deuterostome governance gettin tighter than dick's hatband

NYTimes | Slowly, and largely under the radar, a growing number of local law enforcement agencies across the country have moved into what had previously been the domain of the F.B.I. and state crime labs — amassing their own DNA databases of potential suspects, some collected with the donors’ knowledge, and some without it. 

And that trend — coming at a time of heightened privacy concerns after recent revelations of secret federal surveillance of telephone calls and Internet traffic — is expected only to accelerate after the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding a Maryland statute allowing the authorities to collect DNA samples from those arrested for serious crimes. 

These local databases operate under their own rules, providing the police much more leeway than state and federal regulations. And the police sometimes collect samples from far more than those convicted of or arrested for serious offenses — in some cases, innocent victims of crimes who do not necessarily realize their DNA will be saved for future searches. 

New York City has amassed a database with the profiles of 11,000 crime suspects. In Orange County, Calif., the district attorney’s office has 90,000 profiles, many obtained from low-level defendants who give DNA as part of a plea bargain or in return for having the charges against them dropped. In Central Florida, several law enforcement agencies have pooled their DNA databases. A Baltimore database contains DNA from more than 3,000 homicide victims. 

These law enforcement agencies are no longer content to rely solely on the highly regulated network of state and federal DNA databases, which have been more than two decades in the making and represent one of the most significant developments in the history of law enforcement in this country. 

The reasons vary. Some police chiefs are frustrated with the time it can take for state crime labs to test evidence and enter DNA profiles into the existing databases. Others want to compile DNA profiles from suspects or low-level offenders long before their DNA might be captured by the state or national databases, which typically require conviction or arrest. 

“Unfortunately, what goes into the national database are mostly reference swabs of people who are going to prison,” said Jay Whitt of the company DNA:SI Labs, which sells DNA testing and database services to police departments. “They’re not the ones we’re dealing with day in day out, the ones still on the street just slipping under the radar.” 

The rise in these local databases has aroused concerns among some critics, worried about both the lax rules governing them and the privacy issues they raise.

uh.., where the Hon.Bro.Preznit's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board at?

nydailynews | So, why is it that many Americans, including me, are so upset with the Obama administration gathering up telephone records?

My concerns are twofold. First, the law under which President George W. Bush and now President Obama have acted was not intended to give the government records of all telephone calls. If that had been the intent, the law would have said that. It didn’t. Rather, the law envisioned the administration coming to a special court on a case-by-case basis to explain why it needed to have specific records.

I am troubled by the precedent of stretching a law on domestic surveillance almost to the breaking point. On issues so fundamental to our civil liberties, elected leaders should not be so needlessly secretive.

The argument that this sweeping search must be kept secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing.

Secondly, we should worry about this program because government agencies, particularly the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have a well-established track record of overreaching, exceeding their authority and abusing the law. The FBI has used provisions of the Patriot Act, intended to combat terrorism, for purposes that greatly exceed congressional intent.

Even if you trust Obama, should we have programs and interpretations of law that others could abuse now without his knowing it or later in another administration? Obama thought we needed to set up rules about drones because of what the next President might do. Why does he not see the threat from this telephone program?

If the government wanted a particular set of records, it could tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court why — and then be granted permission to access those records directly from specially maintained company servers. The telephone companies would not have to know what data were being accessed. There are no technical disadvantages to doing it that way, although it might be more expensive.

Would we, as a nation, be willing to pay a little more for a program designed this way, to avoid a situation in which the government keeps on its own computers a record of every time anyone picks up a telephone? That is a question that should have been openly asked and answered in Congress.

The vocal advocate of civil liberties was absent because neither Bush nor Obama had appointed one, despite the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission and a law passed by Congress. Only five years into his administration is our supposedly civil liberties-loving President getting around to activating a long-dormant Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. It will have a lot of work to do.

can't stop terrorism, but will allow you to scope and trace the entire tea party...,

DailyCaller | Daily Caller: What system are we talking about?

