What Adam Curry is reading

What You Need to Know About the New Head of Homeland Security - theTrumpet.com
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 14:44
  The U.S. Senate confirmed a new Secretary of Homeland Security on Monday. Winning confirmation by an overwhelming vote of 78 to 16, Jeh Johnson is now the fourth person to lead the sprawling domestic security agency since its inception in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
  Unlike many of President Barack Obama's other Cabinet nominees, who encountered staunch Republican opposition, Johnson won the votes of 23 gop senators in addition to all 55 members of the Democratic caucus.
  ''As we all know, the president has asked Jeh Johnson to take on a difficult and demanding job,'' said Senator Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. ''Fortunately for our nation, he is a strong leader and well prepared to face the challenges that await him.''
  Johnson is one of three African Americans in President Obama's new Cabinet, and will take over a department overseeing 22 agencies with a far-flung jurisdiction that includes counterterrorism, fighting illegal immigration and responding to natural disasters.
  But many civil rights advocates are deeply concerned about the direction Johnson is likely to move national law enforcement.
  Although he has been an obscure figure thus far to both the general public and the law enforcement community, the American Civil Liberties Union has been voicing concerns about his human rights record.
  As a heavyweight fundraiser, Johnson raised more than $200,000 for the Obama campaign and personally contributed over $100,000 to other Democratic candidates, including senators Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin and James Clyburn. Though some Republicans have voiced concerns over political cronyism, and have called Johnson more a fundraiser than a security officer, the real reason for his appointment may be his unapologetic support of the Obama administration's drone warfare policies.
  During his stint as a legal adviser for the Pentagon, Johnson provided legal rationale for military involvement in the drone program. To the shock of civil rights advocates, Johnson advocated targeting U.S. citizens in such drone strikes. ''Belligerents who also happen to be U.S. citizens do not enjoy immunity where non-citizen belligerents are valid military objectives,'' he said in a speech at Yale Law School.
  Now Johnson is head of Homeland Security. Has he changed his legal rationale, or will he beef up the department's domestic drone fleet?
  Johnson has also defended the National Security Administration's massive and extremely unpopular program of spying on Americans. During a discussion at the 2013 Aspen Security Forum, Johnson said that when Americans make a phone call, they have ''no legitimate expectation of privacy.'' Their metadata (including phone numbers, call duration and sometimes even gps location) belongs to the government.
  All this represents a massive, unprecedented expansion of government power!
  With support from the Pentagon, the federal Department of Homeland Security is working with local police departments to spy on American citizens without warrant and to conduct arrests with military hardware. What comes next?
  To find out, request your own copy of our booklet America Under Attack. Also, keep an eye out for an article in our upcoming February edition of the Philadelphia Trumpet, ''Why Does the Environmental Protection Agency Need Its Own SWAT Team?'' '–ª
Al-Qaeda in Yemen apologizes for hospital attack
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 14:43
  Maamoun Youssef, Associated Press4:56 a.m. EST December 22, 2013
  This photo provided by Yemen's Defense Ministry shows heavy damage after an explosion at the Defense Ministry complex in Sanaa, Yemen, on Dec. 5.(Photo: AP)
  Story HighlightsLeader of al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen said one of his fighters disobeyed ordersHospital attached to the Defense Ministry attacked during a December assault that killed 52 peopleLeader: Attackers were warned in advance not to enter the hospital within the complexSHARE9CONNECTEMAILMORECAIRO (AP) '-- In a rare public apology, the militant leader of al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen has said that one of his fighters disobeyed orders and attacked a hospital attached to the Defense Ministry during a December assault that killed 52 people.
  Qassim al-Rimi, commander of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, said in a video posted on militant websites that the attackers were warned in advance not to enter the hospital within the complex, nor a place for prayer there. But he said one fighter did.
  "Now we acknowledge our mistake and guilt," al-Rimi said in a video released late Saturday by al-Qaeda's media arm al-Mallahem. "We offer our apology and condolences to the victims' families. We accept full responsibility for what happened in the hospital and will pay blood money for the victims' families."
  The apology seemed prompted by Yemen state television earlier broadcasting a video showing a gunman attacking doctors and other hospital staff. Several al-Qaeda jihadis tried to dismiss the video as fake on militant websites, but the outcry apparently embarrassed the al-Qaeda branch to the point of issuing an unusual expression of regret from the group.
  "We rid ourselves of what our brother did," al-Rimi said. "We did not order him to do so and we are not pleased with what he did."
  However, al-Rimi said despite the group making a mistake, "we are continuing with our jihad."
  The authenticity of the English-subtitled video could not be absolutely confirmed, though it was consistent with other Associated Press reporting and came from al-Qaeda's media arm.
  That fighter and eight other militants were killed in the Dec. 5 suicide bombing and gunmen attack on the ministry complex in Sanaa, Yemen's capital. Seven foreigners from Germany, India, the Philippines and Vietnam were among the dead '-- all who were providing aid at the hospital.
  Al-Rimi repeated al-Qaeda's earlier claim that the Defense Ministry was attacked because it housed drone control rooms and American experts. He also said that security headquarters used by Americans in their war are "legitimate targets."
  He also warned that fighters also will attack any other military posts and camps that "cooperate with the American drones by spying, planting chips, providing information or offering intelligence advice."
  "We have a long list of these places," al-Rimi said.
  U.S. drone strikes in Yemen have inflicted heavy losses on al-Qaeda militants and are part of a joint U.S.-Yemeni campaign against a group which Washington has called the most dangerous branch of the global terrorist network.
  But a Dec. 12 drone attack that mistook a wedding party convoy for an al-Qaeda convoy, killing 15 people, has fueled anger against the United States and the government in Sanaa among a Yemeni public already opposed to the strikes. Yemen's parliament later urged the government to end the use of Yemen's airspace by U.S. drones.
  SHARE9CONNECTEMAILMORECopyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
EXPECT DEFLATION FOLLOWED BY INFLATION?
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  Source: aangirfan
  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 14:25
  Last year, Steen Jakobsen, the chief economist at the Danish Saxo Bank, predicted that gold would drop in price to $1,200 an ounce and that shares in the USA would rise sharply in price.Those predictions were correct.
Cards Stolen in Target Breach Flood Underground Markets '-- Krebs on Security
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 14:18
  Credit and debit card accounts stolen in a recent data breach at retail giant Target have been flooding underground black markets in recent weeks, selling in batches of one million cards and going for anywhere from $20 to more than $100 per card, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.
  Prior to breaking the story of the Target breach on Wednesday, Dec. 18, I spoke with a fraud analyst at a major bank who said his team had independently confirmed that Target had been breached after buying a huge chunk of the bank's card accounts from a well-known ''card shop'' '-- an online store advertised in cybercrime forums as a place where thieves can reliably buy stolen credit and debit cards.
  There are literally hundreds of these shady stores selling stolen credit and debit cards from virtually every bank and country. But this store has earned a special reputation for selling quality ''dumps,'' data stolen from the magnetic stripe on the backs of credit and debit cards. Armed with that information, thieves can effectively clone the cards and use them in stores. If the dumps are from debit cards and the thieves also have access to the PINs for those cards, they can use the cloned cards at ATMs to pull cash out of the victim's bank account.
  At least two sources at major banks said they'd heard from the credit card companies: More than a million of their cards were thought to have been compromised in the Target breach. One of those institutions noticed that one card shop in particular had recently alerted its loyal customers about a huge new batch of more than a million quality dumps that had been added to the online store. Suspecting that the advertised cache of new dumps were actually stolen in the Target breach, fraud investigators with the bank browsed this card shop's wares and effectively bought back hundreds of the bank's own cards.
  When the bank examined the common point of purchase among all the dumps it had bought from the shady card shop, it found that all of them had been used in Target stores nationwide between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15. Subsequent buys of new cards added to that same shop returned the same result.
  On Dec. 19, Target would confirm that crooks had stolen 40 million debit and credit cards from stores nationwide in a breach that extended from Nov. 27 to Dec. 15. Not long after that announcement, I pinged a source at a small community bank in New England to see whether his institution had been notified by Visa or MasterCard about specific cards that were potentially compromised in the Target breach.
  This institution has issued a grand total of more than 120,000 debit and credit cards to its customers, but my source told me the tiny bank had not yet heard anything from the card associations about specific cards that might have been compromised as a result of the Target breach. My source was anxious to determine how many of the bank's cards were most at risk of being used for fraud, and how many should be proactively canceled and re-issued to customers. The bank wasn't exactly chomping at the bit to re-issue the cards; that process costs around $3 to $5 per card, but more importantly it didn't want to unnecessarily re-issue cards at a time when many of its customers would be racing around to buy last-minute Christmas gifts and traveling for the holidays.
  On the other hand, this bank had identified nearly 6,000 customer cards '-- almost 5 percent of all cards issued to customers '-- that had been used at Target stores nationwide during the breach window described by the retailer.
  ''Nobody has notified us,'' my source said. ''Law enforcement hasn't said anything, our statewide banking associations haven't sent anything out'...nothing. Our senior legal counsel today was asking me if we have positive confirmation from the card associations about affected cards, but so far we haven't gotten anything.''
  When I mentioned that a big bank I'd spoken with had found a 100 percent overlap with the Target breach window after purchasing its available cards off a particular black market card shop called rescator[dot]la, my source at the small bank asked would I be willing to advise his fraud team on how to do the same?
  CARD SHOPPING
  Ultimately, I agreed to help in exchange for permission to write about the bank's experience without actually naming the institution. The first step in finding any of the bank's cards for sale was to browse the card shop's remarkably efficient and customer-friendly Web site and search for the bank's ''BINs''; the Bank Identification Number is merely the first six digits of a debit or credit card, and each bank has its own unique BIN or multiple BINs.
  According to the ''base'' name for all stolen cards sold at this card shop, the proprietor sells only cards stolen in the Target breach.
  A quick search on the card shop for the bank's BINs revealed nearly 100 of its customers's cards for sale, a mix of MasterCard dumps ranging in price from $26.60 to $44.80 apiece. As one can imagine, this store doesn't let customers pay for purchases with credit cards; rather, customers can ''add money'' to their accounts using a variety of irreversible payment mechanisms, including virtual currencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, WebMoney and PerfectMoney, as well as the more traditional wire transfers via Western Union and MoneyGram.
  With my source's newly registered account funded via wire transfer to the tune of USD $450, it was time to go shopping. My source wasn't prepared to buy up all of the available cards that match his institution's BINs, so he opted to start with a batch of 20 or so of the more recently-issued cards for sale.
  Like other card shops, this store allows customers to search for available cards using a number of qualifications, including BIN; dozens of card types (MasterCard, Visa, et. al.); expiration date; track type; country; and the name of the financial institution that issued the card.
  A graphic advertisement for stolen cards sold under the ''Tortuga'' base.
  A key feature of this particular dumps shop is that each card is assigned to a particular ''base.'' This term is underground slang that refers to an arbitrary code word chosen to describe all of the cards stolen from a specific merchant. In this case, my source at the big bank had said all of the cards his team purchased from this card shop that matched Target's N0v. 27 '' Dec. 15 breach window bore the base name Tortuga, which is Spanish for ''tortoise'' or ''turtle.''
  Indeed, shortly after the Target breach began, the proprietor of this card shop '-- a miscreant nicknamed ''Rescator'' and a key figure on a Russian-language cybercrime forum known as ''Lampeduza'' '-- was advertising a brand new base of one million cards, called Tortuga.
  Rescator even created a graphical logo in the Lampeduza forum's typeface and style, advertising ''valid 100% rate,'' and offering a money-back guarantee on any cards from this ''fresh'' base that were found to have been canceled by the card issuer immediately after purchase. In addition, sometime in December, this shop ceased selling cards from other bases aside from those from the Tortuga base. As the month wore on, new Tortuga bases would be added to shop, with each base incrementing by one with almost every passing day (e.g., Tortuga1, Tortuga2, Tortuga3, etc.).
  Another fascinating feature of this card shop is that it appears to include the ZIP code and city of the store from which the cards were stolen. One fraud expert I spoke with who asked to remain anonymous said this information is included to help fraudsters purchasing the dumps make same-state purchases, thus avoiding any knee-jerk fraud defenses in which a financial institution might block transactions out-of-state from a known compromised card.
  The New England bank decided to purchase 20 of its own cards from this shop, cards from Tortuga bases 6-9, and Tortuga 14 and 15. The store's ''shopping cart'' offers the ability to check the validity of each purchased card. Any cards that are checked and found to be invalid automatically get refunded. A check of the cards revealed that just one of the 20 had already been canceled.
  The bank quickly ran a fraud and common point-of-purchase analyses on each of the 19 remaining cards. Sure enough, the bank's database showed that all had been used by customers to make purchases at Target stores around the country between Nov. 29 and Dec. 15.
  ''Some of these already have confirmed fraud on them, and a few of them were actually just issued recently and have only been used at Target,'' my source told me. Incredibly, a number of the cards were flagged for fraud after they were used to make unauthorized purchases at big box retailers, including '-- wait for it '-- Target. My source explained that crooks often use stolen dumps to purchase high-priced items such as Xbox consoles and high-dollar amount gift cards, goods that can be fenced, auctioned or otherwise offloaded quickly and easily for cash.
  My source said his employer isn't yet sure which course of action it will take, but that it's likely the bank will re-issue some or all of the 5,300+ cards affected by the Target breach '-- most likely sometime after Dec. 25.
  The bank is unconcerned that its cards compromised in the Target breach might be used for online shopping fraud because the stolen data does not include the CVV2 '-- the three digit security code printed on the backs of customer cards. Most online merchants require customers to supply the CVV2 as proof that they posses the legitimate, physical card for the corresponding account that is being used to fund the online purchase.
  Update, 5:20 p.m. ET: In a message to consumers, Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel said Target would be offering free credit monitoring for affected customers. Not sure how credit monitoring helps with this specific breach, but at any rate here's the rest of his statement:
  ''Yesterday we shared that there was unauthorized access to payment card data at our U.S. stores. The issue has been identified and eliminated. We recognize this has been confusing and disruptive during an already busy holiday season. Our guests' trust is our top priority at Target and we are committed to making this right.
  We want our guests to understand that just because they shopped at Target during the impacted time frame, it doesn't mean they are victims of fraud. In fact, in other similar situations, there are typically low levels of actual fraud. Most importantly, we want to reassure guests that they will not be held financially responsible for any credit and debit card fraud. And to provide guests with extra assurance, we will be offering free credit monitoring services. We will be in touch with those impacted by this issue soon on how and where to access the service.
  We understand it's been difficult for some guests to reach us via our website and call center. We apologize and want you to understand that we are experiencing unprecedented call volume. Our Target teams are working continuously to build capacity and meet our guests' needs.
  We take this crime seriously. It was a crime against Target, our team members, and most importantly, our guests. We're in this together, and in that spirit, we are extending a 10% discount '' the same amount our team members receive '' to guests who shop in U.S. stores on Dec. 21 and 22. Again, we recognize this issue has been confusing and disruptive during an already busy holiday season. We want to emphasize that the issue has been addressed and let guests know they can shop with confidence at their local Target stores.''
  Tags: ATM, BINs, Bitcoin, card shop, dumps, Litecoin, mastercard, moneygram, PerfectMoney, PIN, target, target credit card hack, target data breach, tortuga, tortuga base, Visa, webmoney, western union
  This entry was posted on Friday, December 20th, 2013 at 10:06 am and is filed under Other. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Family Of Innocent U.S. Drone Victims Compensated With 101 Kalashnikovs
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 13:56
  A little more than a week after a U.S. drone strike killed innocent civilians from a wedding convoy in Yemen, more eyebrow-raising details have emerged surrounding the compensation practices for the victims' relatives.
  The New York Times reported Friday that Kalashnikov rifles are part of the traditional compensation process in Yemen, and 101 were given out to relatives of those lost in the Dec. 12 strike. According to the AP, the blast killed at least 13 people, with the Times citing six innocent victims.
  From the newspaper's Dec. 20 report:
  At first, the Yemeni government, a close partner with the Obama administration on counterterrorism matters, said that all the dead were militants. But Yemeni officials conceded soon afterward that some civilians had been killed, and they gave 101 Kalashnikov rifles and about 24 million Yemeni riyals (about $110,000) to relatives of the victims as part of a traditional compensation process, a local tribal leader said.
  The fallout from the Dec. 12 strike comes less than two months after human rights investigators called for greater U.S. transparency with its drone program. Human Rights Watch alleged that 82 people, at least 57 of them civilians, were killed by drone strikes in Yemen between September 2012 and June 2013.
  The Obama administration defended its practices in light of that report, with Press Secretary Jay Carney saying in October there must be "near-certainty" of no civilian casualties before the U.S. proceeds with a drone strike.
  "U.S. counterterrorism operations are precise, they are lawful and they are effective," Carney said.
  Also on HuffPost:
Destroying the Right to Be Left Alone | American Civil Liberties Union
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 13:52
  The NSA Isn't the Only Government Agency Exploiting Technology to Make Privacy Obsolete
  This piece was originally published at TomDispatch, where it includes an introduction by the editor.
  For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people with "burner" phones (prepaid mobile phones easy to buy, use, and quickly dispose of), which are popular with drug dealers. The secret information gleaned from this relationship with the telecommunications giant has been used to convict Americans of various crimes, all without the defendants or the courts having any idea how the feds stumbled upon them in the first place. The program is so secret, so powerful, and so alarming that agents "are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document," according to a recently released government PowerPoint slide.
  You're probably assuming that we're talking about another blanket National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program focused on the communications of innocent Americans, as revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. We could be, but we're not. We're talking about a program of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a domestic law enforcement agency.
  While in these last months the NSA has cast a long, dark shadow over American privacy, don't for a second imagine that it's the only government agency systematically and often secretly intruding on our lives. In fact, a remarkable traffic jam of local, state, and federal government authorities turn out to be exploiting technology to wriggle into the most intimate crevices of our lives, take notes, use them for their own purposes, or simply file them away for years on end.
  "Technology in this world is moving faster than government or law can keep up," the CIA's Chief Technology Officer Gus Hunt told a tech conference in March. "It's moving faster I would argue than you can keep up: You should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data."
  Hunt's right. The American public and the legal system have been left in the dust when it comes to infringements and intrusions on privacy. In one way, however, he was undoubtedly being coy. After all, the government is an active, eager, and early adopter of intrusive technologies that make citizens' lives transparent on demand.
  Increasingly, the relationship between Americans and their government has come to resemble a one-way mirror dividing an interrogation room. Its operatives and agents can see us whenever they want, while we can never quite be sure if there's someone on the other side of the glass watching and recording what we say or what we do -- and many within local, state, and federal government want to ensure that no one ever flicks on the light on their side of the glass.
  So here's a beginner's guide to some of what's happening on the other side of that mirror.
  You Won't Need a Warrant for That
  Have no doubt: the Fourth Amendment is fast becoming an artifact of a paper-based world.
  The core idea behind that amendment, which prohibits the government from "unreasonable searches and seizures," is that its representatives only get to invade people's private space -- their "persons, houses, papers, and effects" -- after it convinces a judge that they're up to no good. The technological advances of the last few decades have, however, seriously undermined this core constitutional protection against overzealous government agents, because more and more people don't store their private information in their homes or offices, but on company servers.
  Consider email.
  In a series of rulings from the 1970's, the Supreme Court created "the third-party doctrine." Simply stated, information shared with third parties like banks and doctors no longer enjoys protection under the Fourth Amendment. After all, the court reasoned, if you shared that information with someone else, you must not have meant to keep it private, right? But online almost everything is shared with third parties, particularly your private e-mail.
  Back in 1986, Congress recognized that this was going to be a problem. In response, it passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). That law was forward-looking for its day, protecting the privacy of electronic communications transmitted by computer. Unfortunately, it hasn't aged well.
  Nearly three decades ago, Congress couldn't decide if email was more like a letter or a phone call (that is, permanent or transitory), so it split the baby and decreed that communications which remain on a third party's server -- think Google -- for longer than 180 days are considered abandoned and lose any expectation of privacy. After six months are up, all the police have to do is issue an administrative subpoena -- a legal request a judge never sees -- demanding the emails it wants from the service provider, because under ECPA they're considered junk.
  This made some sense back when people downloaded important emails to their home or office computers and deleted the rest since storage was expensive. If, at the time, the police had wanted to look at someone's email, a judge would have had to give them the okay to search the computer where the emails were stored.
  Email doesn't work like that anymore. People's emails containing their most personal information now reside on company computers forever or, in geek speak, "in the cloud." As a result, the ECPA has become a dangerous anachronism. For instance, Google's email service, Gmail, is nearly a decade old. Under that law, without a judge's stamp of approval or the user ever knowing, the government can now demand from Google access to years of a Gmail user's correspondence, containing political rants, love letters, embarrassing personal details, sensitive financial and health records, and more.
  And that shouldn't be acceptable now that email has become an intimate repository of information detailing who we are, what we believe, who we associate with, who we make love to, where we work, and where we pray. That's why commonsense legislative reforms to the ECPA, such as treating email like a piece of mail, are so necessary. Then the police would be held to the same standard electronically as in the paper-based world: prove to a judge that a suspect's email probably contains evidence of a crime or hands off.
  Law enforcement, of course, remains opposed to any such changes for a reason as understandable as it is undemocratic: it makes investigators' jobs easier. There's no good reason why a letter sitting in a desk and an email stored on Google's servers don't deserve the same privacy protections, and law enforcement knows it, which is why fear-mongering is regularly called upon to stall such an easy fix to antiquated privacy laws.
  As Department of Justice Associate Deputy Attorney General James Bakerput it in April 2011, "Congress should also recognize that raising the standard for obtaining information under ECPA may substantially slow criminal and national security investigations." In other words, ECPA reform would do exactly what the Fourth Amendment intended: prevent police from unnecessarily intruding into our lives.
  Nowhere to Hide
  "You are aware of the fact that somebody can know where you are at all times, because you carry a mobile device, even if that mobile device is turned off," the CIA's Hunt explained to the audience at that tech conference. "You know this, I hope? Yes? Well, you should."
  You have to hand it to Hunt; his talk wasn't your typical stale government presentation. At times, he sounded like Big Brother with a grin.
  And it's true: the smartphone in your pocket is a tracking device that also happens to allow you to make calls, read email, and tweet. Several times every minute, your mobile phone lets your cell-phone provider know where you are, producing a detail-rich history of where you have been for months, if not years, on end. GPS-enabled applications do the same. Unfortunately, there's no way to tell for sure how long the companies hang onto such location data because they won't disclose that information.
  We do know, however, that law enforcement regularly feasts on these meaty databases, easily obtaining a person's location history and other subscriber information. All that's needed to allow the police to know someone's whereabouts over an extended period is an officer's word to a judge that the records sought would aid an ongoing investigation. Judges overwhelmingly comply with such police requests, forcing companies to turn over their customers' location data. The reason behind this is a familiar one: law enforcement argues that the public has no reasonable expectation of privacy because location data is freely shared with service or app providers. Customers, the argument goes, have already waived their privacy rights by voluntarily choosing to use their mobile phone or app.
  Police also use cell-phone signals and GPS-enabled devices to track people in real time. Not surprisingly, there is relatively little clarity about when police do this, thanks in part to purposeful obfuscation by the government. Since 2007, the Department of Justice has recommended that its U.S. attorneys get a warrant for real-time location tracking using GPS and cell signals transmitted by suspects' phones. But such "recommendations" aren't considered binding, so many U.S. Attorneys simply ignore them.
  The Supreme Court has begun to weigh in but the issue is far from settled. InUnited States v. Jones, the justices ruled that, when officers attach a GPS tracking device to a car to monitor a suspect's movements, the police are indeed conducting a "search" under the Fourth Amendment. The court, however, stopped there, deciding not to rule on whether the use of tracking devices was unreasonable without a judge's say so.
  In response to that incomplete ruling, the Justice Department drew up two post-Jones memos establishing guidelines for its agents and prosecutors regarding location-tracking technology. When the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a Freedom of Information Act request for those guidelines, the Justice Department handed over all 111 pages, every one of them redacted -- an informational blackout.
  The message couldn't be any clearer: the FBI doesn't believe Americans deserve to know when they can and cannot legally be tracked. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor drove home what's at stake in her concurring decision in the Jones case. "Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms," she wrote. "And the Government's unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse... [and] may 'alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.'"
  The ability of police to secretly track people with little or no oversight is a power once only associated with odious police states overseas. Law enforcement agencies in the United States, however, do this regularly and enthusiastically, and they do their best as well to ensure that no barriers will be thrown in their way in the near future.
  Sting(ray) Operations
  During one of his last appearances before Congress as FBI director, Robert Mueller confirmed what many insiders already assumed. Asked by Senator Chuck Grassley whether the FBI operates drones domestically and for what purpose, Mueller responded, "Yes, and for surveillance." This was a stunning revelation, particularly since most Americans associate drone use with robotic killing in distant lands.
  And, Grassley followed up, had the FBI developed drone guidelines to ensure that American privacy was protected? The Bureau, Mueller replied, was in the beginning phase of developing them. Senator Dianne Feinstein, hardly a privacy hawk, seemed startled by the answer: "I think the greatest threat to the privacy of Americans is the drone, and the use of the drone, and the very few regulations that are on it today," she said.
  The senator shouldn't have been shocked. The government's adoption of new intrusive technologies without bothering to publicly explore their privacy implications -- or any safeguards that it might be advisable to put in place first -- isn't an aberration. It's standard practice. As a result, Americans are put in the position of secretly subsidizing their own surveillance with their tax dollars.
  In July, for example, the ACLU published a report on the proliferating use of automatic license-plate readers by police departments and state agencies across the country. Mounted on patrol cars, bridges, and overpasses, the cameras for these readers capture the images of every license plate in view and run them against databases for license plates associated with stolen cars or cars used in a crime. Theoretically, when there's a hit, police are alerted and someone bad goes to jail. The problems arise, however, when there's no hit. Most police departments decide to hang onto those license-plate images anyway, creating yet another set of vast databases of innocent people's location history that's easy to abuse.
  Since technology almost always outpaces the law, regulations on license plate readers are often lax or nonexistent. Rarely do police departments implement data-retention time limits so that the license plates of perfectly innocent people are purged from their systems. Nor do they set up rules to ensure that only authorized officers can query the database when there's evidence that a particular license plate might be attached to a crime. Often there aren't even rules to prevent the images from being widely shared with other government agencies or even private companies. These are, in other words, systems which give law enforcement another secret way to track people without judicial oversight and are ripe for privacy abuse.
  As is often the case with security technology -- for instance, full-body scanners at airports -- there's little evidence that license plate readers are worthwhile enough as crime fighting tools to compensate for their cost in privacy terms. Take Maryland. In the first five months of 2012, for every million license plates read in that state, there were just 2,000 "hits." Of those 2,000, only 47 were potentially associated with serious crimes. The vast majority were for minor regulatory violations, such as a suspended or revoked vehicle registration.
  And then there's the Stingray, a device first used in our distant wars and so intrusive that the FBI has tried to keep it secret -- even from the courts. A Stingray mimics a cell-phone tower, tricking all wireless devices in an area to connect to it instead of the real thing. Police can use it to track suspects in real time, even indoors, as well as nab the content of their communications. The Stingray is also indiscriminate. By fooling all wireless devices in an area into connecting to it, the government engages in what is obviously an unreasonable search and seizure of the wireless information of every person whose device gets caught up in the "sting."
  And when the federal government isn't secretly using dragnet surveillance technologies, it's pushing them down to state and local governments through Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grants. The ACLU of Northern California has, for example, reported that DHS grant funds have been used by state and local police to subsidize or purchase automated license plate readers, whose images then flow into federal databases. Similarly, the city of San Diego has used such funds to buy a facial recognition system and DHS grants have been used to install local video surveillance systems statewide.
  In July, Oakland accepted $2 million in federal funds to establish an around-the-clock "Domain Awareness Center," which will someday integrate existing surveillance cameras and thermal imaging devices at the Port of Oakland with the Oakland Police Department's surveillance cameras and license plate readers, as well as cameras owned by city public schools, the California Highway Patrol, and other outfits and institutions. Once completed, the system will leverage more than 1,000 camera feeds across the city.
  Sometimes I Feel Like Somebody's Watching Me
  What makes high-tech surveillance so pernicious is its silent, magical quality. Historically, when government agents invaded people's privacy they had to resort to the blunt instruments of force and violence, either torturing the body in the belief it could unlock the mind's secrets or kicking down doors to rifle through a target's personal effects and communications. The revolution in communications technology has made such intrusions look increasingly sloppy and obsolete. Why break a skull or kick down a door when you can read someone's search terms or web-surfing history?
  In the eighteenth century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived of a unique idea for a prison. He called it a "panopticon." It was to be a place where inmates would be constantly exposed to view without ever being able to see their wardens: a total surveillance prison. Today, creating an electronic version of Bentham's panopticon is an increasingly trivial technological task. Given the seductive possibilities now embedded in our world, only strong legal protections would prevent the government from feeling increasingly free to intrude on our lives.
  If anything, though, our legal protections are weakening and privacy is being devalued, which means that Americans with a well-developed sense of self-preservation increasingly assume the possibility of surveillance and watch what they do online and elsewhere. Those who continue to value privacy in a big way may do things that seem a little off: put Post-it notes over their computer cameras, watch what they tweet or post on Facebook, or write their emails as if some omnipresent eye is reading over their shoulders. Increasingly, what once would have been considered paranoid seems prescient -- self-defense and commonsense all rolled into one.
  It's hard to know just what the cumulative effect will be of a growing feeling that nothing is truly private anymore. Certainly, a transparent life has the potential to rob an individual of the sense of security necessary for experimentation with new ideas and new identities without fear that you are being monitored for deviations from the norm. The inevitable result for many will be self-censorship with all its corrosive effects on the rights of free speech, expression, and association.
  The Unknown Unknowns
  Note that we've only begun a tour through the ways in which American privacy is currently under assault by our own government. Other examples abound. There is E-Verify's proposed giant "right-to-work" list of everyone eligible to work in the United States. There are law enforcement agencies that actively monitor social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. There are the Department of Homeland Security's research and development efforts to create cameras armed with almost omniscient facial recognition technology, not to speak of passports issued with radio frequency identificationtechnology. There are networked surveillance camera feeds that flow into government systems. There is NSA surveillance data that's finding its way into domestic drug investigations, which is then hidden by the DEA from defense lawyers, prosecutors, and the courts to ensure the surveillance data stream continues unchallenged.
  And here's the thing: this is only what we know about. As former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once put it, "there are also unknown unknowns -- there are things we do not know we don't know." It would be the height of na¯vet(C) to believe that government organizations across this country -- from the federal to the municipal level -- aren't engaged in other secret and shocking privacy intrusions that have yet to be revealed to us. If the last few months have taught us anything, it should be that we are in a world of unknown unknowns.
  Today, government agencies act as if they deserve the benefit of the doubt as they secretly do things ripped from the pages of science-fiction novels. Once upon a time, that's not how things were to run in a land where people prized their right to be let alone and government of the people, by the people, and for the people was supposed to operate in the open. The government understands this perfectly well: Why else would its law enforcement agents and officers regularly go to remarkable lengths, sometimes at remarkable cost, to conceal their actions from the rest of us and the legal system that is supposed to oversee their acts? Which is why whistleblowers like Edward Snowden are so important: they mount the last line of defense when the powers-that-be get too accustomed to operating in the dark.
  Without our very own Snowdens working in the county sheriff's departments or big city police departments or behemoth federal bureaucracies, especially with the world of newspapers capsizing, the unknowns are ever more likely to stay unknown, while what little privacy we have left vanishes.
  Learn more about government surveillance and other civil liberty issues: Sign up for breaking news alerts, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.
VIDEO-Global Warming Alarmist Appeared in 1978's 'The Coming Ice Age' | NewsBusters
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 13:40
  Stanford University's noted global warming alarmist and Al Gore advisor Stephen Schneider appeared in a 1978 television program warning Americans of a coming Ice Age.
  For those that have forgotten, "In Search of..." was a televised documentary series from 1976 to 1982 that was normally narrated by Leonard Nimoy.
  In the May 1978 episode "The Coming Ice Age," Nimoy presented to viewers facts about the previous Ice Age, and discussed how the bitterly cold winters of 1976 and 1977 might be a harbinger of a new one: "Climate experts believe the next one is on its way. According to recent evidence, it could come sooner than anyone had expected."
  One climate expert cited was Stephen Schneider, a climatologist working for the National Center for Atmospheric Research at the time who was asked to address some of the possible solutions being discussed to stop the coming Ice Age such as using nuclear energy to loosen the polar icecaps (video embedded below the fold, relevant section at 6:04, h/t Minnesotans for Global Warming via Bob Ferguson):
  DR. STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: Can we do these things? Yes. But will they make things better? I'm not sure. We can't predict with any certainty what's happening to our own climatic future. How can we come along and intervene then in that ignorance? You could melt the icecaps. What would that do to the coastal cities? The cure could be worse than the disease. Would that be better or worse than the risk of an ice age?
  Imagine that. In 1978, one of today's leading global warming alarmists not only appeared in a television program warning the world of a coming Ice Age, but he also said: "We can't predict with any certainty what's happening to our own climatic future. How can we come along and intervene then in that ignorance?"
  Now, thirty years later, Schneider is INDEED predicting what's happening to our climatic future by using models, and advocates government intervention to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent global warming.
  Yet, thirty years ago when he was concerned about a new Ice Age, he worried that the proposed cure could be worse than the disease.
  Such concerns have clearly abated, as Schneider is now a member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well a close advisor to Gore.
  In fact, as this video created by Phelim McAleer (the man whose microphone was recently turned off when he had the nerve to ask Gore a question) demonstrates, Schneider was actually with Gore when he acknowledged winning the Nobel Peace Prize:
  Now that Schneider's appearance on "In Search of..." has been uncovered, will journalists always concerned about presenting all sides of the story report this video and its implications or bury it for fear that it might impact pending legislation to cap and tax carbon dioxide emissions?
  Stay tuned.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Invested Millions In Private Prisons - Healthy Debates | Healthy Debates
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 13:35
  (Michael Allen) The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says on its website that it ''works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives.''
  While the Gates Foundation has invested in many worthy projects to help people worldwide, some of the Gates Foundation Trust investments seem to contradict its admirable goal.
  Mother Jones recently analyzed the Gates Foundation's 2012 tax return to see where it was investing its money.
  Probably the most surprising investment was $2.2 million into a private prison company, The GEO Group, which has been accused of numerous human rights abuses and violations.
  According to the Palm Beach Post, The GEO Group has a laundry list of incidents in its private prisons.
  The State of Texas even canceled an $8 million contract with The GEO Group because of a juvenile jail where officials found feces on walls and floors, locked emergency exits and excessive use of pepper spray on minors.
  ''[The GEO Group] knowingly put workers at risk of injury or death by failing to implement well recognized measures that would protect employees from physical assaults by inmates,'' stated Clyde Payne, OSHA's director in Jackson, Miss.
  Mother Jones also found that the Gates Foundation invested $2.4 million in G4S, a UK-based company that operates private prisons for juveniles. G4S has had its own scandals over the deaths and abuse of children, reported the BBC and The Guardian.
  The defense contractor DynCorp received $2.5 million from the Gates Foundation, even though DynCorp has a long history of scandals.
  In 2010, DynCorp employees hired Afghan boys to dress up like girls and dance, and possibly provide sexual services, noted The Guardian.
  In 1999, DynCorp was involved in a sex slavery scandal in Bosnia where DynCorp employees were accused of raping and buying girls as young as 12, noted The Huffington Post.
  Commentscomments
TJX Companies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 08:01
  TJX NameplatesEditStanley Feldberg was one of the 1956 founders of Zayre Corp. He served as president of the company until 1978, and afterwards remained on the Board of Directors, until he retired in 1989.[2] Once the company had sold off the "Zayre" name, the company consisted of its one core remaining store brand, T.J. Maxx.[2] The next year, in 1990, TJX expanded into an additional store brand division, and at the same time it first went international, as it entered the Canadian market by acquiring the five-store Winners chain.[2] Two years later, it launched its third brand, HomeGoods, in the United States.[2] TJX's expansion beyond North America came in 1994, when the fourth brand division, T.K. Maxx, was founded in the United Kingdom, and then expanded into Ireland.[2]
  In 1995, TJX doubled in size when it acquired Marshalls, its fifth brand. T.J. Maxx and Marshalls later became consolidated as two brands under a single division, The Marmaxx Group.[2] The following year, TJX Companies Inc. was added to the Standard & Poor's S&P 500 Composite Index, which consists of 500 of the largest companies in the United States.[4]
  TJX launched a sixth brand, A.J. Wright, in 1998 in the eastern U.S. The brand went national in 2004 when it opened its first stores in California on the west coast.[2] The company's seventh brand division, HomeSense, formed in 2001, was a Canadian brand modeled after the existing US brand, HomeGoods.[2]
  In 2002, TJX revenue reached almost $12 billion.[2] In mid-2003, TJX acquired an eighth brand division, Bob's Stores, concentrated in New England. In Canada, TJX began to configure some Winners and HomeSense stores side-by-side as superstores. The superstores feature open passageways between them, with dual branding. TJX's revenue in 2003 reached over $13 billion.[2] TJX began to test the side-by-side superstore model in the United States in 2004, combining some of each of the two Marmaxx brand stores with HomeGoods. The company reached 141st position in the 2004 Fortune 500 rankings, with almost $15 billion in revenue. That year was also marked by the death of retired Zayre founder Stanley Feldberg.[2]
  In April 2008, TJX launched the HomeSense brand in the UK, with six stores opening throughout May. The brand is more upmarket than its Canadian namesake. Later that year, in August, TJX sold Bob's Stores to Versa Capital Management and Crystal Capital.[5]
  In December 2010, TJX announced that the A.J. Wright stores would be closed, cutting about 4,400 jobs, and that more than half of them would reopen under other company brands.[6]
  To this day, nobody knows what the initials T.J. stand for.
  Computer systems intrusionEditOn January 17, 2007, TJX announced that it was the victim of an unauthorized computer systems intrusion. It discovered in mid-December 2006 that its computer systems were compromised and customer data was stolen.[7] The hackers accessed a system that stores data on credit card, debit card, check, and merchandise return transactions.[8] The intrusion was kept confidential as requested by law enforcement. TJX said that it is working with General Dynamics, IBM and Deloitte to upgrade computer security.
