banker culpability for foreclosure crisis...,

NYTimes | If you want to understand why the Occupy movement has found such traction, it helps to listen to a former banker like James Theckston. He fully acknowledges that he and other bankers are mostly responsible for the country’s housing mess.

As a regional vice president for Chase Home Finance in southern Florida, Theckston shoveled money at home borrowers. In 2007, his team wrote $2 billion in mortgages, he says. Sometimes those were “no documentation” mortgages.

“On the application, you don’t put down a job; you don’t show income; you don’t show assets,” he said. “But you still got a nod.”

“If you had some old bag lady walking down the street and she had a decent credit score, she got a loan,” he added.

Theckston says that borrowers made harebrained decisions and exaggerated their resources but that bankers were far more culpable — and that all this was driven by pressure from the top.

“You’ve got somebody making $20,000 buying a $500,000 home, thinking that she’d flip it,” he said. “That was crazy, but the banks put programs together to make those kinds of loans.”

Especially when mortgages were securitized and sold off to investors, he said, senior bankers turned a blind eye to shortcuts.

“The bigwigs of the corporations knew this, but they figured we’re going to make billions out of it, so who cares? The government is going to bail us out. And the problem loans will be out of here, maybe even overseas.”

One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.

These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.

Theckston, who has a shelf full of awards that he won from Chase, such as “sales manager of the year,” showed me his 2006 performance review. It indicates that 60 percent of his evaluation depended on him increasing high-risk loans.

In late 2008, when the mortgage market collapsed, Theckston and most of his colleagues were laid off. He says he bears no animus toward Chase, but he does think it is profoundly unfair that troubled banks have been rescued while troubled homeowners have been evicted. Fist tap Big Don.

why Occupation alone comprises an overwhelming DDOS...,

NYTimes | One area where the United States indisputably leads the world is incarceration.

The United States has 2.3 million people behind bars, almost one in every 100 Americans. The U.S. prison population has more than doubled over the past 15 years, and one in nine black children has a parent in jail.

Proportionally, the United States has four times as many prisoners as Israel, six times as many as Canada or China, eight times as many as Germany and 13 times as many as Japan.

With just a little more than 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for a quarter of the planet’s prisoners and has more inmates than the leading 35 European countries combined. Almost all the other nations with high per capita prison rates are in the developing world.

There’s also a national election in the United States soon. This issue isn’t on the agenda. It’s almost never come up with Republican presidential candidates; one of the few exceptions was at a debate in September when the audience cheered the notion of executions in Texas.

Barack Obama, the first black president, rarely mentions this question or how it disproportionately affects minorities. More than 60 percent of the United States’ prisoners are black or Hispanic, though these groups comprise less than 30 percent of the population.

“We’ve had a race to incarcerate that has been driven by politics, racially coded, get-tough appeals,” said Michelle Alexander, a law professor at Ohio State University who wrote “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

The escalating cost of the criminal-justice system is an important factor in the fiscal challenges around the United States. Nowhere is that more evident than in California, which is struggling to obey a court order requiring it to reduce its overcrowded prisons by 40,000 inmates.

Today, there are 140,000 convicts in California’s state prisons, who cost about $50,000 each per year. The state pays more on prisons than it does on higher education.

Yet the prisons are so crowded — as many as 54 inmates have to share one toilet — that Conrad Murray, the doctor convicted in the death of the pop star Michael Jackson, may be able to avoid most prison time. Fist tap Nana.

too simple and too smart for domestic "authority" to fathom...,

Video - comedian Lee Camp's prescient answer to the strategic and tactical dilemma facing domestic "authority"..,

fortunate is he who stands at the beginning ; he will know the end and not taste death

Video - Iran shoots down and recovers U.S. drone over eastern border.

NationalJournal | Two incidents that occurred on Sunday—Iran’s claim of a shoot-down of a U.S. drone, and an explosion outside the British embassy in Bahrain—may have been unrelated. But they appear to add to growing evidence that an escalating covert war by the West is under way against Iran, and that Tehran is retaliating with greater intensity than ever.

Asked whether the United States, in cooperation with Israel, was now engaged in a covert war against Iran’s nuclear program that may include the Stuxnet virus, the blowing-up of facilities and the assassination or kidnapping of scientists, one recently retired U.S. official privy to up-to-date intelligence would not deny it.

“It’s safe to say the Israelis are very active,” the official said, adding about U.S. efforts: “Everything that [GOP presidential candidate] Mitt Romney said we should be doing—tough sanctions, covert action and pressuring the international community -- are all of the things we are actually doing.” Though the activities are classified, a senior Obama administration official also would not deny that such a program was under way. He indicated that the U.S. was not involved in every action, referring to recent alleged explosions at Isfahan and elsewhere. But, he added: “I wouldn’t assume that everything we do is coordinated."

Former undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who oversaw America’s Iran engagement during the Bush administration, asked Sunday about reports that the U.S. program began under George W. Bush, said he could not comment on intelligence matters.