Binney: It used to be called Stellar Wind and now it’s called Ragtime. Ragtime P is the domestic stuff. That may be a reference to the Patriot Act Section 215.

Daily Caller: So what are they doing with all of this information? If they can’t stop the Boston marathon bombing, what are they doing with it?

Binney: Well again, they’re putting an extra burden on all of their analysts. It’s not something that’s going to help them; it’s something that’s burdensome. There are ways to do the analysis properly, but they don’t really want the solution because if they got it, they wouldn’t be able to keep demanding the money to solve it. I call it their business statement, “Keep the problems going so the money keeps flowing.” It’s all about contracts and money.

Daily Caller: But isn’t data collection getting easier and processing speeds getting faster and data collection cheaper? Isn’t the falling price one of the reasons they can collect data at this massive level?

Binney: Yes, but that’s not the issue. The issue is, can you figure out what’s important in it? And figure out the intentions and capabilities of the people you’re monitoring? And they are in no way prepared to do that, because that takes analysis. That’s what the big data initiative was all about out of the White House last year. It was to try to get algorithms and figure out what’s important and tell the people what’s important so that they can find things. The probability of them finding what’s really there is low.

Daily Caller: Well if that’s where the priorities are, should we ask if the goal really is to prevent terrorism? Or is it to know as much as possible about Americans — at an individual level and a society level?

Binney: That’s my point. When you ask how much damage these leaks have done to our capability, they’ve actually done absolutely nothing. The terrorists were monitoring all of this information anyway, so they had a pretty good idea of what was being collected. So, who are we keeping this from? It’s not the terrorists. We are really keeping it from the American public. Because that’s who they’re collecting data about. And that’s who they’re keeping it secret from. The terrorists already knew all this stuff.

Daily Caller: How searchable is this material? Let’s say I want to use NSA material against the tea party. Could I do that?

Binney: That would be very simple. You just take the key point “tea party,” plug it in the graph, and you get everybody. That smacks of what they’re doing.

I was listening to the testimony of one of the tea party people to Congress, one of the people being abused by the IRS, and she said she was asked, “What is my relationship with this person?” And the IRS agent gave her the name. Well, the question becomes, how did the IRS know the relationship with that person? And one way they’d know that is from this program, for sure.

So the question is, is someone in the White House, in the line of command, using any access to that program to find a tea party initiative or tea party people trying to get tax exempt status so they can pass them along for the IRS to target? That’s a question I think the government needs to answer, and prove that that’s not happening.

But when have they ever told you the truth from 2001 on? They only tell you the truth when they’ve been caught or exposed. And then, they only tell you what’s been exposed. They never go any further. Then, they wait for the next exposure to come out. How can you believe it?

cash rules everything around me CREAM get the money, dollah, dollah bill y'all....,

NYTimes | The director of the National Security Agency told Congress on Wednesday that “dozens” of terrorism threats had been halted by the agency’s huge database of the logs of nearly every domestic phone call made by Americans, while a senator briefed on the program disclosed that the telephone records are destroyed after five years.

The director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, who heads both the N.S.A. and United States Cyber Command, which runs the military’s offensive and defensive use of cyberweapons, told skeptical members of the Senate Appropriations Committee that his agency was doing exactly what Congress authorized after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. 

General Alexander said he welcomed debate over the legal justification for the program because “what we’re doing to protect American citizens here is the right thing.” He said the agency “takes great pride in protecting this nation and our civil liberties and privacy” under the oversight of Congress and the courts.

“We aren’t trying to hide it,” he said. “We’re trying to protect America. So we need your help in doing that. This isn’t something that’s just N.S.A. or the administration doing it on its own. This is what our nation expects our government to do for us.” 

But in his spirited exchanges with committee members, notably Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, General Alexander said he was seeking to declassify many details about the program now that they have been leaked by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor who came forward to say he was the source of documents about the phone log program and other classified matters. 

Daily Caller: So what are they doing with all of this information? If they can’t stop the Boston marathon bombing, what are they doing with it?