  By the end of March 2007, the number of affected customers had reached 45.7 million [9] and has prompted credit bureaus to seek legislation requiring retailers to be responsible for compromised customer information saved in their systems. In addition to credit card numbers, personal information such as social security numbers and driver's license numbers from 451,000 customers were downloaded by the intruders. The breach was possible due to a non-secure wireless network in one of the stores.[10]
  Eleven men have been charged in the theft, and one (Damon Patrick Toey) has pleaded guilty to numerous charges related to the breach.[11] One man, Jonathan James, professed his innocence and later committed suicide, apparently out of the belief that he was going to be indicted.[12]
  The alleged ringleader Albert Gonzalez was indicted in August 2009 with attacking Heartland Payment Systems in which 130 million records were compromised.[13]
  RestatementEditOn February 11, 2000, the company restated the quarterly sales and earnings of 1999.[14]
  ReferencesEditNotesEdit^CNN Money: Fortune 500 FY2010^ abcdefghijkl2004 Annual Report^http://www.financialpost.com/open+Marshalls+Canada/3300522/story.html^Sam Stovall, Sector Investing, McGraw Hill, 1996, Appendix A, The S&P 500 Composite Index, ISBN 0-07-052239-1^Financial Wire (2008 August 20). TJX Sells Bob's Stores Chain To Versa Capital, Crystal Capital, Terms Undisclosed. Financial Wire, Retrieved September 22, 2008, from http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/1836096/^US Retail News (10 December 2010). TJX Plans to Close A.J. Wright Stores, Cut 4,400 Jobs. Bloomberg.com, Retrieved December 10, 2010, from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-10/tjx-plans-to-convert-or-shut-its-a-j-wright-stores-cut-4-400-positions.html^"THE TJX COMPANIES, INC. VICTIMIZED BY COMPUTER SYSTEMS INTRUSION; PROVIDES INFORMATION TO HELP PROTECT CUSTOMERS" (Press release). The TJX Companies, Inc. 2007-01-17. Retrieved 2009-12-12. ^Lavoie, Denise (2007-01-18). "Credit cos. watchful after TJX breach". Archived from the original on 2007-01-23. Retrieved 2007-01-18. ^Largest Customer Info Breach Grows. MyFox Twin Cities, 29 March 2007.^Joseph Pereira. Breaking the code: How Credit-Card Data Went Out Wireless Door. Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2007. Subscription might be needed^Tomsho, Rob (2008 September 12). Hacker pleads guilty in TJX security breach. The Wall Street Journal, Retrieved September 12, 2008, from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122122769957627957.html?mod=hps_us_whats_news^Poulsen, Kevin (2009-07-09). "Former Teen Hacker's Suicide Linked to TJX Probe". Wired. Retrieved 2009-10-29. ^Hacker Charged With Heartland, Hannaford Breaches - wired.com - August 17, 2009^"The TJX Companies, Inc. Adopts Provisions of Staff Accounting Bulletin No.101 Related to Layaway Sales". SourcesEditExternal linksEdit
  Last modified on 1 December 2013, at 18:58
News from The Associated Press
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 07:59
  NEW YORK (AP) -- Potential victims of credit card fraud tied to Target's security breach said they had trouble contacting the discounter through its website and call centers.Angry Target customers expressed their displeasure in comments on the company's Facebook page. Some even threatened to stop shopping at the store.Target's CEO Gregg Steinhafel apologized through a statement issued on Friday. The retailer also said it's working hard to resolve the problem and is adding more workers to field calls and help solve website issues. And the discounter began offering 10 percent off for customers who shop in its stores on Saturday and Sunday and free credit-monitoring services to those who've been affected by the issue.The Minneapolis-based discounter said that while it's only heard of "very few" reports of fraud, it's reaching out to customers who made purchases by swiping their cards when the scam occurred. The company also said it's continuing its investigation into the matter."We take this crime seriously," Steinhafel said in the statement.Target's statements come after the nation's second-largest retailer acknowledged Thursday that data connected to about 40 million credit and debit card accounts was stolen as part of a breach that began over the Thanksgiving weekend.The theft is the second-largest credit card breach in U.S. history, exceeded only by a scam that began in 2005 involving retailer TJX Cos. That incident affected at least 45.7 million card users.Target disclosed the theft a day after reports that the company was investigating a breach. The retailer's data-security troubles and its ensuing public relations nightmare threaten to drive off holiday shoppers during the company's busiest time of year.Christopher Browning, of Chesterfield, Va., said he was the victim of credit card fraud earlier this week and believes it was tied to a purchase he made at Target with his Visa card on Black Friday. When he called Visa on Thursday, the card issuer could not confirm his suspicions. He said he hasn't been able to get through to Target's call center.On Monday, Browning received a call from his bank's anti-fraud unit saying there were two attempts to use his credit card in California - one at a casino in Tracy for $8,000 and the other at a casino in Pacheco, for $3,000. Both occurred on Sunday and both were denied. He canceled his credit card and plans to use cash."I won't shop at Target again until the people behind this theft are caught or the reasons for the breach are identified and fixed," he said.On Friday, Target reiterated that the stolen data included customer names, credit and debit card numbers, card expiration dates and the embedded code on the magnetic strip found on the backs of cards, Target said.There was no indication the three- or four-digit security numbers visible on the back of the card were affected, Target said. It also said Friday there was no indication that the stolen data included a customer's birth date or social security number. The data breach did not affect online purchases, the company said.Target also said it didn't believe that PIN numbers to customers' debit cards have been compromised. So that means someone cannot visit an ATM with a fraudulent card and withdraw cash, it said.Target hasn't disclosed exactly how the breach occurred but said it has fixed the problem.Given the millions of dollars that companies such as Target spend implementing credit-card security measures each year, Avivah Litan, a security analyst with Gartner Research, said she believes the theft may have been an inside job."The fact this breach can happen with all of their security in place is really alarming," Litan said.Other experts theorize that Target's network was hacked and infiltrated from the outside.Target, which has almost 1,800 stores in the U.S. and 124 in Canada, said it immediately told authorities and financial institutions once it became aware of the breach on Dec. 15. The company is teaming with a third-party forensics firm to investigate and prevent future problems.Data breaches tied to credit card fraud are on the rise, according to Javelin Strategy & Research, a San Francisco-based financial services firm.According to a report by the firm, nearly 16 million consumers were notified that their card information was compromised in 2012, while the number of victims of fraud increased more than threefold from 2010 to 2012. That resulted in $4.8 billion in fraud losses.Al Pascual, a senior analyst of security risk and fraud at Javelin, noted that 28 percent of customers who are notified that their cards were breached typically suffer fraud in the same year."This is going to spawn credit card fraud," he said.Target's credit card breach poses a serious problem and threatens to scare away shoppers who worry about the safety of their personal data."This is close to the worst time to have it happen," said Jeremy Robinson-Leon, a principal at Group Gordon, a corporate and crisis public relations firm. "If I am a Target customer, I think I would be much more likely to go to a competitor over the next few days, rather than risk the potential to have my information be compromised."Target advised customers Thursday to check their statements carefully. Those who see suspicious charges should report them to their credit card companies and call Target at 866-852-8680. Cases of identity theft can also be reported to law enforcement or the Federal Trade Commission.The incident is particularly troublesome for Target because it has used its store-branded credit and debit cards as a marketing tool to attract shoppers with a 5 percent discount.During an earnings call in November, the company said some 20 percent of store customers as of October have the Target-branded cards. In fact, households that activate a Target-branded card have increased their spending at the store by about 50 percent on average, the company said.Shares in Target Corp. rose 34 cents to $62.49 on Friday.---Associated Press writers Michelle Chapman and Bree Fowler in New York contributed to this report.Follow Anne D'Innocenzio at --http://www.Twitter.com/adinnocenzio
Target Was Sued After Putting More Than 40 Million Customers At Risk
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 07:58
  BOSTON (Reuters) - Target Corp said hackers have stolen data from up to 40 million credit and debit cards of shoppers who visited its stores during the first three weeks of the holiday season in the second-largest such breach reported by a U.S. retailer.
  The hackers worked at unprecedented speed, carrying out their operation from the day before Thanksgiving to this past Sunday, 19 days that are the heart of the crucial Christmas holiday sales season.
  Target, the third-largest U.S. retailer, said on Thursday that it was working with federal law enforcement and outside experts to prevent similar attacks in the future. It did not disclose how its systems were compromised.
  The retailer was alerted its systems might have been compromised by credit card processors who had noticed a surge in fraudulent transactions involving credit cards that had been used at Target, according to a person familiar with the investigation who was not authorized to discuss the matter.
  The timing of the breach could not have been worse for Target, coming just before three of the four busiest days of what has been a bruising holiday season for retailers, with the highest level of discounting in years. Target last month lowered its profit forecast for the year.
  "Most of these attacks are just a cost of doing business," said Mark Rasch, a former U.S. prosecutor of cyber crimes.
  "But an attack that's targeted against a major retailer during the peak of the Christmas season is much more than that because it undermines confidence."
  Investigators are still trying to understand how the attack was carried out, including whether hackers found a weakness at Target's computer network or through credit card services vendors. It was not immediately clear what percent of the transactions at its brick and mortar stores had been compromised but the company said its online business had not been affected.
  Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who headed a multi-state probe into a 2007 data breach at TJX Cos, said in a statement that her office was talking to Target about the breach and planned to work with other Attorneys General to determine whether the company had proper safeguards in place.
  New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a public statement that he had asked Target for more information.
  A customer in California filed a class-action lawsuit against the company late on Thursday, the first of what lawyers said could be many such suits.
  Samantha Wredberg said in a court filing that she was a regular shopper at Target and had used her credit card at a company store on December 8. Besides seeking damages, Wredberg asked the court to certify the lawsuit as class action.
  She also asked the court to explore whether "Target unreasonably delayed in notifying affected customers of the data breach".
  The theft of credit and debit card data from Target customers could end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars, but it is unclear who will bear the expense, lawyers and industry sources said.
  The affected payment cards include Target's REDcard private label debit and credit cards as well as other bank cards, Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder said. She declined to say if the incident was affecting store traffic.
  The largest breach against a U.S. retailer, uncovered in 2007 at TJX Cos Inc, led to the theft of data from more than 90 million credit cards over about 18 months.
  Since then, companies have become far more adept at identifying intruders. But criminals have responded by developing more-powerful attack strategies, spending months on reconnaissance to launch sophisticated schemes with the goal of extracting as much data as they can in the shortest period of time.
  Representatives for J.C. Penney Co Inc, Wal-Mart Stores Inc, Best Buy Co Inc and Home Depot Inc told Reuters they believed their systems had not been compromised in similar attacks.
  Target will provide more details on costs related to the issue at a later date, Snyder said. She declined to comment when asked if Target expected potential fines from MasterCard, Visa and American Express or saw a possible increase in merchant fees.
  "It's so early in this investigation," Snyder said.
  Avivah Litan, a Gartner analyst who specializes in cyber-security and fraud detection, saw costs for Target. "They are going to pay for any fraud on the card," she said. "They will get fined (by card issuers) for non-compliance with payment card security standards. Their merchant fee will probably go up a few basis points."
  Target's shares closed down 2.2 percent at $62.15 on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday afternoon, while the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index fell 0.06 percent.
  ANGRY CUSTOMERS
  Target warned customers in an alert on its website that the criminals had stolen names, payment card numbers, expiration dates and security codes.
  The company had identified the breach on Sunday and had begun responding to it the same day, Snyder said. She declined to explain why the retailer waited until Thursday to alert customers.
  Krebs on Security, a security industry blog that broke the news on Wednesday, said the breach involved nearly all of Target's 1,797 stores in the United States.
  The U.S. Secret Service is working on the investigation, according to an agency spokeswoman. A Federal Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman declined to comment.
  Customers began to complain early on Thursday via Target's Facebook page.
  "Thank you Target for nearly costing me and my wife our identities, we will never shop or purchase anything in your store again," said one posting.
  "Shop at Target, become a target," remarked another. "Gee, thanks."
  Target's Snyder said it had been getting an "extremely high" volume of calls from customers.
  JPMorgan Chase & Co, one of the biggest U.S. credit card issuers, said it was monitoring the accounts involved for suspicious activity and urged customers to contact the bank if they noticed any.
  An American Express spokeswoman said the company was aware of the incident and was putting fraud controls in place.
  Major card brands typically offer their cardholders zero liability and cardholders should contact their issuer if they spot suspicious transactions, a Visa spokesman said, adding that a breached account did not necessarily result in a fraudulent purchase.
  "This could hurt the end of the holiday season if for no other reason than many of their customers have to cancel cards ahead of holidays," said Janney Capital Markets analyst David Strasser.
  The breach also comes at a time Target is trying to build its online business, which by some estimates is only 2 percent of sales.
  "All consumers will hear is that Target is not a safe place to use your credit card. That impacts trust, which in turn can impact retail's fastest-growing and most trust-sensitive touch points: online and mobile," said Carol Spieckerman, president of retail strategy firm newmarketbuilders.
  Still, consumers tend to have short memories with these things, so it will likely be less of an issue next quarter, said Gartner analyst Litan.
  "(Consumers) care more about discounts than security," she said.
  The case is Samantha Wredberg vs Target Corp, Case No. 13-cv-05901, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California.
  (Additional reporting by Sakthi Prasad, Siddharth Cavale, David Henry, Marina Lopes, Phil Wahba and Peter Rudegeair; Editing by Kirti Pandey, Rodney Joyce, Lisa Von Ahn, Jilian Mincer, Peter Henderson, Phil Berlowitz, Bob Burgdorfer and Stephen Coates)
  Also on HuffPost:
Target tops ad spending among retailers | RetailingToday.com
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 07:52
  The most recent Leading National Advertisers annual report from Advertising Age shows Target posted the biggest increased in ad spending in 2010 among conventional retailers. The total amount the company spent increased 12% to $1.508 billion compared with $1.246 billion the prior year. That put the company 18th on the Ad Age list of the nation's 100 largest advertisers. Only two retailers spent more than Target. Fifteenth ranked Sears Holdings spent $1.778 billion, 4.6% more than the prior year and 7th ranked Walmart spent $2,055 billion, 0.9% more than the prior year.
  Target spent more on advertising than 19th ranked Macy's, which invested $1.417 billion in marketing for a 2.3% increase. JCPenny also spent a lot on advertising and ranked 25th on the list. Its spending was essentially flat with the prior year at $1.317 billion.
  Other retailers, their rank on the top 100 list and amount spent included Lowe's (47, $778 million), Home Depot (49, $768 million), Best Buy (56, $666 million), Kroger (66, $533 million), Amazon (70, $486 million), Walgreen (72, $468 million), Gap (90, $413 million), CVS Caremark (95, $400 million) and Fry's Electronics (99, $384 million).
Outdated Magnetic Strips: How U.S. Credit Card Security Lags : All Tech Considered : NPR
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 07:46
  hide captionThe U.K., Canada and other countries have been using more secure chip credit cards for years now. Why hasn't the U.S. caught up?
  Martin Keene/PA Photos/LandovThe U.K., Canada and other countries have been using more secure chip credit cards for years now. Why hasn't the U.S. caught up?
  Martin Keene/PA Photos/LandovCriminals may have stolen information from 40 million credit and debit cards used at Target. A possible weakness? The magnetic stripe on credit cards '-- which fraudsters can pull credit card numbers and expiration dates from to make counterfeit cards.
  Other countries moved beyond this technology years ago. The U.K., Canada and Hong Kong are already using chip-based cards, which are considered more secure. (Magnetic stripe technology is decades old.) Cards using the chip-and-PIN system have an embedded microchip. Instead of swiping the part with a magnetic stripe, you put the card into a terminal, then enter a PIN or sign your name. It's more expensive for criminals to forge these cards, says Brian Krebs, a security journalist who writes for Krebs on Security and broke the story on the breach at Target.
  Target didn't give details on how the breach occurred. But Krebs, citing credit card industry sources, reported that it involved "the theft of data stored on the magnetic stripe of cards used at the stores."
  The newer chip-and-PIN technology "simply raises the costs for the bad guys," Krebs told NPR. "It's not that they can't break the system '-- but it makes it more expensive for them to fabricate these cards."
  Visa and MasterCard have plans to introduce these cards in the U.S. in around two years. But why hasn't the U.S. already adopted this technology?
  That's the wrong question to ask, says Ross Anderson, who has worked on payment technology for almost 30 years and is a professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge.
  "Simply blocking off one of the avenues of attacks by fraudsters isn't enough to make fraud vanish," he says.
  It can be a game of cat and mouse. Anderson says after it became common to pay with chip-based cards in the U.K., around 2003, the level of fraud went up because thieves turned to schemes involving mail and telephone orders.
  Eventually, criminals figured out how to make fake terminals that steal information from the card. Also, the cards still have magnetic strips, in case European cardholders want to travel abroad. According to Krebs, some criminals simply steal the information from the cards in Europe, and because they can't pay with magnetic stripe cards over there, they send the information to crooks in the U.S. for illegal shopping sprees.
  Americans are actually lucky, says Anderson, because they have the thing that matters more than technology '-- consumer protection.
  "If there's fraud, the issue is who pays for it; is it me or is it the bank? And if the bank is running the system, then I want the bank to pay for the fraud," Anderson says. "American citizens are lucky because [since the 1970s and early 1980s, they have] very strong consumer protection in the form of Regulation E, Regulation Z and various decided court cases."
  If U.S. cardholders become victims of credit card fraud, they can call their bank and be done with it, losing at most $50 or so. In the U.K., for instance, cardholders have to write a letter to file their claim.
  "The U.S. is ahead in terms of consumer protection, and if you're thinking about the public interest and how things affect you as a bank customer, that's by far the most important thing," Anderson says. "How the banks use technical mechanisms to limit their own exposure then simply becomes an engineering problem for them to solve."
  He says this consumer protection is why online shopping took off in the U.S.
  Starting Oct. 1, 2015, Visa will encourage the use of the new chip-embedded cards in the U.S. After that, if someone uses a chip card at a store that hasn't adopted the new terminals for reading chip cards, the store may be responsible for any fraud that happens.
  Anderson also says this is an exciting time for payment technology. There hasn't been much innovation for the past 30 years or so, but he says mobile payment systems like Google Wallet could be widely used in five to 10 years.
Target security breach: Outdated payment system will cause credit card hacks to continue
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 07:25
  NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- There's a reason millions of credit cards can be stolen from Target at once -- and will continue happening in the future: Our payment system of plastic cards with magnetic stripes is outdated and fundamentally flawed.
  LINK:Recap of Thursday's chat regarding Target breachhttp://bit.ly/1ch8gnI
  The United States is the financial capital of the world, but when it comes to payment technology, it's actually in the boonies.
  In recent years, more than 80 countries have upgraded to credit cards embedded with microchips. Cards with chips are inconceivably difficult to counterfeit, and there's added security in every swipe: Terminals require a user's PIN, and the information on the chip is encrypted.
  Yet Americans keep using payment technology that was developed in the 1960's. That poses a big risk: Cards with magnetic stripes deliver all your data without hiding anything. Swipe your card and the computer sees everything in plain text: your name, credit card provider, card number, expiration date and more.
  All hackers have to do is catch it before retailers' card swiping terminals encrypt that data into jumbled, protected code. They can then easily use that information for online purchases or make counterfeit cards by encoding the stolen account number on a blank card's magnetic stripe.
  Chip-and-PIN credit card systems would likely have prevented the Target hackers from seeing anything but encrypted code. And they'd need a physical chip to make counterfeits.
  The top credit card companies -- Visa, MasterCard and American Express -- would not say why the archaic magnetic strip system remains the norm.
  Credit card fraud in England plummeted 34% in the six years after English banks and merchants implemented chip-and-PIN cards, according to a Federal Reserve report. During a similar period in France, fraud from in-person card use fell 35%.
  But chip-and-PIN cards aren't going mainstream in the United States anytime soon. At $1 to $2 per card, they're about 10 times more expensive for banks to produce than magnetic stripe versions. Merchants would also need to upgrade their point-of-sale systems -- an expensive proposition.
  "It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Merchants need to make the upgrade, but do consumers have cards?" said Jason Oxman, CEO of the Electronics Transaction Association.
  That trade group hopes the shift to chip-and-PIN will be underway by 2015, but others say 2018 is more realistic. Some banks, such as Chase and Citi, already offer the latest chip-and-PIN cards, but they're mostly marketed to customers who frequently travel abroad.
  The problem is that banks and credit card companies have little motivation to change the current system, said Anisha Sekar, who reviews credit cards for finance site NerdWallet. Financial institutions earned $41.2 billion from credit card swipe fees last year, according to advisory firm Sonecon. Meanwhile, they lost just $5.33 billion to fraud, according to payment industry newsletter The Nilson Report.
  "Credit card companies don't have much incentive to make cards safer," Sekar said.
  The-CNN-Wire' & (C) 2013 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.
Sources: Target Investigating Data Breach '-- Krebs on Security
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  Archived Version
  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 07:20
  Nationwide retail giant Target is investigating a data breach potentially involving millions of customer credit and debit card records, multiple reliable sources tell KrebsOnSecurity. The sources said the breach appears to have begun on or around Black Friday 2013 '-- by far the busiest shopping day the year.
  Update, Dec. 19: 8:20 a.m. ET: Target released a statement this morning confirming a breach, saying that 40 million credit and debit card accounts may have been impacted between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, 2013.
  Original story;
  According to sources at two different top 10 credit card issuers, the breach extends to nearly all Target locations nationwide, and involves the theft of data stored on the magnetic stripe of cards used at the stores.
  Minneapolis, Minn. based Target Brands Inc. has not responded to multiple requests for comment. Representatives from MasterCard and Visa also could not be immediately reached for comment.
  Both sources said the breach was initially thought to have extended from just after Thanksgiving 2013 to Dec. 6. But over the past few days, investigators have unearthed evidence that the breach extended at least an additional week '-- possibly as far as Dec. 15. According to sources, the breach affected an unknown number of Target customers who shopped at the company's bricks-and-mortar stores during that timeframe.
  ''The breach window is definitely expanding,'' said one anti-fraud analyst at a top ten U.S. bank card issuer who asked to remain anonymous. ''We can't say for sure that all stores were impacted, but we do see customers all over the U.S. that were victimized.''
  There are no indications at this time that the breach affected customers who shopped at Target's online stores. The type of data stolen '-- also known as ''track data'' '-- allows crooks to create counterfeit cards by encoding the information onto any card with a magnetic stripe. If the thieves also were able to intercept PIN data for debit transactions, they would theoretically be able to reproduce stolen debit cards and use them to withdraw cash from ATMs.
  It's not clear how many cards thieves may have stolen in the breach. But the sources I spoke with from two major card issuers said they have so far been notified by one of the credit card associations regarding more than one million of cards total from both issuers that were thought to have been compromised in the breach. A third source at a data breach investigation firm said it appears that ''when all is said and done, this one will put its mark up there with some of the largest retail breaches to date.''
  Some of the largest retailer breaches to date may help explain what happened in this case. In 2007, retailer TJX announced that its systems had been breached by hackers. The company later learned that thieves had used the store's wireless networks to access systems at its Massachusetts headquarters that were used to store data related to payment card, check and return transactions at stores across the country, and that crooks had made off with data from more than 45 million customer credit and debit cards.
  In 2009, credit card processor Heartland Payment Systems disclosed that thieves had broken into is internal card processing network, and installed malicious software that allowed them to steal track data on more than 130 million cards.
  This is likely to be a fast-moving story. Stay tuned for updates as they become available.
  Have you seen:Cards Stolen in Target Breach Flood Underground Markets'''...Credit and debit card accounts stolen in a recent data breach at retail giant Target have been flooding underground black markets in recent weeks, selling in batches of one million cards and going for anywhere from $20 to more than $100 per card, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.
  Tags: target black friday breach, target data breach
  This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 18th, 2013 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Other. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Target's Biggest PR Mistake With Credit Card Security Breach - Forbes
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 07:10
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Sickened by service: More US sailors claim cancer from helping at Fukushima | Fox News
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 06:39
  When the USS Ronald Reagan responded to the tsunami that struck Japan in March 2011, Navy sailors including Quartermaster Maurice Enis gladly pitched in with rescue efforts.
  But months later, while still serving aboard the aircraft carrier, he began to notice strange lumps all over his body. Testing revealed he'd been poisoned with radiation, and his illness would get worse. And his fiance and fellow Reagan quartermaster, Jamie Plym, who also spent several months helping near the Fukushima nuclear power plant, also began to develop frightening symptoms, including chronic bronchitis and hemorrhaging.
  ''I get so angry. They said as long as the plume was avoided we would be fine."
  - Navy sailor Jamie Plym
  They and 49 other U.S. Navy members who served aboard the Reagan and sister ship the USS Essex now trace illnesses including thyroid and testicular cancers, leukemia and brain tumors to the time spent aboard the massive ship, whose desalination system pulled in seawater that was used for drinking, cooking and bathing. In a lawsuit filed against Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the plaintiffs claim the power company delayed telling the U.S. Navy the tsunami had caused a nuclear meltdown, sending huge amounts of contaminated water into the sea and, ultimately, into the ship's water system.
  ''At our level, we weren't told anything,'' Plym told FoxNews.com. ''We were told everything was OK.''
  Now, Plym, Enis and dozens of others wonder if their service to their country and to Japan has left them doomed.
  ''I get so angry," Plym said. "They said as long as the plume was avoided we would be fine. But we knew then that something was going to happen. Common sense tells you that the wind would blow it everywhere. You don't need to be a nuclear scientist to figure that out.''
  San Francisco Attorney Charles Bonner,who is representing allegedly cancer-stricken sailors, initially filed a federal suit in the Southern District of California more than a year ago on behalf of a dozen sailors. The lawsuit was initially dismissed, when the court ruled that any ruling would hinge on interpreting communication between the Japanese and U.S. governments, which could violate the separation of powers. But Bonner is amending the suit to add new allegations that would fall under the court's jurisdiction. And the number of plaintives has more than quadrupled as more service members come forward with radiation-related illnesses, he said.
  ''They went in to help with rescue efforts," said Bonner, who plans to refile the suit on Jan. 6. "They did not go in prepared to deal with radiation containment.''
  The plaintiffs don't blame the U.S. Navy, which they believe acted in good faith, Bonner said. It was the plant's operators who sat on the meltdown information during the crucial hours following the March 11, 2011 disaster, he said.
  ''TEPCO pursued a policy which caused rescuers, including the plaintiffs, to rush into an unsafe area which was too close to the [Fukushima nuclear power plant] that had been damaged,'' Bonner charged in an April filing now being updated to add more plaintiffs. ''Relying upon the misrepresentation regarding health and safety made by TEPCO, upon information and belief, the U.S. Navy was lulled into a false sense of security.
  ''The officers and crew of the U.S.S. Reagan (CVN-76) and other vessels believed that it was safe to operate within the waters adjacent to the FNPP, without doing the kinds of research and testing that would have verified the problems known to the defendant TEPCO at the time.''
  Nathan Piekutoski, 22, who served aboard the USS Essex, which was in the same deployment as the Reagan, said sailors had no choice but to trust what they were told.
  ''They did say it was safe at the time,'' Piekutoski said. ''We had to take their word for it.''
  Piekutowski says he suffered from leukemia and, while he is currently in remission, Doctors have told him that he may need a bone marrow transplant.
  ''Within a few months I started getting all these weird symptoms," he recalled of the months following the disaster response. "Night sweats. Not sleeping. I started losing a lot of weight.
  ''It's one of those things," he added. "You're angry that it happens but we had to go. It was our duty. I joined the military to help people in need.''
  A spokesperson for the Department of Defense declined to comment on the pending lawsuit, but told FoxNews.com the Pentagon has been monitoring and collecting data on radiation exposure in the region.
  TEPCO officials did not respond to requests for comment. But a recent admission before members of the Japanese press on Dec. 12 during a meeting at the Tokyo Press Club, former Prime Minister Naoto Jan said the first meltdown occurred five hours after the tsunami, not the next day as reported at the time.
  Bonner alleges that the statement means that the Japanese government knew radiation was being leaked and did not inform the U.S. Navy.
  ''They knew there was an active meltdown and they deliberately hid it from the public as well as the Navy,'' Bonner said. ''Those sailors went in there totally unaware and they were contaminated as a result.''
  Plym says she is prepared to have her symptoms question in court, should the case go to trial. But with so many U.S. sailors coming forward, she believes justice will prevail.
  ''People will say that out lawsuit is fake and that we are doing this for money, but it's really about getting the correct information out there,'' Plym said.
Kenya: Sh320 Billion Is Too Much for a Railway - Expert
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  Source: AllAfrica News: Latest
  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 06:29
  A railway expert has criticised the Sh320 billion cost for the upgrade of the railway to standard gauge. President Uhuru Kenyatta has dismissed doubts of MPs who were questioning the deal.
  He said there was no corruption in the single-sourced tender award to China Roads and Bridges Construction.
  The first phase of the project covers the construction of 480 kilometres between Mombasa and Nairobi and should be completed by 2017.
  The expert said Kenya's topography from Mombasa to Nairobi is almost flat although there will be 98 bridges and 967 culverts.
  "The price is still high. All over the world, the price per kilometer is between $1 million (Sh86 million) and $2 million (Sh172 million). The $6 million (Sh515 million) charged is very high," he said.
  "There are no major rivers or lakes or big hills to justify the high cost," the expert said, adding that CRBC had not explained its costings.
  Some MPs have compared the pricing to the construction of the Djibouti-Addis Ababa railway by China Railway Construction Corporation. The Kenyan unit price is 27 per cent higher than the 743-kilometre Ethiopian railway.
  The Kenyan cost per km is $6.6 million (Sh566 million) compared to $4.9 million (Sh420 million) for the Ethiopian railway.
  However the Ethiopian Railway is double track, not single track. It is also electric which is more expensive than an ordinary railway line for diesel powered trains because of the overhead power lines. Kenya is also spending more to buy its trains and rolling stock than Ethiopia.
  The MPs estimate that the Kenyan taxpayer will be spending Sh110 billion more than necessary.
  The standard gauge railway line will carry freight trains at up to 80 kilometres per hour, and passenger trains at a maximum speed of 120 kilometres per hour.
  The expert, who has worked for Kenya Railways and who asked not to be named, doubted that those speeds can be achieved with a single track as there will be stoppages to allow other trains to pass.
South Sudan: Unity State's Fourth Division Commander Defects, Assumes Governorship
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  Source: AllAfrica News: Latest
  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 06:29
  Bentiu '-- The fourth division commander of South Sudan's army in oil-producing Unity state has declared that he has deposed the caretaker governor and that his forces were no longer loyal to President Salva Kiir.
  Speaking over state and private radio stations on Saturday morning, James Koang Chuol said he had overthrown governor, Joseph Nguen Monytuel after uncovering an alleged plot to have him assassinated.
  Koang said that the fourth division's tank unit allegedly tried to kill him at around 7pm on Friday evening upon being ordered by Monytuel at the behest of senior members of the military in Juba.
  Addressing the people of Unity state, Koang ordered the state ministers to remain in their homes, but called on civil servants to continue working as normal.
  The fourth division commander said president Kiir, his vice president and the former caretaker governor of Unity state had fueled the fighting that has now spread throughout the country, since it began in the capital, Juba on 15 December.
  Human Rights Watch and other sources have reported that some of the fighting in Juba targeted citizens on the basis of their tribe, after clashes between Dinka and Nuer members of the presidential guard.
  The violence comes after severe tension with senior members of South Sudan's ruling party (SPLM) following the dismissal of the country's cabinet, vice president and the suspension of the SPLM's secretary general Pagan Amum earlier in July.
  President Kiir has accused his opponents within the SPLM of staging a coup and has arrested at least 11 senior figures. Former vice president Riek Machar, whom Kiir accuses of masterminding the alleged plot, is now on the run, but advised the latter to step down.
  Machar told the former BBC correspondent, James Copnall that Koang was the new governor of Unity state, while Peter Gadet who is fighting for control Bor, is the military governor of Unity state.
  The ex-vice president confirmed that he was now in rebellion and the former Unity state governor Taban Deng who was sacked earlier this year was physically with him.
  Machar said that he would only enter talk talks if all those detained were allowed safe passage to a neighbouring country like Ethiopia.
South Sudan: Attack On UN's Akobo Base Killed 30 Civilians, Says Foreign Minister
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  Source: AllAfrica News: Latest
  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 06:28
  Juba '-- At least 30 South Sudanese civilians and two Indian peacekeepers lost their lives when the United Nations base in Akobo, in the far east of Jonglei state, was attacked on Thursday, according to South Sudan's foreign minister. One Indian peacekeeper was also injured.
  Speaking during a memorial ceremony for the Indian soldiers in the capital Juba, South Sudan's foreign affairs minister, Benjamin Marial deplored the "cowardice" of those who carried out the attack.
  The South Sudan government was sadden by the death of the two peacekeepers "who had paid [with] their lives to protect our citizens", Marial said during eulogies at the base of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) in Juba.
  Civilians streaming into the UNMISS compound in Bor, capital of Jonglei state, South Sudan, seeking refuge from the violence. (Photo: UNMISS/Hailemichael Gebrekrstos)
  Since fighting between Dinka and Nuer members of the Presidential Guard began on 15 December around around 500 people have been killed. An estimated 34,000 people have taken refuge at UN compounds around the world's youngest country.
  UNMISS said that 43 Indian peacekeepers, six UN police advisers and two civilian UN members of staff were at the base when Dinka civilians sought shelter there from the instability that has spread from the capital Juba to Jonglei and Unity state.
  The attackers, the Indian ambassador to the UN said, were angry Nuer who were seeking retribution against Dinka civilians in response to reports from Juba that Nuer civilians had been targeted by Dinka soldiers in the first days on the fighting.
  This has been denied by the government but Human Rights Watch has reported that civilians were attacked on the basis of their ethnicity.
  Only seven of the estimated 37 Dinka civilians who sought shelter at the base survived the attack. The survivors were airlifted to Malakal, the capital of neighbouring Upper Nile state on Friday.
  One survivor, who reached Juba on Saturday, told Sudan Tribune that the attack was so horrific that he could not bring himself to describe what happened.
  The chief of staff of South Sudan's army, James Hoth Mai, said on Saturday that that youth that attacked the UN base in Akobo are moving, adding that the government is not in control of the area.
  President Salva Kiir claimed on Monday that the army infighting that triggered the violence was an attempted coup and arrested many senior officials. His former deputy, Riek Machar, and the other accused members of the ruling SPLM, denied any coup attempt.
  Since then Machar has been on the run and has called on Kiir to step down. However the former vice president has said he is willing to enter negotiations on the condition that all the senior officials are released and allowed to travel to a safe location, such as Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.
Readout of President Obama's Updates on South Sudan
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  Archived Version
  Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 06:28
  The White House
  Office of the Press Secretary
  For Immediate Release
  December 21, 2013
  Last night, upon landing in Hawaii, President Obama was updated on Air Force One on the status of the four American service members who were wounded attempting to evacuate American citizens in Bor, South Sudan. He directed his national security team to ensure the safety of our military personnel, and to continue to work with the United Nations to evacuate our citizens from Bor.
  This morning, following a meeting of his national security principals that was led by National Security Advisor Susan Rice, President Obama participated in a secure call with Ambassador Rice, Deputy National Security Advisor Tony Blinken, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, and Senior Director for African Affairs Grant Harris to update him on the situation in South Sudan. The President was briefed on the status of our military personnel, and the safety of our citizens in Bor and U.S. personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Juba. The President was pleased that our service members are in stable condition, and reaffirmed the importance of continuing to work with the United Nations to secure our citizens in Bor. He underscored that South Sudan's leaders have a responsibility to support our efforts to secure American personnel and citizens in Juba and Bor.
  More broadly, the President underscored the urgency of helping to support efforts to resolve the differences within South Sudan through dialogue. South Sudan's leaders must know that continued violence will endanger the people of South Sudan and the hard-earned progress of independence. This conflict can only be resolved peacefully through negotiations. Any effort to seize power through the use of military force will result in the end of longstanding support from the United States and the international community.
  President Obama expressed his deep appreciation for the work of our military and civilians who are operating in difficult circumstances in South Sudan and directed his team to continue to update him going forward.
VIDEO-SNL Lampoons Russian Anti-Gay Laws With Billie Jean King Bit
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 06:20
  Earlier in the week, the United States announced its delegation to Russia for the Sochi Olympics and it was pretty obviously a giant middle finger pointed at Moscow. Two openly-gay and one soon-to-be-openly-gay delegats were named to the delegation, including tennis Hall of Famer Billie Jean King. Saturday Night Live made it a double with this bit featuring King in the Weekend Update segment.
  Kate McKinnon plays up all the absurd stereotypes'--Melissa Etheridge, ice dancing and sensible automobile jokes aplenty'--as the tennis star in this send up of the Russian anti-gay stance.
  [NBC]
reasonableness test-Right to protest protected in amendments to bill | Law | The Guardian
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 06:15
  The Home Office minister Norman Baker says he does not believe that the bill in its original draft would lead to major intrusions into civil liberties. Photograph: London News Pictures/Rex Features
  The Home Office minister Norman Baker is to amend the government's new antisocial behaviour powers amid fears they could be used to ban carol singers, charity collectors and protesters .
  Critics say the way the bill is currently drafted mean its powers could be used to stifle many forms of protest on the grounds that they might cause annoyance or a nuisance to somebody else.
  Baker tabled government amendments on Thursday to the anti-social behaviour, crime and policing bill reinforcing the right to peaceful protest.
  The government amendments will also ensure that new injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance, known as Ipnas '' which are to replace antisocial behaviour orders (asbos) '' include an extra "reasonableness test" to ensure that the courts cannot grant them for no reason. This is to extend an existing test in the legislation which requires the court to consider the injunctions "just and convenient" before they are granted.
  The extra civil liberty safeguards are to be included following meetings involving the Liberal Democrat minister and critics of the bill, who have included the former director of public prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, and Lord Faulks, who, coincidentally, was appointed a justice minister on Thursday.
  Macdonald has said that the bill in its current form potentially empowers state interference against political demonstrations, street performers and street corner preachers in the face of shockingly low safeguards.
  A campaign, Reform Clause 1 '' Feel Free to Annoy Me, supported by the former Tory shadow home secretary, David Davis, human rights activist Peter Tatchell, and the former chief constable of the West Midlands, Lord Dear, was set up to highlight concerns over the new style asbos.
  Baker said: "I do not believe that the bill as previously framed would lead to major intrusions into civil liberties. But nevertheless it is right that we apply belt and braces because nobody, least of all me, wants to limit proper civil liberties. Therefore these amendments will, I hope, reassure people that basic liberties will not be affected."
  The Home Office move comes in advance of a House of Lords debate on a raft of critical amendments to the bill due to take place on 8 January, just after the Christmas recess.
VIDEO-ABC Denounces 'Outrageous,' 'Offensive' Duck Dynasty Comments | MRCTV
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 06:12
  MRC TV is an online platform for people to share and view videos, articles and opinions on topics that are important to them '-- from news to political issues and rip-roaring humor.
  MRC TV is brought to you by the Media Research Center, a 501(c) 3 nonprofit research and education organization. The MRC is located at: 1900 Campus Commons Drive, Reston, VA 20194. For information about the MRC, please visit www.MRC.org.
  Copyright (C) 2013, Media Research Center. All Rights Reserved.
VIDEO- "We Have To Get back To Where We Are Protecting Americans Rights!" Senator Leahy - YouTube
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 06:04
Christopher Soghoian - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 05:49
  Christopher Soghoian is a Washington, DC based privacy researcher and activist. He first gained notoriety in 2006 as the creator of a website that generated fake airline boarding passes. Since that incident, he has continued to engage in high-profile activism related to privacy and computer security. He is currently the principal technologist and a senior policy analyst with the speech, privacy and technology project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
  Between 2009 and 2010, he worked for the US Federal Trade Commission as the first ever in-house technical advisor to the Division of Privacy and Identity Protection.[1] While at the FTC, he assisted with investigations of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Netflix.
