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Archived Version

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 23:31

By HENRY C. JACKSON / Associated Press / August 1, 2013

WASHINGTON (AP) '-- A Senate panel took a step forward on legislation to protect reporters and the news media from revealing their sources. But lawmakers put off until September a broader debate over whether Congress defines who is a journalist.

The Judiciary Committee agreed Thursday to legislation sponsored by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., a key supporter of a federal media shield law. The measure would codify many of the regulations proposed earlier this month by Attorney General Eric Holder. The panel approved it on a voice vote.

The renewed push for a media shield law comes after the disclosure earlier this year that the Justice Department had secretly subpoenaed almost two months of telephone records for 21 phone lines used by reporters and editors for The Associated Press and secretly used a warrant to obtain some emails of a Fox News journalist. The AP received no advance warning.

''We need a strong media shield bill now more than ever,'' Schumer said. ''This is an important step forward that strengthens this bipartisan bill and should give it even more momentum to clear the committee and the Senate by the end of the year.''

The bill would protect reporters and news media organizations from revealing the identities of confidential sources, but it does not grant an absolute privilege for journalists.

The lack of objection to taking up Schumer's 21-page bill signaled broad support, but it's also clear there will be a number of proposed changes to the language he has crafted with a bipartisan group of senators that includes Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.

Limited amount of time before Congress' August recess forced lawmakers to postpone further action on the measure until after the break.

One issue is the definition of reporter in the aftermath of WikiLeaks, the website that exposed U.S. classified information leaked by Army Pfc. Bradley Manning.

The bill's definition covers four pages and defines the individual as a person ''with the primary intent to investigate events and procure material in order to disseminate to the public news or information concerning local, national or international events or other matters of public interest,'' collects the information by conducting interviews and directly observing events, and has the intent of gathering news.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., proposed an amendment to narrow the definition of what a journalist is.

Feinstein said she was introducing her amendment because, ''this bill is described as a reporter shield law '-- I believe it should be applied to real reporters.'' She said she was concerned ''that the current version of the bill would grant a special privilege to people who aren't really reporters at all, who have no professional qualifications.''

Feinstein's amendment, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., ''defines a journalist as a salaried agent'' of a media entity, such as a newspaper, broadcast news station, news web site or another type of news service distributed digitally. She said there was also language, including a ''look back'' option to protect legitimate reporters not tied to a specific news organization.

Schumer said he thought his legislation had a tight enough definition of who would be protected by the law.

''The bottom line is the world has changed, and we're very careful in this bill to distinguish journalists from those who shouldn't be protected,'' Schumer said. ''Wikileaks and all those others are not protected.''

Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said senators on the committee had proposed a number of amendments to the bill and that in order to give them all a fair hearing, he wanted to wait until after Congress' August recess to go further.

He also asked senators to consider consolidating some proposed changes before they returned to work.

Schumer's measure would incorporate many of the changes proposed by Attorney General Eric Holder in July. Criticism of the collection of the material without any notice to the news organizations prompted President Barack Obama to order Holder to review the department's policy.

Holder's revised guidelines called for the government to give advance notice to the news media about subpoena requests for reporters' phone records unless the attorney general determines such notice would pose a clear and substantial threat to the investigation. Search warrants for a reporter's email would only apply when the individual is the focus of a criminal investigation for conduct not connected to ordinary newsgathering.Continued...

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Archived Version

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 23:31

During the Senate Judiciary Committee's August 1 mark-up of the shield law bill aimed at protecting journalists' sources, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) reportedly objected to the definition of journalist provided in the bill as introduced, seeking to restrict the definition's scope to apply only to ''real reporters.'' To achieve her misguided goal, Sen. Feinstein has put forward an amendment to S. 987 that would greatly exacerbate the problems with the definition of who's a journalist that existed in the bill as introduced.

Her amendment, to be submitted for Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Il.) as well, not only retains the problematic requirement that a person ''regularly'' engage in journalism to enjoy shield law protections, but moreover adds new requirements that would make it especially difficult for self-publishers such as independent bloggers and citizen journalists to be protected under the law. Indeed, her new requirements for being either salaried or at least affiliated with a news ''entity'' seem to purposefully target these self-publishers.

These problems are rooted in the vagueness of many key terms in her definition of journalist. Indeed, most essential terms are not defined. While vagueness provides an interpretative battleground, self-publishing bloggers and citizen journalists are disadvantaged in this fight.

Three Roads to ''Journalist'' that All Go Nowhere

Feinstein's amendment effectively advances a traditional vision of journalism through the three definitions of journalist that it provides, each of which requires that a person be affiliated with a journalistic ''entity'' or institution (including news websites and other digital news services, and other periodicals distributed digitally).

Specifically, the amendment requires that a journalist meet one of the following definitions:

working as a ''salaried employee, independent contractor, or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information;''either (a) meeting the prior definition ''for any continuous three-month period within the two years prior to the relevant date'' or (b) having ''substantially contributed, as an author, editor, photographer, or producer, to a significantnumber of articles, stories, programs, or publications by an entity . . . within two years prior to the relevant date;'' orworking as a student journalist ''participating in a journalistic publication at an institution of higher education.'' (emphases added)There are problems with each of these three definitions. First, as we pointed out in our critique of the House's bill, requiring that an individual is ''salaried'' is problematic because many people do journalism but do not do it as their primary source of income. Further, it is entirely unclear who or what an ''agent'' or ''entity'' is.

Second, for an individual to fall under the second, seemingly looser criteria, that individual must have distributed the news ''by means of an entity.'' (emphasis added) While this definition may cover freelancers, it is again unclear what it means to have ''substantially contributed'' to a ''significant'' amount of work of an ''entity.'' Indeed, for both the first and second definitions, essential terms are not defined'--vagueness that, as we'll see later, ultimately hurts independent bloggers and citizen journalists.

While the amendment's inclusion of student journalists is laudable, it does nothing for those students who do not work for a ''journalistic publication'' at their college or university'--or for those students the moment they graduate.

Still Requiring that Journalists ''Regularly'' Engage in Journalism

Additionally, Sen. Feinstein's amendment retains the original Senate shield bill's problematic requirement that individuals ''regularly'' do journalism to count as a journalist. Specifically, the amendment requires either:

that individuals ''engage[] in . . . the regular gathering, preparation, collection, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting or publishing on'' matters of public interest; orthat individuals ''regularly conducted interviews, reviewed documents, captured images of events, or directly observed events.'' (emphases added)As in the original Senate bill, the amendment fails to define what ''regularly'' means, vagueness that cuts against non-institutional journalists.

Vague Language Is Bad for Independent Bloggers, Citizen Journalists

Sen. Feinstein's amendment is riddled with vague language, failing to define key terms including ''agent,'' entity,'' ''substantially contributed,'' and ''regularly'''--on which the definition of who's a journalist turns. Non-traditional journalists are at a disadvantage when the interpretative waters are muddy. Why? Because such vagueness invites interpretations that exclude those who are on the margins of status quo journalism, and who are often in a more vulnerable position and unable to hire legal counsel to sort through the law's ambiguities. As a result, independent bloggers and citizen journalists would likely be interpreted out of Feinstein's definition of journalist.

The very fact that developing a crisp, clear definition of journalist is difficult should signal to Congress that it might not be equipped to wade into the uncharted waters of deciding who is a journalist. But it's a problem that Congress can easily avoid by linking shield law protections to the act of journalism, not the definition of who is journalist.

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Archived Version

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 23:40

I'VE HAD IT UP TO HERE: U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., says citizen journalists and bloggers should not be covered by a federal shield law.

By Eric Boehm | Watchdog.org

The most recent congressional threat to the free press in the United States comes from California Democrat U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

In a proposed amendment to a media shield law being considered by Congress, Feinstein writes that only paid journalists should be given protections from prosecution for what they say or write. The language in her proposal is raising concerns from First Amendment advocates because it seems to leave out bloggers and other nontraditional forms of journalism that have proliferated in recent years thanks to the Internet.

''It rubs me the wrong way that the government thinks it should be in the business of determining who should be considered a journalist,'' said Ken Bunting, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition at the Missouri School of Journalism.

But on the other hand, Bunting said, there is a great need for federal shield law in light of recent attempts by the U.S. Justice Department to force journalists to give up information about confidential sources.

The difficulty with writing any such law '-- this is the third time Congress has attempted to craft a federal shield law '-- is that any such law would have to set standards for who counts as a journalist or what qualifies as an ''act of journalism.''

There are shield laws on the books in 40 states, but they do not apply in federal court. The First Amendment of the U.S Constitution promises that the right to a free press ''shall not be infringed.''

The proposed federal shield law would protect journalists from having to comply with subpoenas or court orders forcing them to reveal sources and other confidential information. The important question, of course, is how to determine that the shield law applies to one person and not another.

In other words, how do you determine someone is a journalist?

Feinstein, chairwoman of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee (and a staunch defender of the government's right to spy on anyone at any time), does not want to see a shield law that would protect employees of WikiLeaks and other leak-driven news organizations.

At a congressional hearing on the matter last week, Feinstein said shield laws should only apply to ''real reporters.''

An amendment offered by Feinstein would extend shield-law protections to those who work as a ''salaried employee, independent contractor, or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information,'' though students working for news outlets would similarly be covered. The definition seems to leave out the new tide of bloggers and citizen journalists who thrive on the Internet.

Calls and emails to Feinstein's office were not returned on Monday.

In states with shield laws, the difference between being protected by them or not can be great.

Take the case of Crystal Cox, for example. A self-described ''investigative blogger'' from Seattle, Cox broke a story about financial malpractice at a major investment bank, prompting a lawsuit for defamation.

Cox argued in court that she should be covered by Oregon's shield laws, but a judge found she was not protected because she was not part of the traditional media.

As a result, she was ordered to pay $2.5 million to the investment firm.

The laws in many states are lagging behind the reality of journalism today, where anyone with a camera, smart phone or a computer can break an important story.

''The distinction between who gets paid to do journalism and who doesn't is going to be come essentially meaningless as we go forward with this technological revolution,'' said Kelly McBride, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school based in St. Petersburg, Fla.

McBride, the recent author of a book on journalism ethics in the Internet age, said shield laws are meant to ensure a vibrant marketplace of ideas where all voices can be heard.

''To the extent that you limit the shield law, you limit who is in that marketplace,'' she said.

Feinstein is not the only member of Congress seeking to limit the definition of journalists. Last week, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., sent letters to a number of organizations '' including the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, which runs Watchdog.org '' seeking information about the legitimacy of nonprofit investigative reporters.

A spokesman for Durbin later told Watchdog.org the senator was not targeting any specific individual or group.

Boehm is a reporter for Watchdog.org and can be reached at Eric@PAIndependent.com. Follow him on Twitter @EricBoehm87

Please, feel free to "steal our stuff"! Just remember to credit Watchdog.org. Find out more

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Archived Version

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 23:33

S 987 IS

To maintain the free flow of information to the public by providing conditions for the federally compelled disclosure of information by certain persons connected with the news media.

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

May 16, 2013

Mr. SCHUMER (for himself and Mr. GRAHAM) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

To maintain the free flow of information to the public by providing conditions for the federally compelled disclosure of information by certain persons connected with the news media.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.This Act may be cited as the 'Free Flow of Information Act of 2013'.

SEC. 2. COMPELLED DISCLOSURE FROM COVERED PERSONS.(a) Conditions for Compelled Disclosure- In any proceeding or in connection with any issue arising under Federal law, a Federal entity may not compel a covered person to comply with a subpoena, court order, or other compulsory legal process seeking to compel the disclosure of protected information, unless a Federal court in the jurisdiction where the subpoena, court order, or other compulsory legal process has been or would be issued determines, after providing notice and an opportunity to be heard to such covered person--

(1) that the party seeking to compel disclosure of the protected information has exhausted all reasonable alternative sources (other than a covered person) of the protected information; and

(2) that--

(A) in a criminal investigation or prosecution--

(i) if the party seeking to compel disclosure is the Federal Government, based on public information or information obtained from a source other than the covered person, there are reasonable grounds to believe that a crime has occurred;

(ii) based on public information or information obtained from a source other than the covered person, there are reasonable grounds to believe that the protected information sought is essential to the investigation or prosecution or to the defense against the prosecution;

(iii) the Attorney General certifies that the decision to request compelled disclosure was made in a manner consistent with section 50.10 of title 28, Code of Federal Regulations, if compelled disclosure is sought by a member of the Department of Justice in circumstances governed by section 50.10 of title 28, Code of Federal Regulations; and

(iv) the covered person has not established by clear and convincing evidence that disclosure of the protected information would be contrary to the public interest, taking into account both the public interest in gathering and disseminating the information or news at issue and maintaining the free flow of information and the public interest in compelling disclosure (including the extent of any harm to national security); or

(B) in a matter other than a criminal investigation or prosecution, based on public information or information obtained from a source other than the covered person--

(i) the protected information sought is essential to the resolution of the matter; and

(ii) the party seeking to compel disclosure of the protected information has established that the interest in compelling disclosure clearly outweighs the public interest in gathering and disseminating the information or news at issue and maintaining the free flow of information.

(b) Limitations on Content of Information- A subpoena, court order, or other compulsory legal process seeking to compel the disclosure of protected information under subsection (a) shall, to the extent possible, be narrowly tailored in purpose, subject matter, and period of time covered so as to avoid compelling disclosure of peripheral, nonessential, or speculative information.

SEC. 3. EXCEPTION RELATING TO CRIMINAL CONDUCT.(a) In General- Section 2 shall not apply to any information, record, document, or item obtained as the result of the eyewitness observations of, or obtained during the course of, alleged criminal conduct by the covered person, including any physical evidence or visual or audio recording of the conduct.

(b) Exception- This section shall not apply, and, subject to sections 4 and 5, section 2 shall apply, if the alleged criminal conduct is the act of communicating the documents or information at issue.

SEC. 4. EXCEPTION TO PREVENT DEATH, KIDNAPPING, SUBSTANTIAL BODILY INJURY, SEX OFFENSES AGAINST MINORS, OR INCAPACITATION OR DESTRUCTION OF CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE.Section 2 shall not apply to any protected information that is reasonably necessary to stop, prevent, or mitigate a specific case of--

(1) death;

(2) kidnapping;

(3) substantial bodily harm;

(4) conduct that constitutes a criminal offense that is a specified offense against a minor (as those terms are defined in section 111 of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 (42 U.S.C. 16911)), or an attempt or conspiracy to commit such a criminal offense; or

(5) incapacitation or destruction of critical infrastructure (as defined in section 1016(e) of the USA PATRIOT Act (42 U.S.C. 5195c(e))).

SEC. 5. EXCEPTION TO PREVENT TERRORIST ACTIVITY OR HARM TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY.(a) In General- Section 2 shall not apply to any protected information if--

(1) the party seeking to compel disclosure is the Federal Government; and

(2)(A) in a criminal investigation or prosecution of the allegedly unlawful disclosure of properly classified information, the court finds by a preponderance of the evidence that the protected information for which compelled disclosure is sought would materially assist the Federal Government in preventing or mitigating--

(i) an act of terrorism; or

(ii) other acts that are reasonably likely to cause significant and articulable harm to national security; or

(B) in any other criminal investigation or prosecution, the court finds by a preponderance of the evidence that the protected information for which compelled disclosure is sought would materially assist the Federal Government in preventing, mitigating, or identifying the perpetrator of--

(i) an act of terrorism; or

(ii) other acts that have caused or are reasonably likely to cause significant and articulable harm to national security.

(b) Deference- In assessing the existence or extent of the harm described in subsection (a), a Federal court shall give appropriate deference to a specific factual showing submitted to the court by the head of any executive branch agency or department concerned.

(c) Relationship to Section 2- Subsection (a) shall not apply, and, subject to sections 3 and 4, section 2 shall apply, to any criminal investigation or prosecution of the allegedly unlawful disclosure of properly classified information other than one in which the protected information is sought by the Federal Government to prevent or mitigate the harm specified in subsection (a)(2)(A). In considering the extent of any harm to national security when applying section 2 to such cases, a Federal court shall give appropriate deference to any specific factual showing submitted to the court by the head of any executive branch agency or department concerned.

(d) Subsequent Unlawful Disclosure- The potential for a subsequent unlawful disclosure of information by the source sought to be identified shall not, by itself and without any showing of additional facts beyond such potential disclosure, be sufficient to establish that compelled disclosure of the protected information would materially assist the Federal Government in preventing or mitigating--

(1) an act of terrorism; or

(2) other acts that are reasonably likely to cause significant and articulable harm to national security.

SEC. 6. COMPELLED DISCLOSURE FROM COMMUNICATIONS SERVICE PROVIDERS.(a) Conditions for Compelled Disclosure-

(1) IN GENERAL- Except as provided in paragraph (2), if any document or other information from the account of a person who is known to be, or reasonably likely to be, a covered person is sought from a communications service provider, sections 2 through 5 shall apply in the same manner that such sections apply to any document or other information sought from a covered person.

(2) EXCEPTION- If any document or other information from the account of a person who is known to be, or reasonably likely to be, a covered person is sought from a communications service provider under section 2709 of title 18, United States Code, the provisions of sections 2 through 5 governing criminal investigations and prosecutions shall apply in the same manner that such sections apply to any document or other information sought from a covered person in the course of a criminal investigation or prosecution, except that clauses (i) and (iii) of section 2(a)(2)(A) and the phrase 'particularly with reference to directly establishing guilt or innocence' in section 2(a)(2)(A)(ii) shall not apply.

(b) Notice and Opportunity Provided to Covered Persons- A Federal court may compel the disclosure of a document or other information described in this section only after the covered person from whose account the document or other information is sought has been given--

(1) notice from the party seeking the document or other information through a subpoena or other compulsory request, not later than the time at which such subpoena or request is issued to the communications service provider; and

(2) an opportunity to be heard before the court before compelling testimony or the disclosure of a document.

(c) Exception to Notice Requirement- Notice under subsection (b)(1) may be delayed for not more than 45 days if the Federal court involved determines by clear and convincing evidence that such notice would pose a substantial threat to the integrity of a criminal investigation, a national security investigation, or intelligence gathering, or that exigent circumstances exist. This period may be extended by the court for an additional period of not more than 45 days each time the court makes such a determination.

(d) Notice to Communications Service Provider- In all cases in which notice is required to be provided to the covered person under this section, a copy of such notice shall be provided simultaneously to the communications service provider from whom disclosure is sought. Once it has received such notice, the communications service provider shall not comply with the request for disclosure unless and until disclosure is either ordered by the court or authorized in writing by the covered person.

SEC. 7. SOURCES AND WORK PRODUCT PRODUCED WITHOUT PROMISE OR AGREEMENT OF CONFIDENTIALITY.Nothing in this Act shall supersede, dilute, or preclude any law or court decision compelling or not compelling disclosure by a covered person or communications service provider of--

(1) information identifying a source who provided information without a promise or agreement of confidentiality made by the covered person as part of engaging in journalism; or

(2) records, other information, or contents of a communication obtained without a promise or agreement that such records, other information, or contents of a communication would be confidential.

SEC. 8. PROCEDURES FOR REVIEW AND APPEAL.(a) Conditions for Ex Parte Review or Submissions Under Seal- With regard to any determination made by a Federal court under this Act, upon a showing of good cause, that Federal court may receive and consider submissions from the parties in camera or under seal, and if the court determines it is necessary, ex parte.

(b) Contempt of Court- With regard to any determination made by a Federal court under this Act, a Federal court may find a covered person to be in civil or criminal contempt if the covered person fails to comply with an order of a Federal court compelling disclosure of protected information.

(c) To Provide for Timely Determination- With regard to any determination to be made by a Federal court under this Act, that Federal court, to the extent practicable, shall make that determination not later than 30 days after the date of receiving a motion requesting the court make that determination.

(d) Expedited Appeal Process-

(1) IN GENERAL- The courts of appeal shall have jurisdiction--

(A) of appeals by a Federal entity or covered person of an interlocutory order of a Federal court under this Act; and

(B) in an appeal of a final decision of a Federal court by a Federal entity or covered person, to review any determination of a Federal court under this Act.

(2) EXPEDITION OF APPEALS- It shall be the duty of a Federal court to which an appeal is made under this subsection to advance on the docket and to expedite to the greatest possible extent the disposition of that appeal.

SEC. 9. RULE OF CONSTRUCTION.Nothing in this Act may be construed to--

(1) preempt any law or claim relating to defamation, slander, or libel;

(2) modify the requirements of section 552a of title 5, United States Code, or Federal laws or rules relating to grand jury secrecy (except that this Act shall apply in any proceeding and in connection with any issue arising under that section or the Federal laws or rules relating to grand jury secrecy);

(3) create new obligations, or affect or modify the authorities or obligations of a Federal entity with respect to the acquisition or dissemination of information pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq.); or

(4) preclude voluntary disclosure of information to a Federal entity in a situation that is not governed by this Act.

SEC. 10. AUDIT.(a) In General- The Inspector General of the Department of Justice shall perform a comprehensive audit of the use of this Act during the period beginning on the date of enactment of this Act and ending on December 31, 2016. The audit shall include an examination of each instance in which a court failed to compel the disclosure of protected information under this Act, and whether this Act has created any procedural impediments that have had a detrimental operational impact on the activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

(b) Report- Not later than June 30, 2017, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice shall submit to the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Committee on Intelligence of the Senate and the Committee on the Judiciary and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the House of Representatives a report containing the results of the audit conducted under subsection (a).

(c) Review- Not later than 30 days before the submission of the report under subsection (b), the Inspector General of the Department of Justice shall provide the report to the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence. The Attorney General or the Director of National Intelligence may provide such comments to be included in the report submitted under subsection (b) as the Attorney General or the Director of National Intelligence may consider necessary.

(d) Form- The report submitted under subsection (b) and any comments included under subsection (c) shall be in unclassified form, but may include a classified annex.

SEC. 11. DEFINITIONS.In this Act:

(1) COMMUNICATIONS SERVICE PROVIDER- The term 'communications service provider'--

(A) means any person that transmits information of the customer's choosing by electronic means; and

(B) includes a telecommunications carrier, an information service provider, an interactive computer service provider, and an information content provider (as such terms are defined in section 3 or 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 153 and 230)).

(2) COVERED PERSON- The term 'covered person'--

(A) means a person who--

(i) with the primary intent to investigate events and procure material in order to disseminate to the public news or information concerning local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest, regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports or publishes on such matters by--

(I) conducting interviews;

(II) making direct observation of events; or

(III) collecting, reviewing, or analyzing original writings, statements, communications, reports, memoranda, records, transcripts, documents, photographs, recordings, tapes, materials, data, or other information whether in paper, electronic, or other form;

(ii) has such intent at the inception of the process of gathering the news or information sought; and

(iii) obtains the news or information sought in order to disseminate the news or information by means of print (including newspapers, books, wire services, news agencies, or magazines), broadcasting (including dissemination through networks, cable, satellite carriers, broadcast stations, or a channel or programming service for any such media), mechanical, photographic, electronic, or other means;

(B) includes a supervisor, employer, parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate of a person described in subparagraph (A); and

(C) does not include any person who is or is reasonably likely to be--

(i) a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power, as those terms are defined in section 101 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801);

(ii) a member or affiliate of a foreign terrorist organization designated under section 219(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1189(a));

(iii) designated as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the Department of the Treasury under Executive Order No. 13224 (50 U.S.C. 1701);

(iv) a specially designated terrorist, as that term is defined in section 595.311 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations (or any successor thereto);

(v) a terrorist organization, as that term is defined in section 212(a)(3)(B)(vi)(II) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(3)(B)(vi)(II));

(vi) committing or attempting to commit the crime of terrorism, as that offense is defined in section 2331(5) or 2332b(g)(5) of title 18, United States Code;

(vii) committing or attempting the crime of providing material support, as that term is defined in section 2339A(b)(1) of title 18, United States Code, to a terrorist organization; or

(viii) aiding, abetting, or conspiring in illegal activity with a person or organization defined in clauses (i) through (vii).

(3) DOCUMENT- The term 'document' means writings, recordings, and photographs, as those terms are defined by rule 1001 of the Federal Rules of Evidence (28 U.S.C. App.).

(4) FEDERAL ENTITY- The term 'Federal entity' means an entity or employee of the judicial or executive branch or an administrative agency of the Federal Government with the power to issue a subpoena or issue other compulsory process.

(5) PROPERLY CLASSIFIED INFORMATION- The term 'properly classified information' means information that is classified in accordance with any applicable Executive orders, statutes, or regulations regarding classification of information.

(6) PROTECTED INFORMATION- The term 'protected information' means--

(A) information identifying a source who provided information under a promise or agreement of confidentiality made by a covered person as part of engaging in journalism; or

(B) any records, contents of a communication, documents, or information that a covered person obtained or created--

(i) as part of engaging in journalism; and

(ii) upon a promise or agreement that such records, contents of a communication, documents, or information would be confidential.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 22:11

Right, so yesterday, President Obama sent a letter to James Clapper, the director of national intelligence (DNI), who is a confessed liar to Congress in his attempts to protect the surveillance program from public scrutiny. In that letter, President Obama directed Clapper to "establish a Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies." This was the fulfillment of Obama's promise to set up an "independent group" of "outside experts" to review the surveillance efforts.As you might imagine, many people found this somewhat ridiculous -- beyond having a fox guard the henhouse, this was asking the fox to set up the group to look into what happened to all those missing chickens. It was just laughable. Today, however, the White House is claiming... something. They're saying that Clapper isn't setting up the group or leading it:

"Director Clapper will not be a part of the group, and is not leading or directing the group's efforts," Caitlin Hayden, a White House spokeswoman, told The Hill on Tuesday.

"The White House is selecting the members of the Review Group, consulting appropriately with the Intelligence Community," she said, adding that the administration expects to announce the members of the group soon.

Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, also said that the group will "not be under direction of or led by" Clapper.

It seems like, as with absolutely everything in this discussion, Clapper and the administration are choosing their words very, very, very carefully. Here they're saying that he won't be "leading" the group or "directing" the group. But no one has argued that. They're saying -- as the White House did -- that he's in charge of setting up the group. Now, the White House seems to be suggesting that "establishing" the group is different from "selecting the members," which is possible if the process for "establishing" the group is James Clapper holding out his hands and saying, "poof, this group has been established" and then someone else picks the members.Also, while Clapper may not be a "member" of the group and won't "lead" it, the group is clearly reporting to Clapper. From President Obama's letter:

the Review Group will brief their interim findings to me through the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the Review Group will provide a final report and recommendations to me through the DNI no later than December 15, 2013.

