The Baigong pipes are one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world. They can be found inside a badly-eroded pyramid standing on top of Mount Baigong in the Qinghai Province of northwestern China. The collapsing pyramid once had triangular entrances on all three sides but over time, two of them caved in and are currently out of reach. The one that remains goes deep inside the mountain. Continue reading
Facebook wants to know: How are you feeling?
There’s a water crisis on the other side of the planet. Donald Trump tweeted his latest offensive screed. Your old friend’s brother unexpectedly and tragically died. Do you like it? Better yet, do you love it? Does it make you sad or angry? Does it make you say “wow”? Continue reading
Samsung has confirmed that its “smart TV” sets are listening to customers’ every word, and the company is warning customers not to speak about personal information while near the TV sets.
The company revealed that the voice activation feature on its smart TVs will capture all nearby conversations. The TV sets can share the information, including sensitive data, with Samsung as well as third-party services. Continue reading
Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.
Geneva, Switzerland. US tourists filmed UFO/strange orb entering Interdimensional Portal in the sky of Geneva, just over CERN area.
The CERN project site is located in Geneva, Switzerland. The CERN functions as a Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the World. A collider is the basic tool of particle physics. You take a stream of particles, accelerate them to really high kinetic energy levels, and initiate a collision to slam them into a target. Depending intensity of the experiment, all sorts of peculiar things can happen.As of in 2015, CERN reached levels of double potency over the 10 Tev barrier of dark matter – the theoretical minimal energy of formation of a ‘bag of strangelets’ and ‘micro-black holes’. Continue reading
Windows 10 users are unable to stop the new operating system from spying on them, and even Microsoft is unable to prevent it from collecting some types of data. Microsoft has continued to insist that Windows 10 users enjoy full privacy and can always choose to turn of the data collection options in settings. But, for the first time, the Redmond-based software giant has admitted that the process of collecting core background data in Windows 10 cannot be stopped. Continue reading
“About 200 US nuclear bombs are currently deployed in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Turkey. This nuclear ordnance is also subject to a renewal program,” Shoigu said.
The CIA has had a long history in Hollywood. During the 1950s, CIA asset Luigi G Luraschi used his position as head of censorship at Paramount Studios to bring film content in line with the Agency’s ideals. Scenes that portrayed the US in a bad light were cut; films such as High Noon (1952) were prevented from receiving certain industry awards; and well dressed ‘negroes’ were placed in lavish on-screen environments to suggest that the US didn’t have a race problem. In order to tame or otherwise subvert their content, the CIA also covertly assisted on the film adaptations of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) and Animal Farm (1955), as well as Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1958). Continue reading
Currently there are 7.3 billion people on the planet and 6. 9 billion mobile phone subscriptions — almost one phone for every person! Few of us can even imagine living without our electronic devices like smartphones and computers. But what is living in a sea of electronics doing to our brains? There’s evidence that our electronic devices may be hazardous to both our physical and mental health.
An intriguing signal from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) might prove to be the crack that prises apart the standard model — physicists’ current best description of how matter and forces interact.
Click the YouTube link below to listen
Host of Caravan to Midnight, actor, musician, writer, investigative journalist, composer, martial artist, aviator and broadcaster, John B. Wells finds the ancient sage advice of “concentrating on just one thing” to be true. His one thing: The Arts.
John is also an internationally renowned voice-over artist with credits ranging from serving as the announcer for CBS’ The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, to voicing promos for hit television shows like Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch and Gold Rush to lending his voice to films like Oliver Stone’s JFK and Talk Radio, as well as the popular series Unsealed: Alien Files.
Windows 10 uses the Internet a lot to support many of its features. The operating system also sports numerous knobs to twiddle that are supposed to disable most of these features and the potentially privacy-compromising connections that go with them.
Unfortunately for privacy advocates, these controls don’t appear to be sufficient to completely prevent the operating system from going online and communicating with Microsoft’s servers.
Have you ever seen a post, comment, or reply that absolutely reeked of behind-the-scenes compensation by corporations like Monsanto? In the growing age of internet activism, and the expansion of social media as a tool to spread the word on real issues, paid internet trolling is becoming a new career path.