In September, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, accused Great Britain, Israel and the U.S. of conducting attacks on him and other Iranian scientists."Six years ago the intelligence service of the UK began collecting information and data regarding my past, my family, the number of children," Abbasi-Davani told a news conference at the annual conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. Abbasi-Davani, who was said to have been wounded in 2010 car bomb explosion, said the attacks were carried out by Israel with the "support of the intelligence services of the United States and England."

Last week, Iranian protesters stormed the British embassy in Tehran. Dominick Chilcott, Britain's ambassador to Iran, later said the attack occurred "with the acquiescence and the support of the state." Then, on Sunday, Bahrain's interior ministry announced that an explosion occurred inside a minibus parked near the British Embassy. There were no immediate reports of serious damage or injuries.

U.S. officials alleged in October that agents acting for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which has increasingly exerted control over the Tehran regime, were involved in a plot to kill that Saudi ambassador to Washington in a restaurant. Iran denied the allegations. Then, on Sunday, in what have been another escalation, Iran’s news agency reported that Iranian armed forces shot down an unmanned U.S. spy plane that illegally crossed the country's eastern border.

Responding to the Iranian report, NATO command in Afghanistan released a terse statement Sunday: "The UAV to which the Iranians are referring may be a US unarmed reconnaissance aircraft that had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week. The operators of the UAV lost control of the aircraft and had been working to determine its status."

Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council in Washington, said the tit-for-tat incidents “add up to a very worrisome picture,” in part because “the Iranians are absorbing all of these assassinations without seeing the pace of their nuclear program slow down to the extent it would be acceptable to the West.” But if Iranian retaliations grow serious enough, he said, they could provide “the pretext for a much larger war” in which the Israelis, and possibly the Americans, launch a full attack on Iran.

what kind of war requires this kind of continuing investment?

AP | At Los Alamos National Laboratory, scientists and engineers refer to their planned new $6 billion nuclear lab by its clunky acronym, CMRR, short for Chemistry Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility. But as a work in progress for three decades and with hundreds of millions of dollars already spent, nomenclature is among the minor issues.

Questions continue to swirl about exactly what kind of nuclear and plutonium research will be done there, whether the lab is really necessary, and — perhaps most important — will it be safe, or could it become New Mexico's equivalent of Japan's Fukushima?

As federal officials prepare the final design plans for the controversial and very expensive lab, increased scrutiny is being placed on what in recent years has been discovered to be a greater potential for a major earthquake along the fault lines that have carved out the stunning gorges, canyons and valleys that surround the nation's premier nuclear weapons facility in northern New Mexico.

Final preparations for the lab — whose the high-end price tag estimate of $5.8 billion is almost $1 billion more than New Mexico's annual state budget and more than double the lab's annual budget — also comes as a cash-strapped Congress looks to trim defense spending and cut cleanup budgets at contaminated facilities like Los Alamos. It also comes as the inspector general recommends that the federal government consider consolidating its far-flung network of research labs.

Despite the uncertainty, the National Nuclear Safety Administration, an arm of the Department of Energy that oversees the nation's nuclear labs, is moving forward on final designs for the lab. Project director Herman Le-Doux says it has been redesigned with input from the nation's leading seismic experts, and the NNSA has "gone to great extremes" to ensure the planned building could withstand an earthquake of up to 7.3 magnitude.

Most seismic experts agree that would be a worst-case scenario for the area. But many people who live near the lab — and have seen it twice threatened by massive wildfires in 10 years — see no reason for taking the chance.

"The Department of Energy has learned nothing from the Fukushima disaster," said David McCoy, director of the environmental and nuclear watchdog group Citizens Action New Mexico, at a recent oversight hearing. That's become a common refrain since last year's earthquake and tsunami in Japan caused a meltdown at one of its nuclear plants. "The major lesson of Fukushima is ignored by NNSA: Don't build dangerous facilities in unsafe natural settings."

Lab officials say CMRR is needed to replace a 1940s era facility that is beyond renovation yet crucial to supporting its mission as the primary center for maintaining and developing the country's stockpile of nuclear weapons. While much of the work is classified, they insist the lab's mission is to do analytical work to support the nearby Plutonium Facility, or PF-4, which is the only building in the country equipped for making the pits that power nuclear weapons.

Watchdog groups, however, call it an effort by the DOE and NNSA to escalate the production of new nuclear weapons and turn what has largely been a research facility into a bomb factory.

Video - The Convair WS 125 atomic powered bomber.

Wikipedia | A nuclear aircraft is an aircraft powered by nuclear energy. Research into them was pursued during the Cold War by the United States and the Soviet Union as they would presumably allow a country to keep nuclear bombers in the air for extremely long periods of time, a useful tactic for nuclear deterrence. Neither country created any nuclear aircraft in production numbers. One design problem, never adequately solved, was the need for heavy shielding to protect the crew from radiation sickness. Since the advent of ICBMs in the 60s the tactical advantage of such aircraft was greatly diminished and respective projects were cancelled. Because the technology was inherently dangerous it was not considered in non-military contexts.

Unmanned missiles have been designed to use nuclear thermal rockets, but such designs were considered too dangerous for crews to fly.

Saenger-Bredt Spaceplane

Video - Recreation of the Sanger-Bendt orbital bomber.

