bbcnews | The Dutch Sim card maker at the centre of NSA-GCHQ hacking claims has said it believes that the US and UK cyberspy agencies did indeed launch attacks on its computer systems.
However, Gemalto denied that billions of mobile device encryption keys could have been stolen as a result.
TheIntercept alleged last weekthat spies had obtained the "potential to secretly monitor" voice and data transmissions after hacking the firm.
Gemalto operates in 85 countries.
Its clients include AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint among more than 400 wireless network providers across the world.
GCHQ and the NSA have not commented directly on the allegations.
Fake emails
In a statement, Gemalto said it had carried out a "thorough investigation" following the claims, which were based on documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
"The investigation into the intrusion methods described in the document and the sophisticated attacks that Gemalto detected in 2010 and 2011 give us reasonable grounds to believe that an operation by NSA and GCHQ probably happened," the company said.
It highlighted two "particularly sophisticated intrusions" that it suggested the agencies were responsible for.
WaPo | Cellphones didn’t just arrive in Pakistan. But someone could be
fooled into thinking otherwise, considering the tens of millions of
Pakistanis pouring into mobile phone stores these days.
In one
of the world’s largest — and fastest — efforts to collect biometric
information, Pakistan has ordered cellphone users to verify their
identities through fingerprints for a national database being compiled
to curb terrorism. If they don’t, their service will be shut off, an
unthinkable option for many after a dozen years of explosive growth in
cellphone usage here.
Prompted by concerns about a proliferation
of illegal and untraceable SIM cards, the directive is the most visible
step so far in Pakistan’s efforts to restore law and order after
Taliban militants killed 150 students and teachers at a school in
December. Officials said the six terrorists who stormed the school in
Peshawar were using cellphones registered to one woman who had no obvious connection to the
attackers.
But the effort to match one person to each cellphone number involves a
jaw-dropping amount of work. At the start of this year, there were 103
million SIM cards in Pakistan — roughly the number of the adult
population — that officials were not sure were valid or properly
registered. And mobile companies have until April 15 to verify the
owners of all of the cards, which are tiny chips in cellphones that
carry a subscriber’s personal security and identity information.
In the past six weeks, 53 million SIMs belonging to 38 million
residents have been verified through biometric screening, officials
said.
“Once the verification of each and every SIM is done,
coupled with blocking unverified SIMs, the terrorists will no longer
have this tool,” said a senior Interior Ministry official, who was not
authorized to speak publicly about the government’s security policy.
“The government knows that it’s an arduous job, both for the cellular
companies and their customers, but this has to be done as a national
duty.”
theeconomist | STAGE one of Saudi Arabia’s plan—or perhaps hope—to restructure the
oil market is taking longer than expected. By refusing to rein in
production while prices fell, the Saudis permitted a big surplus to grow
and served notice on higher-cost rivals (Russia, Venezuela, American
shale-oil producers) that they would not prop up other people’s profit
margins at the expense of their own market share.
That signal has been weakened by the growing amount of oil in
storage, which is absorbing most of the glut. World oil stocks rose by
about 265m barrels last year and Société Générale, a French bank,
reckons they will increase by a further 1.6m-1.8m barrels a day (b/d) in
the first six months of this year, adding roughly 300m barrels to the
total. Oil is being stored in the hope that demand and prices will pick
up later. Such restocking, plus renewed political worries (flows from
Libya’s largest oilfield were disrupted again this week by apparent
sabotage), have pushed the price of oil back up. After having fallen by
more than 60% since June, the price of a barrel of Brent crude closed at
$59.96 on February 18th.
The restocking cannot continue for long. Storage facilities in Europe
and Asia are already 80-85% full. Much more and they will overflow. As
it is, companies are renting tankers to keep oil in. If storage space
runs out, prices could tumble again.
Whether that happens depends on how quickly phase two of the Saudi
plan gets under way. This is to force high-cost producers out to
increase the influence of Gulf countries. At the moment, this is
happening only slowly. Oil types have recently become obsessed with the
so-called “rig count”—the number of drilling rigs operating in America
and elsewhere. Analysts think that as the rig count declines, shale-oil
output will fall, hurting profits and investment. That seems dubious.
Figures from Baker Hughes, an oil-services company, showed that the
rig count in America in mid-February fell to its lowest since 2011, and
was 35% below its peak in October 2014. That is a big fall. But most of
the idled rigs are in marginal areas; the fall has been only 9% in the
main shale-oil basins, in North Dakota and Texas, which accounted for
four-fifths of the increase in American oil output in the past two
years. Moreover, productivity is rising in the remaining wells. Citibank
reckons that even a 50% fall in the rig count would allow output to
rise this year and turn the average shale firm’s cashflow positive,
encouraging investment.
aljazeera | Oil is the lifeblood of the Libyan economy. Prior to the 2011 revolution
that toppled Muammar Gaddafi, Libya produced some 1.6 million barrels a
day, exported mostly to Italy, Germany, Spain, and France. Natural gas
and oil revenues made up nearly 96% of government revenue, propping up a
vast public sector and providing millions of Libyans with their main
source of income.
When a revolution backed by NATO air
strikes brought Gaddafi’s regime to a bloody end in the summer of 2011,
output plummeted to zero. To the surprise of many analysts, it quickly
recovered, reaching 1.4 million barrels per day, almost hitting
pre-revolution levels. But that figure belied growing political divides
that would soon bring the oil industry - and Libya’s economy - to its
knees.
As the coalition that brought down Gaddafi started to
fragment, local grievances over the distribution of oil revenues led to
protests, closing down oil fields, pipelines and loading ports. In the
east, a rebel leader charged with protecting the oil infrastructure
seized control of several ports, demanding greater autonomy and a bigger
share of oil revenues for his region.