The internet has revolutionized numerous disciplines, and propaganda is no exception. How can you know who’s saying what — and why — online? Join Ben, Matt, and special guest Joe to learn more about the future of online manipulation.
Authentic Enlightenment Radio is Tuesday and Thursday night at 9pm EST
Thursday June 4 @ 9:00pm EST – Ep#103 – The Return of Planet X with Guest Marshall Masters
Marshall Masters is a former CNN Science Features news producer, freelance writer, television analyst and the publisher of YOWUSA.COM. He spent three years researching Nibiru flyby-related topics including: catastrophic earth changes, crop circles, impact events and future technologies.
As reported over at Vice
As of midnight on Sunday, for the first time since 2001, the NSA lost its legal authority to collect Americans phone records in bulk.
The Senate let three provisions of the Patriot Act expire on Sunday, including the controversial Section 215, which allows the spy agency to collect all phone records from telephone companies every three months, a practice that was ruled illegal by a judge less than a month ago.
Two other provisions of the Patriot Act also expired. One of them allowed the government to obtain warrants from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on suspected “lone wolf” terrorists; and the other, known as the “roving wiretap,” allowed investigators to obtain permission to spy on multiple phones owned by one suspect with just one application.
While this might seem like a victory for anti-surveillance advocates, the truth is that most of the Patriot Act stands, and even this victory is going to be a short-lived one.
While the fight for your privacy rages on Capitol Hill IBM just unleashed a powerful new spy tool into the public sector. http://youtu.be/hM28eK-Ynx4
IBM today announced 20 new industry-specific solutions with pre-built predictive analytics capabilities that will make it easier and faster for corporations to act.
As hemp makes a comeback in the U.S. after a decades-long ban on its cultivation, scientists are reporting that fibers from the plant can pack as much energy and power as graphene, long-touted as the model material for supercapacitors. They’re presenting their research, which a Canadian start-up company is working on scaling up, at the 248th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society. Continue reading
In 1941, Henry Ford partnered with famous scientist and botanist George Washington Carver to “grow an automobile from the soil,” with a body made and powered by cannabis hemp. The result was a car that was stronger, 25 percent lighter, cheaper to manufacture and considerably greener than any modern electric car available today — all thanks to cannabis hemp. Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, the FCC(Federal Communications Commission) voted to pass a new “Net Neutrality” bill. Don’t be fooled by “Net Neutrality”, because there really isn’t anything neutral about it.
Now, while everyone was distracted by trying to guess the color of a dress posted on social media, the federal government was again, overstepping its boundaries to enforce more rules and regulations. Nothing new, right? For something so important, and yes internet IS in fact important to have this day of age, most would think this would be a bill that would have to go through house and senate, then make its way on to the POTUS to sign into effect. Well you thought wrong. One has to think at this point, does it really matter? To me, no, it does not matter. Why? Because for a long time this administration has overstepped its boundaries. But it’s not just the Obama Administration, it’s a large number of congress and of course in my opinion, all of congress. The only difference that I could see at this point, is the fact it would have taken somewhat of a longer process to put this to a vote through. But, would it have? One does have to wonder why it was put through the FCC and not through congress and yes I have my suspicions, but that doesn’t matter at this point. Continue reading
INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’
The Federal Communications Commission is in the middle of a high-stakes decision that could raise taxes for close to 90 percent of Americans. The commission is considering whether to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service and, in doing so, Washington would trigger new taxes and fees at the state and local level. Continue reading
Anyone who’s suffered the indignity of scrubbing, scanning, and restoring their files after a brush with malware knows that computer viruses suck. But whatever you’ve encountered, it’s likely not as bad as Thunderstrike. It’s the worst kind of malware there is. Continue reading
US President Barack Obama yesterday raised the stakes in the confrontation with North Korea over unsubstantiated allegations that it hacked into Sony Pictures Entertainment, authorizing a new round of economic sanctions affecting 10 government officials and three state entities. Continue reading
On January 30th, all Facebook users will be asked whether or not they will accept the new “Terms of Service” policy. According to reports, they want to allow third parties such as CIA, NSA, FBI, and others to access all of your information. This may not just be the information stored on your Facebook account, the also could include private information on your phone and computer. Many Facebook users have vowed to delete their Facebook accounts before the new year starts. Continue reading
Nestled in the hills of Appalachia (Eastern United States), nearly hidden from the rest of the world, the Institute of BioAcoustic Biology and Sound Health quietly goes about changing the future; and the quality of life for those who live on this planet.
