat Inman, who had left Washington because he hated the chronicback-stabbing, decided to Hell with it, and that, in fury, he decidedto strike back at his tormentors instead of giving the usual bromidesabout ''personal reasons'' for withdrawal and making a quick exitfrom the scene?
  It is fascinating,by the way, that so many of the Liberal media, always quick to attack''homophobia'' and to proclaim that they are pro-gayer than thou,should not be above vicious gay-bashing against political figuresthey dislike. (The last time they pulled this stunt was againstVladimir Zhirinovsky, after he won the Russian election, but ofcourse the U.S. media are still a bit less powerful in Moscow thanthey are in Washington, D.C.)
  Saluting ''TheWithdrawal of Admiral Inman,'' the New York Times (Jan. 20)crowed that ''there was no politician or commentator so contrarianas to believe his [Inman's] improbable parting charge of a conspiracy''between Senator Dole and William Safire. Hey, not so fast, fella!You forgot to check with us at Triple R. Why not believeit? Stranger things have happened in Washington, and in recent weeksmany neocons (e.g., at the Wall Street Journal) have beenmaking noises about shifting their allegiance for 1996 from JackKemp to none other than Senator Dole, who of course is eagerly seekingmedia support. And Bill Safire is a powerful leader of the neoconforces. And, as we said above, who in the U.S. is in a positionto know more about political conspiracies than Admiral Inman?
  This is notto say that Inman's conspiracy charge is proven. What we need tofind out the truth is an all out, tough congressional investigation,armed with subpoena power, to get to the bottom of the entire mess.None of the principals or their henchmen should be spared. Big Mediahas become an excessively powerful and malignant force in Americanpolitical life; and it is high time that its machinations are exposedto public view.
  The most fascinating,but oddly enough the least reported, aspect of the Inman Affair,is the source of the implacable hostility that Safire and his allieshave borne for many years toward Bobby Ray Inman. Inman revealedthe source in his famous January 18 press conference, but he failedto bring out the background. The source: In early 1981, Israel suddenlybombed Iraq's nuclear reactor. Puzzled, Inman, then deputy headof the CIA, realized that Israel could only have known where thenuclear reactor was located by having gotten access to U.S. satellitephotographs. But Israel's access was supposed to be limitedto photographs of direct threats to Israel, which would not includeBaghdad. On looking into the matter, furthermore, Inman found thatIsrael was habitually obtaining unwarranted access to photographsof regions even farther removed, including Libya and Pakistan. Inthe absence of Reagan's head of the CIA, Bill Casey, Inman orderedIsrael's access to U.S. satellite photographs limited to 250 milesof its border. When Casey returned from a South Pacific trip, hisfavorite journalist and former campaign manager, Bill Safire, urgedCasey to reverse the decision, a pressure that coincided with complaintsfrom Israeli Defense Minister General Ariel Sharon, who had rushedto Washington to try to change the new policy.
  Secretary ofDefense Cap Weinberger, however held firm, supported Inman, andoverruled Casey, and from then on Safire pursued a vendetta againstBobby Ray Inman.
  Thisincident must be understood against its structural background: theCIA had long consisted of two clashing factions: the hard-line hawks,fanatical Cold Warriors, pro-Zionists and close to Israel's spyagency Mossad; and the moderates, close to the Establishment andthe Rockefeller World Empire. The hard-liners and Mossadniks werebig in the Operations department, and included Ops chief James JesusAngleton, and Bill Buckley's CIA mentor and buddy E. Howard Hunt;they were headed by William J. Casey. The moderates were strongin the Intelligence department, and included William Colby and AdmiralInman.
  Cut to thepresent, and the conspiracy charge by Inman against Safire and Companybegins to make sense. For one point rarely mentioned in the mediaaccounts is that Inman, in his press conference, did not only mentionSafire and Senator Dole. He also mentioned, as part of the campaignagainst him, not only the editors of the New York Times,but three other media powers: New York Times columnist AnthonyLewis, Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, and WashingtonPost cartoonist Herblock (Herbert Block). On the face of it,a concerted campaign by these people against Inman would seem implausible;after all, Safire is a neocon, whereas the New York Times,Tony Lewis, Ellen Goodman, and Herblock are all notorious left-liberals.What could they all possibly have in common?
  The answeris that they all have one important thing in common, one tie thatbinds. They are all ardent Zionists, and the source of the hostilityto Inman at not being sufficiently pro-Israel now makes sense inunderpinning the vendetta when Inman reluctantly agreed to Clinton'sand Talbott's importuning to return in triumph to Washington.
  In a fullerperspective, then, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman does not seem to be aparanoid nut after all. On the contrary, no one can blame him forsaving himself and fleeing back to the warmer milieu of Austin,Texas. It is no wonder that Bobby Ray feels more ''comfortable'' inAustin than in Washington, to use one of his favorite words. Butit would have been far healthier for America, and for Americans'knowledge of the political forces at work in this country, if BobbyRay had stood fast, and had forced a knock-down drag-out confrontation,in the course of which much of the truth might have come to thesurface. As it is, it is inevitable that Safire & Company will beaccorded near-legendary political influence from now on. In a townthat worships Power, Bill Safire has now virtually attained thestatus of a Rajah.
  MurrayN. Rothbard (1926''1995) was the author of Man,Economy, and State, Conceivedin Liberty, WhatHas Government Done to Our Money, Fora New Liberty, TheCase Against the Fed, and manyother books and articles. He wasalso the editor '' with Lew Rockwell '' of TheRothbard-Rockwell Report, and academic vice president ofthe Ludwig von Mises Institute.
  MurrayRothbard Archives
  The Best of Murray N. Rothbard
Former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner Is Moving Into Private Equity - Business Insider
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  Archived Version
  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 12:20
  Former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is taking on a key role at a New York-based private equity firm after leaving the Obama administration earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.Geithner, 52, who was an architect of the 2009 bank bailout during the financial crisis, plans to join Warburg Pincus, LLC as its president and managing director and will be "expected to work on mapping the firm's strategy and management, investor relations and on matters related to the firm's investments," according to The Journal.
  The 40-year-old firm has invested more than $45 billion in 675 companies worldwide, according to its website.
  The Journal has more:
  Mr. Geithner has long considered a career in investing once his days in Washington ended. He has been reluctant to take a job with any banks, which he once regulated, and views private-equity firms and other investment managers as different from the institutions he oversaw as New York Fed chief.
  Mr. Geithner had been weighing job options while writing an account of the financial crisis, due out next year.
  Since leaving public service, Geithner had been traveling on the speaking circuit and speaking at corporate events.
World Wide Words: Flabbergasted
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  Archived Version
  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 12:02
  Flabbergasted
  Pronounced /Ëfl...bÉËŒÉÉ‘ËstÉªd/
  The British comedian Frankie Howerd used to say in mock astonishment: ''I'm flabbergasted '-- never has my flabber been so gasted!''. That's about as good an explanation for the origin of this strange word for being surprised or astonished as you're likely to get.
  It turns up first in print in 1772, in an article on new words in the Annual Register. The writer couples two fashionable terms: ''Now we are flabbergasted and bored from morning to night''. (Bored '-- being wearied by something tedious '-- had appeared only a few years earlier.) Presumably some unsung genius had put together flabber and aghast to make one word.
  The source of the first part is obscure. It might be linked to flabby, suggesting that somebody is so astonished that they shake like a jelly. It can't be connected with flapper, in the sense of a person who fusses or panics, as some have suggested, as that sense only emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. But flabbergasted could have been an existing dialect word, as one early nineteenth-century writer claimed to have found it in Suffolk dialect and another '-- in the form flabrigast '-- in Perthshire. Further than this, nobody can go with any certainty.
Defying Medical Board, FDA Approves Painkiller That Could Be the Next Oxycontin | Mother Jones
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  Archived Version
  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 09:19
  The government agency charged with regulating medicine says it's cracking down on painkiller abuse. Maybe not.
  By Dana Liebelson on Wed. November 13, 2013 3:00 AM PDT
  Late last month, the US Food and Drug Administration made it significantly harder for doctors to prescribe Vicodin, Lortab, and other highly addictive painkillers that have killed tens of thousands of Americans over the past decade. Lawmakers praised the agency's move, but the next day, over the objections of its medical advisory board, the FDA approved Zohydro, a new drug that has 5 to 10 times more of the heroin-like opioid hydrocodone than Vicodin.
  "If you approve this pill, you surely will be signing a death sentence for thousands of people, especially young kids," Avi Israel, a father whose 20-year-old son committed suicide after becoming addicted to doctor-prescribed hydrocodone, told FDA officials at the December hearing.
  The FDA's advisory board, an appointed group of medical experts who evaluate drugs used in anesthesiology and surgery, voted against Zohydro 11-2 last December. As several board members noted, most opioid painkillers on the market also include acetaminophen, the main ingredient found in Tylenol, a combination that is less likely to lead to addiction. But like OxyContin, the "Hillbilly Heroin" the Drug Enforcement Agency has blamed for hundreds of deaths in a single year, Zohydro includes a high dose of its main opioid ingredient undiluted by acetaminophen. That could lead to higher rates of abuse, the FDA's medical advisers warned.
  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released data showing that painkillers are essentially the worst drug epidemic in US history, killing 16,000 people in 2010 alone. Painkillers that include hydrocodone and its cousin, oxycodone, are widely abused by users who crush, snort, or inject the drugs, seeking a high. Zohydro is made from high-dose hydrocodone undiluted with acetaminophen; OxyContin uses undiluted, high-dose oxycodone. "Oxycodone and hydrocodone are very similar drugs and Zohydro (extended release hydrocodone) is similar to OxyContin (extended release oxycodone)," Andrew Kolodny, chief medical officer at the Phoenix House Foundation'‹, a nonprofit drug and alcohol rehabilitation center, tells Mother Jones. "This drug will almost certainly cause dependence in the people that are intended to take it," Judith Kramer, a professor at Duke University Medical Center who voted against the drug, testified in December.
  Among the advisory board's other objections: Zohydro's manufacturer, Zogenix, disregarded FDA recommendations that opioid painkillers include a gel-like plastic preventing them from being crushed and snorted; the drug is meant to be used by cancer patients, but was never widely tested on those patients; and during the study's trial run, 2 of 575 test subjects are believed to have committed suicide, one by hoarding the drug and overdosing after the study was over.
  The FDA says that making painkillers less likely to be abused is a "public health priority." One such abuse deterrent, now standard in OxyContin, involves injecting the pills with a gel so that they can't be crushed and snorted. But Zohydro doesn't come with that measure. On November 4, Zogenix entered into a $750,000 agreement with a Montreal-based company, Altus Formulation Inc, to help it come up with an abuse-deterrent formula'--but it's not clear how long that will take, or whether it will be ready before Zohydro hits pharmacy shelves in four months.'‹'‹ Zogenix did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
  "This is a colossal mistake on the FDA's part," David '‹Jurrlink, a scientist with the Sunnybrook Research Institute at the University of Toronto, tells Mother Jones. "Because this isn't tamper-resistant like OxyContin, there is a real concern that it will be preferentially sought by people who want to abuse it. It boggles the mind." Liscinsky, a spokesperson for the FDA, confirmed to Mother Jones that Zohydro "is not abuse-deterrent," but noted that "FDA does not believe it is feasible at this time to require that all new solid oral-dosage form opioids have abuse-deterrent properties."
  Before approving Zohydro, the FDA examined one study of the drug's effectiveness. In that, study, researchers gave Zohydro to about 1,500 patients. One phase of the study, which weighed the drug against a sugar pill, showed that subjects taking Zohydro for chronic lower back pain reported less pain than those who received the placebo over a 12-week period. The study definitively showed that Zohydro "was superior in controlling pain," Stephen Farr, the cofounder, president, and chief operating officer of Zogenix'‹, told the FDA. But the results were not dramatic enough for some members of the FDA's advisory panel.
  "I am concerned that there's a very modest change in the pain scores. With a lot of methodologic reworking, it is convincing as a study, but not that convincing," Jeanmarie Perrone, the director of the division of medical toxicology at the University of Pennsylvania, said during the December hearing. "I have my doubts." She went on to vote against the drug's approval.
  In another part of the study, researchers gave Zohydro to with a variety of chronic pain conditions to test for possible side effects over a period of six months to a year. The main side effects reported by the test subjects were non-life-threatening symptoms like nausea, fatigue, headache, and dizziness. But a few subjects reported '‹more serious side effects, including "mental impairment." According to Liscinsky, the FDA spokesperson, of 575 subjects in the chronic pain population who were given Zohydro, 5 died. The first four deaths'--one of which was a completed suicide, by carbon monoxide poisoning, and another which was caused by drug toxicity from other painkillers'--"were unlikely [to be] related to study medication'‹." The fifth death was "an apparent suicide" by a patient who "hoarded study medication" during the study and died from an overdose of the drug about a year after the study was over, Licinsky says.
  "If we had this issue arise of diversion and potential abuse in a closely monitored situation with multiple professionals, then how do we control this substance in the larger marketplace where we don't have the same controls underway?" Rodney Mullins, the national director for Community Health Advocates and the consumer advocate on the FDA advisory committee, asked at the December hearing. He, too, went on to vote against the drug.
  Panel members also raised concerns about Zogenix's marketing strategy. Cancer patients will be eligible to take the drug, but only five cancer patients took it during testing. "You're asking us for an approval that will be used much more broadly," said Kramer, who also noted that Zogenix sales representatives will be compensated, up to a certain point, based on the number of Zohydro prescriptions they can convince doctors to write during the drug's first year on the market.
  "In Texas, I have six pain clinics that in a 15-month period wrote between almost 24,000 and 43,000 scripts'...Those guys are still in operation. So we need to be very aware that these people who are into making the money, just because you call [Drug Enforcement Agency] doesn't mean things are going to happen quickly," Jane Maxwell, a senior research scientist at the Addiction Research Institute who voted against the drug, said at the hearing.
  Farr, Zogenix's president, testified at the hearing that the company believes it can control abuse of the drug by limiting its availability and focusing on the patients who need it. The FDA is not allowing any prescription refills with Zohydro, and notes that there will be stringent recordkeeping, reporting, and physical security requirements for the drug. But James Breitmeyer, the chief medical officer at Zogenix, acknowledged, "There's an unfortunate linkage between opioid abuse and suicide. And that will be an important part of the training that we do.'‹"
  The two panel members who voted for the drug argued that Zogenix has met the FDA's safety standards and posed no greater risk than current painkillers on the market. The FDA agrees. "FDA has concluded that the benefits of Zohydro ER outweigh its risks when used as provided in the approved labeling," Licinsky, the FDA spokesman, tells Mother Jones.
  But at the December vote, some doctors weren't willing to take that risk. "I happen to live in the real world," said Alan Kaye, a doctor who chairs the anesthesia department at the Louisiana State University School of Medicine, explaining why he was voting against the drug. "I certainly feel there would be quite a bit of morbidity and mortality that would result."
Austin City Limits Fast Food Restaurants? - Reason.com
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 08:58
  The Austin, Texas, city council will meet next Thursday to consider a resolution that could eventually ban "fast-food food restaurants from locating near areas that children frequent."
  RELATED ARTICLESMORE ARTICLES BY Baylen LinnekinSpecifically, the ban, or "Healthy Food Zone ordinance," would restrict fast food restaurants from locating anywhere near "schools, municipal parks, child care centers, libraries and recreation centers" in the city.
  The resolution directs the city manager to work to draft a timeline before the end of the year for developing an ordinance that, if passed, would take effect in 2016.
  "If passed, this would only affect new fast-food chains from being built," writes KEYE-TV's Alex Boyer. "Existing one[s] (sic) would be allowed to stay put."
  That may be true. But I see nothing in the resolution's language that would guarantee that customers who like their existing fast food restaurant would be able to keep their existing fast food restaurant.
  For example, the resolution would require the city manager "to gather and prepare data that identifies locations of fast food restaurants" in Austin. If the ordinance would only ban future restaurants, then why gather data on existing restaurants?
  The resolution also doesn't distinguish between "existing" or "new" fast food restaurants. Neither word appears in the resolution.
  An attachment to the resolution, model ordinance language developed by a public-health outfit called ChangeLab Solutions, Findings for Model Healthy Food Zone Ordinance, makes clear that an existing fast food restaurant could remain in place "unless the business changes or attempts to expand its use in some way (as defined by the ordinance)."
  That'd be a killer. New awning? New paint job? New drive-thru window? Those are business changes or expansions that I suspect could spell the end for an existing fast food restaurant under an Austin ordinance.
  Even worse is the subtitle of the ChangeLab Solutions model ordinance that Austin wants to adopt: Creating a Healthy Food Zone Around Schools by Regulating the Location of Fast Food Restaurants (and Mobile Food Vendors).
  And mobile food vendors! This model ordinance could ensnare not just fast food restaurants in Austin but might also deal a severe blow to its beloved food truck community.
  But there's more.
  Let's say the KEYE report is correct, and I'm wrong, and that any ordinance adopted by the Austin city council wouldn't target existing fast food restaurants. In that case, the law would boast some dramatic unintended consequences.
  If the ban wouldn't target existing fast food restaurants at all, then it would really just act as a protectionist measure that ensures existing businesses don't have to compete with new market entrants while guaranteeing customers for the very eateries that spurred the council to consider this resolution in the first place.
  There are more reasons to hate the resolution, not the least of which is that it would undermine parental control. It's undoubtedly true that many parents or guardians don't want their kids to eat at fast food restaurants before or after school. That's fantastic. But those parents already have a whole range of options available to prevent their children from doing so. Parents can pack their child's lunch to make sure they eat the right quantity and quality of food at school during the day. They can tell their child not to buy food at a restaurant or corner store before or after school. Or'--and this one's very effective even if all else fails'--parents can send their child to school with no extra money to buy food at a fast food restaurant.
  Baylen J. Linnekin, a lawyer, is executive director of Keep Food Legal, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that advocates in favor of food freedom'--the right to grow, raise, produce, buy, sell, share, cook, eat, and drink the foods of our own choosing.
The Statin Scam
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 08:50
  by Dwight C. Lundell M.D.For 25 years as a thoracic surgeon, my life was passionately dedicated to treating heart disease; I gave many thousands of patients a second chance at life.
  Then a few years ago I made the most difficult decision of my medical career. I left the surgery that I loved to have the freedom necessary to speak the truth about heart disease, inflammation, statin medications, and the current methods of treating heart disease.
  It was an exciting time to be a young cardiac surgeon in the eighties. A new surgical technique, coronary bypass, was the only effective treatment for people afflicted with severe coronary artery disease. Our ability to save lives increased and the risks of surgery decreased as techniques and technology improved.
  Desperately sick and diseased patients could be restored and rehabilitated with relatively low risk, it was an exciting challenge. During my career as a surgeon I performed over 5000 coronary bypass operations.
  The consensus at that time was that elevated cholesterol in the blood caused a gradual deposition of cholesterol in the channel of the blood vessel. We had two obvious treatment choices; lower the levels of cholesterol in the blood or do an operation to detour the blood around the accumulated plaque in the artery thus restoring blood flow and function to the heart muscle.
  Other than looking at more effective ways to lower blood cholesterol, there was relatively little research going on as to what was causing the plaque. The medical community had settled on the idea that it was as simple as controlling saturated fat and cholesterol.
  Statin drugs, the ones your Doctor insists that you take if your cholesterol is slightly elevated and Bernie Madoff ( the now infamous financial fraudster ) have both left in their wake many innocent victims, and many sincere but misled supporters. Both are huge frauds perpetrated on the unsuspecting.
  Mr. Madoff, over 30 years swindled people out of about $50 billion. Statins have a worldwide market of over $30 billion annually and have had for many years. In addition, the testing for and treating elevated cholesterol costs about $100 billion annually with no noticeable benefit to the victims, I mean patients.
  I'm not sure if Mr. Madoff intended to swindle when he started out, but reading the reports it seems things got out of hand and he had to continue to tell a false story in order to keep the money flowing into his coffers to support his and his supporters' lavish lifestyles, and perpetuate the fraud.
  I'm not sure that the statin makers intended to swindle in the beginning but they also were not about to give up on a $30 billion annual market easily. There are many sincere, well intentioned and deeply convinced physicians that will continue to support the theory that dietary cholesterol and saturated fats cause heart disease.
  They will continue to believe that cholesterol lowering medications will successfully treat and prevent heart disease in spite of the fact that a study published in The American Heart Journal ( January 2009 ) analyzing 137,000 patients admitted to hospitals in the United States with a heart attack demonstrated that almost 75% had "normal" cholesterol levels.
  This fact continued to bother me during my surgical career. The idea that a normal substance, namely cholesterol, would cause heart disease never resonated with me. I would see patients coming back for second coronary bypass operations a few years after their first, having had normal cholesterol levels the entire time. In the operating room I had made the observation that there seemed to be inflammation around the coronary arteries that I was bypassing.
  Through brilliant and massive marketing the makers of statin drugs have skillfully influenced science and controlled public policy so that prescribing statin drugs has become the standard of care. Anyone questioning or disagreeing with these policies is labeled as a heretic, disregarded and ridiculed.
  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration ( FDA ), The National Cholesterol Education Program, The American Heart Association and many academic centers are led and influenced by physicians who receive direct or indirect benefit from the makers of statin drugs.
  Their influence is so pervasive that recently the FDA approved Crestor®, a statin, to treat patients with normal cholesterol. Some of these academics have called for treating children with statin drugs. Marketing has truly triumphed over medicine.
  Treating or attempting to prevent heart disease with statin drugs is dangerous and fraudulent for two reasons:
  1.) Serious, deadly and disabling side effects which are largely ignored by the medical profession and suppressed by the statin makers. These side effects have been brilliantly documented by Dr. Duane Graveline and other brave doctors who dare to speak out against the official religion of cholesterol and saturated fat.
  2.) Continued focus on this ineffective treatment diverts attention from truly understanding and controlling heart disease, and gives patients a false sense of security that prevents them from making the lifestyle changes that would truly prevent and reverse heart disease.
  Consider also the following:1.) Statins have not been proven to help any woman of any age!2.) Statins have not been proven to help anyone over the age of 65!3.) The only group of patients who may, and I emphasize "may" get any benefit, are middle aged men who have had a previous heart attack.
  It is amazing to see all the medical literature that is funded by the statin makers and delivered to doctors' offices by enthusiastic young drug reps that purport to prove that statins are beneficial.
  The very best statistical manipulation shows that one must treat at least 10 people for several years for 1 to have possible benefit. I'll bet that when your doctor told you to take statins you were not told that under the most favorable statistical slant on the data there is only 1 chance in 10 that you will benefit.
  The much publicized JUPITER study which led the FDA to approve Crestor® for people with normal cholesterol showed that treating 100 people for 3 years with Crestor® "may" have prevented one heart attack.
  Yet the approval was granted and millions of people were exposed to the risks of statins with no possible benefit except to the maker of Crestor®. Do you think the process is pure and clean and free of improper influence?
  Just as a point of reference, if I had treated 100 people with the correct antibiotic for an infection 99 would have been cured. This is why I call statin treatment a scam that is bigger and more harmful than anything Bernie Madoff pulled off, at least his victims only lost money, not their health.
  In spite of being Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at a large specialty heart hospital I found that I could not change Medicine no matter how much I preached and pleaded, no matter how much scientific evidence I gathered that cholesterol was not a problem and that treating cholesterol with medications was counter productive.
  So I made that difficult decision and left my successful surgical practice in order to have the freedom to speak, write and teach the truth about heart disease. I wrote a book The Cure for Heart Disease, which explains that the real cause of heart disease is low grade inflammation. For without inflammation cholesterol would never accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause plaque with its eventual consequence of heart attack and death.
  Dwight C. Lundell M.D.www.thecureforheartdisease.netChief Medical Consultant, Asantae Inc.Chief Medical Consultant at www.realweight.com
  Dr. Lundell's experience in Cardiovascular & Thoracic Surgery over the last 25 years includes certification by the American Board of Surgery, the American Board of Thoracic Surgery, and the Society of Thoracic Surgeons.Dr. Lundell was a pioneer in off-pump coronary artery bypass or "beating heart" surgery reducing surgical complications and recovery times.He has served as Chief resident at the University of Arizona and Yale University Hospitals and later served as Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery.He was one of the founding partners of the Lutheran Heart Hospital which became the second largest Heart hospital in the U.S.
