20121225
Revealed: NSA targeting domestic computer systems in secret test | Internet & Media - CNET News
Newly released files show a secret National Security Agency program is targeting the computerized systems that control utilities to discover security vulnerabilities, which can be used to defend the United States or disrupt the infrastructure of other nations.
The NSA's so-called Perfect Citizen program conducts "vulnerability exploration and research" against the computerized controllers that control "large-scale" utilities including power grids and natural gas pipelines, the documents show. The program is scheduled to continue through at least September 2014.
The Perfect Citizen files obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and provided to CNET shed more light on how the agency aims to defend -- and attack -- embedded controllers. The NSA is reported to have developed Stuxnet, which President Obama secretly ordered to be used against Iran's nuclear program, with the help of Israel.
via news.cnet.com
20121224
20121215
Military judge allows total blackout of 9/11 plotters’ torture testimony | The Raw Story
A military judge presiding over the trials of the accused 9/11 plotters decided last week that any and all testimony relating to their treatment by U.S. personnel shall be censored, according to a ruling released Wednesday.
In a statement sent to reporters, the American Civil Liberties Union made it clear that they are deeply troubled by the judge’s ruling.
“The government wanted to ensure that the American public would never hear the defendants’ accounts of illegal CIA torture, rendition and detention, and the military judge has gone along with that shameful plan,” ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi said in an advisory.
via rawstory.com
20121214
BBC News - The hum that helps to fight crime
A rape victim has come forward to the police. She says she has confronted her attacker and has secretly recorded him admitting his guilt.
A suspected terrorist has been taped planning a deadly attack, and the police want to use this evidence in court. Or someone has been captured on CCTV threatening an assault.
Increasingly, recordings like these are playing a role in criminal investigations.
But how can the police be sure that the audio evidence is genuine, that it has not been tampered with or cleverly edited?
Forensic scientists have come up with the answer: they can authenticate these recordings with the help of a hum.
via bbc.co.uk
Ho, Ho, Ho! 9/11 Was An Inside Job! | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
Seasons greeting from your old friend Santa! My, my, Christmas is just two short weeks away, and everyone here at the North Pole can't wait to deliver presents to all you nice boys and girls this year. Yes, Jolly ol' St. Nicholas hopes you're all being as good as can be!
But today, Santa would like to tell you all about something very naughty, something very, very naughty indeed. Dear children, have you not heard? Why, 9/11 was an inside job! Oh, ho, ho, my, yes it was!
I mean, look at the facts, boys and girls! We already know the Bush administration was itching to go to war in Iraq, now, don't we? Yes, indeed we do, my darling ones! The Downing Street memo proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt. Then you look at the Presidential Daily Briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, the one headlined "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Ignored! Why, children, they threw that briefing aside like used wrapping paper on Christmas morning, didn't they?
via theonion.com
CIA 'tortured and sodomised' terror suspect, human rights court rules | Law | The Guardian
CIA agents tortured a German citizen, sodomising, shackling, and beating him, as Macedonian state police looked on, the European court of human rights said in a historic judgment released on Thursday.
In a unanimous ruling, it also found Macedonia guilty of torturing, abusing, and secretly imprisoning Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese origin allegedly linked to terrorist organisations.
Masri was seized in Macedonia in December 2003 and handed over to a CIA "rendition team" at Skopje airport and secretly flown to Afghanistan.
It is the first time the court has described CIA treatment meted out to terror suspects as torture.
"The grand chamber of the European court of human rights unanimously found that Mr el-Masri was subjected to forced disappearance, unlawful detention, extraordinary rendition outside any judicial process, and inhuman and degrading treatment," said James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Just
via guardian.co.uk
TSA claims sick girl tests positive for bomb residue - Dallas News | myFOXdfw.com
DALLAS -A 12-year-old girl in a wheelchair was detained for nearly an hour at DFW Airport while trying to get through security.
Shelbi Walser was traveling with her mother on Sunday for a trip that's become routine. The seventh grader lives with a genetic bone disorder and was on her way to Florida for another rare medical treatment.
She's never had a problem flying, but this time Transportation Security Administration agents claimed she had bomb residue on her hands.