  Education[edit]Soghoian, who holds British and US nationality,[2] received a B.S. from James Madison University (Computer Science; 2002), a Masters from Johns Hopkins University (Security Informatics; 2005), and a PhD from Indiana University (Informatics; 2012). His dissertation focused on the role that third party internet and telecommunications service providers play in facilitating law enforcement surveillance of their customers.[3]
  He is currently a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project and a Fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University. He was an Open Society Foundations Fellow between 2011 and 2012 and was a Student Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University between 2008 and 2009.
  Boarding pass security[edit]On October 26, 2006, Soghoian created a website that allowed visitors to generate fake boarding passes for Northwest Airlines. While users could change the boarding document to have any name, flight number or city that they wished, the generator defaulted to creating a document for Osama Bin Laden.
  Soghoian claimed that his motivation for the website was to focus national attention on the ease with which a passenger could evade the no-fly lists.[4] Information describing the security vulnerabilities associated with boarding pass modification had been widely publicized by others before, including Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY)[5][6] and security expert Bruce Schneier.[7] Soghoian received media attention for posting a program on his website to enable the automatic production of modified boarding passes.
  On October 27, 2006, Democratic Congressman Edward Markey called for Soghoian's arrest.[8] Two days later, he issued a revised statement stating that Soghoian should not go to jail, and that instead, the Department of Homeland Security should "put him to work" to fix the boarding pass security flaws.[9]
  At 2 am on October 28, 2006, his home was raided by agents of the FBI to seize computers and other materials.[10] Soghoian's Internet Service Provider voluntarily shut down the website, after it received a letter from the FBI claiming that the site posed a national security threat.[11] The FBI closed the criminal investigation in November 2006 without filing any charges,[12] as did the TSA in June 2007.[13][14]
  Consumer privacy research and activism[edit]In May 2011, Soghoian was approached by public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and asked to write an anti-Google op-ed, criticizing the company for privacy issues associated with its social search product. Soghoian refused, and instead published the email conversation. A subsequent investigation by journalists revealed that the PR firm, which had refused to identify its client to Soghoian, had been retained by Facebook.[15]
  In May 2011, Soghoian filed a complaint with the FTC, in which he claimed that online backup service Dropbox was deceiving its customers about the security of its services.[16] Soon after Soghoian first publicly voiced his concerns, Dropbox updated its terms of service and privacy policy to make it clear that the company does not in fact encrypt user data with a key only known to the user, and that the company can disclose users' private data if forced to by law enforcement agencies.
  Soghoian is one of the three co-creators of the Do Not Track mechanism, along with security researchers Sid Stamm and Dan Kaminsky. In July 2009, Soghoian and Stamm created a prototype add-on for the Firefox web browser, implementing support for a new Do Not Track header.[17] In the three years that followed, all of the major web browsers added support for the header, which is currently being standardized by the W3C.[18]
  In June 2009, Soghoian published an open letter[19] to Google that was signed by an additional 37 prominent security and privacy experts, urging the company to protect the privacy of its customers by enabling SSL encryption by default for Gmail and its other cloud based services.[20] In January 2010, Google enabled SSL by default for users of Gmail,[21] and subsequently for other products, including search (for signed in users).
  Government surveillance research and activism[edit]In December 2009, Soghoian released an audio recording he made at a closed-door surveillance industry conference. In the recording, an executive from Sprint Nextel revealed that the company had created a special website through which law enforcement agents can obtain GPS information on subscribers and that the website had been used to process 8 million requests during the previous year.[22] That recording was subsequently cited by Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in U.S. v. Pineda-Moreno, in support of his view that "1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last."[23]
  In December 2009, Soghoian released a letter written by lawyers for Yahoo!, objecting to the release of documents detailing how much the company charges for government requested surveillance activities. In the letter, Yahoo!'s attorneys argued that: "[T]he [pricing] information, if disclosed, would be used to 'shame' Yahoo! and other companies '' and to 'shock' their customers. Therefore, release of Yahoo!'s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies."[24] When a copy of the price list subsequently appeared on Cryptome, Yahoo! sent a DMCA takedown request to the website in an attempt to force the removal of the information.[25]
  ^Zetter, Kim (August 17, 2009). "Outspoken Privacy Advocate Joins FTC". Wired.com. Retrieved 2009-11-20. ^Brown, David. FBI foils student's air scam siteThe Times November 3, 2006^Soghoian, Christopher (August 1, 2012). "The Spies We Trust: Third Party Service Providers and Law Enforcement Surveillance". Retrieved 2012-12-23. ^Soghoian, Christopher (October 26, 2006). "Chris's NWA Boarding Pass Generator". Retrieved 2007-03-05. ^Schumer, Charles E. (February 13, 2005). "Schumer reveals new gaping hole in air security". Archived from the original on November 21, 2006. Retrieved 2006-11-30. ^Schumer, Charles E. (April 9, 2006). "Schumer Reveals: In Simple Steps Terrorists Can Forge Boarding Pass And Board Any Plane Without Breaking The Law!". Retrieved 2006-11-30. [dead link]^Schneier, Bruce (August 15, 2003). "Flying on Someone Else's Airplane Ticket". Crypto-Gram. Retrieved 2006-11-30. ^Singel, Ryan (October 27, 2006). "Congressman Ed Markey Wants Security Researcher Arrested". Wired News. Retrieved 2012-12-24. ^"Markey: Don't Arrest Student, Use Him To Fix Loopholes". Press Release. October 29, 2006. Retrieved 2012-12-24. ^Krebs, Brian (November 1, 2006). "Student Unleashes Uproar With Bogus Airline Boarding Passes". Washington Post. Retrieved 2006-11-30. ^Singel, Ryan (November 29, 2007). "Is A Gov Shutdown of a Website Without A Court Order Ilegal? Supreme Court Suggests Yes". Wired News. Retrieved 2008-03-05. ^"IU Student, Focus of FBI Probe, Speaks Out". TheIndyChannel.com. Retrieved 2006-11-30. ^Kane, David (June 6, 2007). "Warning Notice, page 1". Transportation Security Administration. Retrieved 2007-07-23. ^Kane, David (June 6, 2007). "Warning Notice, page 2". Transportation Security Administration. Retrieved 2007-07-23. ^Helft, Miguel (May 13, 2011). "Facebook, Foe of Anonymity, Is Forced to Explain a Secret". The New York Times. Retrieved 2011-07-17. ^Singel, Ryan (May 13, 2011). "Dropbox Lied to Users About Data Security, Complaint to FTC Alleges". Wired News. Retrieved 2011-07-17. ^Soghoian, Christopher. "The History of the Do Not Track Header". Slight Paranoia. Retrieved February 22, 2012. ^"Tracking Protection Working Group". W3C. Retrieved February 22, 2012. ^Soghoian, Christopher (June 16, 2009). "An open letter to Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt". Retrieved 2009-06-20. ^Helft, Miguel (June 16, 2009). "Gmail to Get More Protection From Snoops". The New York Times '' Bits Blog. Retrieved 2009-06-20. ^Schillace, Sam (January 12, 2010). "Default HTTPS Access For Gmail". The Official Gmail Blog. Retrieved 2010-05-15. ^Zetter, Kim (December 1, 2009). "Feds 'Pinged' Sprint GPS Data 8 Million Times Over a Year". Wired News. Retrieved 2010-05-15. ^United States v. Pineda-Moreno, 617 F.3d 1120 (9th Cir. 2010).^Zetter, Kim (December 1, 2009). "Yahoo, Verizon: Our Spy Capabilities Would 'Shock', 'Confuse' Consumers". Wired News. Retrieved 2010-05-15. ^Zetter, Kim (December 4, 2009). "Yahoo Issues Takedown Notice for Spying Price List". Wired News. Retrieved 2010-05-15. References[edit](French) Yves Eudes, Hacker vaillant rien d'impossible, Le Monde, November 17, 2012, pp. 36''37. Also published in Le Temps, Saturday December 8, 2012, pp. 26''27.Glenn Fleishman, A knight in digital armour, The Economist, September 1, 2012.Mike Kessler, The Pest Who Shames Companies Into Fixing Security Flaws, Wired, November 23, 2011.External links[edit]PersondataNameSoghoian, ChristopherAlternative namesShort descriptionAmerican computer scientistDate of birth1981Place of birthSan Francisco, CaliforniaDate of deathPlace of death
M(C)decins du Monde - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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  M(C)decins du Monde (MDM) or Doctors of the World, is a French non-governmentalhumanitarian aid organisation created in March 1980 by 15 French doctors, including Bernard Kouchner after he had left M(C)decins Sans Fronti¨res (MSF, Doctors Without Borders), the aid society which he had co-founded earlier in 1971. The impetus for the foundation of MDM was Kouchner's split with MSF over certain aspects of MSF's policies. For example, he felt that MSF was giving up its founding principle of t(C)moignage ("witnessing"), which refers to aid workers making the atrocities they observe known to the public. While MSF still practices this principle under certain conditions, the organization has moved closer to a more neutral approach as a consequence of experiences from the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. In contrast to that shift in MSF's policy, MDM maintains that humanitarian aid cannot be separated from politics, lest the aid become misused by politicians (e.g. by sending bombs, and then doctors). Another reason for Kouchner's split with MSF was an aid mission for Vietnameseboat people organized and led by Kouchner in 1980. While the mission was later considered to be successful, it was seen as a single-handed operation and not supported by the majority of MSF's leadership back then.
  History[edit]Kouchner was president of MDM from 1980 to 1982. In 1989, the foundation of a second national MDM association in Spain paved the way for the creation of the international network of MDM. The MDM association in the United States founded in 1990 was the first non-European association. Currently, the international network of MDM consists of fifteen associations; they are in France (founded 1980), Spain (founded 1989), Greece (founded 1990), Italy and Switzerland (both founded 1993), Sweden (founded 1994), Cyprus (founded 1995 by Elena Theoharous[1]), Argentina (founded 1998), Belgium, Canada and Portugal (all founded in 1999), as well as in Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, the Netherlands, and the US. The international network head office coordinates the network members from its office in Paris, France.
  Operations[edit]MDM has been involved in about 300 projects in more than 80 countries. In contrast to MSF, which primarily focuses its work on emergency aid work, MDM is equally active in short-term emergency aid, reconstruction and rehabilitation aid as well as long-term development projects for a period of up to three years. MDM has around 7,000 members worldwide, around 360 paid staff members and about 6,700 volunteers, about 1,200 of them working on-site in the projects of the organization. The income in 2003 was about 43.6 million euros, of which about two-thirds came from private donations and one-third from public sources. Of these funds, about 41.6 million euros were spent for its work.
  Incidents[edit]In September 2008, two MDM workers were kidnapped in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, and later released.[2]
  See also[edit]References[edit]External links[edit]
Doctors of the World - International network
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  Out of a desire to bring help to the victims of the Biafra (Nigerian province) war of independence, many doctors had joined the Red Cross. In 1971 a number of them opposed to maintaining the silence and neutrality required by the Red Cross created an association with more scope to speak up and to act, Doctors Without Borders.
  At the end of the seventies a crisis was unfolding in Vietnam as people began to flee Vietnam in makeshift boats. Among these doctors, some were of the opinion that a ship had to be chartered with physicians and journalists in order to provide care to the boat people and to report on the human rights violations they were witnessing. The leadership of Doctors without Frontiers considered the operation too sensationalist. about a group of fifteen doctors decided to create a new association whose mandate was to both provide care and bear witness. Doctors of the World was thus born in France in March 1980.
  ' History of Doctors of the World's network
  Setting up the first organisation launched a dynamic force which resulted in the creation of a number of Doctors of the World organisations in Europe, North and South America and Asia.
  Doctors of the World United States: 1987 Doctors of the World Spain / M(C)dicos del Mundo: 1990 Doctors of the World Greece / Giatri tou Kosmou: 1990 Doctors of the World Italy / Medici del Mundo: 1993 Doctors of the World Switzerland / Medecins du Monde: 1993 Doctors of the World Cyprus / Yiatroi Tou Kosmou Kypros: 1995 Doctors of the World Sweden / L¤kare i V¤rlden : 1991 Doctors of the World Canada / M(C)decins du Monde : 1996 Doctors of the World Netherlands / Dokters van de Wereld: 1997 Doctors of the World Argentina / M(C)dicos del Mundo: 1998 Doctors of the World United Kingdom / Doctors of the World:1998 Doctors of the World Portuga/ Medicos do Mundo : 1999 Doctors of the World Belgium / M(C)decins du Monde : 1999 Doctors of the World Germany / Artze der Welt: 1999 Doctors of the World Japan: 2000
  The mandate all of these organisation chose for themselves was to provide care to the most vulnerable populations and report on their situation. They are active throughout the world, through medical programmes in their own countries and abroad.
  The organisations provide care to the most vulnerable without regard for sex, age, religion, ethnic origin or political philosophy.
  Each organisation member of the International Network gathers doctors who volunteer their services. Actions are carried out with professionals generally from the medical field: doctors, surgeons, midwives, nurses, psychologists, and clinicians. However other types of expertisel are also necessary: coordinators, administrators, logisticians, social workers and specialists in human rights.
  While remaining faithful to our mandate for ''humanitarian emergency response'', our original tenet, Doctors of the World gradually expanded its field intervention to incorporate rehabilitation, prevention and development programmes on the five continents.
  In 1994, the growing number of conflicts together with the increased number of international organisations led the international network to set up regulatory bodies. An International Secretariat was created in 1995, it became the International Network Head Office in 2008 with a view toward coordinating our organisations' actions throughout the world, raise the quality of programmes thanks to field practice exchanges and coordination, meetings of actors, common testimony...
  A few key dates
  1969: Biafra crisis 1971: Creation of Doctors Without Borders 1979: Operation ''Island of Light'' in Vietnam 1980: Creation of Doctors of the World 1981: El Salvador: Airlifting 60 tons of food and medicines 1986: Creation of Doctors of the World domestic mission in France with the Parisian opening of a free clinic for social support and care. Opening of the first HIV screening centre. 1987: Creation of Doctors of the World United States 1987: Adoption of the ''droit d'ing(C)rence'' 1988: Creation of Doctors of the World Switzerland 1990: Adoption of the European Charter of Humanitarian Aid known as the Cracow Charter 1990: Creation of Doctors of the World Spain and Doctors of the World Greece 1993: Creation of Doctors of the World Italy 1994: Intervention in Rwanda 1994: Setting up of the first needle exchange programmes by MdM France 1995: Creation of Doctors of the World Cyprus and Doctors of the World Sweden 1995: Setting up of the International Secretariat 1996: Doctors of the World International Network obtained advisory status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council 1997: Assassination of three Spanish volunteers in Rwanda 1997: Creation of Doctors of the World Netherlands 1998: Creation of Doctors of the World Argentina and Doctors of the World United Kingdom 1998: Adoption of the slogan ''We fight all diseases, including injustice'' 1999: Interventions in Kosovo, Timor -Leste and Chechnya 1999: Creation of Artze der Welt Germany 2000: Creation of Doctors of the World Japan 2004: First interdelegation joint mission in Zimbabwe 2005: Interventions in Indonesia and Sri Lanka after the December 2004 : tsunami 2008 : setting up of International Network Head Office / Direction du R(C)seau International (DRI) in Paris and Madrid 2009 : DoW USA and Cyprus are closed 2010 : Haiti : all MdM join their work to help Haitian population
VIDEO- New TOP Secret Documents Reveal More NSA & UK Spying On EU Businesses & Politicians - YouTube
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VIDEO- General Michael Carey Nuclear Commander FIRED After "BOOZING IT UP" In Moscow - YouTube
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Gunman Karl Pierson's Parents 'Shattered' By Arapahoe High School Shooting
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  A father picks up his daughter at a church where students from nearby Arapahoe High School were evacuated to after a shooting on the Centennial, Colo., campus Friday, Dec. 13, 2013. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said the shooter shot two others at the school, before apparently killing himself.(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)
  School Shooting, Grayson RobinsonMedia cover a briefing by Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson Saturday, Dec. 14, 2013, at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., where 18-year-old shooting suspect Karl Halverson Pierson shot student Claire Davis, 17,on Friday, then turned the gun on himself. AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)
  School Shooting, Grayson RobinsonArapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson holds a picture of Claire Davis the 17-year-old student that was shot during a briefing Saturday, Dec. 14, 2013, at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. Davis was shot by 18-year-old shooting suspect Karl Halverson Pierson at the school on Friday before he took his own life. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)
  Arapahoe High SchoolRoses and a sign of support are woven into a cyclone fence around a tennis court at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., on Saturday, Dec. 14, 2013. The school was the scene of a shooting on Friday that left a student gunman dead and two other students injured. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
  School Shooting, Sharon AdamsSharon Adams looks through a 2013 Arapahoe High School yearbook at her home near the school in Centennial, Colo., on Saturday, Dec. 14, 2013. The Adams daughter is a cheerleader at the school and escaped unharmed. Pierson critically wounded one student, before apparently killing himself Friday at Arapahoe High School as police moved in. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)
  School ShootingThe front door at the Highlands Ranch, Colo., home of the 18-year-old shooting suspect Karl Halverson Pierson is covered with plywood on Saturday, Dec. 14, 2013, after the police searched the home. Pierson critically wounded one student, before apparently killing himself Friday at Arapahoe High School as police moved in. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)
  Arapahoe County Sheriff's Department deputyA deputy of the Arapahoe County, Colo., Sheriff's Department walks next to crime scene tape in front of a doorway to Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., on Saturday, Dec. 14, 2013. The school was the scene of a shooting on Friday that left the student gunman dead and two other students injured. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
  Arapahoe High School, Arapahoe Sheriff's deputyA deputy from the Arapahoe County, Colo., Sheriff's Department gets in his patrol car parked outside the west entrance to Arapahoe High School, the scene of a shooting on Friday, in Centennial, Colo., early on Saturday, Dec. 14, 2013. Investigators were working to find out what motivated a teenage gunman to enter his suburban Denver high school armed with a shotgun looking for a specific teacher a day earlier. The 18-year-old shooter critically wounded a 15-year-old student and was later found dead in the school, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
  Sean SweeneySean Sweeney, a runner who lives near Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., pauses to say a prayer for the victims and the gunman of a shooting at the school during his early morning run on Saturday, Dec. 14, 2013. The school was the scene of a shooting on Friday that left the student gunman dead and two other students injured. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
  Chris DavisChris Davis, a senior who plays basketball at Arapahoe High School, talks to reporters as he places a donation box for the victim of the shooting at the school located in Centennial, Colo., on Saturday, Dec. 14, 2013. Investigators were working to find out what motivated a teenage gunman to enter his suburban Denver high school armed with a shotgun looking for a specific teacher a day earlier. The 18-year-old shooter critically wounded a 15-year-old student and was later found dead in the school, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
  Michael Vartuli, Chris DavisMichael Vartuli, left, and Chris Davis, both seniors at Arapahoe High School, hang a sign asking for donations for the victim of the shooting at the school in Centennial, Colo., early on Saturday, Dec. 14, 2013. Investigators were working to find out what motivated a teenage gunman to enter his suburban Denver high school armed with a shotgun looking for a specific teacher a day earlier. The 18-year-old shooter critically wounded a 15-year-old student and was later found dead in the school, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
  School ShootingPolice walk up to search the Highlands Ranch, Colo., home of the 18-year-old shooting suspect Karl Halverson Pierson who shot a student at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., on Friday, Dec. 13, 2013, then turned the gun on himself. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)
  School ShootingPolice used a dog to do an initial search at the Highlands Ranch, Colo., home of the 18-year-old shooting suspect Karl Pierson who shot a student at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., on Friday, Dec. 13, 2013, then turned the gun on himself. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)
  School ShootingPolice gather at the Highlands Ranch, Colo., home of the 18-year-old shooting suspect who shot two students at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., on Friday, Dec. 13, 2013. The police are expected to search the house Friday night. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)
  Allie Zadrow, Liz ReinhardtFreshman Allie Zadrow, right, is hugged by a friend Liz Reinhardt at a church after a shooting at nearby Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., on Friday, Dec. 13, 2013. Students from the school were evacuated to the church. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said the shooter shot two others at the school, before apparently killing himself.(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)
  A parents picks up her daughter at a church where students from nearby Arapahoe High School were evacuated to after a shooting on the Centennial, Colo., campus Friday, Dec. 13, 2013. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said the shooter shot two others at the school, before apparently killing himself.(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)
  School ShootingParents pick up their daughter at a church where students from nearby Arapahoe High School were evacuated to after a shooting on the Centennial, Colo., campus Friday, Dec. 13, 2013. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said the shooter shot two others at the school, before apparently killing himself.(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)
  Allie Zadrow, Liz ReinhardtFreshman Allie Zadrow, right, is hugged by a friend Liz Reinhardt at a church after a shooting at nearby Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., on Friday, Dec. 13, 2013. Students from the school were evacuated to the church. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said the shooter shot two others at the school, before apparently killing himself.(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)
  Courtney LeypoldtCourtney Leypoldt, left, is hugged by a family member as she is picked up at a church after a shooting at nearby Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., on Friday, Dec. 13, 2013. Students from the school were evacuated to the church. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said the shooter shot two others at the school, before apparently killing himself.(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)
  School ShootingA student stares out a bus window as it arrives at a church to be reunited with family after students from nearby Arapahoe High School were evacuated their after a shooting at the school in Centennial, Colo., Friday, Dec. 13, 2013. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said the shooter shot two others at the school, before apparently killing himself.(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)
  A woman screams as she arrives at a church where students from nearby Arapahoe High School were evacuated to after a shooting on the Centennial, Colo., campus Friday, Dec. 13, 2013. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said the shooter shot two others at the school, before apparently killing himself.(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)
  Jenni Meyers, Mary Meyers, Julie MeyersSenior Jenni Meyers, center, is hugged by her sister Mary as they leave a church with their mother Julie after they were reunited after a shooting at nearby Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., on Friday, Dec. 13, 2013. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said the shooter shot two others at the school, before apparently killing himself.(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)
  School ShootingStudents comfort each other outside of Arapahoe High School after a shooting on the campus in Centennial, Colo., on Friday, Dec. 13, 2013. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said Friday that the shooter, who died, was a student at the high school. He said another student was wounded when he confronted the armed student and was shot. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)
  School ShootingSheriffs deputies stand guard over students after they were evacuated to the track and football field at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., on Friday, Dec. 13, 2013, where a student shot at least one other student at a Colorado high school Friday before he apparently killed himself, authorities said. The shooter entered Arapahoe High School in a Denver suburb armed with a shotgun and looking for a teacher he identified by name, said Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)
  School ShootingSheriffs deputies stand guard over students after they were evacuated to the track and football field at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., on Friday, Dec. 13, 2013, where a student shot at least one other student at a Colorado high school Friday before he apparently killed himself, authorities said. The shooter entered Arapahoe High School in a Denver suburb armed with a shotgun and looking for a teacher he identified by name, said Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)
  School ShootingA sheriff deputy talks on his radio at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., on Friday, Dec. 13, 2013, where a student shot at least one other student at a Colorado high school Friday before he apparently killed himself, authorities said. The shooter entered Arapahoe High School in a Denver suburb armed with a shotgun and looking for a teacher he identified by name, said Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)
  School ShootingStudents comfort each other at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., on Friday, Dec. 13, 2013, where a student shot at least one other student at a Colorado high school Friday before he apparently killed himself, authorities said. The shooter entered Arapahoe High School in a Denver suburb armed with a shotgun and looking for a teacher he identified by name, said Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)
  In this still image taken from video provided by Fox 31 Denver, students gather just outside of Arapahoe High School as police respond to reports of a shooting at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. Friday, Dec. 13, 2013. Colorado division of emergency management spokeswoman Micki Trost said her director went to the school and their weren't any more immediate details. (AP Photo/KDVR) MANDATORY CREDIT
  In this still image taken from video provided by Fox 31 Denver, police respond to reports of a shooting at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. Friday, Dec. 13, 2013. Colorado division of emergency management spokeswoman Micki Trost said her director went to the school and their weren't any more immediate details. (AP Photo/KDVR) MANDATORY CREDIT
  In this still image taken from video provided by Fox 31 Denver, students gather just outside of Arapahoe High School as police respond to reports of a shooting at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. Friday, Dec. 13, 2013. Colorado division of emergency management spokeswoman Micki Trost said her director went to the school and their weren't any more immediate details. (AP Photo/KDVR) MANDATORY CREDIT
  In this still image taken from video provided by Fox 31 Denver, police respond to reports of a shooting at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. Friday, Dec. 13, 2013. Colorado division of emergency management spokeswoman Micki Trost said her director went to the school and their weren't any more immediate details. (AP Photo/KDVR) MANDATORY CREDIT
  Police respond to the shooting at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. Friday, Dec. 13, 2013.
  The FBI is seen responding to a shooting at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. Friday, Dec. 13, 2013.
  Police respond to the shooting at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. Friday, Dec. 13, 2013.
  Students were escorted out Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. with their hands up after a shooting broke out on Friday, Dec. 13, 2013.
  Police respond to the shooting at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. Friday, Dec. 13, 2013.
  Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson speaks during a media briefing about the shooting at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. Friday, Dec. 13, 2013.
  Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper speaks at a media briefing about the shooting at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. Friday, Dec. 13, 2013.
  Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper is seen shortly after a press conference at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. Friday, Dec. 13, 2013.
  Arthur Blessitt of Littleton who is listed in the Guinness World Records for the world's longest walk carrying a wooden cross around the world was nearby after the the shooting at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. on Friday, Dec. 13, 2013.
  Buses carrying students from Littleton Public Schools leave after a shooting occurred at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. on Friday, Dec. 13, 2013.
  CO SCHOOL SHOOTING 2UPDATES WITH DETAILS OF THE EVENTS: Map locates Arapahoe High School shooting. ; 1c x 3 inches; 46.5 mm x 76 mm;
VIDEO- "More Than Half The Victims Of Gun Violence Are Young People" Junior Newtown Action Alliance - YouTube
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VIDEO- Canada's Highest Court Strikes Down Country's Anti-Prostitution Laws - YouTube
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VIDEO- Uber revenue leaked, Amazon drones, SpaceX launch - TWiST News Roundtable - YouTube
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A First Look at NewCo's structure >> Pressthink
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  Today Pierre Omidyar announced some details about how his new venture in news will be organized. My summary and explanation'...First, the official release:
  PIERRE OMIDYAR PROVIDES INITIAL FUNDING OF $50M TO ESTABLISH FIRST LOOK MEDIA
  Honolulu '' Dec. 19, 2013 '' The news organization created by Pierre Omidyar (formerly dubbed ''NewCo'') has taken another step forward with an infusion of $50M in capital to fuel operations being established on both coasts.
  Omidyar, who provided the funding, will also serve as the organization's publisher. Omidyar's first capital outlay represents 20 percent of his initial commitment to the media venture. First Look Media will publish robust coverage of politics, government, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, arts and culture, business, technology, and investigative news.
  ''This initial capital is the first step of many to bring the vision of this news organization to life,'' said Omidyar. ''I am deeply committed to the long-term effort to build a new and exciting platform for journalism '-- one that not only provides the innovation and infrastructure journalists need to do their best work, but that brings their reporting and storytelling to the widest possible audience.''
  First Look Media is made up of several entities, including a company established to develop new media technology and a separate nonprofit journalism organization. The journalism operation, which will be incorporated as a 501(c)(3), will enjoy editorial independence, and any profits eventually earned by the technology company are committed to support First Look's mission of independent journalism. The name of First Look Media's initial digital publication is yet to be announced.
  First Look Media is currently securing space and setting up operations in New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. The team is actively recruiting in all areas of its operations.
  As I previously explained to readers of PressThink, I am an adviser to Omidyar's company, so I can provide some further explanation and a view of what this announcement says.
  1. The placeholder name, NewCo, is going away. First Look Media is the name of the new company. It has by the terms of today's announcement received an initial capital infusion of $50 million from Pierre Omidyar.
  2. The new company will consist of several legal entities. One is a technology company, a business run for profit, that will develop new media tools for First Look properties and other markets. Another is a 501(c)(3), a non-profit under U.S. law. Its mission will be to publish and support independent, public interest journalism.
  3. The 501(c)(3) will house the journalism operation, which hasn't given a name yet to its initial publication. It will have editorial independence.
  4. Profits earned by the technology company will be used to support the mission: independent public interest journalism.
  So that's what the announcement says. Now I am going to provide some of my own observations that I hope will be helpful for those who are following news of the company formerly known as NewCo. This isn't the company's description, it's mine.
  5. As we figure out what the pieces of the company will be, we are announcing them. Today's news settles one of the questions I have been asked a lot: ''Is NewCo going to be a business or a non-profit?'' Answer: both. The news and editorial operation will be a non-profit. The technology company will be a business run for profit. If the tech company is successful it can help fund the journalism mission, along with other possible sources of revenue.
  6. There are other known combinations of business and non-profit in journalism land. The Poynter Institute is a non-profit school for journalists that owns a controlling interest in the Times Publishing Company, which publishes the Tampa Bay Times. The Guardian Media Group is a for-profit company in the UK that is owned by the Scott Trust, which exists solely to guarantee the independence and public service mission of the Guardian, in all of its forms. ProPublica is a non-profit investigative newsroom, donor supported, that sometimes shares its work with for-profit newspapers.
  7. The First Look set-up is different. Here the journalism operation is a non-profit, housed within a parent company, which may have other entities inside it. The entire operation is designed to: 1.) support the mission of independent public service journalism, 2.) achieve sustainability and 3.) attract talent.
  8. Another way to say it is: public service, mission-driven journalism, including investigative work, has always been subsidized by something: advertising, other kinds of news, donors to a non-profit (as with ProPublica) or a related and profitable business like the Bloomberg terminals that subsidize Bloomberg News. First Look Media is adding to the picture another possible source of support: profits from a company specifically focused on technology for producing, distributing and consuming news, views and information.
  9. A good comparison point for that relationship is a company like the Atavist, which produces narrative non-fiction '-- also called long form journalism '-- and hopes to profit from a publishing platform, the Creativist, originally developed to publish the Atavist's own work. Notice I said a ''comparison point,'' not: these two are the same.
  I am going on vacation and off the grid for a while, starting today at 3 pm. But the comment thread is open and I will try to respond when I can.
Why we shouldn't give Omidyar and First Look the benefit of the doubt | PandoDaily
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 04:56
  By Paul CarrOn December 20, 2013
  As I've written before, coordinating Pando's coverage of Pierre Omidyar and Glenn Greenwald's new journalism venture has been a real trip. The smears from Greenwald's supporters I'm slowly coming to terms with, likewise the vitriol and even the accusations that Pando is secretly controlled by the CIA.
  One thing that I still can't understand, though, is why apparently intelligent people '-- including some fellow journalists, for Christ's sake '-- have demanded that we hold off asking questions about ''NewCo'' until it has launched.
  Why can't we just wait until they actually start publishing'... give the guy the benefit of the doubt? Why are we questioning whether NewCo will be a for-profit business? Why demand to know if its reporters are being required to sign non-disclosure agreements? Hell, what business is it of ours that Omidyar has invested in a shady microloans company or two?
  The questions are frustrating for two reasons. First, it's clear that many of those begging for amnesty on behalf of Omidyar are doing so because they're kinda hoping he might offer them a job. They know they should probably be asking the same questions but'... well'... these are uncertain times for journalists and, well, the kids have got to eat and private school isn't cheap.
  Second, can it really be true that my esteemed colleagues at other publications don't understand why pre-launch is precisely the time we should be asking the toughest questions?
  That point was driven home yesterday when Jay Rosen, one of the Omidyar's first hires, published a press release issued by Omidyar Network.
  The release was interesting, not so much for what it said about ''First Look Media'' but for what it didn't say.
  What it did say was that First Look will be a curious hybrid beast: a for-profit technology company supporting a not-for-profit journalism business. As well as being the sole backer of First Look, Omidyar himself will act as publisher of the journalism business. Its journalists will, however, retain full editorial independence. At least some staff (including Rosen) have been asked to sign NDAs, but only concerning ''trade secrets,'' whatever that means.
  What it didn't say was'... pretty much anything else.
  Earlier this month, Jason Calacanis suggested that the reason Omidyar wasn't answering questions about the structure of his venture is that he hadn't yet figured out those answers. Since then I've heard from numerous sources that many of the basic questions around editorial independence, financial structure and Omidyar's own role at NewCo First Look were still up for debate.
  In a blog post at Pressthink, Rosen confirmed what those sources had told us: ''As we figure out what the pieces of the company will be,'' he said, ''we are announcing them.'' Responding to a question from a commenter, he added: ''If I could tell you more, I would but it simply hasn't been decided yet.'' Finally, Rosen confirmed that he hadn't been able to answer questions about his own contract, because he'd only received the final document this week.
  And that '-- that '-- is why we should be asking questions about First Look right now, and why it's such a dereliction of duty that most reporters are taking a ''wait and see'' position.
  As Mark Ames explained, Pierre Omidyar's new venture now effectively controls the largest cache of American national security secrets ever leaked. The only two people with access to that entire cache '-- Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras '-- now work for a man whose response to reports of mass suicides caused by one of his investments was to delete that investment from his website and pretend it never happened. A man who has said publicly that he might consider handing over sources to law enforcement. A man who made his fortune founding a company that now boasts of handing user data to the government ''on a silver platter.''
  Right now, the clay that will soon harden into First Look Media is still wet. There is still every chance that the final product will be, as Greenwald assures us, a bold, fearless, wonderful journalistic paradise: a place where sources are safe, reporters are independent and Snowden's Secrets (') will be published even if they contain any embarrassing revelations about eBay or Paypal.
  But there is also a chance that it will be none of those things: that Omidyar's public statements on sources, his track record of selective transparency and eBay's friendliness with the government will foreshadow business as usual for this new billionaire-owned media giant.
  The more of First Look's rule book that is written in the public spotlight, and the more questions Omidyar, Greenwald, Rosen et al are forced to consider before launch, the more likely the end result will be more of the former and less of the latter.
  Photo credit: Matty Gibbon (Creative Commons)
Millions of Target shoppers face new debit card limits | Reuters
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 04:53
  By David Henry
  NEW YORKSat Dec 21, 2013 7:34pm EST
  People shop at a Target store during Black Friday sales in the Brooklyn borough of New York, in this November 29, 2013, file photo.
  Credit: Reuters/Eric Thayer/File
  NEW YORK (Reuters) - At least 2 million shoppers who used bank debit cards at Target Corp (TGT.N) stores during its recent data breach are facing lower limits on how much cash they can take out of teller machines and spend at stores.
  JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) said on Saturday it is notifying customers who used Chase brand debit cards at Target from November 27 through December 15 that they are now limited to $100 a day of cash withdrawals and $300 a day of purchases with their cards.
  The new limit effects roughly 2 million accounts, or 10 percent of Chase debit cards, according to a spokeswoman for Chase, the consumer banking business of JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank by assets.
  Chase said it acted as a precaution to prevent criminals from taking money from customer accounts. Chase and other banks say they will cover unauthorized transactions that customers report.
  "Banks are putting various precautions in place," Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder said by email, declining to be specific about what the banks are doing.
  Representatives for other major banks, including Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) and Citigroup Inc (C.N), told Reuters on Saturday that their institutions take steps to protect accounts, but none described specific actions so broadly limiting to cardholders as those of Chase.
  Target's Snyder said that for the debit card it issues and calls Redcard, the company has activated a "deeper fraud monitoring protocol." She did not describe the new steps.
  Chase said in its notice to customers that it realized its move "could not have happened at a more inconvenient time with the holiday season upon us."
  At Chase, the usual debit card daily limits are $200 to $500 for cash withdrawals and $500 for purchases, according to a bank spokeswoman.
  "It seems like the banks are the 'Grinch who stole Christmas,'" said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, a consumer advocacy group based in Los Angeles. "It is Target's fault, but children across America are going to bear the price ... The banks are protecting themselves."
  Chase spelled out the new limits in an email to customers with the subject line: "Unfortunately, your debit card is at risk by the breach at Target stores."
  Target said on Thursday that computer hackers had stolen data from as many as 40 million credit and debit cards of shoppers who visited its stores during the first three weeks of the holiday season.
  Chase said in the letter that it plans to reissue affected debit cards over the coming weeks and in the meantime said employees at its 5,600 branches would help those who need more cash. Many branches will stay open late if needed, the letter said.
  Debit cards, unlike credit cards, typically require customers to enter personal identification numbers when they make purchases at store check-out counters. Initial reports of Target's security breach said data may have been taken through devices at its counters.
  Debit cards are used to spend money that has been deposited in checking and other demand accounts at banks.
  (Reporting by David Henry in New York; Additional reporting by Jim Finkle and Dhanya Skariachan; Editing by Gunna Dickson and Bill Trott)
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Paddy Power to host match dubbed 'Big Bang in Pyongyang' - The Irish Times - Fri, Dec 20, 2013
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 04:14
  Retired US basketball star Dennis Rodman shakes hands with officials upon arrival at Pyongyang airport, North Korea. Photograph: Kyodo/Reuters
  The Irish bookmaker Paddy Power is set to unveil a star-studded NBA basketball team set to take on a North Korean side in a controversial match dubbed the ''Big Bang in Pyongyang'' next month.
  A spokesman defended the move, saying it hoped to sidestep politics, despite the game being staged in one of the world's most secretive states and with a dire human rights record.
  Former US basketball star Dennis Rodman arrived in North Korea yesterday with a Paddy Power representative and film crew to coach the North Korean side ahead of the January 8th fixture.
  The recent removal from power and execution of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's uncle Jang Song-thaek, and fears over resulting instability in the country, have not affected plans. It is understood assurances have been received about the safety of those travelling.
  Paddy Power is understood to be investing a six-figure sum in the event, which will include the payroll for a star-studded US basketball team made up of primarily current NBA players.
  Dubbed ''basketball diplomacy'' by Rodman, formerly of the Chicago Bulls, Paddy Power says it took advice on the implications of the trip.
  ''The reality is that we are not involving ourselves in the politics. It's a basketball match; we have gone into this with our eyes open,'' said a Paddy Power spokesman.
  ''We are not in it for world peace; we are in it to put on a 'how the hell did they do that' type of event.''
  The event may be viewed with slightly more concern by critics of the pariah state. Since the 1990s it is estimated that about two million people have died of starvation in North Korea.
Koryo Tours - Travel to the DPRK - Group Tours - Itinerary
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  Archived Version
  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 04:11
  The Paddy Power Dennis Rodman Basketball
  Join Dennis Rodman in Pyongyang and see Basketball engagement at first hand at the only match of its kind ever to take place in North Korea
  Koryo Tours is proud to bring an exclusive offer to a small group of visitors who will travel to North Korea in January next year for one of the biggest media events of the year '' the Paddy Power Dennis Rodman Basketball Invitational Event, taking place on the auspicious date of January 8th (DPRK Leader Kim Jong Un's birthday). This event will be talked about for years and be the centre of a lot of international media coverage. Few people, however, will have the opportnuity to witness the event with their own eyes. This is your chance!
  Koryo Tours has an exclusive partnership with the organisers of the event which enables us to offer a limited amount of spaces to our travellers to fly into Pyongyang with the invitational NBA all-stars team that Dennis Rodman is taking with him (the names will be announced soon).