Binney: Well again, they’re putting an extra burden on all of their analysts. It’s not something that’s going to help them; it’s something that’s burdensome. There are ways to do the analysis properly, but they don’t really want the solution because if they got it, they wouldn’t be able to keep demanding the money to solve it. I call it their business statement, “Keep the problems going so the money keeps flowing.” It’s all about contracts and money.

Daily Caller: But isn’t data collection getting easier and processing speeds getting faster and data collection cheaper? Isn’t the falling price one of the reasons they can collect data at this massive level?

Binney: Yes, but that’s not the issue. The issue is, can you figure out what’s important in it? And figure out the intentions and capabilities of the people you’re monitoring? And they are in no way prepared to do that, because that takes analysis. That’s what the big data initiative was all about out of the White House last year. It was to try to get algorithms and figure out what’s important and tell the people what’s important so that they can find things. The probability of them finding what’s really there is low.

sen. wyden giving the side-eye to the fascist pack of lies...,

Priceless Gas Face

NYTimes | The comments of the Senate leaders showed a coordinated effort to squelch any legislative move to rein in the surveillance programs. Mr. Reid took the unusual step of publicly slapping back at fellow senators — including senior Democrats — who have suggested that most lawmakers have been kept in the dark about the issue.

“For senators to complain that they didn’t know this was happening, we had many, many meetings that have been both classified and unclassified that members have been invited to,” Mr. Reid said. “They shouldn’t come and say, ‘I wasn’t aware of this,’ because they’ve had every opportunity.”

Among lawmakers who have expressed concerns in the past, however, the issues have not been laid to rest. When reporters pressed Mr. Wyden on whether Mr. Clapper had lied to him, he stopped short of making that accusation, but made his discontent clear.

“The president has said — correctly, in my view — that strong Congressional oversight is absolutely essential in this area,” he said. “It’s not possible for the Congress to do the kind of vigorous oversight that the president spoke about if you can’t get straight answers.”

At the March Senate hearing, Mr. Wyden asked Mr. Clapper, “Does the N.S.A. collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

“No, sir,” Mr. Clapper replied. “Not wittingly.”

Mr. Wyden said on Tuesday that he had sent his question to Mr. Clapper’s office a day before the hearing, and had given his office a chance to correct the misstatement after the hearing, but to no avail.

In an interview on Sunday with NBC News, Mr. Clapper acknowledged that his answer had been problematic, calling it “the least untruthful” answer he could give.

Michael V. Hayden, the former director of both the N.S.A. and the C.I.A., said he considered Mr. Wyden’s question unfair, given the classified subject. “There’s not another country in the world where that question would have been asked and answered in a public session,” he said.

young, uncorrupted, useful cats - hazardous to the whole gub'mint lying/cheating game...,

The full powerpoint presentation

WaPo | The closest parallel for Snow­den and Manning may be Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 was the New York Times’ and The Washington Post’s source for the Pentagon Papers, a secret assessment of the Vietnam War that eroded the credibility of U.S. government’s more-optimistic public claims about the conflict. Ellsberg in recent days has praised Snowden and described the material Snowden disclosed as more significant than the documents he leaked four decades ago.

There are differences, however. Ellsberg was a senior military analyst working at the Pentagon who had a direct role in drafting the Pentagon Papers. The document was largely a record of U.S. decision-making rather than a blueprint of ongoing operations. Drafts were undoubtedly stored in safes, not on networks where they might be read by low-level employees at distant military or intelligence outposts.

A former senior NSA official recalled procedures in the 1970s that were archaic but secure. “When hot documents would go around they’d be in a double-sealed envelope, and some person would wait while you read it, re-

envelope it and leave,” the former official said. “By contrast, now you bring it up on your computer screen.”

Some U.S. officials question whether there is a generational gap in views on privacy and government transparency. Manning and Snowden, who are in their 20s, grew up with technology and the Internet as fixtures in their lives.