This tiny non-profit research institute has provided supporting evidence for the ancient claims that the sounds of the voice can act as a holographic representation of health and wellness.
Scientifically, Sound Health has proven that people with similar diseases, toxicities, syndromes, traumas…have similar, if not identical, vocal anomalies; and that information can be used to support optimal form and function.
Vulnerabilities in the management interfaces of some wireless router and network-attached storage products from Netgear expose the devices to remote attacks that could result in their complete compromise, researchers warn. Continue reading
The NSA has made hush-hush payments of at least $150 million to Britain’s GCHQ spying agency over the past three years to influence British intelligence gathering operations. The payouts were revealed in new Snowden leaks published by The Guardian. Continue reading
(Daily Mail UK) An eighth of all SIM cards used around the world could be at risk of fraud, theft, or being bugged, a German security expert has claimed.
Karsten Nohl, a cryptographer, discovered the serious security flaw that could let hackers send hidden text messages to affected handsets and infect them with a virus - regardless of what operating system the phone runs on. Continue reading
(The Truth) - Are you a conspiracy theorist? If not, perhaps you should be. Yes, there have certainly been a lot of “conspiracy theories” over the years that have turned out not to be accurate. However, the truth is that a large number of very prominent conspiracy theories have turned out to actually be true. So the next time that you run into some “tin foil hat wearing lunatics”, you might want to actually listen to what they have to say. They may actually know some things that you do not. In fact, one recent study found that “conspiracy theorists” are actually more sane than the general population. So the next time you are tempted to dismiss someone as a “conspiracy theorist”, just remember that the one that is crazy might actually be you. The following are 16 popular conspiracy theories that turned out to be true…
Continue reading
(WHJG) -For the second time in a week, a Drone has been destroyed at Tyndall Air Force Base.
The latest crash came Wednesday morning around 8:25 when the drone crashed alongside US 98 in the Silver Flag area on the east side of the base. Continue reading
We noted yesterday that government officials aren’t trying to keep the spying programs secret to protect national security, but only to protect their own reputations.
We quoted the former head of the National Security Agency’s global digital data gathering program, who said:
The terrorists have already known that we’ve been doing this for years, so there’s no surprise there. They’re not going to change the way they operate just because it comes out in the U.S. press. I mean, the point is, they already knew it, and they were operating the way they would operate anyway. So, the point is that they’re—we’re not—the government here is not trying to protect it from the terrorists; it’s trying to protect it, that knowledge of that program, from the citizens of the United States.
This was just confirmed by the top counter-terrorism czar under Presidents Clinton and Bush – Richard Clarke – who writes:
The argument that this sweeping search must be kept secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing.
The IRS, currently in the midst of scandals involving the targeting of conservative groups and lavish taxpayer-funded conferences, is ordering surveillance equipment that includes hidden cameras in coffee trays, plants and clock radios.
The IRS wants to secure the surveillance equipment quickly – it posted a solicitation on June 6 and is looking to close the deal by Monday, June 10. The agency already has a company lined up for the order but is not commenting on the details.
“The Internal Revenue Service intends to award a Purchase Order to an undisclosed Corporation,” reads the solicitation.
“The following descriptions are vague due to the use and nature of the items,” it says.
“If you feel that you can provide the following equipment, please respond to this email no later than 4 days after the solicitation date,” the IRS said.
Among the items the agency will purchase are four “Covert Coffee tray(s) with Camera concealment,” and four “Remote surveillance system(s)” with “Built-in DVD Burner and 2 Internal HDDs, cameras.”