So, yes, Clapper isn't leading the day-to-day review by the group, but its report is going straight to him, which makes it anything but independent.Honestly, this kind of doubletalk is the exact kind of thing that's pissing so many people off about this. If President Obama's goal here was to rebuild trust, telling Clapper to "establish" this group and to have the group report to Clapper... and then a day later, having the White House carefully choose their language to pretend that Clapper is separate from the group is not the way to do it. Involving Clapper in the first place was a mistake. Actually, having Clapper still on the job after his admitted lying to Congress was a big mistake. Dancing around the fact that he's involved just is making the administration look worse and worse.

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Archived Version

Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:36

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

August 12, 2013

SUBJECT: Reviewing Our Global Signals Intelligence Collection and Communications Technologies

The United States, like all nations, gathers intelligence in order to protect its national interests and to defend itself, its citizens, and its partners and allies from threats to our security. The United States cooperates closely with many countries on intelligence matters and these intelligence relationships have helped to ensure our common security.

Recent years have brought unprecedented and rapid advancements in communications technologies, particularly with respect to global telecommunications. These technological advances have brought with them both great opportunities and significant risks for our Intelligence Community: opportunity in the form of enhanced technical capabilities that can more precisely and readily identify threats to our security, and risks in the form of insider and cyber threats.

I believe it is important to take stock of how these technological advances alter the environment in which we conduct our intelligence mission. To this end, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I am directing you to establish a Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies (Review Group).

The Review Group will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust. Within 60 days of its establishment, the Review Group will brief their interim findings to me through the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the Review Group will provide a final report and recommendations to me through the DNI no later than December 15, 2013.

You are hereby authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register.

BARACK OBAMA

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The United States, like all nations, gathers intelligence in order to protect its national interests and to defend itself, its citizens, and its partners and allies from threats to our security. The United States cooperates closely with many countries on intelligence matters and these intelligence relationships have helped to ensure our common security.

Recent years have brought unprecedented and rapid advancements in communications technologies, particularly with respect to global telecommunications. These technological advances have brought with them both great opportunities and significant risks for our Intelligence Community: opportunity in the form of enhanced technical capabilities that can more precisely and readily identify threats to our security, and risks in the form of insider and cyber threats.

I believe it is important to take stock of how these technological advances alter the environment in which we conduct our intelligence mission. To this end, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I am directing you to establish a Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies (Review Group).

The Review Group will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust. Within 60 days of its establishment, the Review Group will brief their interim findings to me through the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the Review Group will provide a final report and recommendations to me through the DNI no later than December 15, 2013.

You are hereby authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register.

THE WHITE HOUSE,Washington, August 12, 2013.

[FR Doc. 2013-19960Filed 8-14-13; 8:45 am]

Billing code 3910-A7

On June 10, 2013, a search warrant was executed against Lavabit user Joey006@lavabit.com for alleged possession of child pornography.[7]

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This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key. For almost two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary about surveillance, and she occasionally received queries from strangers. She replied to this one and sent her public key '-- allowing him or her to send an encrypted e-mail that only Poitras could open, with her private key '-- but she didn't think much would come of it.

The stranger responded with instructions for creating an even more secure system to protect their exchanges. Promising sensitive information, the stranger told Poitras to select long pass phrases that could withstand a brute-force attack by networked computers. ''Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second,'' the stranger wrote.

Before long, Poitras received an encrypted message that outlined a number of secret surveillance programs run by the government. She had heard of one of them but not the others. After describing each program, the stranger wrote some version of the phrase, ''This I can prove.''

Seconds after she decrypted and read the e-mail, Poitras disconnected from the Internet and removed the message from her computer. ''I thought, O.K., if this is true, my life just changed,'' she told me last month. ''It was staggering, what he claimed to know and be able to provide. I just knew that I had to change everything.''

Laura Poitras filming the construction of a large N.S.A. facility in Utah.

Conor Provenzano

Poitras remained wary of whoever it was she was communicating with. She worried especially that a government agent might be trying to trick her into disclosing information about the people she interviewed for her documentary, including Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks. ''I called him out,'' Poitras recalled. ''I said either you have this information and you are taking huge risks or you are trying to entrap me and the people I know, or you're crazy.''

The answers were reassuring but not definitive. Poitras did not know the stranger's name, sex, age or employer (C.I.A.? N.S.A.? Pentagon?). In early June, she finally got the answers. Along with her reporting partner, Glenn Greenwald, a former lawyer and a columnist for The Guardian, Poitras flew to Hong Kong and met the N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, who gave them thousands of classified documents, setting off a major controversy over the extent and legality of government surveillance. Poitras was right that, among other things, her life would never be the same.

Greenwald lives and works in a house surrounded by tropical foliage in a remote area of Rio de Janeiro. He shares the home with his Brazilian partner and their 10 dogs and one cat, and the place has the feel of a low-key fraternity that has been dropped down in the jungle. The kitchen clock is off by hours, but no one notices; dishes tend to pile up in the sink; the living room contains a table and a couch and a large TV, an Xbox console and a box of poker chips and not much else. The refrigerator is not always filled with fresh vegetables. A family of monkeys occasionally raids the banana trees in the backyard and engages in shrieking battles with the dogs.

Greenwald does most of his work on a shaded porch, usually dressed in a T-shirt, surfer shorts and flip-flops. Over the four days I spent there, he was in perpetual motion, speaking on the phone in Portuguese and English, rushing out the door to be interviewed in the city below, answering calls and e-mails from people seeking information about Snowden, tweeting to his 225,000 followers (and conducting intense arguments with a number of them), then sitting down to write more N.S.A. articles for The Guardian, all while pleading with his dogs to stay quiet. During one especially fever-pitched moment, he hollered, ''Shut up, everyone,'' but they didn't seem to care.

A protest in Hong Kong in support of Edward Snowden on June 15.

Philippe Lopez / AFP / Getty Images

Amid the chaos, Poitras, an intense-looking woman of 49, sat in a spare bedroom or at the table in the living room, working in concentrated silence in front of her multiple computers. Once in a while she would walk over to the porch to talk with Greenwald about the article he was working on, or he would sometimes stop what he was doing to look at the latest version of a new video she was editing about Snowden. They would talk intensely '-- Greenwald far louder and more rapid-fire than Poitras '-- and occasionally break out laughing at some shared joke or absurd memory. The Snowden story, they both said, was a battle they were waging together, a fight against powers of surveillance that they both believe are a threat to fundamental American liberties.

Two reporters for The Guardian were in town to assist Greenwald, so some of our time was spent in the hotel where they were staying along Copacabana Beach, the toned Brazilians playing volleyball in the sand below lending the whole thing an added layer of surreality. Poitras has shared the byline on some of Greenwald's articles, but for the most part she has preferred to stay in the background, letting him do the writing and talking. As a result, Greenwald is the one hailed as either a fearless defender of individual rights or a nefarious traitor, depending on your perspective. ''I keep calling her the Keyser Soze of the story, because she's at once completely invisible and yet ubiquitous,'' Greenwald said, referring to the character in ''The Usual Suspects'' played by Kevin Spacey, a mastermind masquerading as a nobody. ''She's been at the center of all of this, and yet no one knows anything about her.''

As dusk fell one evening, I followed Poitras and Greenwald to the newsroom of O Globo, one of the largest newspapers in Brazil. Greenwald had just published an article there detailing how the N.S.A. was spying on Brazilian phone calls and e-mails. The article caused a huge scandal in Brazil, as similar articles have done in other countries around the world, and Greenwald was a celebrity in the newsroom. The editor in chief pumped his hand and asked him to write a regular column; reporters took souvenir pictures with their cellphones. Poitras filmed some of this, then put her camera down and looked on. I noted that nobody was paying attention to her, that all eyes were on Greenwald, and she smiled. ''That's right,'' she said. ''That's perfect.''

Poitras seems to work at blending in, a function more of strategy than of shyness. She can actually be remarkably forceful when it comes to managing information. During a conversation in which I began to ask her a few questions about her personal life, she remarked, ''This is like visiting the dentist.'' The thumbnail portrait is this: She was raised in a well-off family outside Boston, and after high school, she moved to San Francisco to work as a chef in upscale restaurants. She also took classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied under the experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr. In 1992, she moved to New York and began to make her way in the film world, while also enrolling in graduate classes in social and political theory at the New School. Since then she has made five films, most recently ''The Oath,'' about the Guantnamo prisoner Salim Hamdan and his brother-in-law back in Yemen, and has been the recipient of a Peabody Award and a MacArthur award.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Poitras was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when the towers were attacked. Like most New Yorkers, in the weeks that followed she was swept up in both mourning and a feeling of unity. It was a moment, she said, when ''people could have done anything, in a positive sense.'' When that moment led to the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, she felt that her country had lost its way. ''We always wonder how countries can veer off course,'' she said. ''How do people let it happen, how do people sit by during this slipping of boundaries?'' Poitras had no experience in conflict zones, but in June 2004, she went to Iraq and began documenting the occupation.

Shortly after arriving in Baghdad, she received permission to go to Abu Ghraib prison to film a visit by members of Baghdad's City Council. This was just a few months after photos were published of American soldiers abusing prisoners there. A prominent Sunni doctor was part of the visiting delegation, and Poitras shot a remarkable scene of his interaction with prisoners there, shouting that they were locked up for no good reason.

The doctor, Riyadh al-Adhadh, invited Poitras to his clinic and later allowed her to report on his life in Baghdad. Her documentary, ''My Country, My Country,'' is centered on his family's travails '-- the shootings and blackouts in their neighborhood, the kidnapping of a nephew. The film premiered in early 2006 and received widespread acclaim, including an Oscar nomination for best documentary.

Attempting to tell the story of the war's effect on Iraqi citizens made Poitras the target of serious '-- and apparently false '-- accusations. On Nov. 19, 2004, Iraqi troops, supported by American forces, raided a mosque in the doctor's neighborhood of Adhamiya, killing several people inside. The next day, the neighborhood erupted in violence. Poitras was with the doctor's family, and occasionally they would go to the roof of the home to get a sense of what was going on. On one of those rooftop visits, she was seen by soldiers from an Oregon National Guard battalion. Shortly after, a group of insurgents launched an attack that killed one of the Americans. Some soldiers speculated that Poitras was on the roof because she had advance notice of the attack and wanted to film it. Their battalion commander, Lt. Col. Daniel Hendrickson, retired, told me last month that he filed a report about her to brigade headquarters.

There is no evidence to support this claim. Fighting occurred throughout the neighborhood that day, so it would have been difficult for any journalist to not be near the site of an attack. The soldiers who made the allegation told me that they have no evidence to prove it. Hendrickson told me his brigade headquarters never got back to him.

For several months after the attack in Adhamiya, Poitras continued to live in the Green Zone and work as an embedded journalist with the U.S. military. She has screened her film to a number of military audiences, including at the U.S. Army War College. An officer who interacted with Poitras in Baghdad, Maj. Tom Mowle, retired, said Poitras was always filming and it ''completely makes sense'' she would film on a violent day. ''I think it's a pretty ridiculous allegation,'' he said.

Although the allegations were without evidence, they may be related to Poitras's many detentions and searches. Hendrickson and another soldier told me that in 2007 '-- months after she was first detained '-- investigators from the Department of Justice's Joint Terrorism Task Force interviewed them, inquiring about Poitras's activities in Baghdad that day. Poitras was never contacted by those or any other investigators, however. ''Iraq forces and the U.S. military raided a mosque during Friday prayers and killed several people,'' Poitras said. ''Violence broke out the next day. I am a documentary filmmaker and was filming in the neighborhood. Any suggestion I knew about an attack is false. The U.S. government should investigate who ordered the raid, not journalists covering the war.''

In June 2006, her tickets on domestic flights were marked ''SSSS'' '-- Secondary Security Screening Selection '-- which means the bearer faces extra scrutiny beyond the usual measures. She was detained for the first time at Newark International Airport before boarding a flight to Israel, where she was showing her film. On her return flight, she was held for two hours before being allowed to re-enter the country. The next month, she traveled to Bosnia to show the film at a festival there. When she flew out of Sarajevo and landed in Vienna, she was paged on the airport loudspeaker and told to go to a security desk; from there she was led to a van and driven to another part of the airport, then taken into a room where luggage was examined.

''They took my bags and checked them,'' Poitras said. ''They asked me what I was doing, and I said I was showing a movie in Sarajevo about the Iraq war. And then I sort of befriended the security guy. I asked what was going on. He said: 'You're flagged. You have a threat score that is off the Richter scale. You are at 400 out of 400.' I said, 'Is this a scoring system that works throughout all of Europe, or is this an American scoring system?' He said. 'No, this is your government that has this and has told us to stop you.' ''

After 9/11, the U.S. government began compiling a terrorist watch list that was at one point estimated to contain nearly a million names. There are at least two subsidiary lists that relate to air travel. The no-fly list contains the names of tens of thousands of people who are not allowed to fly into or out of the country. The selectee list, which is larger than the no-fly list, subjects people to extra airport inspections and questioning. These lists have been criticized by civil rights groups for being too broad and arbitrary and for violating the rights of Americans who are on them.

In Vienna, Poitras was eventually cleared to board her connecting flight to New York, but when she landed at J.F.K., she was met at the gate by two armed law-enforcement agents and taken to a room for questioning. It is a routine that has happened so many times since then '-- on more than 40 occasions '-- that she has lost precise count. Initially, she said, the authorities were interested in the paper she carried, copying her receipts and, once, her notebook. After she stopped carrying her notes, they focused on her electronics instead, telling her that if she didn't answer their questions, they would confiscate her gear and get their answers that way. On one occasion, Poitras says, they did seize her computers and cellphones and kept them for weeks. She was also told that her refusal to answer questions was itself a suspicious act. Because the interrogations took place at international boarding crossings, where the government contends that ordinary constitutional rights do not apply, she was not permitted to have a lawyer present.

''It's a total violation,'' Poitras said. ''That's how it feels. They are interested in information that pertains to the work I am doing that's clearly private and privileged. It's an intimidating situation when people with guns meet you when you get off an airplane.''

Though she has written to members of Congress and has submitted Freedom of Information Act requests, Poitras has never received any explanation for why she was put on a watch list. ''It's infuriating that I have to speculate why,'' she said. ''When did that universe begin, that people are put on a list and are never told and are stopped for six years? I have no idea why they did it. It's the complete suspension of due process.'' She added: ''I've been told nothing, I've been asked nothing, and I've done nothing. It's like Kafka. Nobody ever tells you what the accusation is.''

After being detained repeatedly, Poitras began taking steps to protect her data, asking a traveling companion to carry her laptop, leaving her notebooks overseas with friends or in safe deposit boxes. She would wipe her computers and cellphones clean so that there would be nothing for the authorities to see. Or she encrypted her data, so that law enforcement could not read any files they might get hold of. These security preparations could take a day or more before her travels.

It wasn't just border searches that she had to worry about. Poitras said she felt that if the government was suspicious enough to interrogate her at airports, it was also most likely surveilling her e-mail, phone calls and Web browsing. ''I assume that there are National Security Letters on my e-mails,'' she told me, referring to one of the secretive surveillance tools used by the Department of Justice. A National Security Letter requires its recipients '-- in most cases, Internet service providers and phone companies '-- to provide customer data without notifying the customers or any other parties. Poitras suspected (but could not confirm, because her phone company and I.S.P. would be prohibited from telling her) that the F.B.I. had issued National Security Letters for her electronic communications.

Once she began working on her surveillance film in 2011, she raised her digital security to an even higher level. She cut down her use of a cellphone, which betrays not only who you are calling and when, but your location at any given point in time. She was careful about e-mailing sensitive documents or having sensitive conversations on the phone. She began using software that masked the Web sites she visited. After she was contacted by Snowden in 2013, she tightened her security yet another notch. In addition to encrypting any sensitive e-mails, she began using different computers for editing film, for communicating and for reading sensitive documents (the one for sensitive documents is air-gapped, meaning it has never been connected to the Internet).

These precautions might seem paranoid '-- Poitras describes them as ''pretty extreme'' '-- but the people she has interviewed for her film were targets of the sort of surveillance and seizure that she fears. William Binney, a former top N.S.A. official who publicly accused the agency of illegal surveillance, was at home one morning in 2007 when F.B.I. agents burst in and aimed their weapons at his wife, his son and himself. Binney was, at the moment the agent entered his bathroom and pointed a gun at his head, naked in the shower. His computers, disks and personal records were confiscated and have not yet been returned. Binney has not been charged with any crime.

Jacob Appelbaum, a privacy activist who was a volunteer with WikiLeaks, has also been filmed by Poitras. The government issued a secret order to Twitter for access to Appelbaum's account data, which became public when Twitter fought the order. Though the company was forced to hand over the data, it was allowed to tell Appelbaum. Google and a small I.S.P. that Appelbaum used were also served with secret orders and fought to alert him. Like Binney, Appelbaum has not been charged with any crime.

Poitras endured the airport searches for years with little public complaint, lest her protests generate more suspicion and hostility from the government, but last year she reached a breaking point. While being interrogated at Newark after a flight from Britain, she was told she could not take notes. On the advice of lawyers, Poitras always recorded the names of border agents and the questions they asked and the material they copied or seized. But at Newark, an agent threatened to handcuff her if she continued writing. She was told that she was being barred from writing anything down because she might use her pen as a weapon.

''Then I asked for crayons,'' Poitras recalled, ''and he said no to crayons.''

She was taken into another room and interrogated by three agents '-- one was behind her, another asked the questions, the third was a supervisor. ''It went on for maybe an hour and a half,'' she said. ''I was taking notes of their questions, or trying to, and they yelled at me. I said, 'Show me the law where it says I can't take notes.' We were in a sense debating what they were trying to forbid me from doing. They said, 'We are the ones asking the questions.' It was a pretty aggressive, antagonistic encounter.''

Poitras met Greenwald in 2010, when she became interested in his work on WikiLeaks. In 2011, she went to Rio to film him for her documentary. He was aware of the searches and asked several times for permission to write about them. After Newark, she gave him a green light.

''She said, 'I've had it,' '' Greenwald told me. ''Her ability to take notes and document what was happening was her one sense of agency, to maintain some degree of control. Documenting is what she does. I think she was feeling that the one vestige of security and control in this situation had been taken away from her, without any explanation, just as an arbitrary exercise of power.''

At the time, Greenwald was a writer for Salon. His article, ''U.S. Filmmaker Repeatedly Detained at Border,'' was published in April 2012. Shortly after it was posted, the detentions ceased. Six years of surveillance and harassment, Poitras hoped, might be coming to an end.

Poitras was not Snowden's first choice as the person to whom he wanted to leak thousands of N.S.A. documents. In fact, a month before contacting her, he reached out to Greenwald, who had written extensively and critically about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the erosion of civil liberties in the wake of 9/11. Snowden anonymously sent him an e-mail saying he had documents he wanted to share, and followed that up with a step-by-step guide on how to encrypt communications, which Greenwald ignored. Snowden then sent a link to an encryption video, also to no avail.

''It's really annoying and complicated, the encryption software,'' Greenwald said as we sat on his porch during a tropical drizzle. ''He kept harassing me, but at some point he just got frustrated, so he went to Laura.''

Snowden had read Greenwald's article about Poitras's troubles at U.S. airports and knew she was making a film about the government's surveillance programs; he had also seen a short documentary about the N.S.A. that she made for The New York Times Op-Docs. He figured that she would understand the programs he wanted to leak about and would know how to communicate in a secure way.

By late winter, Poitras decided that the stranger with whom she was communicating was credible. There were none of the provocations that she would expect from a government agent '-- no requests for information about the people she was in touch with, no questions about what she was working on. Snowden told her early on that she would need to work with someone else, and that she should reach out to Greenwald. She was unaware that Snowden had already tried to contact Greenwald, and Greenwald would not realize until he met Snowden in Hong Kong that this was the person who had contacted him more than six months earlier.

There were surprises for everyone in these exchanges '-- including Snowden, who answered questions that I submitted to him through Poitras. In response to a question about when he realized he could trust Poitras, he wrote: ''We came to a point in the verification and vetting process where I discovered Laura was more suspicious of me than I was of her, and I'm famously paranoid.'' When I asked him about Greenwald's initial silence in response to his requests and instructions for encrypted communications, Snowden replied: ''I know journalists are busy and had assumed being taken seriously would be a challenge, especially given the paucity of detail I could initially offer. At the same time, this is 2013, and [he is] a journalist who regularly reported on the concentration and excess of state power. I was surprised to realize that there were people in news organizations who didn't recognize any unencrypted message sent over the Internet is being delivered to every intelligence service in the world.''

In April, Poitras e-mailed Greenwald to say they needed to speak face to face. Greenwald happened to be in the United States, speaking at a conference in a suburb of New York City, and the two met in the lobby of his hotel. ''She was very cautious,'' Greenwald recalled. ''She insisted that I not take my cellphone, because of this ability the government has to remotely listen to cellphones even when they are turned off. She had printed off the e-mails, and I remember reading the e-mails and felt intuitively that this was real. The passion and thought behind what Snowden '-- who we didn't know was Snowden at the time '-- was saying was palpable.''

Greenwald installed encryption software and began communicating with the stranger. Their work was organized like an intelligence operation, with Poitras as the mastermind. ''Operational security '-- she dictated all of that,'' Greenwald said. ''Which computers I used, how I communicated, how I safeguarded the information, where copies were kept, with whom they were kept, in which places. She has this complete expert level of understanding of how to do a story like this with total technical and operational safety. None of this would have happened with anything near the efficacy and impact it did, had she not been working with me in every sense and really taking the lead in coordinating most of it.''

Snowden began to provide documents to the two of them. Poitras wouldn't tell me when he began sending her documents; she does not want to provide the government with information that could be used in a trial against Snowden or herself. He also said he would soon be ready to meet them. When Poitras asked if she should plan on driving to their meeting or taking a train, Snowden told her to be ready to get on a plane.

In May, he sent encrypted messages telling the two of them to go to Hong Kong. Greenwald flew to New York from Rio, and Poitras joined him for meetings with the editor of The Guardian's American edition. With the paper's reputation on the line, the editor asked them to bring along a veteran Guardian reporter, Ewen MacAskill, and on June 1, the trio boarded a 16-hour flight from J.F.K. to Hong Kong.

Snowden had sent a small number of documents to Greenwald, about 20 in all, but Poitras had received a larger trove, which she hadn't yet had the opportunity to read closely. On the plane, Greenwald began going through its contents, eventually coming across a secret court order requiring Verizon to give its customer phone records to the N.S.A. The four-page order was from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a panel whose decisions are highly classified. Although it was rumored that the N.S.A. was collecting large numbers of American phone records, the government always denied it.

Poitras, sitting 20 rows behind Greenwald, occasionally went forward to talk about what he was reading. As the man sitting next to him slept, Greenwald pointed to the FISA order on his screen and asked Poitras: ''Have you seen this? Is this saying what I'm thinking it's saying?''

At times, they talked so animatedly that they disturbed passengers who were trying to sleep; they quieted down. ''We couldn't believe just how momentous this occasion was,'' Greenwald said. ''When you read these documents, you get a sense of the breadth of them. It was a rush of adrenaline and ecstasy and elation. You feel you are empowered for the first time because there's this mammoth system that you try and undermine and subvert and shine a light on '-- but you usually can't make any headway, because you don't have any instruments to do it '-- [and now] the instruments were suddenly in our lap.''

Snowden had instructed them that once they were in Hong Kong, they were to go at an appointed time to the Kowloon distsrict and stand outside a restaurant that was in a mall connected to the Mira Hotel. There, they were to wait until they saw a man carrying a Rubik's Cube, then ask him when the restaurant would open. The man would answer their question, but then warn that the food was bad. When the man with the Rubik's Cube arrived, it was Edward Snowden, who was 29 at the time but looked even younger.

''Both of us almost fell over when we saw how young he was,'' Poitras said, still sounding surprised. ''I had no idea. I assumed I was dealing with somebody who was really high-level and therefore older. But I also knew from our back and forth that he was incredibly knowledgeable about computer systems, which put him younger in my mind. So I was thinking like 40s, somebody who really grew up on computers but who had to be at a higher level.''

In our encrypted chat, Snowden also remarked on this moment: ''I think they were annoyed that I was younger than they expected, and I was annoyed that they had arrived too early, which complicated the initial verification. As soon as we were behind closed doors, however, I think everyone was reassured by the obsessive attention to precaution and bona fides.''

They followed Snowden to his room, where Poitras immediately shifted into documentarian mode, taking her camera out. ''It was a little bit tense, a little uncomfortable,'' Greenwald said of those initial minutes. ''We sat down, and we just started chatting, and Laura was immediately unpacking her camera. The instant that she turned on the camera, I very vividly recall that both he and I completely stiffened up.''

Greenwald began the questioning. ''I wanted to test the consistency of his claims, and I just wanted all the information I could get, given how much I knew this was going to be affecting my credibility and everything else. We weren't really able to establish a human bond until after that five or six hours was over.''

For Poitras, the camera certainly alters the human dynamic, but not in a bad way. When someone consents to being filmed '-- even if the consent is indirectly gained when she turns on the camera '-- this is an act of trust that raises the emotional stakes of the moment. What Greenwald saw as stilted, Poitras saw as a kind of bonding, the sharing of an immense risk. ''There is something really palpable and emotional in being trusted like that,'' she said.

Snowden, though taken by surprise, got used to it. ''As one might imagine, normally spies allergically avoid contact with reporters or media, so I was a virgin source '-- everything was a surprise. . . . But we all knew what was at stake. The weight of the situation actually made it easier to focus on what was in the public interest rather than our own. I think we all knew there was no going back once she turned the camera on.''

For the next week, their preparations followed a similar pattern '-- when they entered Snowden's room, they would remove their cellphone batteries and place them in the refrigerator of Snowden's minibar. They lined pillows against the door, to discourage eavesdropping from outside, then Poitras set up her camera and filmed. It was important to Snowden to explain to them how the government's intelligence machinery worked because he feared that he could be arrested at any time.