“We are recruiting Americans from a culture that has a deeper desire for absolute transparency than any previous cohort of people entering the service,” said Michael V. Hayden, former CIA and NSA director. “They are coming from a culture in which, for many, transparency is an absolute good, and it appears that in these two cases it influenced these people.”

Snowden appears to have left fewer online footprints than many of his generation, with no evidence of Facebook or Twitter accounts. In his comments to The Post, he indicated that was in part because of what he had learned.

The Internet “is a TV that watches you,” he said, a technology “governments are abusing . . . to extend their powers beyond what is necessary and appropriate.”

gub'mint sketchiness messing with tech companies smooth criminal money?

WaPo | Both Google and Facebook, whose business models depend on hundreds of millions of users voluntarily sharing information about themselves, have denied participating in a surveillance program as broad as described in news reports on PRISM. Yet all the companies named in reports have struggled to stanch the damage to their reputations as stewards of personal privacy.

Google on Tuesday published an open letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III requesting the right to report publicly the numbers and scope of national security data requests, a move that would allow Google to significantly expand its semiannual “transparency reports” on the information sought by courts and police worldwide.

“Google has nothing to hide,” wrote Chief Legal Officer David Drummond. The Justice Department declined to comment.

Facebook soon after issued a statement suggesting that it may start publishing its own “transparency reports” — a move the company has long resisted. “We urge the United States government to help make that possible by allowing companies to include information about the size and scope of national security requests we receive, and look forward to publishing a report that includes that information,” wrote Ted Ullyot, general counsel to Facebook. (Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham is on Facebook’s board.)

Microsoft issued a statement as well, saying that greater transparency “would help the community understand and debate these important issues.”

Yahoo said late Tuesday that “we recognize the importance of privacy and security, and we also believe that transparency . . . will help build public trust.”

"Fascism is when you cannot slide a cigarette paper between business and government." ~Benito Mussolini

WaPo story as it broke

WaPo story the next day

ZDNet | Summary: A bombshell story published in the Washington Post this week alleged that the NSA had enlisted nine tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple, in a massive program of online spying. Now the story is unraveling, and the Post has quietly changed key details. What went wrong?

the dueterostomes have their say on the nsa..., (friedman channeling sullivan channeling simon)

NYTimes | what I cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it. If there were another 9/11, I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: “Do whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.” That is what I fear most.

That is why I’ll reluctantly, very reluctantly, trade off the government using data mining to look for suspicious patterns in phone numbers called and e-mail addresses — and then have to go to a judge to get a warrant to actually look at the content under guidelines set by Congress — to prevent a day where, out of fear, we give government a license to look at anyone, any e-mail, any phone call, anywhere, anytime.

So I don’t believe that Edward Snowden, the leaker of all this secret material, is some heroic whistle-blower. No, I believe Snowden is someone who needed a whistle-blower. He needed someone to challenge him with the argument that we don’t live in a world any longer where our government can protect its citizens from real, not imagined, threats without using big data — where we still have an edge — under constant judicial review. It’s not ideal. But if one more 9/11-scale attack gets through, the cost to civil liberties will be so much greater.

A hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for linking on his blog to an essay by David Simon, the creator of HBO’s “The Wire.”  For me, it cuts right to the core of the issue.

“You would think that the government was listening in to the secrets of 200 million Americans from the reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about,” wrote Simon. “And you would think that rather than a legal court order, which is an inevitable consequence of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had been discovered to the government’s shame. Nope. ... The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the F.B.I. and N.S.A. are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. ... I know it’s big and scary that the government wants a database of all phone calls. And it’s scary that they’re paying attention to the Internet. And it’s scary that your cellphones have GPS installed. ... The question is not should the resulting data exist. It does. ... The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised. And to that, The Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse.”