The IRS also is buying four cameras to hide in plants: “(QTY 4) Plant Concealment Color 700 Lines Color IP Camera Concealment with Single Channel Network Server, supports dual video stream, Poe [Power over Ethernet], software included, case included, router included.”
Finishing out the order are four “Color IP Camera Concealment with single channel network server, supports dual video stream, poe, webviewer and cms software included, audio,” and two “Concealed clock radio.”
“Responses to this notice must be received by this office within 3 business days of the date of this synopsis by 2:00 P.M. EST, June 10, 2013,” the IRS said. Interested vendors are to contact Ricardo Carter, a Contract Specialist at the IRS.
“If no compelling responses are received, award will be made to the original solicited corporation,” the IRS said.
The original solicitation was only available to private companies for bids for 19 business hours.
The notice was posted at 11:07 a.m. on June 6 and had a deadline of 2:00 p.m. on Monday. Taking a normal 9-to-5 work week, the solicitation was open for bids for six hours on Thursday, eight hours on Friday, and five hours on Monday, for a total of 19 hours.
The response date was changed on Monday, pushed back to 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, June 11.
The location listed for the solicitation is the IRS’s National Office of Procurement, in Oxon Hill, Md.
“The Procurement Office acquires the products and services required to support the IRS mission,” according to its website.
In recent weeks the IRS has been at the center of multiple scandals, admitting to targeting Tea Party groups and subjecting them to greater scrutiny when applying for non-profit status during the 2010 and 2012 elections.
A report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration revealed that groups with names like “patriot” in their titles were singled out, required to complete lengthy personal questionnaires (often multiple times) and having their nonprofit status delayed, sometimes for more than three years.
Last week a second Inspector General report detailed nearly $50 million in wasteful spending by the agency on conferences, in which employees stayed at luxurious Las Vegas hotels, paid a keynote speaker $17,000 to paint a picture of U2 singer Bono, and spent $50,000 on parody videos of “Star Trek.”
Requests for comment from the IRS and Mr. Carter were not returned before this story was posted.
CNSNews.com asked IRS spokesmen Dean Patterson and Anthony Burke to explain the reasoning behind the solicitation, where the surveillance equipment will be used, why the request was so urgent, and whether the request has anything to do with the recent scandals at the IRS.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/irs-buying-spying-equipment-covert-cameras-coffee-trays-plants
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largesttelecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.
Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.
The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government’s domestic spying powers.
Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.
The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.
The Guardian approached the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment in advance of publication on Wednesday. All declined. The agencies were also offered the opportunity to raise specific security concerns regarding the publication of the court order.
The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI’s request for its customers’ records, or the court order itself.
“We decline comment,” said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman.
The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls”.
The order directs Verizon to “continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order”. It specifies that the records to be produced include “session identifying information”, such as “originating and terminating number”, the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and “comprehensive communication routing information”.
The information is classed as “metadata”, or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such “metadata” is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.
While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively.
It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders.
The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration’s surveillance activities.
For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on “secret legal interpretations” to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be “stunned” to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted.
Because those activities are classified, the senators, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, have been prevented from specifying which domestic surveillance programs they find so alarming. But the information they have been able to disclose in their public warnings perfectly tracks both the specific law cited by the April 25 court order as well as the vast scope of record-gathering it authorized.
Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the Cato Institute, explained: “We’ve certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of ‘relevance’ to collect large numbers of records at once — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretence of constraint or particularized suspicion.” The April order requested by the FBI and NSA does precisely that.
The law on which the order explicitly relies is the so-called “business records” provision of the Patriot Act, 50 USC section 1861. That is the provision which Wyden and Udall have repeatedly cited when warning the public of what they believe is the Obama administration’s extreme interpretation of the law to engage in excessive domestic surveillance.
In a letter to attorney general Eric Holder last year, they argued that “there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows.”
“We believe,” they wrote, “that most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted” the “business records” provision of the Patriot Act.
Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited “metadata” is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens’ communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication.
Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individual’s network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack.
The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had “been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth” and was “using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity.” Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.