Greenwald's first articles '-- including the initial one detailing the Verizon order he read about on the flight to Hong Kong '-- appeared while they were still in the process of interviewing Snowden. It made for a strange experience, creating the news together, then watching it spread. ''We could see it being covered,'' Poitras said. ''We were all surprised at how much attention it was getting. Our work was very focused, and we were paying attention to that, but we could see on TV that it was taking off. We were in this closed circle, and around us we knew that reverberations were happening, and they could be seen and they could be felt.''

Snowden told them before they arrived in Hong Kong that he wanted to go public. He wanted to take responsibility for what he was doing, Poitras said, and he didn't want others to be unfairly targeted, and he assumed he would be identified at some point. She made a 12½-minute video of him that was posted online June 9, a few days after Greenwald's first articles. It triggered a media circus in Hong Kong, as reporters scrambled to learn their whereabouts.

There were a number of subjects that Poitras declined to discuss with me on the record and others she wouldn't discuss at all '-- some for security and legal reasons, others because she wants to be the first to tell crucial parts of her story in her own documentary. Of her parting with Snowden once the video was posted, she would only say, ''We knew that once it went public, it was the end of that period of working.''

Snowden checked out of his hotel and went into hiding. Reporters found out where Poitras was staying '-- she and Greenwald were at different hotels '-- and phone calls started coming to her room. At one point, someone knocked on her door and asked for her by name. She knew by then that reporters had discovered Greenwald, so she called hotel security and arranged to be escorted out a back exit.

She tried to stay in Hong Kong, thinking Snowden might want to see her again, and because she wanted to film the Chinese reaction to his disclosures. But she had now become a figure of interest herself, not just a reporter behind the camera. On June 15, as she was filming a pro-Snowden rally outside the U.S. consulate, a CNN reporter spotted her and began asking questions. Poitras declined to answer and slipped away. That evening, she left Hong Kong.

Poitras flew directly to Berlin, where the previous fall she rented an apartment where she could edit her documentary without worrying that the F.B.I. would show up with a search warrant for her hard drives. ''There is a filter constantly between the places where I feel I have privacy and don't,'' she said, ''and that line is becoming increasingly narrow.'' She added: ''I'm not stopping what I'm doing, but I have left the country. I literally didn't feel like I could protect my material in the United States, and this was before I was contacted by Snowden. If you promise someone you're going to protect them as a source and you know the government is monitoring you or seizing your laptop, you can't actually physically do it.''

After two weeks in Berlin, Poitras traveled to Rio, where I then met her and Greenwald a few days later. My first stop was the Copacabana hotel, where they were working that day with MacAskill and another visiting reporter from The Guardian, James Ball. Poitras was putting together a new video about Snowden that would be posted in a few days on The Guardian's Web site. Greenwald, with several Guardian reporters, was working on yet another blockbuster article, this one about Microsoft's close collaboration with the N.S.A. The room was crowded '-- there weren't enough chairs for everyone, so someone was always sitting on the bed or floor. A number of thumb drives were passed back and forth, though I was not told what was on them.

Poitras and Greenwald were worried about Snowden. They hadn't heard from him since Hong Kong. At the moment, he was stuck in diplomatic limbo in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, the most-wanted man on the planet, sought by the U.S. government for espionage. (He would later be granted temporary asylum in Russia.) The video that Poitras was working on, using footage she shot in Hong Kong, would be the first the world had seen of Snowden in a month.

''Now that he's incommunicado, we don't know if we'll even hear from him again,'' she said.

''Is he O.K.?'' MacAskill asked.

''His lawyer said he's O.K.,'' Greenwald responded.

''But he's not in direct contact with Snowden,'' Poitras said

When Greenwald got home that evening, Snowden contacted him online. Two days later, while she was working at Greenwald's house, Poitras also heard from him.

It was dusk, and there was loud cawing and hooting coming from the jungle all around. This was mixed with the yapping of five or six dogs as I let myself in the front gate. Through a window, I saw Poitras in the living room, intently working at one of her computers. I let myself in through a screen door, and she glanced up for just a second, then went back to work, completely unperturbed by the cacophony around her. After 10 minutes, she closed the lid of her computer and mumbled an apology about needing to take care of some things.

She showed no emotion and did not mention that she had been in the middle of an encrypted chat with Snowden. At the time, I didn't press her, but a few days later, after I returned to New York and she returned to Berlin, I asked if that's what she was doing that evening. She confirmed it, but said she didn't want to talk about it at the time, because the more she talks about her interactions with Snowden, the more removed she feels from them.

''It's an incredible emotional experience,'' she said, ''to be contacted by a complete stranger saying that he was going to risk his life to expose things the public should know. He was putting his life on the line and trusting me with that burden. My experience and relationship to that is something that I want to retain an emotional relation to.'' Her connection to him and the material, she said, is what will guide her work. ''I am sympathetic to what he sees as the horror of the world [and] what he imagines could come. I want to communicate that with as much resonance as possible. If I were to sit and do endless cable interviews '-- all those things alienate me from what I need to stay connected to. It's not just a scoop. It's someone's life.''

Poitras and Greenwald are an especially dramatic example of what outsider reporting looks like in 2013. They do not work in a newsroom, and they personally want to be in control of what gets published and when. When The Guardian didn't move as quickly as they wanted with the first article on Verizon, Greenwald discussed taking it elsewhere, sending an encrypted draft to a colleague at another publication. He also considered creating a Web site on which they would publish everything, which he planned to call NSADisclosures. In the end, The Guardian moved ahead with their articles. But Poitras and Greenwald have created their own publishing network as well, placing articles with other outlets in Germany and Brazil and planning more for the future. They have not shared the full set of documents with anyone.

''We are in partnership with news organizations, but we feel our primary responsibility is to the risk the source took and to the public interest of the information he has provided,'' Poitras said. ''Further down on the list would be any particular news organization.''

Unlike many reporters at major news outlets, they do not attempt to maintain a facade of political indifference. Greenwald has been outspoken for years; on Twitter, he recently replied to one critic by writing: ''You are a complete idiot. You know that, right?'' His left political views, combined with his cutting style, have made him unloved among many in the political establishment. His work with Poitras has been castigated as advocacy that harms national security. ''I read intelligence carefully,'' said Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, shortly after the first Snowden articles appeared. ''I know that people are trying to get us. . . . This is the reason the F.B.I. now has 10,000 people doing intelligence on counterterrorism. . . . It's to ferret this out before it happens. It's called protecting America.''

Poitras, while not nearly as confrontational as Greenwald, disagrees with the suggestion that their work amounts to advocacy by partisan reporters. ''Yes, I have opinions,'' she told me. ''Do I think the surveillance state is out of control? Yes, I do. This is scary, and people should be scared. A shadow and secret government has grown and grown, all in the name of national security and without the oversight or national debate that one would think a democracy would have. It's not advocacy. We have documents that substantiate it.''

Poitras possesses a new skill set that is particularly vital '-- and far from the journalistic norm '-- in an era of pervasive government spying: she knows, as well as any computer-security expert, how to protect against surveillance. As Snowden mentioned, ''In the wake of this year's disclosure, it should be clear that unencrypted journalist-source communication is unforgivably reckless.'' A new generation of sources, like Snowden or Pfc. Bradley Manning, has access to not just a few secrets but thousands of them, because of their ability to scrape classified networks. They do not necessarily live in and operate through the established Washington networks '-- Snowden was in Hawaii, and Manning sent hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks from a base in Iraq. And they share their secrets not with the largest media outlets or reporters but with the ones who share their political outlook and have the know-how to receive the leaks undetected.

In our encrypted chat, Snowden explained why he went to Poitras with his secrets: ''Laura and Glenn are among the few who reported fearlessly on controversial topics throughout this period, even in the face of withering personal criticism, [which] resulted in Laura specifically becoming targeted by the very programs involved in the recent disclosures. She had demonstrated the courage, personal experience and skill needed to handle what is probably the most dangerous assignment any journalist can be given '-- reporting on the secret misdeeds of the most powerful government in the world '-- making her an obvious choice.''

Snowden's revelationsare now the center of Poitras's surveillance documentary, but Poitras also finds herself in a strange, looking-glass dynamic, because she cannot avoid being a character in her own film. She did not appear in or narrate her previous films, and she says that probably won't change with this one, but she realizes that she has to be represented in some way, and is struggling with how to do that.

She is also assessing her legal vulnerability. Poitras and Greenwald are not facing any charges, at least not yet. They do not plan to stay away from America forever, but they have no immediate plans to return. One member of Congress has already likened what they've done to a form of treason, and they are well aware of the Obama administration's unprecedented pursuit of not just leakers but of journalists who receive the leaks. While I was with them, they talked about the possibility of returning. Greenwald said that the government would be unwise to arrest them, because of the bad publicity it would create. It also wouldn't stop the flow of information.

He mentioned this while we were in a taxi heading back to his house. It was dark outside, the end of a long day. Greenwald asked Poitras, ''Since it all began, have you had a non-N.S.A. day?''

''What's that?'' she replied.

''I think we need one,'' Greenwald said. ''Not that we're going to take one.''

Poitras talked about getting back to yoga again. Greenwald said he was going to resume playing tennis regularly. ''I'm willing to get old for this thing,'' he said, ''but I'm not willing to get fat.''

Their discussion turned to the question of coming back to the United States. Greenwald said, half-jokingly, that if he was arrested, WikiLeaks would become the new traffic cop for publishing N.S.A. documents. ''I would just say: 'O.K., let me introduce you to my friend Julian Assange, who's going to take my place. Have fun dealing with him.' ''

Poitras prodded him: ''So you're going back to the States?''

He laughed and pointed out that unfortunately, the government does not always take the smartest course of action. ''If they were smart,'' he said, ''I would do it.''

Poitras smiled, even though it's a difficult subject for her. She is not as expansive or carefree as Greenwald, which adds to their odd-couple chemistry. She is concerned about their physical safety. She is also, of course, worried about surveillance. ''Geolocation is the thing,'' she said. ''I want to keep as much off the grid as I can. I'm not going to make it easy for them. If they want to follow me, they are going to have to do that. I am not going to ping into any G.P.S. My location matters to me. It matters to me in a new way that I didn't feel before.''

There are lots of people angry with them and lots of governments, as well as private entities, that would not mind taking possession of the thousands of N.S.A. documents they still control. They have published only a handful '-- a top-secret, headline-grabbing, Congressional-hearing-inciting handful '-- and seem unlikely to publish everything, in the style of WikiLeaks. They are holding onto more secrets than they are exposing, at least for now.

''We have this window into this world, and we're still trying to understand it,'' Poitras said in one of our last conversations. ''We're not trying to keep it a secret, but piece the puzzle together. That's a project that is going to take time. Our intention is to release what's in the public interest but also to try to get a handle on what this world is, and then try to communicate that.''

The deepest paradox, of course, is that their effort to understand and expose government surveillance may have condemned them to a lifetime of it.

''Our lives will never be the same,'' Poitras said. ''I don't know if I'll ever be able to live someplace and feel like I have my privacy. That might be just completely gone.''

Peter Maass is an investigative reporter working on a book about surveillance and privacy. Editor: Joel Lovell

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Tue, 13 Aug 2013 16:06

I did a few searches, and looked around the EFF site to get an idea of where their money comes from. I did not find the information, except in a general sense, that a percentage comes from foundations, some from companies, and some from individuals.

I'm sure they try to represent all of us, and they have done a great job, except now, when it comes to the NSA revelations, it seems to me that they, like a lot of the pundits in tech, have a conflict, unless little or none of their funding comes from the tech industry.

As Bruce Schneier observes, the tech industry is now clearly subordinate to the US government. How long this has been going on is in dispute. Schneier believes it's recent. I think it's deeply ingrained in the structure of the tech industry. There's a revolving door between government and the industry, as with every other industry. Tech is younger so it's less developed, but it's catching up quickly.

Foundations like the EFF may be conflicted as well. Until we know where their money comes from, we won't have a good picture of whether or how conflicted they are.

There has been some discussion. Bruce Sterling wrote a piece that was critical of the EFF without naming them, criticism that I thought was fair. There was a response from Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing and one by Danny O'Brien who currently works at EFF.

Doctorow is a former staffer at EFF and a current EFF fellow.

The discussion so far has been superficial and some of it disappointingly personal. It would be better to get an overall sense of who we're dealing with. Is EFF repping Google, Apple, Amazon, etc? Or the users of the Internet? Can't really represent both now, because the interests are in conflict, imho. And if EFF doesn't represent the people, who does?

Update

John Perry Barlow, co-founder of EFF, offers in a tweet: "Please give us a sense of how you'd like #EFF's income stream to be broken down and we'll do it."

Thanks, that would be great. Any way that answers this question -- how much of EFF's funding comes from the tech industry. And to be complete, how much comes from governments, although I'm pretty sure that's close to nil.

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Tue, 13 Aug 2013 22:06

SANTA MONICA, CA -- In a stunning admission contained in a brief filed recently in federal court, lawyers for Google said people should not expect privacy when they send messages to a Gmail account. Consumer Watchdog said today that people who care about their email correspondents' privacy should not use the Internet giant's service.

Google's brief said: ''Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient's assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their emails are processed by the recipient's [email provider] in the course of delivery. Indeed, 'a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.''' (Motion to dismiss, Page 19)

Read Google's motion to dismiss here: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/googlemotion061313.pdf

''Google has finally admitted they don't respect privacy,'' said John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's Privacy Project director. ''People should take them at their word; if you care about your email correspondents' privacy don't use Gmail.''

Google made the statement that people can't expect privacy when sending a message to a Gmail address in a response to a class action complaint filed in multi-district litigation. The suit says Google violates federal and state wiretap laws when the company reads emails to determine what ads to serve based on the message's content. The class action complaint was filed under seal because it details many of Google's business practices about the way it handles email.

A highly redacted version of the complaint was filed publicly. Read it here: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/gmailcomplaint051613.pdf

A hearing in the case, In re Google Inc. Gmail Litigation, Case No. 5:13-md-02430-LHK, will be held before Judge Lucy H. Koh in U.S. District Court in San Jose, CA. at 1:30 p.m., Sept. 5.

''Google's brief uses a wrong-headed analogy; sending an email is like giving a letter to the Post Office,'' said Simpson. ''I expect the Post Office to deliver the letter based on the address written on the envelope. I don't expect the mail carrier to open my letter and read it. Similarly when I send an email, I expect it to be delivered to the intended recipient with a Gmail account based on the email address; why would I expect its content will be intercepted by Google and read?''

-30-

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 13:12

The Internet is in a panic over a Google legal brief that claims Gmail users have no expectation of privacy when they use the service. Good headline, but let's be honest: that's the entire point of Gmail.

Did you really think they weren't going to open it?

So, I just finished reading Google's motion to dismiss in response to a lawsuit alleging that its e-mail scanning violates California privacy laws. And I'll say this: those Google lawyers are towering writers, indeed. But on to the point: did Google really argue in its rebuttal to the lawsuit that Gmail users do not and never should have an expectation of privacy when they're using Gmail? I mean, they actually just came out and said it like that!?

Well, yes. But if you read the brief, or the Gmail Terms of Service, or even stop and think about what Gmail actually does, that shouldn't come as a surprise, and it's nothing Google hasn't baldly stated before. I'm not saying I like it, but it's definitely not news. It's actually just how Gmail works.

So, yes, Google is saying that you don't have an expectation of privacy when you're using Gmail. But what Google is also saying is that you knew you didn't have an expectation of privacy when you signed up, because when you signed up you agreed to contextual advertising, to indexed, searchable email, to spam filters, and to content filters like Priority Inbox.

Those features, necessarily, involved automated scanning of e-mail. And, Google argues, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act specifically permits such indexing and automated scanning by email providers because it's "necessary" for them to continue to deliver you free, Web-based email (that they use as a vector for serving you ads).

Now, there are some remarkable notes that should be chilling to anyone who's not on Gmail but has friends who are: Google's brief points out that "[u]nder federal law, the consent of a single party to a communication is complete defense to any liability and so the consent of the Gmail user alone is sufficient to bar a claim." That seems problematic, from a privacy perspective, or at the very least, legitimately surprising.

But again, this is Google we're talking about. The company that could probably easily create a full-scale digital replica of you that would talk like you, look like you, know everything about you, and maybe even be way smarter than you.

Google reads your e-mail, knows what's in your calendar, looks at your photos, and knows who your friends are, and that's just via its in-house services. When you include the breadth of its search, Google knows everything about you that's public information, from your address to all your online profiles to your marital status and much, much more.

Remember that time CNET News Googled Eric Schmidt and got blackballed for like a year because even he didn't like seeing it laid out in plain text like that? Google is freaking scary, full stop.

The news here is not so much that you don't have an expectation of privacy when you use Gmail. The news is that anyone, anywhere, thought that they did.

Maybe, if these headlines are good for anything over time, it will be that it's actually kind of helpful to read Google's position in plain English like that, because it clarifies your choices for you.

You can decide that you really don't care whether the giant Google server banks "read" your email and give you contextual ads and put your spam in a spam folder and prioritize your communications (I, for one, don't particularly care). Or, you can decide you really, really do care (and should have read the ToS from the start) and you can go right ahead and dump Gmail for something like BitMessage, which will actually protect your communications for real (hat tip, No Agenda).

As for your friends who only use Gmail, I guess it's carrier pigeon time.

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 20:41

blogget startedwikiOur objective is to create a versatile, decentralized network built on secure protocols for routing traffic over private mesh or public internetworks independent of a central supporting infrastructure.more info

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 17:42

Another Pentagon covert operative has left his post at the Defense Department to join the fight for civil liberties. But you probably won't find him buddying up with ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden any time soon.

Former Navy SEAL commando Mike Janke is a spy-turned-privacy advocate. Unlike Snowden, he still has friendly relations with U.S. special operations teams, as the co-founder of a company that encrypts communications for feds and activists alike.

Still, his allegiances are split right now.

The federal government uses his firm, Silent Circle, to hide sensitive information from the public. The public uses its secure email, texts, videos and calls to hide personal information. And the private sector uses its technology to hide trade secrets from foreign governments and the public. As a citizen, father and intellectual property owner, Janke has had all those needs himself.

"The FBI is a customer of ours," he says. At the same time, "they wanted legislation to put a back door into all kinds of technologies like Silent Circle'' for intercepting transmissions, ''so, we're torn."

AuthorAliya Sternstein reports on cybersecurity and homeland security systems for Nextgov. She has covered technology for nine years at such publications as National Journal's TechnologyDaily, Federal Computer Week and Forbes. Before joining Government Executive, she covered agriculture and derivatives ... Full Bio

Late Thursday, company executives said they felt compelled to cut off Silent Mail, the email service, to preempt any government attempt at email-tapping. The move came after the shutdown earlier in the day of another email provider, Lavabit, that Snowden reportedly relied on for secure correspondences.

Silent Circle might lose some customers in the short term, but the popularity of anti-snooping software is only growing in the wake of the Snowden case. According to Forbes, monthly revenue for Silent Circle jumped more than 400 percent month-on-month after the media's June 6 revelations about NSA Internet surveillance. And Janke's firm will continue to offer its other popular services, which don't collect metadata about conversations and prohibit the company from deciphering content.

Janke claims that about one percent of his user base abuses the services to conceal illicit activities. But U.S. authorities won't put Silent Circle out of business, Janke says, because those tools alone cannot erase every digital footprint.

"Criminals and bad people aren't that smart. They have Twitter accounts. They post on Facebook. They use their credit cards that are stolen,'' he says. ''Law enforcement and government today have so many other avenues, electronically, at their disposal to say, 'Oh, we found the bad person. Oh, they're using Silent Circle. So what? We can see them communicating on Gmail.'''

In May, Silent Circle united with civil libertarians and cryptographers to protest the FBI proposal that would force all web services to plant bugs into real-time communications, like the eavesdropping features embedded in traditional telecommunications.

That doesn't mean Janke's not a champion of U.S. counterintelligence operations, especially those that disrupt terrorist plots. In the activist community, there are "the fringe groups that say, 'Why are you selling to military?' I say, 'Well, you don't understand -- we're saving lives," he explains. "Everybody wants us to join their cause. We try to say, 'Look, we are for everybody."

The need for more privacy is a response to the digitization of our lives, Janke asserts.

"I don't use Google. I don't let my daughter do iCloud or Instagram. I don't let her use a regular browser," he says, referring to Google, Apple and Facebook web services that share certain user data with third parties. "The Moore's law of data collection," Janke says, means that "in ten years they'll be able to get with a single search -- a medical company -- your children's medical reports [going back to] kindergarten and that follows you into jobs and into your healthcare costs."

While Silent Circle was terminating email services last week, President Obama met with industry leaders at the White House to address electronic monitoring issues. And the next day, he extended the olive branch even further, directing administration officials and lawmakers to rethink post-9/11 surveillance laws.

"If you are outside of the intelligence community, if you are the ordinary person and you start seeing a bunch of headlines saying, 'U.S., Big Brother looking down on you, collecting telephone records, et cetera,' well, understandably, people would be concerned," Obama said during a Friday afternoon press conference. In light of the questions raised, he said, ''it makes sense to have a discussion with Congress, have a discussion with industry -- which is also impacted by this -- have a discussion with civil libertarians, and see can we do this better."

Janke, a former SEAL, says he understands the government's right to secrecy and the people's right to privacy.

"I don't believe that there needs to be any friction between the need for a private individual, a need for a company, a need for the government. Where that friction comes in is when one's duty, which is the government's, frictions against the private individuals," he says.

(Image by alphaspirit via Shutterstock)

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 19:26

Information theory '-- the discipline that gave us digital communication and data compression '-- also put cryptography on a secure mathematical foundation. Since 1948, when the paper that created information theory first appeared, most information-theoretic analyses of secure schemes have depended on a common assumption.Unfortunately, as a group of researchers at MIT and the National University of Ireland (NUI) at Maynooth, demonstrated in a paper presented at the recent International Symposium on Information Theory (view PDF), that assumption is false. In a follow-up paper being presented this fall at the Asilomar Conference on Signals and Systems, the same team shows that, as a consequence, the wireless card readers used in many keyless-entry systems may not be as secure as previously thought.

In information theory, the concept of information is intimately entwined with that of entropy. Two digital files might contain the same amount of information, but if one is shorter, it has more entropy. If a compression algorithm '-- such as WinZip or gzip '-- worked perfectly, the compressed file would have the maximum possible entropy. That means that it would have the same number of 0s and 1s, and the way in which they were distributed would be totally unpredictable. In information-theoretic parlance, it would be perfectly uniform.

Traditionally, information-theoretic analyses of secure schemes have assumed that the source files are perfectly uniform. In practice, they rarely are, but they're close enough that it appeared that the standard mathematical analyses still held.

''We thought we'd establish that the basic premise that everyone was using was fair and reasonable,'' says Ken Duffy, one of the researchers at NUI. ''And it turns out that it's not.'' On both papers, Duffy is joined by his student Mark Christiansen; Muriel M(C)dard, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT; and her student Flvio du Pin Calmon.

The problem, M(C)dard explains, is that information-theoretic analyses of secure systems have generally used the wrong notion of entropy. They relied on so-called Shannon entropy, named after the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, who taught at MIT from 1956 to 1978.

Shannon entropy is based on the average probability that a given string of bits will occur in a particular type of digital file. In a general-purpose communications system, that's the right type of entropy to use, because the characteristics of the data traffic will quickly converge to the statistical averages. Although Shannon's seminal 1948 paper dealt with cryptography, it was primarily concerned with communication, and it used the same measure of entropy in both discussions.

But in cryptography, the real concern isn't with the average case but with the worst case. A codebreaker needs only one reliable correlation between the encrypted and unencrypted versions of a file in order to begin to deduce further correlations. In the years since Shannon's paper, information theorists have developed other notions of entropy, some of which give greater weight to improbable outcomes. Those, it turns out, offer a more accurate picture of the problem of codebreaking.

When M(C)dard, Duffy and their students used these alternate measures of entropy, they found that slight deviations from perfect uniformity in source files, which seemed trivial in the light of Shannon entropy, suddenly loomed much larger. The upshot is that a computer turned loose to simply guess correlations between the encrypted and unencrypted versions of a file would make headway much faster than previously expected.

''It's still exponentially hard, but it's exponentially easier than we thought,'' Duffy says. One implication is that an attacker who simply relied on the frequencies with which letters occur in English words could probably guess a user-selected password much more quickly than was previously thought. ''Attackers often use graphics processors to distribute the problem,'' Duffy says. ''You'd be surprised at how quickly you can guess stuff.''

In their Asilomar paper, the researchers apply the same type of mathematical analysis in a slightly different way. They consider the case in which an attacker is, from a distance, able to make a ''noisy'' measurement of the password stored on a credit card with an embedded chip or a key card used in a keyless-entry system.

''Noise'' is the engineer's term for anything that degrades an electromagnetic signal '-- such as physical obstructions, out-of-phase reflections or other electromagnetic interference. Noise comes in lots of different varieties: The familiar white noise of sleep aids is one, but so is pink noise, black noise and more exotic-sounding types of noise, such as power-law noise or Poisson noise.

In this case, rather than prior knowledge about the statistical frequency of the symbols used in a password, the attacker has prior knowledge about the probable noise characteristics of the environment: Phase noise with one set of parameters is more probable than phase noise with another set of parameters, which in turn is more probable than Brownian noise, and so on. Armed with these statistics, an attacker could infer the password stored on the card much more rapidly than was previously thought.

''Some of the approximations that we're used to making, they make perfect sense in the context of traditional communication,'' says Matthieu Bloch, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. ''You design your system in a framework, and then you test it. But for crypto, you're actually trying to prove that it's robust to things you cannot test. So you have to be sure that your assumptions make sense from the beginning. And I think that going back to the assumptions is something people don't do often enough.''

Bloch doubts that the failure of the uniformity assumption means that cryptographic systems in wide use today are fundamentally insecure. ''My guess is that it will show that some of them are slightly less secure than we had hoped, but usually in the process, we'll also figure out a way of patching them,'' he says. The MIT and NUI researchers' work, he says, ''is very constructive, because it's essentially saying, 'Hey, we have to be careful.' But it also provides a methodology to go back and reanalyze all these things.''