"It was frightening. I kinda got mad," she said.
via myfoxdfw.com
Chief of CIA's 'Global Jihad Unit' Revealed Online
The CIA is having trouble keeping its secret agents off the internet. First, it allowed the White House to publish a photograph of the man behind the operation to kill Osama bin Laden. And now the identity of the woman who runs its "Global Jihad Unit"—and who has a long (if pseudonymous) history of being associated with some of the agency's most disastrous boondoggles—has been published online by two documentary filmmakers who sussed it out with the help of some "savvy internet research."
Her name is Alfreda Frances Bikowsky and, according to independent reporters Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy, she is a CIA analyst who is partially responsible for intelligence lapses that led to 9/11. The two reporters recently released a "documentary podcast" called "Who Is Richard Blee?" about the chief of the agency's bin Laden unit in the immediate run-up to the 9/11 attacks and featuring interviews with former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, former CIA agent Bob Baer, Looming Tower author Lawrence Wright, 9/11 Commission co-chairman Tom Keane, and others. In it, Nowosielski and Duffy make the case that Bikowsky and another CIA agent named Michael Anne Casey deliberately declined to tell the White House and the FBI that Khalid al-Mihdhar, an Al Qaida affiliate they were tracking, had obtained a visa to enter the U.S. in the summer of 2001. Al-Mihdhar was one of the hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77. The CIA lost track of him after he entered the U.S.
via gawker.com
20121212
Public Buses Across Country Quietly Adding Microphones to Record Passenger Conversations | Threat Level | Wired.com
Transit authorities in cities across the country are quietly installing microphone-enabled surveillance systems on public buses that would give them the ability to record and store private conversations, according to documents obtained by a news outlet.
The systems are being installed in San Francisco, Baltimore, and other cities with funding from the Department of Homeland Security in some cases, according to the Daily, which obtained copies of contracts, procurement requests, specs and other documents.
The use of the equipment raises serious questions about eavesdropping without a warrant, particularly since recordings of passengers could be obtained and used by law enforcement agencies.
It also raises questions about security, since the IP audio-video systems can be accessed remotely via a built-in web server (.pdf), and can be combined with GPS data to track the movement of buses and passengers throughout the city.
via wired.com
LeaksWiki
Transparency is changing. Leaking websites and organizations are increasingly widespread. In large part, this rise of leaking organizations is likely due to the controversies around WikiLeaks. Leaking organizations are noteworthy because they separate the source from the release of the document or information and thus significantly alter the process of leaking, disclosure, and whistleblowing.[1] This separation has a few important implications. First, the separation of the source from the document release makes the leaking process safer for the source or whistleblower. Anonymous submission systems give the source anonymity in the initial transmission of documents and the disconnection of the source from the release makes the source less traceable. Second, the process becomes easier for the source to release any documents or more documents.[2] The intermediary leaking organization can study the documents in-depth, prepare them for release, work with media partners, and perhaps advocate for correction of a wrongdoing. Third, there is now a middleman in the process, the leaking organization.[3] However, this can be both a benefit and a detriment. The leaking organization can be an additional security risk to the source and innocent people mentioned in the leaked documents, but it is also a body often (but not always) independent of government agencies, companies, and mainstream media institutions. The independence of the leaking organization may sometimes make it easier for them to serve as an additional check on traditional institutions.[4] Fourth, there is now a group of people tasked primarily with determining how to make a leak successful and broadly defining what a successful release of leaked documents means.
via leakswiki.org
20121204
ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS THE TRUTH « The Burning Platform
“Son, we live in a world that has Wall Street banks, and those banks have to be guarded by puppet politicians in Washington D.C. with lobbyist written laws and Madison Avenue PR maggots with media propaganda. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Representative Paul? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for the average middle class American family, and you curse the ruling oligarchs. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That the death of the American middle class, while tragic, probably saved the bonuses of thousands of Wall Street bankers. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, increases the wealth of these same bankers who destroyed the worldwide economic system in 2008. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about in the food bank line, you want me on Wall Street, you need me on Wall Street. We use words like derivative, fiscal stimulus, quantitative easing. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent syphoning off the wealth of the nation. You use them as a punch line. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very debt that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up 1000 shares of Apple, and hope our high frequency trading supercomputers can ramp the market for a while longer. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.”
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