  This tour is operated entirely by Koryo Tours, It is not a commercial venture by Paddy Power
  We'll have as much contact with the team as possible during the trip and will fly in and out of the country with them as well as staying in the same hotel (Pyongyang's deluxe Koryo Hotel)
  We'll attend the main event; the match with the DPRK national basketball team. Along with some very senior North Korean politics, people that regular tourists never see. We can't mention names at this time but we do expect people from the very top to be there, a rare occasion indeed)
  This unique tour is open for booking now (see http://koryogroup.com/travel_bookingATour.php for details on how to get yourself on this trip.)
  We have a very short time in which to accept applications - The final deadline for completed and confirmed application is Saturday 28th December. Any application made after that date, or any incomplete application, cannot be sent to Pyongyang. Apologies to be so rigid on this date. Space is limited, we have just 12 spots available on this tour that we can offer to our travellers, so if you would like to be there for the most unusual and unique sports event of the year then sign up now!
  Tour ItineraryMonday 6th January 13:00 Beijing to Pyongyang flight (90 mins)Thursday 9th January 10:30 Pyongyang to Beijing (90 mins)
  Tour highlights:
  Paddy Power Dennis Rodman Basketball Invitational match '' this is the main reason for the trip; the once in a lifetime chance to be there when history is made and Rodman's US team take to the court against the DPRK national team. Also in attendance with us will be an invited audience of Pyongyang's most senior VIPs, including some (no names mentioned!) so senior that photography will not be permitted at the match (we will have an authorised photographer with us though to take pictures for us that we will distribute afterwards). There has never been an event like this before and will never be something so ground-breaking again. This match will be screened on national North Korean television, making it one of the largest engagement projects ever undertaken in North Korea - and you have the chance to be one of the very few who will always be able to say that you were there!Interaction with the Basketball team '' we will fly in and out of the DPRK with the NBA all-stars team (the names of the players will be released soon) and will stay in the same hotel. While we will not travel around Pyongyang with them some occasions of interaction have been arranged, you'll have the chance to meet and mingle with the players taking part in this ground-breaking trip! And the organisers are working on opportunities for even more interaction and special opportunitiesA percentage of the tour fee will go towards funding theDeafKidsHouse to be built in Pyongyang. It is planned along with a Kindergarten for deaf children, consulting for hearing parents of deaf children, a meeting place for the young deaf community and for learning sign language. This foreign-funded initiative is taking the lead in changing perceptions of these differently abled youth and we are proud to be helping them move forwards in their difficult and responsible work.
  We'll see some of the highlights of Pyongyang as well, including the newly opened War Museum, a panoramic view over the city from the Juche Tower, the longest journey possible with locals on the Pyongyang Metro, we'll visit leisure facilities such as the newly opened Munsu Waterpark, a bowling centre and shooting range, we'll meet the most famous artists in North Korea at the Mansudae Art studio and see how they work, we will eat in the most interesting and famous restaurants in the city tooThe tour will be fully guided by the best guides that our local partners have; people we know very well and have developed a great relationship over the years. Koryo Tours staff will also be along on the trip to provide expert information on all aspects of visiting North Korea and to make sure everything goes as plannedThere will never be another trip quite like this one; anyone coming along with us will have a story to tell forever more. Not just a basketball match with some famous and senior people in attendance, you will witness history in the making and forever be a part of a small and elite number of people who really were there to see it with their bare eyes
  Basic details of this exclusive experience:Dates: Monday January 6th '' Thursday January 9th
  Cost: 6500 EUR per person all inclusive cost
  This package includes:
  Return flights with Air Koryo (economy class) from Beijing to Pyongyang and from Pyongyang to BeijingThe North Korean visa needed for entering and exiting the country, this will be issued by us in Beijing before you arrive to begin the journeyHotel accommodation in single rooms (no need to share) in Pyongyang's best hotel, the Koryo Hotel (also where the Basketball team will be staying) '' if you travel as a couple then we will discount 200 EUR from each person's tour feeAccompaniment on the tour by an experienced Koryo Tours Manager, as well as local Korean Guides (fluent in English)Transportation within Pyongyang and a dedicated driver for the groupAll meals on the tour, drinks with the meals as wellAll entry fees to basketball events and sites to be visited along the wayMedical Insurance for the tripDVD of the trip, still photos from the basketball event, commemorative items unavailable elsewhereAND MOST IMPORTANTLY this package includes the trip of a lifetime, something you cannot get anywhere else or from anyone else '' something to tell the grandkids about when they ask what the most amazing spectacle you have ever witnessed is!
  Please see our terms and conditions page at http://koryogroup.com/travel_terms.php
  Please note that the order of events may change at any time and that Koryo Tours cannot offer a guarantee of any events taking place in the DPRK. Everything is advertised according to agreements we have made but the nature of travelling to the DPRK is that last-minute alterations are a possibility. Koryo Tours accepts no liability for any alterations made to any tour program that we offer. Koryo Tours also reserves the right to cancel any person's participation in this tour at any time
  APPLY FOR THIS TOUR > (Tour name: Rodman Basketball Tour (Jan 6 - 9)
James Alan Fox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 04:06
  James Alan Fox is a professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. He is the Lipman Family Professor of Criminal Justice and former dean at Northeastern University.[1] He has published 15 books and dozens of journal and magazine articles and newspaper columns.[2][3] Fox holds a bachelor's degree in sociology (1972), a master's degree in criminology (1974), a master's degree in statistics (1975), and a Ph.D. in sociology (1976), all from the University of Pennsylvania.[4]
  Fox is known as "The Dean of Death," for his research on mass murders.[5]USA Today says that "Fox is arguably the nation's leading criminologist." As an authority on homicide, he appears regularly on national television and radio programs,[6] including the Today Show, Meet the Press, Dateline, 20/20, and 48 Hours. He has been a guest numerous times on Oprah.[7]
  Fox often gives lectures and expert testimony, including appearances before the United States Congress, and White House meetings with the President. He served on President Bill Clinton's advisory committee on school shootings, and a Department of Education Expert Panel on Safe, Disciplined and Drug-Free Schools.[8]
  Fox has served as a visiting fellow with the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice, and an NBC NewsAnalyst.
  Books published[edit]Elementary Statistics in Criminal Justice Research (Allyn & Bacon, 2008)The Will to Kill: Making Sense of Senseless Murder (Allyn & Bacon, 2007)Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder (Sage, 2006)Elementary Statistics in Social Research, (Allyn & Bacon, 2006)Dead Lines: Essays in Murder and Mayhem (Allyn & Bacon, 2001)References[edit]^Yam, P. (1996) Profile: James Alan Fox '' Catching a Coming Crime Wave, Scientific American274(6), 40-44.^Egan, Timothy. The New York Timeshttp://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/f/james_alan_fox/index.html . ^http://www.google.com/search?q=james+alan+fox^"James Alan Fox Resume". Retrieved April 12, 2011. ^Rucker, Philip (April 8, 2009). "Some Link Economy With Spate Of Killings". The Washington Post. ^http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&se=gglsc&d=5000659446^http://www.jfox.neu.edu/pdfs/speaking%20brochure.pdf^http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3080346/External links[edit]PersondataNameFox, James AlanAlternative namesShort descriptionDate of birthPlace of birthDate of deathPlace of death
VIDEO-So Help Us - Stop Hillary PAC - YouTube
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 01:08
Bullying in academia more prevalent than thought
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 00:36
  Dec. 19, 2013 '-- Bullying isn't only a problem that occurs in schools or online among young people. It can happen anywhere to anyone, and a Rutgers-Camden nursing scholar is shedding some light on how it is becoming increasingly common in academia.
  "What worries me is the impact that bullying is having on the ability to recruit and retain quality educators," says Janice Beitz, a professor at the Rutgers School of Nursing-Camden. "It has become a disturbing trend."
  Beitz is a co-author of "Social Bullying in Nursing Academia," an article published in the September/October 2013 edition of Nurse Educator that draws upon interviews conducted with 16 nursing professors who were the victims of social bullying in an academic nursing workplace. Beitz says that the participants described in detail instances in which they were slandered, isolated, physically threatened, lied to, or given unrealistic workloads, among various other bullying tactics.
  The participants in the study were primarily non-tenured female faculty teaching in baccalaureate programs throughout the Unites States.
  "We don't know how widespread this is, but it exists," says Beitz, who says she was bullied in her career. "Not many people look at bullying in the academic environment. We wanted to raise awareness of it."
  In the study, Beitz notes that in the most common cases of bullying, academic administrators are targeting faculty, but in some cases, faculty are bullying other faculty members or their administrative superiors.
  Bullies may be threatened by a fellow academic's qualifications and scholarship, or victims may be targeted because they are perceived as weak, Beitz says.
  "The bully can make life miserable for the target," she explains. "That's because in an administrative role, a bully has the power to make decisions about the target. Part of it is the unique nature of higher education. The tenure process is different than any other environment. Administrators in academia have power over colleagues, and sometimes that power causes them to bully their subordinates."
  Beitz says bullying victims will often blame themselves for the actions of a colleague and she says sometimes the only thing a victim can do is leave the environment altogether, which can dissuade nurses from pursuing careers as educators.
  "Institutions need to have good faculty who are experienced clinicians and researchers. That doesn't happen in a bad bullying environment," she says. "If I hadn't had support from fellow faculty, I would have left education. I wouldn't have wanted that to happen. I've enjoyed my career. I feel like I've had an impact on a lot of wonderful graduates who have gone on to have great careers. People want to feel valued. That's why it's important to serve the people you work with and employ a collegial, positive environment."
  Beitz is now working on a follow-up study on resilience and how victims are surviving when bullied. Additionally, since her bullying study does address the prevalence of bullying in nursing academia, Beitz hopes to cast a wider net and perform a quantitative study on the issue nationwide.
  Beitz's co-authors on "Social Bullying in Academia" were La Salle University nursing professors Earl Goldberg, Ciara Levine, and Diane Wieland.
  At Rutgers-Camden, Beitz oversees the state's first graduate certificate program in wound, ostomy, and continence nursing. She was inducted as an American Academy of Nursing fellow in October, joining a distinguished group of more than 2,000 academy fellows -- including three other Rutgers-Camden nursing scholars -- as leaders in nursing education, management, practice and research.
  The Cherry Hill resident has co-authored numerous research articles in refereed nursing and interdisciplinary journals, and co-authored multiple book chapters and one book. A research study and algorithm on pressure ulcer prevention was recently published in Ostomy Wound Management, and she recently was part of a research team that developed a step-by-step ostomy instrument that allows nurses to properly assess ostomy patients and their needs.
Public, media barred from hearing on Holmes sanity | CNS News
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  Sun, 22 Dec 2013 00:21
  DENVER (AP) '-- The public and the news media will be barred from a pretrial hearing in the Colorado theater shooting case that will include testimony from a psychiatrist who evaluated whether defendant James Holmes was insane, the judge ruled Friday.
  Arapahoe County District Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. said testimony from the psychiatrist and other witnesses would "infect a large portion of the jury pool with factual information" about Holmes' sanity and make it impossible for him to get a fair trial.
  The order also bars victims of the July 2012 attack from the hearing, scheduled to start Jan. 27.
  Holmes pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to charges of killing 12 people and injuring 70 others. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
  His lawyers acknowledge he was the shooter but argue he was in the grips of a psychotic episode.
  Holmes underwent a mandatory sanity evaluation at the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo last summer. The results have not been made public, but prosecutors asked the judge to allow other doctors selected by the prosecution to examine Holmes.
  That request will be argued at the January hearing.
  The prosecution's motion seeking the new examination hasn't been made public. But in his ruling, Samour revealed that prosecutors claim the state hospital examination was faulty and the psychiatrist who conducted it, Dr. Jeffrey Metzner, "had an unfair bias."
  No phone listing could be found for Metzner. Liz McDonough, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Human Services, which oversees the hospital, said she could not comment.
  Samour also revealed the specific areas in which prosecutors want their own experts to examine Holmes: whether he was insane at the time of the shooting, and whether he had a mental disease or defect that the defense could use to argue against the death penalty.
  Samour said he was disclosing the details of the prosecution request because openness is important in the court system and because Colorado law grants victims the right to attend trials and critical hearings.
  Samour's 40-page ruling said the upcoming hearing "is one of those rare situations in which closure of a pretrial hearing is not only justified, but required" because of the potential damage to Holmes' right to a fair trial.
  More than seven pages of the ruling were redacted.
  Metzger's conclusions about Holmes' sanity will be crucial evidence in Holmes' trial, but it will be up to the jurors to determine whether he was insane.
  Colorado law defines insanity as the inability to tell right from wrong.
  If jurors decide Holmes was insane, he would be committed indefinitely to the state mental hospital. If they decide he was sane and convict him of first-degree murder, he could receive the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole.
  Prosecutors asked Samour to allow victims to attend the hearing even if the general public is excluded. Samour said if victims were allowed to attend, details of the testimony would inevitably wind up in the media.
  News organizations including The Associated Press argued against closing the hearing. Steven Zansberg, an attorney representing the media companies, said he hadn't read the ruling and couldn't comment.
  Holmes' trial was scheduled to start in February, but it was postponed while the two sides argue whether prosecution experts can examine Holmes. No new date has been set.
  ___
  Follow Dan Elliott at http://twitter.com/DanElliottAP .
  (Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
Sending Email with Laravel, SendGrid, Beanstalkd and Go
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  Source: Hacker News
  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 23:01
  Yeah, I know. That's a mouth full, perils of webscale, I guess.
  I was recently having a conversation with Taylor Otwell on twitter about consuming Laravel queue messages in other languages, and figured I'd quickly throw together a little proof of concept.
  You can see all of the source code here.
  There is an almost fresh laravel install, with a single artisan command email:send. The command simply uses Queue:push to put a message in a beanstalkd queue. The app does nothing else, but one could image it's a fully functional app undergoing a refactor.
  There is also a small go application here. This worker listens to the beanstalk queue with one goroutine, and sends email with another. The goroutines communicate through a single channel. I've included the complied go binary in case someone wants to play with this without getting a go environment setup.
  The source for the go application is relativly small, and should be pretty readable. Feel free to ask questions in the comments if something isn't entirely clear.
  If you want to play with this, you'll need a valid sendgrid account and Beanstalkd running and the following env vars set:
  BEANSTALKD: location of the beanstalk installation (e.g. localhost:11300)SENDGRID_USER: username for sendgrid accountSENDGRID_PASS: password for sendgrid accountUpdate: Extra special thanks to the SendGrid team for provisioning a test account early on a saturday morning.
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Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson Gives Drew Magary a Tour
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  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 21:29
  Let's start with the crossbow, because the crossbow is huge. I'm sitting in the passenger seat of a camo-painted ATV, rumbling through the northern Louisiana backwoods with Phil Robertson, founder of the Duck Commander company, patriarch at the heart of A&E's smash reality hit Duck Dynasty, and my tour guide for the afternoon. There are seat belts in this ATV, but it doesn't look like they've ever been used. Phil is not wearing one. I am not wearing one, because I don't want Phil to think I'm a pussy. (Too late!) The crossbow'--a Barnett model equipped with a steel-tipped four-blade broadhead arrow'--is perched on the dash between us. It looks like you could shoot through a goddamn mountain with it.
  ''That'll bury up in you and kill you dead,'' Phil says.
  The bow is cocked and loaded, just in case a deer stumbles in front of us and we need to do a redneck drive-by on the poor bastard, but the safety is on. SAFETY FIRST. Still, Phil warns me, ''You don't want to be bumping that.''
  As we drive out into the woods, past a sign that reads parish maintenance ends, Phil is telling me all about the land around us and how the animals are a glorious gift from God and how blowing their heads off is part of His plan for us.
  ''Look at this,'' he says, gesturing to the surrounding wilderness. ''The Almighty gave us this. Genesis 9 is where the animals went wild, and God gave them wildness. After the flood, that's when he made animals wild. Up until that time, everybody was vegetarian. After the flood, he said, 'I'm giving you everything now. Animals are wild.'''
  There's a fly parked on Phil's long beard. It's been there the whole ride, and I desperately want to pluck it out, but I decide against it. Along with the crossbow, there's a loaded .22-caliber rifle rattling around in the footwell. And yet, much like the 14 million Americans who Nielsen says tune in to Duck Dynasty every week'--over 2 million more than the audience for the Breaking Bad finale'--I am comfortable here in these woods with Phil and his small cache of deadly weaponry. He is welcoming and gracious. He is a man who preaches the gospel of the outdoors and, to my great envy, practices what he preaches. He spends most of his time out here, daydreaming about what he calls a ''pristine earth'': a world where nothing gets in the way of nature or the hunters who lovingly maintain it. No cities. No buildings. No highways.
  Oh, and no sinners, too. So here's where things get a bit uncomfortable. Phil calls himself a Bible-thumper, and holy shit, he thumps that Bible hard enough to ring the bell at a county-fair test of strength. If you watch Duck Dynasty, you can hear plenty of it in the nondenominational supper-table prayer the family recites at the end of every episode, and in the show's no-cussing, no-blaspheming tone. But there are more things Phil would like to say'--''controversial'' things, as he puts it to me'--that don't make the cut. (This March, for instance, he told the Christian-oriented Sports Spectrum magazine that he didn't approve of A&E editing out ''in Jesus'' from a family prayer scene, even though A&E says that the phrase has been uttered in at least seventeen episodes.)
  Out here in these woods, without any cameras around, Phil is free to say what he wants. Maybe a little too free. He's got lots of thoughts on modern immorality, and there's no stopping them from rushing out. Like this one:
  ''It seems like, to me, a vagina'--as a man'--would be more desirable than a man's anus. That's just me. I'm just thinking: There's more there! She's got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I'm saying? But hey, sin: It's not logical, my man. It's just not logical.''
  Perhaps we'll be needing that seat belt after all.
  ···
  The Duck Dynasty origin story is the mighty river from which all other Robertson-family stories flow. And it is an awesome story, one that improves the more it is told, so here is my stab at it: Phil Robertson grew up bone poor in the northwest corner of this state'--a place where Cajun redneck culture and Ozark redneck culture intersect'--to a manic-depressive mother and a roughneck father. He was a star quarterback in high school and earned a scholarship to play at Louisiana Tech, but quit after one season because football interfered with duck-hunting season. The guy who took his roster spot at Tech was Terry Bradshaw, because that's how these kinds of stories go.
  Phil On Growing Up in Pre-Civil-Rights-Era Louisiana''I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I'm with the blacks, because we're white trash. We're going across the field.... They're singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, 'I tell you what: These doggone white people''--not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.''
  According to Phil's autobiography'--a ghostwritten book he says he has never read'--he spent his days after Tech doing odd jobs and his evenings getting drunk, chasing tail, and swallowing diet pills and black mollies, a form of medicinal speed. In his midtwenties, already married with three sons, a piss-drunk Robertson kicked his family out of the house. ''I'm sick of you,'' he told his wife, Kay. But Robertson soon realized the error of his ways, begged Kay to come back, and turned over his life to Jesus Christ.
  In 1972, with Jesus at the wheel, Robertson founded the Duck Commander company, which sold a line of custom-made duck-hunting calls that quickly became popular among avid hunters for their uncanny accuracy in replicating the sound of a real duck. He eventually sold half the company to his son Willie, now 41, and together they made a DVD series about the family's duck hunts, which led to a show on the Outdoor Channel, which led to Duck Dynasty on A&E, which led to everything blowing right the fuck up.
  The show'--a reality sitcom showcasing the semiscripted high jinks of Phil, his brother ''Uncle Si,'' his four sons, Alan, Willie, Jase, and Jep, and the perpetually exasperated but always perfectly accessorized Robertson-family ladies'--has become the biggest reality-TV hit in the history of cable television, reportedly earning the family a holy shit''worthy $200,000-an-episode paycheck. It's a funny, family-friendly show, with ''skits that we come up with,'' as Phil describes the writing process. They plunder beehives. They blow up beaver dams. And when the Robertson-family ladies go up to a rooftop in a hydraulic lift, you just know that lift will ''accidentally'' get stuck and strand them.
  But the show, whose fifth season premieres on January 15, is just one part of the family's pop-cultural dominance. In 2013 four books written (kind of!) by Robertson family members made the top ten on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. Another book'--penned by Jase Robertson and detailing his Christian rebirth at age 14, his struggle to forgive his father's past behavior, and his young daughter's struggle through five facial-reconstruction surgeries to overcome a severe cleft lip and palate'--is forthcoming and destined to make it five best-sellers. There's also a book of devotionals somewhere in there, along with Duck Dynasty''themed birthday cards, bobblehead dolls, camo apparel (pink camo for the ladies), Cajun-spice seasoning, car fresheners, iPhone games (from the press release: ''As players successfully complete the challenges, their beards grow to epic proportions and they start to transform from a yuppie into a full-blown redneck!''), and presumably some sort of camou flage home-pregnancy test.
  It's easy to see the appeal. The Robertsons are immensely likable. They're funny. They look cool. They're ''smarter than they look,'' says sportswriter Mark Schlabach, who co-writes the family's books. And they are remarkably honest both with one another and with the viewing audience: Phil's old hell-raising, Si's traumatic stint in Vietnam, the intervention that the family staged for Jep when he was boozing and doing drugs in college (Phil placed him under house arrest for three months)'--all of it is out in the open. The more they reveal, the more people feel connected to them.
  And then, of course, there is their faith, which plays no small role here. During the family's initial negotiations about the show with A&E, Jase told me, ''the three no-compromises were faith, betrayal of family members, and duck season.'' That refusal to betray their faith or one another has been a staple of every media article about the Robertson family. It's their elevator pitch, and it has made them into ideal Christian icons: beloved for staking out a bit of holy ground within the mostly secular, often downright sinful, pop culture of America.
  ···
  Phil Robertson's house is located in the sticks about twenty miles outside the city of Monroe (pronounce it mun-roe). It's a rather small house'--the kind of place its owner would proudly call ''humble.'' The kitchen table is covered with big plastic tubs of cinnamon rolls and mini muffins. There are candy dishes filled to the brim, bricks of softening butter, and packages of jerky made from unknown animals, sent by unnamed fans. (I tried some, and it was awesome.) Just inside the front door, a giant flat-screen TV shows Fox News on mute at all times, and a bunch of big squishy sofas are arranged in a rectangle around it.
  Si Robertson is sitting on the couch facing the TV. Jep Robertson, age 35, the youngest son, curls up in a recliner in the corner with a pistol strapped to his waist. He barely speaks, like a countrified Silent Bob. Jase, 44, and Willie share a love seat while Phil lounges barefoot on a camo-patterned recliner in the far corner of the room. Two dogs share the recliner's footrest with Phil's heavily callused bare feet. He has severe bunions, so his big toes jut in at forty-five-degree angles. The main TV room is cluttered with mismatched furniture and photos hung haphazardly on the walls. And Phil looks like part of the clutter himself, as if he'd been wedged into that recliner a while back by some absentminded homeowner who didn't know where else to put him.
China's Moon Landing Appears To Be Another Staged Hoax
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: BlackListedNews.com
  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 21:15
  Last week China made international news claiming to have successfully landed a spacecraft carrying a lunar rover called the ''Jade Rabbit'' on the moon. Unfortunately like other publicized space exploration spectacles this event is highly questionable and appears to be another hoax. Many researchers have proven conclusively that the American missions to the moon during the Apollo era of the late 1960s and early 1970s were faked in a television studio on Earth. It is no wonder why Apollo astronauts like Buzz Aldrin get angry and punch people when confronted about their participation in the fraud. It is truly sad that the Chinese have decided to follow this same hoax formula as they attempt to project national prestige through their space program. It is however much more cost effective to fake a mission into space than to actually do it legitimately.
  China's space program already has a dubious history after many independent researchers questioned the authenticity of video footage claiming to show the nation's first manned spacewalk back in 2008. The footage of the alleged spacewalk at one point shows what appear to be water bubbles floating past an astronaut. This indicates that the footage the Chinese passed off as their first spacewalk was shot in a water tank and not in space. Details surrounding the so-called successful spacewalk including quotes from the astronauts involved in the mission were released prior to the mission even launching. In other words, the scripted event was released to the public too early. This embarrassing situation further confirmed people's doubts about the spacewalk's legitimacy and provided more proof that the entire event was staged.
  The circumstances surrounding China's alleged moon landing are just as questionable. When the event was broadcast live by Chinese television it focused primarily on the cartoon animations of the spacecraft. Little if any useful footage was shown from the spacecraft itself. The little footage that we did see showed frame by frame clips of the spacecraft supposedly getting closer to the lunar surface. Once we were told that it had landed on the moon, the camera attached to the spacecraft showed nothing that anyone would find remotely useful. It is also hard to understand how no dust from the surface was picked up by the on board camera when the spacecraft landed. Surely the spacecraft's engine when approaching the surface or the impact with the surface itself would have kicked up some dust from the surface. The footage shows none of this even in the real time version that was released after the live broadcast.
  The only other footage we have been shown of this mission is a brief video clip supposedly showing the ''Jade Rabbit'' lunar rover rolling itself out on to the lunar surface. Some of the same questions that people have raised about the Apollo footage pertains here. The footage shows black sky with no stars or other celestial reference points. In addition, the horizon shown is curved in a very strange manner. It looks man made without the normal inconsistencies you'd expect to see if we were truly looking at the real lunar horizon.
  On top of this, there has been very little mention of the space mission since the alleged landing and rover deployment last week. We have also seen no high quality pictures or video footage taken of the lunar surface. If this were a real mission, one would think that they would be sending back hundreds if not thousands of new images and video in high quality to show off the powerful technological capabilities of the Chinese state. None of this has happened which gives more credence to the premise that this event is being faked.
  Besides the footage mentioned earlier the only other significant material released so far has been a panorama picture of the lunar surface. Instead of releasing a high quality source image, it has been released in the form of a video camera recording the image off of a projector screen. This is the same tactic that was used during the Apollo 11 mission undoubtedly to mask or hide imperfections of the stage. Interestingly enough, the panorama which should show both the sun and the earth are not seen at all anywhere in the sky of the picture. All of this raises some serious questions about the photo's authenticity along with the authenticity of the mission itself. It is pretty sad that you could actually argue that the James Bond film "Diamonds Are Forever" released back in the early 1970s provided a better hoax recreation of the lunar surface than what we are seeing here.
  It should be interesting to see how the Chinese will deal with this moving forward since everything we have seen so far indicates that this mission is nothing more than a gigantic fraud. The footage and images that we have been shown so far are about the same quality of the stuff we saw back in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the Apollo hoaxes. This in of itself is ridiculous considering that we've since had over 40 years of advances in camera technology. Take for example some of the high resolution photos taken from the Hubble telescope. Simply put, the Chinese have given us no reason to believe that this mission is real and every reason to believe that it is fake.
The Screen Shot Image Just Moments Before Barack Obama's Last Press Conference
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: The Ulsterman Report
  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 21:14
  Pretty much sums up where the entire Obama White House '' and Democratic Party is at the moment, eh? Right before Barack Obama stood before the press for a brief ''talk to you before I head out for a two week, multi millions Hawaii vacation'' public appearance, THIS was the image on his own billion taxpayer dollars Obamacare website:
  While social media, and independent conservative news sites picked up on the story, the Mainstream Media has dutifully buried it, not wanting to embarrass the president yet again over his failed, costly, and utterly corrupted healthcare legislation knows by his own name '' Obamacare.
  Oh, and in related news, out in Oregon, a state that was to be used as a model for a system that would link ''flawlessly'' with the Obamacare exchanges, has just warned residents that they need to start ''looking elsewhere'' to sign up for health insurance . In a state of nearly 4 million residents, only 11,000 have actually signed up for one of the Obamacare health exchange plans.
  For years Barack Obama and Democrats cried out about a healthcare crisis in America. No such crisis ever existed '' UNTIL NOW, as millions have been kicked off of their existing plans due to the Obamacare mandates, and now find themselves without insurance.
  In 2014, those millions of uninsured will turn into tens of millions, all because of the failed policies of the current president and his Democratic Party.
  Big government socialist failing at its most damning'...
Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson and family lash back at A&E | Mail Online
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 21:13
  Phil Roberston and his family believe that A & E are discriminating against them for their deeply seated 'Christian beliefs''You have to ask yourself, why this interview happened and why it ever became public,' said a source close to the familyDespite the star's suspension, the Robertson family has a merchandise empire that is estimated by Forbes to be worth about $400million - and their deal with Walmart makes up around half of thisBy Will Payne
  PUBLISHED: 02:43 EST, 21 December 2013 | UPDATED: 10:49 EST, 21 December 2013
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  Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson and his family believe they have been 'hung out to dry' by TV network A&E after he was suspended for homophobic comments made in a magazine interview, MailOnline can reveal.
  Sources within the close-knit Louisiana clan say they are convinced A&E are manipulating the controversial situation to bring them '' and particularly Robertson '' back into line after Television executives grew tired of the family pushing their deeply-held, Christian beliefs.
  They also think the network could have done something to stop the controversial GQ article being made public, because an A&E representative was present during the interview with patriarch, Roberston, 67.
  Scroll down for videos
  Phil Robertson and his family feel that A & E should never have publicized the controversial interview
  A source close to the family, who asked not to be named, told MailOnline: 'You have to ask yourself, why this interview happened and why it ever became public. Someone from A&E was there and was aware of the kind of answers Phil was giving.
  'But despite that, they didn't ever try to stop it or control it. Instead, they let it hit the headlines and then released a statement condemning it.
  'It is our belief that they knew what was going to happen and then used the situation to exercise control over Phil.
  'It is our understanding that when the TV executives came up with the concept for the show they wanted it to be a case of people laughing at a bunch of backward rednecks.
  'But when it didn't turn out like that and people actually started identifying with the way the family behaved and were laughing with them, not at them, they became uncomfortable. It did not sit will with the New York TV types.
  Old school: Suspended Phil on Duck Dynasty
  Family values: The Robertson family feels as though they are being discriminated against for their deeply rooted Christian beliefs
  'We believe they were also uncomfortable with the family's insistence that there would be a strong religious presence in the show. They knew Phil was the driving force behind this and we think they have used this situation to bring him in line so they could steer the show back down the path they originally intended for it.
  'But they may have underestimated how united the family are and how committed they are to their beliefs. They also didn't realize how much support Phil would get from the public, so things have backfired on them.'
  The controversy began after outrageous extracts from Robertson's interview for the January edition of GQ were made public. The outdoorsman was quoted as saying: 'It seems like, to me, a vagina -- as a man -- would be more desirable than a man's anus.
  'That's just me. I'm just thinking: There's more there! She's got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I'm saying? But hey, sin: It's not logical, my man. It's just not logical.'When asked what he thought was sinful, Robertson replied: 'Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men.'
  The Duck Dynasty trailer sits outside of the Duck Commander Store in West Monroe on Friday
  A&E suspended him on Wednesday and released a statement, saying: 'We are extremely disappointed to have read Phil Robertson's comments in GQ, which are based on his own personal beliefs and are not reflected in the series 'Duck Dynasty'.
  'His personal views in no way reflect those of A&E Networks, who have always been strong supporters and champions of the LGBT community. The network has placed Phil under hiatus from filming indefinitely.'
  But on Thursday the family issued their own response which suggested they would be prepared to walk away from the highly lucrative reality show, which regularly pulls in more than 12 million viewers.They said: 'While some of Phil's unfiltered comments to the reporter were coarse, his beliefs are grounded in the teachings of the Bible. Phil is a Godly man who follows what the Bible says are the greatest commandments: ''Love the Lord your God with all your heart'' and ''Love your neighbor as yourself.'' Phil would never incite or encourage hate.
  A sign supporting A & E Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson sits at the corner of Vernon Drive and Washington Street in West Monroe
  'We are disappointed that Phil has been placed on hiatus for expressing his faith, which is his constitutionally protected right. We have had a successful working relationship with A&E but, as a family, we cannot imagine the show going forward without our patriarch at the helm. We are in discussions with A&E to see what that means for the future of Duck Dynasty.'
  The family source added to this, telling MailOnline: 'We believe in the word of the Bible exactly as it is written and we will call a sin a sin and a sinner a sinner. But we are all sinners, every one of us and we believe in redemption and that opening yourself up to Jesus Christ will save you.'That is what Phil believes and that will not change. We are sorry if that has offended anyone, because that was never our intention. We believe in love and truth and that is it.'Multi-millionaire Robertson's incendiary comments have been slammed by many, including gay-rights groups.
  Duck commander Phil Robertson says homosexuals 'invent ways of...
  GLAAD spokesman Wilson Cruz was first to condemn him, saying: 'Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil's lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe.'He clearly knows nothing about gay people or the majority of Louisianans '-- and Americans '-- who support legal recognition for loving and committed gay and lesbian couples.'
  But Cruz's views certainly aren't reflected in the family's home town of West Monroe. The Robertson's are absolutely loved and revered in the deeply religious north-western Louisiana city.The family were already wealthy before their reality show, making their money from the Duck Commander business which sells hunting equipment. Phil Robertson lives in a huge gated compound on the edge of town and his son Willie owns a gigantic lakeside property.
  They have employed dozens of locals for years and now their empire has grown, they provide even more jobs to the town's people. That has cemented their popularity and since the homophobia scandal broke, a number of make-shift signs have been constructed offering backing to Robertson.On Friday cars honked their horns in support as they drove passed one erected on the edge of town.
  The Whites Ferry Road Church of Christ where the Robertson Family worhship
  Their presence in West Monroe is inescapable, with billboards and posters celebrating them everywhere. Last weekend, around 30,000 people packed the downtown area for the 'Duck Commander Christmas Parade'. People travelled from all over the country to celebrate the festive season with the family, filling every hotel room in town.
  Phil's son Willie owns a massive downtown restaurant, which is always packed and there is a huge gift store just down the road, constantly filled with fans, eager to get their hands on Duck Commander merchandise.
  The controversy that has engulfed the family this week has done nothing to put a dent in business, if anything it has given it a boost.
  The Madrid family drove two hours from Alexandria to show their solidarity and snap up some trademark duck calls for an upcoming hunting trip. Mother-of-two Kimberly said: 'We are Christians and we completely support Phil.
  Images of ducks tatter street lamps in downtown Monroe in support of Robertson
  'This country has a proud history of freedom of speech and I believe Phil is the one who is being persecuted, because he has lost his jobs because of his religious beliefs.
  'The spokesman for GLADD said Phil wasn't representing the people of Louisiana, but I don't know one person who is not behind him. We will not be watching A&E again.'
  Another customer, Bernard Wolleson said: 'I think you would have to get out of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Alabama to find anyone who does not support Phil.
  'I am supportive of religious freedom, regardless of the faith and that is what is at issue. They knew he was outspoken when they hired him. What he said may have sounded crude, but I believe his intent was right.'
  Just days after the scandal broke, rather than hide away; Phil Robertson went to his local church, White's Ferry Road church to take part in a prayer meeting.
  He is actually a very prominent elder there and his parishioners are completely behind him. On Friday Church secretary Luanne Watts told MailOnline they had been bombarded with calls and emails from American's showing their support.
  She said: 'What has happened is a blessing. Phil believes in the word of God and he will not shift from that.
  'We have had hundreds of messages from people all over the country and I think out of all of them only one email has been negative.
  Kimberly Madrid of Alexandria, La. discusses her support of Duck Dynasty Star Phil Robertson while shopping at the Duck Commander Store with sons Nathaniel, 12, and Matthew, 9
  'I went to school with his boys, so I have known him for years. He is a great man and his faith is the most important thing in his life. He is here every Wednesday and Sunday, to give sermons, or take prayer groups. He will be here this Sunday as well.
  'We are all completely behind him. You will struggle to find anyone in town who does not support him.'And that view seems to be held by many Americans. On Thursday MailOnline revealed Walmart had sold out of their money-spinning Duck Dynasty range.
  The Robertson family has a merchandise empire that is estimated by Forbes to be worth about $400million - and their deal with Walmart makes up around half of this.
  The chain sells a huge array of Duck Dynasty merchandise- from T-shirts to camo bedding, posters, watches, toy trucks, camo chairs, clothing, jewellery and even bottle openers.
  Walmart announced at their annual shareholders meeting that the best-selling item of apparel for both men and women this year was the reality show's T-shirt, according to Forbes.
  Forbes writer Claire O'Connor said: 'When I was down in Arkansas for this Walmart meeting, you really do marvel at the amount of people who are wearing these Duck Dynasty T-shirts and hats.
  'There are kid's pajamas, there is camo bedding and you probably won't be surprised to hear that they sell Duck Dynasty prayer devotionals.'
  Aside from their continued commercial success, an online petition called #IstandwithPhil demanding Robertson's reinstatement has already attracted almost 140,000 signatures.
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Robertson Family '' ''Phil Was Set Up''
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: The Ulsterman Report
  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 21:08
  Many more behind the scenes details are now emerging regarding the A&E network's recent firing of Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson over words he spoke regarding his views on his faith and homosexuality in a GQ interview published this past week.
  The Robertson clan is a large, but close knit group who have long been open regarding their faith in God and Christ, and the always present dangers of sin.
  ______________________________________________
  This weekend, the Robertson family, after several days of saying very little regarding the controversy, is now speaking out and lining up firmly alongside the Duck Commander himself, Phil Robertson.
  A&E is telling reporters they warned Phil to ''tone down'' his religious themed commentary in recent months. It appears Phil was unwilling to do so. A source within the Robertson family told the media A&E was already aware of the controversial GQ interview weeks earlier, and could easily have pulled it '' even stating their was an A&E representative at the interview itself.
  That appears quite plausible given the hundreds of millions of dollars the Ducky Dynasty empire now represents for the cable network and its ownership, The Hearst Corporation and Disney. This same family source made it clear that A&E had originally agreed to the Duck Dynasty show believing it would make fun of ''rednecks'', and that executives were first perplexed, and then alarmed that instead, the Robertson family became widely admired by millions of viewers for the faith and family message of each episode, and that this recent controversy is nothing more than the network trying to ''bring Phil in line.''
  We believe they were also uncomfortable with the family's insistence that there would be a strong religious presence in the show. They knew Phil was the driving force behind this and we think they have used this situation to bring him in line so they could steer the show back down the path they originally intended for it.
  As for Phil himself, he has spent the last few days working at the Whites Ferry Road Church of Christ that he and his family attend. Phil is a longtime elder of that church, and according to reports, has a congregation firmly behind his right to speak to his faith, especially when asked by a reporter to do so.
  I am supportive of religious freedom, regardless of the faith and that is what is at issue. They knew he was outspoken when they hired him. What he said may have sounded crude, but I believe his intent was right.'
  Just days after the scandal broke, rather than hide away; Phil Robertson went to his local church, White's Ferry Road church to take part in a prayer meeting.
  He is actually a very prominent elder there and his parishioners are completely behind him. On Friday Church secretary Luanne Watts told MailOnline they had been bombarded with calls and emails from American's showing their support.
  She said: 'What has happened is a blessing. Phil believes in the word of God and he will not shift from that.
  'We have had hundreds of messages from people all over the country and I think out of all of them only one email has been negative.
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  ________________________________________________________
  ''Fellow patriots take notice, Mr. Ulsterman has penned prophecy!''
  -Dr. L. Darryl Armstrong
  40% OFF for the Christmas season!
  LINK
  ''First they came for their thoughts. Then they came for their guns. Then they came for their lives'...''
  DOMINATUS
  ''The almost-prophetic characterization of the government types and their approach is enough to keep readers awake''far into the night.