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Tue, 13 Aug 2013 23:12

Now known as the East County Heathens, this is a social group for atheists that live and play in East County ... and anyone else who doesn't mind making the drive out here! Atheists, humanists, agnostics and all freethinkers are welcome. Our goal is to provide a social outlet for freethinkers living east of Route 15 including but not limited to El Cajon, La Mesa, Lemon Grove, Santee, Lakeside, Jamul, Spring Valley, and Alpine. We don't at this point cover points north of Poway but that may change as our membership grows. In this conservative part of San Diego it is often difficult to find like-minded people. Join the East County Heathens ... you are not alone.

Our events comprise all facets of social connection and are membership driven: hiking, exploring new restaurants, play readings, horror movie night, game night, TED.com lectures, music events, humanitarian events, sports, rodeos, book discussions. The only limitations are our own creativity. It is a diverse group and there is something for everyone. So bring your positive energy and make the East County Heathens part of your social life. We are looking forward to meeting you.

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Tue, 13 Aug 2013 18:34

Brandon TurbevilleActivist PostAmid the growing tension in Egypt after the military counter-coup removing former President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood from their posts, the U.S. State Department is considering naming former U.S. Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, as the new Ambassador to Egypt.

With the geographic size of Egypt, its geopolitical importance, and both its historic and contemporary influence in the Middle East, the post of Ambassador to Egypt is an immensely important position, particularly now that both sides in the Egyptian turmoil have legitimate reasons to distrust and detest the United States. As Michael Gordon of the New York Times writes,

The next American ambassador has the difficult task of repairing the United States' image, expanding its influence and working with opposing groups inside the country, as well as diplomats from Arab and European nations, to try to stabilize Egypt and put it on a democratic course.[1]

Obviously, putting Egypt on a ''democratic course'' is not the intention of the United States, evidenced by the support and assistance provided to Morsi and the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood by the U.S. government all the way until the counter-coup was launched by the Egyptian military in response to popular outrage. Morsi's constant rewriting of the Egyptian Constitution,[2] capitulation to the IMF,[3] and flirtation with Muslim fundamentalists and warmongers[4] was anything but ''democratic'' rule of law.However, with Egypt still finding itself in a state of transition and with increasing tension[5] produced by fanatical elements of the Muslim Brotherhood (itself a creation of Britain[6]) and Morsi supporters against the majority of the Egyptian people,[7] the possible appointment of Ford as Ambassador to the country is a concerning development. This is because, ever since his appointment to the position of Political Counselor to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and his subsequent appointment as Ambassador to Syria, Ford has been nothing more than a destabilization expert, who has sown division and discord between populations and societies as well as serving to weaken the national governments of wherever he is placed.

Although mainstream reports tend to portray Ford as if he were a man of the people always fighting on the side of the oppressed, the real Robert Ford is very different. Indeed, the reality is that he is nothing more than a globalist destabilization expert who is merely taking over from his mentor John Negroponte, who became quite refined as a enabler of mass slaughter in Central America and Iraq. Negroponte's Iraq affair is where Ford himself honed his skills in the arming and assistance of ruthless death squads who target innocent people in campaigns of terror and mass murder.[8]John Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. In this role, he was instrumental in supporting and overseeing the Nicaraguan Contra killers who, although based in Honduras, engaged in horrific acts of terrorism inside Nicaragua. Ultimately, this operation claimed the lives of approximately 50,000 innocent civilians. This is the origin of the term ''Salvador Option'' when speaking of the formation of ''death squads'' for political purposes, an option that has become a hallmark of Negroponte and the system which he represents.

Negroponte was also responsible for the formation of the Honduran death squads who engaged in a mission of terror against opponents of the US-backed Honduran regime as well as the Sandinistas and civilian populations in Nicaragua.

As Peter Roff and James Chapin write in their article ''Face-off: Bush's Foreign Policy Warriors,''

The Sun described the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 316, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves."

On August 27, 1997, CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz released a 211-page classified report entitled ''Selected Issues Relating to CIA Activities in Honduras in the 1980s.'' This report was partly declassified on Oct. 22, 1998, in response to demands by the Honduran human rights ombudsman.[9]

In 2005, Negroponte was appointed as ambassador to Iraq. In this role, he again oversaw the formation of death squads who targeted both the civilian populations and the Iraqi insurgency. The goal here was to foment division within the insurgency and turn it into a fragmented front. A divided opposition is obviously much easier to defeat than a united one. This theory has been proven accurate time and time again.Indeed, in 2005, a story was leaked to Newsweek[10] where the Pentagon confirmed that it was ''considering forming hit squads of Kurdish and Shia fighters to target leaders of the Iraqi insurgency in a strategic shift borrowed from the American struggle against left-wing guerrillas in Central America 20 years ago.''[11]

The Pentagon did more than ''consider'' this option. Not very long after this information was leaked, Iraq began to see the results of its implementation. As Dahr Jamail of Antiwar.com wrote in 2007,

Under the "Salvador Option," Negroponte had assistance from his colleague from his days in Central America during the 1980s, Ret. Col James Steele. Steele, whose title in Baghdad was Counselor for Iraqi Security Forces supervised the selection and training of members of the Badr Organization and Mehdi Army, the two largest Shi'ite militias in Iraq, in order to target the leadership and support networks of a primarily Sunni resistance.

Planned or not, these death squads promptly spiraled out of control to become the leading cause of death in Iraq. Intentional or not, the scores of tortured, mutilated bodies which turn up on the streets of Baghdad each day are generated by the death squads whose impetus was John Negroponte. And it is this U.S.-backed sectarian violence which largely led to the hell-disaster that Iraq is today. Of course, the fact that the death squad option was implemented so quickly after the release of the report suggests that the mercenaries were being organized and applied long before Newsweek was made aware of them.[12]

Nevertheless, serving in Iraq at the same time that the death squads were beginning to make their bloody mark on the cohesion of the ''insurgency'' was Robert Ford who, at the time, had been appointed political counselor to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Ford remained in this post from 2004-2006 where he worked closely with Negroponte. He was also heavily involved in the organization of the death squads. Ford was instrumental in helping make ''contacts'' with these individuals, as well as developing and maintaining relations with them for other purposes such as continued and future terror campaigns.In fact, Ford was once described by Negroponte as ''one of these very tireless people . . . who didn't mind putting on his flak jacket and helmet and going out of the Green Zone to meet contacts.'' In short, Ford acted as a foot soldier in death squad formation.

Attempting to summarize the death squad plan, Michael Hirsh and John Barry of Newsweek wrote in 2005:

[O]ne Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called 'snatch' operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries. [emphasis added][13]

Notice that the authors mention Syria as a potential target of destabilization as far back as 2005.With this in mind, Ford's action in Syria served the exact same purpose as his presence in Iraq only a few years previous.[14] This time, however, it seems that Ford took on a more central role in the affair. Indeed, many Syrians, if not aware of the more sinister acts of Ford, are at least aware that he has been instrumental in fomenting violent rebellion and negative Western public opinion against the ruling government. This is why Ford's convoy was attacked by ''pro-government'' Syrians[15] as he rode through town meeting with his terrorist pets[16] early on in the Syrian destabilization operation.

Ford's very presence in Syria was clearly a destabilization tactic.[17] Indeed, he drew quite a bit of international attention to himself by traveling across the country at will, ''meeting with protestors'' and turning terrorists into martyrs in the minds of the gullible Western public.

Of course, by ''meeting with protestors'' one can read ''instigating terrorism.'' The mainstream media, however, reports Ford's terror encouragement tour as a heroic act of solidarity with ''the people.''

Eventually, after a succession of terror tours the Assad regime finally slapped restrictions on Ford's travel, requiring him not to leave the boundaries of Damascus. However, Ford openly disregarded those limitations and brazenly began traveling all over Syria, meeting with his terrorist brethren.[18]Yet the Western agitators did not give up. This much was made clear by the recent ''secret'' visit by Ford to the then death squad leader, Gen. Salim Idriss.

This visit took place Wednesday, May 9, 2013 and was likely initiated via the Bab al-Salama crossing on the Turkey/Syria border. According to Deborah Thomas of NPR,

Ford met with the head of the Aleppo military council, Abdul Jabbar Okaidi, who thanked him for the shipment of nonlethal aid. Seven trucks transported some 65,000 MREs, or meals ready to eat, the U.S. military's battlefield rations.[19]

Although no mention is made of the actual lethal aid that has been provided to the death squads by the generosity of the American taxpayer via Gulf State feudal monarchies such as Saudi Arabia,[20] Thomas points out that the MREs were part of ''an additional $10 million aid package'' dedicated to the death squads by the U.S. government. Likewise, Secretary of State John Kerry announced in April that the United States would be donating $123 million to the Syrian death squads, despite facing a worldwide economic depression, drastic levels of unemployment at home, and a manufactured crisis such as the ''sequester'' and a host of other domestic crises. Later, in July, the effectively ''Secret Congress'' authorized the open shipment of arms to the death squads.[21]Ford's visit to Syria[22] is both part of the overarching attempt to further destabilize the country, organize death squad activity, and create a public relations campaign aimed at forming an image of Idriss as a figure around which popular support can be rallied. This, of course, is at least the third time Western interests have attempted to create a ''freedom fighter'' lead image for the Syrian death squads '' Moaz al-Khatib[23] and Ghassan Hitto[24] being the more recent failures. Idriss, although being heavily supported by the West, is now flailing[25] amongst an increasing trend in division amongst the ranks of the death squads.[26]

As Webster Tarpley commented on PressTV on May 10, 2013,

Well, I think we have some mixed signals from the Obama regime here. Let us hasten to say that anybody calling themselves ''Free Syrian Army'' is, in fact, a representative of the al-Nusra Front because we're getting reports everyday of more and more units of the so-called FSA showing their true colors or going over to Nusra and proclaiming themselves full-fledged terrorists, al-Qaeda disciples, death squads in every sense of the word. Now, we had, in the last twenty four hours, Ambassador Robert Ford of the State Department, somebody who did a lot to get this tragic rebellion going in the first place . . . Ambassador Robert Ford who is a taskmaster of death squad deployments, having learned it from Negrponte in Baghdad some years ago, he crossed into Syria, not with the permission of the Syrian government, but to go and meet General Idriss. And this General, Salim Idriss, is the new golden boy here. He is the new darling of the CIA and the State Department. And it looks like Ford is trying to coordinate the next move with Idriss. You can think of Idriss as the new Ahmed Chalabi '' somebody the U.S. is grooming to become dictator of the country.[27]

Of course, this was not the first time that Ford engaged in a publicity-based visit to the Syrian death squads inside Syria, thus drawing the ire of the Syrian government.[28] In 2011, after his travel as U.S. Ambassador had been restricted due to the destabilization efforts already taking place, Ford traveled to Hama in order to promote and encourage the violent assault waged by the Western-backed death squads against innocent Syrian civilians as well as Syrian soldiers.At the very least, Ford's history should be enough to cause some level of concern from both the Egyptian government and from any Westerner of good will. Ford, in virtually all of his appointments has done nothing but serve as a destabilization agent and a hands-on architect of death and destruction.

For this reason and for those listed discussed in this article, the Egyptians would be wise to reject Robert Ford as Ambassador to their country, even if the United States Senate does not.

Notes:[1] Gordon, Michael R. ''Former Envoy to Syria Said to be Choice for Cairo Post.'' New York Times. August 4, 2013.http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/05/world/middleeast/kerry-picks-former-syria-envoy-as-ambassador-to-egypt.html?ref=michaelrgordon&_r=0[2] Radwan, Tarek. ''Morsi Rewrites the Rules of the Game, Again.'' EgyptSource of the Atlantic Council Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. November 22, 2012. http://www.acus.org/egyptsource/morsi-rewrites-rules-game-again[3] ''Morsi says IMF loan compatible with Islamic banking.'' AFP. October 6, 2012. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j2lFa7wUsqUyO_t9zmJxKebOKx-g?docId=CNG.bd6e4881b495ca106dfcf0314731157d.931[4] Hendawi, Hamza. ''Morsi seen to endorse holy war in Syria.'' Times of Israel. June 17, 2013. http://www.timesofisrael.com/morsi-seen-to-endorse-holy-war-on-syria/[5] ''Over 200 injured as Morsi supporters, opponents clash north of Cairo.'' RT. June 26, 2013. http://rt.com/news/egypt-clashes-mansoura-morsi-281/[6] Draitser, Eric. ''Unmasking the Muslim Brotherhood: Syria, Egypt, and Beyond.'' Stop Imperialism. December 12, 2012. Reposted by Global Research. http://www.globalresearch.ca/unmasking-the-muslim-brotherhood-syria-egypt-and-beyond/5315406[7] Jones, Brandon. ''Egypt Protest Largest In History, Anti-Morsi and Anti-Obama Signs Fill The Streets, PHOTOS.'' The Global Dispatch. July 3, 2013. http://www.theglobaldispatch.com/egypt-protest-largest-in-history-anti-morsi-and-anti-obama-signs-fill-the-streets-photos-58277/[8] Turbeville, Brandon. ''Syria Under Attack By Globalist Death Squad Experts.'' Activist Post. May 27, 2012. http://www.activistpost.com/2012/05/syria-under-attack-by-globalist-death.html[9] Roff, Peter; Chapin, James. ''Face-off: Bush's Foreign Policy Warriors.'' United Press International. July 18, 2001.http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ROF111A.html[10] Hirsch, Michael; Barry, John. ''The Salvador Option.'' Newsweek. January 9, 2005. http://web.archive.org/web/20050110030928/http:/www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/[11] ''El Salvador-style 'death squads' to be deployed by US against Iraq militants.'' Times Online. January 10, 2005. As quoted and sourced by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky of GlobalResearch.ca in his article, '' The Pentagon's 'Salvador Option': The Deployment of Death Squads in Iraq and Syria.''[12] Jamail, Dahr. ''Managing Escalation: Negroponte and Bush's New Iraq Team.'' Antiwar.com. January 9, 2007. http://antiwar.com/jamail/?articleid=10289[13] Hirsch, Michael; Barry, John. ''The Salvador Option.'' Newsweek. January 9, 2005. http://web.archive.org/web/20050110030928/http:/www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/[14] Turbeville, Brandon. ''Syrian Under Attack By Globalist Death Squad Experts.'' Activist Post. May 27, 2012. http://www.activistpost.com/2012/05/syria-under-attack-by-globalist-death.html[15] ''U.S. envoy's convoy stoned; Turkey offered Syria support if Brotherhood given posts.'' Al-Arabiya. September 20, 2011.http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/09/29/169334.html[16] Oweis, Khalid Yacoub. ''Syrian crowd stones U.S. envoy's convoy.'' Reuters. September 29, 2011. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/29/us-syria-idUSTRE78S5TD20110929[17] Shadid, Anthony. ''U.S. Ambassador to Syria Leaves Damascus Amid Threats To Safety.'' New York Times. October 24, 2011.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/world/middleeast/us-ambassador-to-syria-leaves-damascus-amid-threats-to-safety.html[18] Rogin, Josh. ''Is Robert Ford Trying to get thrown out of Syria?'' The Cable. August 23, 2011. http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/08/23/is_robert_ford_trying_to_get_thrown_out_of_syria[19] Amos, Deborah. ''Top U.S. Official Meets With Rebels Inside Syria.'' NPR. May 9, 2013. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/05/09/182665171/top-u-s-official-meets-with-rebels-inside-syria[20] Chivers, C.J.; Schmitt, Eric. ''Arms Airlift to Syrian Rebels Expands, With Help From the CIA.'' New York Times. March 24, 2013.http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/world/middleeast/arms-airlift-to-syrian-rebels-expands-with-cia-aid.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimesworld&_r=2&[21] ''US Intel committees approve arming Syrian rebels, top general warns of costs.'' RT. July 23, 2013. http://rt.com/usa/joint-chiefs-us-options-syria-445/[22] ''Azaz and the Arrival of food aid into the countryside. 04/30/2013.'' Youtube. Posted on May 1, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7rncsu_O8M[23] Bayoumy, Yara; Maclean, William. ''Moaz al-Khatib, Syria Rebel Leader, Slams NATO Refusal To Provide Patriot Missile Support.'' Huffington Post. March 27, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/27/moaz-al-khatib-syria-patriot-missiles_n_2962101.html[24] Dettmer, Jamie. ''The Texan Leader of the Syrian Rebels.'' The Daily Beast. March 23, 2013. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/23/the-texan-leader-of-the-syrian-rebels.html[25] Enders, David. ''Syrian rebel leader Salim Idriss admits difficulty of unifying fighters.'' McClatchy. May 7, 2013. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/05/07/190602/syrian-rebel-leader-salim-idriss.html#.UgFYRKzODTo[26] 'They are killing each other:' Western weapons for Syrian rebels will intensify war.'' RT. June 21, 2013. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/05/07/190602/syrian-rebel-leader-salim-idriss.html#.UgFYRKzODTo[27] Tarpley, Webster. ''Al Qaeda's Nusra Front Now Dominant Partner in 'Free Syrian Army.''' PressTV. May 10, 2013. (Posted on May 13, 2013). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcfpXEAL3jA&feature=player_embedded#![28] Rogin, Josh. ''Is Robert Ford Trying to get thrown out of Syria?'' The Cable. August 23, 2011. http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/08/23/is_robert_ford_trying_to_get_thrown_out_of_syria

Read other articles by Brandon Turbeville here.

Brandon Turbeville is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He has a Bachelor's Degree from Francis Marion University and is the author of three books, Codex Alimentarius -- The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, and Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident. Turbeville has published over 200 articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville's podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

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Source: euronews

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 19:25

Scores of people have been killed in Egypt as security forces moved in to clear the Cairo camps of protesters demanding the reinstatement of deposed President Mohamed Mursi.

The Health Ministry said 149 people have died from the clashes in Cairo and other cities nationwide with 1,400 injured, but euronews' Egypt correspondent said the death toll is likely to be higher as he had seen scores of bodies in one location alone in Cairo.

He described it as like a war zone.

The deaths came as police with armoured vehicles and bulldozers moved in to end a six-week standoff and clear the protest sites.

Eyewitnesses said security forces opened fire on demonstrators with shotguns and automatic rifles as tear gas canisters rained down.

The smaller of the two pro-Morsi camps '' at Nahda, near Cairo University in the west of the city '' appeared to have been cleared quickly, but it was early evening before the authorities finally took control of the much bigger camp around the Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque in the Nasser City neighborhood of north-east Cairo.

Protesters could be see streaming out of the area having been given safe passage.

The violence has also spread to other cities, with deaths and injuries reported following attacks on government buildings and police stations in Alexandria in the north, Suez, and the province of Fayoum south of Cairo.

International condemnation

There was strong international reaction.

''The US strongly condemns the use of violence against protesters in Egypt,'' said Josh Earnest, White House deputy press secretary.

''We have repeatedly called on Egypt's security forces to show restraint,'' he added, ''Just as we've urged protesters to demonstrate peacefully.''

''We also strongly oppose a return to a state of emergency law and call on the interim government to respect basic human rights,'' Earnest concluded, including the right to public assembly.

UN secretary General Ban Ki Moon condemned the violence used.

The European Union also deplored the deaths. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said: ''Confrontation and violence is not the way forward to resolve key political issues.''

'Islamists to blame'

The authorities blame Islamists for provoking the violence. State TV broadcast video which it said showed Mursi supporters shooting at the security forces.

It said six police had been killed in the clashes and 66 injured with four shot dead away from the main clashes at a Cairo police station .

The Egyptian presidency announced a one-month state of emergency across the country with a curfew from 7.00 pm to 6.00 am in Cairo and other major cities.

The latest violence appears sure to further polarise Egypt's 84 million people between backers of Mursi and those who opposed his brief rule.

There were also reports of Christian churches being burned in revenge for Copt christians having supported the military-led removal of the president on July 3.

Violence erupted elsewhere in the Egyptian capital. There were clashes on the 6 October bridge, a major overpass through the centre of the city.

During running battles between the police and Mursi supporters, a bus was hijacked and driven at high speed into the police lines.

Political unease

The violence had political repercussions.

Mohamed ElBaradei, a former UN diplomat, quit his post of vice president in the army-backed government, saying the conflict could have been resolved by peaceful means.

''The beneficiaries of what happened today are those call for violence, terrorism and the most extreme groups.''

Egypt's second largest Islamist party called for an end to political violence it said threatened to split society.

The Nour Party said it held the army-backed government responsible for the bloodshed.

View Egypt '' Cairo protests cleared in a larger map

More about:Cairo, Clashes and riots, Islamists, Mohamed MursiCopyright (C) 2013 euronews

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Source: VK: Home

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 20:37

14/08/13, 18:23 '' bron: ANP

(C) epa. Mohamed El-Baradei

Mohamed ElBaradei stapt op als vicepresident van Egypte. Dit schrijft de voormalige baas van de VN-atoomwaakhond IAEA in een brief aan waarnemers president Adly Mansour.

'Zoals u weet, zag ik dat er vreedzame wegen waren om deze botsing in de samenleving te beindigen; er waren aanvaardbare oplossingen voorgesteld die tot een nationale consensus hadden kunnen leiden', aldus de ontslagbrief. ElBaradei wil geen medeverantwoordelijkheid meer dragen voor beslissingen waar hij het niet mee eens is: 'Ik kan de verantwoordelijkheid voor geen enkele druppel bloed dragen.'

'Ik bid God de Hoogste dat hij ons geliefde Egypte zal behoeden voor alle kwaad en dat hij de hoop en wensen van het volk moge vervullen', aldus ElBaradei, precies een maand na zijn bediging als vicepresident.

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Source: The View From Falling Downs

Thu, 15 Aug 2013 04:10

Here's something worth reading.Note the tinge of desperation as Erdogan wanly champions the imaginary obligations of the international community to intercede with the generals in Egypt and prevent the wholesale slaughter of the Morsi supporters who have been holding peaceful sit-ins in the streets.

Don't expect Hurriyet to spell out the irony of Erdogan's appeal to international law after being neck deep in fomenting the Syrian crisis for the past three years.

Truth is, the big boys have decided that the Muslim Brotherhood is expendable. That's evident by what has happened with the regime change in Qatar and the coup in Egypt. This anti-MB impetus also helps sideline Hamas while the US puts on the latest iteration of the Middle East Peace charade.

The supposed conversations that Erdogan has been having with his counterparts among the UN Security Council must have been awkward in the extreme.

It seems that Erdogan is the last to know that the world has turned a page, and that he is being hung out to dry.

True, he has clapped most of his US-trained high command into prison, but that may not be enough.

The US-sponsored "democracy activists" remain thick on the ground.

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 09:57

President Barack Obama announced the United States is providing an additional $195 million in food and humanitarian aid to help the Syrian people on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan.The White House issued a statement from the president to Muslims celebrating the religious holiday, also known as the Feast of Breaking the Fast.

The statement says the total U.S. humanitarian aid contribution to the Syrian people since the civil war began there totals more than $1 billion.

''Many of us have had the opportunity to break fast with our Muslim friends and colleagues '' a tradition that reminds us to be grateful for our blessings and to show compassion for the less fortunate among us, including millions of Syrians who spent Ramadan displaced from their homes, their families, and their loved ones,'' said the statement by Obama.

Rebels trying to topple the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have accused Washington of being slow to provide weapons and military support to their uprising, which started two and a half years ago.The U.S. has, though, been providing humanitarian aid throughout the conflict.

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 09:59

Numbers At A Glance6.8 millionPeople in Need of Humanitarian Assistance in Syria

4.25 millionInternally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Syria

1.9 millionSyrians Displaced to Neighboring Countries

The United States is committed to helping the innocent children, women, and men affected by the ongoing conflict in Syria.

6.8 million people in Syria are in need of humanitarian assistance, and over 1.6 million people have fled to the neighboring countries.

On August 7, President Barack Obama announced more than $195 million in additional USG humanitarian assistance to help feed, shelter, and provide medical care for children, women, and men affected by the ongoing conflict in Syria. The United States remains the single-largest contributor of humanitarian assistance for the Syrian people, and this new contribution brings total U.S. humanitarian assistance for the crisis in Syria to to more than $1 billion.

This $195 million in additional humanitarian aid from the United States will increase food aid, medical care, clean water, and provide shelter and other relief supplies for families suffering in Syria and neighboring countries. In addition, the United States is increasing support for activities to protect especially vulnerable populations'--including women, children, and the elderly'--and improving sanitation and hygiene to help prevent the spread of water-borne illness.

The United States is now providing aid to 3.2 million people in Syria across all 14 governorates and continues to work through all possible channels to deliver aid to those in need in Syria, including through the United Nations, international and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and local Syrian organizations.

HUMANITARIAN FUNDING TO SYRIA HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE IN FY2012 AND FY2013*USAID/OFDA

$208,811,613

USAID/FFP

$312,783,482

State/PRM

$488,759,482

Total U.S. Government (USG) Assistance to the Syria Humanitarian Response

$1,010,354,195

*These figures are current as of August 7, 2013

Key DevelopmentsOn August 7, President Barack Obama announced more than $195 million in additional USG humanitarian assistance for the Syria response, bringing total USG humanitarian assistance for the Syria crisis to more than $1 billion since the conflict began. The new funding includes $156 million through U.N. agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to support food, health care, psychosocial support, gender-based violence (GBV) response services, the distribution of relief supplies, and other assistance inside Syria. The remaining $40.7 million will support food assistance, including food vouchers, in-kind rations, and ready-to-eat meals where necessary, for refugees in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Egypt.

On July 23, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah each met with leaders of several U.N. agencies and other international humanitarian organizations. Both the Secretary and Administrator reinforced the unwavering U.S. commitment to addressing the Syria humanitarian crisis. The meetings provided an opportunity to discuss ways to address challenges in delivering aid and to focus attention on the need to increase regional stabilization and development programs.

On July 25, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated that the Syria conflict has killed more than 100,000 people. The Secretary-General, who made the remarks prior to talks with Secretary Kerry, urged the convening of a peace conference. Both leaders stressed that the conflict has no military solution and can only be resolved through political means.