Sanger Orbital Bomber - In June 1935 and February 1936, Dr. Eugen Sänger published articles in the Austrian aviation publication Flug on rocket-powered aircraft. This led to his being asked by the German High Command to build a secret aerospace research institute in Trauen to research and build his "Silverbird", a manned, winged vehicle that could reach orbit. Dr. Sänger had been working on this concept for several years, and in fact he had began developing liquid-fuel rocket engines. From 1930 to 1935, he had perfected (through countless static tests) a 'regeneratively cooled' liquid-fueled rocket engine that was cooled by its own fuel, which circulated around the combustion chamber. This engine produced an astounding 3048 meters/second (10000 feet/second) exhaust velocity, as compared to the later V-2 rocket's 2000 meters/second (6560 feet/second). Dr. Sänger, along with his staff, continued work at Trauen on the "Silverbird" under the Amerika Bomber program. The Sänger Amerika Bomber (or Orbital Bomber, Antipodal Bomber or Atmosphere Skipper) was designed for supersonic, stratospheric flight. The fuselage was flattened, which helped create lift and the wings were short and wedge shaped. There was a horizontal tail surface located at the extreme aft end of the fuselage, which had a small fin on each end. The fuel was carried in two large tanks, one on each side of the fuselage, running from the wings aft. Oxygen tanks were located one on each side of the fuselage, located forward of the wings. There was a huge rocket engine of 100 tons thrust mounted in the fuselage rear, and was flanked by two auxiliary rocket engines. The pilot sat in a pressurized cockpit in the forward fuselage, and a tricycle undercarriage was fitted for a gliding landing. A central bomb bay held one 3629 kg (8000 lb) free-falling bomb, and no defensive armament was fitted. The empty weight was to be approximately 9979 kg (22000 lbs). An interesting flight profile was envisioned for the "Silverbird". It was to be propelled down a 3 km (1.9 mile) long monorail track by a rocket-powered sled that developed a 600 ton thrust for 11 seconds (please see diagram below). After taking off at a 30 degree angle and reaching an altitude of 1.5 km (5100'), a speed of 1850 km/h (1149 mph) would be reached. At this point, the main rocket engine would be fired for 8 minutes and burn 90 tons of fuel to propel the "Silverbird" to a maximum speed of 22100 km/h (13724 mph) and an altitude of over 145 km (90 miles), although some sources list the maximum altitude reached as 280 km (174 miles). As the aircraft accelerated and descended under the pull of gravity, it would then hit the denser air at about 40 km (25 miles) and 'skip' back up as a stone does when skipped along water (please see drawing below). This also had the added benefit of cooling the aircraft after the intense frictional heating encountered when the denser air was reached. The skips would gradually be decreased until the aircraft would glide back to a normal landing using its conventional tricycle landing gear, after covering approximately 23500 km (14594 miles). The final test facilities for full-scale rocket engine tests were being built when Russia was invaded in June 1941. All futuristic programs were canceled due to the need to concentrate on proven designs. Dr. Sänger went on to work on ramjet designs for the DFS (German Research Institute for Gliding), and helped to design the Skoda-Kauba Sk P.14. Although the Luftwaffe did its best to stop Dr. Sänger from publishing his research results, a few copies went unaccounted for and made their way to other countries. After the war, he was asked to work (along with mathematician Irene Bredt) for the French Air Ministry, where in a bizarre plot, he was almost kidnapped by Stalin, who recognized the value of the Amerika Bomber.

bear in mind china's pressing domestic political needs, as well...,

Video - China will not hesitate to protect Iran even with a third World War.

been making fireworks for thousands of years....,

Video - China's subterranean great wall.

Telegraph | The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Georgetown University students under the instruction of a former Pentagon official have assembled the largest body of public knowledge yet about a vast network of secret tunnels dug by China's secretive Second Artillery Corps, responsible for nuclear warheads.

The 363-page study has not yet been published, but has already sparked a congressional hearing and been circulated among top US defence officials, including the Air Force vice chief of staff, the Post reported.

"It's not quite a bombshell, but those thoughts and estimates are being checked against what people think they know based on classified information," it quoted an unnamed Defense Department strategist as saying.

The newspaper said critics of the report had questioned the students methods, which included using internet-based sources like Google Earth, blogs, military journals and even a fictionalised Chinese TV show.

But the Post also said the students were able to obtain a 400-page manual produced by the Second Artillery and usually only available to Chinese military personnel.

2012 national defense authorization act

Wired | Here’s the best thing that can be said about the new detention powers the Senate has tucked into next year’s defense bill: They don’t force the military to detain American citizens indefinitely without a trial. They just let the military do that. And even though the leaders of the military and the spy community have said they want no such power, the Senate is poised to pass its bill as early as tonight.

There are still changes swirling around the Senate, but this looks like the basic shape of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Someone the government says is “a member of, or part of, al-Qaida or an associated force” can be held in military custody “without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” Those hostilities are currently scheduled to end the Wednesday after never. The move would shut down criminal trials for terror suspects.

But far more dramatically, the detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”

An amendment that would limit military detentions to people captured overseas failed on Thursday afternoon. The Senate soundly defeated a measure to strip out all the detention provisions on Tuesday.

So despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to trial, the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end. And because the Senate is using the bill that authorizes funding for the military as its vehicle for this dramatic constitutional claim, it’s pretty likely to pass.

It would be one thing if the military was clamoring for the authority to become the nation’s jailer. But to the contrary: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta opposes the maneuver. So does CIA Director David Petraeus, who usually commands deference from senators in both parties. Pretty much every security official has lined up against the Senate detention provisions, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to FBI Director Robert Mueller, who worry that they’ll get in the way of FBI investigations of domestic terrorists. President Obama has promised to veto the bill.

Which is ironic. After all, Obama approved of the execution without trial of Anwar al-Awlaki, al-Qaida’s YouTube preacher, based entirely on the unproven assertion that Awlaki was dangerous. Awlaki was an American citizen. So Obama thinks he has the right to kill Americans the government says are terrorists, but he doesn’t want the military to lock them up forever without trial. OK then.

Weirder still, the bill’s chief architect, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), tried to persuade skeptics that the bill wasn’t so bad. His pitch? “The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States,” he said on the Senate floor on Monday. The bill would just let the government detain a citizen in military custody, not force it to do that. Reassured yet?

Civil libertarians aren’t. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said it “denigrates the very foundations of this country.” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) added, “it puts every single American citizen at risk.”

But there’s a reason this measure goes into the defense bill: Voting against the defense bill is usually considered political suicide. That’s why the bill will almost certainly pass tonight. If Obama backs down from his veto threat, get ready to see Americans at Guantanamo Bay. Fist tap Davera.

gutting the privacy act

NYTimes | The Privacy Act of 1974 allows a person to sue a federal agency for intentionally disclosing personal, confidential information without permission. But the government is trying to limit the force of that law and make it harder to hold agencies accountable for such violations.

In Federal Aviation Administration v. Cooper, a case argued this week in the Supreme Court, the government contends that the statute allows a plaintiff to recover “actual damages” only for monetary losses, but not for emotional distress.

Stanmore Cooper brought the suit because in an exchange of data to identify medically unfit pilots, the Social Security Administration gave the Federal Aviation Administration confidential information that revealed that he was H.I.V.-positive and was receiving disability benefits. He was devastated when he learned of this revelation. He experienced anxiety, sleeplessness and other serious problems. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for not disclosing his H.I.V. status to the F.A.A., but he sued the government for severe mental and emotional distress.

The Supreme Court held in 2004 that it is necessary to show actual damages in a lawsuit under the Privacy Act but did not say whether nonmonetary harm like emotional distress comes under that heading. In Mr. Cooper’s case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that it does. It found support in Congress’s intent to provide relief for “any damages”; in the Supreme Court’s view that in privacy cases “the primary damage is the mental distress from having been exposed to public view”; and in the law in seven other federal circuits.

The government, however, contends that the statute does not explicitly allow damages for emotional distress claims. To counter this argument, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out that “the person who is subject to this, to this embarrassment, this humiliation, doesn’t have out-of-pocket costs, but is terribly distressed, nervous, anxious, and all the rest.” If Congress did not intend to allow damages for emotional distress, she said, “Then maybe Congress shouldn’t have passed this statute.”

The government’s restricted interpretation would gut the point of the Privacy Act, and in too many cases would allow agencies to act improperly with impunity.

atheists can not be trusted...,

NationalPost | Many religious people don’t like atheists, and in fact would apparently rate them alongside rapists on levels of trust, suggests a new Canadian study that claims to be one of the first psychological probes into anti-atheist prejudice.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon conducted a series of studies that found a deep level of distrust toward those who don’t believe in God, deeming them to be among the least trusted people in the world — despite their growing ranks to an estimated half billion globally.

“There’s this persistent belief that people behave better if they feel like God is watching them,” said Will Gervais, lead study author and doctoral candidate in the social psychology department at UBC. “So if you’re playing by those rules, you’re going to see other people’s religious beliefs as signals of how trustworthy they might be.”

The research began a few years ago, when a series of polls revealed atheists to be some of the least liked people in areas with religious majorities, which is to say, much of the world. In one poll, only 45% of American respondents said they would vote for a qualified atheist presidential candidate and overwhelmingly preferred to vote for African American, Jewish and female candidates. Americans also rated atheists as the group that least agrees with their vision for the country and the group they’d most disapprove of their child marrying.

The resulting paper, published in the current online issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, includes six studies all designed to measure people’s perception of an atheist’s trustworthiness. The first study asked 351 Americans from across the country to compare the trustworthiness of an atheist and a gay man, since both represent groups often described as threatening to majority religious values. They rated atheists significantly higher than gay men on distrust, though lower on levels of disgust.

The second study recruited 105 UBC undergrads —they purposely targeted a more liberal sample from a less-religious nation — to test whether distrust of atheists is more pronounced than distrust of other groups, including Muslims. The students read a description of an untrustworthy man who pretended to leave insurance information after backing his car into a parked vehicle and were asked to say whether it was more likely the man was either a Christian, Muslim, rapist or an atheist. People were far more likely to say he was either an atheist or a rapist and not part of a religious group. They did not significantly differentiate atheists from rapists, something Mr. Gervais found disconcerting.