These recent events reflect how profoundly the NSA’s mission has transformed from an agency exclusively devoted to foreign intelligence gathering, into one that focuses increasingly on domestic communications. A 30-year employee of the NSA, William Binney, resigned from the agency shortly after 9/11 in protest at the agency’s focus on domestic activities.
In the mid-1970s, Congress, for the first time, investigated the surveillance activities of the US government. Back then, the mandate of the NSA was that it would never direct its surveillance apparatus domestically.
At the conclusion of that investigation, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired the investigative committee, warned: “The NSA’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order
Madison Ruppert
Activist Post
The U.S. House of Representatives passed CISPA todaywith the majority of the major problems intact. When Rep. Alan Grayson proposed an amendment that would require the National Security Agency, FBI, Department of Homeland Security and others to obtain a warrant before searching a database, it was shot down without debate.
Grayson, a Florida Democrat, proposed a simple amendment only a sentence long that would require “a warrant obtained in accordance with the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States” when a government agency sought to search a database of private information obtained from e-mail and internet service providers for evidence of criminal activity.
Grayson complained earlier today on Twitter saying, “The Rules Committee wouldn’t even allow debate on requiring a warrant before a search.”
As CNET points out, “That’s a reference to a vote this week by the House Rules committee that rejected a series of privacy-protective amendments, meaning they could not be proposed and debated during today’s floor proceedings.”
Without that amendment, a wide range of agencies within the federal government can be searched without a warrant so long as it is supposedly related to any crime related to protecting someone from “serious bodily harm.”
While some of the crimes are quite serious, like child pornography, kidnapping and “serious threats to the physical safety of minors,” the database can also be searched for “cybersecurity purposes” and for the “investigation and prosecution of cybersecurity crimes.” Obviously that leaves a lot of leeway.
According to Rep. Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat and former Internet entrepreneur, the “serious bodily harm” is dangerous because it is ambiguous enough to allow federal agencies to “go on fishing expeditions for electronic evidence,” according to CNET.
“The government could use this information to investigate gun shows” and even football games, simply because there is a threat of serious bodily harm if an accident were to occur, Polis said.
“What do these things even have to do with cybersecurity? … From football to gun show organizing, you’re really far afield,” he said.
To make matters even worse, there is nothing under CISPA requiring the anonymization of records as incredibly sensitive and personal as health records or banking information before they are shared and searched by the government according to ZDNet.
Another amendment similarly shot down was proposed by Rep. Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican. This would have ensured the privacy policies and terms of use of companies remained both valid and legally enforceable in the future.
As CNET rightly notes, one of the most controversial aspects of CISPA is that it “overrules all existing federal and state laws by saying ‘notwithstanding any other provision of law,’ including privacy policies and wiretap laws, companies may share cybersecurity-related information ‘with any other entity, including the federal government.’”
While CISPA would not require companies to share the information, it is hard to think of a large corporation these days that wouldn’t play ball if pressured by the federal government.
The problems with CISPA are so glaring that 34 advocacy groupsas diverse as the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Reporters Without Borders and many more, wrote a letter in opposition to the legislation.
“CISPA’s information sharing regime allows the transfer of vast amounts of data, including sensitive information like Internet records or the content of emails to any agency in the government including military and intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency or the Department of Defense Cyber Command,” the groups pointed out in their letter.
The ACLU opposes the bill because, “there’s a disconnect here between what they say is going to happen and what the legislation says,” thanks to the amendments that were blocked, according to legislative counsel Michelle Richardson.
Unfortunately, this time around CISPA is not receiving the widespread opposition legislation like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) received, which eventually led to SOPA’s failure.
CNET chalks this up to the lack of alliances between ordinary Internet users, civil liberties groups and technology companies this time around.
While no broad-based coalition exists fighting CISPA, massive corporations have gathered together to support it.
“Companies including AT&T, Comcast, EMC, IBM, Intel, McAfee, Oracle, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon have instead signed on as CISPA supporters,” Declan McCullagh writes.
Some, including Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, are calling on Internet companies to take a stand in opposing CISPA.
In the below video, Ohanian calls on Google, Facebook and Twitter to stand up for the privacy rights of the American people:
There is still time to fight CISPA in the Senate.