His attempts to sell
oil internationally without the government’s consent were only thwarted
when US navy commandos stormed a tanker trying to take oil out of the
country. Meanwhile, a militia in the west shut down two of the country’s
most important oil fields, and insecurity grew. International oil
companies fled as security deteriorated.
democracynow |NBC is facing questions over its
decision to pull veteran news correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin out of Gaza
just after he personally witnessed the Israeli military’s killing of
four Palestinian boys on a Gaza beach. Mohyeldin was kicking a soccer
ball around with the boys just minutes before they died. He is a
longtime reporter in the region. In his coverage, he reports on the Gaza
conflict in the context of the Israeli occupation, sparking criticism
from some supporters of the Israeli offensive. Back in 2008 and 2009,
when he worked for Al Jazeera, Mohyeldin and his colleague Sherine
Tadros were the only foreign journalists on the ground in Gaza as Israel
killed 1,400 people in what it called "Operation Cast Lead." We speak
to Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, who has revealed that the decision
to pull Mohyeldin from Gaza and remove him from reporting on the
situation came from NBC executive David Verdi.
Greenwald also comments on the broader picture of the coverage of the
Israel/Palestine conflict in the U.S. media.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:NBC
is facing questions over its decision to pull its veteran news
correspondent out of Gaza. Ayman Mohyeldin personally witnessed the
Israeli military’s killing of four Palestinian boys on a Gaza beach
Wednesday. Mohyeldin was kicking a soccer ball around with the boys just
minutes before they died. He’s a veteran reporter who has placed the
Gaza conflict in the context of the Israeli occupation, sparking
criticism from some supporters of the Israeli offensive. Glenn Greenwald
of The Intercept has revealed the decision to pull Mohyeldin from Gaza and remove him from reporting on the situation, it came from NBC executive David Verdi.
AMYGOODMAN:NBC
executives have reportedly claimed the decision was motivated by
"security concerns" ahead of Israel’s ground invasion, but late
Wednesday NBC sent correspondent Richard Engel
to Gaza. During the 2008-2009 war on Gaza, Ayman Mohyeldin, who then
worked for Al Jazeera, was one of the only foreign journalists reporting
from Gaza.
NBC News did not respond to Democracy Now!’s repeated requests for comment on its decision.
For more, we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His piece for The Intercept at First Look Media is "NBC News Pulls Veteran Reporter from Gaza After Witnessing Israeli Attack on Children."
guardian | Binyamin Netanyahu’s dramatic declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran
was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by
his own secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document.
It is part of a cache of hundreds of dossiers, files and cables from
the world’s major intelligence services – one of the biggest spy leaks
in recent times.
Brandishing a cartoon of a bomb with a red line to illustrate his
point, the Israeli prime minister warned the UN in New York that Iran
would be able to build nuclear weapons the following year and called for
action to halt the process.
But in a secret report shared with South Africa a few weeks later,
Israel’s intelligence agency concluded that Iran was “not performing the
activity necessary to produce weapons”. The report highlights the gulf
between the public claims and rhetoric of top Israeli politicians and
the assessments of Israel’s military and intelligence establishment.
WSJ | As a liberal Democrat who twice campaigned for President
Barack Obama
,
I am appalled that some Democratic members of Congress are
planning to boycott the speech of Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu
on March 3 to a joint session of Congress. At bottom, this
controversy is not mainly about protocol and politics—it is about the
constitutional system of checks and balances and the separation of
powers.
Under the Constitution, the executive and legislative
branches share responsibility for making and implementing important
foreign-policy decisions. Congress has a critical role to play in
scrutinizing the decisions of the president when these decisions involve
national security, relationships with allies and the threat of nuclear
proliferation.
Congress has every right to invite, even over the
president’s strong objection, any world leader or international expert
who can assist its members in formulating appropriate responses to the
current deal being considered with Iran regarding its nuclear-weapons
program. Indeed, it is the responsibility of every member of Congress to
listen to Prime Minister Netanyahu, who probably knows more about this
issue than any world leader, because it threatens the very existence of
the nation state of the Jewish people.
Congress has the right to
disagree with the prime minister, but the idea that some members of
Congress will not give him the courtesy of listening violates protocol
and basic decency to a far greater extent than anything Mr. Netanyahu is
accused of doing for having accepted an invitation from Congress.
theatlantic | Why does this matter? Because the U.S. government has
finite resources. If you assume, as conservatives tend to, that the only
significant terrorist threat America faces comes from people with names
like Mohammed and Ibrahim, then that’s where you’ll devote your time
and money. If, on the other hand, you recognize that environmental
lunatics and right-wing militia types kill Americans for political
reasons too, you’ll spread the money around.
We’ve already seen the consequences of a disproportionate focus on jihadist terrorism. After 9/11, the Bush administration so dramatically shifted
homeland-security resources toward stopping al-Qaeda that it left FEMA
hideously unprepared to deal with an attack from Mother Nature, in the
form of Hurricane Katrina. The Obama administration is wise to avoid
that kind of overly narrow focus today. Of course it’s important to stop
the next Nidal Malik Hasan or Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev. But it’s also important to stop the next Timothy McVeigh or
Wade Michael Page. And by calling the threat “violent extremism” rather
than “radical Islam,” Obama tells the bureaucracy to work on that too.
Obama, after all, faces two overlapping but distinct
challenges. One is an ideology: the totalitarian, even genocidal, vision
espoused by ISIS. The second is a tactic: terrorism, which is available
to people of all ideological stripes and which grows more dangerous as
technology empowers individuals or groups to kill far more people far
more quickly than they could have in ages past.
Instead of assuming that these threats are the same,
we should be debating the relative danger of each. By using “violent
extremism” rather than “radical Islam,” Obama is staking out a position
in that argument. It’s a position with which reasonable people can
disagree. But cowardice has nothing to do with it.
theatlantic | After the jump I have a reader's note marveling at the way
we've agreed to discuss Iran as a bottomless evil, rather than as a
state with whom we should look for diplomatic ways to manage conflicts, as we have with China and the old Soviet Union—and as Begin did with Sadat.
A reader writes:
This whole thing has become so utterly surreal it's hard to talk
about anymore. The entire kerfuffle is premised on an Iranian nuclear
weapons program - a program we KNOW with certainty they do not have in
operation. NO fissile materials have been diverted, IAEA inspectors
routinely tell us that. Meanwhile, Netanyahu and his Likudnik colleagues
have been telling us since the 1980s that Iran is SIX MONTHS away from
having a nuclear weapon.