  January, 2011
U.S. Navy Bets $42 Billion on Carriers in China's Sights - Bloomberg
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 08:36
  By Roxana TironJune 19, 2012 12:00 AM EDTThe final keel section of the future USS Gerald R. Ford is lowered into place at Huntington Ingalls Industries-Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News, Virginia, on May 24, 2012. Photographer: Ricky Thompson/U.S. Navy
  The U.S. Navy is betting $42 billion on a new class of aircraft carriers, the world's biggest and costliest warships ever, even as the Pentagon budget shrinks and China and Iran arm themselves with weapons to disable or destroy the behemoths.
  The Navy says the new carriers -- rising 20 stories above the water, 1,092 feet (333 meters) long, moving at 30 knots (35 miles per hour) with almost 5,000 Americans on board -- can project U.S. power around the globe.
  ''A carrier is 4 1/2 acres of sovereign U.S. territory,'' Captain Bruce Hay, a Navy pilot who helps set requirements for the new carrier, said in an interview. ''An aircraft carrier is a piece of America, and we're going to do what it takes to keep them relevant because a carrier is presence and American resolve all at one time.''
  The ships' rising costs are drawing scrutiny from lawmakers at a time when the military faces cuts in personnel and funding for new weapons. Critics see the new Gerald R. Ford-class carriers as big targets for rival militaries expanding their arsenals of ballistic and cruise missiles, undersea mines, submarines, drones and cyber weapons.
  ''Our future adversaries are developing a set of capabilities specifically for the purpose of attacking our aircraft carriers,'' Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said in an interview.
  Increasing 18%Although it's still about five years from entering the fleet, the price tag for the USS Gerald R. Ford, the first carrier in the class being built by Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. (HII), based in Newport News, Virginia, already has climbed about 18 percent in four years to $12.3 billion, according to Defense Department data.
  The Navy is trying to assure lawmakers that it was worth the money to start from scratch designing a new carrier.
  With an electromagnetic system to launch aircraft similar to those used to propel roller coasters at Walt Disney World, the Ford-class carriers are designed to send swarms of fighter jets over vast expanses of water to deter potential enemies.
  The Pentagon's revised global strategy, released in January, emphasizes a shift to the waters of the Asia-Pacific region at the same time the Pentagon is moving to cut $487 billion from previously planned spending over the next decade. More than $500 billion in additional defense cuts will be required unless the president and Congress agree on plans to avert the automatic reductions known as sequester that are set to begin in January.
  'National Disgrace'The Navy's oversight of construction on the Gerald R. Ford, or CVN-78, has drawn criticism as cost overruns of at least $800 million have been disclosed this year. Critics led by Senator John McCain, a former Navy pilot, say the technologies that set it apart from the Navy's 10 existing carriers may not work as planned when the carrier is launched and begins testing as early as 2013.
  ''It's outrageous, it's a national disgrace,'' McCain of Arizona, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview. ''They try all these experiments and all these different ideas that they have in the new class of carrier and obviously disregard the cost.''
  The Navy should have kept buying the proven Nimitz-class carriers, McCain said. The last carrier in the Nimitz class, the USS George H.W. Bush, was commissioned in 2009.
  The number of aircraft regularly launched from the new carriers, or the sortie rate, will increase to 160 a day from 120 a day now on the Nimitz class, according to the Navy. The number of sorties can surge to 270 from 192 on the older carriers.
  Sub-Launched TomahawksDispatching more jets from a carrier doesn't provide a tactical advantage in an age of precision-guided weapons and Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from submarines, according to Norman Polmar, a naval analyst and author who has been a consultant to secretaries of the Navy.
  ''Do we need a new class?'' Polmar said in an interview. ''The answer is absolutely not. You want to kill someone's airfield, you launch 20, 30 Tomahawks, which go farther and are more accurate than planes, and you do not risk pilots.''
  While a missile-armed submarine can move alone beneath the sea, a carrier must travel with a strike group that typically includes a guided-missile cruiser, two guided-missile destroyers, an attack sub and a combined ammunition, oiler and supply ship, according to a Navy fact sheet.
  The Navy estimates that each Ford-class carrier will cost $27 billion to build and then operate and maintain for 50 years, $5 billion less than its Nimitz-class predecessors, even after the rising costs.
  Fewer SailorsHalf the savings will come from design and technology changes that will reduce the number of sailors needed, Rear Admiral Thomas Moore, who runs the Navy's carrier programs, said in an interview at the Washington Navy Yard. The Ford carriers will accommodate 4,660 personnel, down from 5,922, according to a presentation by Moore.
  The Nimitz class was designed in the 1960s ''when labor was cheap, and so we used manpower to accomplish all the functions,'' Hay, the Navy pilot, said in an interview at the Pentagon. ''One guy grabbing a case of soda and going up and down a ladder, well, that is a pretty expensive way to transport material inside this kind of ship.''
  Some critics of the Ford class's rising cost, including McCain, say carriers remain the invaluable, and virtually unsinkable, centerpiece of U.S. naval strategy.
  China's MissilesOthers say carriers, like wooden men-of-war and steel battleships before them, aren't as useful as they once were. With the proliferation of drones and satellite imagery, carriers become easier to locate and thus potentially more vulnerable, according to Polmar.
  While the Ford carriers are going to be ''very formidable,'' the ships ''may not be able to get close enough to a future enemy that has precision-guided anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles,'' Gunzinger said.
  China is fielding DF-21 anti-ship missiles that may force U.S. carriers to operate 1,000 nautical miles or farther from an enemy's coastline early in a conflict, according to Gunzinger. Carrier-based jets with a heavy load of weapons are designed to strike at about 300 nautical miles without refueling, Polmar said.
  China also is developing weapons to attack satellites and computer networks, disrupting long-distance U.S. military sensors and communications networks, Gunzinger wrote in a report last year for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
  Iran's ArsenalIran's arsenal includes ballistic missiles that can reach targets across the Persian Gulf region, Gunzinger wrote. Iranian officials have threatened to use anti-ship cruise missiles, smart mines that can sense their targets and swarms of small, fast-attack craft to exert their control over the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf shipping lanes, he wrote. The strait is about 21 miles (34 kilometers) across at its narrowest point, with the shipping lane in either direction only two miles wide, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
  Gunzinger said carriers should be equipped with stealth drones that can be launched undetected from greater distances to find and attack their targets.
  The combined cost of three Ford-class carriers would be $42.5 billion, according to the Pentagon's Selected Acquisition Report published in December.
  Electromagnetic LaunchesThe $12.3 billion for the first carrier includes about $3.7 billion in design and development.
  ''You are making a $3.7 billion design investment for a class of ship that is going to be around for 94 years,'' Moore said. ''This is not like building a Honda. It is probably the most complex piece of machinery that is built in the world.''
  Among new or updated equipment on the carrier will be its nuclear power plant, weapons elevators, arresting gear and a dual-band radar, according to Moore.
  The launch system by General Atomics Corp. will use a moving electromagnetic field to propel aircraft from the deck instead of the steam-driven catapults on earlier carriers. The carrier will have three aircraft elevators, each weighing 120 tons and able to lift two fighter jets at a time, according to Huntington Ingalls.
  Cutting CostsThe Navy is trying to reduce labor hours from 53 million on the first ship to 40 million or less for the third, according to Moore. That would make its cost comparable to the Nimitz class when adjusted for inflation, he said.
  ''I am absolutely incentivized to drive that cost down as low as possible,'' Mike Petters, Huntington's chief executive officer, said in an interview at his office overlooking the Newport News yard where the Ford is being built. The company stands to lose as much as $194.3 million, more than 40 percent of a potential fee, based on the overruns projected by the Navy.
  Huntington Ingalls, spun off last year by defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. (NOC), is working to preserve support for the increasingly costly ships in Washington. The company has a web of suppliers across the country that make the case to Congress each year to protect carrier funding.
  From 2005 to 2011, the shipbuilder and its predecessor placed orders of about $3 billion in more than 330 of the 435 U.S. congressional districts, according to the Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition, a group that says it represents about 400 companies.
  ''When you have 45 states that provide stuff for the ship, it's a fairly large job-creator,'' said the Navy's Admiral Moore.
  To contact the reporter on this story: Roxana Tiron in Washington at rtiron@bloomberg.net
  To contact the editor responsible for this story: John Walcott at jwalcott9@bloomberg.net
VIDEO-TYPHOON HAIYAN | The White House
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 08:32
  On November 8, Typhoon Haiyan'--known as Yolanda in the Philippines'--made landfall in the central Philippines, bringing strong winds and heavy rains that have resulted in flooding, landslides, and widespread damage.
  According to USAID, the storm affected an estimated 9.7 million people, and damaged or destroyed approximately 23,200 houses, as well as public infrastructure and agricultural land. Those numbers are expected to increase in the coming days as more information becomes available.
  The best way to help those affected by disasters is to make a cash donation to reputable relief and charitable organizations working in the disaster zone.
  Contact the Center for International Disaster Information to learn where to donateOn the web: www.cidi.org
  By phone: 202-821-1999
  Visit the following sites for lists of organizations responding to Typhoon Haiyan.
  DISASTER RESPONSE UPDATES
  As President Obama said in a statement this weekend, the U.S. government is providing $20 million in immediate humanitarian assistance to benefit typhoon-affected populations, including the provision of emergency shelter, food assistance, relief commodities, and water, sanitation, and hygiene support. USAID's Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance activated a Disaster Assistance Response Team and a corresponding Washington, D.C.- based Response Management Team, and other humanitarian groups including the International Red Cross and the United Nations have also deployed response teams.
  HighlightsFact Sheet: Typhoon Haiyan by the numbersGet information on the storm's impact as well as response and recovery efforts.
  See a map of affected areasLearn more about which parts of the Philippines were affected by Typhoon Haiyan
A Russian GPS Using U.S. Soil Stirs Spy Fears - NYTimes.com
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  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 08:16
  WASHINGTON '-- In the view of America's spy services, the next potential threat from Russia may not come from a nefarious cyberweapon or secrets gleaned from the files of Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor now in Moscow.
  Instead, this menace may come in the form of a seemingly innocuous dome-topped antenna perched atop an electronics-packed building surrounded by a security fence somewhere in the United States.
  In recent months, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon have been quietly waging a campaign to stop the State Department from allowing Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to build about half a dozen of these structures, known as monitor stations, on United States soil, several American officials said.
  They fear that these structures could help Russia spy on the United States and improve the precision of Russian weaponry, the officials said. These monitor stations, the Russians contend, would significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of Moscow's version of the Global Positioning System, the American satellite network that steers guided missiles to their targets and thirsty smartphone users to the nearest Starbucks.
  An engineer with a space navigation satellite for Glonass, Russia's global positioning network, in Zheleznogorsk in 2011.
  Ilya Naymushin / Reuters
  ''They don't want to be reliant on the American system and believe that their systems, like GPS, will spawn other industries and applications,'' said a former senior official in the State Department's Office of Space and Advanced Technology. ''They feel as though they are losing a technological edge to us in an important market. Look at everything GPS has done on things like your phone and the movement of planes and ships.''
  The Russian effort is part of a larger global race by several countries '-- including China and European Union nations '-- to perfect their own global positioning systems and challenge the dominance of the American GPS.
  For the State Department, permitting Russia to build the stations would help mend the Obama administration's relationship with the government of President Vladimir V. Putin, now at a nadir because of Moscow's granting asylum to Mr. Snowden and its backing of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
  But the C.I.A. and other American spy agencies, as well as the Pentagon, suspect that the monitor stations would give the Russians a foothold on American territory that would sharpen the accuracy of Moscow's satellite-steered weapons. The stations, they believe, could also give the Russians an opening to snoop on the United States within its borders.
  The Brazilian monitor station for Glonass, Russia's global positioning network, which is operated by its space agency.
  Russian Federal Space Agency
  The squabble is serious enough that administration officials have delayed a final decision until the Russians provide more information and until the American agencies sort out their differences, State Department and White House officials said.
  Russia's efforts have also stirred concerns on Capitol Hill, where members of the intelligence and armed services committees view Moscow's global positioning network '-- known as Glonass, for Global Navigation Satellite System '-- with deep suspicion and are demanding answers from the administration.
  ''I would like to understand why the United States would be interested in enabling a GPS competitor, like Russian Glonass, when the world's reliance on GPS is a clear advantage to the United States on multiple levels,'' said Representative Mike D. Rogers, Republican of Alabama, the chairman of a House Armed Services subcommittee.
  Mr. Rogers last week asked the Pentagon to provide an assessment of the proposal's impact on national security. The request was made in a letter sent to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Secretary of State John Kerry and the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.
  The monitor stations have been a high priority of Mr. Putin for several years as a means to improve Glonass not only to benefit the Russian military and civilian sectors but also to compete globally with GPS.
  Earlier this year, Russia positioned a station in Brazil, and agreements with Spain, Indonesia and Australia are expected soon, according to Russian news reports. The United States has stations around the world, but none in Russia.
  Russian and American negotiators last met on April 25 to weigh ''general requirements for possible Glonass monitoring stations in U.S. territory and the scope of planned future discussions,'' said a State Department spokeswoman, Marie Harf, who said no final decision had been made.
  Ms. Harf and other administration officials declined to provide additional information. The C.I.A. declined to comment.
  The Russian government offered few details about the program. In a statement, a spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington, Yevgeniy Khorishko, said that the stations were deployed ''only to ensure calibration and precision of signals for the Glonass system.'' Mr. Khorishko referred all questions to Roscosmos, which did not respond to a request for comment last week.
  Although the Cold War is long over, the Russians do not want to rely on the American GPS infrastructure because they remain suspicious of the United States' military capabilities, security analysts say. That is why they have insisted on pressing ahead with their own system despite the high costs.
  Accepting the dominance of GPS, Russians fear, would give the United States some serious strategic advantages militarily. In Russians' worst fears, analysts said, Americans could potentially manipulate signals and send erroneous information to Russian armed forces.
  Monitor stations are essential to maintaining the accuracy of a global positioning system, according to Bradford W. Parkinson, a professor emeritus of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University, who was the original chief architect of GPS. As a satellite's orbit slowly diverges from its earlier prediction, these small deviations are measured by the reference stations on the ground and sent to a central control station for updating, he said. That prediction is sent to the satellite every 12 hours for subsequent broadcast to users. Having monitor stations all around the earth yields improved accuracy over having them only in one hemisphere.
  Washington and Moscow have been discussing for nearly a decade how and when to cooperate on civilian satellite-based navigation signals, particularly to ensure that the systems do not interfere with each other. Indeed, many smartphones and other consumer navigation systems sold in the United States today use data from both countries' satellites.
  In May 2012, Moscow requested that the United States allow the ground-monitoring stations on American soil. American technical and diplomatic officials have met several times to discuss the issue and have asked Russian officials for more information, said Ms. Harf, the State Department spokeswoman.
  In the meantime, C.I.A. analysts reviewed the proposal and concluded in a classified report this fall that allowing the Russian monitor stations here would raise counterintelligence and other security issues.
  The State Department does not think that is a strong argument, said an administration official. ''It doesn't see them as a threat.''
  David M. Herszenhorn and Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Moscow. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
EPA Closure of Last Lead Smelting Plant to Impact Ammunition Production
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 08:14
  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is not content to infringe on property rights; recent actions taken against the country's last lead smelting facility will affect the right to keep and bear arms, as well, by substantially impacting the production of ammunition. As of December 31, 2013, the lead refining plant will close for good.
  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:
  About 145 employees of the Doe Run lead smelter [in Herculaneum, Missouri] learned they will lose their jobs at the end of December because of the plant's closure, the Doe Run Co. said Wednesday. An additional 73 contractor jobs also will be eliminated.
  The job cuts were expected. The plant, which has operated for more than a century and is the lone remaining lead smelter in the United States, announced in 2010 that it will cease operations at the end of this year.
  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the company ''made a business decision'' to shut down the smelter instead of installing pollution control technologies needed to reduce sulfur dioxide and lead emissions as required by the Clean Air Act.
  That all sounds so very sterile, but the truth of the matter is that in shuttering this plant, the Obama administration has taken yet another unconstitutional step, one that will severely impinge on the nation's ammunition manufacturing capability. Why would the Doe Run Company, the owners of the Missouri lead smelting facility, agree to being run out of business by the EPA? One word: extortion.
  In a document published on its website, the EPA explains that in order for Doe Run to continue its operations, the company would have to agree to pay ''$65 million to correct violations of several environmental laws at 10 of its lead mining, milling and smelting facilities in southeast Missouri. The settlement also requires the company to pay a $7 million civil penalty.''
  In a statement to the press, Doe Run said the fine and the required upgrades to its facilities were ''too financially risky.''
  The effect on the right to keep and bear arms is obvious. As explained by the National Rifle Association (NRA):
  The Herculaneum smelter is currently the only smelter in the United States which can produce lead bullion from raw lead ore that is mined nearby in Missouri's extensive lead deposits, giving the smelter its ''primary'' designation. The lead bullion produced in Herculaneum is then sold to lead product producers, including ammunition manufacturers for use in conventional ammunition components such as projectiles, projectile cores, and primers. Several ''secondary'' smelters, where lead is recycled from products such as lead acid batteries or spent ammunition components, still operate in the United States.
  Without ammunition, a gun is just a club. The government knows this, and in light of the ongoing project of arming federal agencies to the teeth with millions of rounds of ammunition and military-grade weapons and vehicles, the EPA's closing of the Doe Run plant, although not a direct assault on the right to keep and bear arms, can be seen as another step toward civilian disarmament.
  While a few other media outlets have reported on the closure, none has connected this dot to a couple of others in the overall plan to leave Americans without weapons and ammunition.
  First, the EPA's closing of the country's last lead smelting facility follows close on the heels (within a little over a month) of Secretary of State John Kerry's signing of the United Nations' Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) ''on behalf of President Barack Obama and the people of the United States.''
  Article 3 of that agreement outlaws the buying, selling, trading, or transferring by civilians of all ''ammunition/munitions fired, launched or delivered by the conventional arms.''
  By making it impossible to manufacture ammunition, it becomes impossible for civilians to own it. Mind you, such prohibitions do not apply to government. In fact, under the Arms Trade Treaty, the national governments of member countries are given monopoly control of the entire ammunition stockpile of that country.
  Another dot not being identified by other outlets reporting on the Doe Run story is the relationship of the closure to another multinational agreement: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
  What does the United States' membership in the TPP have to do with the EPA's forced closure of a lead smelting plant '-- a plant, while not critical to the manufacture of ammunition, certainly important to that crucial function?
  Two of the countries from which the United States will now be importing lead are Peru and Australia '-- two members of the 13-nation bloc participating in the TPP.
  The third exporter that the United States will soon rely on for the lead necessary to make ammunition? China. Although China isn't currently negotiating with the other Pacific Rim countries in establishing the TPP, on November 1, the Chinese state-run media reported:
  China and the United States strongly intend to engage each other in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a "high-standard" trade agreement involving the US and other countries including Japan and Australia, according to insiders close to both governments.
  China's leaders see entering into regional trade and agreements as an opportunity for the nation to pursue market-oriented reform and transform its economic development pattern.
  Those goals will be high on the agenda next week when the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China convenes in Beijing.
  "I was informed by high-level US officials recently that the US side hasn't meant to exclude China from the TPP trade arrangement," said Long Yongtu, who was China's chief negotiator for its entry into the World Trade Organization.
  Long commented on Friday at the start of a two-day international forum on emerging economies, which was organized by the China Institute for Reform and Development.
  "The Chinese side is also taking an active interest in the TPP. When it's ready, we are going to launch negotiations with the US," Long added.
  In Novermber 2011, President Obama tipped his hand in this high-stakes game of trade talks when he told Chinese media, ''Now, if China says, we want to consult with you about being part of this [the TPP] as well, we welcome that.''
  Connect those dots and the picture gets clearer: The Obama administration will stop at nothing to absolutely abolish the right of the people to keep and bear arms. The means to this end are mounting: first, the flurry of executive orders unconstitutionally infringing on that right; second, the signing of a UN treaty explicitly calling for the disarmament of civilians, including the restriction on the purchase of ammunition; third, although the shutdown of domestic lead smelting capacity does not signal the end of domestic production of ammunition, it does indirectly force Americans to turn to fellow members of the unconstitutional sovereignty-stealing Trans-Pacific Partnership, as well as to communist China for a key component of ammunition manufacturing.
  There is still a way for Americans determined to preserve the right to keep and bear arms to fight back against the federal assault.
  Congress must be called upon to immediately defund the EPA and repeal the act that created it, as well as to refuse to ratify any treaty '-- the Arms Trade Treaty and the Trans-Pacific Partnership '-- that infringes on the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Once these basic rights are surrendered to unelected, unaccountable international bodies, those rights will be regarded as fungible and revocable at the will of global bureaucrats bent on finally eliminating the Constitution.
  Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels frequently nationwide speaking on topics of nullification, the NDAA, and the surveillance state. He is the host of The New American Review radio show that is simulcast on YouTube every Monday. Follow him on Twitter @TNAJoeWolverton and he can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  Related article:
  EPA Shutting Down Last-standing U.S. Primary Lead Smelter
VIDEO-fox news has Benghazi NDA
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 07:55
  At least five CIA personnel, including government contractors, were asked to sign a second non-disclosure agreement after the Benghazi terrorist attack, Fox News has learned.
  While the three-page NDA, obtained by Fox News, does not contain specific references to the 2012 attack which killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, it does contain standard language that unauthorized disclosures could lead to "temporary loss of pay or termination" and "in some circumstances, constitute a criminal offense."
  Sources not authorized to speak on the record, given the sensitivity of this week's closed-door testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, said the five CIA personnel did not feel pressure to sign the document. But they felt the request for a second non-disclosure agreement after the terrorist attack was odd and not standard practice because their original NDA's were still in effect, and only some in the group were undergoing contract modifications that might require a new NDA.
  The House Intelligence Committee is trying to determine who at the agency -- or within the administration -- thought a second NDA was necessary, whether the motivation was to send a message that the agency operation and response to the attack should not be discussed and why CIA personnel in Benghazi were apparently the only agency personnel who were asked to sign a second NDA.
  The timing is also of interest to the committee as the request was made when the CIA team from Benghazi was together as a group for the first time at a memorial service for the two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, who were killed in a mortar attack defending the CIA annex. Fox News is told the CIA personnel were taken to a room where folders were laid out on a tabletop with paperwork including the NDAs
  While not addressing specific allegations, CIA spokesman Todd D. Ebitz gave Fox the following statement: ''CIA contractors routinely sign secrecy agreements, which are standard forms.No CIA officer has ever signed a secrecy agreement that referenced Benghazi or that prohibited them from talking to Congress. In fact, CIA secrecy agreements specifically note an officer's right to bring issues to the attention of Congress.Furthermore, Director Brennan extended to all Benghazi survivors an invitation to speak to Congress and indicated the Agency would support their interaction.Severalhave spoken to CIA's oversight committees.''
  The lawyer representing three contractors who testified this week on the Hill has declined to discuss the men's case, referring to them only as members of an "elite security team."
  Daily must-read stories from the biggest name in politics
VIDEO-CIA Head Brennan Lied, Benghazi Survivors WERE Asked To Sign Non-Disclosure Agreements At Memorial Service | Weasel Zippers
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 07:53
  We reported yesterday on the fact that CIA personnel who had been on the ground during the attack on Benghazi were asked to sign additional non-disclosure agreements after the attack.
  Not only were they asked to sign these additional agreements, they were asked to do sign them at the memorial service for the dead, according to Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard.
  John Brennan was given written questions by Mike Rogers, chair of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, back in September. One of the questions specifically dealt with this point: were CIA who had been in Benghazi during the attack made to sign NDAs.
  Brennan denied it, in writing.
  Here is a copy of the letter, signed by Brennan, denying anyone was made to sign an NDA after Benghazi, and with a postscript that also appears to be from Brennan, saying, ''I want to assure you that I will not tolerate any effort to prevent our intelligence oversight committees from doing their jobs''.