  Read it and be aware.'' -MERLYN
  LINK
DNI Announces the Declassification of the Existence of...
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: IC ON THE RECORD
  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 21:06
  DNI Announces the Declassification of the Existence of Collection Activities Authorized by President George W. Bush Shortly After the Attacks of September 11, 2001
  December 21, 2013
  Yesterday, the Director of National Intelligence (''DNI'') announced the declassification of the existence of collection activities authorized by President George W. Bush shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
  Starting on October 4, 2001, President Bush authorized the Secretary of Defense to employ the capabilities of the Department of Defense, including the National Security Agency (''NSA''), to collect foreign intelligence by electronic surveillance in order to detect and prevent acts of terrorism within the United States. President Bush authorized NSA to collect: (1) the contents of certain international communications, a program that was later referred to as the Terrorist Surveillance Program (''TSP''), and (2) telephony and Internet non-content information (referred to as ''metadata'') in bulk, subject to various conditions.
  President Bush issued authorizations approximately every 30-60 days. Although the precise terms changed over time, each presidential authorization required the minimization of information collected concerning American citizens to the extent consistent with the effective accomplishment of the mission of detection and prevention of acts of terrorism within the United States. NSA also applied additional internal constraints on the presidentially-authorized activities.
  Over time, the presidentially-authorized activities transitioned to the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (''FISA''). The collection of communications content pursuant to presidential authorization ended in January 2007 when the U.S. Government transitioned the TSP to the authority of the FISA and under the orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (''FISC''). In August 2007, Congress enacted the Protect America Act (''PAA'') as a temporary measure. The PAA, which expired in February 2008, was replaced by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which was enacted in July 2008 and remains in effect. Today, content collection is conducted pursuant to section 702 of FISA. The metadata activities also were transitioned to orders of the FISC. The bulk collection of telephony metadata transitioned to the authority of the FISA in May 2006 and is collected pursuant to section 501 of FISA. The bulk collection of Internet metadata was transitioned to the authority of the FISA in July 2004 and was collected pursuant to section 402 of FISA. In December 2011, the U.S. Government decided to not seek reauthorization of the bulk collection of Internet metadata.
  After President Bush acknowledged the TSP in December 2005, two still-pending suits were filed in the Northern District of California against the United States and U.S. Government officials challenging alleged NSA activities authorized by President Bush after 9/11. In response the U.S. Government, through classified and unclassified declarations by the DNI and NSA, asserted the state secrets privilege and the DNI's authority under the National Security Act to protect intelligence sources and methods. Following the unauthorized and unlawful release of classified information about the Section 215 and Section 702 programs in June 2013, the Court directed the U.S. Government to explain the impact of declassification decisions since June 2013 on the national security issues in the case, as reflected in the U.S. Government's state secrets privilege assertion. The Court also ordered the U.S. Government to review for declassification all prior classified state secrets privilege and sources and methods declarations in the litigation, and to file redacted, unclassified versions of those documents with the Court.
  The eight previously classified DNI declarations and classified NSA declarations that were filed in support of the U.S. Government's prior assertions of the state secrets privilege and sources and methods privilege in this litigation are posted on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence website and ICOntheRecord.tumblr.com, the public website dedicated to fostering greater public visibility into the intelligence activities of the U.S. Government. Some information has been redacted from the declarations to protect information that remains properly classified for national security reasons and because of the great harm to national security if disclosed. The unclassified DNI and NSA declarations filed with the Court yesterday are also posted.
  Office of the Director of National Intelligence Public Affairs
  Documents:
Weekly Address: Working Together on Behalf of the American People
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 21:06
  The White House
  Office of the Press Secretary
  For Immediate Release
  December 21, 2013
  WASHINGTON, DC'-- In his weekly address, President Obama highlighted the bipartisan budget agreement that unwinds some of the cuts that were damaging to the economy and keeps investments in areas that help us grow, and urged both parties to work together to extend emergency unemployment insurance and act on new measures to create jobs and strengthen the middle class.
  The audio of the address and video of the address will be available online at www.whitehouse.gov at 6:00 a.m. ET, December 21, 2013.
  Remarks of President Barack ObamaWeekly AddressThe White HouseDecember 21st, 2013
  Hi, everybody. This week, Congress finished up some important work before heading home for the holidays.
  For the first time in years, both parties came together in the spirit of compromise to pass a budget '' one that helps chart our economic course for the next two years. This budget will unwind some of the damaging cuts that have threatened students and seniors and held back our businesses. It clears the path for critical investments in the things that grow our economy and strengthen our middle class, like education and research. And it will keep reducing our deficits '' at a time when we've seen four years of the fastest deficit reduction since the end of World War II.
  Members of Congress also voted to finally allow several dedicated and well-qualified public servants to do their jobs for the American people '' many of whom waited months for a simple yes-or-no vote. These are judges, cabinet secretaries and military leaders. They're men and women charged with growing our economy, keeping our homeland secure, and making sure our housing system and financial system work for ordinary Americans.
  So after a year of showdowns and obstruction that only held back our economy, we've been able to break the logjam a bit over the last few weeks. It's a hopeful sign that we can end the cycle of short-sighted, crisis-driven decision-making and actually work together to get things done.
  And that's important. Because there's plenty of work to do.
  Right now, because Congress failed to act before leaving on vacation, more than one million Americans are poised to lose a vital source of income just a few days after Christmas. For many people who are still looking for work, unemployment insurance is a lifeline that can make the difference between temporary hardship or lasting catastrophe. Instead of punishing these families who can least afford it '' especially now '' Congress should first restore that lifeline immediately, then put their entire focus on creating more good jobs that pay good wages.
  That's what I'll be focused on next year, and every day I have the privilege of being your President. Growing the economy. Expanding opportunity. Building an America that offers everyone who works hard the chance to get ahead, and every child a fair shot at success.
  And if Congress continues to act in the spirit of cooperation we've seen in recent weeks, I'm confident we can make much more progress together in the year to come.
  Thank you. Have a great weekend and a very Merry Christmas.
Former Daily Show Writer Accuses Jon Stewart of Punishing His Writers For Forming A Union
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  Archived Version
  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 21:01
  Ed Brayton's Culture War Radio show last week was fascinating for both of its two hours. In the first hour he talked to comedian David Feldman. The most interesting section to me was where Feldman compared the comedy and politics of Dennis Miller, Bill Maher, and Jon Stewart (each of whom he has written for). His discussion of Stewart centered on scathing accusations that he punishes his writers by not using their stuff as retaliation after they formed a union against his wishes. Below I have typed up a transcript of this portion of the interview, which starts with his discussion of Miller and Maher and then segues into a rant against Stewart:
  David Feldman: I love Dennis. He's the abusive brother I never had. I think he's one of the funniest people in the world. His politics are diseased. You know, he is a great man [but] his politics are diseased, they're sick. And yes he does believe it. I think he allows his audience''I think the audience, the roar of the right wing, the lure of the Republican baubles. You know, ''If you come and play with us, follow the party line, and say the things you have to say, riches will follow.'' And I think he found that very easy to go down that road. It's shameful because he's brilliant. He's probably'--you know, I've worked for three powerhouses in political comedy: Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, and Dennis Miller. And of all the guys I've worked for Dennis is the funniest, the sharpest, the smartest, the wisest'... For some reason, his politics are diseased. That's his one flaw.
  And I, you know, like, Bill Maher is very brave politically. And if you ask me who I respect the most, it would be Bill Maher because I think he is willing to lose everything for what he believes. Comedically he is not as brave as Dennis. Dennis will do jokes and they're comedically right, they're mathematically right, and the audience be damned. But he knows what's funny. And if this joke is funny, he's gonna do the joke. And working for him gave me a lot of courage to be right comedically. He's wrong politically. And Bill Maher'...I love Bill Maher, I really do. [But] I don't think he's as brave comedically. He's down the middle with the jokes. He's not trying to lose the audience with his comedy. He's just trying to lose them with his politics.
  Jon Stewart on the other hand, who I worked for on The Daily Show, is in my opinion, very manipulative. He's more of a crowd pleaser and gives the illusion of taking chances. But he's an impressionist and he's trying to, uh'...Well, I don't want to talk about Jon Stewart because I could, you know, it's like going after Christ. And this is a guy who'--I'm a staunch member of the Writer's Guild of America and Jon Stewart fought his writers when they wanted to go union. They went union and [he] has been punishing them ever since, so the reason, you know, if you watch the Jon Stewart show, he doesn't really do well-crafted jokes. He'll throw a couple in, but it's mostly mugging and shouting. He's funny, but he's punishing his writers. He doesn't use his writers' stuff because he's mad at them for going union. And when I was there, I came in there right after they signed with the Writer's Guild and many of his writers wanted to work with me because they had never gotten their stuff on the show. So he's turned them all into sinecures, you know, people who have titles and Emmy's and they work all day, then he doesn't uses their stuff.
  It's kind of [like] what Walt Disney did to the animators who went union on him. Walt Disney called in a guy named Art Babbitt who was a very rich artist with the Disney Corporation who felt that his animators should be union, and Art Babbitt paid a price with Disney. Eventually, he was one of, they called him the wise man of Disney and there was an animator's strike that Art Babbitt orchestrated. And he didn't need to, he was rich! And he still felt his employees at Disney deserved a union, Walt Disney felt they didn't. So they got their union, Walt Disney called Art Babbitt into his office and said, ''Congratulations, you got your union, let me see your drawings, your cels'' and Disney took these beautiful cels that Art Babbitt had worked on all day and tore them in front of Art Babbitt and said, ''you've got your union, you'll never see your work on the screen again.''
  And my experience with Jon Stewart is that's exactly what he has done to his writers. He's, you know, a very anti-union guy. He gives the illusion of being a liberal. But then if you look at that big rally he held in Washington, DC, in 2010; boy did he miss the boat on Occupy Wall Street, didn't he? You know, a year later, what was the real message that America needed to hear? That message was about the wealthy 1% and the stranglehold they have on our lives. Instead, Jon Stewart held this big rally a year before in Washington, DC telling his followers to calm down. That's who he is, you know? And he's'...so he's a bad guy, John Stewart.
  Ed Brayton: Well that's interesting, that's nothing I've ever heard before.
  David Feldman: You won't hear that because his going union was very difficult for the Writer's Guild and unions are weak right now. There is not a single writer who ever worked for Jon Stewart who will tell you that he's a good man. Everybody who has ever written for Jon Stewart will tell you that he hates his writers, and he's abusive, and is anti-union. But nobody has the courage to take on Satan in Christ's clothes. I'm joking about his being Satan but he is anti-union. And the head of the Writer's Guild out here told me that during the strike, when Jon was working as a writer, doing shows, and being his own scab, the head of the Writer's Guild told me in his whole history he had never been talked to as abusively as he was by Jon Stewart. But nobody's going to go after Jon Stewart. Nobody's going to tell the truth about what a bad guy Jon Stewart is because for some reason he's got angel's wings. You know'--he is funny, the show's great, but he is not a supporter of unions.
  Ed Brayton: Well, if nobody's going to say it, you just did! So, so, uh, I'm amazed with all the people I know in the comedy business that nobody's ever said that to me before, so I'm glad to have it [be] aired.
  David Feldman: Yeah, you know, I could go on about his reading the e-mails of his writers, stuff like that. People need to know the truth. You know the First Commandment, the First Commandment is ''thou shalt not worship false idols''. It is wrong to worship false idols. And in comedy and the New York news media, they have decided that Jon Stewart is an idol, an icon. And he's not.
  The audio is here. I transcribed the interview from 29:23-37:45.
  Listen to the whole first hour of the show if you love the art of comedy and thinking about the great comedians. It's great stuff.
  Your Thoughts?
VIDEO-Jarrett: 'I'm not the shadow chief of staff' - POLITICO.com
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  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 20:02
  Valerie Jarrett says she has "very specific responsibilities" in the Obama White House and focuses on them, rather than on an all-encompassing portfolio.
  "I'm not the shadow chief of staff," she said, responding to the use of the term by POLITICO's Ben White at a Morning Money breakfast. She mentioned her roles in outreach to women and girls, and to the business community and local government officials.
  Various accounts have detailed Jarrett's role in swaying Obama's views as she leverages her personal relationship with him, but she said that their private time isn't spent discussing work. "We do compartmentalize," she said.
  (More coverage from POLITICO's Morning Money Breakfast)
  Later on, pressed about what she and the president talk about as friends, she responded with a smile. "Just stuff," she said, "just stuff."
  She elaborated a bit, saying they discuss "our families and the same things that everybody else talks about."
  (PHOTOS: Morning Money Breakfast with Valerie Jarrett)
  Jarrett also said she expects to stay in the White House through the end of the Obama presidency. "I have the best job that I have ever had and will ever have," she said. "I serve at the pleasure of the president ... I'll be there as long as he'll have me."
  Read more about: Valerie Jarrett
Turkey's Erdogan Battles the Gulen Movement, His One-Time Ally | TIME.com
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  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 14:32
  The intensifying hostility between Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Gulen movement, an influential religious organization once seen as a key Erdogan ally, shows how the Turkish premier's power is unraveling
  Adem Altan / AFP / Getty ImagesTurkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is applauded by members of parliament from his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) during a meeting at the Turkish parliament in Ankara June 25, 2013.
  Both were religious men. In the early 1970s, Cemal Usak and Recep Tayyip Erdogan were classmates at the Istanbul Imam Hatip Lisesi, an Islamic high school. By the end of the decade, their career paths had begun, ever so slightly, to diverge. ''I was coming from what you would call a tradition of cultural Islam,'' says Usak. ''He opted for political Islam''. Still, he says, the pair remained close.
  Today, forty years removed from his high school days, Usak is a leading figure in Turkey's largest Islamic movement, the Gulen community. Erdogan, meanwhile, is the country's Prime Minister and by far the most powerful man in the land, if not the entire region. Usak still counts the Turkish leader as a personal friend, but the alliance between the groups that each man represents '' and which helped bring Erdogan to power '' is fast unraveling. For the first time in years, the glue that binds Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is being put to the test.
  To Turks and outside observers alike, Usak's movement remains something of a puzzle. Its leader, Fethullah Gulen, a septuagenarian preacher, resides in a sprawling estate in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. Its followers, said to number in the millions in Turkey alone, preach a feel-good gospel of tolerance, almsgiving and education, which they feel is intrinsic to Islam. Their preferred activities, at least those advertised publicly, include running hundreds of schools across the world, organizing humanitarian assistance, and engaging other religious groups in inter-faith dialogue.
  (MORE: 'Turkish Betrayal' Is the Talk of Israel)
  The movement's leading lights insist that it has no political agenda to speak of. Critics find this laughable. Over the years, they say, the Gulenists have accumulated and exercised considerable power in Turkey, rising to positions of influence inside the civil service, the media and the business community. The movement, some of them say, has become a state within a state.
  Formerly one of Erdogan's most stalwart allies, the Gulen community has recently become a major thorn in the Prime Minister's side. Last year, prosecutors said to be close to the movement tried to subpoena his intelligence chief. This year, media organs run by its followers criticized his clumsy handling of the Gezi Park protests. Finally, prominent Gulenists have taken the Prime Minister to task for his government's restrictions on press freedoms, policies towards the Middle East, and the post-Gezi crackdown.
  Erdogan has now decided to hit the Gulenists where it hurts. In mid-November, the prime minister announced that he would close down the country's private exam prep schools, or dershanes, roughly a quarter of which are run by Gulen's followers. The schools, he said, are perpetuating social inequalities between those who can and cannot afford them, creating a parallel system of education. The government has since moderated its tone, emphasizing that dershanes would be allowed to operate until 2015, at which point they would be ''transformed'' into private schools.
  For young Turks, the dershanes are a necessary fact of life, offering hours of daily tutoring for the tortuous high school and college entrance exams, both of which, given the amount of stress and cramming involved, make the SATs seem like a pop quiz. For the Gulenists, the schools are also a major source of financial revenue and a way to attract young followers. The decision to close them, they say, is an attack on private enterprise. Usak himself acknowledges that the dershane system might be an anomaly, but it's the flawed educational system that needs fixing first, he says, and not its byproduct.
  (MORE: Amid Explosions and Clashes, Volatile Turkey-Syria Border Gets More Dangerous)
  With the controversy in full swing, the Gulenists and the Erdogan faithful, once wary of allowing tensions between them to boil over, are now trading blows on an almost daily basis. The movement's leader, Fethullah Gulen, known for speaking in abstruse parables, has resorted to ones that are less difficult to decipher. ''If people concerned with mundane interests in every realm are against you, if the Pharaoh is against you, if Croesus is against you, then you are walking on the right path,'' he told supporters in a statement posted online, almost certainly likening Erdogan to ancient, tyrannical potentates.
  The latest bombshell landed last week, when a Turkish newspaper leaked a 2004 document in which Erdogan's government and the top army brass signed off on a decision to go after the Gulen movement and its interests. (The movement is said to boast several million supporters, many of them in influential positions.) AKP officials do not deny the document's authenticity. They insist, however, that the decision, signed at a time when the generals still breathed down the government's neck, never entered into force.
  They might have a point. For much of the past decade, the Gulen movement appeared to be working hand-in-glove with the AKP, much to its own benefit. Its sympathizers filled key positions in the bureaucracy. Its newspapers cheered the prime minister through thick and thin. Gulen followers also found plenty of common ground with the government during a series of controversial coup trials that eventually landed many of Turkey's top military officials behind bars. The trials not only neutralized Turkey's meddlesome army as a force in domestic politics, critics say, but also allowed the Gulenists and the AKP to silence a handful of outspoken critics.
  Even if the movement's marriage of convenience with Erdogan had recently been on the rocks, why the Prime Minister should file for divorce just months ahead of local elections remains anyone's guess. ''Mr. Erdogan feels that has the power to do whatever he wants, to control everything in the country,'' says Sahin Alpay, a lecturer at Istanbul's Bahcesehir University. Perhaps, he says, having won nearly 50 percent of the vote in 2011, having brought the army to heel, and having made some inroads with Turkey's Kurdish minority, ''Erdogan does not care whether the Gulen movement will oppose him or not.''
  Even so, the AKP's polling numbers aren't expected to budge significantly, at least in the short term. Continued economic growth, though down from 2010 and 2011 when it approached double digits, is one reason. Another is that with the opposition unable to mount a credible challenge to Erdogan, AKP supporters upset with the government's reaction to the Gezi Park protests and its handling of the dershane issue have practically nowhere to turn. ''As long as the AKP performs to satisfy the economic and social wishes of its constituency, Turkish voters are not going to look for an alternative,'' says Atilla Yesilada, an Istanbul-based political analyst with Global Source Partners. Some might vote for the nationalists, he says, and some might turn to the social democrats, but overall ''there aren't too many addresses that could accommodate them.''
  The same goes for the Gulenists. For all its recent criticism of Erdogan's government, the movement can ill afford to jump ship. ''It has nowhere to go politically,'' says Joshua Hendrick, a professor at Loyola University Maryland. The ruling party, he says, is its only home. ''There is no opposition that can create and implement policies that are as favorable to the movement's political interests.''
  The Gulenists' only available recourse, Hendrick says, is to try to reshape the AKP. They appear to have started already '' mainly by championing the only man capable of mounting a challenge to Erdogan'--Turkish President Abdullah Gul.
  Erdogan, who has promised to stand down as Prime Minister at the end of his current third term, is said to have his eyes on the presidency, which he hopes to use to continue steering the ship of state. Gul, who has hinted at running for reelection, appears to be the only man in his way. He may, of course, make way for Erdogan, but in exchange for becoming prime minister. However he positions himself, the sitting president, who projects the image of a much more conciliatory, inclusive leader, can count on the Gulenists' backing. ''There is very vocal support for Gul inside the movement,'' says Hendrick. ''They are strongly pushing for him to take up the mantle.''
  Usak, though guardedly, appears to acknowledge that the movement's main grudge is not with the AKP, but with Erdogan. ''He seems too overconfident compared to his previous terms,'' he says of Erdogan, so much so ''that he does not even discuss the issues with his own team.'' It remains to be seen how much Erdogan's team will suffer from losing the loyalty of Usak's movement.
  MORE: From Atat¼rk to Erdogan '-- TIME Covers Turkey
Turkey: Corruption Arrests Suggest Row Between Erdogan and Gulenists | TIME.com
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  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 14:31
  An astonishing series of arrests this week hint at a power struggle between Turkey's Prime Minister and the Gulenists, an influential Islamist movement that was once his ally '-- but which now could provoke a political meltdown in Ankara
  Burhan Ozbilici / APTurkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a news conference in Ankara, Turkey, on Dec. 18, 2013.
  In May 2011, a month before parliamentary elections that were to sweep him to power for the third time since 2002, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan triumphantly unveiled his ''Two Cities'' project, featuring plans for a third Istanbul airport, a new bridge over the Bosporus Strait, and a 35-mile canal connecting the Black and Marmara seas. At the end of his presentation, greeted with rapturous applause, he turned to a middle-aged man seated near the stage, and asked, half-jokingly, ''Hey, Agaoglu, maybe you'll want in on the job?''
  Two parts Crazy Eddie, one part Gatsby and one part Trump, Ali Agaoglu, No. 527 on Forbes' billionaire list, is Turkey's most famous and arguably most notorious construction mogul, a man known just as much for his collection of luxury cars and ex-wives as he is for his links to Erdogan's government and the state housing authority in particular. When I met him earlier this year at his company's sprawling offices, Agaoglu did not dispute the content of his May 2011 encounter with Erdogan. ''The Prime Minister was kind enough to make that request of us and we will do what is expected,'' he said. ''We will get our fair share.''
  Today, Agaoglu is in police custody. On Tuesday morning, in a series of raids that seemed to catch all of Turkey, including Erdogan's government, entirely off guard, Turkish police detained at least 50 people on suspicion of tender rigging, money laundering and bribery. In a country where corruption investigations, at least those involving figures close to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), are rare, this one has netted a number of very big fish: the sons of three Cabinet members, the mayor of one of Istanbul's biggest boroughs, the general manager of Turkey's second biggest state bank, Halkbank, several prominent businessmen, as well as a number of civil servants. And finally, Agaoglu.
  According to a written statement released by the Istanbul Public Prosecutor's Office, the detentions are the result of three separate probes that have been under way for at least 10 months and ''include public servants accepting bribery and misuse of office.''
  To many Turkish observers, however, the ongoing inquiry isn't about the famous real estate tycoon or the dozens of other suspects, but about the man who holds the nation's top office, Erdogan, and the Gulen community, a powerful Islamist movement that has turned into one of the Prime Minister's most dangerous foes. The movement's growing grudge with Erdogan's government, its strength in the police and the judiciary, the main suspects' links to the AKP, as well as the background of the prosecutors in charge, all speak to the widely aired theory that the Gulenists are the driving force behind the arrests. ''It really does look like a Gulen operation, an escalation in [their] power struggle with Erdogan,'' says Gareth Jenkins, an Istanbul-based expert at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute. ''This is an attempt by a dark [force] to finish Erdogan,'' AKP deputy Mehmet Metiner said at a press conference.
  (MORE:The Battle Between Erdogan and the Gulenists)
  In a speech delivered just hours after news of the arrests surfaced, Erdogan mentioned neither the investigation nor the Gulenists by name but made sure to warn his audience of what he saw as a plot staged by ''gangs'' and ''dark circles'' based ''abroad and at home.'' Returning to the kind of rhetoric he deployed earlier this summer, when antigovernment protests broke out in major cities across Turkey, he warned against ''traps,'' ''threats,'' ''ugly methods'' and ''dirty alliances.''
  ''We and the nation will not condone those who seek to settle their scores outside the ballot box,'' he said.
  The Gulen community has been at odds with the Prime Minister over a range of issues, including the wide powers afforded to his intelligence agency, his handling of the Gezi Park protests and his government's foreign policy. The blowback began with reports that Erdogan was engineering a purge of the Turkish bureaucracy, in which the Gulenists had established a number of powerful fiefdoms. In November, when the government confirmed that it would go ahead with plans to shut down Turkey's exam prep schools '-- one of the Gulen movement's financial lifelines '-- it reached a peak.
  With Tuesday's arrests, analysts here say, the Gulenists have struck back. The movement, says Jenkins, ''is trying to intimidate Erdogan into backing down. They're desperate to prevent the closure of the prep schools, which they see as an existential issue, because it is their main method of recruitment.''
  Through some of its leading supporters, the Gulen movement has denied having a role in the probe. ''This operation is a state operation,'' tweeted Huseyin Gulerce, a prominent columnist for a Gulenist daily. In an ensuing post, however, Gulerce left plenty of room for readers to draw the exact opposite conclusion. The day before the arrests, he noted, a soccer star turned AKP deputy had resigned from the ruling party, citing the government's ''senseless'' decision to close down the prep schools. ''The AKP should see this as a friendly warning,'' Gulerce said. ''Perhaps the last one.'' (Both tweets have since been deleted.) In a subsequent statement issued through his lawyer, the movement's U.S.-based leader, Fethullah Gulen, denied any involvement in the bribery probe.
  ''This is the biggest scandal of the republic's history,'' Engin Altay, head of the main opposition's parliamentary group, told Turkish media the day of the arrests. ''The Prime Minister should resign.''
  That, for Erdogan, is not an option. Having governed over a decade of rapid growth, the Turkish leader remains popular among large swaths of the electorate and is widely believed to have his eyes fixed on the country's presidency, which will come up for grabs in elections in August next year. Still, he is unlikely to emerge unscathed. In Turkish, the ''AK'' in AKP means ''white'' or ''pure,'' a pun that Erdogan's party has played on cleverly and successfully, portraying itself as an incorruptible political force and fighting back any suggestions to the contrary, notably by muzzling much of the mainstream media. Whatever the outcome of the corruption probe, the stain it will leave on the AKP's reputation will be hard to remove. Photos of countless stacks of $100 bills found in the apartment of the Turkish Interior Minister's son, as well as news of $4.5 million in cash found in the house of Halbank's general manager, are already making the rounds in TV programs and social media. The markets have shuddered. On Tuesday, shares on the Borsa Istanbul fell by 5.2%, or $12.7 billion, before recovering slightly the following day.
  It did not take long for the government to respond. By the end of the day on Wednesday, at least 11 high-ranking police officials, including department chiefs working on the corruption probe, found themselves fired or reassigned. The next day, Istanbul's police chief was relieved of his post. Erdogan has warned of more to come. ''They are trying to act as a state within the state,'' he said. ''But we will certainly lift the veil on this organization.''
  It's far from certain where the new Erdogan-Gulen row will end, or who will deliver the definitive blow. Perhaps what matters more than who wins is who loses, or who loses more, Rusen Cakir, a columnist for Vatan, wrote in a recent column.
  Still, the airing of the government's laundry, no matter the sides and the agendas involved, might actually be good news for Turkey, at least in the long term, says Cengiz Aktar of the Istanbul Policy Center, a think tank. ''Anything that reveals more details about how this country is run and governed is always good,'' he says. ''There are no more checks and balances in this country on public governance. It's one reason why we have ended up where we are.''
VIDEO-Newsy | CIA Director Promotes Surveillance, Endorses Bugging Home | Multisource Video News Analysis
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  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 05:57
  (Image: SmartPlanet)
  BY STACEY WELSH
  ANCHOR MEGAN MURPHY
  Enjoy watching TV?How about your TV '-- watching you?Oh, and your dishwasher, and your stove, and your '-- well '-- you name it.It could be in the works.
  CIA Director David Petraeus tells the agency's non-profit investment firm, In-Q-Tel, earlier this month how the Internet of PCs will move toward an ''Internet of things.'' Petraeus projected 50 to 100 billion household fixtures will be connected by 2020.
  In-Q-Tel investment companies are working on this technology. The Daily Mail reports you could even ''bug'' your own home with app-controlled gadgets.
  ''Everything from remote controls to clock radios can now be controlled via apps, and chip company ARM recently unveiled low-powered, cheaper chips which will be used in everything from fridges and ovens to doorbells.''
  Alex Jones from Infowars.com thinks that even the possibility of stealth-tracking appliances takes the whole idea of government power too far.
  ''All of the new washing machines, dryers, computers, iPhones have cameras that are two-way, have audio that's two-way, and they admit they're tracking you.''
  A blogger for SmartPlanet says '-- Big Brother, anyone?
  ''While developers would argue that espionage wasn't what any of them were intended for, we'd be naive not to realize by now that anything that lets us be more connected also opens us up to such possibilities.''
  Although many are opposed to the 'Internet of things,' one potentially positive aspect is that it could hide information about future CIA officers on social media sites. New data '-- about locations for example '-- could bury information posted online in the past.
  Wired reports Petraeus is...
  ''...interested in creating new online identities for his undercover spies and sweeping away the 'digital footprints' of agents who suddenly need to vanish.''
  NDTV predicts this online data will be spot-on, tracking home appliances as precisely as Google Maps charts locations. Petraeus also described the surveillance as ''transformational'' in tracking persons of interest in CIA investigations.
In-Q-Tel
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  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 05:55
  A.B. ''Buzzy'' Krongard serves as an outside director on the Global Board of DLA Piper. DLA Piper is one of the world's largest law firms with over 2,800 lawyers in 49 offices in 18 countries.
  A.B. ''Buzzy'' Krongard serves as an outside director on the Global Board of DLA Piper. DLA Piper is one of the world's largest law firms with over 2,800 lawyers in 49 offices in 18 countries. In addition, he is the Lead Director of Under Armour Inc. where he chairs the Audit Committee. He is also a member of the Board of Iridium Satellite Communications Inc., Apollo Global Management, and In-Q-Tel. He serves as Interim Chairman of the Johns Hopkins Health System.
  Krongard retired from the Central Intelligence Agency on November 30, 2004 where he had been Executive Director since March, 2001. Prior to this appointment, Krongard served as Counselor to the Director of Central Intelligence from February 2, 1998, after a 29-year career in investment banking. Krongard's CIA awards include the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the Director's Medal, the Directorate of Operations Donovan Award and the Warren medallion. Krongard had previously worked in various capacities at Alex. Brown Incorporated, the nation's oldest investment banking firm. In 1991, he was elected as Chief Executive Officer and assumed the additional duties of Chairman of the Board in 1994. Upon the merger of Alex. Brown with Bankers Trust Corporation in September 1997, Krongard became Vice Chairman of the Board of Bankers Trust and served in such capacity until joining the CIA.
  Krongard was involved in many industry and community activities. He served as Chairman of the Securities Industry Association in 1996 and was named the Outstanding Executive in the financial services industry in 1995 and 1996 by Financial World. In 1997, he received the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement.
  Krongard received an A.B. Degree with honors from Princeton University in 1958 and a Juris Doctor Degree with honors from the University of Maryland School of Law in 1975.
  He served three years of active duty as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps and ended his career as a captain. His hobbies include scuba diving and martial arts, in which he holds a black belt and equivalent rankings in several disciplines. He was elected to the Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 1981. Krongard is a native of Baltimore, Maryland and resides in Lutherville, Maryland. He is married to the former Cheryl G. Gordon and has three sons and seven grandchildren. His club memberships include The Ivy Club (Princeton, N.J.), The Links (New York, NY), The Metropolitan Club (Washington, D.C.), The Baltimore Country Club (Baltimore, MD), The Green Spring Hounds (Baltimore, MD) , The Woodmont Rod and Gun Club (Hancock, MD) and the Rolling Rock Club (Ligonier, PA).
Remarks by Director David H. Petraeus at In-Q-Tel CEO Summit '-- Central Intelligence Agency
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  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 05:39
  Excerpts from Remarks Delivered by Director David H. Petraeus at the In-Q-Tel CEO Summit (March 1, 2012)
  Thank you for that kind introduction and warm welcome. It truly is a pleasure to be here with such an impressive mix of entrepreneurs, investors, and technologists'--in fact, some of you, I'm sure, have all three titles to your credit. I'm also pleased that we have such strong representation from across the US Intelligence Community.
  I had a great discussion at dinner last night with a number of venture capitalists, and I'm looking forward to continuing those exchanges today with In-Q-Tel partner companies. Indeed, I'm very impressed with the innovative technologies In-Q-Tel is fostering development of in partnership with its portfolio companies. I can tell you that they are providing enormous support to us as we execute various critical intelligence missions. And, on behalf of the Agency, I thank you all for helping us perform at the very high level that the American people expect of us.
  Well, up front, I know it takes a wide variety of expertise to come up with the truly amazing applications that are associated with In-Q-Tel and its portfolio. And when I thought of that, I recalled the story of the four engineers driving home from one of our partner startups in Silicon Valley'--a mechanical engineer, a chemical engineer, an electrical engineer, and a computer engineer. And, sure enough, while heading up the West Valley Freeway, their car broke down. This is a joke, by the way, which I don't quite get'--but my team assures me it is funny, so work with me please!
  They of course immediately sought to determine the cause, and the mechanical engineer naturally said, ''Sounds to me as if the pistons have seized. We'll just have to strip down the engine.''
  ''I'm not sure about that,'' offered the chemical engineer. ''Seems to me the fuel might be contaminated. We should flush out the fuel system.''
  ''No,'' the electrical engineer replied, ''I think it's a grounding problem, or maybe a faulty plug lead. We need to check the wiring.''
  They all then turned to the computer engineer, who had said nothing, and asked for his opinion.
  ''Well,'' he said, ''this is a tough one. How about if we all get out of the car and get back in again?''
  Well, thanks for laughing. You know the deal'...at this stage in life, I'm only as good as the material they give me!
  I'm often asked what I find most gratifying about my job'--which, by the way, is the best job in the world and, in my case, a pretty awesome entry-level position. But the reason being CIA Director is so much fun is the extraordinary people with whom I'm privileged to serve. The CIA truly is a national treasure, with a workforce unparalleled in my experience. Within our Directorate of Science and Technology, the operative trait is diabolical creativity. The ingenuity our people bring to our S&T work'--helped by folks like you, those with whom you work, and those you lead'--is world-class, and the value they add to our operations worldwide is immeasurable. And it's great to have the Director of Science & Technology, Glenn Gaffney, here with me. Our Chief Information Officer is also here, along with other DS&T deputies and the S&T equivalent from NSA.
  Indeed, I've found that our technical capabilities often far exceed what you see in Tom Cruise films. But there are a few feats he can accomplish in the movies that we can't: we haven't figured out, for example, how to change an individual's fingerprints or eyeballs just yet'--but give us time.
  In any event, our partnership with In-Q-Tel is essential to helping identify and deliver groundbreaking technologies with mission-critical applications to the CIA and to our partner agencies. We don't necessarily ask you to be diabolical'--you can leave that to us'--but your creativity is vital. So, again, I truly appreciate the opportunity to be here with you today for this exchange of ideas, and I appreciate you all being here for the annual In-Q-Tel gathering.
  This morning, I'd like to discuss some of the top challenges that the CIA faces'--challenges that your work is helping us to meet.
  To set the context at the strategic level, the Agency is engaged in a ''tug of war,'' if you will, between the need to lead our country's war against al-Qa'ida and its affiliates, and the need for global intelligence coverage'--all of this, of course, against the backdrop of tighter budgets.
  As you know, our Agency has a global charter to collect intelligence. It's our job to ensure that challenges that arise in any corner of the world are not surprises to the President or to other policymakers. Certainly, we will continue relentlessly to pursue terrorists and support the troops in several different theaters. That is imperative, and the last year has seen considerable achievement in the fight against al-Qa'ida and its affiliates. But, to use the kids' soccer analogy, we cannot turn the counterterrorist fight into a game of magnetball, in which the leadership is always focused on the counterterror mission. Everyone can't flock to the ball and lose sight of the rest of the field'--the whole rest of the world.
  And it's an enormous field to cover: again, the whole world, with proliferation of weapons and technology, cyber threats, counterintelligence threats, the next developments in the evolution of the Arab Spring, Iran, North Korea, China, illegal narcotics, emerging powers, non-state organizations, and even lone wolves. Our duty is nothing less than to be on top of every potential foreign challenge and opportunity facing the United States'--and we now have to do it without the steady budget growth we saw in the years after 9/11. And this is why my job is so intellectually stimulating.
  Against this backdrop, transformational changes in the nature of intelligence work have driven us to adopt the kind of innovative technologies developed by the firms represented in this room. And I'd like to briefly discuss three major challenges of this new era: the utter transparency of the digital world, the enormous task of processing so-called Big Data, and the ever-greater need for speed.
  First, given the digital transparency I just mentioned, we have to rethink our notions of identity and secrecy. In the digital world, data is everywhere, as you all know well. Data is created constantly, often unknowingly and without permission. Every byte left behind reveals information about location, habits, and, by extrapolation, intent and probable behavior. The number of data points that can be collected is virtually limitless'--presenting, of course, both enormous intelligence opportunities and equally large counterintelligence challenges. We must, for example, figure out how to protect the identity of our officers who increasingly have a digital footprint from birth, given that proud parents document the arrival and growth of their future CIA officer in all forms of social media that the world can access for decades to come. Moreover, we have to figure out how to create the digital footprint for new identities for some officers.
  As you all know, exploiting the intelligence opportunities'--which is an easier subject to discuss in an unclassified setting than the counterintelligence challenges'--will require a new class of in-place and remote sensors that operate across the electromagnetic spectrum. Moreover, these sensors will be increasingly interconnected.
  The current ''Internet of PCs'' will move, of course, toward an ''Internet of Things'''--of devices of all types'--50 to 100 billion of which will be connected to the Internet by 2020. As you know, whereas machines in the 19th century learned to do, and those in the 20th century learned to think at a rudimentary level, in the 21st century, they are learning to perceive'--to actually sense and respond. Key applications developed by our In-Q-Tel investment companies are focused on technologies that are driving the Internet of Things. These include:
  Item identification, or devices engaged in tagging;Sensors and wireless sensor networks'--devices that indeed sense and respond;Embedded systems'--those that think and evaluate;And, finally, nanotechnology, allowing these devices to be small enough to function virtually anywhere.Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters'--all connected to the next-generation Internet using abundant, low cost, and high-power computing'--the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.
  In practice, these technologies could lead to rapid integration of data from closed societies and provide near-continuous, persistent monitoring of virtually anywhere we choose. ''Transformational'' is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies, particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft. Taken together, these developments change our notions of secrecy and create innumerable challenges'--as well as opportunities.
  Secondly, the CIA and our Intelligence Community partners must be able to swim in the ocean of ''Big Data.'' Indeed, we must be world class swimmers'--the best, in fact. We are inundated by constantly evolving open sources of foreign information, such as social media, that can provide invaluable, real-time insights. The Arab Spring has been a case study in how these rich streams of data can speak volumes on how a breaking crisis is liable to develop. And our Open Source Center and social media folks are on it. Of course, making sense of today's massive quantities of unstructured data presents enormous challenges as well. For any given high-interest event, the ''digital dust'' to which we have access is being delivered by the equivalent of dump trucks!
  The volume of Twitter and YouTube traffic in the continuing unrest in the Middle East offers an idea of what we're up against: at the start of the Arab Spring, there were 2,200 Tweets generated every second'--that equals some 190 million Tweets generated each day. And, since the beginning of the Arab Spring, those numbers have risen dramatically.
  This ocean of Big Data has implications for both intelligence collection and intelligence analysis. For collection, having access to free and open information on so many topics that used to be denied to us allows our Agency to better focus our human intelligence effort'--which often involves high costs and risks'--on learning the key secrets that justify those costs and risks.