I understand that Netanyahu is using fear of a nuclear-armed Iran for
domestic political purposes - primarily to frighten his citizens into
keeping him in office. The use of a ginned-up external existential
threat is a time-honored method for cowing and manipulating a domestic
constituency, and clearly at some point the fear of the Palestinians had
lost its punch.
But why do the US, UK, France, China and other nations go along with
this charade? Why do the media always write the stories in such a manner
as to indicate that Iran has an active weapons R&D program? Why did
we pile sanctions on and make daily threats of offensive war against a
signatory of the NPT is good standing, particularly in support of an
illegal proliferator? How can we continue this ridiculous sham?
Over the last couple years, you wrote repeatedly about how the press
covered Republican filibusters - and you were right. This is the same
thing - we're going through all these massive machinations to address a
problem WE KNOW DOES NOT EXIST. If I wrote this in a novel it would be
rejected as "utterly implausible"...
World War III (which we are currently in) is being fought with very
different tactics than World War I and II. However, in my opinion the
mass-motivational strategy is the same: different breeding population males trying to
extend the territories on which they are able to impose their
respective socio-political systems. The tactics in WW III involve small groups of
(mostly) highly trained and skilled (mostly) men killing primarily
civilians in lands yet to be conquered. Because the group of (mostly)
men is not concentrated in one country, large nation states with large
and powerful traditional armies are rendered rather helpless in trying to defeat
them.
None of the prospective combatants are interested in making peace
because each of the combatant bands of killer-apes believe themselves
in possession of the winning set of tactics to eventually win the war.
It is a war that will last for decades or until the socio-economic and
political conditions in the enemy combatant nations of the world
change. Only those who are losing wars want to end wars, as cynical as
that might sound.
What if all Western nation states with large and powerful traditional
armies joined together to send military forces (ground troops) into
Syria and Iraq to defeat and capture and/or kill ISIS? A misguided
start as it won't work and will probably make things worse. Western
military intervention is merely a guarantee of inflaming and widening
the scope of violence and death. Western military intervention would be
as effective as stepping on ants in one's house as a way of eliminating
the ant problem.
Neither Judeo-Christian extremists or Muslim extremists are interested
in making peace. Each extremist pole is deeply embedded in majority moderate/secular
populations and each believes itself in possession of an effective set
of tactics to eventually win the war.
If "we" in the West send soldiers to kill ISIS won't that be something
of a winning set of tactics? What is called "ISIS" today is just a
drop in the bucket in terms of the number of potential and actual
Muslim extremists in the world. If every Muslim extremist who is a part
of ISIS is killed in 2015, by 2020 there will be twice as many Muslim
extremists in the world, as those watching the unfolding spectacle will be motivated to get even with the
western capitalist republics that killed their Muslim brothers in ISIS.
Can the West (and the rest of the world) afford to wait until its own
extremist male sub-populations quiet down, are assimilated by the secular moderate majorities in which they're embedded, or until Muslim extremist
sub-populations calm down? No. A better strategy for the west would be
to increase the factors that lead to secularization in the Muslim
countries: better education, access to information, democratic forms of
government, civil rights for women, homosexuals, etc. The western industrial
democracies have been secularizing since the Protestant Reformation in
the early 16th to mid 17th century. It takes time. Islam is as much a
political system as it is a religion.
The United States had a winning strategy to win the Cold War, which was
a war between capitalism and communism. We need a similar political
strategy to wage war between capitalism and Sharia, the political arm
of Islam. The U.S. has been at war in the middle east since 1991 and
things are worse, not better, then when we first went there. A better
strategy does not involve sending soldiers to kill individual Muslim
extremists or their leaders. One has to be patient. Under the best of
circumstances the needed change would take decades. In the global
economic contraction we're currently all experiencing, there's no
guarantee that the sources of extremism will abate or can be assimilated.
The Arab Spring unfortunately didn't lead to what the protesters wanted
and led to violence in many cases. The Arab Spring demonstrated that
the Arab masses were tired of the post-colonial dictatorships installed
by the west in their respective societies. Most of the Muslim countries
of the world were not democracies and are not now democracies. They were, however, national
socialist autocracies with Islam as the state religion and Sharia Law
influencing national law. The primary dictatorial strategies in Iraq, Libya and
Syria were to facilitate secularization. Destruction of the
dictatorships brought the western processes - progressively in effect in these
countries for decades - to a screeching and catastrophic halt. There has never been a greater policy blunder in the modern era than overthrowing the dictatorships in Iraq and Libya. Continuing this failed policy in Syria has only served to make the already intolerable situation still worse.
Tribalism and extremism under the rubric of cultural Islam have become the
prevailing order of the day in the western-created and western destroyed former states of the Middle-East and Northeast Africa. In order to successfully progress away from this situation, the west must turn to the centralized, hierarchical theocracy of Iran and consolidate power in the hands of the Revolutionary Guard (who are probably quite tired of Mullahs, Mullah nonsense, and Mullah theft and graft). As a good friend of mine is fond of noting, the Shah and his cronies were awful thieves and despots, but you can't steal and pack as much into a uniform or a suit as you can in the bottomless pockets of a Mullah-robe.
Because of neocon stupidity, eggregious cultural miscalculation, and abject military misapplication and failure, we are now faced with the inevitable fact of having to assist with the restoration of Persian empire, actually working with and assisting Iran to become the preeminent power in the entire middle east.
WaPo | Like every world leader and, for that matter,
nearly everybody else, Netanyahu is fully aware that the fault lines in
U.S. politics between Republicans and Democrats have widened to a chasm.