“We’re committed to taking this fight to the Senate and fighting to ensure no law which would be so detrimental to online privacy is passed on our watch,” said Rainey Reitman, EFF Activism Director.
Contacting your senators is incredibly easy. If you care about the principles of the Constitution and your privacy, you will be doing yourself and others a favor by taking a few moments to contact your senators to instruct them to uphold their oath of office by defending the Constitution and the rights of the American people.
Did I forget anything or miss any errors? Would you like to make me aware of a story or subject to cover? Or perhaps you want to bring your writing to a wider audience? Feel free to contact me at[email protected] with your concerns, tips, questions, original writings, insults or just about anything that may strike your fancy.
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This article first appeared at End the Lie.
Madison Ruppert is the Editor and Owner-Operator of the alternative news and analysis database End The Lie and has no affiliation with any NGO, political party, economic school, or other organization/cause. He is available for podcast and radio interviews. Madison also now has his own radio show on UCYTV Monday nights 7 PM - 9 PM PT/10 PM - 12 AM ET. Show page link here: http://UCY.TV/EndtheLie. If you have questions, comments, or corrections feel free to contact him at [email protected]
A trove of leaked classified reports has confirmed what many had suspected – US drone kills in Pakistan are not the precision strikes against top-level al-Qaeda terrorists they are portrayed as by the Obama administration.
Instead, many of the attacks are aimed at suspected low-level tribal militants, who may pose no direct danger to the United States – and for many there appears to be little evidence to justify the assassinations.
Top secret documents obtained by McClatchy newspapers in the US show the locations, identities and numbers of those attacked and killed in Pakistan in 2006-8 and 2010-11, as well as explanations for why the targets were picked.
The statistics illustrate the breadth of the US ‘drone doctrine’ – which has never been defined by consecutive US administrations. Between 1,990 and 3,308 people are reported to have been killed in the drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, the vast majority of them during the Obama terms.
In the 12-month period up to 2011, 43 out of 95 drone strikes in the reports (which give an account of the vast majority of US operations in the country) were not aimed at al-Qaeda at all. And 265 out of 482 people killed in those assassinations, were defined internally as “extremists”.
Indeed, only six of the men killed – less than two percent – were senior al-Qaeda leaders.
Some of the groups include the Haqqani network and the Taliban Movement of Pakistan, both militant organizations, but ones the US did not designate as terrorists until 2012 and 2010 respectively. Neither one has ever conducted an attack on US soil.
It also confirms that attacks during the George W. Bush era, were conducted on targets picked by ISI, Pakistan’s security agency, which has no obligations to comply with US legal criteria.
Furthermore, in some cases it is difficult to confirm that the targets were militants at all.
In the strikes above, the internal reports showed that only one civilian had been killed. But the modus operandi revealed behind the strikes, shows that some of the attacks seem to have been based on the certain people or visitors being present as certain locations, or merely associating with those the US believes were terrorists. This chimes with the accusation that the US is carrying out a policy of“signature strikes” – attacks based on behavior, or “signature” that would be expected of a terrorist, rather than any specific illegal activity.
These “signatures” apparently include such suspicious behavior as taking part in a funeral procession orfirst responding to an initial drone strike. Last year, the United Nation’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson, said it’s believed that, “since President Obama took office, at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims and more than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners.”
The US has previously refused to admit that it operates such a policy.
Some of the assassinations, such as that of, Mohammad, the younger brother of the leader of the Haqqani network, Badruddin, appear to have been simply errors, with the victims branded as terrorists only after the fact.
All this seems to go against the assurance of John Brennan, the former White House counterterrorism chief, and new CIA head, who is the mastermind behind the drone policy
“We only authorize a particular operation against a specific individual if we have a high degree of confidence that the individual being targeted is indeed the terrorist we are pursuing,” Brennan explained a year ago.
Obama’s administration has also said all targets are on a “list of active terrorists,” compiled with “extraordinary care and thoughtfulness”. Obama has also explicitly stated that drones should not carry out “speculative” killings.