  The implications of big data loom largest, of course, for our analytic effort. I'm convinced that the CIA has the greatest, most talented concentration of all-source intelligence analysts in the entire world; individuals unequaled in their ability to pull together the product of myriad sources of intelligence'--human, signals, imagery, liaison, and so on, in addition to open sources'--and to provide analysis with true insight. We place a high premium on knowledge, including regional and cultural expertise, and skills such as foreign language fluency, and fluency with applications that enable them. Indeed, we owe our analysts tools and systems that increasingly help them to give structure and meaning to the mountain of raw intelligence and to place it in proper context for the President and our policymakers.
  Moreover, our analysts must discern the non-obvious relationships embedded deeply within different types of data: finding connections between a purchase here, a phone call there, a grainy video, customs and immigration information, various embedded meta-data, and so on'--and then making sense of it. Ultimately, if you combine the open-source feeds such as those I mentioned with the increasingly massive volumes of classified data we receive, it's clear that the CIA and our Community partners require new ways to organize and unify this universe of data'--to make it usable, to accelerate automation, and to enable data traceability, relevance, and security. In short, these solutions must lead to automated discovery, rather than depending on the right analyst asking the right question.
  Cloud computing provides important new capabilities for performing analysis across all data, allowing our analysts and decisionmakers to ask ad-hoc analytic questions of Big Data in a quick, precise fashion. New cloud computing technologies developed by In-Q-Tel partner companies are driving analytic transformation in the way organizations store, access, and process massive amounts of disparate data via massively parallel and distributed IT systems.
  I am very encouraged by what I've seen so far. In fact, we're excited about it. For example, among the analytic projects underway with In-Q-Tel startups is one that enables collection and analysis of worldwide social media feeds, along with projects that use either cloud computing or other methods to explore and analyze Big Data. These are very welcome additions to the initiatives we have underway to enable us to be the strongest swimmers in the ocean of Big Data.
  Finally, and my third point, is that we need products that help us respond to threats at the speed our mission demands. Despite our success in preventing another major attack on our shores since 9/11, we still face a resilient enemy in al-Qa'ida and its affiliates, an enemy every bit as determined to attack our country and our allies as it has ever been, and an enemy becoming increasingly sophisticated. The stakes are very high, and, quite simply, we must derive ever greater speed for our work from the systems you provide. Over the past decade, we have achieved considerable progress along the continuum from responsive and reactive to predictive and preventive, and we must sustain that momentum.
  ''Connecting the dots'' may be one of biggest catch phrases of the last ten years, but it truly remains at the heart of our CT mission and many others. At the end of the day, that's how we got Bin Ladin. And In-Q-Tel companies are providing capabilities that allow our analysts to develop unique insights into seemingly intractable search-and-discovery challenges'--and to do it quickly, interactively, and securely.
  We require speed not only in performing our mission, but in developing and fielding tools that are as state-of-the art when they arrive in the field as when they were designed. It used to be acceptable to take years to build a new capability. Now we're lucky if we have months between identifying a need and deploying a solution. Sometimes the deadline we're facing is only weeks'--or even days.
  Industry's ability to rapidly prototype new products and get them to market'--especially our market'--is a skill that government simply cannot match. And so, in many cases, we rely on the private sector for the developmental speed that intelligence work requires. In-Q-Tel and its partner companies, through the Interface Center, help accelerate our application of technology'--and, consequently, our ability to meet our global mission.
  Chris Darby and the In-Q-Tel team live inside the fence, as we say, a good bit of the time. And they have become expert at translating our requirements into language that partner companies understand. And, of course, what we need often anticipates a need in the commercial arena'--and that is why In-Q-Tel attracted more than $9 in venture capital for every $1 we put in.
  I have boundless confidence in what the partnership between the CIA, our Intelligence Community colleagues, In-Q-Tel, and our partner companies can accomplish in helping us meet our global intelligence missions. There is, after all, no limit to what American ingenuity can achieve, whether in commerce, on the battlefield, or in the intelligence realm. Thanks in large part to your invaluable work, our officers enjoy an operational edge that our adversaries cannot hope to match'--though they are trying! And we have to stay Number One!
  Working together, we can best meet the high expectations that the American people have of us, especially in wartime. And we can put our nation's greatest strengths to work against America's most dangerous enemies.
  You have my personal commitment that we will continue to make our market more available and accessible to you. I strongly support the In-Q-Tel model, and I am one of its biggest boosters. That's why I'm here today, and that's why I have asked Glenn Gaffney, our Director for Science and Technology, to expand our outreach to the startup community.
  So, thanks for being here today, thanks for what you and your firms do in helping the Agency to be diabolically clever, and thanks for helping to keep America's Intelligence Community at the forefront of global innovation.
Obama Pardons Top Dem Ally Deval Patrick's Crack Dealer Cousin'...
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Weasel Zippers
  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 01:41
  Even better, they're claiming it was just a coincidence.
  Via Boston Herald:
  Gov. Deval Patrick's convicted drug dealer cousin was among eight people whose hefty sentences were commuted yesterday by President Obama, who cited a disparity in penalties for crack cocaine.
  Reynolds Allen Wintersmith Jr., 39, is serving a life sentence for drug trafficking and has been imprisoned since 1994.
  Patrick's office said in a statement: ''Mr. Wintersmith is the Governor's first cousin. The Governor has no recollection of meeting Mr. Wintersmith (they are quite far apart in age), and believes that if they did meet it would have been when Mr. Wintersmith was a small boy. The Governor was not involved in any application for a commutation of Mr. Wintersmith's sentence, and only learned of the commutation through today's media reports.
  Wintersmith's case had been adopted by advocates and crusading attorneys. All eight inmates were sentenced under old federal guidelines that treated convictions for crack cocaine offenses more harshly than those involving the powder form of the drug. Obama also pardoned 13 others for various crimes.
Russia Foiled 12 Terrorist Attacks This Year '' Putin
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: RIA Novosti
  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 01:33
  MOSCOW, December 20 (RIA Novosti) '' Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that the country's Federal Security Service (FSB) had prevented at least 12 terrorist attacks in the past year.
  ''This year, FSB officers foiled 77 terrorism-related crimes, including 12 terrorist attacks,'' Putin said at a gala evening dedicated to the professional holiday of security officers, Security Agency Workers Day.
  ''As a result of the special operations carried out, 255 militants have been neutralized, including 40 gang leaders; more than 500 militants and their accomplices have been detained,'' he said.
  Putin urged security agency officers to keep acting ''in the same resolute way'' ahead of and during international events Russia hosts next year, in an apparent reference to the 2014 Winter Olympic Games due in February in Russia's southern resort city of Sochi.
  (C) RIA Novosti.
  Terrorist threat levels in Russia
Government Report Confirms That A Major Solar Event Will Be A Kill Shot For The United States
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Activist Post
  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 01:31
  Chris CarringtonActivist PostAn official report prepared by John Kappenman, an independent consultant, was commissioned by The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2010. The report is summarized in The JASON report on Impacts of Severe Space Weather on The Electrical Grid, project number 13119022.
  JASON is an independent group of some 60 scientists that advises the United States government on science and technology that could have national implications. It is run by the non-profit making MITRE Corporation in Virginia.
  There is a massive amount of information in the report which was published in November 2011. For the technically minded, transformers are discussed in detail, highlighting the problems that space weather impacts could, and does have on them. There are examples from around the world of the damage caused to electrical grids when a coronal mass ejection hits the Earth. There are details of different types of space weather, their effects and likely outcomes of such incidents.
  Kappenman based his findings on past space weather, the effects felt at the time and how the advances in technology since that time would be affected by a similar event.
  Page 51-54 of the JASON report is of particular interest. It summarizes Kappenman's findings. It is somber reading.
  More than 300 transformers destroyed.130 million people in the United States lacking power for several years.1-2 trillion dollars of economic losses.A US map of vulnerable transformers with areas of probable system collapse encircled. Credit: National Academy of Sciences.At risk transformers in the same scenario(To make the writing legible the map is way too big so you can read the details in the JASON report, page 53, here.)Kappenman based his findings on past storms. It goes without saying that should future storms be more severe than those the scenario is based on, then the damage caused will also be more severe.We have become so reliant on electricity in the last 200 years, it's difficult to imagine life without it. Those who rely on refrigerated medications would be hard hit within hours of the power going off, as would those who rely on regular oxygen cylinder deliveries to their homes.
  The usual back up power in hospitals is 72 hours. After that life support machines and operating rooms will cease to function.
  Pumps at gas stations will no longer dispense fuel affecting everything from the family car to the food supply.
  Water treatment and pumping stations will cease to function, again this will affect a wide range of services we take for granted, drinking water, sanitation and even firefighting will be limited or non-existant for millions. Contestation over water in lakes and rivers will be a source of ongoing conflict for years after the event.
  Many factories that make parts for transformers will not be able to do so, leaving the United States at the mercy of foreign powers for transformers and parts. (If those countries have not been affected by the event themselves.)
  The very fabric of the only society we know will come to a grinding halt within a week of the grid going down.
  The government knows this; they have known it for more than two years yet they have done nothing about it. They are not hardening the grid, they are not changing at least some of it to short line instead of long line runs.
  There is no advice given regarding stocking up on food, water and other supplies beyond the recommended 'store at least a three day supply' on the FEMA website. I particularly like their advice never to ration water unless told to do so by the authorities'...
  Without medicines and medical assistant diseases like typhus, typhoid and cholera will move through the population.
  A severe space weather event will mean the end of life as we know it. Only the most prepared will survive, and those that do will find themselves in a very different world. Such an event has the potential to put not just the United States, but half the planet back to the Stone Age, reducing the ability of others in the First World to assist allied nations. A severe solar event would have the ability to affect an entire hemisphere rather than just an individual country.
  Geo-political power bases would move to those nations that have a functioning government and electricity. Even people in those countries currently considered to be Third World will be living in conditions far more favorable than those living in a post solar event world, where electricity and sanitation are things children will grow up hearing about rather than experiencing.
  It isn't a case of IF a large flare causes devastation on Earth, it's a case WHEN.
  The Sun is beyond human control, and will remain so. There is nothing we can do to prevent flares, coronal mass ejections and the like. All we can do is increase our knowledge base of the damage they can do and try to mitigate it by preparing ourselves and our families as best we can.
  Chris Carrington is a writer, researcher and lecturer with a background in science, technology and environmental studies. Chris is an editor for The Daily Sheeple, where this first appeared. Wake the flock up!
  BE THE CHANGE! PLEASE SHARE THIS USING THE TOOLS BELOW
Huffington Post Logic: They Don't Pay Bloggers, But They Are In Favor of a $10.10 Minimum Wage
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: EconomicPolicyJournal.com
  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 01:26
  In 2012, Huffington Post went to court to battle a class action suit filed on behalf of its bloggers, who aren't paid. HuffPo won the challenge and a judge dismissed the suit.Yet, today, we have Jillian Berman, an Associate Business Editor at HufffPo, out with an article supporting a increase in the minimum wage to $10.10.
  Got it? When it comes to HuffPo, not even the courts can make it pay one damn penny, but when it comes to the rest of the world HuffPo demands a government decree that requires minimum pay of $10.10 a hour.
  As for Berman's argument, it is a classic case of Berman not understanding that 2+2=4.
Anti-Google Protest Turns Slightly Violent
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Valleywag
  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 01:26
  S
  To the pronounced horror of some people who work at Google, a cadre of anti-tech-gentrification protestors today surrounded one of the company's private San Francisco shuttles, eventually smashing one of its windows.
  From PandoDaily's account of the incident, which will surely become one of the Where were you? moments for those inside the coddled, gurgling startup scene:
  The smashing of the Google bus window today marks the first time the anti-eviction movement has used physically aggressive tactics, although in May between 30 and 40 protesters in San Francisco's Mission district attacked a pi±ata in the form of a Google bus.
  First they came for the pi±atas. Naturally, Sarah Lacy is shocked and appalled by this display of barbarism:
  As is other leading Silicon Valley thinker, Brit Morin:
  There was a time when shocking people in positions of apparently unimpeachable power and influence to attain some political goal was considered "disruption," but that was long, long ago.
  Photo via Craig Frost
You may drone the bride: Yemen drone strike 'targeted al-Qaeda leader'
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: AL JAZEERA ENGLISH (AJE)
  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 01:25
  American and Yemeni officials have said the target of a deadly drone strike that hit a wedding convoy and killed 15 people in Yemen earlier this month was a mid-level al-Qaeda leader.
  Two US and one Yemeni official, speaking to Associated Press news agency on condition of anonymity on Friday, said that Shawqi Ali Ahmad al-Badani was wounded and escaped the December 12 air strike.
  The officials described al-Badani as the leader behind a bomb plot that briefly closed 19 US diplomatic posts across Africa and the Middle East earlier this year.
  The US officials said between nine and 12 other fighters were killed in the December drone strike, and that there were no civilian casualties.
  Initial reports from Yemen, however, had said that 13 civilians were killed in the drone strike, as their wedding party in the south of Yemen was mistaken for an al-Qaeda convoy.
  "Even if it turns out that this was a case of killings based on mistaken identity or dodgy intelligence, whoever was responsible needs to own up to the error and come clean about what happened in this incident," said Philip Luther, director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Programme.
  Bomb plot link
  Yemen is among a handful of countries where the US acknowledges using drones, although it does not directly comment on the practice.
  Human Rights Watch said in a report earlier this year that US missile strikes have killed dozens of civilians in Yemen.
  On Friday, a Yemeni official told the AP al-Badani was linked to a plot to bomb the US embassy in Yemen's capital, Sanaa, in 2012, and to a threat that shut down 19 US embassies across the region last August.
  The US said it intercepted a message between al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahri and Yemen's al-Qaeda offshoot about plans for the attack on August 2.
  The US missions, as well as some European diplomatic posts, were shut for at least a week.
  320
Proposed Disposal of George H.W. Bush and Clinton Administration Electronic Backup Tapes
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Federal Register Latest Entries
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 15:05
  Presidential Records Act Notice Of Proposed Disposal Of George H.W. Bush And Clinton Administration Disaster Recovery Backup Tapes; Final Agency Action.
  The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is issuing this final notice to dispose of a collection of disaster recovery backup tapes from the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations under the provisions of 44 U.S.C. 2203(f)(3). The notice of proposed disposal of this collection of disaster recovery backup tapes was published in the Federal Register on June 28, 2013 (78 FR 125, p. 39016), and contains a detailed description of this issue. NARA received no comments on the proposed notice, and is therefore proceeding with this notice of final agency action.
  This notice will be effective and the disposal will occur on or after February 18, 2014.
  Director of Presidential Libraries Susan K. Donius; National Archives and Records Administration, Suite 2200; 8601 Adelphi Road; College Park, Maryland 20740-6001; by telephone at 301-837-3250; by fax to 301-837-3199; or by email to beth.fidler@nara.gov.
  NARA published a ''Presidential Records Act notice of Proposed Disposal of George H.W. Bush and Clinton Administration Electronic Backup Tapes'' on June 28, 2013, in the Federal Register (78 FR 125) for a 45 day comment period. NARA received no written comments.
  NARA has determined that further retention of these disaster recovery backup tapes is not warranted. The Presidential and Federal electronic mail with attachments, pager, and calendar records residing on these backup tapes were previously restored and NARA will permanently retain those Presidential and Federal records on a different set of electronic media. Because the backup tapes proposed for disposal were made for disaster recovery purposes and the restoration project was completed in 1996, NARA is following the normal disposal processes established in General Records Schedules 20 and 24 for Federal record backup tapes.
  NARA will proceed to dispose of 22,907 All-In-One backup tapes created during the George H.W. Bush and Clinton Administrations by OA staff as specified in the February 18, 2014 of this notice, because NARA has determined that they lack sufficient administrative, historical, informational, or evidentiary value. This notice constitutes NARA's final agency action pursuant to 44 U.S.C. 2203(f)(3).
  Dated: December 16, 2013.
  David S. Ferriero,
  Archivist of the United States.
  [FR Doc. 2013-30371 Filed 12-19-13; 8:45 am]
  BILLING CODE 7515-01-P
President Obama Honors Outstanding Math and Science Teachers
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 01:24
  The White House
  Office of the Press Secretary
  For Immediate Release
  December 20, 2013
  WASHINGTON, DC -- President Obama today named 102 mathematics and science teachers as recipients of the prestigious Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. This year's awardees represent all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Department of Defense Education Activity. The educators will receive their awards at a Washington, DC, event in the coming year.
  The Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching is awarded annually to outstanding K-12 science and mathematics teachers from across the country. The winners are selected by a panel of distinguished scientists, mathematicians, and educators following an initial selection process done at the state level. Each year the award alternates between teachers teaching kindergarten through 6th grade and those teaching 7th through 12th grades. The 2012 awardees named today teach kindergarten through 6th grade.
  Winners of this Presidential honor receive a $10,000 award from the National Science Foundation to be used at their discretion. They also are invited to Washington, DC, for an awards ceremony and several days of educational and celebratory events, including visits with members of Congress and the Administration.
  ''These teachers are inspiring today's young students to become the next generation of American scientists, mathematicians, and innovators,'' President Obama said. ''Through their passion and dedication, and by sharing their excitement about science, technology, engineering, and math, they are helping us build a promising future for all our children.''
  Excellent math and science teachers, exemplified by these awardees, are critical to getting more students engaged in the increasingly important science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. That's why President Obama has committed to strengthening STEM education and has called for preparing 100,000 excellent science and mathematics teachers over the next decade'--a goal that inspired the creation of ''100kin10,'' a coalition of leading corporations, philanthropies, universities, service organizations, and others working to train and retain STEM teachers across the Nation. The President has also proposed to further strengthen the STEM teaching profession by launching a new STEM Master Teacher Corps, leveraging the expertise of some of our nation's best and brightest teachers in science and mathematics to elevate the teaching of these subjects nationwide.
  Nominations for the 2014 PAEMST are open through April 1, 2014. For more information about PAEMST, please visit www.paemst.org. The recipients of the 2012 Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching are:
  AlabamaDanielle Peterson, Hoover (Math)Rita Schell, Homewood (Science)
  AlaskaRebecca Himschoot, Sitka (Science)Amy Laufer, Anchorage (Math)
  ArizonaAllison Davis, Chandler (Math)Cindy Piano, Glendale (Science)
  ArkansasJennifer Richardson, Greenbrier (Science)Christi Snow, Springdale (Math)
  CaliforniaJamie Garner, Turlock (Math)Alma Park, East Palo Alto (Science)
  ColoradoElizabeth Grabois, Denver (Science)Joan Standefer, Boulder (Math)
  ConnecticutMary Servino, Bridgeport (Science)Maren Sussman, Ellington (Math)
  DelawareTimothy Dalby, Wilmington (Science)Jeanine Moore, Millsboro (Math) Department of Defense Education ActivityCarol Fears (Math)Marilyn Hawks (Science)
  District of ColumbiaKatrina Abdussalaam (Math)Martha Estroff (Science)
  FloridaNancy Bourne, Jupiter (Math)Barbara Wilcox, Cocoa (Science)
  GeorgiaChristy Garvin, Powder Springs (Science)Jeanne Rast, Hapeville (Math)
  HawaiiLaura Fukumoto, Honolulu (Math)Dave Morishige, Mililani (Science)
  IdahoTauna Johnson, Genesse (Science)Donna Wommack, Genesse (Math)
  IllinoisLisa Feltman, Algonquin (Math)Bryan Lake, Urbana (Science)
  IndianaTeresa Gross, Greenwood (Science)Jay Vahle, Carmel (Math)
  IowaJosie Burg, Des Moines (Math)Mason Kuhn, Shell Rock (Science)
  KansasLindsey Constance, Shawnee (Science)Cathy Wilber, Wamego (Math)
  KentuckySuzanne Farmer, Danville (Math)Patricia Works, Lexington (Science)
  LouisianaDonna Lamonte, Baton Rouge (Math)Amanda Warren, Mandeville (Science)
  MaineKaren Jagolinzer, Yarmouth (Math)Elizabeth Heidemann, Cushing (Science)
  MarylandTimothy Emhoff, Indian Head (Science)Kris Hanks, Glen Burnie (Math)
  MassachusettsErin Dukeshire, Roxbury (Science)Jessica Findlay, Douglas (Math)
  MichiganBrian Peterson, Rochester (Science)Emily Theriault-Kimmey, Ann Arbor (Math)
  MinnesotaCathy Kindem, Apple Valley (Science)Michael Wallus, Saint Paul (Math)
  MississippiCatherine Tebo, Jackson (Math)
  MissouriLaura Parn, Wentzville (Math)Ragan Webb, Columbia (Science)
  MontanaElizabeth Matthews, Gallatin Gateway (Science)Melissa Romano, Helena (Math)
  NebraskaAlysia Augustus, Bellevue (Math)Kimberly Humphrey, Kearney (Science)
  NevadaRyan Doetch, Sparks (Math)Traci Loftin, Reno (Science)
  New HampshireHolly Doe, Pelham (Science)
  New JerseyJennifer Basner, Berlin (Math)Jeanette Scillieri, Leonia (Science)
  New Mexico
  Anna Suggs, Las Cruces (Science)
  Vivian Valencia, Espanola (Math)
  New YorkHelen Rogosin, New York (Science)Joshua Rosen, Dobbs Ferry (Math)
  North CarolinaTeresa Cowan, Swannanoa (Science)Tonya Kepley, China Grove (Math)
  North DakotaKristine Brandt, Fargo (Math)Kathleen Lentz, Valley City (Science)
  OhioNatalie Harr, Mantua (Science)Elizabeth Pitzer, Arcanum (Math)
  OklahomaCarol Huett, Moore (Science)Patricia Reece, Bokoshe (Science)
  OregonKerry Morton, Bend (Math)
  PennsylvaniaSusan Bauer, Macungie (Science)Michael Soskil, Newfoundland (Math)
  Puerto RicoMaria Cerra-Castaner, Rio Pierdras (Math) Rhode IslandRegina Kilday, Exeter (Math)Clare Ornburn, Ashaway (Science)
  South CarolinaJohn Dearybury III, Spartanburg (Science)Donald Sarazen, Columbia (Math)
  South DakotaAnn Anderson, Belle Fourche (Science)Erin Marsh, Pierre (Math)
  TennesseeMargaret Hawkins, Lebanon (Science)Amber Hodge, Knoxville (Math)
  TexasWendy Hendry, Colleyville (Math)Kent Page, San Antonio (Science)
  UtahRebecca Elder, Murray (Math)Julie Hammari, Spanish Fork (Science)
  VermontCarol Joy Dobson, Weybridge (Math)Mary Ellis, Enosburg Falls (Math)
  VirginiaStephanie Chlebus, Alexandria (Math)Elizabeth Miller, Richmond (Science)
  WashingtonPamela Nolan-Beasley, Waitsburg (Science)Nancy Pfaff, Redmond (Math)
  West VirginiaBarbara Black, Hurricane (Science)Gabrielle Rhodes, Buckhannon (Science)
  WisconsinMary Fernan, Milton (Math)Kathleen Hiteman, Middleton (Science)
  WyomingLaurie Graves, Big Horn (Science)Kathleen Kniss, Laramie (Math)
$10m NSA contract with security firm RSA led to encryption 'back door' | World news | theguardian.com
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  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 01:15
  As a key part of a campaign to embed encryption software that it could crack into widely used computer products, the National Security Agency arranged a secret $10m contract with RSA, one of the most influential firms in the computer security industry, Reuters has learned.
  Documents leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers, to create a "back door" in encryption products, the New York Times reported in September. Reuters later reported that RSA became the most important distributor of that formula by rolling it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used to enhance security in personal computers and many other products.
  Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10m in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the BSafe software, according to two sources familiar with the contract. Although that sum might seem paltry, it represented more than a third of the revenue that the relevant division at RSA had taken in during the entire previous year, securities filings show.
  The earlier disclosures of RSA's entanglement with the NSA already had shocked some in the close-knit world of computer security experts. The company had a long history of championing privacy and security, and it played a leading role in blocking a 1990s effort by the NSA to require a special chip to enable spying on a wide range of computer and communications products. RSA, which is now a subsidiary of the computer storage giant EMC Corp , urged customers to stop using the NSA formula after the Snowden disclosures revealed its weakness.
  RSA and EMC declined to answer questions for this story, but RSA said in a statement: "RSA always acts in the best interest of its customers and under no circumstances does RSA design or enable any back doors in our products. Decisions about the features and functionality of RSA products are our own."
  The NSA declined to comment.
  The RSA deal shows one way the NSA carried out what Snowden's documents describe as a key strategy for enhancing surveillance: the systematic erosion of security tools. NSA documents released in recent months called for using "commercial relationships" to advance that goal, but did not name any security companies as collaborators.
  The NSA came under attack this week in a landmark report from a White House panel appointed to review US surveillance policy. The panel noted that "encryption is an essential basis for trust on the Internet", and called for a halt to any NSA efforts to undermine it.
  Most of the dozen current and former RSA employees interviewed said that the company erred in agreeing to such a contract, and many cited RSA's corporate evolution away from pure cryptography products as one of the reasons it occurred. But several said that RSA also was misled by government officials, who portrayed the formula as a secure technological advance.
  "They did not show their true hand," one person briefed on the deal said of the NSA, asserting that government officials did not let on that they knew how to break the encryption.
  Started by MIT professors in the 1970s and led for years by an ex-marine, Jim Bidzos, RSA and its core algorithm were named for the last initials of the three founders, who revolutionized cryptography. Little known to the public, RSA's encryption tools have been licensed by most large technology companies, which in turn use them to protect computers used by hundreds of millions of people.
  At the core of RSA's products was a technology known as public key cryptography. Instead of using the same key for encoding and then decoding a message, there are two keys related to each other mathematically. The first, publicly available key is used to encode a message for someone, who then uses a second, private key to reveal it.
  From RSA's earliest days, the US intelligence establishment worried it would not be able to crack well-engineered public key cryptography. Martin Hellman, a former Stanford researcher who led the team that invented the technique, said NSA experts tried to talk him and others into believing that the keys did not have to be as large as they planned.
  The stakes rose when more technology companies adopted RSA's methods and internet use began to soar. The Clinton administration embraced the Clipper Chip, envisioned as a mandatory component in phones and computers to enable officials to overcome encryption with a warrant. RSA led a fierce public campaign against the effort, distributing posters with a foundering sailing ship and the words "Sink Clipper!"
  A key argument against the chip was that overseas buyers would shun US technology products if they were ready-made for spying. Some companies say that is just what has happened in the wake of the Snowden disclosures.
  The White House abandoned the Clipper Chip and instead relied on export controls to prevent the best cryptography from crossing US borders. RSA once again rallied the industry, and it set up an Australian division that could ship what it wanted.
  "We became the tip of the spear, so to speak, in this fight against government efforts," Bidzos recalled in an oral history.
  RSA and others claimed victory when export restrictions relaxed. But the NSA was determined to read what it wanted, and the quest gained urgency after the 11 September 2001 attacks.
  RSA, meanwhile, was changing. Bidzos stepped down as chief executive in 1999 to concentrate on VeriSign, a security certificate company that had been spun out of RSA. The elite lab Bidzos had founded in Silicon Valley moved east to Massachusetts, and many top engineers left the company, several former employees said. And the BSafe toolkit was becoming a much smaller part of the company. By 2005, BSafe and other tools for developers brought in just $27.5m of RSA's revenue, less than 9% of the $310m total.
  "When I joined there were 10 people in the labs, and we were fighting the NSA," said Victor Chan, who rose to lead engineering and the Australian operation before he left in 2005. "It became a very different company later on."
  By the first half of 2006, RSA was among the many technology companies seeing the US government as a partner against overseas hackers. New RSA chief executive Art Coviello and his team still wanted to be seen as part of the technological vanguard, former employees say, and the NSA had just the right pitch. Coviello declined an interview request.
  An algorithm called Dual Elliptic Curve, developed inside the agency, was on the road to approval by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology as one of four acceptable methods for generating random numbers. NIST's blessing is required for many products sold to the government and often sets a broader de facto standard. RSA adopted the algorithm even before NIST approved it. The NSA then cited the early use of Dual Elliptic Curve inside the government to argue successfully for NIST approval, according to an official familiar with the proceedings.
  RSA's contract made Dual Elliptic Curve the default option for producing random numbers in the RSA toolkit. No alarms were raised, former employees said, because the deal was handled by business leaders rather than pure technologists.
  "The labs group had played a very intricate role at BSafe, and they were basically gone," said labs veteran Michael Wenocur, who left in 1999.
  Within a year, major questions were raised about Dual Elliptic Curve. Cryptography authority Bruce Schneier wrote that the weaknesses in the formula "can only be described as a back door".
  After reports of the back door in September, RSA urged its customers to stop using the Dual Elliptic Curve number generator. But unlike the Clipper Chip fight two decades ago, the company is saying little in public, and it declined to discuss how the NSA entanglements have affected its relationships with customers.
  The White House, meanwhile, says it will consider this week's panel recommendation that any efforts to subvert cryptography be abandoned.
VIDEO- Under Pressure (A-Capella) - Only Vocals - YouTube
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  Sat, 21 Dec 2013 01:14
Newly confirmed Homeland Security No. 2 is still under investigation
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  Archived Version
  Source: TheBlaze.com - Blog
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 20:51
  But thanks to Democrats' new anti-filibuster rules, Alejandro Mayorkas sailed through confirmation despite serious questions.
  The Washington Times reports:
  Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, told colleagues he was stunned they were going ahead with the vote.
  He said he'd had analysts research the record and they couldn't find any instances where a nominee under active investigation had been confirmed.
  ''It's never been done before,'' he said.
  Mr. Coburn said if the review, which he said could take a few more months, cleared Mr. Mayorkas then he should easily be confirmed.
  The Oklahoma senator also said President Obama was being hypocritical by continuing to push Mr. Mayorkas's nomination, saying that when he was Sen. Obama he objected to moving ahead with one of President George W. Bush's nominees while that person was under investigation.
Fatally poisoned by tainted shoes
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  Archived Version
  Source: Global Times
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 20:50
  A resident in Dongying, Shandong Province was fatally poisoned after receiving shoes bought from the Internet on November 29.After opening the shoe box, the resident, surnamed Liu, smelled a bad odor, vomited and experienced stomach pains, and died in hospital.
  Police discovered the poison had leaked at a dispatch center for YTO Express in Weifang, Shandong Province, and will revoke its license.
  Global Times
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Russian Rail Taps Banks on Kazan Route as Costs Hit $33 Billion
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  Source: 33 World News
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 20:29
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Presidential Determination -- Taiwan
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  Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 20:28
  The White House
  Office of the Press Secretary
  For Immediate Release
  December 20, 2013
  MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF STATE
  THE SECRETARY OF ENERGY
  SUBJECT: Proposed Agreement for Cooperation Between the American Institute in Taiwan and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States Concerning Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy
  I have considered the proposed Agreement for Cooperation Between the American Institute in Taiwan and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States Concerning Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, along with the views, recommendations, and statements of the interested agencies.
  I have determined that the performance of the Agreement will promote, and will not constitute an unreasonable risk to, the common defense and security. Pursuant to section 123 b. of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended (42 U.S.C. 2153(b)), I hereby approve the proposed Agreement and authorize the Secretary of State to arrange for its execution.
  The Secretary of State is authorized to publish this determination in the Federal Register.
  BARACK OBAMA
President Obama Signs Texas Disaster Declaration
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  Archived Version
  Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 20:28
  The White House
  Office of the Press Secretary
  For Immediate Release
  December 20, 2013
  The President today declared a major disaster exists in the State of Texas and ordered federal aid to supplement state and local recovery efforts in the area affected by severe storms and flooding during the period of October 30-31, 2013.
  Federal funding is available to state and eligible local governments and certain private nonprofit organizations on a cost-sharing basis for emergency work and the repair or replacement of facilities damaged by the severe storms and flooding in the counties of Caldwell, Hays, and Travis Counties.
  Federal funding is also available on a cost-sharing basis for hazard mitigation measures statewide.
  W. Craig Fugate, Administrator, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Department of Homeland Security, named William J. Doran III as the Federal Coordinating Officer for federal recovery operations in the affected area.
  FEMA said additional designations may be made at a later date if requested by the state and warranted by the results of further damage assessments.
Canada lifts all restrictions on prostitution - Americas - Al Jazeera English
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  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 20:27
  Canada's top court has overturned all restrictions on prostitution, declaring that existing laws violated sex workers' right to safety.
  The Supreme Court of Canada struck down bans on brothels, street solicitation, and living on the earnings of prostitution in a unanimous 9-0 decision on Friday, and gave the Canadian government one year to re-write the country's prostitution laws.
  The impugned laws deprive people engaged in a risky, but legal, activity of the means to protect themselves against those risks.
  Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin.
  While prostitution itself is technically legal in Canada, most prostitution-related activities were previously considered criminal offences.
  In the decision, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin said many prostitutes "have no meaningful choice" but to "engage in the risky economic activity of prostitution," and that the law should not make such activities more dangerous.
  "It makes no difference that the conduct of pimps and johns is the immediate source of the harms suffered by prostitutes," McLachlin wrote.
  "The impugned laws deprive people engaged in a risky, but legal, activity of the means to protect themselves against those risks."
  The legal challenge to Canada's prostitution laws was brought by a group of sex workers who argued that the now-overturned restrictions put them in danger.
  Katrina Pacey, a lawyer for the petitioners, called it "an unbelievably important day for the sex workers but also for human rights."
  "The court recognized that sex workers have the right to protect themselves and their safety," she said.
  Last year, a lower court in the province of Ontario struck down the ban on brothels on the grounds that it exposed sex workers to more danger.
  Friday's ruling comes 34 years after the Supreme Court last upheld Canada's anti-prostitution laws.
  Prostitution is legal in much of Europe and Latin America, and brothels are legal in numerous countries, including the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland.
  309
Statement by the President on the Confirmation of John Koskinen as IRS Commissioner
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  Archived Version
  Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 20:27
  The White House
  Office of the Press Secretary
  For Immediate Release
  December 20, 2013
  I applaud the bipartisan majority of Senators who today confirmed John Koskinen as the next commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. John has decades of private and public-sector experience, and he has led institutions in challenging times. Throughout his career, John has always acted with the absolute integrity Americans demand from those in public service, and his strong leadership and unquestioned expertise make him the right person to lead the IRS. I want to thank Daniel Werfel for his outstanding service as principal deputy commissioner of the IRS, and I look forward to working with John as he takes on this new role.
VIDEO-Duck Dynasty Is Fake! - YouTube
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  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 19:29
Document Friday: What a CIA Nondisclosure Agreement Looks Like | UNREDACTED
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  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 19:03
  A comparison of pages from Operation Dark Heart. From New York Times
  Jose Rodriguez has almost finished writing his book. Remember Jose Rodriguez? He was the CIA agent who ordered the destruction of 92 video tapes that recorded Abu Zabaydah being waterboarded 83 times in one month in a black site in Thailand. He justified his actions by noting, ''The heat from destroying [the torture videos] is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into the public domain.'' Amazon's preview of the book describes Jose Rodriguez as a ''real-life Jack Bauer from television's24.'' Wow. Just. Wow'... wow.
  Rodriguez was not punished for his actions.
  We'll see how the CIA's pre-publication review goes for Rodriguez's likely hagiographic account of the Agency. But my guess is he'll have a much easier time publishing his memoir than former intelligence agents who have written more critically of the War on Terror.
  Take for example the Defense Intelligence Agency's attempts to pull a ''Fahrenheit 451'" to stop Americans from reading former Army Intelligence Officer Anthony Shaffer's book, Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan '' and the Path to Victory. The Defense Department spent nearly $50,000 to buy up and destroy the first printing of the book. A subsequent printing redacted all sorts of information, including the fact that the author's pseudonym, Chris Stryker, was John Wayne's character in the 1949 film, The Sands of Iwo Jima. Of course after the DOD's attempted buyout, uncensored editions of the book that had been provided in advance to reviewers quickly found their way to ebay. (See first image for side-by-side comparison.)
  Or take The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda,'' by former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan. In his book, Soufan argues that the CIA could have prevented 9/11 by passing information it had about two of the 9/11 hijackers to the FBI. He also details the evolution of the CIA's brutal torture methods which he believes were ''unnecessary and counterproductive.'' The FBI signed off on Black Banners, requesting only minor rewrites, which Soufan agreed to. The CIA did not. The Agency demanded Soufan cut phrases that he had used in Congressional testimony (available in print and online); not refer to overseas CIA centers as ''stations;'' and, most capriciously, demanded he remove references showing that the CIA had been sent a passport photo of one of the 9/11 hijackers in January 2001 ''even though this fact was recounted in the 9/11 Commission Report. Speaking to the New York Times, Jennifer Youngblood, a spokesperson for the CIA, denied that the CIA redacted information because it didn't like its content. She did add, however:
  ''Just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean it's been officially released or declassified by the US government.''
  Wow. Now THAT is a sweeping claim to the information that the CIA thinks it has the right to censor.
  Another recent work, The Interrogator, by Glenn Carle, a 23-year CIA veteran, was also subjected to ''extensive cuts'' by the CIA. In an interview with Salon.com, Carle provided important insight into his meeting with the CIA's Publications Review Board. He stated that he met with ''a handful'' of CIA staffers who submitted input from several CIA departments. ''My goal was not to piss them off to the extent that I couldn't get anything that I wanted,'' he told Salon. ''Their goal was to intimidate me. That was quite clear.'' He also recounted an encounter in which a member of the Review Board asked him ''in the restroom'' ''Don't you realize that people could go to jail for this?'' He was referring to passages in Carle's book where he wrote about detention and interrogation techniques which were ''in all likelihood'' illegal.
  Fourth, we have the CIA's case against its former agent, Ishmael Jones (a pseudonym), who wrote The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture in 2008, a harsh critique of the Agency's operations. This June, a judge found Jones guilty of breaching his secrecy agreement with the CIA because he published his book without the CIA Publications Review Board's approval. (Jones went through the review and appeal process for more than two years, before deciding to publish without permission.) The US District Court's decision ultimately hinged on the secrecy and non-disclosure agreements that Jones had signed in 1989 and 1997, respectively. These agreements ''submitted as an exhibits to the court (I found them on cryptome)'' are indeed very interesting documents.
  Loose lips sink ships.
  The seventeen-point secrecy agreement ''which is a ''prior condition of'... being employed by'... the Central Intelligence Agency'''' forbids the signatory from ever revealing information classified by the President's Executive Order on Classification. It also requires the employee to ''notify the Central Intelligence Agency immediately'' if he is ever required to testify before judicial or congressional authorities. Finally, the agreement stipulates that ''all royalties, remonstrations, and emoluments'' resulting from an agent's disclosure of classified information will be ''assigned'' to the United States government.
  Despite the seemingly crystal clear NDAs that these intelligence agents signed, they have been put in extremely difficult positions. Must they keep their observations of the US government's missed opportunities, illegal activities, and wasteful management secret forever? Is it true that the nondisclosure agreements they signed ''before even beginning their work'' bar them from recounting missed opportunities to prevent 9-11? Exposing torture carried out in the name of US citizens? Pointing out critical flaws in the intelligence community? Revealing information already published in the Congressional Record? Do the desires of the intelligence community to keep its actions secret trump the rights of Americans to write books about the wrongs that they have witnessed? Apparently so.