Unlike every other world leader, the bumptious Bibi has decided to take
a side in America’s internal conflict by addressing a joint meeting of
the Republican-controlled Congress (responding to an invitation from
House Speaker John Boehner) without even informing President Obama that
he was Washington-bound. One of Netanyahu’s goals is to undercut the
administration’s efforts to negotiate a pact with Iran that will impede
that nation’s nuclear program. His other goal is clearly to stick it to
Obama and thus appear to the Israeli electorate — which will go to the polls on March 17 — as one tough dude. If Netanyahu’s talk, the idea for which was at least partly cooked up by Ron Dermer,
a former GOP operative who moved to Israel and is now its ambassador to
the United States, also has the effect of boosting the Republican Party
at the expense of Obama and the Democrats, so much the better. During
the 2012 election, Netanyahu did everything he could to make apparent
that he preferred Mitt Romney to Obama, with no perceptible effect on
the outcome or even on the voting preferences of American Jews, who backed Obama, 69 percent to 30 percent.
Of
all the reasons that American Jews remain firmly Democratic, and
liberal as well, the most fundamental is their commitment, both
particular and universal, to minority rights. For Jews in a
majority-Christian country, the enshrinement of minority rights and its
institutional guarantees — nondiscrimination in hiring and voting, say,
or a judiciary independent of the elected branches of government — has
always been paramount. It’s why American Jews have embraced not only the
battles for their own liberties but those of every other minority
group.
NYTimes | President Obama stands accused of political correctness for his unwillingness to accuse groups such as the Islamic State of “Islamic extremism,” choosing a more generic term, “violent extremism.”
His critics say that you cannot fight an enemy you will not name. Even
his supporters feel that his approach is too “professorial.”
But far from being a scholar concerned with describing the phenomenon accurately, the president is deliberately choosing not to emphasize the Islamic State’s religious dimension for political and strategic reasons.
After all, what would be the practical consequence of describing the
group, also known as ISIS, as Islamic? Would the West drop more bombs on
it? Send in more soldiers to fight it? No, but it would make many
Muslims feel that their religion had been unfairly maligned. And it
would dishearten Muslim leaders who have continually denounced the
Islamic State as a group that does not represent Islam.
But “the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic,” Graeme Wood writes in a much-discussed cover essay for the Atlantic this month.Wood is much taken by the Princeton academic Bernard Haykel,
who says that people want to turn a blind eye to the Islamic State’s
ideology for political reasons. “People want to absolve Islam,” he
quotes Haykel as saying. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’
mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do.”
Right. There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and perhaps 30,000 members of the Islamic State.
And yet Haykel feels that it is what the 0.0019 percent of Muslims do
that defines the religion. Who is being political, I wonder?
NYTimes | Mr. Giuliani has plainly not mellowed in his prosperity. Representative
Peter T. King, a Long Island Republican who has known him for decades,
said the former mayor was “very personally angry” in his remarks, on
and off the stage at the fund-raising event on Wednesday evening.
“This is as emotional as I’ve seen him. He was in some ways more
emotional than he was after 9/11,” said Mr. King, who spoke alongside
Mr. Giuliani at a private “super PAC” fund-raising event at the Women’s
National Republican Club in Manhattan.
John A. Catsimatidis, the billionaire grocery store magnate, attended
the same fund-raiser and, on a whim, invited Mr. Giuliani to join him
at a meet-and-greet for Mr. Walker with members of the New York
financial elite. Mr. Catsimatidis, a frequent Republican donor,
lamented that Mr. Giuliani’s unplanned speech became an enveloping
spectacle.
“The focus of the event should not have been that,” Mr. Catsimatidis
said, adding: “Look, Rudy is Rudy. He’s not going to run for anything
himself. Maybe he wanted to get it off his chest.”
To some in Republican politics, Mr. Giuliani’s public eruption looks
like the product of slack political instincts, the shoot-from-the-lip
behavior of a former champion who has lost self-awareness with each
year removed from office. The former mayor’s political career has
sloped precipitously downward since his ill-fated 2008 campaign; while
he remains an occasional fund-raising attraction, his time as a
national Republican leader is past.
For all the criticism Mr. Giuliani’s comments attracted from Democrats
and members of the Republican establishment, there are quarters of the
right where his remarks struck a chord. The talk-radio host Rush
Limbaugh crowed about “getting texts praising Rudy to the rooftops.”
Joe M. Allbaugh, a former Giuliani adviser who led the Federal
Emergency Management Agency during the World Trade Center attacks, said
he applauded Mr. Giuliani’s candor.
“He represents a lot of Americans who are scratching their heads
wondering why our president — the president of the United States —
doesn’t defend our culture the way he defends everybody else’s
culture,” Mr. Allbaugh said.
Ask Regina Peruggi, the second cousin he grew up with and married, who
was "offended" when Rudy later engineered an annulment from the priest
who was his best man on the grounds, strangely enough, that she was his
cousin. Or ask Donna Hanover, the mother of his two children, who found
out he wanted a separation when he left Gracie Mansion one morning and
announced it at a televised press conference.
Or ask Judi Nathan, his third wife, whom he started dating while still
married to Hanover and New York mayor. In two SUVs, he and an entourage
of six or seven cops traveled 11 times to Judi's Hamptons getaway at a
taxpayer cost of $3,000 a trip. That's love.
Rudy knows so much about love that he declared the other day that President Obama "doesn't love you" and "doesn't love me" at a private party of GOP fat cats.
The onetime presidential candidate also revealed at the party that
Obama "doesn't love America," an echo of a speech he'd delivered to
delirious cheers in Arizona a week earlier when he declared: "I would go
anywhere, any place, anytime, and I wouldn't give a damn what the
President of the United States said, to defend my country. That's a
patriot. That's a man who loves his people. That's a man who fights for
his people. Unlike our President."
Rudy may have forgotten the half-dozen deferments he won ducking the
Vietnam War, even getting the federal judge he was clerking for to write
a letter creating a special exemption for him. And remember Bernie
Kerik? He's the Giulaini police commissioner, business partner and
sidekick whose nomination as homeland security secretary narrowly
preceded indictments. He then did his national service in prison.
Giuliani went so far as to rebuke the President for not being "brought
up the way you were and the way I was brought up through love of this
country," a bow no doubt to the parenting prowess of Harold Giuliani,
who did time in Sing Sing for holding up a Harlem milkman and was the
bat-wielding enforcer for the loan-sharking operation run out of a
Brooklyn bar owned by Rudy's uncle.