  Here's a video from September from around the time of the letter, where Congressman Frank Wolf at around 1:09, says that he has no confidence in John Brennan, and says ''John Brennan was in the White House, John Brennan is partially responsible for this[Benghazi]''.
  Wolf also indicated additionally that his information was survivors had gone from being polygraphed once a year to being polygraphed ''several times a month''. Brennan had also specifically denied this in his letter.
  HT: Mass Tea Party for video, Watchful1 for letter
Study: Racist Attitudes Linked To Gun Ownership CBS DC
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 07:43
  A study finds a connection between increased racist attitudes and US residents who keep guns in their households. credit: KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images)
  Latest NewsPhotos WASHINGTON (CBS DC) '' A study finds a connection between increased racist attitudes and US residents who keep guns in their households.
  The study published in the Oc.t 31 research journal PLOS ONE found that ''symbolic racism'' '' described as ''racial resentment'' '' was directly related to US respondents who kept guns in their home. For each point increase in ''symbolic racism,'' there was a 50 percent greater chance of people having a gun in their home.
  There was also a 28 percent increase in the odds of supporting permits to carry concealed handguns.
  ''This anti-black affect is not necessarily conscious or deliberate but may be felt as fear, anger, unease and hostility towards blacks,'' according to the researchers from Australia and the United Kingdom. ''The symbolic component reflects the abstract view of blacks as a collective rather than as individuals, as well as its basis in abstract white moralistic reasoning and traditions.''
  The study also found that the rate of gun ownership in the U.S. is twice as high among whites as opposed to blacks. And white Americans opposed gun control policies far more than black Americans. However, white gun owners were found to be statistically more likely to kill themselves than to be killed by others.
  The survey respondents were recruited through the American National Election Studies, a joint effort between Stanford University and the University of Michigan. Respondents were paid $10 each month to respond to survey questions from 2008 to 2009.
PLOS ONE : accelerating the publication of peer-reviewed science
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  Archived Version
  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 07:42
  PLOS ONE (eISSN-1932-6203) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication. PLOS ONE welcomes reports on primary research from any scientific discipline. It provides:
  Open-access'--freely accessible online, authors retain copyrightFast publication timesPeer review by expert, practicing researchersPost-publication tools to indicate quality and impactCommunity-based dialogue on articlesWorldwide media coveragePLOS ONE is published by PLOS, a nonprofit organization.
  PLOS ONE is run as a partnership between its in-house PLOS staff and international Advisory and Editorial Boards, ensuring fast, fair, and professional peer review. To contact the Editorial Director, Damian Pattinson, or any of the Publications Assistants (who can be found at our contacts page), please e-mail plosone [at] plos.org. To access EveryONE, the PLOS ONE community blog, please visit http://everyone.plos.org
  ScopePLOS ONE features reports of original research from all disciplines within science and medicine. By not excluding papers on the basis of subject area, PLOS ONE facilitates the discovery of the connections between papers whether within or between disciplines.
  Rigorous Peer-ReviewToo often a journal's decision to publish a paper is dominated by what the Editor/s think is interesting and will gain greater readership '-- both of which are subjective judgments and lead to decisions which are frustrating and delay the publication of your work. PLOS ONE will rigorously peer-review your submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication by the readership (who are the most qualified to determine what is of interest to them).
  Open AccessPLOS applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) to all works we publish. Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in PLOS journals, so long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers.
  Publication ChargesTo provide open access, PLOS journals use a business model in which our expenses'--including those of peer review, journal production, and online hosting and archiving'--are recovered in part by charging a publication fee to the authors or research sponsors for each article they publish. The fees vary by journal.
  PLOS is committed to the widest possible global participation in open access publishing. To determine the appropriate fee, we use a country-based pricing model, which is based on the country that provides 50% or more of the primary funding for the research that is being submitted. Research articles funded by Upper Middle and High Income Countries incur our standard publication fees. Corresponding authors who are affiliated with one of our Institutional Members are eligible for a discount on this fee. Such authors will be informed of the discount applicable after submission of their manuscript.
  Fees for Low and Lower Middle Income Countries are calculated according to the PLOS Global Participation Initiative pricing program for manuscripts submitted after 9am Pacific Time on September 4, 2012 (this program is not retroactive).
  Group One: Countries from this list will not be charged for publishingGroup Two: Countries from this list will be charged a flat $500Our fee waiver policy, whereby PLOS offers to waive or further reduce the payment required of authors who cannot pay the full amount charged for publication, remains in effect. Editors and reviewers have no access to whether authors are able to pay; decisions to publish are only based on editorial criteria.
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  Editorial and Peer-Review ProcessEach submission to PLOS ONE passes through a rigorous quality control and peer-review evaluation process before receiving a decision. Beginning in 2008, we are providing the following summary data regarding our process. This information will be updated quarterly with the latest data:
  The PLOS ONE criteria for publication are as follows (more detailed information is provided here):The study presents the results of primary scientific research.Results reported have not been published elsewhere.Experiments, statistics, and other analyses are performed to a high technical standard and are described in sufficient detail.Conclusions are presented in an appropriate fashion and are supported by the data.The article is presented in an intelligible fashion and is written in standard English.The research meets all applicable standards for the ethics of experimentation and research integrity.The article adheres to appropriate reporting guidelines and community standards for data availability.Each submission is subjected to an in-house quality control check, which deals with issues such as competing interests; ethical requirements for studies involving human participants or animals; financial disclosures; full compliance with data deposition standards, etc. Submissions may be returned to authors for queries, and will not be seen by our Editorial Board or Peer Reviewers until they pass this quality control check.We use an international Editorial Board of over 3,000 academic experts, and a list of their areas of expertise is available at: http://www.plosone.org/static/edboard. Once each manuscript has passed quality control, it is assigned to a member of the Editorial Board, who takes responsibility as the Academic Editor for the submission. The Academic Editor is responsible for conducting the peer-review process and for making a decision to accept, invite revision of, or reject the article. Further details of the editorial process are described here.Our instructions for Peer Reviewers are to be found here. Currently, of the articles that are ultimately accepted for publication, 95.8%* were sent for review by external experts. Around 4.2%* of articles are peer reviewed by the Academic Editors themselves (often in consultation with other members of the Editorial Board) when they are sufficiently expert in the field to determine whether the paper meets the PLOS ONE criteria.On average, ALL accepted articles have been reviewed by 2.9* experts (one Academic Editor and 1.9* external Peer Reviewers).Authors can recommend specific Academic Editors, but PLOS ONE is not obliged to use that suggestion, and the identity of the Academic Editor is not revealed until a decision is rendered. The Academic Editor is also publicly identified on all published articles. If Peer Reviewers are willing, then they are also identified to the author at the time of decision.On average, PLOS ONE publishes 69%** of all submissions.Rejected papers are given the opportunity for a formal appeal. Appeal requests should be made in writing, not by telephone, and should be addressed to plosone [at] plos.org with the word "appeal" in the subject line. Authors should provide detailed reasons for the appeal and point-by-point responses to the reviewers' and/or Academic Editor's comments. Decisions on appeals are final without exception. Authors should also be aware that priority is given to new submissions to the journal and so the processing of the appeal may well take longer than the processing of the original submission.*Data refer to the 1,837 manuscripts that received a decision in the period 7/1/10 - 9/30/10.
  **Data refer to the 2,216 manuscripts submitted in the period 1/1/10 - 3/31/10 and their status as of 10/5/10. We quote data from an earlier time period as some submissions spend time passing through revisions and re-evaluations before ultimately being accepted or rejected. Therefore, if we quoted data for submissions in the most recent quarter, it would not give a complete picture for those papers still being evaluated.
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  About PLOSPLOS is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. For more information about PLOS, visit www.plos.org.
Report: Government Spying Causing Self-Censorship, Privacy Fears Among US Writers CBS DC
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Sun, 17 Nov 2013 07:29
  In the wake of revelations about intrusive government surveillance, many American authors are worrying about the freedom of the press and some simply are avoiding controversial topics. (credit: Patrick Lux/Getty Images)
  Filed underNews, Politics, TechRelated tagschilling effect, Edward Snowden, FDR Group, freedom of the press, government intrusion, government spying, National Security Agency, NSA, NSA surveillance, PEN Center USA, privacy fears, privacy rights, self-censor, self-censorship, writer surveyLatest NewsPhotos WASHINGTON (CBS DC) '' In the wake of revelations about intrusive government surveillance, many American authors are worrying about the freedom of the press and some simply are avoiding controversial topics.
  A new report from the PEN Center and the FDR Group entitled ''Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self-Censor'' finds that 85 percent of surveyed writers are worried about government surveillance of Americans, and nearly three-quarters (73 percent) ''have never been as worried about privacy rights and freedom of the press as they are today.''
  Sixteen percent of writers have avoided writing or speaking about certain topics due to threatening privacy concerns, and an additional 11 percent have seriously considered such avoidance.
  Writer comments included statements such as, ''I assume everything I do electronically is subject to monitoring.''
  Another responded, ''I feel that increased government surveillance has had a chilling effect on my research, most of which I do on the Internet. This includes research on issues such as the drug wars and mass incarceration, which people don't think about as much as they think about foreign terrorism, but is just as pertinent.''
  Many expressed concerns that if the U.S. is conducting far-reaching surveillance then it would become a new ''norm'' for governments across the world to use stronger police and military surveillance tactics. Others reflected that today's privacy threats are much greater than former President Richard Nixon and Cold War-era intrusion, especially because of advanced technology.
  According to their website, PEN Center looks to both protect the rights and freedoms of writers around the world, while also promote literary culture and interest in the written word. Their survey of over 520 American writers asked for long-form responses to the information being revealed by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden and other government whistleblowers.
  The survey looked at the harms caused by widespread surveillance, and the possibly ''chilling effect'' that could affect the amount and type of information written and reported.
  Nearly a quarter of the writers surveyed (24 percent) reported deliberately avoiding certain topics in phone or email conversations, and an additional 9 percent have seriously considered such action. A small portion of respondents said they had even declined opportunities to meet with people deemed ''security threats by the government'' because of privacy fears.
  The report notes several revelations from Snowden's leaked documents which have shown ''ever-greater infringements on privacy by the NSA.''
  The report cites that the NSA ''has broken into the main telecommunication companies, has built a system that can reach deep into U.S. Internet backbone and cover 75 percent of traffic in the country, including not only metadata but the content of online communications.''
  '' By Benjamin Fearnow
The Global Intelligence Files - Goodbye
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Sat, 16 Nov 2013 11:39
  The Global Intelligence Files,5543061emails released so farCommunity resourcescourage is contagious
  On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.
  Released on 2013-11-15 00:00 GMT
  Email-ID391Date2005-10-26 22:20:07Fromjones@stratfor.comToallstratfor@stratfor.comAs many of you know, today is my last day with Stratfor. Working herehas been a tremendous experience on so many levels - I've expanded myknowledge of the world, grown as a professional and made some valuablefriendships. I wish you all the best and expect to see Stratfor expandits presence and impact in the months and years ahead. While I amexcited about my next opportunity, I will truly miss working with sucha talented and diverse team in such a unique industry.Thank you all,
  --Alex JonesStrategic Forecasting, IncWebmasterT: 512-744-4080F: 512-744-4334Email: jones@stratfor.comwww.stratfor.com
I Really Do Forgive You, Kitty!
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: The Fabulous Geezersisters’ Weblog
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 22:45
  I would never have made it as a pioneer. Are you kidding? I haven't camped out since 1974, and even then, it was under duress.
  One of the last times my husband and I camped out, we stayed at a lonely, desolate campground close to Indian burial mounds in Mississippi. The only other campers at our site were two skinny, jittery, malevolent-looking guys who refused to speak to us when we dropped by to say hello (this was my husband's idea to calm me down: get to know the neighborhood! Then she'll feel better! Yeah!).
  Unfortunately, one of our new and ominously silent neighbors bore a distinct resemblance to Elmer Wayne Henley, a Houstonian of recent mass-murder fame. Waving our arms and calling out loud good-byes, my husband and I slunk back to our tent. There, we spent the remainder of the long night expecting a sudden and excruciating death by machete or ax or Swiss army knife. When we awoke the next morning, though, Elmer Wayne and his sidekick were gone. For years, I thought of them every time I saw a Wanted! poster.
  Even so, I'm pretty sure that being a pioneer would have been much worse than that last camping experience. I am also positive that being a pioneer in Texas would have been worse than settling almost anywhere else in this country. The state's weather veers from brutally hot to bone-chilling cold, the wind spits dust and tumbleweeds, and the rivers and lakes breed poisonous snakes that frequently go into politics.
  By the time my family moved to Texas in 1954, the environment was still harsh '-- but at least oil was being discovered and air-conditioning units were mass-produced. Our family lived in a small ranch house on the edge of Wichita Falls in a neighborhood teeming with children. We played hopscotch on the sidewalks and proved our mettle by stepping on red ants barefooted. When the endless summer days grew too hot and blistering, we retreated into our houses, which were cooled by overworked air-conditioning window units, and watched TV.
  TV! That showed us another world beyond the barren expanses of the Texas horizons. It was like reading, my other, preferred escape. But books opened an interior world that was my own, while TV channeled a presumably real world that existed somewhere else in black and white, where people dressed more formally and spoke an orotund language distinct from our own broad, flat tones.
  People on TV had exciting lives unlike, say, mine. They led three lives. They got run over by cars (some of us never got over Sarah on The Edge of Night, who threw herself in front of a car to save her daughter. This probably defined motherhood for a generation of American girls). They got to meet Bat Masterson and Davy Crockett (which meant they were probably pioneers, but never mind. Child or adult, my strong suit has never been consistency). They got to run elegantly down steep, winding staircases, like Loretta Young, and swirl around in skirts that defied the laws of physics; when you lived in a one-story rancher and only owned one petticoat, your staircase-and-swirling odds were tragically low.
  Also, there were game shows like To Tell the Truth and I've Got a Secret, where sophisticated contestants cracked and snickered at languid witticisms I never quite understood. They lived in a very different world from mine '-- that much I did understand. That's why they dressed in black and hailed taxis and lounged around and joked about drinking. (In our own mostly Protestant neighborhood, only the Catholics drank; this is why I always considered Catholicism the religion for people who liked to have more fun than Methodists. As my mother commented darkly, this was why Catholics had more babies and would probably take over the world. Also, you only wore black if somebody died and I didn't ride in a taxi till I was 20.)
  This all brings me to Kitty Carlisle Hart, who is really kind of the point, even if it took me millennia to get to it. (Lack of concision is right up there with lack of consistency in my long list of character flaws.) Anyway, for years, I watched Kitty Carlisle and resented her, since she was so glamorous and so what would have been called la-dee-dah in my neighborhood. I comforted myself that Kitty Carlisle probably couldn't stomp on red ants barefooted or hula-hoop as well as I did, but somehow I knew I wasn't holding trump cards. ''The glamorous Kitty Carlisle Hart'' is how they always introduced her; this was always my cue to head to the kitchen and do some revenge eating of ice cream.
  It wasn't till years later that I began to read about Carlisle that I realized she was a very accomplished woman. A singer, actress, benefactor, married to Moss Hart, proposed to by George Gershwin, acted with the Marx Brothers '-- and the daughter of a calculating, social-climbing mother who tried to marry her off to European royalty. Like all people you want to easily resent, she turned out to be far more complicated and sympathetic than you wanted to think.
  But, best of all, I once read that Kitty Carlisle Hart began every day by staring into the mirror and announcing, ''I forgive you, Kitty!'' Forgiving yourself '-- now that was as foreign a concept to my stern Protestant childhood as uttering bon mots and hailing taxis. No wonder Kitty Carlisle seemed to be enjoying herself so much.
  ''I forgive you, Kitty!'' I announce to the mirror now and then. And I mean it. Because the older I've gotten, the more I've realized Kitty Carlisle Hart and I had something in common: She would have sucked at being a pioneer, too.
  (Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)
  Read about the moment in life when everything changes
  Tagged as: childhood, humor, kitty carlisle, kitty carlisle hart, pioneer, television, West Texas
Report: Benghazi Attackers Had Inside Information, Knew Location of Safe Room
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 20:49
  by AWR Hawkins15 Nov 2013, 8:29 AM PDTpost a commentAccording to Fox News, notes from Young's visit with Ubben show the consulate attack was "very well orchestrated, well organized, almost a military operation, using military weapons and using military signals."
  Young's notes emphasized that the attackers "had knowledge of almost everything in the compound." For example, "they knew where the gasoline was, they knew where the generators were, they knew where the safe room was, they knew more than they should have [known] about that compound."
  Young said Ubben believed the attackers had inside information: "It was pretty well figured out, where everything was located, where the doors were," he reported.
  Ubben told Young that the security force hired to protect the compound capitulated once the attack began: "When the attack started, the Libyan security folks who were supposed to secure the compound...ran. So, [Stevens and the other Americans] were at the mercy of their own capabilities."
  Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins.
Interview: Telecom Security Expert Philippe Langlois on GCHQ Spying - SPIEGEL ONLINE
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 20:01
  SPIEGEL ONLINE: The British intelligence agency GCHQ is hacking into the networks of mobile phone companies operating so-called GRX routers. What are these networks and why are they an attractive target?
  Philippe Langlois: These are the "roaming tubes" of the worldwide mobile system. You can basically track every user in the world who is roaming with their smartphone. When roaming, all the Internet surfing and accesses to corporate networks go through these exchanges, and can be eavesdropped on by passively "sniffing" all data, all web pages and all emails.
  SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is it possible to defend against that kind of snooping?
  Langlois: Basic security such as encrypted web pages (https), encrypted email (PGP) or encrypted chat (Jabber OTR) will prevent such interception. In that sense, the GRX is not different from a traditional Internet Service Provider. If you're using safe Internet best practice there, you can protect your communication secrecy, but you cannot protect your location.
  SPIEGEL ONLINE: Can one track a user this way only while he's roaming with his handset? Or does the GRX hacking allow tracking even when the targets are in their home country?
  Langlois: By listening passively to a GRX network, one can know where any user is roaming with a coarse location granularity: i.e. their city or region. But GRX also enables making requests that can basically target any subscriber, not only those that are roaming. Though this is an advanced security attack.
  SPIEGEL ONLINE: Could this kind of access also be used to implant spying software directly on someone's phone?
  Langlois: If you control what goes into these "roaming tubes," if you can see what people surf, you can probably also change that. And if you can change the content, you can possibly suggest some application to the user through a trusted content provider. By doing that, you may compromise his handset, and implant hidden software features such as GPS location acquisition, covertly taking pictures or even video, listening to calls and even ambient conversation when the phone is in "sleep mode." Some companies such as Gamma have provided this kind of software to many different governments and regimes.
  SPIEGEL ONLINE: Does access to a GRX network also allow access to other, local mobile networks from there?
  Langlois: A GRX network is called a "walled garden." The theory is that only "nice people" are on the network, that is, only clean telecom mobile operators. That was the theory, so the mobile operators didn't really protect themselves against other operators on the GRX network. The user traffic, which is potentially harmful to operators, is neatly encapsulated into the "roaming tubes," preventing users from reaching the infrastructure of the GRX network itself. But operators themselves can do that. And therefore, anyone having compromised one operator or the GRX network can attack other mobile operators with a much better chance to compromise them than by attacking through, say, Internet access. The unknown, dark, insider-only networks are always less secure than the ones which are heavily exposed and attacked, and thus more protected.
  SPIEGEL ONLINE: According to material from whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, GCHQ is also attacking the networks of billing clearinghouses like MACH. How could a secret service benefit from accessing the networks of such companies?
  Langlois: The billing clearinghouses get a very particular kind of data: the call detail records (CDRs). These add up to make bills for all users. This way, mobile operators know who owes them what. But this data can also be used by intelligence agencies to know who calls whom, when, and for how long. CDRs don't have the content of the call, just caller number, called number, duration, sometimes even caller location, etc. In intelligence jargon, that's called "traffic analysis," and it's way faster than listening to conversations from a user. That's the main tool that police forces use to gain insight into the extent of criminal rings, for example. But it's also very useful to perform counter-insurgency work by tracking who calls whom to a rally, or to know who calls the political leader of one party or another.
  SPIEGEL ONLINE: Could access to billing house networks be used to gain access to actual mobile networks from there?
  Langlois: Billing clearinghouses have the same "walled garden" pattern. You don't expect to be hacked by your accountant. Here, it is similar: You may fear the Russian mafia on the Internet, but not the service that generates the biggest part of your revenues. Therefore, mobile operators are not protected enough on these networks, and can be compromised this way.
  SPIEGEL ONLINE: One GCHQ document says that the intelligence service would like to be able to implant software on any device based "just on the MSISDN," or the phone number. Do you think that's feasible, given what we know about the current capabilities of the GCHQ andNSA?
  Langlois: Yes, since intelligence agencies are routinely buying previously unknown vulnerabilities from the gray market (it's called zero day exploit trading), they probably have some of them which enable compromise of some or most of the target operating systems or standard applications of these phones.
  (C) SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013All Rights ReservedReproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH
ALERT - Mass ransomware spamming event targeting UK computer users
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 19:45
  15 November 2013
  The NCA's National Cyber Crime Unit are aware of a mass email spamming event that is ongoing, where people are receiving emails that appear to be from banks and other financial institutions.
  The emails may be sent out to tens of millions of UK customers, but appear to be targeting small and medium businesses in particular. This spamming event is assessed as a significant risk.
  The emails carry an attachment that appears to be correspondence linked to the email message (for example, a voicemail, fax, details of a suspicious transaction or invoices for payment). This file is in fact a malware that can install Cryptolocker '' which is a piece of ransomware
  Cryptolocker works by encrypting the user's files on the infected machine and the local network it is attached to.
  Once encrypted, the computer will display a splash screen with a count down timer and a demand for the payment of 2 Bitcoins in ransom (Approx £536 as at 15/11/2013) for the decryption key.
  The NCA would never endorse the payment of a ransom to criminals and there is no guarantee that they would honour the payments in any event.
  Lee Miles, Deputy Head of the NCCU says "The NCA are actively pursuing organised crime groups committing this type of crime. We are working in cooperation with industry and international partners to identify and bring to justice those responsible and reduce the risk to the public."
  An NCCU investigation is ongoing to identify the source of the email addresses used. Anyone who is infected with this malware should report it via Action Fraud
  Sound advice can be found at GetSafeOnline
  Advice: This is a case where prevention is better than cure.
  The public should be aware not to click on any such attachment.Antivirus software should be updated, as should operating systems.User created files should be backed up routinely and preserved off the network.Where a computer becomes infected it should be disconnected from the network, and professional assistance should be sought to clean the computer.Various antivirus companies offer remedial software solutions (though they will not restore encrypted files).
LiveLeak.com - Obamacare: New rule may remove reinsurance fee for unions. Radioviceonline.com
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  Archived Version
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 17:31
  Obamacare: New rule may remove reinsurance fee for unions. Radioviceonline.com
  A provision in Obamacare would collect a fee from health insurance companies and third-party administrators (TPAs) of administrative services only (ASO a.k.a. self-insured) group health plans, to fund a reinsurance program to help ''stabilize'' premiums available through the exchanges. A significant number of unions are self-insured. Unions were pissed they had to pay this fee of between $60 and $80 per insured (now said to start at $63 and reduce in following years), and as recently as last week were demanding President Obama change the law. Obama caved.
  I thought we had to suck it up and the law was the law? It's ''settled'' is it not? From the NY Post, with a hat tip to John Nolte at Big Government.
  The Obama administration sneaked in a rule that would let some labor unions off the hook for an ObamaCare tax.
  After publicly rejecting the unions' request for an exemption, the Department of Health and Human Services last week quietly gave the unions a pass on what would have been a massive tax hit.
  The tax, known as the reinsurance fee, requires self-insured organizations, such as unions and some large companies, to pay $63 for each covered member and an additional $63 for each additional family member on a health plan.
  The fee was expected to raise $25 billion over three years, with the funds going to insurance companies to offset the cost of covering pre-existing conditions and other mandatory benefits.
  Another friggin' back-door waiver deal. The first year (2014) they were to pay $63, then pay $42 in 2015 and $26 in 2016. After that, they said the reinsurance fee '' designed as a start-up tax to help get things going '' would go away after three payments. It is certainly true this waiver may not be exclusive to unions. More from Kaiser Health News.