  We'll see how thorough the CIA's Publications Review is with Jack Bauer's Jose Rodriguez's whitewash memoir.
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"Canada high court strikes down all restrictions on prostitution" - Reuters
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  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:57
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BIZARRE New York City Council Bans Public E-Cigarette Vaping Because It Looks Too Much Like Smoking
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  Source: EconomicPolicyJournal.com
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:48
  Power freak freedom-haters know no bounds.The New York City Council approved legislation Thursday to ban the use of electronic cigarettes from indoor public spaces where smoking is already prohibited, reports CBS New York.Under the bill, e-cigarettes would be prohibited in the same places as traditional cigarettes and other tobacco products throughout the city. This despite the fact that e-cigarettes contain no tobacco and produce no smokeThe "logic" behind this move as explained by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is simply mind boggling. She said the ban would make it easier to enforce the city's Smoke-Free Air Act, which banned smoking in bars, restaurants and other indoor public spaces.''Because many of the e-cigarettes are designed to look like cigarettes and be used just like them, they can lead to confusion or confrontation,'' Quinn said, according to CBS.The speaker added that the ban will end what she called the re-normalization of smoking in public places, 1010 WINS' Al Jones reported.Outgoing Mayor Bloomberg is expect to sign the legislation.
Standard and Poor's downgrades EU credit-worthiness
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  Source: BlackListedNews.com
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:44
  Rating agency Standard & Poor's downgraded the long-term credit rating of the European Union on Friday, taking away its top-notch AAA grade by pointing to waning support for the bloc. The rating was lowered by one notch to AA+, while its outlook was found to be "stable."
  "We believe the financial profile of the EU has deteriorated, and that cohesion among EU members has lessened," the US agency said. "EU budgetary negotiations have become more contentious, signaling what we consider to be rising risks to the support of the EU."
  It pointed in particular to talks on the bloc's 2014-20 spending plans, noting that a "relatively small number of EU members was able to determine at least a temporary limit to the EU's budget."
  The EU budgetary framework, more commonly known as MFF, delivers for the first time a real-term cut by allowing a maximum of only 960 billion euros (1.3 trillion dollars) in financial commitments for 2014-20.
  British plans for a referendum on the country's membership in the EU have also worried Standard & Poor's.
  "(It) is the first time in the EU's history that a sitting government has proposed such a step," it noted. "Although this potential plebiscite is set for 2017, the UK general elections are expected in 2015 and we expect EU membership to be a key debate."
  European elections are also to be held in five months' time, with expectations high that eurosceptic and far-right political parties will score gains.
  The Standard & Poor's announcement raised eyebrows in Brussels, coming just hours after EU leaders endorsed a eurozone scheme to wind down troubled banks - a move considered key to restoring trust in the currency bloc and the EU's ability to tackle its economic woes.
  "This is an analysis done by experts who back before the banking crisis thought that everything was just fine," Belgian Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo told journalists in Brussels. "You always have to put things into perspective. ... An opinion remains an opinion."
  "For the first time since I have been attending European summits, there are positive signs of (economic) recovery," he added.
  The EU's top economy official also took issue with the arguments of the credit agency, pointing to the bloc's "very strong budget revenues" and a treaty clause that requires its 28 countries "to always balance the EU budget."
  Economy Commissioner Olli Rehn said that he disagrees with the assessment that national contributions to the EU budget "in a stress scenario are questionable."
  "All member states have always, and also throughout the financial crisis, provided their expected contributions to the budget in full and in time," he said in a statement.
South Sudan bloodshed heightens UN fears of inter-clan war
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  Source: euronews
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:43
  An attack on a United Nations compound in South Sudan which left three Indian peacekeepers dead on Thursday has deepened confusion there.
  It followed what is said to have been a failed coup on Sunday, with hundreds of deaths after fighting between the army and dissidents.
  UN Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson said: ''I'll tell you how deeply concerned the Secretary General and I and our colleagues are about the current situation in South Sudan. Our base in Akobo, Jonglei State, was attacked and we have reports that lives are lost.''
  The authorities in Juba say the violence was started by rebels affiliated with Riek Machar. Officials say he has fled the scene of a massacre in Bor, capital of the major northeastern state of Jonglei in South Sudan.
  Members of the Dinka clan of President Salva Kiir Mayardit are accused of killing soldiers of another clan, the Nuer.
  The organisation Human Rights Watch says selective murders are being carried out according to ethnicity, and against those loyal to the president.
  Salva Kiir on Wednesday said he was ready to parlay with his former vice president, Machar, but the latter said he would only talk if Kiir stepped down.
  Washington has sent four dozen of its soldiers to protect American nationals in the trouble zone. US president Barack Obama has said South Sudan is on the brink of civil war. In July 2011, Obama supported the partition of Sudan, and the creation of the South as a new country.
NSA spied on EU antitrust official who sparred with US tech giants - CNET Mobile
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  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:33
  A report in The New York Times pulls from Edward Snowden documents to give more details about agency surveillance of foreign officials and businesses, as well as humanitarian organizations.
  Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff (left) has raised strong objections to the NSA's reported spying on oil company Petrobras. Today's Times story once again raises the issue of spying for economic advantage.
  (Credit: Miguel Schincariol/AFP/Getty Images)The NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ, spied on the official in charge of the European Commission's antitrust office, which has threatened Google with large fines and has already levied punitive fees from Microsoft and Intel, a new report says.
  Relying on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, The New York Times today gives "a much fuller portrait" of the intelligence agencies' interests, reporting that the allied services' targets from 2008 to 2011 have included not only Joaquin Almunia, the aforementioned antitrust official, but also an Israeli prime minister and defense minister; various other heads of state (and sometimes their families); the French oil and gas giant Total; Unicef, the United Nations' Children's Fund; and the UN Institute for Disarmament studies.
  This particular set of documents also lists, "though in smaller numbers," targets associated with terrorism and other "more obvious" areas, the Times says.
  The documents don't specify if the spying on Almunia was done at the behest of the NSA or the GCHQ, the Times reports, adding that when the paper contacted the antitrust official about the surveillance, he said he was "very upset."
  The NSA, for its part, responded to the Times' queries by saying, "We do not use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of -- or give intelligence we collect to -- U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line."
  The agency representative also said some economic spying was necessary. "The intelligence community's efforts to understand economic systems and policies, and monitor anomalous economic activities, are critical to providing policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security."
  In a profile of the NSA last month, the Times said the agency had "an almost unlimited agenda," spying "routinely on friends as well as foes" not only to fight terrorism but also to "achieve 'diplomatic advantage' over such allies as France and Germany and 'economic advantage' over Japan and Brazil, among other countries."
  And in October, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said during a congressional hearing that monitoring of "leadership intentions" was a "hardy perennial" of the intelligence trade and one of the first things he learned in intelligence school back in 1963. He also answered "absolutely" when asked if US allies had spied on the states.
  Nevertheless, revelations about the NSA's activities have caused a stir in Europe and elsewhere, and a report released this week by an investigative panel appointed by President Obama recommended stronger limits on monitoring foreign leaders, especially those of allied countries. The NSA told the Times in regard to today's story that it's reviewing how it coordinates on allied spying.
  The executive director of M(C)decins du Monde, a relief organization that services war-torn areas and that was also spied on, told the Times that "there is absolutely no reason for our operations to be secretly monitored."
  Read the Times report here.
Saudi Arabia Restored As Defendant In 9/11 Lawsuit By Appeals Court
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  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:26
  This is an extremely interesting turn of events, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Philadelphia law firm which filed the case. The discovery process should be very educational:
  In a significant reversal, a federal appeals panel Thursday restored Saudi Arabia as a defendant in a lawsuit alleging that the desert kingdom financed and provided logistical support to members of al-Qaeda in the years before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, facilitating the terrorist group's emergence as a global threat.
  The lawsuit, filed by Center City's Cozen O'Connor, has been wending its way through courts since it was filed in 2003. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan ruled in 2008 that Saudi Arabia could not be sued under U.S. law. But in a highly unusual move, the court effectively acknowledged Thursday that its earlier decision was mistaken.
  It restored not only Saudi Arabia, but also a government charity called the Saudi High Commission for Relief of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which plaintiffs attorneys charge provided cash and logistical support to al-Qaeda units in the Balkans during the armed conflicts there in the 1990s.
  "I think it is an eminently correct decision," Stephen Cozen of Cozen O'Connor said of the Second Circuit's opinion restoring Saudi Arabia as a defendant. "The kingdom and the Saudi High Commission deserved to be back in the case as defendants, and we are prepared to meet any of their legal and factual arguments with substantial legal and factual arguments of our own."
  The decision marked the second advance in the last week for lawyers representing 9/11 victims, their families, and insurers that lost billions covering businesses and properties damaged or destroyed when two hijacked commercial airliners slammed into the World Trade Center in New York City. Scores of people from the Philadelphia region lost their lives in the attacks.
  On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court asked the Obama administration to weigh in on an appeal by Cozen, asking for the reinstatement of another group of defendants - dozens of individuals and financial institutions accused of funneling money to al-Qaeda before the attacks. The request suggests that the court views the matter as having some importance and increases the odds that it may agree to hear the appeal.
  '†' Story continues below '†'
  Cozen O'Connor and several other law firms sued the government of Saudi Arabia, various Islamist charities, and alleged terrorism financiers in 2003, charging that they provided financial support to al-Qaeda over 10 years before the 9/11 attacks. The firms alleged that Saudi Arabia provided tens of millions of dollars to charities that in turn bankrolled al-Qaeda units in the Balkans, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Senior U.S. government officials warned Saudis before the 9/11 attacks that government-funded charities were bankrolling terrorist units, but, they said, the Saudis failed to react.
Message to the Congress -- Report Consistent with War Powers Resolution
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  Archived Version
  Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:21
  The White House
  Office of the Press Secretary
  For Immediate Release
  December 19, 2013
  Dear Mr. Speaker: (Mr. President:)
  On December 18, 2013, approximately 45 U.S. Armed Forces personnel deployed to South Sudan to support the security of U.S. personnel and our Embassy. Although equipped for combat, this force was deployed for the purpose of protecting U.S. citizens and property. This force will remain in South Sudan until the security situation becomes such that it is no longer needed.
  This action has been directed consistent with my responsibility to protect U.S. citizens both at home and abroad, and in furtherance of U.S. national security and foreign policy interests, pursuant to my constitutional authority to conduct U.S. foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive.
  I am providing this report as part of my efforts to keep the Congress fully informed, consistent with the War Powers Resolution (Public Law 93-148). I appreciate the support of the Congress in these actions.
  Sincerely,
  BARACK OBAMA
gender cc - women for climate justice: About GenderCC
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  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:20
  VisionThe change we envision is fundamental. GenderCC believes that in order to achieve women's rights, gender justice and climate justice, fundamental changes are necessary to overcome the existing systems of power, politics, and economics.The challenges of climate change and gender injustice resemble each other - they require whole system change: not just gender mainstreaming but transforming gender relations and societal structures. Not just technical amendments to reduce emissions, but real mitigation through awareness and change of unsustainable life-styles and the current ideology and practice of unlimited economic growth. Not the perpetuation of the current division of resources and labour but a responsible cooperative approach to achieving sustainable and equitable societies.We believe that linking women's rights, gender justice and climate justice is key to achieving these fundamental changes. This is a question of justice and equity as much as a matter of quality and effectiveness of decisions.
  GoalsThe main goal of GenderCC '' Women for Climate Justice is integrating gender justice in climate change policy at local, national and international levels. GenderCC is working to achieve gender and climate justice by:
  Raising awareness and building capacity relating to gender and climate issues among decision-makers and others working on climate change in order to achieve improved policies;Raising awareness and building capacity relating to gender and climate issues among women (and men) worldwide in order to increase pressure on policy-makers for effective mitigation and adaptation;Increasing the global knowledge base on gender and climate issues through research, action learning and frequent knowledge exchange to identify a growing host of options for most effective mitigation and adaptationDeveloping more effective climate protection and adaptation through empowering women and men to make maximum, active contributions to mitigation and adaptation measures, while denouncing the disproportionally negative impacts imposed on women by false solutions;Increasing the participation of women in the formal policy making process, including grassroots women;Raising awareness and capacity building on gender and climate change issues among youth and children;Bridging the gap between local action and decision making by bringing local experiences to the decision making levels through advocacy and lobbying;Strengthening the capacity of the GenderCC members to effectively participate in climate change negotiations through training, facilitating sharing of information and experiences;Enhancing collaboration and cooperation on gender and climate issues at local, national, regional and international levels.StrategyGiven the diversity and different contexts of work within GenderCC, we constantly check who can do what in her respective country and region, and her context of work in policy, research, or implementation, and how we can coordinate for optimum impact. Actions taken at the national and international level, respectively, should interconnect, bearing in mind that acting at the international level is based on the experience at the local and national level and reflects back. The slogan ''emissions down, women's rights up'' is central to our advocacy, awareness raising and campaigning. All other demands for structural change, against false solutions, etc. are based on that: unless emissions are reduced, there is no way how women's rights and the right to development can be fulfilled. The same applies the other way round: there is no climate justice without gender justice. Our diversity of background, expertise and strategies is key to our strength: ''We are a forest, we don't want to be a monoculture tree plantation. We are trees, we are flowers, and our common goal is climate justice.'' (Titi Soentoro, 2008)
  HistoryThe network GenderCC - Women for Climate Justice was kickstarted at COP9 in Milan (2003), when some organisations (LIFE, ENERGIA, WECF) invited to an informal meeting to discuss whether the issue 'gender' should be given more attention at climate change negotiations. There was a strong voice for further networking and cooperation in bringing gender into the debates. In order to support cooperation and to introduce the issue to a broader audience the website "genCC" was created (the website is not available any more).
  Since then, there were regular side events and meetings at the following COP's, followed by a growing interest in the network and in the issue gender and climate change.
  A milestone was reached at COP13 in Bali, when the network published several position papers articulating the women's and gender perspectives on the most pressing issues under negotiation. They were met with interest, increasing awareness, and increased expression of commitment to gender justice from a number of stakeholders.
What is vaccine-derived polio? World Health Organization says vaccinated people transmit the virus to others
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  Archived Version
  Source: Moral Volcano Daily Press
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:18
  '£ The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions '£ www.vsubhash.com '£ moralvolcano it yahoo dit com '£
  Moral Volcano is unsafe for children and pregnant women. Adults may experience discomfort when reading Moral Volcano. Symptomatic treatment is recommended. Moral Volcano has nothing to do with morals or volcanoes.
Some US government contractor publishes the Al Qaeda Inspire magazine
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  Archived Version
  Source: Moral Volcano Daily Press
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 18:17
  Al Qaeda's Inspire magazine provides e-mail addresses hosted by American companies. This is proof that the Inspire magazine is a honeypot project of the US government.
  The fact that Al Qaeeda has not denied that it has anything to do with the magazine should tell you that the Al Qaeeda is a Western intelligence operation.
  8 May 2012
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  Moral Volcano is unsafe for children and pregnant women. Adults may experience discomfort when reading Moral Volcano. Symptomatic treatment is recommended. Moral Volcano has nothing to do with morals or volcanoes.
Senate Says Facebook Data Brokers "Operate Under a Veil of Secrecy"
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Valleywag
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 17:57
  S
  Yesterday, during a Senate commerce committee meeting about data brokers'--which make $156 billion tracking and selling your personal information'--Senator Jay Rockefeller released the damning results of a year-long investigation. "I think it's a dark underside of American life, in which people make a lot of money and cause people to suffer even more."
  The report looked into nine companies, including Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon. Facebook entered into a partnership with those three companies in April to build a new advertising tool that married "what Facebook already knows about people's friends and 'likes' with vast troves of information from third-party data marketers." In September, Acxiom rolled out a new product that knew who you were on the web even if you used a different name. Another data broker examined as part of the report was Rapleaf, a reviled company that's still in business.
  Fox says the report showed that:
  Consumer data companies are selling lists of rape victims, seniors with dementia and even those suffering from HIV and AIDS to marketers, underscoring the need for tighter government regulations, a privacy group told Congress Wednesday.
  The report also stated that data brokers "operate under a veil of secrecy." Motherboard explains:
  According the report, the tight-lippedness from Acxiom and several other firms questioned only contributes to the aura of mystery surrounding the online data trade. The Senate commerce committee, chaired by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, finds the industry's secretive nature troublesome not only because it's invasive and well, generally sketchy, but also because there's no check on whether people's marketing profiles are being used legitimately. In other words, consumers are at risk of being exploited. Rockefeller wants to make sure our data isn't being used for things like employment screening and discriminatory pricing, or being sold to fraudsters and predators. In fact, the report revealed that the large data broker firm Experian has had probable criminals as customers.
  The report also includes a slide that shows what data brokers see when they look at people who are struggling financially:
  S
  Where is the NINJA category?
  [Top image via Shutterstock, bottom image via Motherboard]
Pierre Omidyar Provides Initial Funding of $50M to Establish First Look Media
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  Archived Version
  Source: Omidyar Group
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 17:52
  Honolulu '' Dec. 19, 2013 '' The news organization created by Pierre Omidyar (formerly dubbed ''NewCo'') has taken another step forward with an infusion of $50M in capital to fuel operations being established on both coasts.
  Omidyar, who provided the funding, will also serve as the organization's publisher. Omidyar's first capital outlay represents 20 percent of his initial commitment to the media venture. First Look Media will publish robust coverage of politics, government, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, arts and culture, business, technology, and investigative news.
  ''This initial capital is the first step of many to bring the vision of this news organization to life,'' said Omidyar. ''I am deeply committed to the long'''term effort to build a new and exciting platform for journalism '-- one that not only provides the innovation and infrastructure journalists need to do their best work, but that brings their reporting and storytelling to the widest possible audience.''
  First Look Media is made up of several entities, including a company established to develop new media technology and a separate nonprofit journalism organization. The journalism operation, which will be incorporated as a 501(c)(3), will enjoy editorial independence, and any profits eventually earned by the technology company are committed to support First Look's mission of independent journalism. The name of First Look Media's initial digital publication is yet to be announced.
  First Look Media is currently securing space and setting up operations in New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. The team is actively recruiting in all areas of its operations.
  For more information about First Look Media, please visit: www.omidyargroup.com/pov/FirstLookMedia.
  About Pierre Omidyar
  Pierre Omidyar is an entrepreneur, innovator and philanthropist who is best known as the founder of eBay. He believes that a strong democracy requires an engaged society supported by effective news reporting and analysis. His passion for investigative journalism led him to launch the online news organization Honolulu Civil Beat in 2010, serving his home state of Hawaii. Pierre and his wife, Pam, are active philanthropists who believe everyone has something to contribute. You can read more about The Omidyar Group here.
VIDEO-IBM Research: Doctors will routinely use your DNA to keep you well
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  Archived Version
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 17:44
  Already, full DNA sequencing is helping some patients fight cancer. For example, Dr. Lukas Wartman famously beat leukemia using treatments that were tailored to the DNA mutations of his cancer cells. While previous leukemia treatments had failed, full genome sequencing of Wartman's healthy cells and cancer cells revealed that a drug normally used for kidney cancer might work. It did.
  This breakthrough has led to tremendous advances in cancer therapy based on DNA mutations, rather than simply the location of the cancer in the body.
  But today, Big Data can get in the way of these breakthroughs for patients because doctors must correlate data from full genome sequencing with reams of medical journals, studies and clinical records at a time when medical information is doubling every five years. This process is expensive and time-consuming, and available to too few patients.
  IBM is building cognitive systems connected in the cloud to bring these tailored treatment options to more patients around the world. The speed of these insights through cognitive systems could save the lives of cancer patients who have no time to lose.
  View the storymap
  Once a doctor sequences your full genome as well as your cancer's DNA, mapping that information to the right treatment is difficult. Today, these types of DNA-based plans, where available, can take weeks or even months. Cognitive systems will decrease these times, while increasing the availability by providing doctors with information they can use to quickly build a focused treatment plan in just days or even minutes '' all via the cloud.
  Within five years, deep insights based on DNA sequencing will be accessible to more doctors and patients to help tackle cancer. By using cognitive systems that continuously learn about cancer and the patients who have cancer, the level of care will only improve. No more assumptions about cancer location or type, or any disease with a DNA link, like heart disease and stroke.
  Learn how IBM is helping to make education systems smarter
Loophole Allows Company to Make, Sell Incandescent Light Bulbs After 2014
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  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 17:31
  Larry Birnbaum said that when the federal government "decided to ban incandescent lightbulbs, they left a loophole in the law" for what are known as "rough service" light bulbs.
  According to Fox News, the 2007 law "forces manufacturers to improve the energy efficiency of ordinary bulbs dramatically: 40W bulbs must draw just 10.5W, and 60W bulbs 11W, and incandescents simply can't do that."
  The law has a variety of exceptions, though, for "for specialty lighting, including bulbs with unusual bases, others meant for special display purposes, and rough service bulbs."
  Birnbaum described a "rough service" bulb as one that "can take a beating, one meant for industrial purposes -- imagine a lightbulb on a subway car, built to survive the jostling and vibrations of the daily commute." He said that they work like normal bulbs and, as Fox News noted, "consumers can buy them and screw them into any ordinary lamp socket."
  Birnbaum applied for a permit to build the bulbs in 2010 and, after a tedious and bureaucratic process, he finally got approval to make his "Newcandescents"bulbs, which "began shipping in 2010 -- made in America, at a plant outside of Indianapolis by around two dozen employees."
  Birnbaum said that he received over $100,000 worth of orders after an appearance on the Rush Limbaugh show in 2012.
  ''You'd be shocked how many people still want incandescents,'' he told Fox News.
  Of the LED bulbs, he said, ''People don't like the color, the fact that they don't go on right away, the fact that they have mercury.'' Studies have shown the the LEDs not only cost more, but are much "more likely to leak UV light compared to traditional fluorescent bulbs, causing damage to healthy human skin cells."
  According to Fox News, Home Depot sells a "six pack of 60-Watt incandescents from GE for $4.67, or 78 cents apiece. A six-pack of 60-Watt LEDs from Cree sells for $77.82 -- $12.97 each."
  Newcandescents, which "run on 130 volts rather than 120, meaning they last longer on the lower voltages," are available at various retail stores and supermarkets and can also be purchased online. The bulbs sell for about $1.44 apiece.
  A lot of Newcandescents purchases are coming from the South, and Birnbaum emphasized that Americans are addicted to the color of the incandescent bulbs. He said the color Americans are accustomed to is "very difficult to replicate" and "virtually impossible" in the LEDs and CFLs.
>> Former CIA Head: Snowden ''Should Be Hanged By The Neck Until He Is Dead'' Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 17:26
  Globalists pine for return of the Middle Ages
  Steve WatsonInfowars.comDecember 19, 2013
  In a statement that conjures images of the middle ages, former CIA chief and all round globalist neocon James Woolsey said on live TV Tuesday that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden should be hanged for treason.
  ''He should be prosecuted for treason. If convicted by a jury of his peers, he should be hanged by his neck until he is dead.'' said Woolsey in an interview with Fox News.
  The conversation surrounded Snowden's offer to help Brazil investigate NSA surveillance of its people in return for asylum. US officials have also suggested providing an amnesty for Snowden to the US in return for an agreement to end the intelligence leaks.
  ''I think giving him amnesty is idiotic,'' Woolsey, a prominent Council on Foreign Relations insider, noted.
  Woolsey has previously refused to be drawn on the documented role of the spy state in controlling and manipulating the lives of the American people, opting instead to play dumb on programs such as 'Operation Mockingbird', the CIA's historically established program to control and influence the media.
  Woolsey's latest comments echo those of fellow arch-neocon, Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, who said this week that Snowden should ''swing from a tall oak tree'' as punishment for exposing NSA spying.
  ''I must say absent some other important piece of information, it has to be one of the dumbest things that I've seen in a long time, to be speculating about it publicly, even if they are contemplating a deal with Snowden some kind of amnesty,'' Bolton added.
  Given that the last public hanging occurred in the 1930s, it shows you where the mind set of these neocons is still firmly rooted with regards to anyone who challenges or seeks to expose the inner workings of the shadow government and the surveillance state.
  Even while federal judges rule that the NSA spying is most likely unconstitutional, these disgusting elitists still defend the program and maintain that anyone who attempts to expose it is a traitor.
  Meanwhile, the Obama administration is currently conducting a phony dog and pony show to convince the American people that it is really doing something about NSA overreach. The 304-page report released late Wednesday by Obama's special review commission DOES NOT advise that the NSA should be stripped of the power to bulk collect Americans' communications data.
  As reported by Nextgov, The ''bottom line'' of the report translates to ''Don't give up the crown jewels of America's surveillance program, including bulk collection of telephone data, but add enough new transparency and legal restrictions to fulfill the public's right to privacy and civil liberties.''
  The Obama administration's position on Snowden, and thus whistleblowers in general, also remains constant.
  ''It remains our view that Mr. Snowden is accused of leaking classified information and that he faces felony charges here in the United States,'' White House Press Secretary Carney said.
  '--'--'--'--'--'--'--'--'--'--'--'--'--'--'--'--'--'--'--'--'---
  Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones' Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.
  This article was posted: Thursday, December 19, 2013 at 10:56 am
  Tags: big brother, domestic spying
NYC Council passes plastic foam, e-cigarette bills
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  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 17:13
  NEW YORK (AP) '-- New York City lawmakers paved the way Thursday for an eventual ban on plastic foam containers, added electronic cigarettes to the city's already stringent smoking bans and approved the creation of a website that will help the public track federal dollars budgeted for Superstorm Sandy-related damages.
  The flurry of activity '-- more than two dozen introductions and resolutions were passed '-- came on its last legislative session of the year. Twenty outgoing council members cast their final votes on high profile bills only after spending hours making tearful farewell addresses in what one councilwoman likened to the last day of high school.
  Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who leaves office Dec. 31, is likely to sign both the e-cigarette bill and the polystyrene foam bill, environmental and health achievements he has pushed throughout his 12 years in office. The laws will take effect four months after his signature.
  "Foam pollutes the waste stream, making it harder to recycle food waste as well as metal glass and plastic," the mayor said in a statement after the vote.
  The foam bill allows lawmakers to ban the product if after a yearlong study the commissioner of the Sanitation Department finds the material can't be recycled effectively. If banned, it could add the nation's largest city to a list of localities that prohibit the foam, which the food-service industry has long valued for keeping food warm or cool but environmentalists see as a landfill-clogging, litter-generating scourge.
  "Once the ban takes effect, it will be much easier and more economical to collect and separate recyclables," Bloomberg said.
  At a news conference before the vote, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn warned against the environmental hazards of the material, particularly its presence in landfills, saying the only things that last longer than the foam containers are cockroaches and the performer Cher.
  "If you could recycle it for real, that would be great. But we're not going to wait forever to get the answer to that," said Quinn. "If within a year a conclusion is not affirmative that foam can be recycled, it will be banned."
  New Yorkers toss out about 23,000 tons of plastic foam per year, accounting for a fraction of the 3 million tons of trash the city spends $310 million annually to bury, but city officials say the foam also muddies efforts to compost food waste.
  San Francisco and dozens of other U.S. cities already have nixed takeout containers made from what's technically called expanded polystyrene foam (the Styrofoam brand isn't used in food packaging). It takes a long time to break down in landfills, and there's debate over how readily it can be recycled once it's soiled by food. City plastics recycling contractor Sims Municipal Recycling has said it can't currently process and market plastic foam.
  Also Thursday the council moved, by a vote of 43 to 8, to prohibit the use of e-cigarettes in locations like restaurants, bars and city parks where smoking is already outlawed.
  E-cigarettes heat a nicotine solution and emit a puff of vapor that manufacturers say is harmless. But there's sharp disagreement within public health circles about how to treat the devices.
  Most scientists agree that e-cigarettes are substantially less dangerous than tobacco but they are still highly addictive, and some anti-smoking activists say it isn't clear whether they are truly safe.
  Several states, including New Jersey, Arkansas, Utah and North Dakota, have already expanded their indoor smoking bans to include e-cigarettes.
  Quinn said before the vote that allowing the devices into places where cigarettes are now banned also could "renormalize" smoking and undermine the public perception that the habit is now acceptable only in the privacy of one's own home.
  "We don't want a step backward with that," she said.
  An online database to track the use of Sandy funds already exists and is operated by the Bloomberg Administration. Thursday's bill will update the website, creating a searchable, interactive online tool that allows users to look-up by zip code information about how federal Sandy dollars are being spent.
  The council also approved a bill that would create an online registry for people convicted of abusing animals, the creation of a commercial composting program at large restaurants and grocery stores and a requirement that the mayor's office provide annual reports on poverty.
  ___
  Associated Press writers David B. Caruso and Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report.
Customers turn violent as Zimbabwe bank runs out of cash - Africa - World - The Independent
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  Archived Version
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 17:09
  Witnesses said Monday scores of depositors turned violent after officials at Allied Bank, owned by former mines minister Obert Mpofu, failed to explain why the bank faced cash shortages.
  They said riot police fired teargas to disperse the crowd demanding their money.
  Witnesses said damage was caused when people thronged to escape into the street. There were no immediate reports of injury or arrests.
  In the first similar incident this month, a bank manager in the eastern city of Mutare had to take refuge at the local police station.
  Long lines at banks have become a daily sight.
  AP
TSA Wants to Hire 'Economically Disadvantaged Woman Owned Small Business' | Washington Free Beacon
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  Archived Version
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 17:04
  AP
  BY:Elizabeth HarringtonDecember 18, 2013 3:30 pm
  The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is looking exclusively for an ''economically disadvantaged woman owned small business'' when it awards its next $30 million contract for security training.
  The agency announced a solicitation for a company to conduct training for its Inter-Modal Security and Training Exercise Program (I-Step) last week.
  ''The Department of Homeland Security, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) issues this request for proposals (RFP) to the economically disadvantaged woman owned small business (EDWOSB) industry to assist the TSA in meeting its responsibilities under the Aviation Transportation Security Act and other legislation,'' the solicitation said.
  The notice states that the female-owned business chosen will deliver security training and work to ''continuously improve the risk posture of the transportation systems serving the nation.''
  The contract will be worth up to $30 million, including $29.9 million to provide the program and $100,000 for travel expenses.
  I-STEP ''provides exercise, training, and security planning tools and services to the transportation community.''
  The Small Business Administration defines an Economically Disadvantaged Women-Owned Small Business (EDWOSB) as a company that is ''at least 51 percent directly and unconditionally owned and controlled by one or more women who are citizens (born or naturalized) of the United States and who are economically disadvantaged.''
  An economically disadvantaged woman is one who earns less than $350,000 a year, with a net worth not greater than $750,000.
  Contracting offices are required to set quotas for hiring EDWOSBs by the Small Business Act, which was enacted in January. According to the law, women are ''subjected to discrimination in entrepreneurial endeavors due to their gender'' and it is ''in the national interest'' to ''remove discriminatory barriers.''
  The act sets government-wide goals that at least 23 percent of all contracts must be awarded to businesses owned by service-disabled veterans, ''socially and economically disadvantaged individuals,'' and women.
  The upcoming award, which was first reported by Government Security News, will place a woman-owned business in charge of the I-STEP program. The contractor will be required to deliver a ''suite of risk-based security planning solutions and training products.'' Interested female vendors will have until Jan. 27 to respond.
  The contractor will also ''track and document the development of a comprehensive transportation security objectives and scenarios.''
  Requests for comment from the TSA were not returned.
Acoustic cryptanalysis
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  Archived Version
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 16:52
  Acoustic cryptanalysisDaniel GenkinAdi ShamirEran TromerTechnion and Tel Aviv UniversityWeizmann Institute of ScienceTel Aviv Universityassisted by Lev Pachmanov and numerous othersSummaryMany computers emit a high-pitched noise during operation, due to vibration in some of their electronic components. These acoustic emanations are more than a nuisance: they can convey information about the software running on the computer and, in particular, leak sensitive information about security-related computations. In a preliminary presentation, we have shown that different RSA keys induce different sound patterns, but it was not clear how to extract individual key bits. The main problem was the very low bandwidth of the acoustic side channel (under 20 kHz using common microphones, and a few hundred kHz using ultrasound microphones), many orders of magnitude below the GHz-scale clock rates of the attacked computers.
  Here, we describe a new acoustic cryptanalysis key extraction attack, applicable to GnuPG's current implementation of RSA. The attack can extract full 4096-bit RSA decryption keys from laptop computers (of various models), within an hour, using the sound generated by the computer during the decryption of some chosen ciphertexts. We experimentally demonstrate that such attacks can be carried out, using either a plain mobile phone placed next to the computer, or a more sensitive microphone placed 4 meters away.
  Beyond acoustics, we demonstrate that a similar low-bandwidth attack can be performed by measuring the electric potential of a computer chassis. A suitably-equipped attacker need merely touch the target computer with his bare hand, or get the required leakage information from the ground wires at the remote end of VGA, USB or Ethernet cables.
  PaperA detailed account of the results and their context is given in the full version of our paper (8MB PDF).
  Note: these are recent results, first published on 18 December 2013. Preliminary results were announced in the Eurocrypt 2004 rump session presentation, "Acoustic cryptanalysis: on nosy people and noisy machines", and are now archived. Progress since publication of the preliminary results is summarized in Q16 below.
  Q&AQ1: What information is leaked?This depends on the specific computer hardware. We have tested numerous laptops, and several desktops.
  In almost all machines, it is possible to distinguish an idle CPU (x86 "HLT") from a busy CPU.On many machines, it is moreover possible to distinguish different patterns of CPU operations and different programs.Using GnuPG as our study case, we can, on some machines:distinguish between the acoustic signature of different RSA secret keys (signing or decryption), andfully extract decryption keys, by measuring the sound the machine makes during decryption of chosen ciphertexts.Q2: What is making the noise?The acoustic signal of interest is generated by vibration of electronic components (capacitors and coils) in the voltage regulation circuit, as it struggles to supply constant voltage to the CPU despite the large fluctuations in power consumption caused by different patterns of CPU operations. The relevant signal is not caused by mechanical components such as the fan or hard disk, nor by the laptop's internal speaker.
  Q3: Does the attack require special equipment?It sure helps, and in the paper we describe an expensive hardware setup for getting the best sensitivity and frequency response. But in some cases, a regular mobile phone is good enough. We have used a mobile phone to acoustically extract keys from a laptop at a distance of 30cm, as in the following picture.
  Q4: What is the acoustic attack range?That depends on many factors. Using a sensitive parabolic microphone, we surpassed 4 meters. In the following example, a parabolic microphone, attached to a padded case of equipment (power supply, amplifier, filters, and a laptop running the attack code) is extracting an RSA key from a target laptop (on the far side of the room).
  Without the ungainly parabolic dish, we achieved a range of 1 meter. In the following, the target (A) is on the right, and the attacker is on the left. Only the capsule of the microphone, marked (B), is sensitive to position and orientation; the rest of the attacker's equipment can be hidden away.
  Q5: What are some examples of attack scenarios?We discuss some prospective attacks in our paper. In a nutshell:
  Install an attack app on your phone. Set up a meeting with the victim and place the phone on the desk next to his laptop (see Q2).Break into the victim's phone, install the attack app, and wait until the victim inadvertently places his phone next to the target laptop.Construct a web page use the microphone of the computer running the browser (using Flash or HTML Media Capture, under some excuse such as VoIP chat). When the user permits the microphone access, use it to steal the user's secret key.Put your stash of eavesdropping bugs and laser microphones to a new use.Send your server to a colocation facility, with a good microphone inside the box, and then acoustically extract keys from all nearby servers.Get near a TEMPEST/1-92 protected machine, such as the one pictured to the right, place a microphone next to its ventilation holes, and extract its supposedly-protected secrets.Q6: What if I don't have any microphone, or the environment is too noisy?Another low-bandwidth channel is the electric potential of the laptop's chassis. We've shown that in many computers, this "ground" potential fluctuates (even when connected to a grounded power supply) and leaks the requisite signal. This can be measured in several ways, for example:
  Magic-touch attack: the attacker measures the chassis potential by merely touching the laptop chassis with his hand, while surreptitiously measuring his own body potential relative to the ground potential of the room. (This attack is especially effective in hot weather, since sweaty fingers offer a lower electric resistance.)Far-end-of-cable attack: the victim plugs in some innocuous-looking VGA or Ethernet cable into his laptop. The attacker measures the shield's electric potential on the far side of the cable (out of sight, in some cabinet or server room).Q7: Can an attacker use power analysis instead?Yes, power analysis (by measuring the current drawn from the laptop's DC power supply) is another way to perform our low-bandwidth attack.
  If the attacker can measure clockrate-scale (GHz) power leakage, then traditional power analysis may also be very effective, and far faster. However, this is foiled by the common practice of filtering out high frequencies on the power supply.
  Q8: How can low-frequency (kHz) acoustic leakage provide useful information about a much faster (GHz)? Individual CPU operations are too fast for a microphone to pick up, but long operations (e.g., modular exponentiation in RSA) can create a characteristic (and detectable) acoustic spectral signature over many milliseconds. In the chosen-ciphertext key extraction attack, we carefully craft the inputs to RSA decryption in order to maximize the dependence of the spectral signature on the secret key bits.
  Q9 How vulnerable is GnuPG now?We have disclosed our attack to GnuPG developers under CVE-2013-4576, suggested suitable countermeasures, and worked with the developers to test them. New versions of GnuPG 1.x and of libgcrypt (which underlies GnuPG 2.x), containing these countermeasures and resistant to our current key-extraction attack, were released concurrently with the first public posting of these results. Some of the effects we found (including RSA key distinguishability) remain present.
  Q10: How vulnerable are other algorithms and cryptographic implementations?We don't know. Our attack requires careful cryptographic analysis of the implementation, which so far has been conducted only for the GnuPG 1.x implementation of RSA. Implementations using ciphertext blinding (a common side channel countermeasure) appear less vulnerable. We have, however, observed that GnuPG's implementation of ElGamal encryption also allows acoustically distinguishing keys.
  Q11: Is there a realistic way to perform a chosen-ciphertext attack on GnuPG?To apply the attack to GnuPG, we found a way to cause GnuPG to automatically decrypt ciphertexts chosen by the attacker. The idea is to use encrypted e-mail messages following the OpenPGP and PGP/MIME protocols. For example, Enigmail (a popular plugin to the Thunderbird e-mail client) automatically decrypts incoming e-mail (for notification purposes) using GnuPG. An attacker can e-mail suitably-crafted messages to the victims, wait until they reach the target computer, and observe the acoustic signature of their decryption (as shown above), thereby closing the adaptive attack loop.
  Q12: Won't the attack be foiled by loud fan noise, or by multitasking, or by several computers in the same room?Usually not. The interesting acoustic signals are mostly above 10KHz, whereas typical computer fan noise and normal room noise are concentrated at lower frequencies and can thus be filtered out. In task-switching systems, different tasks can be distinguished by their different acoustic spectral signatures. Using multiple cores turns out to help the attack (by shifting down the signal frequencies). When several computers are present, they can be told apart by spatial localization, or by their different acoustic signatures (which vary with the hardware, the component temperatures, and other environmental conditions).