Though Rudy cited Harold throughout his public life as his model
(without revealing any of his history), he and five Rudy uncles found
ways to avoid service in World War II. Harold, whose robbery conviction
was in the name of an alias, made sure the draft board knew he was a
felon. On the other hand, Obama's grandfather and uncle served. His
uncle helped liberate Buchenwald, which apparently affected him so
deeply he stayed in the family attic for six months when he returned
home.
H+ |DARPA,
the Defense Research Projects Agency, is perhaps best known for its
role as progenitors of the computer networking and the Internet. Formed
in the wake of the Soviet Union’s surprise launch of Sputnik, DARPA’s
objective was to ensure that the United States would avoid technological
surprises in the future. This role was later expanded to causing
technological surprises as well.
And although DARPA is and has been the leading source of funding for
artificial intelligence and a number of other transhumanist
projects, they’ve been missing in action for a while. Nothing DARPA has
worked on since seems to have had the societal impact of the invention of the Internet. But that is about to change.
The current director of DARPA is Dr. Arati Prabhakar. She is the second female director of the organization, following the previous and controversial director Regina Dugan
who left the government to work at Google. The return to big visions
and big adventures was apparent and in stark contrast to Dugan’s
leadership of the organization.
Quoted in WIRED, Dugan had, for example, stated that “There is a time
and a place for daydreaming. But it is not at DARPA,” and she told a
congressional panel in March 2011, “Darpa is not the place of dreamlike
musings or fantasies, not a place for self-indulging in wishes and
hopes. DARPA is a place of doing.”
Those days are gone. DARPA’s new vision is simply to revolutionize
the human situation and it is fully transhumanist in its approach.
The Biological Technologies Office or BTO was announced with little
fanfare in the spring of 2014. This announcement didn’t get that much
attention, perhaps because the press release announcing the BTO was published on April Fool’s Day.
But DARPA is determined to turn that around, and to help make that
happen, they held a two day event in the SIlicon Valley area to
facilitate and communicate about radical changes ahead in the area of
biotechnologies. Invitees included some of the top biotechnology
scientists in the world. And the audience was a mixed group of
scientists, engineers, inventors, investors, futurists, along with a
handful of government contractors and military personnel.
WaPo | There’s a scene
in Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove” in which Jack
D. Ripper, an American general who’s gone rogue and ordered a nuclear
attack on the Soviet Union, unspools his paranoid worldview — and the
explanation for why he drinks “only distilled water, or rainwater, and
only pure grain alcohol” — to Lionel Mandrake, a dizzy-with-anxiety
group captain in the Royal Air Force.
Ripper: “Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?”
Mandrake: “Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes, yes.”
Ripper: “Well, do you know what it is?”
Mandrake: “No. No, I don’t know what it is, no.”
Ripper:
“Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and
dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?”
The
movie came out in 1964, by which time the health benefits of
fluoridation had been thoroughly established and anti-fluoridation
conspiracy theories could be the stuff of comedy. Yet half a century
later, fluoridation continues to incite fear and paranoia. In 2013,
citizens in Portland, Ore., one of only a few major American cities that
don’t fluoridate, blocked a plan
by local officials to do so. Opponents didn’t like the idea of the
government adding “chemicals” to their water. They claimed that fluoride
could be harmful to human health.
Actually fluoride is a natural
mineral that, in the weak concentrations used in public drinking-water
systems, hardens tooth enamel and prevents tooth decay — a cheap and
safe way to improve dental health for everyone, rich or poor,
conscientious brushers or not. That’s the scientific and medical
consensus.
To which some people in Portland, echoing anti-fluoridation activists around the world, reply: We don’t believe you.
We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge — from the safety of fluoride and vaccines
to the reality of climate change — faces organized and often furious
opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own
interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus
of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you’d
think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people
argumentative.
WaPo | Walker had decided to challenge Gwen Moore (D),
an African American woman who represented a partly white and deeply
Democratic state assembly district that surrounded Marquette, Hiller
said.
Republican leaders welcomed Walker’s bid. He wouldn’t win,
but he would still force Moore to spend money and time defending the
seat. (Walker later moved to suburban Wauwatosa, and it was there that
he won his seat in 1993.)
In 1990, the 22-year-old Walker spent
days knocking on doors in the district, preaching a get-tough message.
He wanted 200 more cops on the street and stronger mandatory sentences
for drug dealers.
“The number one fear is crime,” he wrote in a
letter to Marquette students, asking them, again, to vote for him. “For
too long, we have ignored this issue and now it is time to do something
about it.”
Moore, who is now a member of Congress, said: “His
campaign was one big dog whistle.” She believed that Walker’s anti-crime
message was a way to speak to white voters’ fears of blacks without
saying them aloud. “He had sort of insinuated sort of the worst
stereotypes about black people [and] innate criminality.”
Hiller,
Walker’s campaign treasurer, said that Moore was entirely wrong about
Walker’s message. “There was no racial angle,” he said. “It never
crossed our minds.”
On election night, Walker’s chances looked so
terrible that Walker and Hiller left the district and the city of
Milwaukee behind. They started driving to Madison, the state capital, to
attend parties for other Republicans who had a chance.
Then, for a minute, something strange happened.
“We’re
listening to election returns on the radio, and the guy comes on: ‘In a
surprise in the [7th District], Scott Walker is ahead of Gwen Moore,’ ”
Hiller said. “Literally, I pulled off the road.”
The two young
men sat there on the shoulder, blindsided by the idea that Walker — a
politician who hadn’t won anything he really wanted — might be about to
win. Fist tap Vic.
mintpressnews | “We’re currently in one of the hottest periods of extremist activity
in the United States that I’ve seen in my 20-year career. This blows
what we saw pre-Oklahoma City out of the water and makes it look like a
kindergarten picnic,” Daryl Johnson, a domestic terrorism expert and
founder of DT Analytics, a private consulting firm for law enforcement
and Homeland Security professionals, says during an interview for the recent Vice News documentary. Johnson was also the main author of the intelligence assessment issued by DHS in 2009.