Previous Syria Fact SheetsFY 2013Syria '' Complex Emergency07/18/2013 Fact Sheet #20 (436kb PDF) and map (523kb PDF)07/03/2013 Fact Sheet #19 (350kb PDF) and map (3mb PDF)06/17/2013 Fact Sheet #18 (382kb PDF) and map (525kb PDF)06/07/2013 Fact Sheet #17 (288kb PDF) and map (500kb PDF)05/23/2013 Fact Sheet #16 (301kb PDF) and map (900kb PDF)

Syria Disaster Response Archive

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Source: EconomicPolicyJournal.com

Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:51

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is set to announce Monday that low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with no ties to gangs or large-scale drug organizations will no longer be charged with offenses that impose severe mandatory sentences, reports WaPo.The new Justice Department policy is part of a comprehensive prison reform package that Holder will reveal in a speech to the American Bar Association in San Francisco, according to senior department officials, says WaPo. He is also expected to introduce a policy to reduce sentences for elderly, nonviolent inmates and find alternatives to prison for nonviolent criminals.

Of course the devil is in the details and even on its face it doesn't go far enough, but it appears to be a step in the right direction. A better step in this direction, from a libertarian perspective, would be to repeal all drug laws. But this does seem to be a small step in the right direction.

According to WaP, Holder's prepared remarks reveal that he plans to say:

A vicious cycle of poverty, criminality and incarceration traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities. However, many aspects of our criminal justice system may actually exacerbate this problem rather than alleviate it.

Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no good law enforcement reason. We cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way to becoming a safer nation.

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Source: The Volokh Conspiracy

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 03:51

In my last post, I gave a preliminary assessment of Attorney General Eric Holder's recent speech on reforming charging policy for low-level drug offenders. I pointed out that whether or not this really marks a major policy change depends in large part on the details outlined in an internal memorandum Holder issued to federal prosecutors. Here is that memorandum in all its glory [HT: Jacob Sullum, who makes some good points about the memo and its limitations]. Unfortunately, the relevant section is not much more precise than Holder's speech or the NY Times account I quoted in my last post. Overall, this is hardly ''a major shift in criminal justice policy,'' as the New York Times calls it. It looks more like a fairly minor shift dressed up in major rhetorical flourishes.

Here are the relevant guidelines:

[I]n cases involving the applicability of Title 21 minimum sentences involving drug type and quantity, prosecutors should decline to charge the quantity necessary to trigger a mandatory minimum sentence if the defendant meets each of the following criteria:

* The defendant's relevant conduct does not involve the use of violence, the credible threat of violence, the possession of aweapon, the trafficking of drugs to or with minors, or the death or serious bodily injury of any person;

* The defendant is not an organizer, leader, manager, or supervisor of others within a criminal organization;

* The defendant does not have significant ties to large-scale drug-trafficking organizations, gangs, or cartels; and

* The defendant does not have a significant criminal history. A significant criminal history will normally be evidenced by three or more criminal history points but may involve fewer or greater depending on the nature of any prior convictions.

These four exceptions are both vague and broad. They don't explain what qualifies as a ''large-scale drug-trafficking organization, gangs, or cartel,'' or what it means to have ''significant'' ties to such, or how much evidence is needed to prove any of this. Jacob Sullum suggests that '' Many marijuana dealers and pretty much all cocaine and heroin dealers arguably would fail that test,'' and he's probably right.

The memo does shed a little light on what it means to have a ''significant criminal history.'' However, the accumulation of 3 points under federal sentencing guidelines is actually fairly easy. Even the shortest possible prior prison sentence counts as 1 point, any sentence of sixty days or more counts as 2 points, and any sentence of more than 13 months counts as 3 points all by itself. Given the lengthy sentences given to low-level drug offenders in the federal system, that isn't much of a constraint, especially since in some cases the 3 point standard need not be reached at all. A ''credible threat of violence'' probably exists in a wide range of drug deals; that's a normal part of conducting business in an illegal market. Finally, the range of people who might qualify as an ''organizer, leader, manager, or supervisor of others within a criminal organization'' is potentially very broad. It could include anyone who issued instructions to anyone else as part of a drug sale, and thereby served as an ''organizer'' or ''manager'' of their activities. The four exceptions are so broad that there isn't that much of a rule left. They are vague enough that, in practice, it's difficult to imagine many cases where the prosecutor who couldn't make at least a plausible argument that the defendant fit within at least one of these four categories.

I don't mean to be completely negative about the memorandum. It might well encourage some federal prosecutors to cut down on drug charges against low-level offenders at the margin, especially some who may be skeptical about the War on Drugs to begin with. By and large, however, the memorandum does not live up to the hoopla surrounding it.

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Tue, 13 Aug 2013 13:34

WASHINGTON (AP) '-- Attorney General Eric Holder announced a major shift Monday in federal sentencing policies, targeting long mandatory terms that he said have flooded the nation's prisons with low-level drug offenders and diverted crime-fighting dollars that could be far better spent.

If Holder's policies are implemented aggressively, they could mark one of the most significant changes in the way the federal criminal justice system handles drug cases since the government declared a war on drugs in the 1980s.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA '' AUGUST 12: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder speaks during the 2013 America Bar Association (ABA) annual meeting on August 12, 2013 in San Francisco, California. Attorney Holder announced plans for major changes in the sentencing of certain drug-related crimes in an effort to reduce overcrowding in the nation•s prisons. Credit: Getty Images

As a first step, Holder has instructed federal prosecutors to stop charging many nonviolent drug defendants with offenses that carry mandatory minimum sentences. His next step will be working with a bipartisan group in Congress to give judges greater discretion in sentencing.

''We will start by fundamentally rethinking the notion of mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes,'' Holder told the American Bar Association in San Francisco.

There are currently more than 219,000 federal inmates, and the prisons are operating at nearly 40 percent above capacity. Holder said the prison population ''has grown at an astonishing rate '' by almost 800 percent'' since 1980. Almost half the inmates are serving time for drug-related crimes.

Holder said he also wants to divert people convicted of low-level offenses to drug treatment and community service programs and expand a prison program to allow for release of some elderly, non-violent offenders.

The speech drew widespread praise, including from some of the people Holder will need most '' Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he is encouraged by the Obama administration's view that mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent offenders promote injustice and do not serve public safety. Paul and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., have introduced legislation to grant federal judges greater flexibility in sentencing. Leahy commended Holder for his efforts on the issue and said his committee will hold a hearing on the bill next month.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said he looked forward to working on the issue with Holder and senators of both parties.

But support was not universal. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said Holder ''cannot unilaterally ignore the laws or the limits on his executive powers. While the attorney general has the ability to use prosecutorial discretion in individual cases, that authority does not extend to entire categories of people.''

Still, the impact of Holder's initiative could be significant, said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a private group involved in research and policy reform of the criminal justice system.

African-Americans and Hispanics probably would benefit the most from a change. African-Americans account for about 30 percent of federal drug convictions each year and Hispanics account for 40 percent, according to Mauer.

If state policymakers were to adopt similar policies, the impact of changes at the state level could be even broader. Currently, about 225,000 state prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. One national survey from 15 years ago by the Sentencing Project found that 58 percent of state drug offenders had no history of violence or high-level drug dealing.

''These proportions on state prisoners may have shifted somewhat since that time, but it's still likely that a substantial proportion of state drug offenders fall into that category today,'' said Mauer.

In a three-page memo to all 94 U.S. Attorneys' offices around the country, Holder said rising prison costs have resulted in reduced spending on law enforcement agents, prosecutors and prevention and intervention programs.

''These reductions in public safety spending require us to make our public safety expenditures smarter and more productive,'' the memo stated.

In some cases where a defendant is not an organizer, leader, manager or supervisor of others, ''prosecutors should decline to pursue charges triggering a mandatory minimum sentence,'' Holder's memo stated.

In his speech to the ABA, the attorney general said ''we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, deter and rehabilitate '' not merely to convict, warehouse and forget.''

Holder said new approaches '' which he is calling the ''Smart On Crime'' initiative '' are the result of a Justice Department review he launched early this year.

The attorney general said that some issues are best handled at the state or local level and that he has directed federal prosecutors across the country to develop locally tailored guidelines for determining when federal charges should be filed and when they should not.

He said 17 states have directed money away from prison construction and toward programs and services such as treatment and supervision that are designed to reduce the problem of repeat offenders.

In Kentucky, legislation has reserved prison space for the most serious offenders and refocused resources on community supervision. The state, Holder said, is projected to reduce its prison population by more than 3,000 over the next 10 years, saving more than $400 million.

He also cited investments in drug treatment in Texas for non-violent offenders and changes to parole policies which he said have brought about a reduction in the prison population of more than 5,000 last year. He said similar efforts helped Arkansas reduce its prison population by more than 1,400. He also pointed to Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Hawaii as states that have improved public safety while preserving limited resources.

Praising Holder's efforts, Laura W. Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington Legislative Office, said the attorney general ''is taking crucial steps to tackle our bloated federal mass incarceration crisis.''

Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, said, ''For the past 40 years, the Department of Justice, under both political parties, has promoted mandatory minimum sentencing like a one-way ratchet.''

Featured image via Getty

''

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 11:29

Employees of Obama donor Leo Hindery Jr.'s media conglomerate Intermedia Partners, which now owns most of the top gun-culture media outlets in the country, believe that Hindery plans to gut and destroy all of them as part of a business plan that has already led to numerous layoffs and the virtual shuttering of prominent television production facilities in Minnesota and Montana.

Hindery, who was in consideration to be President Barack Obama's secretary of commerce, is managing partner of Intermedia Partners. The New York-based media private equity fund owns Intermedia Outdoor Holdings, which publishes 17 hunting, fishing, and shooting magazines, including Guns & Ammo, Handguns, Gun Dog, Rifle Shooter and Shooting Times.

InterMedia Outdoor Holdings purchased the pro-gun hunting and fishing network the Sportsman Channel in 2007, and is now in the process of acquiring the Outdoor Channel, pending the federal government's approval of last month's merger between InterMedia Outdoors and Outdoor Channel Holdings.

InterMedia employees believe that Hindery, a Huffington Post blogger who has contributed to numerous Democratic politicians including Andrew Cuomo and Elizabeth Warren, is in the process of consolidating all of America's leading gun-culture media outlets and stripping them down to virtual destruction.

Prior to its acquisition by InterMedia, the media brand Petersen's Hunting, the television arm of which is broadcast by the Sportsman Channel, was housed in a ''beautiful'' facility in Baxter, Minnesota, overlooking the Mississippi River. The facility had approximately 60 employees, a massive studio, at least nine editing bays and fully-wired machine rooms and was conducting about four studio shoots per year with a full production crew.

That facility now mostly consists of about 12 employees '-- ''basic administrative types,'' who ''think every day they go into work is going to be their layoff day,'' according to an InterMedia employee who spoke on condition of anonymity.

''They have people working out of rental strip malls doing all of their TV production,'' the source said.

Employees of the Baxter facility were offered the chance to move to Peoria, Ill., which offers a tax credit to companies who ''create'' jobs in town, in order to keep their employment.

''That studio in Brainerd was a real staple in that community for years. We used to joke that it was the Microsoft of Brainerd County. Everyone was impressed if you worked there. You made money, you did well, you had this dream life. Then Leo Hindery Jr. bought it and just completely gutted it,'' said the employee. ''It's sad. I know a lot of good people in Brainerd who lost their jobs and had their houses foreclosed on.''

Petersen's Hunting now ''has its entire TV production staff working out of call centers'' in Peoria, according to the employee.

InterMedia also purchased a company called Barrett Productions in Missoula, Mont., which was previously a thriving and well-respected television production company. The Barrett facility is now ''gutted.''

''There's nothing there but one intern slash production assistant and one administrative type. All the production people are gone. It's a shell,'' according to the employee.

''Now that Hindery has the Outdoor Channel, he's in a position to consolidate all of the major pro-Second Amendment media titles in this country, strip them down, and destroy them, like venture capitalists do sometimes,'' the employee said.

Many Outdoor Channel producers are ''scared shitless,'' realizing that the careers they built are now in the hands of an Obama donor who is in the process of breaking apart pro-gun media companies.

New York-based InterMedia Outdoors CEO Jeff Paro sent a memo to staff Feb. 4 describing the merger.

''It's hard to believe it has been several months since the announcement of the IMO/SC and Outdoor Channel merger. It probably seems like it is taking forever, but unfortunately, despite great progress, that is the nature the beast. Since some time has passed, I just wanted to take a moment and provide you with a brief update of where we are to date and next steps for IMO over the next 4-6 weeks,'' Paro wrote.

''Our registration for the new combined company was submitted to the SEC several weeks ago and we are hopeful that we will see final approvals soon. There will then be a short period of review by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which is required for the cable nets and then the merger ultimately will be subject to a formal vote by the current Outdoor Channel Shareholders. When all is said and done the new company, InterMedia Outdoor Holdings Inc. will be official. While you never know, our expectations are that this process will get us to go by, or around March 1st,'' Paro wrote.

''So with this time frame as a target the management teams from SC/IMO and OC have begun the process of evaluating and prioritizing our integration strategy at launch. This process will accelerate over the coming weeks as many of our senior managers have already been recruited to participate on different integration teams. Most of the areas under immediate consideration are on the TV side between SC and OC, but with that said we have several groups forming to evaluate plans for some exciting development opportunities in TV, Digital and Multimedia Sales and Marketing,'' Paro wrote.

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Tue, 13 Aug 2013 23:21

MOSCOW, August 13 (RIA Novosti) '' The Russian and Azerbaijani state oil companies on Tuesday agreed to establish a joint venture on a parity basis to prospect and produce oil and gas in Russia and Azerbaijan and in other countries as Russian President Vladimir Putin paid a one-day working visit to Baku.

Energy Cooperation

During Putin's visit '' designed to discuss a wide range of bilateral issues, including trade, energy, transportation and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict '' Rosneft reported that it had also agreed with the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) to jointly use some pipelines and terminals to optimize supplies to consumers.

A cooperation agreement was signed by Rosneft and SOCAR respective chiefs, Igor Sechin and Rovnag Abdullayev, in the presence of Putin and Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev. The two oil giants also said they would cooperate in marketing and sales of oil, gas and oil products.

Rosneft has shown interest in joining the development of the Apsheron gas field in the Caspian Sea, whereas Russia's largest privately held oil company, LUKoil, is participating in the development of the Shah Deniz gas field in the Caspian Sea and owns a network of gasoline-filling stations in Azerbaijan.

LUKoil CEO Vagit Alekperov is accompanying Putin on his visit to Azerbaijan, just as Rosneft chief Sechin is.

Last year, Azerbaijan delivered 1.55 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Russia.

Bilateral interaction is set to be expanded in the military and technical sphere, and border activities and between the two countries' emergencies ministries. Experts polled by RIA Novosti have said Moscow has yet failed to make Baku its ally rather than partner.

Military and Emergencies Cooperation

Azerbaijani President Aliyev told reporters after a meeting with Putin that Moscow and Baku planned to continue military and technical collaboration.

According to Aliyev, his country's defense industry cooperation with Russia is worth $4 billion and keeps growing. Azerbaijan is among the top buyers of Russian arms and other military equipment, which, Aliyev said, is considered the best in the world.

The two countries' emergencies ministries signed a cooperation plan for 2013-2015, and a new program to train Azerbaijani emergencies staff will soon be worked out, a Russian ministry spokeswoman said.

Nagorno-Karabakh

Putin and Aliyev also touched upon the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia have been strained for over two decades, since the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly ethnic Armenian region, first erupted in 1988. The region then claimed independence from Azerbaijan to join Armenia.

''During the talks we touched upon urgent international issues, including, of course, the Nagorno-Karabakh issue,'' Putin said. ''Russia has been actively contributing to the soonest settlement of the conflict, which is only possible through political means.''

Aliyev said the conflict may only be solved on the basis of international law.

More than 30,000 people are estimated to have died on both sides between 1988 and 1994, when a ceasefire was agreed. Nagorno-Karabakh has remained in Armenian control, and tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia have persisted.

The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh is mediated by the OSCE Minsk Group, which comprises the United States, Russia and France.

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 20:32

President Obama is golfing today on Martha's Vineyard. The foursome is made up of the following individuals, according to the White House pool reporter:

Per the WH, the president's golf partners are:

Jim Kim, president of the World Bank

Brian Roberts, chief executive of Comcast.

Ron Kirk, former US Trade Representative.

Comcast owns NBC and MSNBC.

Beaches near Fukushima plant still open despite contamination

Fukushima plant spilling contaminated water into the sea 'for years' - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Fukushima now in state of emergency, leaking 300 tons of radioactive water into the ocean daily

Fukushima now in state of emergency, leaking 300 tons of radioactive water into the ocean daily

Sir Rod's Analysis

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Source: Weasel Zippers

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 03:02

Killing Ibrahim al-Asiri would be huge.

Via Free Beacon:

A Saudi national known to be a key al Qaeda bomb maker was wounded during a U.S.-led drone strike in Yemen, according to a Yemeni news report.

Ibrahim al Asiri, the bomb maker, was targeted during a missile strike launched from a U.S.-operated armed drone in southern Yemen that killed two other al Qaeda terrorists, the online Yemeni news outlet Al Watan reported Sunday.

A U.S. official had no public comment but urged caution regarding claims that al Asiri was dead.

The drone attack took place in Yemen's southernmost Lahij Governorate that borders the Gulf of Aden. Covert, U.S. military-operated drones carried out the strike. The United States operates a drone base located in southern Saudi Arabia.

According to the Al Watan report, photos of the drone strike victims showed one man whose facial features matched al Asiri, who was said to have been severely wounded.

Al Asiri is one of the most wanted terrorists and was behind at least two unsuccessful plots to blow up airliners.

Al Watan quoted eyewitnesses as saying the drone strike Saturday was carried out against a passenger car that heard the drone and sought refuge under a bridge. However, before the passengers could get out of the car, a missile struck the vehicle and destroyed it.

After seeing that the missile had not hit the passengers, the drone fired three more missiles against four people who had fled from the car.

Keep reading'...

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Source: aangirfan

Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:26

Ibrahim Asiri has been attempting to design bombs to be implanted inside a bomber's body.Asiri reportedly invented the 'suppository bomb'.One US official told Newsweek about a bomb to be inserted in the terrorist's 'love handle'. Asiri of the CIAAsiri reportedly equipped his 23-year-old brother, Abdullah, with a 'suppository bomb'.

Abdullah then attempted to kill Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, a senior Saudi interior minister who has led a programme in Saudi Arabia to encourage CIA-terrorists to reform.

Abdullah al-Asiri

"Abdullah gained a private audience with Prince Muhammad, detonating the device when he entered his office.

"It killed Abdullah but missed the prince... Security sources later said Abdullah's own body mass had deflected the charge upwards rather than outwards."

The CIA's Umar Farouk Abdulmutallib "attempted to detonate an Asiri-made bomb on a flight over Detroit" (ABC/EPA)Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri (Aseery) is alleged to be the bomb maker in:(1) The failed attempt to kill Saudi counter-terrorism chief Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in August 2009

(2) The failed Christmas bombing by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Underpants Bomber.

The al-Qaeda 'underpants' bomber was working for CIA, according to the Telegraph

(U.S. eyeing Saudi-born bombmaker in parcel bomb plot / Yemen parcel bombmaker believed to be al Qaeda terrorist Ibrahim ...)

Asiri, whose father was in the Saudi military.

According to the Telegraph (UK):

Asiri can now make bombs that can pass undetected through airport security.

Yemen's hunt for master bomber In Yemen "a weak, corrupt and cash-starved central government is pitted against one of the most sophisticated and well-resourced al-Qaeda (CIA militia) franchises on the planet.

"America only yesterday called off an unprecedented terrorism alert triggered by an intercepted conversation betweenAyman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda, and Nasser al-Wuhaysi, the commander of the terrorist movement's Yemen affiliate."Yemen's hunt for master bomber

Ayman al-Zawahiri, who works for the US government, and who was granted US residence.Ayman al-Zawahiri is an Egyptian, 'a crypto-Jew', and the leader of al Qaeda.Al-Zawahiri joined the Muslim Brotherhood, a tool of the British and later of the CIA.In Pakistan he was helped by the CIA to get arms, training and money for the Mujahideen.

The CIA gave him and his accomplices new identities and new passports.

Al-Zawahiri's brother Muhammad helped the CIA in Bosnia and Croatia.In 1993, al-Zawahiri traveled to the United States and met many people in California.In 1996, he was helping the CIA in Chechnya.

According to January 2000 U.S. Congressional testimony, al-Zawahiri was granted U.S. residence by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

aangirfan: USA BEHIND MASSACRE IN EGYPT?Anwar Al-Awlaki is a Yemeni and a top man in al Qaeda.Anwar Al-Awlaki was born in the USA, was once a chaplain at George Washington University, and most likely is an agent of the CIA.On 21st October 2010, it was reported that Al Qaeda's Anwar Al-Awlaki was 'invited to the Pentagon for lunch after 9 11'.

In 1996 and in 1997, Al-Awlaki was arrested in San Diego for soliciting prostitutes.[14][38][58][59]

Al-Awlaki studied at George Washington University which is known for having close ties to the intelligence community. (Anwar al-Awlaki and 'CIA Islam')

Fox News says it has documents revealing how Anwar Al-Awlaki, a top man in al Qaeda, met high-ranking US military personnel just months after the 9 11 atrocities.

The 'crypto-Jew' Osama bin Laden came from Yemen which was at one time a Jewish state.

According to the documents, Awlaki was taken to the U.S. Department of Defense's headquarters, to have lunch, in the immediate aftermath of the 9 11 attacks.

In an FBI interview, conducted after the Fort Hood shooting in November last year, a Defense Department employee told investigators that she helped to arrange the meeting with Awlaki.

Awlaki is American-born, and of Yemeni descent.

Awlaki was apparently interviewed at least four times by the FBI in the week after the September 11 attacks because of his links to three 'hijackers', Nawaf al-Hazmi,Khalid al-Mihdhar and Hani Hanjour who were allegedly aboard Flight 77 that 'crashed into the Pentagon'.

He was also linked to the alleged Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan.

Awlaki, a former Muslim chaplain at George Washington University, is now believed to be in Yemen.

In Yemen, he is said to have met with the 'Christmas Day bomber' Farouk Abdulmutallab.

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Source: Weasel Zippers

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 03:05

So we already know how this is going to end.

Via WaPo:

On Friday, President Barack Obama promised to appoint an ''independent group'' of ''outside experts'' to review the government's surveillance programs.

Today, the president formally ordered the formation of this group, giving us a sense forjust how independent the group would be. The announcement doesn't inspire confidence that the president is interested in truly independent scrutiny of the nation's surveillance programs.

The panel will be chosen by, and report to, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Clapper famously answered ''no sir'' when Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked whether the NSA collects information about millions of Americans. Clapper has since conceded that this answer was ''clearly erroneous.''

And there are other signs that the group won't turn out quite the way the president described it on Friday. Friday's speech talked about the need for input from outside experts with independent points of view. The president made no mention of the need for outsiders or independent viewpoints in his memo to Clapper.

Keep reading'...

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Source: Weasel Zippers

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:57

Is this part of the threat that closed the embassies, the fear that our own weapons would be used against us? Joe Di Genova, who was a federal prosecutor, also notes that the President mentioned the sealed indictment to make it appear as though he was doing something, but violated a court order to reveal the sealed indictment.

Via Breitbart:

On August 12, Joe DiGenova, attorney for one of the Benghazi whistleblowers, told Washington D.C.'s WMAL that one of the reasons people have remained tight-lipped about Benghazi is because 400 U.S. missiles were ''diverted to Libya'' and ended up being stolen and falling into ''the hands of some very ugly people.''

DiGenova represents Benghazi whistleblower Mark Thompson. He told WMAL that he ''does not know whether [the missiles] were at the annex, but it is clear the annex was somehow involved in the distribution of those missiles.''

He claimed his information ''comes from a former intelligence official who stayed in constant contact with people in the special ops and intelligence community.'' He said the biggest concern right now is finding those missiles before they can be put to use. ''They are worried, specifically according to these sources, about an attempt to shoot down an airliner,'' he claimed.

On August 4, Breitbart News covered a report in The Telegraph that said 35 CIA operatives were working in Benghazi when the attack against the consulate took place. The Telegraph claimed these operatives were allegedly in an ''annex near the consulate [working] on a project to supply missiles from Libyan armories to Syrian Rebels.''

Months earlier, following then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's February 7 testimony on Capitol Hill about the Benghazi attacks, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) suggested that one of the causes behind the terrorist attack ''may have been that there was a gun running operation going on in Benghazi, leaving Libya and going to Turkey and [distributing] arms to the [Syrian] rebels.''

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Thu, 15 Aug 2013 12:45

@ tigerwolf no problems, the NSA will have his calls monitored and I am fully confident that the inquiry will follow those leads and bring down the whole Synogogue of Satan as a result..... one word, NOT.(thats excellent analyses on that vid - btw it required me to alow scripts (NoScripts, Firefox, Ubuntu)) and all other videos on this site have not required it...I thought at first the language was from the OOmah Poompah's from the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory aka pied piper of hamlyn. still a yid made it and starred in it.Inonly guessed tha mde it, but surprise surprisehttp://www.imdb.com/name/nm0835799/?ref_=tt_ov_drmel stewart born stuart solomon.I'm reading Collins syagogue of satan at the moment.www.new-moon.org/TheSynagogueOfSatanByAndrewCarringtonHitchcock.pdf(btw I am not getting into futile technical arguments here, just putting out some possibilities, I dont proclaim to know a lot in expert matters, and I could spend another hour looking up some magnesium fires and compare to this one, the bottom line remains, the lies lies lies and the power mongering that loves nothing better than goys bickering - Monty Pythons Peoples Front of Palestine vs the Peoples Palestinian Front).

ok, one video, 1955 lemans, wiki page says they fed magnesium fuelled fire with water prolonging it. looks yellow to me.

better still, lucky no palm trees were in the way. ok two videos. less boring than the Lightning McQueen version.short video, might be good background for the serious researchers here.

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Source: Weasel Zippers

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 03:05

Liberal elitists hanging with fellow liberal elitists, or as it is commonly known, hell.

Via Weekly Standard:

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama attended a cocktail party this evening at the Martha's Vineyard home of National Public Radio host and special correspondent Michele Norris, according to the White House pool report. Norris's husband, Broderick Johnson, is a lobbyist who worked on Obama's 2012 reelection campaign.

The pool report reads:

West Tisbury, Mass.