  Weeks after denying labor's request to give union members access to health-law subsidies, the Obama administration is signaling it intends to exempt some union plans from one of the law's substantial taxes.
  Buried in rules issued last week is the disclosure that the administration will propose exempting ''certain self-insured, self-administered plans'' from the law's temporary reinsurance fee in 2015 and 2016.
  That's a description that applies to many Taft-Hartley union plans acting as their own insurance company and claims processor, said Edward Fensholt, a senior vice president at Lockton Cos., a large insurance broker.
  You'll only see the section of the Federal Register, Vol. 78, No. 210 released on Oct. 30 referenced right here at RVO. My emphasis added.
  C. Part 153'--Standards Related to Reinsurance, Risk Corridors, and Risk Adjustment Under the Affordable Care Act
  In the proposed rule, we proposed certain provisions related to program integrity for State-operated risk adjustment and reinsurance programs, including provisions governing reporting requirements and restricting the use of reinsurance funds for administrative expenses. In addition, we proposed record retention standards for States operating risk adjustment, for contributing entities, and for reinsurance-eligible plans when HHS operates reinsurance on behalf of a State. We intend to propose additional standards related to the oversight of the premium stabilization programs in future regulations and guidance.
  We also note that, to alleviate the upfront burden of the reinsurance contributions, we intend to propose in future rulemaking to collect reinsurance contributions in two installments'--the reinsurance contributions for reinsurance payments and administrative expenses would be collected at the beginning of the calendar year following the applicable benefit year, and the contributions for payments to the U.S. Treasury would be collected at the end of the calendar year following the applicable benefit year. We also intend to propose in future rulemaking to exempt certain self-insured, self-administered plans from the requirement to make reinsurance contributions for the 2015 and 2016 benefit years.
  What do they mean by certain self-insured, self-administered plans? Will some get the deal and others not? Even though the law was passed forty-three months ago, we still don't know what's in it.
VIDEO-House Democrat Jim McDermott: I Haven't Seen This Much Panic on the Floor Since 9/11 | Washington Free Beacon
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  Archived Version
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 17:27
  House Dem. compares Congressional panic over Obamacare to worst terror attack in nation's history
  BY:Washington Free Beacon StaffNovember 15, 2013 12:01 pm
  Rep. Jim McDermott (D., Wash.) said ''I haven't seen this much panic on the [House] floor since 9/11'" in response to the House Republican proposal allowing insurers to offer healthcare plans scheduled to be cancelled under Obamacare Friday morning:
  JIM MCDERMOTT: Mr. Speaker, my mother used to say, patience is a virtue. I haven't seen so much panic on this floor since 9/11.
A Closer Look at the Reinsurance Fee - NYTimes.com
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  Archived Version
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 17:25
  Though a tax on medical devices has been a point of contention in the negotiations over the fiscal standoff, the Senate proposal that would end the government shutdown and raise the debt limit is likely to include instead a one-year delay of another tax associated with the Affordable Care Act '-- the so-called reinsurance tax, which employers pay.
  The reinsurance tax is one of several measures intended to stabilize premiums in the individual insurance market as major provisions of the health care law take effect in January. The fees, to be charged from 2014 to 2016, will provide money to insurers that incur high claims for consumers in the individual insurance market, both inside and outside the new exchanges, or marketplaces. Insurers are apprehensive that some of their new customers, having been uninsured for years, will have costly existing conditions.
  The fees are to be paid by insurers in the individual, small group and large group markets, as well as by employers that serve as their own insurers.
  A delay in the implementation of the tax is popular with both employers and labor unions, many of which provide health coverage to members, because it would put off significant new costs.
  The government set the fee for 2014 at $63 per covered life, or $5.25 a month. Insurers and some self-insured employers may have to pay not only for subscribers and employees, but also for spouses and children who are covered.
  The total amount of fees to be collected over three years is $25 billion. Of that amount, $20 billion will go to the reinsurance program and $5 billion to the Treasury.
  ''The primary purpose of the reinsurance program is to stabilize premiums in the individual market from 2014 through 2016,'' the Obama administration said when it proposed the rules in December 2012. ''The reinsurance program is designed to protect against issuers' potential perceived need to raise premiums due to the implementation of the 2014 market reform rules, specifically guaranteed availability.''
  The tax, the administration said, should alleviate the concerns of insurance companies about the risk of ''high-cost claims from newly insured individuals.''
4 New Ways to Smuggle Messages Across the Internet - IEEE Spectrum
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  Archived Version
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 17:19
  Illustrations by Carl De Torres
  Their neighbors thought they were just ordinary U.S. residents, but secretly they were spies, sent by Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service to gather information on U.S. policies and programs. For years they thwarted detection partly by hiding secret correspondence in seemingly innocent pictures posted on public websites. They encoded and decoded the dispatches using custom-made software.
  But the scheme wasn't as covert as the spies had assumed. Eventually investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice tracked down the altered images, which helped build a case against the Russians. In June 2010, federal agents arrested 10 of them, who admitted to being secret agents a few weeks later.
  The act of concealing data in plain sight is known as steganography. Since antiquity, clandestine couriers have used hundreds of steganographic techniques, including invisible ink, shrunken text, and strategically placed tattoos. Picture steganography'--one of the Russian spies' primary tactics'--dates back to about the early 1990s. That they used such an old-school strategy is odd, particularly because doctored images can be detected and used as evidence.
  A more modern approach, known as network steganography, leaves almost no trail [see ''Vice Over IP,''IEEE Spectrum, February 2010]. Rather than embed confidential information in data files, such as JPEGs or MP3s, network steganography programs hide communication in seemingly innocent Internet traffic. And because these programs use short-lived delivery channels'--a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) connection, for example'--the hidden exchanges are much harder to detect.
  Network security experts have invented all of the dozens of publicly documented network steganography techniques. But this doesn't mean that criminals, hackers, and spies'--as well as persecuted citizens wanting to evade government censorship or journalists wanting to conceal sources'--aren't using these or similar tactics. They probably are, but nobody has tools that are effective enough to detect these techniques. In fact, had the Russian spies used newer steganography methods, they might not have been exposed so handily.
  As members of the Network Security Group at Warsaw University of Technology, in Poland, we study new ways to disguise data in order to help security experts design better detection software for those cases when steganography is used for nefarious purposes. As communication technologies evolve, we and other steganographers must develop ever more advanced steganography techniques.
  About a decade ago, state-of-the-art programs manipulated the Internet Protocol primarily. Today, however, the most sophisticated methods target specific Internet services, such as search tools, social networks, and file-transfer systems. To illustrate the range of things that are possible, we present four steganographic techniques we've recently developed, each of which exploits a common use of the Internet.
  Skype
  Silences in a telephone conversation can carry a great deal of meaning'--and hidden messages.
  Skype, Microsoft's proprietary VoIP service, is particularly easy to exploit because of the way the software packages audio data. While a user'--let's call her Alice'--is talking, Skype stuffs the data into transmission packets. But unlike many other VoIP apps, Skype continues to generate audio packets when Alice is silent. This improves the quality of the call and helps the data clear security firewalls, among other advantages.
  But the outgoing silence packets also present an opportunity to smuggle secret information. These packets are easy to recognize because they're much smaller'--about half the number of bits'--than the packets containing Alice's voice.
  We've developed a steganography program that allows Alice to identify the small-size packets and replace their contents with encrypted secret data. We call this program SkyDe, shorthand for Skype Hide. For a covert transaction to take place, the recipient of Alice's call'--let's name him Bob'--also needs to have SkyDe installed on his computer. The software intercepts Alice's transmission, grabs some of the small packets while letting all of the big ones pass through, and then reassembles the secret message.
  Meanwhile, Alice and Bob chat away as if nothing unusual were transpiring. Bob's Skype application assumes the filched packets have simply been lost. Skype then fills the gap left by each lost packet most likely by reconstructing its contents based on the contents of its neighbors' packets. (Because Skype is proprietary, we don't know for sure.) As a result, the missing silence packets sound just like all the other silence packets surrounding them.
  Our experiments show that up to 30 percent of Alice's silence packets can transport clandestine cargo without causing a noticeable change in call quality. This means that Alice could send Bob up to about 2 kilobits per second of secret data'--roughly 100 pages of text in 4 minutes'--without arousing the suspicion of anyone monitoring their call.
  BitTorrent
  What better place to hide secrets than in one of the world's most popular file-sharing systems? The peer-to-peer transfer protocol BitTorrent conveys hundreds of trillions of bits worldwide every second. Anyone sniffing for criminal correspondence on its networks would have better luck finding that proverbial needle in a haystack.
  Our group developed StegTorrent for encoding classified information in BitTorrent transactions. This method takes advantage of the fact that a BitTorrent user often shares a data file (or pieces of the file) with many recipients at once.
  So let's say Alice wants to send a hidden message to Bob. First, Bob needs to have previously established control over a group of distributed computers that all run a BitTorrent application. These are most likely computers that Bob owns or, if he's an especially savvy hacker, computers he has co-opted to do his bidding. Both he and Alice need to know how many computers are in this group and what their IP addresses are.
  For simplicity's sake, let's say Bob controls a group of just two computers. To initiate a transaction, he commands the computers to each request a file from Alice. In a typical BitTorrent transfer, Alice's program would transmit the data packets in random order, and Bob's computers would stitch them back together based on the instructions they contain. Using StegTorrent, however, Alice can reorder the packets to encode a specific bit sequence.
  For example, if she sends a packet to computer 1 and then to computer 2, that sequence might designate the binary number 1. But if she sends a packet to computer 2 first, Bob's StegTorrent program would read the signal as binary number 0. To prevent scrambling due to packet losses or delays, StegTorrent modifies the time stamp on each packet so that Bob can decipher the exact order in which Alice sent them. Our experiments showed that using six IP addresses, Alice can relay up to 270 secret bits per second'--enough bandwidth for a simple text conversation'--without distorting the transfers or attracting suspicion.
  Google Suggest
  Alice can also conceal her messages to Bob'--and the fact the two conspirators are communicating at all'--simply by having him perform a series of innocent-looking Google searches. Our StegSuggeststeganography program targets the feature Google Suggest, which lists the 10 most popular search phrases given a string of letters a user has entered in Google's search box.
  Here's how it works: For Alice to send Bob a hidden note, she must first infect his computer with StegSuggest malware so that she can monitor the traffic exchanged between Google's servers and Bob's browser. This can be done using basic hacker tools. Then, when Bob types in a random search term, say, ''Robots will'...,'' Alice intercepts the data traveling from Google to Bob. Using StegSuggest, she adds a unique word to the end of each of the 10 phrases Google suggests. The software chooses these additions from a list of 4096 common English words, so the new phrases aren't likely to be too bizarre. For example, if Google suggests the phrase ''Robots will take our jobs,'' Alice might add ''Robots will take our jobs tree.'' Odd, yes, but probably not worthy of alarm.
  Bob's StegSuggest program then extracts each added word and converts it into a 10-bit sequence using a previously shared lookup table. (Each of the 1024 possible bit sequences corresponds to four different words, making the code more difficult to crack.) Alice can thus transmit 100 secret bits each time Bob types a new term into his Google search box.
  To send data faster, Alice could hijack the searches of several innocent googlers in a crowded hot spot, such as an Internet caf(C) or a college dormitory. In this scenario, both she and Bob would intercept the googlers' traffic. Alice would insert the coded words into Google's suggested phrases, and Bob would extract and decode them. He would pass on only the original phrases to the googlers'--who would never suspect they had just facilitated a secret exchange.
  Wi-Fi Networks
  Now let's say Alice wants to secretly send video in addition to documents or text messages. In this case, she might opt to smuggle the stream in a very average-looking wireless transmission.
  But not just any wireless network will do. Alice must use a network that relies on the data-encoding technique known as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). Wireless standards that employ this scheme are some of the most popular, including certain versions of IEEE 802.11, used in Wi-Fi networks.
  To understand how to hide data in OFDM signals, you must first know something about how OFDM works. This transmission scheme divvies up a digital payload among several small-bandwidth carriers of different frequencies. These narrowband carriers are more resilient to atmospheric degradation than a single wideband wave, allowing data to pass to receivers with higher fidelity. OFDM carefully selects carriers and divides the bits up into groups of set length, known as symbols, to minimize interference.
  In reality, though, a digital payload rarely divides perfectly into a collection of symbols; there will usually be some symbols left with too few bits. So OFDM transmitters add extra throwaway bits to these symbols until they conform to the standard size.
  Because this ''bit padding'' is meaningless, Alice can replace it with secret data without compromising the original data transmission. We call this steganographic method Wireless Padding, or WiPad. Because bit padding is abundant in OFDM transmissions, Alice can send hidden data to Bob at a pretty good clip. A single connection on a typical Wi-Fi network in a school or coffee shop, for instance, could support up to 2 megabits per second'--fast enough for Alice to secretly stream standard-definition video to Bob.
  This article originally appeared online 23 September 2013. A version appeared in print in the November 2013 issue.
  Wojciech Mazurczyk, Krzysztof Szczypiorski, and J"zef Lubacz wrote ''Vice Over IP'' in the February 2010 issue of IEEE Spectrum. In 2002, as members of the Network Security Group at Warsaw University of Technology, in Poland, they founded the Stegano.net project to investigate new ways to smuggle data through networks and how to thwart such attempts. After many years spent anticipating evildoers and their machinations, Szczypiorski says his favorite saying comes from Indiana Jones: ''Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.''
C.I.A. Collects Global Data on Transfers of Money - NYTimes.com
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  Archived Version
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 17:08
  WASHINGTON '-- The Central Intelligence Agency is secretly collecting bulk records of international money transfers handled by companies like Western Union '-- including transactions into and out of the United States '-- under the same law that the National Security Agency uses for its huge database of Americans' phone records, according to current and former government officials.
  The C.I.A. financial records program, which the officials said was authorized by provisions in the Patriot Act and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, offers evidence that the extent of government data collection programs is not fully known and that the national debate over privacy and security may be incomplete.
  Some details of the C.I.A. program were not clear. But it was confirmed by several current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter is classified.
  The data does not include purely domestic transfers or bank-to-bank transactions, several officials said. Another, while not acknowledging the program, suggested that the surveillance court had imposed rules withholding the identities of any Americans from the data the C.I.A. sees, requiring a tie to a terrorist organization before a search may be run, and mandating that the data be discarded after a certain number of years. The court has imposed several similar rules on the N.S.A. call logs program.
  Several officials also said more than one other bulk collection program has yet to come to light.
  ''The intelligence community collects bulk data in a number of different ways under multiple authorities,'' one intelligence official said.
  Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the C.I.A., declined to confirm whether such a program exists, but said that the agency conducts lawful intelligence collection aimed at foreign '-- not domestic '-- activities and that it is subject to extensive oversight.
  ''The C.I.A. protects the nation and upholds the privacy rights of Americans by ensuring that its intelligence collection activities are focused on acquiring foreign intelligence and counterintelligence in accordance with U.S. laws,'' he said.
  Juan Zarate, a White House and Treasury official under President George W. Bush, said that unlike telecommunications information, there has generally been less sensitivity about the collection of financial data, in part because the government already collects information on large transactions under the Bank Secrecy Act.
  ''There is a longstanding legal baseline for the U.S. government to collect financial information,'' said Mr. Zarate, who is also the author of ''Treasury's War,'' about the crackdown on terrorist financing. He did not acknowledge the C.I.A. program.
  Orders for business records from the surveillance court generally prohibit recipients from talking about them. A spokeswoman for one large company that handles money transfers abroad, Western Union, did not directly address a question about whether it had been ordered to turn over records in bulk, but said that the company complies with legal requirements to provide information.
  ''We collect consumer information to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act and other laws,'' said the spokeswoman, Luella Chavez D'Angelo. ''In doing so, we also protect our consumers' privacy.''
  In recent months, there have been hints in congressional testimony, declassified documents and litigation that the N.S.A. program '-- which was disclosed by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor '-- is not unique in collecting records involving Americans.
  For example, the American Civil Liberties Union is fighting a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for documents related to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the provision that allows the government to compel companies to turn over business records for counterterrorism purposes. After the government declassified the N.S.A. phone records program, it has released many documents about it in response to the suit.
  But the government has notified the A.C.L.U. that it is withholding two Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rulings invoking Section 215 '-- one dated Aug. 20, 2008, and the other Nov. 23, 2010 '-- because they discuss matters that remain classified, according to Alexander Abdo, an A.C.L.U. lawyer. ''It suggests very strongly that there are other programs of surveillance that the public has a right to know about,'' Mr. Abdo said.
  In addition, a Justice Department ''white paper'' on the N.S.A.'s call records program, released in August, said that communications logs are ''a context'' in which the ''collection of a large volume of data'' is necessary for investigators to be able to analyze links between terrorism suspects and their associates. It did not say that call records are the only context that meets the criteria for bulk gathering.
  In hearings on Capitol Hill, government officials have repeatedly avoided saying that phone logs '-- which include date, duration and numbers of phone calls, but not their content '-- are the only type of data that would qualify for bulk collection under the Patriot Act provision. In a little-noticed exchange late in an Oct. 3 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the N.S.A. director, appeared to go further.
  At the hearing, Senator Mazie K. Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii, asked General Alexander and James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, a sweeping question: ''So what are all of the programs run by the N.S.A. or other federal agencies'' that used either Section 215 of the Patriot Act or another surveillance law that allows warrantless wiretapping of phone and emails?
  General Alexander responded by describing, once again, the N.S.A.'s call records program, adding, ''None of that is hid from you.'' Mr. Clapper said nothing.
  Then, moments later, General Alexander interjected that he was talking only about what the N.S.A. is doing under the Patriot Act provision and appearing to let slip that other agencies are operating their own programs.
  ''You know, that's of course a global thing that others use as well, but for ours, it's just that way,'' General Alexander said.
  In September, the Obama administration declassified and released a lengthy opinion by Judge Claire Eagan of the surveillance court, written a month earlier and explaining why the panel had given legal blessing to the call log program. A largely overlooked passage of her ruling suggested that the court has also issued orders for at least two other types of bulk data collection.
  Specifically, Judge Eagan noted that the court had previously examined the issue of what records are relevant to an investigation for the purpose of ''bulk collections,'' plural. There followed more than six lines that were censored in the publicly released version of her opinion.
  Lawmakers on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees have been trying to gain more information about other bulk collection programs.
  In September, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin and an author of the original Patriot Act, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. asking if the administration was collecting bulk records aside from the phone data. An aide said he had yet to get a response. Even lawmakers on the Intelligence Committees have indicated that they are not sure they understand the entire landscape of what the government is doing in terms of bulk collection.
  Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, recently sent a classified letter to Mr. Clapper asking for a full accounting of every other national security program that involves bulk collection of data at home or abroad, according to government officials.
VIDEO-Study finds women with young kids earn less than men
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  Archived Version
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 17:01
  Katherine Gallagher Robbins, a senior policy analyst with the National Women's Law Center, pointed out research showing that moms are often perceived'--consciously or not'--as less valuable workers. She noted a study in which participants were given two sets of r(C)sum(C)s, with one set including activities that would point to being a parent.
  The r(C)sum(C)s that implied the woman was a mother generally got lower competency and commitment ratings and a lower recommended salary than those of a woman without children, while r(C)sum(C)s suggesting a man was a dad commanded a higher salary than those for a man without kids.
  Budig's research shows that the effect on earnings is true for all parents. Looking more narrowly at white women only, however, she found that the mommy penalty is especially strong for low-wage women. They are more likely to have trouble balancing less flexible jobs with the often-unexpected demands of parenthood, like a sick kid, she said.
  "Women who earn less pay more'--they pay a higher proportional penalty for kids," Budig said.
  Her research also has shown that married white moms pay a higher penalty than single moms after accounting for other factors, like age and the demographics of who gets married. But white women who are in the highest earnings bracket do not seem to be subject to the penalty.
  In addition, her research found that the fatherhood bonus is especially true for well-educated white and Hispanic men.
  "Men who conform to expectations of what makes a good man'--being a highly educated, married father'--[are] more valued as an employee," Budig said.
  The reports come as working mothers are increasingly important to family finances. A Pew Research Center report released earlier this year found that women are either the sole or primary breadwinner in 40 percent of U.S. households with children under age 18, in many cases because they are single mothers. That compares with just 11 percent in 1960.
  "It really is an economic concern not just for women but for their families in general," said Robbins at the law center.
  (Read more: How the weak jobs recovery slammed men and women)
  Blau, the economist, noted that families are changing in other ways and that men are much more involved in children's lives than they were a generation ago. The shift in attitudes about home life could eventually lead to changing attitudes about parents' position in the workplace.
  As a practical matter, she said, more women are pursuing the type of educational specialty that is valuable to employers, such as a law degree or an MBAs. That could spur companies to start thinking more about keeping these highly educated moms happy, loyal'--and well compensated.
  "It's sort of incumbent '... upon employers to be concerned about these issues because they want to have the most productive workers," Blau said.
  '--By CNBC's Allison Linn. Follow her on Twitter @allisondlinn and Google or send her an email.
Oligarchs Approve The NSA Debate. I Guess We're #Winning | The Rancid Honeytrap
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 16:50
  Careful readers who saw something in all my Fuck The Guardian posts beyond envy-fueled animus against He Who Must Never Be Criticized In The Same Way He Criticizes, surely could guess that I wasn't even slightly surprised when I saw this, from second string Leak Keeper Barton Gellman of the Washington Post:
  Applause for #Snowden tonight at Knickerbocker Club, old money Upper East Side, when Jim Goodale & I said he enabled vital public debate.'--Barton Gellman (@bartongellman) September 25, 2013
  For those who don't know, Manhattan's Upper East Side has among the highest concentrations of wealth in the world and the men-only Knickerbocker is among New York's most exclusive clubs. So what Gellman described is nothing less than a representative sample of the people on whose behalf the government, the mainstream media, and the security apparatus are mostly supposed to work '-- applauding both Mr. Snowden and The Debate' he kicked off.
  Feel free to congratulate the gatecrashing Leak Keepers for so deftly infiltrating platforms that even serious third party candidates and advocates of single payer health care can barely touch, and marvel at how quickly they have brought certain elites around on how yes, we really must talk about this NSA business. Alternatively, you might join me in thinking a little harder on stuff I wrote that's gotten lost in a lot of talk about drips and dumps and proper pleb-to-celeb protocol:
  It's rather naive, and maybe even grandiose for people on the left to think that on the rare occasions when their concerns land on successive front pages of The New York Times and on CNN, this is due to the supernatural savvy of a Greenwald, rather than that people in high places are very ok with certain information getting out and certain debates taking place'....maybe we're having this debate because people in high places want us to. (original post)
  '...In [NYU Journalism Professor Jay] Rosen's view, the cascade of events he attributes to the Snowden Effect followed inevitably from Snowden's disclosures. In mine, Snowden, like every other news event protagonist, is just the raw material with which people with genuine control of the news cycle tell us the the things they think we should hear in the ways they think we should hear them. (original post)
  Someone accused me of wearing a 'tin foil hat' for insisting that there are no gatecrashers on television news. The proof is in the television news, but there is no conspiracy. It's powerful decision-makers owning a few carriers, stacking the deck with largely non-unionized, like-minded people and doling out rewards and punishments in accordance with compliance. This is why the 'national conversation' is such a toxic waste dump. To recognize this is to take nothing away from the talent and courage of the people who do the best they can within the constraints of this system. But their talent and courage do not oblige an analytical person to mythologize what is actually going on, including the steps people take and the qualities they have (or don't), that keep them inside the margins.
  Now, to observe that elites are aiding and abetting The Snowden Effect is not to say all of them are. But many of them clearly are, so the question is why. Well, it depends on which elites we're talking about.
  On the same day obscenely wealthy men on Manhattan's Upper East Side applauded Snowden's name, a few blocks south, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff gave a speech at the UN excoriating the United States for NSA surveillance in her country, as disclosed by Snowden-based stories in the Brazilian press. Rousseff expressed her concern for human rights and made clear which humans she meant:
  Corporate information '' often of high economic and even strategic value '' was at the centre of espionage activity.