  Q13: What countermeasures are available?One obvious countermeasure is to use sound dampening equipment, such as "sound-proof" boxes, designed to sufficiently attenuate all relevant frequencies. Conversely, a sufficiently strong wide-band noise source can mask the informative signals, though ergonomic concerns may render this unattractive. Careful circuit design and high-quality electronic components can probably reduce the emanations.
  Alternatively, the cryptographic software can be changed, and algorithmic techniques employed to render the emanations less useful to the attacker. These techniques ensure that the rough-scale behavior of the algorithm is independent of the inputs it receives; they usually carry some performance penalty, but are often used in any case to thwart other side-channel attacks. This is what we helped implement in GnuPG (see Q9).
  Q14: Why software countermeasures? Isn't it the hardware's responsibility to avoid physical leakage?It is tempting to enforce proper layering, and decree that preventing physical leakage is the responsibility of the physical hardware. Unfortunately, such low-level leakage prevention is often impractical due to the very bad cost vs. security tradeoff: (1) any leakage remnants can often be amplified by suitable manipulation at the higher levels, as we indeed do in our chosen-ciphertext attack; (2) low-level mechanisms try to protect all computation, even though most of it is insensitive or does not induce easily-exploitable leakage; and (3) leakage is often an inevitable side effect of essential performance-enhancing mechanisms (e.g., consider cache attacks).
  Application-layer, algorithm-specific mitigation, in contrast, prevent the (inevitably) leaked signal from bearing any useful information. It is often cheap and effective, and most cryptographic software (including GnuPG and libgcrypt) already includes various sorts of mitigation, both through explicit code and through choice of algorithms. In fact, the side-channel resistance of software implementations is nowadays a major concern in the choice of cryptographic primitives, and was an explicit evaluation criterion in NIST's AES and SHA-3 competitions.
  Q15: What about other acoustic attacks?See the discussion and references in our paper, and the Wikipedia page on Acoustic Cryptanalysis. In a nutshell:
  Eavesdropping on keyboard keystrokes has been well discussed; keys can be distinguished by timing, or by their different sounds. While this attack is applicable to data that is entered manually (e.g., passwords), it is not applicable to larger secret data such as RSA keys. Another acoustic source is hard disk head seeks; this source does not appear very useful in the presence of caching, delayed writes and multitasking. Preceding modern computers is MI5's "ENGULF" technique (recounted in Peter Wright's book Spycatcher), whereby a phone tap was used to eavesdrop on the operation of an Egyptian embassy's Hagelin cipher machine, thereby recovering its secret key. Declassified US government publications describe "TEMPEST" acoustic leakage from mechanical and electromechanical devices, but do make no mention of modern electronic computers.
  Q16: What's new since the Eurocrypt 2004 presentation?Full key extraction attack, exploiting deep internal details of GnuP's implementation of RSADramatic improvement in range and applicability (increased from 20cm with open chassis to 4m in normal operation)Much better hardware (some self-built), allowing longer range and better signal characterizationSignal processing and error correction, making it possible to perform the attack using a mobile phone despite the low-quality microphoneMany more targets testedNon-acoustic low-bandwidth attacks, including chassis potential analysisCountermeasures implemented and tested in GnuPG (see Q9)Detailed writeupAcknowledgementsLev Pachmanov wrote much of the software setup used in our experiments, including custom signal acquisition programs. Avi Shtibel, Ezra Shaked and Oded Smikt assisted in constructing and configuring the experimental setup. Assa Naveh assisted in various experiments, and offered valuable suggestions. Sharon Kessler provided copious editorial advice. We thank Werner Koch, lead developer of GnuPG, for the prompt response to our disclosure and the productive collaboration in adding suitable countermeasures. We are indebted to Pankaj Rohatgi for inspiring the origin of this research, and to Nir Yaniv for use of the Nir Space Station and for valuable advice on audio recording. National Instruments Israel generously donated a National Instruments PCI-6052E DAQ card and a MyDAQ device. Erik Olson's Baudline signal analysis software was used for some of the analysis. We thank numerous volunteers for access to test-target machines.This work was sponsored by the Check Point Institute for Information Security; by the Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology; by the Israeli Centers of Research Excellence I-CORE program (center 4/11); and by NATO's Public Diplomacy Division in the Framework of "Science for Peace".
  Acoustic cryptanalysisDaniel GenkinAdi ShamirEran TromerTechnion and Tel Aviv UniversityWeizmann Institute of ScienceTel Aviv Universityassisted by Lev Pachmanov and numerous othersSummaryMany computers emit a high-pitched noise during operation, due to vibration in some of their electronic components. These acoustic emanations are more than a nuisance: they can convey information about the software running on the computer and, in particular, leak sensitive information about security-related computations. In a preliminary presentation, we have shown that different RSA keys induce different sound patterns, but it was not clear how to extract individual key bits. The main problem was the very low bandwidth of the acoustic side channel (under 20 kHz using common microphones, and a few hundred kHz using ultrasound microphones), many orders of magnitude below the GHz-scale clock rates of the attacked computers.
  Here, we describe a new acoustic cryptanalysis key extraction attack, applicable to GnuPG's current implementation of RSA. The attack can extract full 4096-bit RSA decryption keys from laptop computers (of various models), within an hour, using the sound generated by the computer during the decryption of some chosen ciphertexts. We experimentally demonstrate that such attacks can be carried out, using either a plain mobile phone placed next to the computer, or a more sensitive microphone placed 4 meters away.
  Beyond acoustics, we demonstrate that a similar low-bandwidth attack can be performed by measuring the electric potential of a computer chassis. A suitably-equipped attacker need merely touch the target computer with his bare hand, or get the required leakage information from the ground wires at the remote end of VGA, USB or Ethernet cables.
  PaperA detailed account of the results and their context is given in the full version of our paper (8MB PDF).
  Note: these are recent results, first published on 18 December 2013. Preliminary results were announced in the Eurocrypt 2004 rump session presentation, "Acoustic cryptanalysis: on nosy people and noisy machines", and are now archived. Progress since publication of the preliminary results is summarized in Q16 below.
  Q&AQ1: What information is leaked?This depends on the specific computer hardware. We have tested numerous laptops, and several desktops.
  In almost all machines, it is possible to distinguish an idle CPU (x86 "HLT") from a busy CPU.On many machines, it is moreover possible to distinguish different patterns of CPU operations and different programs.Using GnuPG as our study case, we can, on some machines:distinguish between the acoustic signature of different RSA secret keys (signing or decryption), andfully extract decryption keys, by measuring the sound the machine makes during decryption of chosen ciphertexts.Q2: What is making the noise?The acoustic signal of interest is generated by vibration of electronic components (capacitors and coils) in the voltage regulation circuit, as it struggles to supply constant voltage to the CPU despite the large fluctuations in power consumption caused by different patterns of CPU operations. The relevant signal is not caused by mechanical components such as the fan or hard disk, nor by the laptop's internal speaker.
  Q3: Does the attack require special equipment?It sure helps, and in the paper we describe an expensive hardware setup for getting the best sensitivity and frequency response. But in some cases, a regular mobile phone is good enough. We have used a mobile phone to acoustically extract keys from a laptop at a distance of 30cm, as in the following picture.
  Q4: What is the acoustic attack range?That depends on many factors. Using a sensitive parabolic microphone, we surpassed 4 meters. In the following example, a parabolic microphone, attached to a padded case of equipment (power supply, amplifier, filters, and a laptop running the attack code) is extracting an RSA key from a target laptop (on the far side of the room).
  Without the ungainly parabolic dish, we achieved a range of 1 meter. In the following, the target (A) is on the right, and the attacker is on the left. Only the capsule of the microphone, marked (B), is sensitive to position and orientation; the rest of the attacker's equipment can be hidden away.
  Q5: What are some examples of attack scenarios?We discuss some prospective attacks in our paper. In a nutshell:
  Install an attack app on your phone. Set up a meeting with the victim and place the phone on the desk next to his laptop (see Q2).Break into the victim's phone, install the attack app, and wait until the victim inadvertently places his phone next to the target laptop.Construct a web page use the microphone of the computer running the browser (using Flash or HTML Media Capture, under some excuse such as VoIP chat). When the user permits the microphone access, use it to steal the user's secret key.Put your stash of eavesdropping bugs and laser microphones to a new use.Send your server to a colocation facility, with a good microphone inside the box, and then acoustically extract keys from all nearby servers.Get near a TEMPEST/1-92 protected machine, such as the one pictured to the right, place a microphone next to its ventilation holes, and extract its supposedly-protected secrets.Q6: What if I don't have any microphone, or the environment is too noisy?Another low-bandwidth channel is the electric potential of the laptop's chassis. We've shown that in many computers, this "ground" potential fluctuates (even when connected to a grounded power supply) and leaks the requisite signal. This can be measured in several ways, for example:
  Magic-touch attack: the attacker measures the chassis potential by merely touching the laptop chassis with his hand, while surreptitiously measuring his own body potential relative to the ground potential of the room. (This attack is especially effective in hot weather, since sweaty fingers offer a lower electric resistance.)Far-end-of-cable attack: the victim plugs in some innocuous-looking VGA or Ethernet cable into his laptop. The attacker measures the shield's electric potential on the far side of the cable (out of sight, in some cabinet or server room).Q7: Can an attacker use power analysis instead?Yes, power analysis (by measuring the current drawn from the laptop's DC power supply) is another way to perform our low-bandwidth attack.
  If the attacker can measure clockrate-scale (GHz) power leakage, then traditional power analysis may also be very effective, and far faster. However, this is foiled by the common practice of filtering out high frequencies on the power supply.
  Q8: How can low-frequency (kHz) acoustic leakage provide useful information about a much faster (GHz)? Individual CPU operations are too fast for a microphone to pick up, but long operations (e.g., modular exponentiation in RSA) can create a characteristic (and detectable) acoustic spectral signature over many milliseconds. In the chosen-ciphertext key extraction attack, we carefully craft the inputs to RSA decryption in order to maximize the dependence of the spectral signature on the secret key bits.
  Q9 How vulnerable is GnuPG now?We have disclosed our attack to GnuPG developers under CVE-2013-4576, suggested suitable countermeasures, and worked with the developers to test them. New versions of GnuPG 1.x and of libgcrypt (which underlies GnuPG 2.x), containing these countermeasures and resistant to our current key-extraction attack, were released concurrently with the first public posting of these results. Some of the effects we found (including RSA key distinguishability) remain present.
  Q10: How vulnerable are other algorithms and cryptographic implementations?We don't know. Our attack requires careful cryptographic analysis of the implementation, which so far has been conducted only for the GnuPG 1.x implementation of RSA. Implementations using ciphertext blinding (a common side channel countermeasure) appear less vulnerable. We have, however, observed that GnuPG's implementation of ElGamal encryption also allows acoustically distinguishing keys.
  Q11: Is there a realistic way to perform a chosen-ciphertext attack on GnuPG?To apply the attack to GnuPG, we found a way to cause GnuPG to automatically decrypt ciphertexts chosen by the attacker. The idea is to use encrypted e-mail messages following the OpenPGP and PGP/MIME protocols. For example, Enigmail (a popular plugin to the Thunderbird e-mail client) automatically decrypts incoming e-mail (for notification purposes) using GnuPG. An attacker can e-mail suitably-crafted messages to the victims, wait until they reach the target computer, and observe the acoustic signature of their decryption (as shown above), thereby closing the adaptive attack loop.
  Q12: Won't the attack be foiled by loud fan noise, or by multitasking, or by several computers in the same room?Usually not. The interesting acoustic signals are mostly above 10KHz, whereas typical computer fan noise and normal room noise are concentrated at lower frequencies and can thus be filtered out. In task-switching systems, different tasks can be distinguished by their different acoustic spectral signatures. Using multiple cores turns out to help the attack (by shifting down the signal frequencies). When several computers are present, they can be told apart by spatial localization, or by their different acoustic signatures (which vary with the hardware, the component temperatures, and other environmental conditions).
  Q13: What countermeasures are available?One obvious countermeasure is to use sound dampening equipment, such as "sound-proof" boxes, designed to sufficiently attenuate all relevant frequencies. Conversely, a sufficiently strong wide-band noise source can mask the informative signals, though ergonomic concerns may render this unattractive. Careful circuit design and high-quality electronic components can probably reduce the emanations.
  Alternatively, the cryptographic software can be changed, and algorithmic techniques employed to render the emanations less useful to the attacker. These techniques ensure that the rough-scale behavior of the algorithm is independent of the inputs it receives; they usually carry some performance penalty, but are often used in any case to thwart other side-channel attacks. This is what we helped implement in GnuPG (see Q9).
  Q14: Why software countermeasures? Isn't it the hardware's responsibility to avoid physical leakage?It is tempting to enforce proper layering, and decree that preventing physical leakage is the responsibility of the physical hardware. Unfortunately, such low-level leakage prevention is often impractical due to the very bad cost vs. security tradeoff: (1) any leakage remnants can often be amplified by suitable manipulation at the higher levels, as we indeed do in our chosen-ciphertext attack; (2) low-level mechanisms try to protect all computation, even though most of it is insensitive or does not induce easily-exploitable leakage; and (3) leakage is often an inevitable side effect of essential performance-enhancing mechanisms (e.g., consider cache attacks).
  Application-layer, algorithm-specific mitigation, in contrast, prevent the (inevitably) leaked signal from bearing any useful information. It is often cheap and effective, and most cryptographic software (including GnuPG and libgcrypt) already includes various sorts of mitigation, both through explicit code and through choice of algorithms. In fact, the side-channel resistance of software implementations is nowadays a major concern in the choice of cryptographic primitives, and was an explicit evaluation criterion in NIST's AES and SHA-3 competitions.
  Q15: What about other acoustic attacks?See the discussion and references in our paper, and the Wikipedia page on Acoustic Cryptanalysis. In a nutshell:
  Eavesdropping on keyboard keystrokes has been well discussed; keys can be distinguished by timing, or by their different sounds. While this attack is applicable to data that is entered manually (e.g., passwords), it is not applicable to larger secret data such as RSA keys. Another acoustic source is hard disk head seeks; this source does not appear very useful in the presence of caching, delayed writes and multitasking. Preceding modern computers is MI5's "ENGULF" technique (recounted in Peter Wright's book Spycatcher), whereby a phone tap was used to eavesdrop on the operation of an Egyptian embassy's Hagelin cipher machine, thereby recovering its secret key. Declassified US government publications describe "TEMPEST" acoustic leakage from mechanical and electromechanical devices, but do make no mention of modern electronic computers.
  Q16: What's new since the Eurocrypt 2004 presentation?Full key extraction attack, exploiting deep internal details of GnuP's implementation of RSADramatic improvement in range and applicability (increased from 20cm with open chassis to 4m in normal operation)Much better hardware (some self-built), allowing longer range and better signal characterizationSignal processing and error correction, making it possible to perform the attack using a mobile phone despite the low-quality microphoneMany more targets testedNon-acoustic low-bandwidth attacks, including chassis potential analysisCountermeasures implemented and tested in GnuPG (see Q9)Detailed writeupAcknowledgementsLev Pachmanov wrote much of the software setup used in our experiments, including custom signal acquisition programs. Avi Shtibel, Ezra Shaked and Oded Smikt assisted in constructing and configuring the experimental setup. Assa Naveh assisted in various experiments, and offered valuable suggestions. Sharon Kessler provided copious editorial advice. We thank Werner Koch, lead developer of GnuPG, for the prompt response to our disclosure and the productive collaboration in adding suitable countermeasures. We are indebted to Pankaj Rohatgi for inspiring the origin of this research, and to Nir Yaniv for use of the Nir Space Station and for valuable advice on audio recording. National Instruments Israel generously donated a National Instruments PCI-6052E DAQ card and a MyDAQ device. Erik Olson's Baudline signal analysis software was used for some of the analysis. We thank numerous volunteers for access to test-target machines.This work was sponsored by the Check Point Institute for Information Security; by the Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology; by the Israeli Centers of Research Excellence I-CORE program (center 4/11); and by NATO's Public Diplomacy Division in the Framework of "Science for Peace".
Will credit default swaps cause the next financial crisis? - Sep. 30, 2008
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 16:50
  (Fortune Magazine) -- As Congress wrestles with another bailout bill to try to contain the financial contagion, there's a potential killer bug out there whose next movement can't be predicted: the Credit Default Swap.
  In just over a decade these privately traded derivatives contracts have ballooned from nothing into a $54.6 trillion market. CDS are the fastest-growing major type of financial derivatives. More important, they've played a critical role in the unfolding financial crisis. First, by ostensibly providing "insurance" on risky mortgage bonds, they encouraged and enabled reckless behavior during the housing bubble.
  "If CDS had been taken out of play, companies would've said, 'I can't get this [risk] off my books,'" says Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland law professor and former director of trading and markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. "If they couldn't keep passing the risk down the line, those guys would've been stopped in their tracks. The ultimate assurance for issuing all this stuff was, 'It's insured.'"
  Second, terror at the potential for a financial Ebola virus radiating out from a failing institution and infecting dozens or hundreds of other companies - all linked to one another by CDS and other instruments - was a major reason that regulators stepped in to bail out Bear Stearns and buy out AIG (AIG, Fortune 500), whose calamitous descent itself was triggered by losses on its CDS contracts (see "Hank's Last Stand").
  And the fear of a CDS catastrophe still haunts the markets. For starters, nobody knows how federal intervention might ripple through this chain of contracts. And meanwhile, as we'll see, two fundamental aspects of the CDS market - that it is unregulated, and that almost nothing is disclosed publicly - may be about to change. That adds even more uncertainty to the equation.
  "The big problem is that here are all these public companies - banks and corporations - and no one really knows what exposure they've got from the CDS contracts," says Frank Partnoy, a law professor at the University of San Diego and former Morgan Stanley derivatives salesman who has been writing about the dangers of CDS and their ilk for a decade. "The really scary part is that we don't have a clue." Chris Wolf, a co-manager of Cogo Wolf, a hedge fund of funds, compares them to one of the great mysteries of astrophysics: "This has become essentially the dark matter of the financial universe."
  ***
  AT FIRST GLANCE, credit default swaps don't look all that scary. A CDS is just a contract: The "buyer" plunks down something that resembles a premium, and the "seller" agrees to make a specific payment if a particular event, such as a bond default, occurs. Used soberly, CDS offer concrete benefits: If you're holding bonds and you're worried that the issuer won't be able to pay, buying CDS should cover your loss. "CDS serve a very useful function of allowing financial markets to efficiently transfer credit risk," argues Sunil Hirani, the CEO of Creditex, one of a handful of marketplaces that trade the contracts.
  Because they're contracts rather than securities or insurance, CDS are easy to create: Often deals are done in a one-minute phone conversation or an instant message. Many technical aspects of CDS, such as the typical five-year term, have been standardized by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA). That only accelerates the process. You strike your deal, fill out some forms, and you've got yourself a $5 million - or a $100 million - contract.
  And as long as someone is willing to take the other side of the proposition, a CDS can cover just about anything, making it the Wall Street equivalent of those notorious Lloyds of London policies covering Liberace's hands and other esoterica. It has even become possible to purchase a CDS that would pay out if the U.S. government defaults. (Trust us when we say that if the government goes under, trying to collect will be the least of your worries.)
  You can guess how Wall Street cowboys responded to the opportunity to make deals that (1) can be struck in a minute, (2) require little or no cash upfront, and (3) can cover anything. Yee-haw! You can almost picture Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove climbing onto the H-bomb before it's released from the B-52. And indeed, the volume of CDS has exploded with nuclear force, nearly doubling every year since 2001 to reach a recent peak of $62 trillion at the end of 2007, before receding to $54.6 trillion as of June 30, according to ISDA.
  Take that gargantuan number with a grain of salt. It refers to the face value of all outstanding contracts. But many players in the market hold offsetting positions. So if, in theory, every entity that owns CDS had to settle its contracts tomorrow and "netted" all its positions against each other, a much smaller amount of money would change hands. But even a tiny fraction of that $54.6 trillion would still be a daunting sum.
  The credit freeze and then the Bear disaster explain the drop in outstanding CDS contracts during the first half of the year - and the market has only worsened since. CDS contracts on widely held debt, such as General Motors' (GM, Fortune 500), continue to be actively bought and sold. But traders say almost no new contracts are being written on any but the most liquid debt issues right now, in part because nobody wants to put money at risk and because nobody knows what Washington will do and how that will affect the market. ("There's nothing to do but watch Bernanke on TV," one trader told Fortune during the week when the Fed chairman was going before Congress to push the mortgage bailout.) So, after nearly a decade of exponential growth, the CDS market is poised for its first sustained contraction.
  ***
  ONE REASON THE MARKET TOOK OFF is that you don't have to own a bond to buy a CDS on it - anyone can place a bet on whether a bond will fail. Indeed the majority of CDS now consists of bets on other people's debt. That's why it's possible for the market to be so big: The $54.6 trillion in CDS contracts completely dwarfs total corporate debt, which the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association puts at $6.2 trillion, and the $10 trillion it counts in all forms of asset-backed debt.
  "It's sort of like I think you're a bad driver and you're going to crash your car," says Greenberger, formerly of the CFTC. "So I go to an insurance company and get collision insurance on your car because I think it'll crash and I'll collect on it." That's precisely what the biggest winners in the subprime debacle did. Hedge fund star John Paulson of Paulson & Co., for example, made $15 billion in 2007, largely by using CDS to bet that other investors' subprime mortgage bonds would default.
  So what started out as a vehicle for hedging ended up giving investors a cheap, easy way to wager on almost any event in the credit markets. In effect, credit default swaps became the world's largest casino. As Christopher Whalen, a managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, observes, "To be generous, you could call it an unregulated, uncapitalized insurance market. But really, you would call it a gaming contract."
  There is at least one key difference between casino gambling and CDS trading: Gambling has strict government regulation. The federal government has long shied away from any oversight of CDS. The CFTC floated the idea of taking an oversight role in the late '90s, only to find itself opposed by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others. Then, in 2000, Congress, with the support of Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, passed a bill prohibiting all federal and most state regulation of CDS and other derivatives. In a press release at the time, co-sponsor Senator Phil Gramm - most recently in the news when he stepped down as John McCain's campaign co-chair this summer after calling people who talk about a recession "whiners" - crowed that the new law "protects financial institutions from over-regulation ... and it guarantees that the United States will maintain its global dominance of financial markets." (The authors of the legislation were so bent on warding off regulation that they had the bill specify that it would "supersede and preempt the application of any state or local law that prohibits gaming ...") Not everyone was as sanguine as Gramm. In 2003 Warren Buffett famously called derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction."
  ***
  THERE'S ANOTHER BIG difference between trading CDS and casino gambling. When you put $10 on black 22, you're pretty sure the casino will pay off if you win. The CDS market offers no such assurance. One reason the market grew so quickly was that hedge funds poured in, sensing easy money. And not just big, well-established hedge funds but a lot of upstarts. So in some cases, giant financial institutions were counting on collecting money from institutions only slightly more solvent than your average minimart. The danger, of course, is that if a hedge fund suddenly has to pay off on a lot of CDS, it will simply go out of business. "People have been insuring risks that they can't insure," says Peter Schiff, the president of Euro Pacific Capital and author of Crash Proof, which predicted doom for Fannie and Freddie, among other things. "Let's say you're writing fire insurance policies, and every time you get the [premium], you spend it. You just assume that no houses are going to burn down. And all of a sudden there's a huge fire and they all burn down. What do you do? You just close up shop."
CFTC Announces It Is Undercounting Size Of Swaps Market By As Much As $55 Trillion | Zero Hedge
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 16:49
  What is $55 trillion between friends? Very little according to the CFTC. In perhaps the biggest under the radar news of the day - to be expected with every watercooler occupied by taper experts - the WSJ reports that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said Wednesday that technical errors at two so-called swaps data repositories, which collect and supply regulators with transaction data, have led the CFTC to misreport the overall size of the swaps market by undercounting its size. Isn't it curious how all these "glitches" always work out in the favor of preserving market calm and confidence and away from spooking investors and speculators? Either way, a better question is how big was the so called undercounting? The answer: as large as $55 trillion!
  Regulators aren't sure how much the repositories are undercounting. One CFTC official familiar with the matter said the discrepancy could be as high as $55 trillion, though another official said the figure is closer to $10 trillion once regulators cancel out certain transactions to prevent double counting.
  One just has to laugh: the total US swaps market is what - roughly $400 trillion? So... just add enough notional to that number equal to the GDP of the entire world - or 4 times the size of US GDP - and call it a day. And in this environment somehow the Fed and other central planners are expected to have any clue what they are doing on a day to day basis?
  Naturally this discovery makes a mockery of such transaprency enchancing initatives as Dodd-Frank.
  The lack of clarity over the size of the market may undermine a key plank of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law aimed at bringing transparency to the opaque derivatives market. Swaps, which were at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis, are complex financial contracts that allow financial firms and their clients to hedge against risks or bet on an asset's value.
  The CFTC has issued a number of rules to bring transparency to swaps trading so regulators can detect risks that could pose a threat to a firm or the financial system.
  It would appear that those rules, uh, failed. It gets better:
  The CFTC said in a footnote to its weekly swaps report that the largest data repository, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., "has informed us that due to a'...technical coding issue, the notional values in the interest rate asset class have been understated." The agency also reported "a processing error" by a separate repository operated by CME Group Inc. A CME spokeswoman didn't respond to a request for comment. A CFTC official characterized the data problems as "growing pains." The agency formally began to report swaps data on a weekly basis just last month.
  A technical coding issue with 12 zeroes?
  Sure enough, the CFTC was quick to scapegoat someone for this epic clusterfuck - naturally, this someone was evil Congress for not spending even more money on the CFTC's toothlessness, something popularized recently by the recently departedBart Chilton, who more or less told gold traders that manipulation in the gold market will continue because the government just doesn't have the funds to stop it.
  The official said the error also reflects the agency's chronic lack of resources. Just two employees at the agency are charged with putting together the weekly swaps report and it takes them 12 days to prepare the data for publication compared with three for another report the agency publishes. The agency is reviewing the matter and hopes to have firmer figures by next week's report, due Thursday.
  In a statement, DTCC said: "We notified the CFTC immediately after we uncovered this matter and are working overtime to resolve these issues as soon as possible to ensure that the agency has timely access to the most accurate, highest quality market data."
  Oh that's ok then, after all what's a little eletronic $55,000,000,000,000 shuttling back and forth between insolvent counterpa.... oh hey look, over there everyone, the Fed just tapered!
  Average:Your rating: NoneAverage: 5(32 votes)
Chinese lunar rover finds no evidence of American moon landings
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Fri, 20 Dec 2013 16:39
  Post by Don RobertoA report from the Chinese state news agency Xinhua has confirmed thatChina¯½s mission to the moon hasn¯½t found a single scrap of evidence thatAmericans were ever there.Photographs of the lunar surface taken while the ¯½Jade Rabbit¯½ probe wasin orbit and further investigations on the ground have now been analysedand show that areas where US landings were thought to have taken placereveal a surface untouched by man, and no sign of any golf activitywhatsoever.¯½They were never there at all,¯½ said baffled Chinese Foreign Minster,Wang Yi, ¯½All those conspiracy theories about Americans making stuff upto make themselves look good turn out to be true. And we would neverhave known if it weren¯½t for the glorious People¯½s Lunar probe of Chinare-writing history and putting the record straight.¯½The findings were even more disappointing for the scientists who createdthe probe. They had equipped Jade Rabbit with special cutting tools forshredding any American flags it found and replacing them with China¯½sown. Special legs were also fitted so that the rover could sidle up toremnants of any American spacecraft and kick it and kick it and kick itin the most contemptuous manner possible.¯½We thought, well, what were they going to do, they¯½d have to send amission to go back and replant them, surely?¯½ Mr Yi added. ¯½Our policywas simple: all they would have to do was ask us to lend them the moneyto do it. And then we¯½d say no. Ha ha ha ha ha! Pig dogs! It¯½s such ashame that we won¯½t now get the chance to HUMILIATE them again.¯½The Chinese lunar programme is set to accelerate, Mr Yi confirmed. ¯½Weare building a space centre in the Gobi desert, with a mission controlroom, astronaut training and a massive sound stage made to look like themoon from where our fake landing will be broadcast to the world in2016,¯½ he stated, completely oblivious to the fact that he may havegiven too much away and will probably be shot in the morning.White House press secretary Jay Carney refused to comment, but was heardmuttering under his breath that ¯½those bastards will copy anything¯½.Given that your cordless phone has way more technology than existed back then I don't think we ever went there either. You'd think someone would beat a confession from 1 of the guys that supposedly went there.
36(b)(1) Arms Sales Notification
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Federal Register Latest Entries
  Thu, 19 Dec 2013 15:38
  Ms. B. English, DSCA/DBO/CFM, (703) 601-3740.
  The following is a copy of a letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Transmittal 13-69 with attached transmittal, policy justification, and Sensitivity of Technology.
  Dated: December 13, 2013.
  Aaron Siegel,
  Alternate OSD Federal Register Liaison Officer, Department of Defense.
  BILLING CODE 5001-06-P
  BILLING CODE 5001-06-C
  Transmittal No. 13-69Notice of Proposed Issuance of Letter of Offer Pursuant to Section 36(b)(1) of the Arms Export Control Act, as amended(i) Prospective Purchaser: Austria
  (ii) Total Estimated Value:
  Major Defense Equipment$ 72 millionOther$ 65 millionTotal$ 137 million(iii) Description and Quantity or Quantities of Articles or Services under Consideration for Purchase:
  3UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters in standard USG configuration with designated unique equipment and Government Furnished Equipment (GFE)
  3Aviation Survivability Equipment (ASE)
  7T700-GE-701D Engines (6 installed and 1 spare)
  3Aviation Mission Planning Systems
  1Transportable Black Hawk Operations Simulator (TBOS)
  8AN/AVS-9 Night Vision Goggles
  1Aviation Ground Power Unit
  8Embedded Global Positioning Systems with Inertial Navigation
  Also included are Communication Security equipment including AN/ARC-231, AN/ARC-210, AN/ARC-220 and AN/ARC-201D radios, Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) systems, AN/VRC-92 SINCGARS, aircraft warranty, air worthiness support, facility construction, spare and repair parts, support equipment, communication equipment, publications and technical documentation, personnel training and training equipment, site surveys, tool and test equipment, U.S. Government and contractor technical and logistics support services, and other related element of program, technical and logistics support.
  (iv) Military Department: Army (VAR)
  (v) Prior Related Cases: None
  (vi) Sales Commission Fee, etc., Paid, Offered, or agreed to be paid: None
  (vii) Sensitivity of Technology Contained in the Defense Article or Defense Services Proposed to be sold: See Attached Annex
  (viii) Date Report Delivered to Congress: 5 Dec 13
  * as defined in Section 47(6) of the Arms Export Control Act.
  Policy JustificationAustria'--UH-60M Black Hawk Helicopters in Total Package ApproachThe Government of Austria has requested a possible sale of:
  3UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters in standard USG configuration with designated unique equipment and Government Furnished Equipment (GFE)
  3Aviation Survivability Equipment (ASE)
  7T700-GE-701D Engines (6 installed and 1 spare)
  3Aviation Mission Planning Systems
  1Transportable Black Hawk Operations Simulator (TBOS)
  8AN/AVS-9 Night Vision Goggles
  1Aviation Ground Power Unit
  8Embedded Global Positioning Systems with Inertial Navigation
  Also included are Communication Security equipment including AN/ARC-231, AN/ARC-210, AN/ARC-220 and AN/ARC-201D radios, Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) systems, AN/VRC-92 SINCGARS, aircraft warranty, air worthiness support, facility construction, spare and repair parts, support equipment, communication equipment, publications and technical documentation, personnel training and training equipment, site surveys, tool and test equipment, U.S. Government and contractor technical and logistics support services, and other related element of program, technical and logistics support. The estimated cost is $137 million.
  This proposed sale will contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of a friendly country which has been, and continues to be, an important force for political stability and progress in Europe.
  The proposed sale of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters will improve Austria's capability to conduct domestic search and rescue missions, border surveillance operations, and contribute to international operations. The proposed sale will also contribute to the Austrian military's modernization goals while enhancing interoperability between Austria, the U.S., and other allies. Austria, which has S-70A-42 aircraft in its inventory, will have no difficulty absorbing these additional helicopters and support into its armed forces.
  The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the basic military balance in the region.
  The principal contractor will be Sikorsky Aircraft Company in Stratford, Connecticut. The engines will be purchased from General Electric Aircraft Company (GEAC) in Lynn, Massachusetts. There are no known offset agreements proposed in connection with this potential sale.
  Implementation of this proposed sale will require nine U.S. government or contractor representatives to travel to Austria for a period of up to five years for support.
  There will be no adverse impact on the U.S. defense readiness as a result of this proposed sale.
  Transmittal No. 13-69Notice of Proposed Issuance of Letter of Offer Pursuant to Section 36(b)(1) of the Arms Export Control ActAnnexItem No. vii(vii) Sensitivity of Technology:
  1. The UH-60M aircraft is a medium lift aircraft which includes two T-701D Engines, and the Common Avionics Architecture System (CAAS) cockpit, which provides aircraft system, flight, mission, and communication management systems. The CAAS includes five Multifunction Displays (MFDs), two General Purpose Processor Units (GPPUs), two Control Display Units (CDUs) and two Data Concentrator Units (DCUs). The Navigation System will have Embedded GPS/INS (EGIs), two Digital Advanced Flight Control Systems (DAFCS), one ARN-149 Automatic Direction Finder, one ARN-147 (VOR/ILS marker Beacon System), one ARN-153 TACAN, two air data computers, and one Radar Altimeter system. The communication equipment includes the APX-118A IFF, AN/ARC-231 UHF/VHF-AM/FM and the AN/ARC-201D/E VHF-FM. depending on the finalized configuration, the AN/ARC-210 dual multiband radio and AN/ARC-220 HF radio may also be included on the UH-60M.
  a. The AN/APX-118A, Transponder is classified Secret if Mode IV or Mode S fill is installed.
  b. The AN/ARC-210 radio is a multi mode radio with satellite communications capabilities.
  c. The AN/ARC-201D Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio Systems (SINCGARS) is a tactical FM airborne radio subsystem that provides secure, anti-jam voice and data communication. The Enhanced Data Modes (EDM) of the radio employs a Reed-Solomon Forward Error Correction (FEC) technique that provides enhanced bit-error-rate performance. That EDM Packet Data Mode supports packet data transfer from the airborne host computer to another airborne platform or the ground-based equivalent SINCGARS system. Performance capabilities, Electronic Countermeasures/Electronic Counter Countermeasures specifications and Engineering Change Orders (ECOs) are classified Secret.
  d. A commercial variant of the AN/ARC-201D is available to FMS customers.
  e. The AN/ARC-231 requires an exportable variant of the AN/ARC-231 radio, the MXF-4027.
  f. The Embedded GPS/INS (EGI) unit CN-1689-(H-764GU) contains sensitive GPS technology.
  2. If a technologically advanced adversary were to obtain knowledge of the specific hardware and software elements, the information could be used to develop countermeasures or equivalent systems which might reduce weapon system effectiveness or be used in the development of a system with similar or advanced capabilities.
  3. The benefits to be derived from this sale, as outlined in the Policy Justification outweigh the potential damage that could result if the sensitive technology were revealed to unauthorized persons. The Government of Austria is expected to afford all system related information and technologies the same degree of protection given to it by the United States.
  [FR Doc. 2013-30120 Filed 12-18-13; 8:45 am]
  BILLING CODE 5001-06-P
Hawaii official who released Obama birth certificate dies in plane crash | Reuters
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Thu, 19 Dec 2013 22:15
  By Christopher D'Angelo
  KAUAI, HawaiiThu Dec 12, 2013 5:41pm EST
  KAUAI, Hawaii (Reuters) - A Hawaii state health official who gained national attention when she released a copy of President Barack Obama's birth certificate in 2011 was killed in a plane crash off the island of Molokai, authorities said on Thursday.
  Loretta Fuddy, director of the Hawaii Department of Health, died when a single-engine plane with nine people on board, operated by a small regional carrier, went down some 300 yards off Molokai's Kalaupapa peninsula on Wednesday during an inter-island flight.
  The pilot and seven other passengers survived the crash with various injuries, U.S. Coast Guard search and rescue controller Darin McCracken said, adding that one of the injured swam to shore.
  A spokesman for the Hawaii Department of Health said Fuddy's deputy, Keith Yamamoto, was among the passengers who survived the crash of the Cessna 208 Caravan.
  "Our hearts are broken. Loretta was deeply loved and respected. She was selfless, utterly dedicated, and committed to her colleagues in the Department of Health and to the people of Hawaii," Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie, who appointed Fuddy in 2011, said in a statement.
  The flight was being operated by Makani Kai Air, which flies between Oahu and Molokai.
  Makani Kai Air owner Richard Schuman told local KITV4 that the crash was caused by engine failure and that the pilot tried to bring the plane down safely and keep the passengers together after they were in the ocean. Schuman did not respond to calls from Reuters requesting comment.
  A spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board said the agency was investigating the crash and would issue a preliminary report within 10 to 14 days but that the plane was probably not recoverable.
  The Federal Aviation Administration was also conducting a probe of the incident, and a spokesman said its agents planned to speak with the pilot and some of the surviving passengers as early as Thursday.
  Amid accusations by so-called "birthers," who claimed that Obama was not born in the United States, Fuddy released to him copies of his original certificate of live birth in Hawaii.
  She said that "in recognition of your status as president of the United States," she was making an exception to her department's policy of only releasing a computer-generated certified copy.
  Obama then released a copy of that longer version of his birth certificate in response to the widely discredited claims he was not born in the United States. In doing so, he blasted "carnival barkers" who refused to let the issue go.
  (Additional reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis and Eric M. Johnson; Writing by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by John Stonestreet, Leslie Adler and Steve Orlofsky)
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In Search Of... The Coming Ice Age - YouTube
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Thu, 19 Dec 2013 22:12
Edward Snowden doesn't show up once in Google's list of top 2013 searches
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  Archived Version
  Thu, 19 Dec 2013 22:02
  (AP Photo)
  This year's National Security Agency revelations have created a firestorm of reports and debates about the state of U.S. surveillance technology and intelligence policy. It set off a brief international manhunt. Entire countries are now building countermeasures to deflect the NSA's gaze. But at least in the eyes of Google, Edward Snowden was hardly a blip on the radar. The search giant's global year-in-review is topped by Nelson Mandela, followed by the late actor Paul Walker and the iPhone 5S. Snowden doesn't make an appearance. Okay, the iPhone and the Harlem Shake might be skewing the results. What if we just limited it to people? Still no luck. Oscar Pistorius, the South African athlete under investigation for his girlfriend's murder, ranked higher than Snowden. Maybe "Snowden" is a little too specific. What if we broadened the query to "NSA" or "surveillance" or "spying"? The same pattern will repeat itself if you drill down to U.S.-specific searches. Here's what trends in Washington, D.C. '-- arguably the city most preoccupied with Snowden this year '-- looked like, as provided by a Google spokesperson:
  While the details of the Snowden saga may have gripped civil liberties advocates and Internet policy types '-- and although Snowden himself clearly thinks he's still a major subject of debate '-- the rest of the world seems to think otherwise.