But other than when ordering assassinations of US citizens, the President does not have to give full information to the Senate about the basis for any drone attack, much less give it a legal justification.
The latest revelations have unleashed a torrent of protest from experts who believe that the program is extra-judicial, violates Pakistan’s sovereignty, and is counter-productive in the long term.
“I have never seen nor am I aware of any rules of engagement that have been made public that govern the conduct of drone operations in Pakistan, or the identification of individuals and groups other than al Qaida and the Afghan Taliban,” Christopher Swift, a national security law expert from Georgetown University told McClatchy.
“We are doing this on a case-by-case, ad hoc basis, rather than a systematic or strategic basis.”
Micah Zenko, from the Council on Foreign Relations, a foreign policy think tank, went further, and accused the government of“misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.”
He added: “When there is such a disconnect between who the administration says it kills and who it actually kills, that hypocrisy itself is a very dangerous precedent that other countries will emulate.”
Last month Ben Emmerson, after a secret research trip to the country announced that drone strikesviolate Pakistan’s sovereignty.
Emmerson added that the Pakistani government conveyed to him that it does not consent to the attacks, something that is often challenged in Washington and fuels mass protests in Pakistan.
Drone strikes were first used after the 9/11 attacks from bases in Pakistan and Uzbekistan, in combat missions inside Afghanistan. More than a decade later, Washington has expanded the use of the remotely controlled aircraft into Yemen, Somalia and most of all Pakistan.
The US has carried out countless attacks on targets in northwest Pakistan since 2004 through the CIA’s Special Activities Division. Begun by President George W. Bush, the intensity of the missions has increased under the presidency of Barack Obama.
Islamabad publicly condemns these attacks but is known to have shared intelligence with the US and allowed drones to operate from its territory until April 2011, when NATO forces killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in the Salala incident. WikiLeaks cables also revealed that Pakistan’s Army Chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani sanctioned the flights and in 2008 even asked the CIA for more “Predator coverage.”
Ordinary Pakistanis have also repeatedly protested against these attacks as a violation of its sovereignty and because of immense civilian collateral damage, including the death dozens of women and children.
Members of the House Intelligence Committee accepted amendments to the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act Wednesday, voting to include the new provisions by an 18-2 margin after a closed door meeting.
Members of the House Intelligence Committee accepted amendments to the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act Wednesday, voting to include the new provisions by an 18-2 margin after a closed door meeting. It puts the bill back on the table for consideration after failing last year.
The proposed CISPA legislation has been criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and major Internet companies including Reddit andCraigslist, who say the bill all but eliminates privacy online. Facebook withdrew its support for the bill in March, joining 30,000 other websites in their opposition.
CISPA critics have decried the language in the bill, which grants private companies and the federal government unprecedented power to share an individual’s personal information for purported national security reasons. The House Intelligence Committee has repeatedly warned of the risk presented by potential cyber-attacks, threats that some experts say are unfounded.
CISPA is expected to be reintroduced to Congress as soon as next week after failing to gain enough momentum to summon a vote last year. US President Barack Obama has stated in the past that he would veto CISPA because of security concerns.
Evidently attempting to address those misgivings, the House Intelligence Committee’s closed-door session was expected to introduce amendments that would give privacy advocates and civil liberties officers more oversight on how personal information isshared and used.
Including language to deny companies legal immunity if they use cyber-threat disclosures to hack other companies and dropping language that allows the government to use cyber-threat information for national-security purposes were also reportedly on the docket, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
“We have seen the language of these amendments – and what we’ve been hearing is that they still don’t tackle the core concerns including tailoring so that information that’sshared by private industry can’t be used for purposes other than cyber-security,” said Mark Jaycox, an analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Before the secret meeting Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) said he planned to propose an amendment that would require companies to at least attempt to remove personally identifiable information from data before sharing it with the federal government.
“I think the other amendments are definitely a step in the right direction, but we still need the private sector to take efforts on its own to remove personally identifiable information,” Schiff told The Hill. “I still believe that the House, Senate and White House can come to a common agreement on these outstanding issues. It just shouldn’t be that difficult.”