“It’s pretty shocking that we get the same magnitude of distrust towards atheists simply because they don’t believe [in God],” said the researcher, who is himself an atheist. “With rapists, they’re distrusted because they rape people. Atheists are viewed as sort of a moral wild card.”

Another among the six studies found people are more likely to hire someone for a job that requires high levels of trust, such as a daycare worker, if they believe they are religious. They would hire atheists for a low trust job, such as a waitress, the study found.

The levels of distrust were more pronounced among respondents who said they were religious, said Mr. Gervais. One of the studies measured how much people thought believing God is watching makes you a better person.

one-time thought crime...,

NYTimes | Border Patrol agents pursue smugglers one moment and sit around in boredom the next. It was during one of the lulls that Bryan Gonzalez, a young agent, made some comments to a colleague that cost him his career.

Stationed in Deming, N.M., Mr. Gonzalez was in his green-and-white Border Patrol vehicle just a few feet from the international boundary when he pulled up next to a fellow agent to chat about the frustrations of the job. If marijuana were legalized, Mr. Gonzalez acknowledges saying, the drug-related violence across the border in Mexico would cease. He then brought up an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition that favors ending the war on drugs.

Those remarks, along with others expressing sympathy for illegal immigrants from Mexico, were passed along to the Border Patrol headquarters in Washington. After an investigation, a termination letter arrived that said Mr. Gonzalez held “personal views that were contrary to core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication and esprit de corps.”

After his dismissal, Mr. Gonzalez joined a group even more exclusive than the Border Patrol: law enforcement officials who have lost their jobs for questioning the war on drugs and are fighting back in the courts.

In Arizona, Joe Miller, a probation officer in Mohave County, near the California border, filed suit last month in Federal District Court after he was dismissed for adding his name to a letter by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which is based in Medford, Mass., and known as LEAP, expressing support for the decriminalization of marijuana.

“More and more members of the law enforcement community are speaking out against failed drug policies, and they don’t give up their right to share their insight and engage in this important debate simply because they receive government paychecks,” said Daniel Pochoda, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which is handling the Miller case.

Mr. Miller was one of 32 members of LEAP who signed the letter, which expressed support for a California ballot measure that failed last year that would have permitted recreational marijuana use. Most of the signers were retired members of law enforcement agencies, who can speak their minds without fear of action by their bosses. But Mr. Miller and a handful of others who were still on the job — including the district attorney for Humboldt County in California and the Oakland city attorney — signed, too.

LEAP has seen its membership increase significantly from the time it was founded in 2002 by five disillusioned officers. It now has an e-mail list of 48,000, and its members include 145 judges, prosecutors, police officers, prison guards and other law enforcement officials, most of them retired, who speak on the group’s behalf.

“No one wants to be fired and have to fight for their job in court,” said Neill Franklin, a retired police officer who is LEAP’s executive director. “So most officers are reluctant to sign on board. But we do have some brave souls.”

Mr. Miller was accused of not making clear that he was speaking for himself and not the probation department while advocating the decriminalization of cannabis. His lawsuit, though, points out that the letter he signed said at the bottom, “All agency affiliations are listed for identification purposes only.”

He was also accused of dishonesty for denying that he had given approval for his name to appear on the LEAP letter. In the lawsuit, Mr. Miller said that his wife had given approval without his knowledge, using his e-mail address, but that he had later supported her.

Kip Anderson, the court administrator for the Superior Court in Mohave County, said there was no desire to limit Mr. Miller’s political views.

“This isn’t about legalization,” Mr. Anderson said. “We’re not taking a stand on that. We just didn’t want people to think he was speaking on behalf of the probation department.”

Mr. Miller, who is also a retired police officer and Marine, lost an appeal of his dismissal before a hearing officer. But when his application for unemployment benefits was turned down, he appealed that and won. An administrative law judge found that Mr. Miller had not been dishonest with his bosses and that the disclaimer on the letter was sufficient.

In the case of Mr. Gonzalez, the fired Border Patrol agent, he had not joined LEAP but had expressed sympathy with the group’s cause. “It didn’t make sense to me why marijuana is illegal,” he said. “To see that thousands of people are dying, some of whom I know, makes you want to look for a change.”

Since his firing, Mr. Gonzalez, who filed suit in federal court in Texas in January, has worked as a construction worker, a bouncer and a yard worker. He has also gone back to school, where he is considering a law degree.

“I don’t want to work at a place that says I can’t think,” said Mr. Gonzalez, who grew up in El Paso, just across the border from Ciudad Juárez, which has experienced some of the worst bloodshed in Mexico.

wikileaks: the spy files

CBSNews | President Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address, warned that the military-industrial complex could "endanger our liberties or democratic processes." Today WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange is warning that the surveillance-industrial complex is even more dangerous.

A set of nearly 300 documents that the document-leaking Web site published today reveals how extensive and privacy-invasive the secretive multi-billion dollar industry devoted to surveillance technology has become.

"We are in a world now where not only is it theoretically possible to record nearly all telecommunications traffic out of a country, all telephone calls, but where there is an international industry selling the devices now to do it," Assange said in a video interview today.