Yet, rather than acting on the information gathered in the
assessment, the government cancelled all of its domestic terrorism
reporting and law enforcement training after the report was leaked and
politicized by conservative media outlets and politicians.
One such publication
described “the piece of crap report” as “a sweeping indictment of
conservatives.” It continues, “In Obama land, there are no coincidences.
It is no coincidence that this report echoes Tea Party-bashing
left-wing blogs … and demonizes the very Americans who will be
protesting in the thousands on Wednesday for the nationwide Tax Day Tea
Party.”
Conservative news organizations interpreted the publication of the
report as a political power play by Obama to demonize the right, rather
than an impartial analysis of domestic terrorism that could help law
enforcement.
In 2011, two years after the report was released, Johnson said he was
deeply disheartened by how the report was characterized. Johnson told Joe Hamilton at the Muskegon Chronicle
that he was “a former intelligence analyst and counterterrorism expert
for the U.S. Army, an Eagle Scout, Mormon, one-time church missionary,
an anti-abortion gun owner, and third-generation lifetime registered
Republican.” In short, he said he is a conservative. Johnson added that
the report could not have been a political move on the part of Obama,
since he was hired in 2004 by the George W. Bush administration.
Following Hamilton’s opinion piece, Johnson penned his own article for Salon, “Daryl Johnson: I tried to warn them.” In it, he makes a damning indictment of the DHS decision not to follow through on recommendations made in his report.
splcenter |At 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, a 7,000-pound truck bomb,
constructed of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and nitromethane racing fuel
and packed into 13 plastic barrels, ripped through the heart of the
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The explosion
wrecked much of downtown Oklahoma City and killed 168 people, including
19 children in a day-care center. Another 500 were injured. Although
many Americans initially suspected an attack by Middle Eastern radicals,
it quickly became clear that the mass murder had actually been carried
out by domestic, right-wing terrorists.
The slaughter
engineered by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, men steeped in the
conspiracy theories and white-hot fury of the American radical right,
marked the opening shot in a new kind of domestic political extremism — a
revolutionary ideology whose practitioners do not hesitate to carry out
attacks directed at entirely innocent victims, people selected
essentially at random to make a political point. After Oklahoma, it was
no longer sufficient for many American right-wing terrorists to strike
at a target of political significance — instead, they reached for higher
and higher body counts, reasoning that they had to eclipse McVeigh's
attack to win attention.
What follows is a detailed listing
of major terrorist plots and racist rampages that have emerged from the
American radical right in the years since Oklahoma City. These have
included plans to bomb government buildings, banks, refineries,
utilities, clinics, synagogues, mosques, memorials and bridges; to
assassinate police officers, judges, politicians, civil rights figures
and others; to rob banks, armored cars and other criminals; and to amass
illegal machine guns, missiles, explosives and biological and chemical
weapons. [Each of these plots aimed to make changes in America through
the use of political violence.] Most contemplated the deaths of large
numbers of people — in one case, as many as 30,000, or 10 times the
number murdered on Sept. 11, 2001.
Here are the stories of
plots, conspiracies and racist rampages since 1995 — plots and violence
waged against a democratic America.
politico | Rudy Giuliani went straight for the jugular Wednesday night during a
private group dinner here featuring Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker by
openly questioning whether President Barack Obama “loves America.”
The former New York mayor, speaking in front of the 2016 Republican
presidential contender and about 60 right-leaning business executives
and conservative media types, directly challenged Obama’s patriotism,
discussing what he called weak foreign policy decisions and
questionable public remarks when confronting terrorists.
“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do
not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said during the
dinner at the 21 Club, a former Prohibition-era speakeasy in midtown
Manhattan. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t
brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through
love of this country.”
With Walker sitting just a few seats away, Giuliani continued by saying
that “with all our flaws we’re the most exceptional country in the
world. I’m looking for a presidential candidate who can express that,
do that and carry it out.”
nationaljournal | Google is warning that the government's quiet plan to expand the
FBI's authority to remotely access computer files amounts to a
"monumental" constitutional concern. The
search giant submitted public comments earlier this week opposing a
Justice Department proposal that would grant judges more leeway in how
they can approve search warrants for electronic data.
The
push to change an arcane federal rule "raises a number of monumental and
highly complex constitutional, legal, and geopolitical concerns that
should be left to Congress to decide," wrote Richard Salgado, Google's director for law enforcement and information security.
The
provision, known as Rule 41 of the federal rules of criminal procedure,
generally permits judges to grant search warrants only within the bounds
of their judicial district. Last year, the Justice Department
petitioned a judicial advisory committee to amend the rule to allow
judges to approve warrants outside their jurisdictions in cases where
authorities are unsure where a computer is located.
Google,
in its comments, blasted the desired rule change as overly vague,
saying the proposal could authorize remote searches on the data of
millions of Americans simultaneously—particularly those who share a
network or router—and cautioned it rested on shaky legal footing.
"The
serious and complex constitutional concerns implicated by the proposed
amendment are numerous and, because of the nature of Fourth Amendment
case law development, are unlikely to be addressed by courts in a timely
fashion," Salgado wrote.
The
Justice Department has countered that the rule change amounts to a
small-scale tweak of protocol, one that is necessary to align
search-warrant procedures with the realities of modern technology. In
its own comments, the Justice Department accused some opponents of the rule change of "misreading the text of the proposal or misunderstanding current law."
"The
proposal would not authorize the government to undertake any search or
seizure or use any remote search technique not already permitted under
current law," Deputy Assistant Attorney General David Bitkower said in a
memorandum written late last year and made public Tuesday. He added
that investigators are "careful to avoid collateral damage when
executing remote searches, just as [they are] careful to avoid injury to
persons or damage to property in the far more common scenario of
executing physical warrants."
telegraph | Hong Kong’s unpopular chief executive has infuriated pro-democracy campaigners
by using a Chinese New Year message to urge the former colony's citizens to
act more "like sheep".
“Last year was no easy ride for Hong Kong. Our society was rife with
differences and conflicts,” the chief executive of the former British colony
said.