“I think we can maintain the proper balance of protecting the country from cyber-attacks and also ensuring the privacy rights of the American people are respected.”
Hardware from a spacecraft that the Soviet Union landed on Mars in 1971 might appear in images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
While following news about Mars and NASA’s Curiosity rover, Russian citizen enthusiasts found four features in a five-year-old image from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that resemble four pieces of hardware from the Soviet Mars 3 mission: the parachute, heat shield, terminal retrorocket and lander. A follow-up image by the orbiter from last month shows the same features.
The Mars 3 lander transmitted for several seconds after landing on Dec. 2, 1971, the first spacecraft to survive a Mars landing long enough to transmit anything.
Images of the possible Mars 3 features, taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, are available at http://uahirise.org/ESP_031036_1345 andhttp://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA16920 .
“Together, this set of features and their layout on the ground provide a remarkable match to what is expected from the Mars 3 landing, but alternative explanations for the features cannot be ruled out,” said HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “Further analysis of the data and future images to better understand the three-dimensional shapes may help to confirm this interpretation.”
In 1971, the former Soviet Union launched the Mars 2 and Mars 3 missions to Mars. Each consisted of an orbiter plus a lander. Both orbiter missions succeeded, although the surface of Mars was obscured by a planet-encircling dust storm. The Mars 2 lander crashed. Mars 3 became the first successful soft landing on the Red Planet, but stopped transmitting after just 14.5 seconds for unknown reasons.
The predicted landing site was at latitude 45 degrees south, longitude 202 degrees east, in Ptolemaeus Crater. HiRISE acquired a large image at this location in November 2007. This image contains 1.8 billion pixels of data, so about 2,500 typical computer screens would be needed to view the entire image at full resolution. Promising candidates for the hardware from Mars 3 were found on Dec. 31, 2012.
Vitali Egorov from St. Petersburg, Russia, heads the largest Russian Internet community about Curiosity, athttp://vk.com/curiosity_live . His subscribers did the preliminary search for Mars 3 via crowdsourcing. Egorov modeled what Mars 3 hardware pieces should look like in a HiRISE image, and the group carefully searched the many small features in this large image, finding what appear to be viable candidates in the southern part of the scene. Each candidate has a size and shape consistent with the expected hardware, and they are arranged on the surface as expected from the entry, descent and landing sequence.
“I wanted to attract people’s attention to the fact that Mars exploration today is available to practically anyone,” Egorov said. “At the same time we were able to connect with the history of our country, which we were reminded of after many years through the images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.”
An advisor to the group, Alexander Basilevsky, of Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry, Moscow, contacted McEwen suggesting a follow-up image. HiRISE acquired the follow-up on March 10, 2013. This image was targeted to cover some of the hardware candidates in color and to get a second look with different illumination angles. Meanwhile, Basilevsky and Erogov contacted Russian engineers and scientists who worked on Mars 3 for more information.
The candidate parachute is the most distinctive feature in the images. It is an especially bright spot for this region, about 8.2 yards (7.5 meters) in diameter. The parachute would have a diameter of 12 yards (11 meters) if fully spread out over the surface, so this is consistent. In the second HiRISE image, the parachute appears to have brightened over much of its surface, probably due to its better illumination over the sloping surface, but it is also possible that the parachute brightened in the intervening years because dust was removed.
The descent module, or retrorocket, was attached to the lander container by a chain, and the candidate feature has the right size and even shows a linear extension that could be a chain. Near the candidate descent module is a feature with the right size and shape to be the actual lander, with four open petals. The image of the candidate heat shield matches a shield-shaped object with the right size if partly buried.
Philip J. Stooke from the University of West Ontario, Canada, suggested the direction of search and offered helpful advice. Arnold Selivanov (one of the creators of Mars 3) and Vladimir Molodtsov (an engineer at NPO Lavochkin, Moscow) helped with access to data archives.
HiRISE is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson. The instrument was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project and Curiosity are managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
For more information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been studying Mars from orbit since 2006, visit http://www.nasa.gov/mro .
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-132&cid=release_2013-132