What WikiLeaks has dubbed the "Spy Files" is a collection of marketing and technical documents, including previously-unreleased presentations from companies that showed up at government-only conferences like ISS World Europe, billed as a gathering in 2008 for "telecom operators, law enforcement," and employees of spy agencies.

Amesys, a unit of French technology firm Bull SA, boasts in a leaked document how it can aid governments in moving from eavesdropping on one person to "full country traffic monitoring," including automatic translation and mapping of real-world social networks based on who's talking to who.

Amesys's presentation offers a one-stop shop for nationwide monitoring, including GSM cell phone communications, satellite signals, Internet communications, and phone calls. The company boasts of a "huge range of sensors and analyzing probes" and -- in an echo of what the former East German secret police attempted decades earlier -- a "centralized intelligence system gathering all information."

There were hints about the extent of Amesys' surveillance apparatus before, including in an August article in the Wall Street Journal that described a room used by Moammar Gadhafi's secret police to monitor Internet traffic in Libya. The room sported Amesys logos, manuals, and posters, the article said.

But the WikiLeaks' new leaks, which resume a dry spell for the group when it effectively halted disclosures after a series of U.S. Defense Department and State Department documents, are likely to draw more attention to the surveillance-industrial complex and could lead to more legal oversight and reform efforts.

Amesys did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNET. It did distribute a statement in September that it sold "analysis hardware" to Libya to help it fight terrorism, and included a vague threat of legal action against anyone who damages its "image or reputation."

Not all of the documents in WikiLeaks' archive are actual leaks. An HP brochure describing "technology that supports global law enforcement" is publicly available (PDF) on the company's Web site.

Earlier this week, an attorney representing Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks' alleged source for the U.S. government files who is now facing criminal charges, suggested that the megabytes of classified data his client allegedly turned over didn't truly harm national security. Manning, an Army private, was charged last July with sending a military video to a person not authorized to receive it and with obtaining "more than 150,000 diplomatic cables" from the State Department. A preliminary hearing in Manning's case has been scheduled for later this month.

is the personal computer dead?

TechnologyReview | The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don't merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we're seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.

The transformation is one from product to service. The platforms we used to purchase every few years—like operating systems—have become ongoing relationships with vendors, both for end users and software developers. I wrote about this impending shift, driven by a desire for better security and more convenience, in my 2008 book The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It.

For decades we've enjoyed a simple way for people to create software and share or sell it to others. People bought general-purpose computers—PCs, including those that say Mac. Those computers came with operating systems that took care of the basics. Anyone could write and run software for an operating system, and up popped an endless assortment of spreadsheets, word processors, instant messengers, Web browsers, e-mail, and games. That software ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous to the dangerous—and there was no referee except the user's good taste and sense, with a little help from nearby nerds or antivirus software. (This worked so long as the antivirus software was not itself malware, a phenomenon that turned out to be distressingly common.)

Choosing an OS used to mean taking a bit of a plunge: since software was anchored to it, a choice of, say, Windows over Mac meant a long-term choice between different available software collections. Even if a software developer offered versions of its wares for each OS, switching from one OS to another typically meant having to buy that software all over again.
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That was one reason we ended up with a single dominant OS for over two decades. People had Windows, which made software developers want to write for Windows, which made more people want to buy Windows, which made it even more appealing to software developers, and so on. In the 1990s, both the U.S. and European governments went after Microsoft in a legendary and yet, today, easily forgettable antitrust battle. Their main complaint? That Microsoft had put a thumb on the scale in competition between its own Internet Explorer browser and its primary competitor, Netscape Navigator. Microsoft did this by telling PC makers that they had to ensure that Internet Explorer was ready and waiting on the user's Windows desktop when the user unpacked the computer and set it up, whether the PC makers wanted to or not. Netscape could still be prebundled with Windows, as far as Microsoft was concerned. Years of litigation and oceans of legal documents can thus be boiled down into an essential original sin: an OS maker had unduly favored its own applications.

When the iPhone came out in 2007, its design was far more restrictive. No outside code at all was allowed on the phone; all the software on it was Apple's. What made this unremarkable—and unobjectionable—was that it was a phone, not a computer, and most competing phones were equally locked down. We counted on computers to be open platforms—hard to think of them any other way—and understood phones as appliances, more akin to radios, TVs, and coffee machines.

get root on your android...,

androidcentral | So you want to know about rooting your Android phone, eh? Yeah, it sounds a little scary. It's kind of a big leap, and it may involve a few steps. and quite possibly the use of a command prompt, which would require you to follow instructions and type words and stuff.

Here's rooting in a nutshell: Your Android smartphone is based on Linux. A big, bad, scary computer operating system known only by people with neck beards. (Only, not really. But mostly.) Anyhoo, Android apps need permission to access certain parts of Linux, and not all apps have this special "root" access. That includes a few basic things, like the camera flash, and the ability to take screen shots. There are a bunch of other apps that need root access for other reasons, too, but the basic premise is the same.