Motorcade was on the move again at 5:46 pm. About 10 minutes later POTUS arrived at a cocktail party at the home of Broderick Johnson, who was an adviser on the Obama 2012 campaign, and his wife, Michele Norris Johnson. FLOTUS is also at the cocktail party.

No sighting of the first couple. Pool vans pulled off on side of the road while the rest of the motorcade turned onto Nat's Farm Lane.

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Source: VK: Home

Thu, 15 Aug 2013 12:24

OPINIE - Peter de Waard '' 15/08/13, 13:51

(C) epa. Nobelprijswinnaar Paul Krugman.

column Dus Nederland doet alles fout, vindt Nobelprijswinnar Paul Krugman. Hij ziet nogal een hoop gemakkelijk over het hoofd, schrijft Volkskrant-columnist Peter de Waard.

Het grote voordeel van een Nobelprijswinnaar is dat hij zijn standpunten niet hoeft te onderbouwen omdat hij de wijsheid in pacht heeft. Dat geldt zeker voor de Amerikaan Paul Krugman. Als een overtuigd keynesiaan is hij 's werelds populairste economische roeptoeter geworden in een tijd dat iedereen zich van de regen in de drup lijkt te bezuinigen.

Deze week schreef hij op het weblog van The New York Times dat 'Belgi economisch beter wordt geleid dan Nederland omdat het niet wordt geleid'. De bestuurlijke verlamming bij de zuiderburen door de taalstrijd werkt in zijn ogen beter dan de eensgezinde vastberadenheid in Nederland om precies het verkeerde te doen.

Krugman reageerde hiermee op een artikel van de Britse econoom Simon Wren-Lewis die betoogt dat de opkomst van extreem-linkse (SP) en -rechtse partijen (PVV) in onder meer Nederland het automatische gevolg is van gebrek aan verzet tegen de bezuinigingen van de 'respectabele' middenpartijen. Hierdoor wordt een uitlaatklep gezocht voor groeiende ontevredenheid. 'Het overheidsbestuur in Nederland sinds het begin van de crisis is precies wat 's werelds Zeer Toegewijde Mensen zich zullen wensen: het hele politieke centrum heeft zich voorgenomen om het Juiste Te Doen.'

OnderzoekUitgebreid veldonderzoek heeft Krugman hiervoor niet gedaan. Hij zet drie indicatoren op een rij en concludeert dat die eigenlijk niet zo veel verschillen. Nederland betaalt minder rente op de staatsschuld maar ziet op dit moment de werkloosheid sneller toenemen.

Krugman heeft zich in zijn pleidooi voor politieke apathie niet verdiept in de specifieke problemen die Nederland op dit moment heeft om de hypotheek- en pensioenmarkt te hervormen. Het huidige kabinet heeft het H-woord laten vallen - iets wat geen partij daarvoor in meer dan een eeuw durfde - en heeft daardoor het land in grote onzekerheid gebracht. Dat is verder versterkt doordat de huidige regering geen meerderheidssteun heeft in de Eerste Kamer. Daarnaast heeft Nederland het beste pensioenstelsel ter wereld, maar aanpassingen zijn onontkoombaar.

Voor Krugman zijn dat details waarin de Nobelprijswinnaar zich niet wenst te verdiepen. Ook ziet hij nogal gemakkelijk over het hoofd dat in Belgi ook extremistische partijen zijn. Het Vlaams Belang en de Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie zijn in sommige opzichten nog extremer dan de PVV en de SP. En ten slotte vergeet hij dat Nederland en Belgi tegenwoordig allebei deels vanuit hetzelfde Brussel worden bestuurd.

Krugman sloeg onlangs een uitnodiging af om naar Nederland te komen. Hij vond de honorering te laag. Hij blijkt nu deel te nemen aan een discussiebijeenkomst met collega Carmen Reinhart die in november wordt gehouden in Amsterdam. Eigenlijk zou hij zijn veldwerk moeten doen in een boetekleed dat soms zelfs een Nobelprijswinnaar niet zou misstaan.

Peter de Waard is redacteur van de Volkskrant, en schrijft elke dag een column onder de titel 'De Kwestie' Reageren? p.dewaard@volkskrant.nl

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 10:59

Soon after the 10th anniversary of the foundation bearing his name, Bill Clinton met with a small group of aides and two lawyers from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Two weeks of interviews with Clinton Foundation executives and former employees had led the lawyers to some unsettling conclusions.

The review echoed criticism of Mr. Clinton's early years in the White House: For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.

And concern was rising inside and outside the organization about Douglas J. Band, a onetime personal assistant to Mr. Clinton who had started a lucrative corporate consulting firm '-- which Mr. Clinton joined as a paid adviser '-- while overseeing the Clinton Global Initiative, the foundation's glitzy annual gathering of chief executives, heads of state, and celebrities.

The review set off more than a year of internal debate, and spurred an evolution in the organization that included Mr. Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, taking on a dominant new role as the family grappled with the question of whether the foundation '-- and its globe-spanning efforts to combat AIDS, obesity and poverty '-- would survive its founder.

Video | Clinton Calls to Protect Voting Rights Speaking at an American Bar Association conference, Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized a Supreme Court ruling that allows states to change election laws without advance federal approval.

Now those efforts are taking on new urgency. In the coming weeks, the foundation, long Mr. Clinton's domain since its formation in 2001, will become the nerve center of Hillary Rodham Clinton's increasingly busy public life.

This fall, Mrs. Clinton and her staff will move into offices at the foundation's new headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, occupying two floors of the Time-Life Building. Amid speculation about her 2016 plans, Mrs. Clinton is adding major new initiatives on women, children and jobs to what has been renamed the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

Worried that the foundation's operating revenues depend too heavily on Mr. Clinton's nonstop fund-raising, the three Clintons are embarking on a drive to raise an endowment of as much as $250 million, with events already scheduled in the Hamptons and London. And after years of relying on Bruce R. Lindsey, the former White House counsel whose friendship with Mr. Clinton stretches back decades, to run the organization while living part-time in Arkansas, the family has hired a New York-based chief executive with a background in management consulting.

''We're trying to institutionalize the foundation so that it will be here long after the lives of any of us,'' Mr. Lindsey said. ''That's our challenge and that is what we are trying to address.''

Bill Clinton and his daughter, Chelsea, in South Africa last week.

Joao Silva / The New York Times

But the changing of the guard has aggravated long-simmering tensions within the former first family's inner circle as the foundation tries to juggle the political and philanthropic ambitions of a former president, a potential future president, and their increasingly visible daughter.

And efforts to insulate the foundation from potential conflicts have highlighted just how difficult it can be to disentangle the Clintons' charity work from Mr. Clinton's moneymaking ventures and Mrs. Clinton's political future, according to interviews with more than two dozen former and current foundation employees, donors and advisers to the family. Nearly all of them declined to speak for attribution, citing their unwillingness to alienate the Clinton family.

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Last Thursday, Mr. Clinton arrived two hours late to an exuberant welcome at a health clinic about 60 miles north of Johannesburg. Children in zebra-striped loincloths sang as Mr. Clinton and Ms. Clinton made their entrance, and the former president enthusiastically explained how his foundation had helped the South African government negotiate large reductions in the price of drugs that halt the progress of HIV. Aaron Motsoaledi, South Africa's minister of health, heaped praise on the effort. ''Because of your help we are able to treat three and a half times more people than we used to,'' he told the crowd.

The project is typical of the model pioneered by the Clinton Foundation, built around dozens of partnerships with private companies, governments, or other nonprofit groups. Instead of handing out grants, the foundation recruits donors and advises them on how best to deploy their money or resources, from helping Procter & Gamble donate advanced water-purification packets to developing countries to working with credit card companies to expand the volume of low-cost loans offered to poor inner city residents.

The foundation, which has 350 employees in 180 countries, remains largely powered by Mr. Clinton's global celebrity and his ability to connect corporate executives, A-listers and government officials. On this month's Africa trip, Mr. Clinton was accompanied by the actors Dakota Fanning and Jesse Eisenberg and the son of the New York City mayoral candidate John A. Catsimatidis, a longtime donor.

For most of the foundation's existence, its leadership has been dominated by loyal veterans of the Clintons' political lives. Ira C. Magaziner, who was a Rhodes scholar with Mr. Clinton and ran Mrs. Clinton's failed attempt at a health care overhaul in the 1990s, is widely credited as the driving force behind the foundation's largest project, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which, among other efforts, negotiates bulk purchasing agreements and price discounts on lifesaving medicines.

Mr. Band, who arrived at the White House in 1995 and worked his way up to become Mr. Clinton's closest personal aide, standing behind the president on golf courses and the global stage, helped build the foundation's fund-raising structure. He conceived of and for many years helped run the Clinton Global Initiative, the annual conference that draws hundreds of business leaders and heads of state to New York City where attendees are pushed to make specific philanthropic commitments.

Today, big-name companies vie to buy sponsorships at prices of $250,000 and up, money that has helped subsidize the foundation's annual operating costs. Last year, the foundation and two subsidiaries had revenues of more than $214 million.

Yet the foundation's expansion has also been accompanied by financial problems. In 2007 and 2008, the foundation also found itself competing against Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign for donors amid a recession. Millions of dollars in contributions intended to seed an endowment were diverted to other programs, creating tension between Mr. Magaziner and Mr. Band. The foundation piled up a $40 million deficit during those two years, according to tax returns. Last year, it ran more than $8 million in the red.

Amid those shortfalls, the foundation has sometimes catered to donors and celebrities who gave money in ways that raised eyebrows in the low-key nonprofit world. In 2009, during a Clinton Global Initiative gathering at the University of Texas at Austin, the foundation purchased a first-class ticket for the actress Natalie Portman, a special guest, who brought her beloved Yorkie, according to two former foundation employees.

In interviews, foundation officials partly blamed the 2008 recession and difficulties in getting donors to provide operating support rather than restricted grants for specific programs for the deficits.

But others criticized Mr. Magaziner, who is widely seen within the foundation as impulsive and lacking organizational skills. On one occasion, Mr. Magaziner dispatched a team of employees to fly around the world for months gathering ideas for a climate change proposal that never got off the ground. Another time, he ignored a report '-- which was commissioned at significant expense from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company '-- on how the foundation could get involved in forestry initiatives.

Mr. Magaziner's management style and difficulty keeping projects within budget were also raised in discussions that surrounded the 2011 Simpson Thacher review. (One person who attended a meeting with Mr. Magaziner recalled his lying on a conference room table in the middle of the meeting because of terrible back spasms, snapping at a staff member.)

Mr. Band repeatedly urged Mr. Clinton to fire Mr. Magaziner, according to people briefed on the matter. Mr. Clinton refused, confiding in aides that despite Mr. Magaziner's managerial weaknesses, he was a visionary with good intentions. The former president, according to one person who knows them both, ''thinks Ira is brilliant '-- and brilliant people get away with a lot in Clinton world.''

Indeed, by then, Mr. Magaziner had persuaded Mr. Clinton and the foundation to spin the health initiative off into a separate organization, with Mr. Magaziner as its chief executive and the Clinton Foundation appointing a majority of its board members. The financial problems continued. In 2010 and 2011, the first two years when the health initiative operated as a stand-alone organization, it ran annual shortfalls of more than $4 million. A new chief financial officer, hired in 2010, left eight months later.

A foundation official said the health initiative had only three chief financial officers in 10 years and that its financial problem was a common one in the nonprofit world: For all the grant money coming in '-- more than $160 million in 2011 '-- Mr. Magaziner had also had difficulty raising money for operating costs. But by the end of 2011, the health initiative had expanded its board, adding two seats. Chelsea Clinton took one.

Growing Ventures

As the foundation grew, so did the outside business ventures pursued by Mr. Clinton and several of his aides.

None have drawn more scrutiny in Clinton circles than Teneo, a firm co-founded in 2009 by Mr. Band, described by some as a kind of surrogate son to Mr. Clinton. Aspiring to merge corporate consulting, public relations and merchant banking in a single business, Mr. Band poached executives from Wall Street, recruited other Clinton aides to join as employees or advisers and set up shop in a Midtown office formerly belonging to one of the country's top hedge funds.

By 2011, the firm had added a third partner, Declan Kelly, a former State Department envoy for Mrs. Clinton. And Mr. Clinton had signed up as a paid adviser to the firm.

Teneo worked on retainer, charging monthly fees as high as $250,000, according to current and former clients. The firm recruited clients who were also Clinton Foundation donors, while Mr. Band and Mr. Kelly encouraged others to become new foundation donors. Its marketing materials highlighted Mr. Band's relationship with Mr. Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative, where Mr. Band sat on the board of directors through 2011 and remains an adviser. Some Clinton aides and foundation employees began to wonder where the foundation ended and Teneo began.

Those worries intensified after the collapse of MF Global, the international brokerage firm led by Jon S. Corzine, a former governor of New Jersey, in the fall of 2011. The firm had been among Teneo's earliest clients, and its collapse over bad European investments '-- while paying $125,000 a month for the firm's public relations and financial advice '-- drew Teneo and the Clintons unwanted publicity.

Mr. Clinton ended his advisory role with Teneo in March 2012, after an article appeared in The New York Post suggesting that Mrs. Clinton was angry over the MF Global controversy. A spokesman for Mr. Clinton denied the report. But in a statement released afterward, Mr. Clinton announced that he would no longer be paid by Teneo.

He also praised Mr. Band effusively, crediting him with keeping the foundation afloat and expressing hopes that Mr. Band would continue to advise the Global Initiative.

''I couldn't have accomplished half of what I have in my post-presidency without Doug Band,'' Mr. Clinton said in the statement.

Even that news release was a source of controversy within the foundation, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. Mr. Band helped edit the statement, which other people around the Clintons felt gave him too much credit for the foundation's accomplishments. (The quotation now appears as part of Mr. Band's biography on the Teneo Web site.)

Mr. Band left his paid position with the foundation in late 2010, but has remained involved with C.G.I., as have a number of Teneo clients, like Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical and UBS Americas. Standard Chartered, a British financial services company that paid a $340 million fine to New York regulators last year to settle charges that it had laundered money from Iran, is a Teneo client and a sponsor of the 2012 global initiative.

Last year, Coca-Cola's chief executive, Muhtar Kent, won a coveted spot on the dais with Mr. Clinton, discussing the company's partnership with another nonprofit to use its distributors to deliver medical goods to patients in Africa. (A Coca-Cola spokesman said that the company's sponsorship of foundation initiatives long predated Teneo and that the firm plays no role in Coca-Cola's foundation work.)

In March 2012, David Crane, the chief executive of NRG, an energy company, led a widely publicized trip with Mr. Clinton to Haiti, where they toured green energy and solar power projects that NRG finances through a $1 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative.

Officials said the foundation has established clear guidelines for the Clinton Global Initiative to help prevent any favoritism or special treatment of particular donors or sponsors.

Teneo was not the only worry: other events thrust the foundation into internal turmoil. In 2011, a wave of midlevel program staff members departed, reflecting the frustration of much of the foundation's policy personnel with the old political hands running the organization. Around the time of the Simpson Thacher review, Mr. Lindsey suffered a stroke, underscoring concerns about the foundation's line of succession. John D. Podesta, a chief of staff in Mr. Clinton's White House, stepped in for several months as temporary chief executive.

While much attention has focused on Mrs. Clinton's emerging role within the foundation, advisers to the family say her daughter's growing involvement could prove more critical in the years ahead. After years of pursuing other career paths, including working at McKinsey & Company and a hedge fund, Ms. Clinton, 33, has begun to assert herself as a force within the foundation. Her perspective is shaped far more than her parents' by her time in the world of business, and she is poised to play a significant role in shaping the foundation's future, particularly if Mrs. Clinton chooses to run for president.

She formally joined the foundation's board in 2011, marking her growing role there '-- and the start of intensifying tensions between her and Mr. Band. Several people close to the Clintons said that she became increasingly concerned with the negative impact Mr. Band's outside business might have on her father's work and that she cited concerns raised during the internal review about potential conflicts of interest involving Teneo.

It was Ms. Clinton who suggested that the newly installed chief executive, Eric Braverman, be considered for the job during a nearly two-year search. A friend and a former colleague from McKinsey, Mr. Braverman, 38, had helped the Clintons with philanthropic projects in Haiti after the earthquake there. And his hiring coincided with Ms. Clinton's appointment as the vice chairwoman of the foundation board, where she will bear significant responsibility for steering her family's philanthropy, both in the causes it tackles and in the potential political and financial conflicts it must avoid.

Ms. Clinton has also grown worried that the foundation she stood to inherit would collapse without her father, who turns 67 next week. Mr. Clinton, who had quadruple-bypass surgery in 2004 and no longer eats meat or dairy products, talks frequently about his own mortality.

Mr. Catsimatidis said Ms. Clinton ''has to learn how to deal with the whole world because she wants to follow in the footsteps of her father and her mother.''

Shifting the Emphasis

Over the years, the foundation has dived into virtually any cause that sparked Mr. Clinton's interest: childhood obesity in the United States, sustainable farming in South America, mentoring entrepreneurs, saving elephants from poaching, and more. That list will shift soon as Mrs. Clinton and Chelsea build their staffs to focus on issues including economically empowering women and combating infant mortality.

In the coming months, as Mrs. Clinton mulls a 2016 presidential bid, the foundation could also serve as a base for her to home in on issues and to build up a stable of trusted staff members who could form the core of a political campaign.

Mrs. Clinton's staff at the foundation's headquarters includes Maura Pally, a veteran aide who advised her 2008 presidential campaign and worked at the State Department, and Madhuri Kommareddi, a former policy aide to President Obama.

Dennis Cheng, Mrs. Clinton's deputy chief of protocol at the State Department and a finance director of her presidential campaign, will oversee the endowment drive, which some of the Clintons' donors already describe as a dry run for 2016.

And Mrs. Clinton's personal staff of roughly seven people '-- including Huma Abedin, wife of the New York mayoral candidate Anthony D. Weiner '-- will soon relocate from a cramped Washington office to the foundation's headquarters. They will work on organizing Mrs. Clinton's packed schedule of paid speeches to trade groups and awards ceremonies and assist in the research and writing of Mrs. Clinton's memoir about her time at the State Department, to be published by Simon & Schuster next summer.

Lydia Polgreen contributed reporting, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

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Tue, 13 Aug 2013 04:04

WASHINGTON '-- Even while rapidly expanding its electronic surveillance around the world, the National Security Agency has lobbied inside the government to deploy the equivalent of a ''Star Wars'' defense for America's computer networks, designed to intercept cyberattacks before they could cripple power plants, banks or financial markets.

But administration officials say the plan, championed by Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency and head of the Pentagon's Cyber Command, has virtually no chance of moving forward given the backlash against the N.S.A. over the recent disclosures about its surveillance programs.

Senior agency officials concede that much of the technology needed to filter malicious software, known as malware, by searching incoming messages for signs of programs designed to steal data, or attack banks or energy firms, is strikingly similar to the technology the N.S.A. already uses for surveillance.

''The plan was always a little vague, at least as Keith described it, but today it may be Snowden's biggest single victim,'' one senior intelligence official said recently, referring to Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who released documents revealing details of many of the agency's surveillance programs.

''Whatever trust was there is now gone,'' the official added. ''I mean, who would believe the N.S.A. when it insists it is blocking Chinese attacks but not using the same technology to read your e-mail?''

On Friday, the N.S.A. reported for the first time that it ''touches about 1.6 percent'' of all the traffic carried on the Internet each day. In a statement, it said it closely examines only a tiny fraction of that information. But General Alexander's plan would put the agency, or Internet-service providers acting on its behalf, in the position of examining a far larger percentage of the world's information flows.

Under this proposal, the government would latch into the giant ''data pipes'' that feed the largest Internet service providers in the United States, companies like A.T.&T. and Verizon. The huge volume of traffic that runs through those pipes, particularly e-mails, would be scanned for signs of anything from computer servers known for attacks on the United States or for stealing information from American companies. Other ''metadata'' would be inspected for evidence of malicious software.

''It's defense at network speed,'' General Alexander told a Washington security-research group recently, according to participants. ''Because you have only milliseconds.''

This summer, the N.S.A. has begun assembling scores of new cyber ''offense'' and ''defense'' teams, the agency's most concrete step toward preparing the Pentagon and intelligence agencies for a new era of computer conflict. Erecting a national cyberdefense is a key element of that plan. At an interagency meeting that discussed the flood of cyberattacks directed daily at American networks, from Chinese efforts to steal corporate secrets to Iranian efforts to cripple financial institutions, General Alexander said, ''I can't defend the country until I'm into all the networks,'' according to other officials who were present.

The appeal of such a program is its seeming simplicity: The worst malware could be blocked before it reaches companies, universities or individual users, many of whom may be using outdated virus protections, or none at all. Normal commercial virus programs are always running days, or weeks, behind the latest attacks '-- and the protection depends on users' loading the latest versions on their computers.

The government has been testing a model for a national defense against cyberattack with major defense contractors including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon. Early results were disappointing, but participants in the program '-- the specific details of which are heavily classified '-- say they are getting significantly improved results. Each company in the defense industrial base program now shares data on the kinds of attacks it is seeing, anonymously, with other participating companies.

But for the N.S.A., which is building a target list of servers used by the most aggressive cyberattackers, monitoring all Internet traffic would also be an intelligence bonanza. It would give it a real-time way to watch computer servers around the world, and focus more quickly on those it suspects are the breeding ground for governments or private hackers preparing attacks.

Even before the Snowden revelations, General Alexander had encountered opposition. Top officials of the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for domestic defense of the Internet, complained that N.S.A. monitoring would overly militarize America's approach to defending the Internet, rather than making sure users took the primary responsibility for protecting their systems.

The deputy secretary of defense, Ashton B. Carter, described in speeches over the past year an alternative vision in which the government would step in to defend America's networks only as a last line of defense. He compares the Pentagon's proper role in defending cyberattacks to its ''Noble Eagle'' operation, in which it intercepts aircraft that appear threatening only after efforts by the airlines to identify the passengers and by the Transportation Safety Administration to search passengers and luggage have failed.

It appears unlikely that, with the administration divided, and faced with a backlash against the N.S.A. in Congress, any proposal for a formal plan for national cyberdefense will be submitted soon. Members of the Intelligence Committees in the House and Senate said that they were only vaguely aware of General Alexander's plan, but that it would almost certainly require Congressional approval.

That is a fight the White House is not interested in having while it struggles to get a much more modest cybersecurity bill through Congress after years of arguments over privacy concerns and corporate America's fears that Washington will dictate how companies protect data and how much they must spend on new defenses. The bill failed last year, and passage this year appears in doubt.

Before the Snowden revelations, General Alexander's idea appeared to be gaining some ground because of concerns over the cyber-enabled Chinese theft of critical corporate secrets, including some designs for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Internal intelligence reports, based on N.S.A. analysis, attributed an attack on American banks to Iran's cybercorps, a unit of the Revolutionary Guards.

''After the Iranian attacks, we were looking at these ideas pretty hard,'' said a recently departed senior official in the Obama national security team, who like other officials declined to be identified because of the sensitivities of the government's discussions about building Internet defenses.

But this summer, the mood in Congress has changed. The White House only narrowly avoided a House vote to cut off the collection of metadata about telephone calls in the country. Suddenly a national debate emerged; along the way the N.S.A. admitted that until 2011 it had collected about 1 percent of all e-mails in the United States, until the program was canceled after being judged ineffective.

''Cyberissues usually change so rapidly because of the advance of technology,'' said Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University professor who worked in the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration.

''But the biggest change in the last year has been political: Public skepticism about U.S. cyberoperations is dramatically higher today, and it could result in political constraints that were off the table even a year ago.''

Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

New Orleans and U.S. in Standoff on Detentions

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Source: Dave Winer's linkblog feed

Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:33

Fake web traffic has long plagued the online publishing world, but Dr. Paul Barford, computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin, is claiming the problem might be worse than suspected. And it's costing some of the top online advertisers millions in wasted ad impressions.

Dr. Paul Barford is chief scientist at MdotLabs.Dr. Barford, who is also the chief scientist at startup MdotLabs, is slated to present a study at an Internet security symposium Wednesday in Washington, D.C., where he we will claim that 10 traffic networks are serving up more than 500 million invalid ad impressions a month.

"We estimate the cost to advertisers for this fraudulent traffic to be on the order of $180 million annually," he said in a statement in advance of the presentation.

Dr. Barford reached his conclusion by posing as a web publisher and signing up for several different traffic generation services, also called PPV networks, which he filtered through software that uses anomaly detection to identify fake website traffic.

The study comes as more publishers and advertisers are becoming aware of fake web traffic and taking steps to combat bots that are growing increasingly more sophisticated.

"We see bots playing games that we didn't see a few years ago," said Brian Pugh, a senior-VP of audience analytics at ComScore.

MdotLabs, the company that Dr. Barford co-founded this month, is among a number of firms that publishers, media agencies and advertisers use to identify bogus traffic. GroupM, for instance, employs the services of at least three such firms: Double Verify, Integral Ad Science and Spider.io. In February, the London-based Spider.io uncovered a cluster of more than 120,000 computers that had been infected by the Chameleon botnet, which was flooding websites with fake traffic.

Among the services firms such as MdotLabs offers is the ability for publishers to incorporate software onto their own sites for the purpose of weeding out fake traffic.

"From a publisher perspective, the platform allows them to differentiate themselves from lower-quality players and charge for higher-quality CPMs," said Timur Yarnall, the CEO and other co-founder of MdotLabs.

Estimates about the amount of overall fake web traffic varies. Mr. Yarnall claims that as much as 50% of all web traffic is fake -- which is likely on the high end.

ComScore has indicated that 36% of all traffic is non-human, though that includes certain bots -- such as those from Google -- which do not inflate ad impressions. The percentage has increased sharply from 2011, when it was just 6%. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of visitors to so-called "long-tail sites," which have an overall reach of less than 1.5% of total internet users, are creating fake ad impressions, according to Mr. Pugh. He said the percentage of fake visitors to large websites is far less.

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 18:51

LAS VEGAS Closing the curtains in your living room may not close the doors on potential hackers. At a demonstration Friday in Las Vegas, researchers showed an audience of children at Defcon Kids how a Samsung Smart TV can be hacked.So-called smart TVs have an operating system installed that is similar to a smartphone, which hosts third-party apps. People can browse the Internet, launch apps and take photos using their remote controls.