  Also, Brazilian diplomatic missions, among them the permanent mission to the UN and the office of the president of the republic itself, had their communications intercepted.
  The day before, also in Manhattan, the increasingly comedic Leak Keeper Editor/computer smasher, Alan Rusbridger, gave a speech about the leaks in which he disclosed that Obama and David Cameron are 'nice', made banal allusions to Orwell, then risibly paraphrased the message of Edward Snowden as 'Look, wake up. You are building something that is potentially quite alarming.' He then worried aloud over one alarmed billionaire, an emphasis his paper reproduced in the write-up of his speech:
  If you are Mark Zuckerberg and you are trying to build an international business, this is dismaying to you,'' Rusbridger said.
  Zuckerberg recently criticized the Obama administration's surveillance apparatus. ''Frankly I think the government blew it,'' he told TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
  The Facebook founder was particularly damning of government claims that they were only spying on ''foreigners''.
  ''Oh, wonderful: that's really helpful to companies trying to serve people around the world, and that's really going to inspire confidence in American internet companies,'' said Zuckerberg
  So, to summarize, we know that certain wealthy, important people around the world are concerned about the NSA because:
  Their own emails and phone calls are being monitored by the NSAThe NSA is engaging in corporate espionageNSA spying interferes with profitable internet business by impeding customer trustCertainly there is some grandstanding for the rubes going on here with Rousseff and Zuckerberg, but those Upper East Side bluebloods applauding Snowden amongst themselves must surely reflect some genuine anxiety in all of these people, and no wonder. Undoubtedly the one percenters like surveillance like they like their justice system and everything else: two-tiered. The NSA system is two-tiered, certainly, but the tiers don't split neatly along the usual line of wealth and melanin. They divide along the lines of who's in and who's out with the NSA, which, with its network of private contractors and thousands of analysts empowered to extract troves of data with a single email address, poses a kind of risk elites can't buy their way out of.
  If you don't think that alone is reason enough to allow The Debate, consider also the interests of elites within the security establishment, like within The CIA and its own network of private contractors. This crowd must surely be on the easiest of terms with any debate about the security state so steeply skewed toward the Bad Apple-ing of only one agency rather than thorough-going scrutiny of the Intelligence Community as a whole.
  With this in mind I went poking around to see what the CIA's been up to besides incinerating rights-free humans, and found this fascinating presentation given in March at a Big Data conference by The Agency's CTO, Gus Hunt. Hunt is surprisingly frank in describing the opportunities presented by all the data people expose to 'sentiment analysis' via social media and simply as bodies moving through a 'sensor-connected world.' A world in which 'someone can know where you are at all times' and 'you can be 100% identified by your gait.' 'We are at high noon in the information age' he says. 'it is 'nearly in our grasp to compute on all human generated information.' Of course to do all that computing, you need all the information:
  The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time. Since you can't connect dots you don't have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.
  There is a whole lot that's interesting (and chilling) about this presentation but two things stick out for me. One is that Hunt is presaging the next phase of signals intelligence, where machines connecting the dots of all the data that is just out there will make PRISM look primitive. The other is that the CIA seems to be making a play for dominance in signals intelligence '-- which has traditionally been the NSA's speciality '-- as its 'investment focus shifts from missiles to big data. (source).' This means that the CIA could win big if the NSA loses credibility and funding without tainting the CIA in the process. As Snowden's leak of the black budget revealed, the Agency is certainly in empire-building mode, having surged past the NSA as the most lavishly funded agency in the Intelligence Community, largely by growing covert operations (its third 'business line' in Hunt's words) into a paramilitary force.
  The message here really is that people attempting to 'reform' the NSA are, whether they acknowledge it or not, in a tactical alliance with a lot of shady people who are in the fight for very different reasons and who have considerable means to make it go a certain way. This is why the Leak Keepers have been given a berth that surprises even them. That doesn't mean the debate is a fraud or a total loss, though by virtue of its tight circumscription, I find it increasingly banal and pointless. Those who remain transfixed should at least be far more analytical than various starry-eyed reformists, self-mythologizers and sycophants are encouraging you to be. If nothing else, people who call for Clapper's head because 'he lied to Congress ' '-- who are, unsurprisingly, the same people that insisted Obama would change everything in 2008 '-- will be increasingly good for laughs as the narcotic of increased access makes them progressively more giddy. But as the beginning and the end of The Debate, The NSA is a red herring.
  UPDATE 5
  Oops. Not #Winning???
  So the asshole who has worked tirelessly to confine the leaks safely to a 'Debate' about public policy '-- and gotten vastly wealthier and more influential in the process '' is now lamenting the entirely predictable result.
  If Feinstein's bill passes, it'd be the 2nd time in 5 years Congress exploits an NSA scandal to *increase NSA powers theguardian.com/commentisfree/'...'--Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 11, 2013
  UPDATE 4
  Now Glenn's pal, Andy Sullivan, is coming around. Someone took issue with Glenn's approving tweet (below) and a little kerfuffle ensued. TBH the worst thing about that little dust-up is the way ostensible anti-authoritarians tiptoe around His (barely) Liberal Highness after yet another sneer at 'radicals'. Where would we be without Glenn's trusty, self-effacing radical elves? Under surveillance, that's where!
  Early Snowden critic Andrew Sullivan: "As more & more details emerge, Snowden leaks look more and more justifiable" dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/10/29/spy'...'--Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 30, 2013
  UPDATE 3
  Every little charade helps. I feel less surveilled already
  Remarkable reversal from Feinstein on NSA '' thehill.com/blogs/defcon-h'... '' see NSA's reaction in the headline: thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/10/'...'--Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 29, 2013
  UPDATE 2
  #Winning
  Richard Cohen does a complete about-face on Edward Snowden: washingtonpost.com/opinions/richa'...'--Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 22, 2013
  Once you understand what an acute case of heat vampirism afflicts Greenwald and his moronic cult, the laughs never stop. I recommend it. My buddy Arthur Silber has some thoughts.
  UPDATE 1
  Quoting myself from above: 'increasingly good for laughs as the narcotic of increased access makes them progressively more giddy.'
  'Fascinating'...Revealing' LOL
  Fascinating '' and revealing '' that even Michael Hayden now saying that intelligence agencies need more transparency theguardian.com/world/2013/sep'...'--Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 01, 2013
  Related
  Another Snowden News Story, Another Lesson in Proper Whistleblowing
  Greenwald Tries To Settle A Score, Fails
  Cliffs Notes for a Pile-On
  Dr. Rosen and The Snowden Effect
  My reply to Glenn Greenwald's Comments on Take Your Drip and Stick It
  Fuck The Guardian: Take Your Drip and Stick It
  Fuck The Guardian Part 2
  Fuck The Guardian Part 1
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Social Media & Big Data Intelligence for Law Enforcement & Public Safety
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 16:47
  DigitalStakeout customers quickly unlock the value of social media to assess risk, respond to threats, and discover actionable intelligence. Our location aware technology and patent pending social analytics can pinpoint criminal activity, detect breaking events, and locate persons of interest.
  Our customers use DigitalStakeout to analyze millions of posts, tweets, updates, and other content in real-time to mitigate and respond to critical incidents and link discoveries to people, places and things.
  We're a leading provider of social media intelligence for law enforcement & public safety agencies because our solution makes our customers efficient, effective, and DigtialStakeout yields accurate discoveries.
Mass Surveillance and No NSA. It Happens!
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: The Rancid Honeytrap
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 16:46
  As my readers must know, one of my many problems with The Snowden Leak Keepers is the extent to which they largely reduce a gigantic surveillance problem involving 16 government agencies, hundreds of contract companies, a gang of corporate co-conspirators, hundreds of local police forces etc, down to one bad agency. The Leak Keepers even seem hard-pressed to implicate Google's rubbery arm in the twisting the NSA 's been giving it for years, for reasons that surely must owe to something vastly more 11 dimensional chessy than the increasingly friendly reception various Leak Keepers are getting from multiple corporate sectors and beneficentoligarchs. Therefore, I suppose I am duty-bound to occasionally depart from critiquing the painstakingly dumbed-down Leak Keeper narrative and instead demonstrate by example how misplaced its narrow focus on the NSA is.
  Here's a timely example, posted yesterday evening on Ars Technica:
  At last month's International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) conference in Philadelphia, LexisNexis showed off a new tool it will bundle with its research service for law enforcement agencies'--one that will help them ''stake out'' social media as part of their criminal investigations.
  Called Social Media Monitor, the cloud-based service will watch social networks for comments and activities that might offer clues to crimes in the physical world. With direct connections into a variety of social media services' feeds, it will help police plow through Twitter and Facebook in search of evidence that could lead to arrests.
  Social Media Monitor is provided by an Atlanta firm called Digital Stakeout [which] pulls data and metadata directly from Twitter's ''firehose,'' as well historical data from Twitter. The system taps into Facebook posts and comments, Google+ and YouTube, Instagram, and other social media ''big data'' feeds. It performs a variety of rules-based processing on the data live from the source'--including some proprietary natural language analytics [and] . . .includes sentiment analysis features to monitor the general mood of postings and pick up potential threats of violence.
  Social Media Monitor, the article goes on, will complement Lexis Nexis' Accurint for Law Enforcement which is -
  a sort of LinkedIn for law enforcement agents that provides a way to network and identify people with expertise at other levels of law enforcement. It also allows for access to public records about individuals and businesses that law enforcement can use to verify identities, locate suspects and their assets, and discover links between people that may not show up on their Facebook page.
  Nothing surprising here, right? But don't ho-hum me if you're waiting breathlessly for the next Snowden scoop in which we'll learn '-- lemme guess '-- that the NSA scoops up web and phone data somewhere and doesn't spare foreign elites. This Ars Technica story tells us quite a lot more, don't you think? Here's what's notable:
  1. Look Ma, no NSA!!!
  Look who's driving here, it's the corporate sector. There's no evidence any government agency asked Lexis Nexis to produce this service. They saw that cops were using social networks anyway and decided to help. The end users are not a scary federal agency but scary local militarized police who can be dispatched to an evil tweet-doer's home in minutes. Assuming this product gets traction, its users will collectively comprise a massive surveillance network, and via Accurint '-- which is used by ''over 4,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies'' (source) '' they'll be one big national team working together. We can expect to see more and more of this so long as the Dept. of Fear money keeps flowing.
  2. No national security interest gunking up the story.
  Those inclined to think 'ordinary Americans' are uniquely important in the Snowden case should note that ordinary Americans are, so far, this product's only targets. There is no national security alibi, though the service does promise upticks in NatSec-minded Muslim-harassing. It will also likely boost anti-drug enforcement efforts as well, and be quite handy in managing various rabble rousers in times of social unrest. Among other things, identifying marks for concocted plots and drug stings is likely to get easier. That 'sentiment analysis' stuff has all kinds of potential.
  3. The use of open source intelligence.
  As far as I can tell, no warrants or subpoenas are needed for any of this. Digital Stakeout and Lexis Nexis are pulling from data that people willfully make public via social networking and from Accurint's 37 billion public records.
  This is what they call Open Source Intelligence in the biz and all sorts of shady characters are showing a big interest in it. No wonder: since it mines publicly available information, open source intelligence occupies a kind of Fourth Amendment gray zone, where secrets are disclosed through automated analysis. If you have an unlimited storage capacity for data, and the processing power to analyze it, you theoretically can finger people for arrest or intimidation long before they resort to communication methods requiring warrants. If indeed this is the future of signals intelligence, things like PRISM are likely to seem horribly hamfisted and antiquated in a few years, as will any policy changes they inspire if open source intelligence is not factored in.
  4. Corporate complicity
  The level of access Digital Stakeout has to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube and Instagram should raise both eyebrows and questions. Perhaps Digital Stakeout is simply using public APIs, feeds and scrapes, with no involvement from these companies at all. Twitter has been heralded by privacy enthusiasts for opting out of PRISM and for being more protective of user data, so it's interesting that the company has provided both Data Stakeout and a competitor, BrightPlanet, with access to its hard-to-get and highly prized 'firehose'. I get that the info is public anyway, but it matters if these companies are making it easier for the surveillance apparatus to hoover it up and analyze it.
  It certainly seems to me there's a lot more to wring one's hands over here than one finds in Angela Merkel's cell phone. This is just one of tens of articles along these lines that get published every month '-- authored by uncelebrated scribes like AT's Sean Gallagher '-- disclosing surveillance activity that equals or exceeds anything the NSA is doing. In most of these stories, all the damning details come straight from the spies' own mouths, no heavily redacted leaks required! Our story began this time with Lexis Nexis bragging about its enhancements to the panopticon at a cop convention. Curious readers can find more on the Digital Stakeout blog and from Lexis Nexis's Accurint sales pitch. Or they can continue to watch some rich, connected guy wave a smelly red herring and some trophies around, on his way to saving journalism.
  h/t @thomas_lord
  Related
  Fuck These Google Guys
  Oligarchs Approve the NSA Debate. I Guess We're Winning
  A Harbinger of Journalism Saved
  Take Your Drip and Stick It
  Dr. Rosen and The Snowden Effect
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LAX shooting: TSA officer Hernandez bled for 33 minutes at scene - report - U.S. News
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 16:30
  Hernandez family via AP
  Slain TSA worker Gerardo Hernandez, seen in this June 2013 photo released by him family.
  By Tami Abdollah, The Associated Press
  LOS ANGELES - An airport security officer lay helplessly bleeding after a gunman opened fire at Los Angeles International Airport as paramedics waited 150 yards away because police had not declared the terminal safe to enter, according to two law enforcement officials.
  It would be 33 minutes before Transportation Security Administration Officer Gerardo Hernandez, who was about 20 feet from an exit, would be wheeled out by police to an ambulance, said the officials, who were briefed on the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity because the probe was still ongoing into the Nov. 1 shooting.
  For all but five of those minutes, there was no threat from the suspected gunman '-- he had been shot and was in custody, they said.
  While it's not known when Hernandez died or if immediate medical attention could have saved his life, officials are examining what conversations took place between police and fire commanders to determine when it was safe enough to enter and whether paramedics could have gone into the terminal earlier, one of the officials said.
  Formal conclusions may take months to reach, but what's known raises the possibility that a lack of coordination between police and fire officials prevented speedy treatment for Hernandez and other victims.
  TSA workers at LAX have been wondering the same thing, said Victor Payes, who works at the airport and is president of the local union.
  "I basically think there's a lack of coordination between entities at this airport. That lack of coordination may have led to something that shouldn't have happened," Payes said. "We may be talking about Officer Hernandez as a survivor."
  Representatives for the Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles Fire Department and Los Angeles Airport Police said they couldn't comment on the ongoing investigation until extensive reports are finished.
  Authorities say that Paul Ciancia entered Terminal 3 with a duffel bag, pulled out an assault rifle and started shooting. They said he had a note in his bag that said he wanted to "kill TSA" and that he wanted to stir fear in them, criticizing their searches as unconstitutional.
  He was shot by airport police officers four times, in the mouth and leg, before being taken into custody. He remains in fair condition at a hospital and his doctors will determine when he's fit to appear in court.
  In the chaotic moments after the gunfire began, as travelers dove to the ground or scrambled for cover in restaurants and stores, officials worried there could be bombs in the terminal and tried to determine Whether the gunman had any accomplices. In the first 30 minutes, there was also an unfounded report of two suspicious people on an adjacent parking garage roof, one of the officials said.
  Officers from multiple agencies bent down to check on Hernandez before moving on, officials said.
  Police broadcast over their radios that Ciancia was in custody at 9:25 a.m., five minutes after Hernandez was shot in the chest. That's when a nearly 26-year veteran Los Angeles police officer checked on Hernandez several times, repeatedly telling officers who came by from various agencies "he's dead," according to one of the law enforcement officials.
  It's unclear whether the officer was qualified to determine Hernandez was dead. No officers rendered first aid on scene, according to surveillance video reviewed by the officials. Finally, airport police put Hernandez in a wheelchair and ran him to an ambulance.
  Trauma surgeon David Plurad said Hernandez had no signs of life when he arrived at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. Doctors worked for about an hour to revive him despite significant blood loss.
  "When somebody is shot and they're bleeding to death, lifesaving skills need to be implemented immediately, in a couple minutes, and they're very simple, pressure dressings, tourniquets, adequate bandages to stop the bleeding," said Dr. Lawrence E. Heiskell, an emergency physician for 27 years and a reserve police officer for 24 years who founded the state and federally approved International School of Tactical Medicine.
  Reed Saxon / AP, file
  Police stand outside Los Angeles International Airport on Friday, Nov. 1 after shots were fired.
  Responding to a situation with a shooter on the loose has changed since the 1999 Columbine school massacre, when officials huddled outside to formulate a plan while shooters continued firing inside and a teacher bled to death without timely treatment. Now police immediately charge in to stop the shooting as quickly as possible; officers are trained to step over the wounded and stop the gunman first, then tend to victims.
  During active shooter training last month with the LAX police and LAPD, Los Angeles city firefighters wearing ballistic vests and helmets dragged survivors to areas where they could provide treatment.
  Because police are often the first at the scene where there are injuries, California law requires officers receive first aid and CPR training in the academy and regular refreshers afterward.
  A recent audit by Los Angeles Police Commission Inspector General Alex Bustamante found that the LAPD had a zero percent compliance rate. Only 250-sworn officers in the Metropolitan Division out of the department's more than 9,900 sworn officers received the refresher training, it states. Airport police have the training.
  On day-to-day crime scenes, firefighters wait down the street until police clear the scene, usually in minutes, and allow them in, Los Angeles County Fire Battalion Chief Larry Collins, who's a member of a Los Angeles interagency working group creating best practices for mass casualty incidents.
  "When we have an active shooter, we can't hold back a block away, we've got to go in" because clearing the scene could take hours.
  Related:
  (C) 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
California Shuts Down Sites Mimicking State Insurance Marketplace - NYTimes.com
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 16:29
  LOS ANGELES'--The California attorney general's office has shut down 10 websites that mimicked state's official health insurance marketplace, the attorney general, Kamala Harris, announced Wednesday.
  ''These websites fraudulently imitated Covered California in order to lure consumers away from plans that provide the benefits of the Affordable Care Act,'' Ms. Harris said in a prepared statement. ''My office will continue to investigate and shut down these kinds of sites.''
  While not without its own hiccups, the rollout of the Affordable Care Act has been smoother in California than in many other parts of the country. Covered California, the state's insurance exchange, enrolled more people in private healthcare plans during the first month of open enrollment than any other state health exchange or the beleaguered federal marketplace, which serves 36 states.
  Ms. Harris's announcement on Wednesday was the latest example of state officials in California, where Democrats hold all statewide offices, enthusiastically pushing Californians to buy healthcare plans on the state's exchange.
  ''I urge Californians to avoid healthcare scams by visiting coveredca.com,'' Ms. Harris said.
  The attorney general's office began investigating websites that imitated Covered California in September.
  The sites all used domain names similar to coveredca.com, including coveredcalifornia.com and californiabenefitexchange.com, and they used phrases like ''Get Covered'' and ''Covered California'' to attract consumers, according to the attorney general's office. However, the sites were operated by private health insurance brokers not affiliated with the state's official exchange.
  The California Affordable Care Act prohibits entities from claiming to provide services on behalf of Covered California without a valid agreement with the state exchange. Multiple website operators were sent cease and desist orders, demanding they either shut the sites down, or redirect traffic to the official Covered California website, and ten operators have now been shut down, according to the attorney general's office.
  In urging residents to visit the state exchange, Ms. Harris warned that health insurance plans sold outside the official exchange before Jan. 1, 2014, would not qualify for federal subsidies, and would not have the consumer protections guaranteed under the Affordable Care Act.
National Television Multiple Ownership Rule
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Federal Register Latest Entries
  Thu, 14 Nov 2013 17:09
  The Commission must receive written comments on or before December 16, 2013 and reply comments on or before January 13, 2014.
  You may submit comments, identified by MB Docket No. 13-236; FCC 13-123, by any of the following methods:
  Federal eRulemaking Portal: http://www.regulations.gov. Follow the instructions for submitting comments.Federal Communications Commission's Web site: http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs2/. Follow the instructions for submitting comments.Mail: U.S. Postal Service first-class, Express, and Priority mail must be addressed to 445 12th Street SW., Washington, DC 20554. Commercial overnight mail (other than U.S. Postal Service Express Mail) must be sent to 9300 East Hampton Drive, Capitol Heights, MD 20743.Hand or Messenger Delivery: 445 12th St. SW., Room TW-A325, Washington, DC 20554.People With Disabilities: Contact the FCC to request reasonable accommodations (accessible format documents, sign language interpreters, CART, etc.) by email: FCC504@fcc.gov or phone: (202)-418-0530 or TTY: (202)-418-0432.For detailed instructions for submitting comments, additional information on the rulemaking process, and where to find materials available for inspection, see the SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION section of this document.
  Brendan Holland, Industry Analysis Division, Media Bureau, Brendan.Holland@fcc.gov, (202) 418-2757, or Johanna Thomas, Industry Analysis Division, Media Bureau, Johanna.Thomas@fcc.gov, (202) 418-7551.
  This Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, (NPRM) in MB Docket No. 13-236; FCC 13-123, was adopted and released on September 26, 2013. The complete text of the document is available for inspection and copying during normal business hours in the FCC Reference Center, 445 12th Street SW., Washington, DC 20554. This document may also be purchased from the Commission's duplicating contractor, Best Copy and Printing, Inc., in person at 445 12th Street SW., Room CY-B402, Washington, DC 20554, via telephone at (202) 488-5300, via facsimile at (202) 488-5563, or via email at FCC@BCPIWEB.com. Alternative formats (computer diskette, large print, audio cassette, and Braille) are available to persons with disabilities or by sending an email to FCC504@fcc.gov or calling the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau at (202) 418-0530, TTY (202) 418-0432. This document is also available on the Commission's Web site at http://fcc.gov.
  1. This NPRM commences a proceeding to consider elimination of the so-called UHF discount in the Commission's national television multiple ownership rule. Currently, the national television ownership rule prohibits a single entity from owning television stations that, in the aggregate, reach more than 39 percent of the total television households in the nation. In determining compliance with the 39 percent national audience reach cap, the rule provides that television stations broadcasting in the UHF spectrum will be attributed with only 50 percent of the television households in their Designated Market Areas (DMAs); this is termed the UHF discount. The discount was adopted in 1985, in recognition of the technical inferiority of UHF signals as compared with VHF signals in analog television broadcasting and was intended to mitigate the competitive disadvantage that UHF stations experienced in comparison to VHF stations because of their weaker signals and smaller audience reach. However, there is a serious question whether this justification for the UHF discount continues to exist in light of the transition of full-power television stations to digital broadcasting (the DTV transition) completed in June 2009. While UHF channels were technically inferior to VHF channels for purposes of transmitting analog television signals, experience since the DTV transition suggests that, far from being inferior, they may actually be superior to VHF when it comes to the transmission of digital television signals, as discussed below.
  2. It thus appears that the DTV transition has rendered the UHF discount obsolete and it should be eliminated. We seek comment on that tentative conclusion. We also tentatively decide, in the event that we eliminate the UHF discount, to grandfather existing television station combinations that would exceed the 39 percent national audience reach cap in the absence of the UHF discount and seek comment on that proposal. Finally, we seek comment on whether a VHF discount should be adopted, as it appears that under current conditions VHF channels may be technically inferior to UHF channels for the propagation of digital television signals.
  3. In 1985, the Commission imposed the national audience restriction together with the UHF discount. To protect localism, diversity, and competition, the Commission determined that both a station limit, restricting the total number of broadcast stations a single entity could own, and a nationwide audience reach limit were necessary. Thus, in addition to reaffirming its prior decision to limit the number of AM, FM, and television broadcast stations that a single entity could own, operate, or control to twelve stations in each service, the Commission revised the national television multiple ownership rule to prohibit a single entity from owning television stations that collectively exceeded 25 percent of the total nationwide audience.