So should you root your phone? First thing to do is read this editorial, and decide if you want to go further. Then if you're the type who loves to mess with things, go for it. If you want to squeeze a little more functionality out of your phone, go for it. Need more convincing? Check out "Rooting Q&A -- Is it for me?"

what is rooting?

androidcentral | Each day more and more Android handsets are being sold, and that means users are faced with a major decision: To root, or not to root. Some of us will do it simply because we can, others will decide not to do it as they enjoy the phone as-is, but the majority of us will be on the fence about the whole idea of rooting.

Hopefully some of those questions can get answered and you’ll have a clearer picture of the process and some understanding to make the decision a bit easier. I’m sure this won’t answer every question you’ll have when considering whether or not to root your device, but hopefully this is a good start and a basis for further discussion.
What, exactly, is rooting?

Rooting your Android device involves adding in a small Linux application called “su”. It stands for SuperUser, and allows applications and commands to run with elevated permissions. Everything that runs code, whether it’s an application or the user, has a permission level set by the operating system.

Why Linux? Well the heart of the Android operating system is the Linux kernel. You'll hear a lot of nerdy geek-speak about the Linux kernel, but all you really need to know is that it's what is interfacing Android to your hardware, and ultimately has complete control. When you stray outside the "normal" way of using Android and start entering commands directly, the kernel is who you're talking to.

The root user is the boss and can do anything (good or bad) on the device. From simple things like clearing the cache from core applications, to more advanced things like wirelessly tethering a laptop or iPod touch through your phone, root can do it. The su program is a sort of gateway that lets applications or users act as root while doing tasks. If you’re the curious type (I know some of you are ;) ) here’s a more in-depth review of root as used in a Linux system by the Linux Information Project.

OK, so why would I want to root my phone?
Good question! Maybe you don’t. Everything in a Linux system is a file, or is treated as a file. Since Android runs on top of Linux, it acts the same way. Most of the files you will need to access or change are available to you without having elevated permissions. "Most" being the key term here. When you want to do things that affect or change the core software of your device -- like updating the version of Android on your phone, or adding a nice piece of software from another device -- you'll have to do it as root. Dream and Magic users have been running Eclair on their phones for a good while now, and it’s because they have rooted their device. Rooting also gives you access to some handy software that you couldn’t use otherwise. Things like a complete system backup or ad blocking software require you to root your device. Don’t root your phone just for the sake of rooting your phone, but if you come across something you feel you could use or would like to have, then consider it. You'll find that the open source community is usually pretty helpful and encouraging new people to do new things is common. And when you get to the point where you can lend a hand to the new folks, pay it forward.

sprint uses it to keep droids in the "4G" cattle pen...,

Gigaom | Carrier IQ supplies Sprint generalized data about how its customers’ smartphones perform on its network, but Sprint does not snoop into the private contents of those phones, Sprint said on Tuesday. While Sprint is primarily using that information to optimize both its network and how phones behave on it, the operator isn’t – and technically incapable of — tracking or viewing the contents of any message or media in the device, Sprint spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge said in an email. Here’s her full statement:

“Carrier IQ provides information that allows Sprint, and other carriers that use it, to analyze our network performance and identify where we should be improving service. We also use the data to understand device performance so we can figure out when issues are occurring. We collect enough information to understand the customer experience with devices on our network and how to address any connection problems, but we do not and cannot look at the contents of messages, photos, videos, etc., using this tool. The information collected is not sold and we don’t provide a direct feed of this data to anyone outside of Sprint.

“Sprint is well known for our serious commitment to respecting and protecting the privacy and security of each customer’s personally identifiable information and other customer data. A key element of this involves communicating with our customers about our information privacy practices. The Sprint privacy policy makes it clear we collect information that includes how a device is functioning and how it is being used. Carrier IQ is an integral part of the Sprint service. Sprint uses Carrier IQ to help maintain our network performance.”

Sprint, like many of its operator brethren, is in the firing line as a new research from Android developer Trevor Eckhart discovered what he termed a “rootkit” buried in the guts of many Android phones. The Carrier IQ software tracks every keystroke in on the phones it is installed on, recording that information for Carrier IQ’s analytics purposes. It’s not clear if the information collected goes directly to the operators, handset makers or to Carrier IQ. But the applications cannot be disabled or uninstalled, and there’s no way opt out of its recording activities. (Kevin Tofel wrote earlier about how to detect Carrier IQ in your phone).

carrier iq disputes Mr. Mackey's claim...,

Video - some USB debug information about carrier iq.

LATimes | Carrier IQ, the beleagured online metrics company that has been accused of installing spy software on millions of smartphones, has broken its silence to say the critics have it wrong.

"While a few individuals have identified that there is a great deal of information available to the Carrier IQ software inside the handset, our software does not record, store or transmit the contents of SMS messages, email, photographs, audio or video," the company said in a statement released late Thursday.

The firm's defense came as as politicians and privacy organizations continued to question the little-known Mountain View, Calif., company, which designs communications analysis software used by some of the largest U.S. wireless carriers, including AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. The carriers say data collected on their behalf by Carrier IQ helps them improve their service.

Last week, 25-year-old system administrator named Trevor Eckhart released a video (above) purporting to show Carrier IQ's app recording smartphone users' every keypress, and implying that the company was therefore able to intercept users' private communications.

But security researchers have disagreed with conclusions drawn from Eckhart's analysis.