Hackers come clean on what's most at riskPresented by security engineers Aaron Grattafiori and Josh Yavor of iSEC Partners, the exploit works by inserting malicious JavaScript

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 18:50

iSEC Partners assists clients in improving the security of the software they develop or outsource. iSEC Partners' services help enterprises and product companies to improve security during project design, implementation, testing and once software is released or running in a production environment. Our recommendations help development teams understand the business and security implications of choices made when designing and developing a product or service.

Here is a selection of the services we can provide:

Application and Product Penetration TestingIdentification of security weaknesses through penetration testing with or without code reviewDemonstration of weaknesses as needed to validate findingsSimplified architecture review and threat modelingCharacterization of the impact of a successful attackRecommend solutions for addressing weaknessesThe application, protocol, or implementation's security posture is reportedUpon request, a public facing document explaining the test methodology and results can be providedApplication Design ReviewConduct a review of a system's designIdentify security implications of the designPerform threat modelingPerform a gap analysis between the design and industry best practicesEnumerate conflicts between business requirements and security considerations so informed trade offs are madeRecommend solutions for addressing security weaknessesCan be conducted prior to implementation, or once in productionApplication Code ReviewExamine sensitive areas of software codeIdentify security flaws including: race conditions, overflows, character set conversion problems, logical errors, bad assumptions, key management flaws, and cryptographic mistakesRecommend specific fixes and general coding practice improvements appropriate to the Client's environmentLead groups of developer through code review exercises to enhance the Client's ability to audit codeUpon request, a public facing document explaining the test methodology and results can be provided

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Source: WT news feed

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 00:26

Brazil has put off bidding for its ambitious high-speed train project, which will connect Rio de Janeiro and S£o Paulo, for at least one year after consortiums from Spain and Germany asked for the postponement.

Bernardo Figueiredo, the chairman of the state entity that will supervise the bidding, said the decision came after Brazilian authorities spoke with candidate consortiums from the three countries.

France's Alstom SA and state-owned railway company SNCF Group already had a bid prepared but Spain ''asked for more time,'' while Germany requested that the process be ''postponed for another year,'' said Figueiredo at a news conference on Monday.

Friday was the deadline for the consortiums to submit their bids. The winner was to have been announced on September 19.

Spain has two consortiums participating. One is formed by state rail operator Renfe and track manager Adif, with the private firms of high-speed train maker Talgo, ACS, Indra, Elecnor, Abengoa, Thales, Bombardier and Dimetronic. The second group is headed by CAF, which has not released the names of its partners.

Siemens AG leads the German consortium.

Transport Minister C(C)sar Borges said the 13-billion-euro project was still on track even though the bidding had been postponed. There are no plans to change the 511-kilometer route that will connect Brazil's two biggest cities and the inauguration date is still set for 2020, he said.

The high-speed train, the first to be built in Latin America, will have stops in six cities and a branch line to the city of Campinas, northwest of S£o Paulo. This is the third time the Brazilian government has postponed awarding the project, which was first announced in 2007. It is part of a $100-billion investment plan by President Dilma Rousseff to upgrade Brazil's roads, railways, airports and seaports through private concessions.

Spain's Public Works Ministry hopes to repeat the success it had in 2011 when the government of Saudi Arabia awarded a multi-billion-euro contract to build an AVE line connecting Mecca with Medina.

Following the July 24 Alvia train accident in Santiago de Compostela '' Spain's worst rail tragedy in 40 years '' concerns were raised on whether the incident would affect Spanish bids in Brazil. One of the conditions the Brazilian government set was that competing companies could not have had a rail accident on their records over the previous five years.

The cause of last month's accident is being placed on the driver of the train who was speeding through a sharp curve when the cars derailed, killing 79 people and injuring more than 150 other passengers.

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Source: The Guardian World News

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 03:10

The blaze in Lac M(C)gantic, Quebec, after a runaway trail hauling oil tankers crashed. Photograph: EPA

Canada's transportation agency is suspending the operating licence of the US-based rail company whose runaway oil train derailed and exploded in a Quebec town, killing 47 people.

The agency said on Tuesday it was taking away the certificate of fitness for the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway and its Canadian subsidiary, effective from 20 August.

The agency said it was not satisfied that the troubled company, which has filed for bankruptcy since the 6 July disaster, had demonstrated that its third-party liability insurance was adequate to keep operating.

The parked train, with 72 tankers of crude oil, was unattended when it began rolling and derailed in the center of Lac-M(C)gantic. Several tankers exploded, destroying 40 buildings. The company has blamed the man operating the train for failing to set enough handbrakes.

The agency said the disaster raised questions about the growing use of rail transport for oil, including important ones regarding the adequacy of third-party liability insurance coverage to deal with catastrophic events, especially for smaller railways.

"This was not a decision made lightly, as it affects the economies of communities along the railway, employees of MMA and MMAC, as well as the shippers who depend on rail services," said Geoff Hare, the agency's chief executive.

Messages left at the office of MMA chairman Ed Burkhardt by the Associated Press were not immediately returned.

In its bankruptcy filings the railway and its Canadian counterpart, Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Canada Co, cited debts to more than 200 creditors following the disaster.

Lac-M(C)gantic and the Quebec government have sent legal notices to the railway demanding it reimburse the town nearly $8m in environmental clean-up costs.

Pierre Arseneau, a union representative for MMA workers in Quebec, said he was disappointed the railway would lose its licence but he understood the importance of having sufficient insurance coverage. Arseneau, a member of the United Steelworkers, was concerned about the dozens of jobs at stake and hoped another operator would take over the railroad quickly.

Twenty-four of the railway's 75 employees in Quebec have already lost their jobs since the derailment but Arseneau feared the impact of the suspension could reach well beyond MMA if a solution was not found quickly. "It's also the whole economy of the region," Arseneau said. "There are lots of companies that depend on the railroad."

The Canadian decision had no immediate effect across the border because the severed rail line meant Maine shippers had to reroute traffic.

The US Surface Transportation Board could step in to appoint someone to operate the line if Montreal, Maine and Atlantic stopped rail service or if the service deteriorated, said Nate Moulton, rail director for Maine's transportation department.

MM&A had already announced its intention to sell the rail line to generate money to pay its debts, Moulton said.

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Source: The Local - Germany's news in English

Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:34

Photo: DPA

A record number of Germans are taking on second jobs with women the worst affected, according to government figures.

Published: 12 Aug 2013 14:32 CET

A record number of Germans are taking on second jobs, with women the worst affected, according to government figures.Latest figures show 2.66 million Germans are now working part time alongside their normal jobs, the national employment agency said on Monday.

The number of people taking on second jobs has doubled in less than ten years to 9.1 percent of workers, according to data from the last quarter of 2012.

There has been no sudden jump in the number of people with two jobs, rather, it is a long-term trend according to the employment agency.

A spokeswoman said: "There are seasonal variations, but in essence the number has been increasing slowly and continuously."

Women are the worst affected with 1.5 million working a second job compared to 1.1 million men.

Analysts blamed the rise on low wages whereas others said consumerism was to blame.

MP for left wing party Die Linke, Sabine Zimmermann said people were taking on the extra work out of ''pure financial need rather than voluntary'', the Welt newspaper reported.

dpa/The Local/tsb

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Archived Version

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 11:03

Spain and Italy both remain in recession. Photograph: Susana Vera/Reuters

A strong performance by Germany and France helped haul the battered eurozone out of recession in the three months to June.

Figures released in Brussels showed that the 17 nations using the single currency expanded by 0.3% in the second quarter of 2013.

The return to growth brings to an end six successive quarters of contraction but the data from Eurostat, the European's statistical agency, revealed a big disparity in growth rates and Ollie Rehn, Europe's economic commissioner, said it was too early to celebrate.

"Yes, this slightly more positive data is welcome '' but there is no room for any complacency whatsoever", Rehn said. "I hope there will be no premature, self-congratulatory statements suggesting 'the crisis is over'. For we all know that there are still substantial obstacles to overcome: the growth figures remain low and the tentative signs of growth are still fragile."

Financial markets had been expecting the eurozone to grow by 0.2% in the second quarter and the slightly stronger outcome was the result of the big two economies both exceeding forecasts. Germany, the eurozone's biggest economy, grew by 0.7% while France '' the second biggest '' grew by 0.5%.

But Italy and Spain both remained in recession. Spain's economy shrank by 0.1% percent on the quarter, while Italy posted a 0.2% decline. The Dutch economy also contracted by 0.2% but Portugal '' one of the three countries that required a financial bailout '' recorded the fastest growth of any eurozone country with 1.1% quarterly growth.

David Brown, of New View Economics said: "These are better than expected second-quarter GDP numbers from the eurozone, but it's nothing for the ECB to celebrate. After six quarters of unrelenting recession misery, the eurozone has finally broken back into positive growth. It is going to be a very long, hard haul back into sustainable, strong growth again.

"It is a tale of two very different economies. Germany is doing all the hard work in the vanguard of strong recovery as its 0.7% second-quarter GDP expansion showed. On the other side of the equation, the troubled eurozone economies are still mired down in the mud of deep recession risk."

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Archived Version

Mon, 12 Aug 2013 15:37

''Look into my eyes look into my eyes look into my eyes''

The third piece on EU under-the-radar Bailin capability I posted this morning has tempted quite a bit of leakage from the wood work. And some of it is dynamite.

A regular Slogger source writes to tell me that '''Derivatives'' can remain ''off-balance sheet'' under this ''resolution'' process. Thus the true nature of the problem is going to remain hidden.'

He quotes how Article 38 of the proposal uses this quite brazen but explosive phrase:

'Exceptionally and where there is a justified necessity to ensure the critical operations of theinstitution and its core business lines or financial stability (Article 38) the resolution authoritycould exclude derivatives' liabilities.'

Well damn me boys, there's the E word again. And we all know what that means. But specifically to the point, this part of the proposal will have come down from Count Draghula at the ECB himself: nobody since the start of this four year disaster has grasped the ability of non-netted derivatives to blow the entire banking system to smithereens quite like the Italian Galleon. Il conti Mario doesn't care if Spain splits into three parts, Italy has a revolution and the Greek population starves to death'....as long as the banking system survives. But the derivatives must be faced one day. And that day is always tomorrow.

Meanwhile, a Dutch Slogger has copied me on an email he sent to Nigel Farage this morning on the subject of a Bailin procedure that can circumnavigate the EU Parliament. He clearly grasps the eurojargon better than I do, writing to Nige that 'this legislation is being handled under the ''regulatory comitology procedure with scrutiny'', which means that it is automatically adopted if your Parliament does not oppose the draft'. Let's see what Farrago Man does with this. I'm happy to settle past differences and join forces to defeat a common enemy.

Earlier at The Slog: How an EU proposal can become law without a single MEP voting on it

In the UK, of course, the process is already real'...as in the Co-Op bailin that is strengstens verboten from debate in Westminster. Make your view equally strongly known to the legislature:

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Archived Version

Source: Federal Register Latest Entries

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 15:12

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (''OFAC'') is publishing the names of 5 individual(s) and 2 entity(-ies) whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to Executive Order 13581 of July 24, 2011, ''Blocking Property of Transnational Criminal Organizations.''

The designations by the Director of OFAC, pursuant to Executive Order 13581, of the 5 individual(s) and 2 entity(-ies) identified in this notice were effective on July 24, 2013.

Assistant Director, Sanctions Compliance and Evaluation, Office of Foreign Assets Control, Department of the Treasury, Washington, DC 20220, tel.: 202/622-2490.

This document and additional information concerning OFAC are available from OFAC's Web site (www.treas.gov/ofac). Certain general information pertaining to OFAC's sanctions programs is available via facsimile through a 24-hour fax-on-demand service, tel.: 202/622-0077.

On July 24, 2011, the President issued Executive Order 13581, ''Blocking Property of Transnational Criminal Organizations'' (the ''Order''), pursuant to, inter alia, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701-06). The Order was effective at 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on July 25, 2011. In the Order, the President declared a national emergency to deal with the threat that significant transnational criminal organizations pose to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.

Section 1 of the Order blocks, with certain exceptions, all property and interests in property that are in the United States, that come within the United States, or that are or come within the possession or control of any United States person, of persons listed in the Annex to the Order and of persons determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of State, to satisfy certain criteria set forth in the Order.

On July 24, 2013, the Director of OFAC, in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of State, designated, pursuant to one or more of the criteria set forth in subparagraphs (a)(ii)(A) through (a)(ii)(C) of Section 1 of the Order, 5 individual(s) and 2 entity(-ies) whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to the Order.

The listings for these individuals on OFAC's List of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons appear as follows:

1. DI LAURO, Marco; DOB 16 Jun 1980; POB Naples, Italy (individual) [TCO].

2. RICCIO, Mario (a.k.a. RICCIO, Mariano); DOB 28 Jun 1991; POB Mugnano di Napoli, Italy (individual) [TCO].

3. MENNETTA, Antonio; DOB 03 Jan 1985; POB Naples, Italy (individual) [TCO].

4. ABETE, Mariano; DOB 03 Apr 1991; POB Naples, Italy (individual) [TCO].

5. GUARINO, Rosario; DOB 26 Jun 1983; POB Naples, Italy (individual) [TCO].

1. AVUAR OOO (a.k.a. AVUAR LLC), 12/120, Komn 51, Ulitsa Demokraticheskaya, Samara 443031, Russia; National ID No. 1036300456213 (Russia); alt. National ID No. 14565711 (Russia); alt. National ID No. 6315565439 (Russia) [TCO].

2. GUGA ARM SRO (a.k.a. GUGA ARM LTD), Dr. Davida Bechera 907/27, Karlovy Vary 36001, Czech Republic; National ID No. 27994783 (Czech Republic) [TCO].

Dated: July 24, 2013.

Adam J. Szubin,

Director, Office of Foreign Assets Control.

[FR Doc. 2013-19563 Filed 8-12-13; 8:45 am]

BILLING CODE 4811-AL-P

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Archived Version

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 00:02

We might be one step closer to an Internet-of-things reality.

University of Washington engineers have created a new wireless communication system that allows devices to interact with each other without relying on batteries or wires for power.

University of Washington

Using ambient backscatter, these devices can interact with users and communicate with each other without using batteries. They exchange information by reflecting or absorbing pre-existing radio signals.

The new communication technique, which the researchers call ''ambient backscatter,'' takes advantage of the TV and cellular transmissions that already surround us around the clock. Two devices communicate with each other by reflecting the existing signals to exchange information. The researchers built small, battery-free devices with antennas that can detect, harness and reflect a TV signal, which then is picked up by other similar devices.

The technology could enable a network of devices and sensors to communicate with no power source or human attention needed.

''We can repurpose wireless signals that are already around us into both a source of power and a communication medium,'' said lead researcher Shyam Gollakota, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. ''It's hopefully going to have applications in a number of areas including wearable computing, smart homes and self-sustaining sensor networks.''

The researchers published their results at the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communication 2013 conference in Hong Kong, which begins Aug. 13. They have received the conference's best-paper award for their research.

''Our devices form a network out of thin air,'' said co-author Joshua Smith, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering and of electrical engineering. ''You can reflect these signals slightly to create a Morse code of communication between battery-free devices.''

University of Washington

Everyday objects could be enabled with battery-free tags to communicate with each other. A couch could use ambient backscatter to let the user know where his keys were left.

Smart sensors could be built and placed permanently inside nearly any structure, then set to communicate with each other. For example, sensors placed in a bridge could monitor the health of the concrete and steel, then send an alert if one of the sensors picks up a hairline crack. The technology can also be used for communication '' text messages and emails, for example '' in wearable devices, without requiring battery consumption.

The researchers tested the ambient backscatter technique with credit card-sized prototype devices placed within several feet of each other. For each device the researchers built antennas into ordinary circuit boards that flash an LED light when receiving a communication signal from another device.

Groups of the devices were tested in a variety of settings in the Seattle area, including inside an apartment building, on a street corner and on the top level of a parking garage. These locations ranged from less than half a mile away from a TV tower to about 6.5 miles away.

University of Washington

Researchers demonstrate how one payment card can transfer funds to another card by leveraging the existing wireless signals around them. Ambient RF signals are both the power source and the communication medium.

They found that the devices were able to communicate with each other, even the ones farthest from a TV tower. The receiving devices picked up a signal from their transmitting counterparts at a rate of 1 kilobit per second when up to 2.5 feet apart outdoors and 1.5 feet apart indoors. This is enough to send information such as a sensor reading, text messages and contact information.

It's also feasible to build this technology into devices that do rely on batteries, such as smartphones. It could be configured so that when the battery dies, the phone could still send text messages by leveraging power from an ambient TV signal.

The applications are endless, the researchers say, and they plan to continue advancing the capacity and range of the ambient backscatter communication network.

The other researchers involved are David Wetherall, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, Vincent Liu, a doctoral student in computer science and engineering, and Aaron Parks and Vamsi Talla, both doctoral students in electrical engineering.

The research was funded by the University of Washington through a Google Faculty Research Award and by the National Science Foundation's Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering at the UW.

For more information, contact Gollakota and Smith at abc@cs.washington.edu or 206-685-2094.

Tagged with: College of Engineering, David Wetherall, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering, Joshua Smith, Shyam Gollakota

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Archived Version

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 11:10

There is a belief within American media that a successful person can succeed at anything. He (and it's invariably he) is omnicompetent, and people who question him and laugh at his outlandish ideas will invariably fail and end up working for him. If he cares about something, it's important; if he says something can be done, it can. The people who are already doing the same thing are peons and their opinions are to be discounted, since they are biased and he never is. He doesn't need to provide references or evidence '' even supposedly scientific science fiction falls into this trope, in which the hero gets ideas from his gut, is always right, and never needs to do experiments.

Thus we get Hyperloop, a loopy intercity rail transit idea proposed by Tesla Motors' Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who hopes to make a living some day building cars. And thus a fair amount of the media coverage is analysis-free summary of what Tesla already said: see stenography by ABC, Forbes, the Washington Post's Wonkblog, and even BusinessWeek (which added that critics deal with ''limited information''). Some media channels are more nuanced, sometimes even critical; the Wall Street Journal deserves especial credit, but Wonkblog also has a second, mildly critical post. But none has pressed Musk or Tesla about the inconsistencies in his proposal, which far exceed the obvious questions about the proposed $6 billion price tag (compare $53 billion in today's money for California HSR). For better prior criticism, see James Sinclair's post and Clem Tillier's comment on California HSR Blog.

My specific problems are that Hyperloop a) made up the cost projections, b) has awful passenger comfort, c) has very little capacity, and d) lies about energy consumption of conventional HSR. All of these come from Musk's complex in which he must reinvent everything and ignore prior work done in the field; these also raise doubts about the systems safety that he claims is impeccable.

In principle, Hyperloop is supposed to get people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour, running in a tube with near-vacuum at speeds topping at 1,220 km/h. In practice, both the costs and the running times are full of magic asterisks. The LA end is really Sylmar, at the edge of the LA Basin; with additional access time and security checks, this is no faster than conventional HSR doing the trip in 2:40. There is a crossing of the San Francisco Bay, but there's no mention of the high cost of bridging over or tunneling under the Bay '' we're supposed to take it on faith the unit cost is the same as along the I-5 corridor in the Central Valley.

There is no systematic attempt at figuring out standard practices for cost, or earthquake safety (about which the report is full of FUD about the risks of a ''ground-based system''). There are no references for anything; they're beneath the entrepreneur's dignity. It's fine if Musk thinks he can build certain structures for lower cost than is normal, or achieve better safety, but he should at least mention how. Instead, we get ''it is expected'' and ''targeted'' language. On Wikipedia, it would get hammered with ''citation needed'' and ''avoid weasel words.''

The worst is the cost of the civil infrastructure, the dominant term in any major transportation project's cost. Hundreds of years of incrementally-built expertise in bridge building is brushed aside with the following passage:

The pods and linear motors are relatively minor expenses compared to the tube itself '' several hundred million dollars at most, compared with several billion dollars for the tube. Even several billion is a low number when compared with several tens of billion proposed for the track of the California rail project.

The key advantages of a tube vs. a railway track are that it can be built above the ground on pylons and it can be built in prefabricated sections that are dropped in place and joined with an orbital seam welder. By building it on pylons, you can almost entirely avoid the need to buy land by following alongside the mostly very straight California Interstate 5 highway, with only minor deviations when the highway makes a sharp turn.

In reality, an all-elevated system is a bug rather than a feature. Central Valley land is cheap; pylons are expensive, as can be readily seen by the costs of elevated highways and trains all over the world. The unit costs for viaducts on California HSR, without overhead and management fees, are already several times as high as Musk's cost: as per PDF-page 15 of the cost overrun breakdown, unit costs for viaducts range from $50 million to $80 million per mile. Overheads and contingencies convert per-mile cost almost perfectly to per-km costs. And yet Musk thinks he can build more than 500 km of viaduct for $2.5 billion, as per PDF-page 28 of his proposal: a tenth the unit cost. The unrealistically low tunnel unit cost is at least excused on PDF-page 31 on the grounds that the tunnel diameter is low (this can also be done with trains if they're as narrow as Hyperloop, whose capsule seating is 2-abreast rather than 4- or 5-abreast as on HSR; see below on capacity). The low viaduct unit cost is not.

This alone suggests that the real cost of constructing civil infrastructure for Hyperloop is ten times as high as advertised, to say nothing of the Bay crossing. So it's the same cost as standard HSR. It's supposedly faster, but since it doesn't go all the way to Downtown Los Angeles it doesn't actually provide faster door-to-door trip times.

Nor is the system more comfortable for the passenger. Levitating systems can get away with higher cant than conventional rail because they sway less: Transrapid's lateral acceleration in the horizontal plane is about 3.6 m/s^2 in Shanghai, and the company claims 4.37 m/s^2 is possible. On standard-gauge rail, the conversion rate is approximately 150 mm of total equivalent cant per 1 m/s^2. HSR cant tops at 180-200 mm, and cant deficiency tops at 180 mm for Talgos and 270-300 mm for medium-speed Pendolinos, so about 2.5 m/s^2 at high speed; this was shown safe by simulation in Martin Lindahl's thesis, which is also a good source for track construction standards.

But Hyperloop goes one step further and proposes a lateral acceleration of 4.9 m/s^2: 0.5 g. This is after canting, according to the standards proposed:

The Hyperloop will be capable of traveling between Los Angeles and San Francisco in approximately 35 minutes. This requirement tends to size other portions of the system. Given the performance specification of the Hyperloop, a route has been devised to satisfy this design requirement. The Hyperloop route should be based on several considerations, including:

Maintaining the tube as closely as possible to existing rights of way (e.g., following the I-5).Limiting the maximum capsule speed to 760 mph (1,220 kph) for aerodynamic considerations.Limiting accelerations on the passengers to 0.5g.Optimizing locations of the linear motor tube sections driving the capsules.Local geographical constraints, including location of urban areas, mountain ranges, reservoirs, national parks, roads, railroads, airports, etc. The route must respect existing structures.For aerodynamic efficiency, the velocity of a capsule in the Hyperloop istypically:

300 mph (480 kph) where local geography necessitates a tube bend radii < >760 mph (1,220 kph) where local geography allows a tube bend > 3.0 miles (4.8 km) or where local geography permits a straight tube.These bend radii have been calculated so that the passenger does not experience inertial accelerations that exceed 0.5 g. This is deemed the maximum inertial acceleration that can be comfortably sustained by humans for short periods. To further reduce the inertial acceleration experienced by passengers, the capsule and/or tube will incorporate a mechanism that will allow a degree of 'banking'.

0.5 g, or 4.9 m/s^2, is extreme. Non-tilting trains do not accelerate laterally at more than 1.2 m/s^2 in the plane of the track (i.e. after accounting for cant), and at high speed they have lower lateral acceleration, about 0.67 m/s^2 with limiting cases of about 0.8 for some tilting trains relative to the plane of the train floor. For example, the Tokaido Shinkansen has 200 mm of cant and maximum speed of 255 km/h on non-tilting trains on 2,500-meter curves, for 100 mm of cant deficiency, or 0.67 m/s^2.

The proposed relationship between curve radius and speed in the Hyperloop standards is for a lateral acceleration much greater than 4.9 m/s^2 in the horizontal plane: 480 km/h at 1,600 meters is 11.1 m/s^2. This only drops to 5 m/s^2 after perfectly canting the track, converting the downward 9.8 m/s^2 gravity and the sideways acceleration into a single 14.8 m/s^2 acceleration vector downward in the plane of the capsule floor, or 5 m/s^2 more than passengers are used to. This is worse than sideways acceleration: track standards for vertical acceleration are tighter than for horizontal acceleration, about 0.5-0.67 m/s^2, one tenth to one seventh what Musk wants to subject his passengers to. It's not transportation; it's a barf ride.

Even 4.9 m/s^2 in the horizontal plane is too much. With perfect canting, it combines with gravity to accelerate passengers downward by 11 m/s^2, 1.2 m/s^2 more than the usual, twice as high as the usual standards. Motion sickness is still to be fully expected in such a case. Transrapid's 4.37 m/s^2, which adds 0.93 m/s^2 in the vertical component with perfect canting, is the limit of what's possible.

Speaking of vertical acceleration, this gets no comment at all in the Hyperloop proposal. At 1,220 km/h, it is very hard to climb grades, which would require very tall viaducts and deep tunnels under mountains. Climbing grades is easy, but vertical acceleration is such that the vertical curve radius has to be very large. A lateral acceleration of 0.67 m/s^2 would impose a minimum vertical curve radius of 170 km, versus 15 km at 360 km/h HSR speed. Changing the grade from flat to 2% would take 3.4 km, and changing back would take the same, so for climbing small hills, the effective average grade is very low (it takes 6.8 km to climb 68 meters).

Nor does jerk get any treatment. Reversing a curve takes several seconds at the cant and cant deficiency of conventional HSR (about 3 seconds by Swedish standards, more by German ones); reversing a curve with the extreme canting levels of Hyperloop would take much longer. Maintaining comfort at high total equivalent cant requires tight control of the third derivative as well as the second one; see a tilting train thesis for references.