  4. At that time, the Commission recognized the ''inherent physical limitations'' of the UHF band. It concluded that the technical limitations of UHF stations should be reflected in the implementation of the national audience cap. The Commission specifically found that the delivery of television signals was more difficult in the UHF band because the strength of UHF television signals decreased more rapidly with distance in comparison to the signals of stations broadcasting in the VHF band, resulting in significantly smaller coverage area and audience reach. To reflect the coverage limitations of the UHF band, the Commission determined that the licensee of a UHF station should be attributed with only 50 percent of the television households in its market area for purposes of the national audience restriction. The Commission concluded that this UHF discount reflected the historical concern for the viability of UHF television and provided a measure of the actual handicap of UHF voices, which was consistent with traditional diversity objectives.
  5. In the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (1996 Act), Congress directed the Commission to increase the national audience reach cap from 25 percent to 35 percent and to eliminate the rule restricting an entity to owning no more than twelve television stations nationwide. The 1996 Act did not direct the Commission to amend the UHF discount.
  6. The Commission subsequently reaffirmed the 35 percent national audience reach cap in its 1998 Biennial Review Order. The Commission reasoned that it was premature to revise the audience cap because it had not had sufficient time to fully observe the effects of raising the cap from 25 to 35 percent. The Commission retained the UHF discount, finding that it remained in the public interest. But the Commission indicated that the UHF discount would not likely be necessary after the anticipated transition to digital television and stated that a NPRM would be issued in the future to propose phasing out the discount once the digital transition was complete.
  7. The Commission reexamined the issue in its 2002 Biennial Review Order. At that time, the Commission found that the national audience reach cap, while not necessary to promote competition and diversity, nonetheless remained necessary to promote localism. Further, the Commission decided that an increase in the cap to 45 percent was justified. The Commission concluded that a 45 percent cap would strike an appropriate balance, by permitting some growth for the big four network owners and allowing them to achieve greater economies of scale, while at the same time ensuring that the networks could not reach a larger national audience than their affiliates collectively. The Commission also found that setting the cap at 45 percent was consistent with past congressional action to increase the ownership limit by 10 percentage points.
  8. At the same time, the Commission upheld the UHF discount once again, finding that there continued to be a disparity between the household reach of UHF and VHF signals, which diminished the ability of UHF stations to compete effectively. The Commission surmised, however, that the digital [television] transition [would] largely eliminate the technical basis for the UHF discount because UHF and VHF signals [would] be substantially equalized. Accordingly, the Commission decided to sunset application of the UHF discount for stations owned by the top four broadcast networks (i.e., ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox) as the digital transition was completed on a market-by-market basis. The Commission noted that the sunset would apply unless it made an affirmative determination that the UHF discount continued to serve the public interest beyond the digital transition. The Commission indicated further that it would review the status of the UHF discount in a subsequent biennial review and decide at that time whether to extend the sunset to all other networks and station group owners.
  9. Subsequently, Congress superseded the Commission's modification of the national audience reach cap in the 2002 Biennial Review Order, including the increased 45 percent limit and the sunset of the UHF discount. The 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act directed the Commission to modify its ownership rules to revise the national audience reach cap from 35 percent to 39 percent. Further, it amended section 202(h) of the 1996 Act to require a quadrennial review of the Commission's broadcast ownership rules rather than a biennial review, but specifically excluded any rules relating to the 39 percent national audience reach limitation from the quadrennial review.
  10. Prior to the enactment of the 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act, several parties had appealed the Commission's 2002 Biennial Review Order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (Third Circuit). In June 2004, the Third Circuit issued a decision in which it found that the challenges to the Commission's actions with respect to the national audience reach cap and the UHF discount were moot as a result of Congress's action. The court determined that the Commission was under a statutory directive, following the 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act, to modify the national audience reach cap to 39 percent, and that challenges to the Commission's decision to raise the cap to 45 percent therefore were no longer justiciable. The court found that challenges to the Commission's decision to retain the UHF discount were likewise eliminated from the litigation by the language in the 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which insulated the UHF discount rule from the Commission's quadrennial (previously biennial) review of its media ownership rules. At the same time, the court indicated that its decision did not foreclose the Commission's consideration of its regulation defining the UHF discount in a rulemaking outside the context of section 202(h). The court concluded that, barring congressional intervention, the Commission may decide, in the first instance, the scope of its authority to modify or eliminate the UHF discount outside the context of section 202(h).
  11. In July 2006, the Commission issued a Further Notice of Proposed Rule Making as part of its 2006 quadrennial review of the media ownership rules. Among other things, the Further Notice sought comment on the Third Circuit's holding with respect to the UHF discount rule and whether the Commission should retain, modify, or eliminate the UHF discount. In February 2008, the Commission concluded in the 2006 Quadrennial Review Order that the UHF discount is insulated from review under section 202(h) as a result of the 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act. But the Commission noted the Third Circuit's 2004 decision had left it to the Commission to decide the scope of its authority to modify or eliminate the UHF discount outside the context of section 202(h). Accordingly, the Commission indicated that it would address the petitions, comments, and replies filed with respect to the alteration, retention, or elimination of the UHF discount in a separate proceeding.
  12. Since June 13, 2009, all full-power television stations have broadcast their over-the-air signals using only digital technology. The DTV transition has enabled broadcasters to provide multiple programming choices and enhanced capabilities to consumers. Yet the transition has posed more challenges for VHF channels than UHF channels, because VHF spectrum has proven to have characteristics that make it less desirable for providing digital television service. For instance, nearby electrical devices tend to emit noise that can cause interference to DTV signals within the VHF band, creating reception difficulties in urban areas even a short distance from the TV transmitter. The reception of VHF signals also requires physically larger antennas compared to UHF signals, making VHF signals less well suited for mobile applications. For these reasons among others, television broadcasters generally have faced greater challenges providing consistent reception on VHF signals than UHF signals in the digital environment.
  A. Authority To Modify the UHF Discount13. We tentatively conclude that the Commission has the authority to modify the national television ownership rule, including the authority to revise or eliminate the UHF discount. Specifically, we tentatively conclude that the 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act does not preclude the Commission from revisiting the national television ownership rule or the UHF discount contained therein, in a proceeding separate from the quadrennial reviews of the broadcast ownership rules pursuant to section 202(h) of the 1996 Act. Notably, in the 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act, Congress directed the Commission to revise its rules to reflect a 39 percent audience reach cap. Congress did not directly establish that limitation by statute or amend the Communications Act of 1934 (the Communications Act or Act) to address the subject of national television ownership. Further, as the court in Prometheus I recognized, while Congress excluded the national television ownership rule from the quadrennial review requirement under section 202(h), it did not foreclose Commission action to review or modify the rule in a separate context.
  14. In addition, the Communications Act provides the Commission with the statutory authority to revisit its rules and revise or eliminate them if it concludes such action is appropriate. Section 4(i) of the Act authorizes the agency to ''perform any and all acts, make such rules and regulations, and issue such orders, not inconsistent with this Act, as may be necessary in the execution of its functions.'' Similarly, section 303(r) provides that the FCC may ''[m]ake such rules and regulations . . . not inconsistent with this law, as may be necessary to carry out the provisions of this Act . . .''. Indeed, the courts have held that the Commission has an affirmative obligation to reexamine its rules over time. For instance, in Bechtel v. FCC, the court observed that changes in factual and legal circumstances may impose upon the agency an obligation to reconsider a settled policy or explain its failure to do so. In the rulemaking context, for example, it is settled law that an agency may be forced to reexamine its approach if a significant factual predicate of a prior decision has been removed, which is precisely the case here.
  15. For these reasons, we believe the Commission retains the authority to modify both the national audience reach restriction and the UHF discount, provided such action is undertaken in a rulemaking proceeding separate from the Commission's quadrennial review of the broadcast ownership rules pursuant to section 202(h). We seek comment on our tentative conclusion and analysis. Does our tentative conclusion appropriately interpret the 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act and the Third Circuit's guidance in its 2004 decision? Is there additional statutory guidance or case law that supports or undermines our conclusion?
  B. Elimination of the UHF Discount16. The Commission has recognized for more than a decade that the underlying basis for the UHF discount would likely disappear following the transition to digital television. As discussed above, even as the Commission determined in both the 1998 Biennial Review Order and the 2002 Biennial Review Order that the UHF discount was still necessary, it anticipated that the DTV transition would largely eliminate the technical basis for the UHF discount. The Commission found that the digital transition would substantially equalize UHF and VHF signals, and, thus, it decided to sunset the discount for UHF stations owned by the top four broadcast networks (i.e., CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox). As discussed above, the sunset provisions adopted by the Commission were superseded by Congress's action in the 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act. Nevertheless, the DTV transition has borne out the Commission's expectation. Digital UHF stations do not suffer from the same comparative technical deficiencies vis- -vis VHF facilities that characterized analog UHF stations.
  17. The Commission has acknowledged that UHF spectrum is now highly desirable in light of its superior propagation characteristics for digital television, and that the disparity between UHF and VHF channels has if anything been reversed. In fact, following the DTV transition, some stations that initially elected to operate on a VHF channel have sought to relocate to a UHF channel to resolve technical difficulties encountered in broadcasting on VHF. The Commission has explored engineering options to increase the utility of VHF spectrum for digital television purposes. Furthermore, the Commission recently determined that annual regulatory fees for UHF and VHF stations will be combined into one fee category beginning in Fiscal Year 2014, eliminating a distinction based on the historical disadvantages of UHF. Today, rather than offsetting an actual service limitation or reflecting a disparity in signal coverage, the UHF discount appears only to confer a factually unwarranted benefit on owners of UHF television stations. If left in place, the UHF discount could undermine the 39 percent national audience reach cap on the false predicate that UHF stations do not reach equivalent audiences to VHF stations.
  18. Based on these findings, we tentatively conclude that the historical justification for the UHF discount no longer exists and the rule is therefore obsolete. We accordingly propose that the UHF discount should be eliminated from the national television multiple ownership rule.
  19. We seek comment on this proposal. In particular, does the UHF discount still serve the public interest? Does the discount promote market entry? Does it promote competition among broadcast networks? Are we correct in concluding that the technical limitations for UHF spectrum that existed for analog operations are not present in a digital environment? If so, are there other public policy justifications for maintaining the UHF discount despite the fact that the historical technical inferiority of UHF spectrum for television broadcasting no longer exists? Is any disparity between the broadcast coverage of UHF and VHF channels less important today than in 1985 given that many consumers receive local broadcast stations via a multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) and not over-the-air? Are there any other market conditions that merit our consideration with regard to the UHF discount? Is there any factual basis to maintain the UHF discount in the current environment? What are the costs and benefits of eliminating the UHF discount?
  C. Existing Broadcast Station Combinations20. We recognize that the elimination of the UHF discount would impact the calculation of nationwide audience reach for broadcast station groups with UHF stations. We believe, however, that only a small number of broadcast station ownership groups have combinations that approach the current 39 percent ownership nationwide cap and that might exceed the cap if the UHF discount were eliminated. We therefore propose, in the event that we eliminate the UHF discount, to grandfather broadcast station ownership groups to the extent that they exceed the 39 percent national audience cap solely as a result of the termination of the UHF discount rule as of the date of the release of this NPRM. We also propose to grandfather proposed station combinations that would exceed the 39 percent cap as a result of the elimination of the UHF discount for which an application is pending with the Commission or which have received Commission approval, but are not yet consummated, at that the time this NPRM is released. Further, we propose that any grandfathered ownership combination subsequently sold or transferred would be required to comply with the national ownership cap in existence at the time of the transfer.
  21. We seek comment on these issues. Do our proposals serve the public interest? What is the potential impact of our grandfathering proposals on broadcast ownership groups, the broadcast industry, local markets, and consumers? Do our proposals adequately address any potential impact on existing broadcast station ownership groups? Should we consider any specific circumstances in evaluating applications for waiver of the national ownership cap received from grandfathered station groups that enter into subsequent transactions, such as whether the application for waiver seeks to allow a corporate transformation of an existing station group'--including a refinancing or restructuring'--versus action that would circumvent the proposed rule change? Are there other strategies we should consider or employ to address existing broadcast station ownership groups that would exceed the 39 percent limit if the UHF discount were eliminated? Are there other alternatives we should consider with regard to pending applications? What are the costs and benefits of our grandfathering proposal and any other proposals offered by commenters?
  D. VHF Discount22. As noted above, the Commission has acknowledged that the DTV transition has made UHF spectrum, if anything, more desirable than VHF spectrum for purposes of digital television broadcasting. While the Commission has proposed solutions to VHF reception challenges, it has acknowledged that the options for improving digital television service on VHF channels are limited, especially in the low-VHF band. Unfortunately, it is often consumers using indoor antennas who tend to face reception difficulties most frequently. For these reasons, some television stations, as previously indicated, have sought to relocate to UHF channels in order to resolve the technical difficulties experienced with their VHF channels.
  23. Given the challenges that VHF stations face in delivering digital television signals, we seek comment on whether it would be appropriate at this time to adopt a VHF discount. Could a VHF discount function similarly to the current UHF discount in that only a certain percentage of the television households in a DMA would be attributed to a VHF television station for purposes of calculating a station group's national audience reach? We seek comment on whether a VHF discount is either warranted or advisable at this time. If a VHF discount is advisable, would it be appropriate to attribute to VHF stations only 50 percent of the TV households in their DMA? Would a different percentage be more appropriate? Is a discount more or less important than it was when the UHF discount was adopted in 1985, because many television consumers today receive local broadcast stations via an MVPD rather than over-the-air? Would a VHF discount run the risk of becoming obsolete as a result of market developments, as in the case of the UHF discount? Are there any other market conditions that merit our consideration with regard to a possible VHF discount? In the event that the Commission adopts a VHF discount, should we distinguish between high and low VHF channels? Are there options other than a discount to address the current inferiority of VHF signal propagation for purposes of the national audience reach cap? What are the costs and benefits of imposing a VHF discount and any other proposal offered by commenters?
  A. Ex Parte Presentations24. The proceeding this Notice initiates shall be treated as a ''permit-but-disclose'' proceeding in accordance with the Commission's ex parte rules. Persons making ex parte presentations must file a copy of any written presentation or a memorandum summarizing any oral presentation within two business days after the presentation (unless a different deadline applicable to the Sunshine period applies). Persons making oral ex parte presentations are reminded that memoranda summarizing the presentation must (1) list all persons attending or otherwise participating in the meeting at which the ex parte presentation was made, and (2) summarize all data presented and arguments made during the presentation. If the presentation consisted in whole or in part of the presentation of data or arguments already reflected in the presenter's written comments, memoranda or other filings in the proceeding, the presenter may provide citations to such data or arguments in his or her prior comments, memoranda, or other filings (specifying the relevant page and/or paragraph numbers where such data or arguments can be found) in lieu of summarizing them in the memorandum. Documents shown or given to Commission staff during ex parte meetings are deemed to be written ex parte presentations and must be filed consistent with rule § 1.1206(b). In proceedings governed by rule § 1.49(f) or for which the Commission has made available a method of electronic filing, written ex parte presentations and memoranda summarizing oral ex parte presentations, and all attachments thereto, must be filed through the electronic comment filing system available for that proceeding, and must be filed in their native format (e.g.,.doc, .xml, .ppt, searchable .pdf). Participants in this proceeding should familiarize themselves with the Commission's ex parte rules.
  B. Paperwork Reduction Act Analysis25. This document does not contain proposed information collection(s) subject to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (PRA), Public Law 104-13. In addition, therefore, it does not contain any new or modified information collection burden for small business concerns with fewer than 25 employees, pursuant to the Small Business Paperwork Relief Act of 2002, Public Law 107-198, see 44 U.S.C. 3506(c)(4).
  C. Comment Filing Procedures26. Pursuant to §§ 1.415 and 1.419 of the Commission's rules, 47 CFR 1.415, 1.419, interested parties may file comments and reply comments on or before the dates indicated on the first page of this document. Comments may be filed using the Commission's Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS). See Electronic Filing of Documents in Rulemaking Proceedings,63 FR 24121 (1998).
  Electronic Filers: Comments may be filed electronically using the Internet by accessing the ECFS: http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs2/.Paper Filers: Parties who choose to file by paper must file an original and one copy of each filing. If more than one docket or rulemaking number appears in the caption of this proceeding, filers must submit two additional copies for each additional docket or rulemaking number.Filings can be sent by hand or messenger delivery, by commercial overnight courier, or by first-class or overnight U.S. Postal Service mail. All filings must be addressed to the Commission's Secretary, Office of the Secretary, Federal Communications Commission.All hand-delivered or messenger-delivered paper filings for the Commission's Secretary must be delivered to FCC Headquarters at 445 12th Street SW., Room TW-A325, Washington, DC 20554. The filing hours are 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. All hand deliveries must be held together with rubber bands or fasteners. Any envelopes and boxes must be disposed of before entering the building.Commercial overnight mail (other than U.S. Postal Service Express Mail and Priority Mail) must be sent to 9300 East Hampton Drive, Capitol Heights, MD 20743.U.S. Postal Service first-class, Express, and Priority mail must be addressed to 445 12th Street SW., Washington DC 20554.People with Disabilities: To request materials in accessible formats for people with disabilities (braille, large print, electronic files, audio format), send an email to fcc504@fcc.gov or call the Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau at 202-418-0530 (voice), 202-418-0432 (tty).27. Additional Information: For additional information on this proceeding, please contact Brendan Holland of the Media Bureau, Industry Analysis Division, Brendan.Holland@fcc.gov, (202) 418-2757, or Johanna Thomas of the Media Bureau, Industry Analysis Division, Johanna.Thomas@fcc.gov, (202) 418-7551.
  Initial Regulatory Flexibility Act Analysis28. As required by the Regulatory Flexibility Act of 1980, as amended (''RFA''), the Federal Communications Commission (Commission) has prepared this present Initial Regulatory Flexibility Analysis (''IRFA'') concerning the possible significant economic impact on small entities by the policies and rules proposed in this Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (''NPRM''). Written public comments are requested on this IRFA. Comments must be identified as responses to the IRFA and must be filed by the deadlines for comments provided on the first page of the NPRM. The Commission will send a copy of the NPRM, including this IRFA, to the Chief Counsel for Advocacy of the Small Business Administration (''SBA''). In addition, the NPRM and IRFA (or summaries thereof) will be published in the Federal Register.
  A. Need for, and Objectives of, the Proposed Rule Changes29. The Commission seeks comment in this NPRM to consider elimination of the so-called ''UHF discount'' in the Commission's national television multiple ownership rule. The national television ownership rule currently prohibits a single entity from owning television stations that, in the aggregate, reach more than 39 percent of the total television households in the nation. The rule provides television stations broadcasting in the UHF spectrum with a discount by attributing those stations with only 50 percent of the television households in their Designated Market Areas (DMAs); this is termed the UHF discount. The UHF discount was adopted in recognition of the technical inferiority of UHF signals in analog television broadcasting and was intended to mitigate the competitive disadvantages that UHF stations experienced in comparison to VHF stations because of their weaker signals and smaller audience reach. However, there is serious question whether this justification for the UHF discount continues to exist in light of the transition of full-power television stations to digital broadcasting (the DTV transition) completed on June 12, 2009. Our experience since the DTV transition suggests that UHF channels may actually be superior to VHF channels when it comes to the transmission of digital television.
  30. This NPRM tentatively concludes that the UHF discount is obsolete since the DTV transition and should be eliminated. The Commission seeks comment on this tentative conclusion, as well as on our tentative decision to grandfather existing television station combinations that would exceed the 39 percent national audience reach cap in the absence of the UHF discount. Finally, we seek comment on whether a ''VHF discount'' should be adopted, as it appears that under current conditions VHF channels may be technically inferior to UHF channels for the propagation of digital television signals.
  31. Legal Basis
  32. The proposed action is authorized under sections 1, 2(a), 4(i), 303(r), 307, 309, and 310 of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, 47 U.S.C. 151, 152(a), 154(i), 303(r), 307, 309, and 310.
  33. Description and Estimate of the Number of Small Entities to Which the Proposed Rules Will Apply
  34. The RFA directs agencies to provide a description of and, where feasible, an estimate of the number of small entities that may be affected by the proposed rules, if adopted. The RFA generally defines the term small entity as having the same meaning as the terms small business, small organization, and small governmental jurisdiction. In addition, the term small business has the same meaning as the term small business concern under the Small Business Act. A small business concern is one which: (1) Is independently owned and operated; (2) is not dominant in its field of operation; and (3) satisfies any additional criteria established by the SBA.
  35. Television Broadcasting. The SBA designates television broadcasting stations with $35.5 million or less in annual receipts as small businesses. Television broadcasting includes establishments primarily engaged in broadcasting images together with sound. These establishments operate television broadcasting studios and facilities for the programming and transmission of programs to the public. These establishments also produce or transmit visual programming to affiliated broadcast television stations, which in turn broadcast the programs to the public on a predetermined schedule. Programming may originate in their own studio, from an affiliated network, or from external sources. The Commission estimates that there are 1,386 licensed commercial television stations in the United States. In addition, according to Commission staff review of the BIA Kelsey Inc. Media Access Pro Television Database as of June 10, 2013, 1,245 (or about 90 percent) of the estimated 1,386 commercial television stations have revenues of $35.5 million or less and, thus, qualify as small entities under the SBA definition. We therefore estimate that the majority of commercial television broadcasters are small entities. The Commission has also estimated the number of licensed noncommercial educational (NCE) television stations to be 396. These stations are non-profit, and therefore considered to be small entities.
  36. We note, however, that in assessing whether a business concern qualifies as small under the above definition, business (control) affiliations must be included. Our estimate, therefore, likely overstates the number of small entities that might be affected by our action because the revenue figure on which it is based does not include or aggregate revenues from affiliated companies. In addition, an element of the definition of ''small business'' is that the entity not be dominant in its field of operation. We are unable at this time to define or quantify the criteria that would establish whether a specific television station is dominant in its field of operation. Accordingly, the estimate of small businesses to which rules may apply does not exclude any television station from the definition of a small business on this basis and is therefore possibly over-inclusive to that extent.
  B. Description of Projected Reporting, Recordkeeping, and Other Compliance Requirements37. The NPRM tentatively concludes to modify the national television multiple ownership rule as set forth in paragraph 3 above, which would affect reporting, recordkeeping, or other compliance requirements. The conclusion, if ultimately adopted, would modify several FCC forms and their instructions: (1) FCC Form 301, Application for Construction Permit For Commercial Broadcast Station; (2) FCC Form 314, Application for Consent to Assignment of Broadcast Station Construction Permit or License; and (3) FCC Form 315, Application for Consent to Transfer Control of Corporation Holding Broadcast Station Construction Permit or License. The Commission may have to modify other forms that include in their instructions the media ownership rules or citations to media ownership proceedings, including Form 303-s and Form 323. The impact of these changes will be the same on all entities, and we do not anticipate that compliance will require the expenditure of any additional resources as the proposed modification to the national television multiple ownership rule will not place any additional obligations on small businesses.
  C. Steps Taken To Minimize Significant Impact on Small Entities and Significant Alternatives Considered38. The RFA requires an agency to describe any significant alternatives that it has considered in reaching its proposed approach, which may include the following four alternatives (among others): (1) The establishment of differing compliance or reporting requirements or timetables that take into account the resources available to small entities; (2) the clarification, consolidation, or simplification of compliance and reporting requirements under the rule for small entities; (3) the use of performance, rather than design, standards; and (4) an exemption from coverage of the rule, or any part thereof, for small entities.
  39. The tentative conclusions and specific proposals on which the NPRM seeks comments, as set forth in paragraph 3 above, are intended to achieve our public interest goal of competition. By recognizing the technical advancements of the UHF band after the DTV transition, this NPRM seeks to create a regulatory landscape that reflects the current value of UHF spectrum in order to better assess national television ownership figures. Further, this NPRM complies with the President's directive for independent agencies to review their existing regulation to determine whether such regulations should be modified, streamlined, expanded, or repealed so as to make the agency's regulatory program more effective or less burdensome in achieving the regulatory objectives. As such, our proposed rule seeks to reduce costs on firms generally, including small business entities, by removing outdated regulations. In addition, the grandfathering and VHF discount proposals seek to create a more effective regulatory landscape by addressing current market realities. The NPRM also requests comment on whether any alternatives to the Commission's tentative conclusions or specific proposals exist, which provides small entities with the opportunity to indicate any disagreement with our findings and conclusions.