“In the coming year, I hope that all people in Hong Kong will take inspiration
from the sheep's character and pull together in an accommodating manner to
work for Hong Kong's future.”
In case his message had been missed, Mr Leung noted that the 12 animals in the
Chinese zodiac had 12 individual "character types". "Sheep
are widely seen to be mild and gentle animals living peacefully in groups,"
he said.
proceduralfairness | The theory behind procedural fairness, or procedural justice as it is
sometimes called, has developed over a period of more than 25 years.
Tom Tyler, one of the key figures in the field of procedural fairness,
provides a concise overview for members of the court community in his
article "Procedural Justice and the Courts."
In a recent lecture,
Professor Tyler further explores and highlights the implications of
procedural fairness on several aspects of the justice system.
Judges Kevin Burke and Steve Leben authored an extensive white paper on procedural fairness entitled, "Procedural Fairness: A Key Ingredient in Public Satisfaction."
The paper examines core research in the area and recommends various
changes to "improve" the daily work of the courts and their judges. Click here to access the spanish version of the paper.
In a December 2011 presentation to the Conference of State Court
Administrators, Judge Kevin Burke presented an overview of procedural
fairness and its practical applications. A copy of the powerpoint from
his presentation can be found here.
Other scholars have explored the connection between procedural fairness and other areas of research. The article Fair Procedures, Yes. But We Dare Not Lose Sight of Fair Outcomes
by Brian Bornstein and Hannah Dietrich discusses procedural justice and
its interrelation with distributive justice. Similarly, Jonathan
Jackson discusses procedural justice as an important aspect of
criminology's definition of legitimate authority in his chapter, On the Dual Motivational Force of Legitimate Authority.
An Argument for Procedural Fairness
Professor Tom Tyler's presentation to a 2007 Harvard Law School
Conference focuses on how legitimacy, which is rooted in procedural
justice, is important in decisions to adhere to social rules. The
presentation is broken into three parts below:
WaPo | Over the holiday weekend, I waited for something that never came. Given FBI Director James Comey’s powerful and direct speech
on law enforcement and race at Georgetown University on Thursday, I
thought for sure hellfire would rain down upon him from the right. After
all, in tone and word, he echoed the sentiments expressed by President
Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder on the same topic. Yet instead of
being accused of having blood on his hands or labeled a race-baiter,
Comey and his “hard truths” have been met with silence.
The four
“hard truths” articulated by Comey were tough on police. “Much of our
history is not pretty,” he said as he acknowledged law enforcement’s
role in maintaining the status quo against “disfavored groups.” He
talked about the unconscious bias that grips many in law enforcement. He
discussed the “different flavors of cynicism” that cops “work hard to
resist.” And he talked about the staggering problems facing many young
men and boys of color that become part of officers’ “life experience.”
In addition, Comey called on police to “better understand the people we
serve and protect — by trying to know, deep in our gut, what it feels
like to be a law-abiding young black man walking on the street and
encountering law enforcement.”
That’s strong stuff. And yet,
those easily irritated folks on the right who slammed Obama and Holder
for saying similar things over the past six months have been rendered
mute. No doubt it is because the new messenger is a white, 54-year-old
Republican son of Irish immigrants and grandson of a police chief.
What’s disturbing is that they willingly ignore Comey’s entreaties while
trivializing the same from the president and the attorney general.
WaPo | Abdisalam Adam is a public school teacher and imam from St. Paul,
Minn., and a model for how the White House and U.S. law enforcement hope
to avoid an American version of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris. By
working within local communities and with civic leaders, they aim to
prevent the radicalization and recruitment of young people into
extremist organizations.
But even Adam — whose work in this area will be highlighted during this week’s White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism
(CVE) — has to fight deep suspicions among his fellow Somalis that the
government efforts are just a guise for intelligence gathering.
“Is
the government sincere about this?” Adam said. “That’s a big question.
The trust is not completely there.” But he added that communities such
as his have little choice. “Personally, I think if it’s done right and
the government’s sincere, it’s the right thing to do.”
The
three-day gathering, which has been in the works since the fall but has
attracted significant attention in the wake of terrorist attacks in
Paris and elsewhere, will launch a new U.S. framework aimed at
preventing potential extremists from launching strikes in the United
States or joining the fight overseas.
Expanding beyond the work already underway, the White House’s approach
aims to enlist the help of social-service providers and religious
leaders to avert future conversions to radicalism.
Senior
administration officials, speaking to reporters Monday, said that while
the initiative would not end terrorist acts like those undertaken in Copenhagen and Libya in the past few days, they are part of the broader answer to such threats.
“I
think we need to be realistic that this is a long-term investment,”
said one official, who asked for anonymity to discuss the event in
advance. “And so, ultimately, we hope to get to a place where we just
have much greater resilience and greater action across communities. But
that is not something we’re going to see tomorrow.”
***************
One of the senior administration officials said Monday that “there’s
no profile that we can point to to say this person is from this
community, is going to be radicalized to violence,” adding, “I think
that we make a mistake as a government if we focus on stereotypes.”
Nicholas J. Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, testified
this month before the House Homeland Security Committee that these
initiatives should not be “perceived as intimidating” and that several
communities have responded positively to the government’s overtures.
theatlantic | Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity
of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to
know the answers. In December, The New York Times published
confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special
Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting
that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We
have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the
idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic
State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,”
statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have
contributed to significant strategic errors.
The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area
larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader
since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance
on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp
Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he
stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to
deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading
his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from
hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists
that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and
volume, and is continuing.
Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It
is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has
spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s
countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the
caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project
knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of
principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make
it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that
change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a
harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.
The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS),
follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to
the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know
its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the
triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the
Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a
dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived
to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8
million.
We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two
ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the
logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it.
The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden
as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since
al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain
the group’s priorities and current leadership.
Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did
not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible,
operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The
Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and
a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil
and military arms, and its territory into provinces.)
We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest
campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. Peter
Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled
his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as
a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror
and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such
as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers
navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohammad Atta’s last full day
of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut.