The barf ride that is as expensive as California HSR and takes as long door-to-door is also very low-capacity. The capsules are inexplicably very short, with 28 passengers per capsule. The proposed headway is 30 seconds, for 3,360 passengers per direction per hour. A freeway lane can do better: about 2,000 vehicles, with an average intercity car occupancy of 2. HSR can do 12,000 passengers per direction per hour: 12 trains per hour is possible, and each train can easily fit 1,000 people (the Tokaido Shinkansen tops at 14 tph and 1,323 passengers per train).

But even 30 seconds appears well beyond the limit of emergency braking. It's common in gadgetbahn to propose extremely tight headways, presuming computerized control allowing vehicles to behave as if they're connected by a rod. Personal rapid transit proponents argue the same. In reality, such systems have been a subject of research for train control for quite a while now, with no positive results so far. Safety today still means safe stopping distances. If vehicles brake at a constant rate, the safe headway is half the total deceleration time; if a vehicle brakes from 1,220 km/h to zero in 60 seconds, the average acceleration is more than 5 m/s^2, twice the current regulatory safety limit for passengers with seat belts.

Most of this could be chalked to the feeling of some entrepreneurs that they must reinvent everything. The indifference to civil engineering costs, passenger comfort issues, and signal safety could all be chalked to this. So could the FUD about earthquake safety of HSR on PDF-page 5.

However, one thing could not: the chart on PDF-page 9 showing that only the Hyperloop is energy-efficient. The chart has a train consuming nearly 900 megajoules per person for an LA-San Francisco trip, about as much as a car or a plane; this is about 1,300 kJ per passenger-km. This may be true of Amtrak's diesel locomotives; but energy consumption for HSR in Spain is on average 73 Watt-hour (263 kJ) per passenger-km (see PDF-page 17 on a UIC paper on the subject of HSR carbon emissions), one fifth as much as Tesla claims. Tesla either engages in fraud or is channeling dodgy research about the electricity consumption of high-speed trains.

Indeed, a train with a thousand seats, 20 MW of power drawn, 60% seat occupancy, and a speed of 360 km/h can only ever expend 333 kJ per passenger-km while accelerating, and much less while cruising (acceleration at lower speed requires more energy per unit of distance, but cruising at lower speed expends only a fraction of the energy of full-power acceleration). Tesla's train energy consumption numbers do not pass a sanity check, which suggests either reckless disregard for the research or fraud. I wouldn't put either past Musk: the lack of references is consistent with the former, and the fact that Musk's current primary endeavor is a car company is consistent with the latter.

There is no redeeming feature of Hyperloop. Small things can possibly be fixed; the cost problems, the locations of the stations, and the passenger comfort issues given cost constraints can't. Industry insiders with ties to other speculative proposals meant to replace conventional rail, such as maglev, are in fact skeptical of Hyperloop's promises of perfect safety.

It's possible to discover something new, but people who do almost always realize the context of the discovery. If Musk really found a way to build viaducts for $5 million per kilometer, this is a huge thing for civil engineering in general and he should announce this in the most general context of urban transportation, rather than the niche of intercity transportation. If Musk has experiments showing that it's possible to have sharper turns or faster deceleration than claimed by Transrapid, then he's made a major discovery in aviation and should announce it as such. That he thinks it just applies to his project suggests he doesn't really have any real improvement.

In math, one common sanity check on a result is, ''does it prove too much?'' If my ten-page paper proves a result that implies a famous open problem, then either my paper is wrong or I've proved the famous open problem, and it's up to me to take extra care to make sure I did not miss anything. Most people in this situation do this extra step and then realize that they were subtly wrong. If a famous question could be solved in ten pages, it probably wouldn't still be open. The same is even true in undergrad-level proof classes: if your homework answer proves things that are too strong, you've almost certainly made a mistake.

Musk's real sin is not the elementary mistakes; it's this lack of context. The lack of references comes from the same place, and so does the utter indifference to the unrealistically low costs. This turns it from a wrong idea that still has interesting contributions to make to a hackneyed proposal that should be dismissed and forgotten as soon as possible.

I write this not to help bury Musk; I'm not nearly famous enough to even hit a nail in his coffin. I write this to point out that, in the US, people will treat any crank seriously if he has enough money or enough prowess in another field. A sufficiently rich person is surrounded by sycophants and stenographers who won't check his numbers against anything.

There are two stories here. In the less interesting one, Musk is a modern-day streetcar conspiracy mogul: he has a car company, he hopes to make money off of it in the future and uses non-generally accepted accounting to claim he already does, and he constantly trash-talks high-speed rail, which competes with his product. Since he's not proposing to build Hyperloop soon, it could be viewed as clever distraction or FUD.

The more interesting possibility, which I am inclined toward, is that this is not fraud, or not primarily fraud. Musk is the sort of person who thinks he can wend his way from starting online companies to building cars and selling them without dealerships. I have not seen a single defense of the technical details of the proposal except for one Facebook comment that claims, doubly erroneously, that the high lateral acceleration is no problem because the tubes can be canted. Everyone, including the Facebook comment, instead gushes about Musk personally. The thinking is that he's rich, so he must always have something interesting to say; he can't be a huckster when venturing outside his field. It would be unthinkable to treat people as professionals in their own fields, who take years to make a successful sideways move and who need to be extremely careful not to make elementary mistakes. The superheros of American media coverage would instantly collapse, relegated to a specialized role while mere mortals take over most functions.

This culture of superstars is a major obstacle frustrating any attempt to improve existing technology. It more or less works for commercial websites, where the startup capital requirements are low, profits per employee are vast, and employee turnover is such that corporate culture is impossible. People get extremely rich for doing something first, even if in their absence their competitors would've done the same six months later. Valve, a video game company that recognizes this, oriented its entire structure around having no formal management at all, but for the most part what this leads to is extremely rich people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg who get treated like superstars and think they can do anything.

In infrastructure, this is not workable. Trains are 19th-century technology, as are cars and buses. Planes are from the 20th century. Companies can get extremely successful improving the technology somehow, but this works differently from the kind of entrepreneurship that's successful in the software and internet sectors. The most important airline invention since the jet engine is either the widebody (i.e. more capacity) or the suite of features that make for low-cost flights, such as quick turnarounds. What Southwest and its ultra low-cost successors have done is precious: they've figured how to trim every airline expense, from better crew utilization to incentives for lower-transaction cost booking methods. This requires perfect knowledge of preexisting practices and still takes decades to do. The growth rate of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook is not possible in such an environment, and so the individual superstar matters far less than a positive corporate culture that can transmit itself over multiple generations of managers.

There is plenty of room for improvement in HSR technology, then, but it's of a different kind. It involves adapting techniques used by low-cost airlines to reduce costs, as SNCF is doing right now with its new low-cost TGV product. It perhaps involves controlling construction costs more tightly, though $5 million per km for viaducts seems like an impossible fantasy. But it has to come from within the business, or from someone who intimately understands the business.

And with the kind of success that US media harps on, this is almost impossible to do domestically. Someone as smart as Musk, or any of many other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, could find a detailed breakdown of the operating and construction costs of civil infrastructure, and figure out ways of reducing them, Megabus- or Southwest-style. That's what I would do if I had the unlimited resources Musk has: I'd obtain unit costs at far greater detail than ''X meters of tunnel cost $Y'' and compare what New York is doing wrong that Madrid is doing right. But I don't have the resources '' in money, in ability to manage people, in time. And the people who do are constantly told that they don't need to do that, that they're smart enough they can reinvent everything and that the world will bow to their greatness.

Update: people all over the Internet, including in comments below, defend the low cost projections on the grounds that the system is lighter and thinner than your average train. The proposal itself also defends the low tunneling costs on those same grounds. To see to what extent Musk takes his own idea seriously, compare the two proposals: the first for a passenger-only tube, and the second for a larger tube capable of carrying both passengers and vehicles. On PDF-pp. 25-26, the proposal states that the passenger-only tube would have an internal diameter of 2.23 meters and the passenger-plus-vehicle tube would have an internal diameter of 3.3 meters, 47% more. Despite that, the tunneling costs on PDF-p. 28 are $600 and $700 million, a difference of just 17%.

The same is true of the ''but the Hyperloop capsule is lighter than a train'' argument for lower pylon construction costs. Together with the differences in tube thickness posited on PDF-p. 27, 20-23 mm versus 23-25, there is 60% more tube lining in the passenger-plus-vehicle version, but the tube and pylons are projected to cost just 24% more. In this larger version, the twin tube has 0.025*3.3*pi*2 = 0.5 cubic meters of steel per meter of length, weighing about 4 tons. This ranges from a bit less than twice to a bit more than twice the weight of a train. To say nothing of the pylons' need to support their own considerable weight, which is larger than for HSR due to the need for taller viaducts coming from the constrained ability to change grade. They are far more obtrusive than trees and telephone poles, contra the claims of minimal obtrusiveness and disruption.

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Source: Federal Register Latest Entries

Thu, 15 Aug 2013 12:40

Notice is hereby given that the U.S. International Trade Commission has determined not to review an initial determination (''ID'') (Order No. 5) of the presiding administrative law judge (''ALJ'') granting Google, Inc.'s unopposed motion to intervene.

Michael Liberman, Esq., Office of the General Counsel, U.S. International Trade Commission, 500 E Street SW., Washington, DC 20436, telephone (202) 205-3115. Copies of non-confidential documents filed in connection with this investigation are or will be available for inspection during official business hours (8:45 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.) in the Office of the Secretary, U.S. International Trade Commission, 500 E Street SW., Washington, DC 20436, telephone (202) 205-2000. General information concerning the Commission may also be obtained by accessing its Internet server at http://www.usitc.gov. The public record for this investigation may be viewed on the Commission's electronic docket (EDIS) at http://edis.usitc.gov. Hearing-impaired persons are advised that information on this matter can be obtained by contacting the Commission's TDD terminal on (202) 205-1810.

The Commission instituted this investigation under section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, 19 U.S.C. 1337, on June 26, 2013, based on a complaint filed by Nokia Corporation of Espoo, Finland and Nokia Inc., of Sunnyvale, California (collectively, ''Nokia''). The complaint, as supplemented, alleges a violation of section 337 by reason of infringement of certain claims of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,035,189 (''the `189 patent''); 6,373,345; 6,711,211 (''the `211 patent''); 7,187,945; 8,140,650 (''the `650 patent''); and 8,363,824. 78 FR 38362 (Jun. 26, 2013). The respondents are HTC Corporation of Taoyuan City, Taiwan, and HTC America, Inc. of Bellevue, Washington (collectively, ''HTC'').

On July 11, 2013, third party Google Inc. (''Google'') filed a motion to intervene as a party in this investigation with respect to three of the six patents, namely the `189, `211 and `650 patents. The motion states that neither complainants Nokia nor respondents HTC oppose the motion.

On July 16, 2013, the ALJ issued an ID (Order No. 5) granting Google's motion. The ALJ found, inter alia, that the motion was timely filed and that Google has shown that it has a substantial interest in the investigation. No party petitioned for review. The Commission has determined not to review the ID.

The authority for the Commission's determination is contained in section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, as amended (19 U.S.C. 1337), and in sections 210.42-.46 of the Commission's Rules of Practice and Procedure (19 CFR 210.42-.46).

Issued: August 12, 2013.

By order of the Commission.

Lisa R. Barton,

Acting Secretary to the Commission.

[FR Doc. 2013-19825 Filed 8-14-13; 8:45 am]

BILLING CODE 7020-02-P

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 11:23

When mice were fed a diet that was 25% added sugars '' an amount consumed by many humans '' the females died at twice the normal rate and the males were less likely to reproduce and hold territory, scientists said in a study published Tuesday.

The study shows "that added sugar consumed at concentrations currently considered safe exerts dramatic impacts on mammalian health," the researchers said in the study, published in the journal Nature Communications. "Many researchers have already made calls for reevaluation of these safe levels of consumption."

The study's senior author, University of Utah biology professor Wayne Potts, said earlier studies fed mice sugars at levels higher than people eat in sodas, cookies, candy and other items. The current study stuck to levels eaten by people.

The mice lived in "seminatural enclosures," and the experimental and control groups lived in direct competition with each other. After being fed the two diets for 26 weeks, the mice lived for 32 weeks in mouse barns -- enclosures of 377 square feet ringed by three-foot walls. There were some nesting areas that were more desirable than others.

"Added sugars" are those added during processing or preparation, not those that occur naturally in fruit or milk. The scientists fed the mice a diet that got its added sugars from half fructose and half glucose monosaccharides, which is about what's found in high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), Potts said. The study, he said, was not set up to differentiate between the effects of different forms of caloric sweeteners.

The Corn Refiners Assn., a trade group, questioned the use of mice in the study, saying in a statement that the only way to know the effect in people would be to test people.

"Mice do not eat sugar as a part of their normal diet, so the authors are measuring a contrived overload effect that might not be present had the rodents adapted to sugar intake over time," the group said.

The trade group for the sugar industry, the Sugar Assn., said it was studying the research. But it maintained that the sweetener used in the study was crucial.

"Sugar and the various formulations of HFCS are molecularly different '-- they are not the same product, yet too often, and erroneously, HFCS is referred to as an 'added sugar.' " the statement said. "Only sugar is sugar."

In a statement, Potts said mice were "an excellent mammal to model human dietary issues" because they've been living with people and eating the same food for thousands of years.

The Utah researchers noted that consumption of added sugars increased in the American diet by 50% from the 1970s to about 2008, primarily because of the higher consumption of HFCS. (The intake has since been declining, and the Sugar Assn. said consumption of sucrose has decreased by 35% in the last four decades.)

The 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans advise us to limit our total intake of added sugars, fats and other "discretionary calories" to 5% to 15% of total calories consumed every day. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that from 2005 to 2010, we got 13% of our total calories from added sugar.

The male mice controlled 26% fewer territories and produced 25% fewer offspring, the scientists said. The lower reproduction levels could be the result of a decreased ability to defend their territories, the researchers said. The diet did not affect weight.

Potts said he has reduced the amount of "refined sugar" he eats and has suggested his family do the same.

mary.macvean@latimes.com

@mmacvean on Twitter

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 16:58

AP

BY:Washington Free Beacon StaffAugust 13, 2013 2:16 pm

Not a single person showed up at the Georgetown waterfront Tuesday for a climate change agenda event put on by Organizing for Action, the shadowy nonprofit advocacy group born out of President Obama's 2012 campaign, the NRCC wrote in its blog.

The event page for the ''Climate Change Day of Action Rally'' disappeared after rainy weather appeared to drive away whatever people planned to attend. The embarrassing showing follows the news that only one volunteer stayed for an OFA Obamacare event in Centreville, Va., last week to work the phones:

The NRCC blog added:

Now that I've had Phil Kerpen write half my post for me, here's the other half: it should surprise nobody '' including the, ah, enthusiasts over at OfA, bless their hearts '' that global warming doesn't have nearly the same bite to it that the Left desperately wants it to. The polling is consistent: global warming '' or climate change, or whatever the latest buzzword is/will be '' is at the bottom of any list of things that people worry about, or prioritize. It is thus unsurprising that an admittedly unpleasant sudden rain shower would stop people in Georgetown from attending: after all, OfA doesn't really want to talk about global warming at all. It's just that the two things that they should be talking about '' the economy, and health care '' are also two things that OfA does not dare talk about, largely because President Barack Obama clearly has no idea how to go about repairing the damage that he's caused to either.

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Source: 33 World News

Thu, 15 Aug 2013 03:38

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Source: Crooks and Liars

Mon, 12 Aug 2013 04:13

(h/t Heather at VideoCafe)Not long after 9/11, Osama bin Laden released a recording to al Jazeera that expressed his goal for the attacks: to bankrupt the US.

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript.

He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, "using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers."

"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.

He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."

"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.[..]

As part of the "bleed-until-bankruptcy plan," bin Laden cited a British estimate that it cost al Qaeda about $500,000 to carry out the attacks of September 11, 2001, an amount that he said paled in comparison with the costs incurred by the United States.

"Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs," he said. "As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.[..]

"And it all shows that the real loser is you," he said. "It is the American people and their economy."

Looking at the collapse of 2008 and the near historical levels of income inequality, it's hard to argue that bin Laden didn't succeed. And that is exactly what Ted Koppel wrote for the Wall Street Journal.

Terrorism, after all, is designed to produce overreaction. It is the means by which the weak induce the powerful to inflict damage upon themselves'--and al Qaeda and groups like it are surely counting on that as the centerpiece of their strategy.

It appears to be working. Right now, 19 American embassies and a number of consulates and smaller diplomatic outposts are closed for the week due to the perceived threat of attacks against U.S. targets. Meantime, the U.S. has launched drone strikes on al Qaeda fighters in Yemen.

But don't tell that to Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. McCaul KNOWS that the threat is "real" and "growing".

You know, well, listen. I think the threat's real. And what I call the narrative of the president, saying that Al Qaeda's on its heels; the struggles over, "Let's go back to a pre-9/11 mentality" -- I think is a very dangerous narrative. I get the same threat briefings that the president of the United States does, and I'm not seeing his rhetoric meeting reality. And the fact of the matter is, there is a spider web. You know, we were just focused on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq; core Al Qaeda versus non Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda everywhere: distinction without a difference. It's all Al Qaeda.

Wait, what? The president has a "pre-9/11" mentality? The guy who ordered the successful hit on Osama bin Laden and who has his own personal "kill list" for drone strikes is thinking pre-9/11? You know McCaul is just reciting Republican talking points and counting on no pushback from David Gregory, because when Gregory does ask him what else Obama could do, he hems and haws and basically can't name anything he'd do differently.

Telling, that.

Meanwhile, Ted Koppel has the right side of it. Terrorism has always been around and always be around. How we choose to react to it is the measure of how successful it is.

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Source: WT news feed

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 00:26

On Tuesday, CNN host Jake Tapper interviewed Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the filmmaker behind the Innocence of Muslims YouTube trailer which some members of President Barack Obama's administration erroneously blamed for deadly attack on an American consulate in Libya on September 11, 2012. Nakoula was recently released from prison after a parole violation. Nakoula told CNN that he believes the administration was ''irresponsible'' when they blamed the attack on a YouTube trailer.

Asked by Tapper if the Obama administration put him in danger by blaming the Benghazi attack on him, Nakoula said that he had no comment. The filmmaker added that the government has kept him in hiding for his own safety.

RELATED: RNC Predicts This Quote Won't Make It into CNN and NBC's Hillary Films

While he also refused to comment about the members of the State Department, including then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's, decision to blame the Benghazi attack on him, Nakoula praised Obama.

''I like him personally,'' Nakoula said. ''I don't blame him. He has a lot of responsibility.''

Nakoula said his personal feelings about the Obama administration are less warm. He agreed with Tapper when asked if he thinks the administration was ''irresponsible'' when they blamed the video for the attack on the Benghazi consulate.

Nakoula described his movie as a ''political'' rather than a ''religious'' movie. He emphatically declared that he is opposed to Islamic terrorism.

''Do you think that Islam is a religion that promotes terrorism?'' Tapper asked.

''No comment,'' Nakoula replied.

Watch the segment below via CNN:

> >Follow Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) on Twitter

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Thu, 15 Aug 2013 03:53

It's hard enough to believe that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are subjects that President Obama has to even think about in passing, let alone discuss during interviews, and yet they are.

Obama made a few disparaging remarks about the couple recently, and it should surprise no one to learn that it didn't sit well with the Kardashian empire matriarch Kris Jenner.

On Friday's episode of her talk show "Kris," Jenner responded to Obama's critique of the over-the-top lives of West and Kardashian and the effect they have on today's youth, when he explained, "Kids weren't monitoring every day what Kim Kardashian was wearing, or where Kanye West was going on vacation, and thinking that somehow that was the mark of success."

And oh, boy, Jenner was not pleased.

"It's really great that people aspire to get a great job ... but I wasn't aware that you could only set the bar so high and that we could only dream so big," Jenner said after she read Obama's remarks aloud on her show. "I was taught: Dream big, work hard and you could have whatever you wanted."

Jenner then went on to suggest that the president was a bit of a hypocrite for noting that Kim and Kanye live in a 10,000 square foot home:

''I bet the President has some friends with 10,000 square foot houses and that he wouldn't mind going over there'... when [he was] asking them to have a party for [him] while [he was] campaigning for dollars to run for president.''

Not only that, Jenner took issue with the fact that Obama would pick on the couple because, well, they've simply worked for what they have.

"I find it so odd that he's picking on Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Well, Kanye West, first of all, doesn't go on vacation. Ever," Jenner said. "And Kim Kardashian is the hardest-working young lady in the world. She never sleeps, she never stops, she never slows down and works so hard for what she's got."

Jenner went on to say that she started thinking that her daughter's job affords her to live in that kind of house, and that's when she realized, if she's not mistaken, "the president's job affords him to live in a 55,000 square foot house."

Of course Obama is far from the first to criticize the couple, and he definitely won't be the last. We're pretty sure Kris Jenner will always be there ready with the argument that Kim Kardashian is the hardest working woman in show business, which may actually be true.

Also on HuffPost:

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Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:07

By Kimberly Dvorak

Created: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 10:51:00 PST

Updated: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 10:57:18 PST

This week Elise Jordan, wife of famed journalist Michael Hastings, who recently died under suspicious circumstances, corroborated this reporter's sources that CIA Director, John Brennan was Hastings next expos(C) project (CNN clip).

Last month a source provided San Diego 6 News with an alarming email hacked from super secret CIA contractor Stratfor's President Fred Burton. The email (link here) was posted on WikiLeaks and alleged that then Obama counter-terrorism Czar Brennan, was in charge of the government's continued crackdown or witch-hunt on investigative journalists.

After providing the Stratfor email to the CIA for comment, the spymaster's spokesperson responded in lightning speed. Two emails were received; one acknowledging Hastings was working on a CIA story and the other said, ''Without commenting on information disseminated by WikiLeaks, any suggestion that Director Brennan has ever attempted to infringe on constitutionally-protected press freedoms is offensive and baseless.''

The emails also prompted a phone from CIA media spokesman Todd Ebitz. He said they were saddened by Michael's death and reiterated their position that they had a cordial working relationship with the investigative reporter.

On the other hand, Stratfor, specifically Fred Burton, remains nonresponsive.

As for Hastings' final story, his wife said Rolling Stone would publish the Brennan piece in an upcoming edition of the magazine.

Was speed a factor?

The release of a new surveillance video from a nearby Italian restaurant by Michael Krikorian, an author, freelance blogger who also writes for LA Weekly, reveals a lot of information about Hastings' final seconds.

An SDSU professor Morteza M. Mehrabadi, Professor and Interim Chair Areas of Specialization: Mechanics of Materials told San Diego 6 News that calculating the speed of Hastings car follows a simple mathematic equation. By using the video and the distance traveled (195 feet) as well as the seconds that lapsed prior to the explosion '' in his opinion, the car was traveling roughly 35 mph.

That revelation is important because Jose, an employee of ALSCO a nearby business, and a witness to the accident told KTLA/Loud Labs (Scott Lane) the car was traveling at a high rate of speed and he saw sparks coming from the car and saw it explode BEFORE hitting the tree.

The pre-explosion could possibly explain the flash of light on the video that preceded the appearance of the car in the video. The pre-explosion and slower speed could also explain the minimal damage to the palm tree and the facts the rear tires rested against the curb. It also provides an explanation for the location of the engine and drive train at more than 100 feet from the tree impact area.

This new information prompted another round of FOIA/CPRAs and only adds to the questions that remain unanswered. One of those questions is where was Mr. Hastings going at 4:30 in the morning? Based on the accident location, Hastings was only 1.5 miles from his home and was headed away from his address.

Other unanswered questions point to the contents (computer, phones, notes, etc.) of his home, so far there has been no response from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) FOIA request regarding these issues. Also, numerous FOIAs have been filed with other federal agencies concerning details of Hastings suspicious car ''accident.''

I would like to thank the tens of thousands of people following this important story and the supportive comments that include many helpful tips. You can post anonymous tips for me at theKDreport.com or sandiego6.com or email: Kimberly.dvorak@hotmail.com

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 18:15

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What does the Prime Minister think New Zealanders are thinking about the GCSB bill? Read the article >

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 19:04

With Tea Party activists determined to defund Obamacare and halt the immigration bill, lawmakers' August recess is anything but sleepy. Congressman Robert Pittenger found that out firsthand.

Comment | more >>Critics are starting to ask what's happening with the once highly respected actor. ''The Lone Ranger'' is one of the biggest box office bombs of the summer, and it's earned Depp even more negative reviews.

19 Comments | more >>Staff Sgt. Ed Drew brought his photography equipment from art school to Afghanistan, including equipment to make tintypes '-- a photographic technique from the Civil War.

7 Comments | more >>Watsi '-- one of the fastest growing non-profits in web history '-- puts up pictures and profiles of people around the world who need money for medical care. It's like Kickstarter for medical care.

18 Comments | more >>It's been a great summer for actor Ethan Hawke, with films including ''Before Midnight'' and ''The Purge.'' In an interview with Here & Now, he talks about those films, his life and future plans.

Comment | more >>''Kids Jeopardy'' contestant Thomas Hurley made it all the way to Final Jeopardy and even got the right answer. The only problem? He spelled it wrong. He told his local newspaper he was ''cheated.''

37 Comments | more >>A new in vitro fertilization (IVF) technique has huge cost-saving implications, but it also raises ethical questions because the process can screen the entire human genome.

5 Comments | more >>The newspaper's executive editor, Marty Baron, tells Here & Now that employees are optimistic about what Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos can bring to the Post.

Comment | more >>To mark the one-year anniversary of the mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, the son of the president of the temple '-- who was killed in the shooting '-- invited a Newtown father to speak.

4 Comments | more >>former U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine says she's concerned that the intercepted messages between members of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula could be a diversionary tactic.

2 Comments | more >>

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Thu, 15 Aug 2013 03:28

If the player does not load, please check that you are running the latest version of Adobe Flash Player.

While NBC's Today has done 35 stories on the Kardashians in the past six months and frequently promotes the family's reality show, a panel discussion on Tuesday's program posed this question: "Are We Keeping Up Too Much With the Kardashians?" Why the sudden introspection? It might have something to do President Obama being critical of culture in which kids are "monitoring every day what Kim Kardashian was wearing or where Kanye West was going on vacation, and thinking that somehow that was the mark of success."

More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.

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Wed, 14 Aug 2013 16:54