  D. Federal Rules That May Duplicate, Overlap, or Conflict With the Proposed Rule40. None.
  41. Accordingly, it is ordered that, pursuant to the authority contained in sections 1, 2(a), 4(i), 303(r), 307, 309, and 310 of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, 47 U.S.C. 151, 152(a), 154(i), 303(r), 307, 309, and 310, this Notice of Proposed rulemaking is adopted.
  42. It is further ordered that the Commission's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, Reference Information Center, shall send a copy of this Notice, including the Initial Regulatory Flexibility Analysis, to the Chief Counsel for Advocacy of the Small Business Administration.
  Federal Communication Commission.
  Marlene H. Dortch,
  Secretary.
  For the reasons discussed in the preamble, the Federal Communication Commission proposes to amend 47 CFR Part 73 as follows:
  begin regulatory text
  1.The authority citation for part 73 continues to read as follows:
  Authority:47 U.S.C. 154, 303, 334, 336 and 339.
  2.Amend § 73.3555 by revising paragraph (e)(2)(i) to read as follows:
  * * * * *
  (e) * * *
  (2) * * *
  (i) National audience reach means the total number of television households in the Nielsen Designated Market Areas (DMAs) in which the relevant stations are located divided by the total national television households as measured by DMA data at the time of a grant, transfer, or assignment of a license.
  * * * * *
  end regulatory text
  [FR Doc. 2013-26004 Filed 11-13-13; 8:45 am]
  BILLING CODE 6712-01-P
DoD/TSA Partner to Provide Military TSA Pre'''' at 100 Airports
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: The TSA Blog
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 15:40
  Yesterday, TSA and the DoD announced a partnership to expand TSA Pre'''' expedited screening benefits to more than 2.6 million U.S. Armed Forces service members in the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps, and Navy, as well as the Reserves and National Guard. Currently, members of the U.S. Armed Forces can use TSA Pre'''' lanes at 10 domestic airports by presenting their Common Access Card (CAC). Starting December 20th, these individuals will be able to enjoy the benefits of the program at the 100 participating airports across the country, allowing them to keep their footwear on as well as light outerwear, laptop in its case and their 3-1-1 compliant liquids/gels bag in a carry on in select screening lanes. Under this partnership, all active duty, U.S. Coast Guard, Reserve and National Guard service members are recommended to:Check the back of your CAC for your DoD ID number.Enter the DoD ID number in the Known Traveler ID field when booking your flight.Check your boarding pass. It should have a TSA Pre'''' logo if you're traveling after December 20. If you try to print your boarding pass prior to December 20, you may not see the TSA Pre'''' indicator.When arriving at the airport, service members will then be permitted access to TSA Pre'''' lanes for official or leisure travel on participating airlines. Service members do not need to be in uniform to benefit from TSA Pre''''. If you are traveling with children 12 and under they may accompany service members through the TSA Pre'''' lanes. However, spouses will need to be enrolled in a trusted traveler program to participate. TSA will always incorporate random and unpredictable security measures throughout the airport. No individual will be guaranteed expedited screening.TSA has long recognized our men and women in uniform as nearly a quarter of TSA's workforce is a veteran or currently serves as an active duty service member in the U.S. Armed Forces. Click here for more information about TSA Pre''''. If you have a travel related issue or question that needs an immediate answer, you can contact us byclicking here.
Statement by the President on H.R. 2094
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 15:39
  The White House
  Office of the Press Secretary
  For Immediate Release
  November 13, 2013
  I just want to thank all of the outstanding legislators who are here and advocates. This is something that will save children's lives. Some people may know that Malia actually has a peanut allergy. She doesn't have asthma, but obviously making sure that EpiPens are available in case of emergency in schools is something that every parent can understand. And, thanks to the bipartisan work of the folks behind us and the advocacy communities that have been pushing this so hard, we're going to be giving states a lot more incentives to make sure that that happens. So I want to congratulate all of you.
TSA's got 94 signs to ID terrorists, but they're unproven by science | Ars Technica
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 15:38
  Feeling nervous, citizen?
  TSA
  Science! Forget subjective screening, which too often slides into racial and ethnic profiling; instead, evaluate travelers entering an airport using a rigorous set of objective measurements that could spot deception. This was the admirable principle behind the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) program known as Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT), which has been operating at airports around the country since 2007 at a total cost of $900 million'--or about $200 million a year.
  Unfortunately, according to the US government's internal watchdog agency, little real science stands behind the program. In a new report (PDF) released today, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that "the human ability to accurately identify deceptive behavior based on behavioral indicators is the same as or slightly better than chance." And it dryly noted that programs like SPOT should be "demonstrated to work reliably in their intended environment prior to program deployment."
  SPOT relies on a network of 3,000 behavior detection officers (BDOs) deployed at 176 airports around the country. BDOs observe passengers waiting to cross security checkpoints into the "sterile" section of an airport. They are trained to observe 94 different signs of stress, fear, and deception, with the goal of calculating a "point total" for an observed individual in less than 30 seconds. The 94 signs remain a secret, but we do know that anyone displaying enough of them is referred for a patdown and secondary screening, during which officers will engage in "casual conversation" to determine whether the traveler poses a potential threat. (The secondary screenings take an average of 13 minutes.) If so, law enforcement officers such as police or FBI agents are brought in to deal with the situation and potentially make an arrest.
  In 2008, the official TSA blog explained the program:
  The program was designed by Paul Ekman (PhD), a psychology professor at the University of California Medical School, San Francisco. He's been studying behavioral analysis for the past 40 years and has taught the TSA, Customs and Border Protection, CIA, FBI and other federal agencies to watch for suspicious facial expressions of tension, fear or deception. He has even taught animators at Disney-Pixar to create convincing faces for film characters. After passing along his skills to US Customs, their "hit rate" for finding drugs during passenger searches rose to 22.5 percent from 4.2 percent in 1998.
  Behavior analysis is based on the fear of being discovered. People who are trying to get away with something display signs of stress through involuntary physical and physiological behaviors. Whether someone's trying to sneak through that excellent stone ground mustard they bought on vacation, a knife, or a bomb, behavior detection officers like me are trained to spot certain suspicious behaviors out of the crowd. Once we make our determination, we refer these passengers for additional screening or directly to law enforcement.
  It sounds pretty science-y, but it turns out that, in practice, BDOs across the country are referring passengers for secondary screenings at very different rates. For a program based on "objective" biometric measurements of deception, this is not the result one would hope to see. (Even the TSA admitted to GAO auditors that some of the observations were "subjective"; it is trying to rein these in.) And Ekman, who helped set up the program, told GAO three years ago that no one knew "how many BDOs are required to observe a given number of passengers moving at a given rate per day in an airport environment, or the length of time that such observation can be conducted before observation fatigue affects the effectiveness of the personnel."
  For the report, GAO auditors looked at the outside scientific literature, speaking to behavioral researchers and examining meta-analyses of 400 separate academic studies on unmasking liars. That literature suggests that "the ability of human observers to accurately identify deceptive behavior based on behavioral cues or indicators is the same as or slightly better than chance (54 percent)." That result holds whether or not the observer is a member of law enforcement.
  It turns out that all of those signs you instinctively "know" to indicate deception usually don't. Lack of eye contact for instance simply does not correlate with deception when examined in empirical studies. Nor do increases in body movements such as tapping fingers or toes; the literature shows that people's movements actually decrease when lying. A 2008 study for the Department of Defense found that "no compelling evidence exists to support remote observation of physiological signals that may indicate fear or nervousness in an operational scenario by human observers."
  GAO
  Despite the academic literature, the TSA actually began testing the SPOT program in 2003'--not with an eye toward finding out if it worked, but with an eye toward seeing if it was practical to run in a major airport. In 2007, the program went live and travelers underwent screening. Once the program was set up in 2007, the TSA did hire an outside consultant to evaluate the system's effectiveness. The resulting study, published in 2011, found some effectiveness in using the SPOT criteria. Due to various weaknesses in the study design and implementation, however, GAO doesn't dub it a reliable guide to evaluating SPOT.
  But even if it works, in practice SPOT isn't stopping terrorists'--it has largely led to arrests for drug crime, immigration violations, and outstanding warrants. Because the signs of deception and stress tell you nothing about the underlying activity meant to be concealed, an effective SPOT program would simply become a general dragnet focused on air travelers. In 2008, the TSA argued that this wasn't a problem:
  Some will say that it shouldn't be TSA's job to look for drugs, or money - our job is airport security. But when we spot someone behaving suspiciously, we don't know what they have; all we know is they're behaving in a way that says they might pose a threat. In many cases, we find things that might have otherwise gotten through security (money, drugs) and that's a good sign because it could just as easily been plastic or liquid explosives. The behaviors these drug and currency smugglers exhibit are the same behaviors we expect a terrorist to exhibit.
  But of course, according to the GAO, SPOT may not even work'--we simply don't know.
  The GAO's conclusion from all this is damning. "Ten years after the development of the SPOT program, TSA cannot demonstrate the effectiveness of its behavior detection activities," it wrote. "Until TSA can provide scientifically validated evidence demonstrating that behavioral indicators can be used to identify passengers who may pose threat to aviation security, the agency risks funding activities that have not been determined to be effective." The title of the report sums up the GAO recommendation: "TSA Should Limit Future Funding for Behavior Detection Activities."
  For its part, the TSA insists the program works, and it is currently running more studies to evaluate effectiveness.
Former top CIA official Michael J. Morell working on book, scheduled for 2015 release - The Washington Post
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  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 15:37
  By Associated Press, Published: NOVEMBER 13, 9:07 AM ET Aa NEW YORK '-- A former top CIA official whose 33 years of service included the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the death of Osama bin Laden has a book deal.
  The publisher Twelve has acquired Michael J. Morell's ''The Great War of Our Time: An Insider's Account of the CIA's Fight Against al-Qaida.'' Twelve, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, announced Wednesday that the book was scheduled for release in spring 2015.
  Morell, who retired last summer, had been the deputy director. He briefed President George W. Bush on the day of the 2001 attacks and was with President Barack Obama in 2011 when bin Laden was killed in Pakistan. Morell was also involved in the deadly 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, and the use of harsh interrogation techniques.
  Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Health Law Rollout's Stumbles Draw Parallels to Bush's Hurricane Response - NYTimes.com
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  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 15:34
  WASHINGTON '-- Barack Obama won the presidency by exploiting a political environment that devoured George W. Bush in a second term plagued by sinking credibility, failed legislative battles, fractured world relations and revolts inside his own party.
  President Obama is now threatened by a similar toxic mix. The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration's botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.
  But unlike Mr. Bush, who faced confrontational but occasionally cooperative Democrats, Mr. Obama is battling a Republican opposition that has refused to open the door to any legislative fixes to the health care law and has blocked him at virtually every turn. A contrite-sounding Mr. Obama repeatedly blamed himself on Thursday for the failed health care rollout, which he acknowledged had thrust difficult burdens on his political allies and hurt Americans' trust in him.
  ''It's legitimate for them to expect me to have to win back some credibility on this health care law in particular and on a whole range of these issues in general,'' Mr. Obama said. The president did not admit to misleading people about whether they could keep their insurance, but again expressed regret that his assurances turned out to be wrong.
  Video | Selections From Obama on Health Care President Obama announced a fix to his signature health care law that will allow existing customers to keep their insurance plans.
  ''To those Americans, I hear you loud and clear,'' Mr. Obama said as he announced changes intended to allow some people to keep their insurance.
  But earning back the confidence of Americans, as he pledged to do, will require Mr. Obama to right more than just the health care law. At home, his immigration overhaul is headed for indefinite delay, and new budget and debt fights loom. Overseas, revelations of spying by the National Security Agency have infuriated American allies, and negotiations over Iran's nuclear arsenal have set off bipartisan criticism.
  For the first time in Mr. Obama's presidency, surveys suggest that his reserve of good will among the public is running dry. Two polls in recent weeks have reported that a majority of Americans no longer trust the president or believe that he is being honest with them.
  ''When you start losing the trust and confidence, not only of Congress, but the American people, that makes it even more difficult,'' said Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia. ''You can work yourself out. But you have to be sincere, and you have to be honest.''
  The difficulties have put Mr. Obama on the defensive at exactly the moment he might have seized political advantage in a dysfunctional Washington. If not for the health care disaster, the two-week shutdown of the government last month would have been an opportunity for Mr. Obama to sharpen the contrast with Republicans. Democratic lawmakers expressed growing frustration on Thursday with the opportunities the party had missed to hammer home the ideological differences between the two parties. The lawmakers say there is intensifying anxiety within the Democratic caucus that the poor execution of the health care law could bleed into their 2014 re-election campaigns.
  Republicans readily made the Hurricane Katrina comparison. ''The echoes to the fall of 2005 are really eerie,'' said Peter D. Feaver, a top national security official in Mr. Bush's second term. ''Katrina, which is shorthand for bungled administration policy, matches to the rollout of the website.'' Looking back, he said, ''we can see that some of the things that we hoped were temporary or just blips turned out to be more systemic from a political sense. It's a fair question of whether that's happening to President Obama.''
  The president's top aides vehemently reject the comparison of Mr. Obama's fifth year in office to the latter half of Mr. Bush's second term. They say Americans lost confidence in Mr. Bush because of his administration's ineptitude on Hurricane Katrina and its execution of the war in Iraq, while Mr. Obama is struggling to extend health care to millions of people who do not have it. Those are very different issues, they said.
  ''I'm always very leery of these apocalyptic predictions,'' said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Mr. Obama.
  Senior White House officials are nonetheless in crisis mode over the failure so far of what was supposed to be the president's most significant legislative achievement. ''We get that it is a big deal for him, for the law, for the Democrats who voted for him,'' said Jennifer Palmieri, the White House communications director. ''We are taking it deathly seriously.''
  Some Democrats are warning their colleagues against a rush to count Mr. Obama out prematurely. Steve Elmendorf, who was an influential Democratic aide on Capitol Hill in President Bill Clinton's second term, insisted that Mr. Obama would recover and thrive, much as Mr. Clinton did.
  That message was echoed in a memo that Representative Steve Israel, Democrat of New York, distributed to his colleagues during a caucus meeting on Wednesday. In the memo, Mr. Israel, who is the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said coming clashes with Republicans over the budget and the debt would once again play to the strengths of Democratic candidates.
  In an interview, Mr. Israel said that he was confident that the administration would be able to put Mr. Obama's current troubles behind it. ''The website will get fixed,'' Mr. Israel said. ''The issue with insurance policies has been addressed.''
  Still, the president's own words on Thursday betrayed a realization inside the White House that for all his travails over the last five years, this situation could be different.
  Never before has Mr. Obama been as hard on himself and his staff in describing failures of both policy and politics. He repeatedly apologized and said that the criticism of the health care rollout was more justified than criticism of him in the past.
  ''There were times I thought we got slapped around unjustly,'' the president said. ''This one is deserved. It's on us.''
  But speaking to steelworkers later in the day in Cleveland, Mr. Obama was combative. ''We are not going to gut this law,'' he said, adding that to ''those who say they are opposed to it and can't offer a solution, we'll push back.''
  Christopher Johnston contributed reporting from Cleveland.
  Correction: November 15, 2013
  An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated when President Obama spoke to steelworkers in Cleveland. It was Thursday, not Wednesday.
President Obama's messy breakup with insurers - David Nather - POLITICO.com
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  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 15:32
  Obama has had a love-hate relationship with insurers since the debate started. | AP Photo
  ClosePresident Barack Obama is breaking up with the health insurance industry again.
  He's had a love-hate relationship with the insurers ever since the early days of the health care reform debate. He yelled at them in public for giving people skimpy coverage, then slipped them a gift-wrapped box of chocolates '-- the individual mandate they wanted to gain millions of new customers.
  Continue Reading
  Even during the implementation of Obamacare, he has stuck with the industry, staying in the rocky relationship despite all the petty bickering. He has to use them as a foil to advertise the law's benefits, like all the rebates from greedy insurance companies. But he also needs them to make the law work '-- which is why he has been careful not to raise his voice at them even as they sent cancellation notices to individual insurance customers throughout the country.
  Now, Obama is putting them on the spot. The message of his proposed one-year fix to the cancelled policies is this: I'm giving you a chance to clean up the mess. If you don't clean it up, don't blame it on me.
  ''The bottom line is insurers can extend current plans that would otherwise be cancelled into 2014,'' Obama said at his Thursday press conference.
  (PHOTOS: Obamacare online glitches: 25 great quotes)
  Industry CEOs have been summoned to a White House meeting Friday that's sure to be full of those awkward conversations about who did what to whom, and who's being unreasonable this time.
  It's enough to stress a relationship to the breaking point. And breaking up, as the song goes, can indeed be hard to do - and in the case may have implications for innocent bystanders, such as health care customers.
  ''The president was clear as a bell: 'We've done our part. If rates go up or anything, that's not our fault.' And that's not the case,'' said Bill Pierce, a former Department of Health and Human Services official who has also worked in the health insurance industry.
  Democrats badly needed a fix to point to on Friday, when they'll have to vote on a Republican bill to let all Americans keep their health plans. But the need to give Democrats political cover can't justify a change that could backfire in other ways, Pierce said.
  (IN 90 SECONDS: Obamacare puts Democrats' credibility on the line)
  ''It is a political solution to a policy problem '... You cannot solve a policy problem with a political solution,'' said Pierce, now a senior director at APCO Worldwide.
  Sure, there was a bit of ''it's not you, it's me'' in Obama's press conference Thursday. ''That's on me. I mean, we fumbled the rollout on this health care law,'' Obama said.
  But really, insurers, it's you.
  ''What we want to do is to be able to say to these folks, you know what, the Affordable Care Act is not going to be the reason why insurers have to cancel your plan,'' Obama said.
  There's just one problem: Health insurers say the fix won't work. And state insurance commissioners and leading actuaries aren't sure, either.
  (WATCH: 6 major players in HealthCare.gov debacle)
  For one thing, health insurance plans already set their prices for the Obamacare plans assuming that they'd get a certain number of customers, and the right mix of healthy and sick people. If they don't get those people, they're warning that the mix will be thrown off, and prices will have to go up '-- creating a new nightmare for the administration.
  ''Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers,'' Karen Ignagni of America's Health Insurance Plans, the leading health insurance trade group, said in a statement.
  Health insurance actuaries echoed the alarm.
  ''Changing the [Affordable Care Act] provisions could alter the dynamics of the insurance market, creating two parallel markets operating under different rules, thereby threatening the viability of insurance markets operating under the new rules,'' said Cori Uccello, the senior health fellow at the American Academy of Actuaries.
The recorded world: Every step you take | The Economist
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  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 15:31
  ''THIS season there is something at the seaside worse than sharks,'' declared a newspaper in 1890. ''It is the amateur photographer.'' The invention of the handheld camera appalled 19th-century society, as did the ''Kodak fiends'' who patrolled beaches snapping sunbathers.
  More than a century later, amateur photography is once more a troubling issue. Citizens of rich countries have got used to being watched by closed-circuit cameras that guard roads and cities. But as cameras shrink and the cost of storing data plummets, it is individuals who are taking the pictures.
  Through a Glass, darkly
  Some 10,000 people are already testing a prototype of Google Glass, a miniature computer worn like spectacles (see article). It aims to replicate all the functions of a smartphone in a device perched on a person's nose. Its flexible frame holds both a camera and a tiny screen, and makes it easy for users to take photos, send messages and search for things online.
  Glass may fail, but a wider revolution is under way. In Russia, where insurance fraud is rife, at least 1m cars already have cameras on their dashboards that film the road ahead. Police forces in America are starting to issue officers with video cameras, pinned to their uniforms, which record their interactions with the public. Collar-cams help anxious cat-lovers keep tabs on their wandering pets. Paparazzi have started to use drones to photograph celebrities in their gardens or on yachts. Hobbyists are even devising clever ways to get cameras into space.
  Ubiquitous recording can already do a lot of good. Some patients with brain injuries have been given cameras: looking back at images can help them recover their memories. Dash-cams can help resolve insurance claims and encourage people to drive better. Police-cams can discourage criminals from making groundless complaints against police officers and officers from abusing detainees. A British soldier has just been convicted of murdering a wounded Afghan because the act was captured by a colleague's helmet-camera. Videos showing the line of sight of experienced surgeons and engineers can help train their successors and be used in liability disputes. Lenses linked to computers are reading street-signs and product labels to partially sighted people.
  Optimists see broader benefits ahead. Plenty of people carry activity trackers, worn on the wrist or placed in a pocket, to monitor their exercise or sleep patterns; cameras could do the job more effectively, perhaps also spying on their wearers' diets. ''Personal black boxes'' might be able to transmit pictures if their owner falls victim to an accident or crime. Tiny cameras trained to recognise faces could become personal digital assistants, making conversations as searchable as documents and e-mails. Already a small band of ''life-loggers'' squirrel away years of footage into databases of ''e-memories''.
  Not everybody will be thrilled by these prospects. A perfect digital memory would probably be a pain, preserving unhappy events as well as cherished ones. Suspicious spouses and employers might feel entitled to review it.
  The bigger worry is for those in front of the cameras, not behind them. School bullies already use illicit snaps from mobile phones to embarrass their victims. The web throngs with furtive photos of women, snapped in public places. Wearable cameras will make such surreptitious photography easier. And the huge, looming issue is the growing sophistication of face-recognition technologies, which are starting to enable businesses and governments to extract information about individuals by scouring the billions of images online. The combination of cameras everywhere'--in bars, on streets, in offices, on people's heads'--with the algorithms run by social networks and other service providers that process stored and published images is a powerful and alarming one. We may not be far from a world in which your movements could be tracked all the time, where a stranger walking down the street can immediately identify exactly who you are.
  Sovereign over your own body and mind'--and face
  This is where one of this newspaper's strongly held beliefs'--that technological progress should generally be welcomed, not feared'--runs up against an even deeper impulse, in favour of liberty. Freedom has to include some right to privacy: if every move you make is being chronicled, liberty is curtailed.
  One option is to ban devices that seem irksome. The use of dashboard cameras is forbidden in Austria. Drivers who film the road can face a '‚¬10,000 ($13,400) fine. But banning devices deprives people of their benefits. Society would do better to develop rules about where and how these technologies can be used, just as it learned to cope with the Kodak fiends.
  For the moment, companies are treading carefully. Google has banned the use of face-recognition in apps on Glass and its camera is designed to film only in short bursts. Japanese digital camera-makers ensure their products emit a shutter sound every time a picture is taken. Existing laws to control stalking or harassment can be extended to deal with peeping drones.
  Still, as cameras become smaller, more powerful and ubiquitous, new laws may be needed to preserve liberty. Governments should be granted the right to use face-recognition technology only where there is a clear public good (identifying a bank robber for instance). When the would-be identifiers are companies or strangers in the street, the starting-point should be that you have the right not to have your identity automatically revealed. The principle is the same as for personal data. Just as Facebook and Google should be forced to establish high default settings for privacy (which can be reduced at the user's request), the new cameras and recognition technologies should be regulated so as to let you decide whether you remain anonymous or not.
  Silicon Valley emphasises the liberating power of technology'--and it is often right. But the freedom that a gadget gives one person can sometimes take away liberty from another. Liberal politicians have been lazy about defending the idea of personal space, especially online. The fight should start now. Otherwise, in the blink of an eye, privacy could be gone.
Outrage after TPP leak reveals piracy criminalisation - Delimiter
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  Fri, 15 Nov 2013 08:48
  news Australian political parties and digital rights lobby groups today erupted in outrage after a Wikileaks leak of the intellectual property rights chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement revealed Australians could be slugged with new draconian measures if caught infringing copyright online.
  The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a secretive, multi-national trade agreement that threatens to extend what many see restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe and rewrite international rules on its enforcement. A number of major countries are currently negotiating the agreement, including the US, Japan, Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and Brunei Darussalam.
  Leaked draft texts of the agreement have previously shown that the intellectual property chapter would have extensive ramifications for users' freedom of speech rights, right to privacy and due process, and could hinder innovation. The process of the TPP negotiations has been shrouded in secrecy and the full text of drafts of the proposed agreement has never been publicly released.