NYTimes | In
a report to be published on Monday, and provided in advance to The New
York Times, Kaspersky Lab says that the scope of this attack on more
than 100 banks and other financial institutions in 30 nations could make
it one of the largest bank thefts ever — and one conducted without the
usual signs of robbery.
The
Moscow-based firm says that because of nondisclosure agreements with
the banks that were hit, it cannot name them. Officials at the White
House and the F.B.I. have been briefed on the findings, but say that it
will take time to confirm them and assess the losses.
Kaspersky
Lab says it has seen evidence of $300 million in theft through clients,
and believes the total could be triple that. But that projection is
impossible to verify because the thefts were limited to $10 million a
transaction, though some banks were hit several times. In many cases the
hauls were more modest, presumably to avoid setting off alarms.
The majority of the targets were in Russia, but many were in Japan, the United States and Europe.
No
bank has come forward acknowledging the theft, a common problem that
President Obama alluded to on Friday when he attended the first White
House summit meeting on cybersecurity and consumer protection at
Stanford University. He urged passage of a law that would require public
disclosure of any breach that compromised personal or financial
information.
But
the industry consortium that alerts banks to malicious activity, the
Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, said in a
statement that “our members are aware of this activity. We have
disseminated intelligence on this attack to the members,” and that “some
briefings were also provided by law enforcement entities.”
arstechnica | A long list of almost superhuman technical feats illustrate Equation Group's extraordinary skill, painstaking work, and unlimited resources. They include:
The stashing of malicious files in multiple branches of an infected
computer's registry. By encrypting all malicious files and storing them
in multiple branches of a computer's Windows registry, the infection was
impossible to detect using antivirus software.
Redirects that sent iPhone users to unique exploit Web pages. In
addition, infected machines reporting to Equation Group command servers
identified themselves as Macs, an indication that the group successfully
compromised both iOS and OS X devices.
The use of more than 300 Internet domains and 100 servers to host a sprawling command and control infrastructure.
USB stick-based reconnaissance malware to map air-gapped networks,
which are so sensitive that they aren't connected to the Internet. Both
Stuxnet and the related Flame malware platform also had the ability to bridge airgaps.
An unusual if not truly novel way of bypassing code-signing
restrictions in modern versions of Windows, which require that all
third-party software interfacing with the operating system kernel be
digitally signed by a recognized certificate authority. To circumvent
this restriction, Equation Group malware exploited a known vulnerability in an already signed driver for CloneCD to achieve kernel-level code execution.
Taken together, the accomplishments led Kaspersky researchers to
conclude that Equation Group is probably the most sophisticated computer
attack group in the world, with technical skill and resources that
rival the groups that developed Stuxnet and the Flame espionage malware.
"It seems to me Equation Group are the ones with the coolest toys,"
Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky Lab's global research and analysis
team, told Ars. "Every now and then they share them with the Stuxnet
group and the Flame group, but they are originally available only to the
Equation Group people. Equation Group are definitely the masters, and
they are giving the others, maybe, bread crumbs. From time to time they
are giving them some goodies to integrate into Stuxnet and Flame."
NHTSA | Background and Introduction
While the extent of use of alcohol by drivers and the risks
posed by alcohol use have been well known for many
decades, relatively little has been known about the use of
other drugs by drivers and the associated risks. However,
drug-impaired driving has recently become an issue of
increasing public and governmental concern in the United
States and in many other countries (Compton et al., 2009;
Asbridge et al., 2012; ICADTS, 2007). While it is readily
apparent that driving-related skills can be impaired by
a wide variety of illegal substances and medications, the
nature and scope of the drug-impaired driving problem
has been difficult to define (Jones et al., 2003; DuPont et
al., 2012; Houwing, 2013). In the United States, recent State
actions to legalize the use of marijuana for medical and
recreational use have further exacerbated concern over
potential risks of driving impaired by marijuana.
Marijuana is the most frequently detected drug (other
than alcohol) in crash-involved drivers as well as the general
driving population (Terhune, 1982; Terhune et al., 1992;
Lacey et al., 2009; Walsh et al., 2005). There is evidence
that marijuana use impairs psychomotor skills, divided
attention, lane tracking, and cognitive functions (Robbe
et al., 1993; Moskowitz, 1995; Hartman and Huestis, 2013).
However, its role in contributing to the occurrence of
crashes remains less clear. Many studies, using a variety
of methods have attempted to estimate the risk of driving
after use of marijuana (Li et al., 2012; Asbridge et al., 2012).
The methods have included experimental studies, observational
studies, and epidemiological studies. While useful
in identifying how marijuana affects the performance
of driving tasks, experimental and observational studies
do not lend themselves to predicting real world crash risk.
Epidemiological Studies
Epidemiological studies differ in how they estimate risk.
Culpability studies compare the rate at which crash-involved,
drug-positive drivers and drug-negative drivers
are deemed to be at fault for their crashes. Case-control
studies compare drug use by crash-involved drivers to
drug use by non-crash involved drivers. In general, the
case-control method is preferable since it can eliminate
more sources of potential bias in estimating crash risk
resulting from drug use (e.g., alcohol use is much higher
at night and on weekends than during the day or on
weekdays). The existing epidemiological research (both
culpability and case-control studies) have produced contradictory
estimates of risk for marijuana use. Some of
these studies have suggested that marijuana use has minimal
or no effect on the likelihood of crash involvement,
while others have estimated a small increase in the risk of
crash involvement.
Two recent population-based case control studies have
estimated the crash risk of drug use by drivers by using
NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) 2007
data for the crash-involved driver population and the
2007 National Roadside Survey of Alcohol and Drug Use
by Drivers for the control drivers (Lia, Bradya, & Chen,
2013; Romano, Torres-Saavedra, Voas, & Lacey, 2014). The
Li study estimated the increased risk of crash involvement
for drivers using marijuana at 1.83 times that of drug-free
drivers, while the Romano study found no increased risk
of crash involvement for those drivers testing positive
for THC (the main psychoactive substance in marijuana).
However, current limitations in the FARS dataset do not
allow calculation of unbiased, reliable and valid estimates
of the risk of crash involvement that results from drug use.
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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He ...