"It's not true," said Dan Rosenberg, a senior consultant at Virtual Security Research, who said the video shows only diagnostic information and at no point provides evidence the data is stored or sent back to Carrier IQ.

"I've reverse engineered the software myself at a fairly good level of detail," Rosenberg said. "They're not recording keystroke information, they're using keystroke events as part of the application."

The difference is subtle but important. To perform commands, applications need to know which buttons a user has pushed: Your email app needs to know when you tap the reply button, and your phone app needs to know which numbers you press in order to dial. Applications therefore pay attention to which buttons a user is pressing.

But listening for a button press does not mean an application is therefore sending a record of those button presses back to the company, researchers said.

System-related apps like Carrier IQ often allow users or phone engineers to tap a series of keys in order to bring up administrative options or to display information on the phone's performance. In order to show that data, apps needs to know the correct code was tapped in -- by identifying specific key presses, as it is shown doing in the video.

But Rosenberg said his look at the Carrier IQ program revealed "a complete absence of code" that would indicate key presses were being tracked and recorded or sent over the Internet by the phone.

Instead, the readouts on Eckhart's video that occur when he presses keys are "debugging messages" -- informational feedback meant to help smartphone programmers verify that their applications are working correctly. In this case, Carrier IQ's developers appear to have set up the program to display a diagnostic message when a key is pressed or when a text message is sent.

"It's just spitting debug messages to the internal Android log service," sad Jon Oberheide, a co-founder of Duo Security. "It appears that Carrier IQ is indeed collecting some metrics, but I have not seen any evidence that keystrokes, SMS messages or Web browsing session content are being transferred off the device."

Carriers like AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint have long disclosed that they collect and store information about users' locations, phone records and text messages. But what appeared to unnerve consumers and privacy observers was the possibility that the companies had gone a step further and were monitoring nearly every action a user performed on the phone.

about that little cootie in your droid...,

HuffPo | You might have heard about Carrier IQ, software that comes pre-installed on millions of smartphones that has the capability to record and store your keystrokes, the text messages you send and receive, the Internet websites you visit and more. If you own a smartphone -- a BlackBerry, an iPhone, an Android, a Windows Phone, whatever -- you are probably wondering whether or not Carrier IQ is on your smartphone, and if it is, how you can remove it.

Here is a rundown of everything we know about Carrier IQ, OS by OS. For a full background on Carrier IQ, what it does and why it has so many people nervous, read my colleague Gerry Smith's thorough piece from earlier.

ANDROID
The furor over Carrier IQ started with the discovery of the nosy software on Android smartphones and is only getting noisier (Senator Al Franken recently asked Carrier IQ for an explanation of its practices).

Unless you have a rooted Android device, you won't be able to see if your phone is running Carrier IQ. But here's what we know:

No Nexus smartphones (the Google Nexus One, the Nexus S and the Galaxy Nexus) have Carrier IQ software, according to a source who spoke with The Verge. That source also claimed that no Motorola Xoom tablets have Carrier IQ.

- Verizon, the largest mobile carrier in the United States, told GigaOM in an email that it did not install Carrier IQ on any of its smartphones.

- Sprint has issued a statement to The Verge. They do use Carrier IQ -- from their statement

Carrier IQ provides information that allows Sprint, and other carriers that use it, to analyze our network performance and identify where we should be improving service. We also use the data to understand device performance so we can figure out when issues are occurring. We collect enough information to understand the customer experience with devices on our network and how to address any connection problems, but we do not and cannot look at the contents of messages, photos, videos, etc., using this tool. The information collected is not sold and we don't provide a direct feed of this data to anyone outside of Sprint.

- AT&T and T-Mobile have not yet issued statements.

- The Kindle Fire tested negative for Carrier IQ, per Gizmodo.

- On Android phones, developer Trevor Eckhart has written an app that can detect and possibly remove Carrier IQ; however, your Android phone has to be "rooted," a step that the non-tech-savvy probably should not take. Better to wait for Carrier IQ and the carriers to resolve this mess than to risk bricking your phone, voiding the warranty or opening yourself up to malware.

WINDOWS PHONE
- 9to5Mac reports that Windows Phone appears to be totally free of Carrier IQ.

BLACKBERRY
Research in Motion told Business Insider that its phones do not have Carrier IQ preinstalled, nor does it authorize its carriers to do so. This does not mean, however, that carriers have not installed Carrier IQ without authorization.

The full statement:

RIM is aware of a recent claim by a security researcher that an application called “CarrierIQ” is installed on mobile devices from multiple vendors without the knowledge or consent of the device users. RIM does not pre-install the CarrierIQ app on BlackBerry smartphones or authorize its carrier partners to install the CarrierIQ app before sales or distribution. RIM also did not develop or commission the development of the CarrierIQ application, and has no involvement in the testing, promotion, or distribution of the app. RIM will continue to investigate reports and speculation related to CarrierIQ.

IPHONE
Noted iOS hacker chpwn found traces of Carrier IQ in iPhones running iOS 3.1.1 and up -- all the way up to iOS 5. However, it appears that the verison of Carrier IQ installed was tracking much less information than it was on Android phones.