  Last month the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade took the extraordinary step of rescinding confirmations of attendance for journalists who had registered to attend a public briefing on the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement in Sydney, stating that the meeting was ''off-the-record'', and that journalists are not welcome.''
  Overnight, Wikileaks published a leaked draft of the intellectual property chapter of the TPP. It reveals, among a number of other moves to tighten countries' IP regulations, that those caught conducting copyright infringement activities online ('Internet piracy') could face criminal charges.
  The leak caused instant outrage in Australia, with a wide range of groups active in digital rights issues raising an outcry regarding the stipulations of the trade agreement.
  ''CHOICE is deeply concerned at a proposal from the United States to expand criminal liability for copyright infringement. This would mean that domestic non-commercial infringement could become a criminal act,'' said Alan Kirkland, chief executive of consumer advocacy group CHOICE, in a statement issued this morning. ''While CHOICE condemns copyright infringement, we certainly don't agree that an individual downloading Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones for personal use should be open to criminal prosecution.''
  And it's not just piracy criminalisation Australians should be concerned about.
  ''The United States appears to be proposing a raft of measures that would be disastrous for Australian consumers if they made the final text,'' said Kirkland. ''This includes a ban on parallel importation, which involves purchasing products from overseas retailers and shipping them to Australia.''
  Kirkland noted that CHOICE was also disappointed that Australians had to rely on leaked copies of the draft trade agreement to be informed on its stipulations. ''On behalf of our members and consumers more broadly, CHOICE wants to have input into this wide-reaching agreement. Ideally, this would be through open debate,'' the executive said. ''We renew our call on the Australian government to move towards transparency by allowing consumers to see drafts of the TPP.''
  The Greens today flagged plans to take parliamentary action regarding the TPP draft. ''The Australian Greens have given notice that they will move a motion in the Senate, when it next sits on December 2nd, to end the secrecy around the TPPA trade talks,'' the party noted in a statement issued by Senators Scott Ludlam and Peter Whish-Wilson.
  ''We have one piece of the TPPA puzzle, and it is chilling,'' said Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson. ''The Greens will move for the rest of the document to be made public to the Parliament and the Australian people, before the Government signs up to something we will regret '... ''Tony Abbott must end the secrecy and hidden agendas that have defined his Government.''
  Digital rights lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia accused the Federal Government of selling out Australians to foreign interests again.
  ''EFA considers the leaked Intellectual Property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership to represent looming disaster for Australian citizens,'' wrote EFA board member Sean Rintel in a statement issued today. ''Not only are the secret negotiations deplorable, as is Australia's almost total agreement with the US positions, but if passed, its provisions will severely restrict choice, increase prices, and reduce freedom of expression.''
  And the Pirate Party Australia issued its own furious statement on the TPP.
  ''This corporate wishlist masquerading as a trade agreement is bad for access to knowledge, access to medicine, and access to innovation. It re-enforces the worst parts of our intellectual property enforcement regime on a regional level, making the necessary positive reforms for the digital era much more difficult, if not impossible,'' said Brendan Molloy, Councillor of Pirate Party Australia.
  ''It is absolutely appalling that we are still relying on leaked texts to determine just what we're getting ourselves into with these trade agreements. Even Parliament is being kept in the dark. It's time to release the text, and all future texts, so that transparency and oversight can result in texts that help, not hinder, legitimate Australian interests. There is no economic justification for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement's intellectual property provisions. DFAT must immediately hold public briefings to explain their now public negotiating positions. It's time for some accountability.''
  Prime Minister Tony Abbott was quoted in an article published by The Age newspaper this morning as saying: '' '... there's always horse-trading in these negotiations, but in the end '... everyone is better off''. The previous Labor Federal Government also largely supported the TPP negotiations.
Fight for the Future | a nonprofit working to expand the internet's power for good
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  Thu, 14 Nov 2013 23:34
  Fight for the Future is dedicated to expanding the Internet's transformative power for good. Our goal: to build a grassroots movement to ensure that everyone can access the Internet's many resources affordably, free of interference or censorship and with full privacy. Our vision: a world where everyone can enjoy the basic freedom to express, create and connect online.
  Our organization is nimble and can react quickly to current events, and our staff is a unique combination of talented technologists, educators, organizers, advocates and artists. Working with our many allies in the non-profit and tech sectors, we launch campaigns that frequently go viral and engage virtually every demographic. We frame our messages in ways that make people understand and care about even the most technical issue. We also provide them with online tools that make it easy and compelling to take action and share with friends.
  We believe that we can turn Internet users around the world into empowered and informed agents for change. By bringing individuals together so that they identify as a unified Internet constituency, and by providing them with the tools to amplify their collective voice we know that the best outcome will prevail in any policy debate.
  We view the following as the major threats to freedom of expression online:
  Copyright and patent laws are outdated and overzealous. They hurt artists and innovation, shifting control of our art, media, and ideas to large corporations.Slow speed and limited access: Lack of competition in the U.S. broadband market has resulted in an Internet system that is among the slowest, most expensive and least available among developed nations.Tracking and Spying: People can't express themselves freely online when they feel like they are being watched. In an extreme form, government and corporate surveillance can lead to political repression.Fight for the Future is known for its powerful and massive viral organizing campaigns that have changed Internet history both nationally and globally. Under a campaign to stop SOPA and PIPA '-- the largest and most visible online protest in history '-- hundreds of thousands of websites, including sites like Google, Craigslist and Wikipedia, joined the protest by going dark or prominently displaying info on the bills. Ultimately, 24 million people took action against bad tech policy, and both bills were shelved.
  Our SOPA strike inspired street protests across Europe against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) '-- another attack on digital rights '-- and led to ACTA's historic defeat. In 2012, we also helped to stall out the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) written ostensibly to prevent threats to cybersecurity, but written so broadly that it could easily be used for government spying and censorship. For the last election, we created a slate of voter registration and get-out-the-vote apps which gave the grassroots access to the tools that typically only large presidential campaigns can afford, diluting the power and influence of SuperPACs. And last November, public outcry from our campaign contributed to the rejection of a treaty that would have moved Internet governance to a top-down United Nations agency that operates behind closed doors and under corporate influence.
  For more details on these and other accomplishments, check out a timeline of the events leading up to and immediately after the SOPA strike.
  Tiffiniy ChengCo-Founder and Co-DirectorTiffiniy is our co-founder and co-director. She started Open Congress, Miro, almost got the SAFE Act passed until Chris Dodd pulled a late night vote - her work is on art, culture and structural power issues.
  Holmes WilsonCo-DirectorHolmes is a co-founder of Fight for the Future. He also co-founded Miro, Open Congress, and Amara, and ran online campaigns for the FSF.
  Evan GreerCampaign ManagerEvan is our campaign manager and joined our team after years traveling internationally as a social justice musician and workshop facilitator. She's been organizing creative campaigns and fighting "the Man" since high school, recently with Free Tarek and Rising Tide.
  Vasjen KatroLead DesignerVasjen is our Lead Designer from Albania '-- he loves to craft great UI / UX and making the Internet a better place. You can see his work on Dribbble and follow him on Twitter..
  Douglas SchatzCampaign CoordinatorDouglas graduated from Hampshire College in 2011 after writing his senior thesis, "Sampling Copyright" & in his spare time creates art dealing with themes like copyright, parody, and the hacker ethos.
  Jessica BrunoAccountingJessica joined as our bookkeeper in 2013 with over 15 years experience in public and private accounting & is also involved in helping to facilitate bringing high-speed Internet to unserved rural areas.
  Sarena NeymanGrant WriterSarena Neyman writes our grants and other fundraising materials. She's been helping non-profit groups raise money for over 25 years and is thrilled to be doing work that protects her beloved Internet.
Infants develop rare bleeding disorder after parents refuse vitamin K shots, CDC reports | The Verge
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  Thu, 14 Nov 2013 21:52
  Four infants in Tennessee developed an exceedingly rare bleeding disorder, after their parents turned down the administration of standard vitamin K injections. The cluster of illness, reported this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), highlights the ongoing risks of parents either refusing or delaying preventive injections '-- like vitamin K or MMR vaccinations '-- among infants and children.
  Since around 1961, doctors in the US have used vitamin K injections to prevent Vitamin K deficiency bleeding (VKDB) in newborns. Infants are born with low levels of vitamin K, which is vital in helping blood coagulate, and they don't obtain sufficient levels of the vitamin during breastfeeding. That puts them at an increased risk of hemorrhage, which is precisely why the American Academy of Pediatrics has long recommended injections of the vitamin at birth: infants who don't receive it are 81 times more likely to experience VKDB.
  "Fears that the injection increases the risk of leukemia."
  All of the infants in this illness cluster survived, though longterm neurodevelopmental repercussions (three of them suffered intracranial hemorrhage) remain a possibility. The CDC's research also revealed that a whopping 28 percent of infants born at birthing centers in Nashville didn't receive a vitamin K injection in 2013, compared to 3.4 percent of infants born at one Nashville hospital.
  Some parents of the babies in question said that they declined a vitamin K injection because of fears '-- which have no scientific backing '-- that the injection increases the risk of leukemia. Others cited a concern over exposing their child to excessive toxins. The CDC is now working to determine whether cases of VKDB, at least in Tennessee, have been occurring at an increased rate in recent years, or are being underreported.
Griepvaccins bij apothekers zijn bijna op - De Standaard
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  Thu, 14 Nov 2013 21:49
  De apothekers in ons land zitten bijna door hun voorraad aan griepvaccins. Toch is er geen reden tot ongerustheid omdat de meeste mensen die een hoog risico lopen intussen hun griepprik al gekregen hebben. Dat meldt de Algemene Pharmaceutische Bond.
  Op heel wat plaatsen in Belgi kunnen apothekers hun voorraad griepvaccins niet meer aanvullen, er zijn zelfs apothekers die helemaal geen vaccins meer hebben. 'Dat de voorraad aan griepvaccins uitgeput raakt, is elk jaar het geval', zegt Jan Depoorter van de Algemene Pharmaceutische Bond.
  Vroeger
  'Alleen valt dat moment dit jaar wel vroeger dan anders en dat heeft alles te maken met productieproblemen van het vaccin. Daardoor is het aanbod zo'n 10 procent lager dan andere jaren', aldus Depoorter.
  Toch zal dat geen groter aantal griepgevallen met zich meebrengen, volgens Depoorter hebben risicopatinten immers al een griepprik gekregen. Mensen die nu nog een griepvaccin aanschaffen zijn over het algemeen geen risicopatinten.
  Ook griepspecialist Marc Van Ranst ziet geen enkele reden tot ongerustheid. 'In Europa is op dit moment nog geen sprake van een grieppiek, dus ook zeker niet in Belgi.' Of en wanneer die komt, is moeilijk te voorspellen. 'Als we afgaan op de meeste andere jaren, dan zou de grieppiek pas na nieuwjaar komen', aldus Van Ranst.
Copyright actually makes books disappear, according to study TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics
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  Thu, 14 Nov 2013 21:45
  By Paul St John MackintoshYou've long suspected it, and now here's an academic study to prove it: Copyright actually makes books disappear.
  ''A random sample of new books for sale on Amazon.com shows three times more books initially published in the 1850's are for sale than new books from the 1950's. Why? This paper presents new data on how copyright seems to make works disappear,'' runs the abstract of the study, How Copyright Makes Books and Music Disappear (and How Secondary Liability Rules Help Resurrect Old Songs), by Professor Paul J. Heald (pictured at left), of the University of Illinois College of Law, and visiting professor at the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management (CIPPM) at Britain's Bournemouth University.
  The full text of the paper can be found here.
  Heald's study tests the justification for copyright extension, increasingly popular in the media industry, ''that after a work is created, it needs to be protected for a significant period of time to assure its continued availability and distribution.
  In the words of one commentator, a work may need ''proper husbandry'' in order to assure its continued exploitation. Powerful copyright lobbyists presently circle the globe advocating ever longer terms of copyright protection based on this under-exploitation hypothesis'--that bad things happen when a copyright expires, the work loses its owner, and it falls into the public domain.''
  For his study, Heald took ''a random sample of 2300 new books for sale on Amazon.com,'' also performing a similar analysis on music. ''Copyright status correlates highly with absence from the Amazon shelf,'' he concluded. ''Together with publishing business models, copyright law seems to stifle distribution and access.''
  Heald, admittedly, has been plowing this furrow for quite a few years now, quoting his own earlier papers from years ago in this study.
  This time around, however, he's employing a new methodological take that completely reinforces his earlier conclusions. He used statistical techniques to compensate for effects such as the growth in population of the United States and the volume of books published.
  The results only made the impact of copyright even more pronounced.
  Furthermore, Heald demonstrates that publishers are only damaging their own businesses by delaying the admission of works into the public domain. Even copyright-free, such works actually get sold, as his data proves. These are not Project Gutenberg freebies: Those works are offered on the Amazon shelves for sale. But publishers lack incentive to shift long-tail backlist titles, which tend to languish neglected in the copyright warehouse. Once in the public domain, however, they flourish.
  From Heald's conclusion:
  ''The data presented in this article demonstrate that there is a market for these missing works, illustrated bluntly by the fact that there are three times as many new books from the 1850's for sale on Amazon than books from the 1950's. Ever-longer term extensions exacerbate the availability and distribution crisis by delaying the moment when the market can intervene and restart production.''
  The White House Task Force on High-Tech Patent Issues has been pushing for reform to U.S. intellectual property law in the realm of patents to re-energize American innovation. Is it any surprise that similar regulations in the area of copyright have equally stultifying effects on cultural productivity? Heald's report is just one more stone in the balance weighing against Big Media's specious and self-interested campaign for copyright limit extension.
  Set the works free. Ultimately, even the IP monopolists can only gain.
Onderzoek naar herkomst kunst bij Oranjes | nu.nl/algemeen | Het laatste nieuws het eerst op nu.nl
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  Thu, 14 Nov 2013 21:32
  Dat heeft de Rijksvoorlichtingsdienst donderdag laten weten.
  Als er voorwerpen worden aangetroffen waarvan de herkomst ''niet rechtmatig'' is, kunnen deze worden geclaimd door de erfgenamen van de oorspronkelijke eigenaar.
  Het onderzoek omvat alle collecties die gezamenlijk de Koninklijke Verzamelingen vormen en de museale voorwerpen uit de nalatenschap van koningin Juliana en prins Bernhard die nog in het bezit zijn van de koninklijke familie.
  Een onafhankelijke deskundige zal het onderzoek uitvoeren. Voor de begeleiding van de deskundige is een 3-koppige commissie ingesteld, bestaande uit onder andere kunsthistoricus Rudi Ekkart. Hij is bij het grote publiek bekend door zijn onderzoek naar de herkomst van in de Tweede Wereldoorlog geroofde kunstwerken.
  139 stukkenEind oktober werd bekend dat Nederlandse musea 139 kunstvoorwerpen in hun collecties hebben die tussen 1933 en 1945 tijdens het naziregime (vermoedelijk) zijn geroofd, geconfisqueerd of gedwongen verkocht.
  Sommige deskundigen meenden dat het Koninklijk Huis ook moet meewerken aan een onderzoek naar roofkunst, omdat de koninklijke collectie ook kunst zou kunnen bevatten die in de oorlog is gestolen van Joodse eigenaren.
  Historische VerzamelingenDe museale collecties van de Stichting Historische Verzamelingen worden beheerd door de directeur en de staf van het Koninklijk Huisarchief.
  Hieronder vallen de familieportretten, portretminiaturen en talloze andere (kunst-)historische objecten. Delen van de collectie zijn langdurig in bruikleen bij onder meer Paleis Het Loo Nationaal Museum in Apeldoorn en het Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
  Het bestuur van de stichting bestaat onder anderen uit koning Willem-Alexander.
Pentagon Ending Buys of Russian-Made Helicopters | Military.com
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  Thu, 14 Nov 2013 14:57
  WASHINGTON - The Defense Department said Wednesday it is canceling plans to buy additional cargo helicopters from the Russian arms export agency that has supplied Syrian President Bashar Assad's military forces with arms and ammunition.
  The additional 15 Russian-built Mi-17 helicopters were to be purchased next year at a cost of $345 million and then delivered to Afghanistan's national security forces.
  Bipartisan opposition to the Mi-17 acquisition grew as the violence in Syria escalated and U.S. relations with Russia deteriorated. A growing number of lawmakers from both political parties objected to acquiring military gear from Rosoboronexport, which has provided Assad's regime with weapons used against Syrian civilians.
  "I applaud the Defense Department's decision to cancel its plan to buy 15 additional Mi-17 helicopters from Rosoboronexport," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in an emailed statement. `'Doing business with the supplier of these helicopters has been a morally bankrupt policy, and as a nation, we should no longer be subsidizing Assad's war crimes in Syria."
  Cornyn, the Senate's No. 2 GOP leader, said he was informed of the decision last week by Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.
  Pentagon spokeswoman Maureen Schumann said the department re-evaluated the requirements for Mi-17s in consultation with Congress. "We currently do not have plans to purchase additional Mi-17s from Rosoboronexport beyond those" already under contract.Top U.S. military officials have maintained the Russian-made helicopters are ideally suited for the Afghans, who are rebuilding their air force and need a reliable and easy-to-operate helicopter for transporting troops throughout the country's harsh environment. Overall, the Defense Department has paid more than $1 billion since 2011 for 63 Mi-17s that have been delivered to Afghanistan or are on order.
  Russian Embassy spokesman Yevgeniy Khorishko played down the Pentagon's decision. He described it as a single action that doesn't affect the broader military and technical cooperation between the two countries.
  Rosoboronexport announced Monday that 12 of the Mi-17s had been delivered to Afghanistan in the month of October. The shipments, the export agency said, reflected the joint effort between Russia and the U.S. to combat international terrorism.
  Frank Kendall, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, told Cornyn in a letter last year that the Defense Department "condemns the actions of Rosoboronexport in supplying arms and ammunition to the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, whose forces have used these weapons to murder Syrian civilians."
  Rosoboronexport's director general, Anatoly Isaykin, said in February that since there are no sanctions against shipping weapons to Syria, Russia was still fulfilling its contract obligations. "These aren't offensive weapons," he said. "We are mostly shipping air defense systems and repair equipment for various branches of the military."
  The urgent need to supply the Afghans with Mi-17s had trumped congressional calls to terminate the contract with Rosoboronexport.
  Cornyn and other members of Congress also argued the Defense Department should have more seriously considered acquiring an American-made helicopter for the Afghans. The U.S. Army's Chinook, manufactured by defense giant Boeing in Pennsylvania, and a transport helicopter made by Sikorsky in Connecticut, were among the possible options.
  Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., called the move a welcome, if long overdue, first step and she urged the Pentagon to spend U.S. tax dollars on American-made systems. "I am proud Congress united in a bipartisan manner to deliver that message, and that the Pentagon has finally heard us," she said.
  Carter told House lawmakers in September that multiple reviews and assessments were conducted of more than two dozen helicopters that were either available or in development. Carter said the Afghans are very familiar with the Mi-17 and none of the other aircraft examined met the requirements.
  Despite the Pentagon's certainty the Mi-17 was the right choice for the Afghans, Capitol Hill refused to let up its campaign to end the business relationship with the Russians.
  In an August letter to Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 13 Republican and Democratic senators questioned whether Afghanistan could ever be fully independent of Russia if the country continues to operate Russian aircraft for decades to come. They also expressed concern the arrangement could put the United States at a disadvantage on matters of strategic importance.
  They questioned whether the "overreliance on Russia fostered by this Mi-17 program put the U.S. at risk of Russian coercion or blackmail on other security issues," including the crisis in Syria, Iran's drive to obtain nuclear weapons, and U.S. missile defense.
  (C) Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Green Energy Is Out to Get Tesla - Bloomberg
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  Thu, 14 Nov 2013 14:55
  Shares of Tesla Motors Inc. fell by as much as 22 percent during one stretch last week, the biggest decline since the company went public in 2010. Much of the attention has been directed to the tendency of the company's Model S to catch fire when driving over metal debris. My colleague Megan McArdle writes that ''Tesla could be in big trouble'' because ''small, new companies are extraordinarily vulnerable to stories like this.'' A longer view of the transportation industry, however, suggests that consumers are surprisingly tolerant of danger. The real threat to Tesla would be the withdrawal of government subsidies for all-electric vehicles.
  For most of our existence as a species, humans traveled from place to place by walking on foot or, if they were lucky, horseback. It's only within the past 200 years that we decided to put ourselves in metal cages that hurl forward at dozens if not hundreds of miles an hour. Despite the inherent dangers of these forms of transportation, people have been remarkably willing to trade safety for speed. Even now, cars kill about three times as many people in the U.S. as murderers with guns. And that's a big improvement from the late 1960s, when fatality rates from driving were much higher. The improved safety record is due to innovations that seem obvious in retrospect. Seat belts weren't widely available until the 1950s, for example.
  Planes and trains also became popular when they were unsafe. More than four times as many people died from plane crashes in 1985 than they did last year, even though people fly much more often now than 30 years ago. (Things were even worse in preceding decades.) As for trains, the oldest of the three forms of transportation, there still isn't a universal system to check whether trains are heading toward each other from opposite directions on the same track. This history makes me think that consumers will be willing to forgive Tesla for a few non-fatal fires, especially if the company makes an effort to fix the problem.
  The real threat to Tesla is that the government subsidies it relies upon to sell cars may soon be directed elsewhere. Bloomberg News reports that the U.S. federal government and major states such as California are reconsidering their emphasis on all-electric vehicles. Prospective buyers of Tesla's Model S may have to make do with subsidies as much as 40 percent less starting in 2015. One reason is that electric cars may actually be worse for the environment than conventional cars once you consider the energy costs involved in producing and disposing of giant batteries. Alternatives such as clean-diesel engines and hydrogen-fuel cells now look more attractive as a result. The International Energy Agency forecasts that all-electric vehicles will only constitute a small fraction of new vehicle sales in 2050, in part because of their harmful environmental impact. It would be quite a paradox if green regulation ended up being a bigger threat to Tesla than its safety record.
  (Matthew C. Klein is a writer for Bloomberg View. Follow him on Twitter.)
  About Matthew C Klein>>Matthew C. Klein writes for Bloomberg View about the economy and financial markets. He previously wrote for the ... MORE
Common Core textbooks arrive late, filled with errors | The Daily Caller
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  Thu, 14 Nov 2013 14:54
  New York City teachers recently received their new Common Core-approved textbooks '-- a month late '-- and they don't like them one bit.
  ''They are loaded with errors,'' said Rebecca Murphy a third-grade teacher in Queens, in a statement to the New York Daily News.
  The mistakes are numerous. A third-grade workbook contains a set of questions accompanying a mismatched reading selection; one of the pages in another workbook is printed upside down; and some teacher's manuals don't line up with student versions.
  Teachers also complained that textbook lessons are lengthy and poorly conceived.
  On top of everything else, the textbooks arrived late: a month after school had already begun.
  The textbooks were manufactured by Pearson, a company heavily involved in the production and implementation of instructional materials and standardized tests under the national Common Core education guidelines.
  Pearson's products have been heavily criticized for incomprehensibility. A first-grade math test was recently scrutinized for asking kids conceptually odd questions that would stump calculus students. (RELATED: Would your first grader pass this weird Common Core math test?)
  And a lesson on possessive nouns contained Orwellian statements about the relationship between the individual and government, such as ''The commands of government officials must be obeyed by all,'' and ''An individual's wants are less important than the nation's well-being.''
  Joy Pullman, managing editor of School Reform News and a leading critic of Common Core, told The Daily Caller that error-ridden textbooks are the result of heavy government involvement in the education sector.
  ''Textbook production has actually always been this slipshod, because the government education cartel essentially dictates the market, and has for decades,'' she wrote in an email to The DC. ''Because states and districts have controlled what books children will read, publishers have had an incentive to influence the political process as well as create a poor product, generally, because rushing the first book to market means more sales.''
  The problem is likely to get worse under Common Core's national curriculum standards, which weaken state and district autonomy in education matters.
  ''The really odd thing is that Common Core has been available for three years, now, and Pearson hasn't managed to get an error-free book together yet,'' wrote Pullman. ''It makes one wonder about their other products, which are in millions of schools across the country.''
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