We do need to be constantly on guard for abuses. But the fact is, added Simon, that for at least the last two presidencies “this kind of data collection has been a baseline logic of an American anti-terrorism effort that is effectively asked to find the needles before they are planted into haystacks, to prevent even such modest, grass-rooted conspiracies as the Boston Marathon bombing before they occur.”

somebody very sophisticated has scripted Snowden's exit strategy...,

The Motch Brothers

slate | As I explained earlier today, NSA whistle-blower/leaker/source Edward Snowden's decision to flee for Hong Kong doesn't look like the wisest decision given the former British colony's existing extradition treaty with the United States. But the GlobalPost's Benjamin Carlson explains one detail that everyone seems to be overlooking: A potential bureaucratic loophole that could buy Snowden some much-needed time while he figures out where he'll go next.

Simon Young, director of the Centre for Comparative and Public Law at the University of Hong Kong, told GlobalPost that a decision delivered by Hong Kong's High Court in March of this year required the government to create a new procedure for reviewing asylum applications.

Until the government does this, he said, asylum seekers are allowed to stay in Hong Kong indefinitely. "We’re still waiting to hear from government how they are going to implement this decision," said Young. "Until that’s the case, you can’t return anyone until the law’s in place." 

In other words, should Snowden apply for asylum, then even if the US made a valid extradition request and Hong Kong was willing to comply he could not be deported until the government figured out a new way to review asylum cases — a potentially lengthy process.

Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch says that any Snowden extradition must be "a long way off" because of this gap in the law. "If it comes to the point where the US does issue a warrant on Snowden, and then passes it over to the Hong Kong authorities, and he decides to fight it, at this point it would be a court case," he told GlobalPost. "And it can be a long court case, going up to the court of final appeals."

It's unclear if Snowden and his allies planned to exploit this loophole all along, although it would certainly provide the missing rationale for why he chose to head to Hong Kong in the first place, and why he felt comfortable enough to out himself and his (rough) location over the weekend. Regardless, it's unlikely that he'll be resting easy any time soon.

you CAN beat the state with a little assistance from friends in very high places..,

To have Hollywood tell it, the bare knuckles end of the machinery of state is just oh, so super bad. While at one time, say during that era in which Time Life was the Google of our world, this may indeed have been the case. But since the era in which Moore's Law has run wild, and during which the 1% have sponged up more wealth on a vaster scale than the Medici ever dared imagine, things have changed considerably.

See, the DOJ, the NSA, and all the rest of the alphabet soup (with the exception of the CIA's self-funding fronts, blinds, and other business interests) have all had to compete for talent and manage personnel under the exceedingly cumbersome rubric of the general schedule system.

This is a system which has produced generations of deeply inbred and incumbent double and triple-dippers, i.e., young retirees from the military who then get on the federal civil service roll and who know and have gamed the system to such an extent that many don't have to produce a whole lot in order to maintain their status, their station, and their lucrative incumbency. I'm guessing that in large measure, the whole complex of outsourced contractors in just about every field of federal endeavor is a response to the realities and limitations that a moribund federal work force imposes.

But back to the topic at hand, outside the echelons of certain elite, or should we say "rogue", self-funding CIA operations, is there really any entity of government that can compete toe-to-toe for talent, or, provide greater access and exposure to a whole world of accumulated knowledge and data than an enormous, brilliantly run, multinational corporation with deep and globe-spanning infrastructural and specialist knowledge? 

The minute you understand what Koch Industries is, what it does, and how superbly it does it - in that precise moment you will be forced to accept the very distinct possibility that it is indeed possible for certain entities, under certain circumstances, and with the appropriate malice of forethought - to flatly contradict Jean Paul's admonishment to over-the-hill CIA enforcer Brian Mills "you can't beat the state Bryan!"  

What if, consistent with their principles, their politics, and their means - Koch minions have scripted the unfolding episode which has so galvanized our collective short attention spans? Fist tap sistah Joyce!

icelandic legislator: I'm ready to help NSA whistle-blower eric snowden seek asylum

Forbes | When WikiLeaks burst onto the international stage in 2010, the small Nordic nation of Iceland offered it a safe haven. Now American whistleblower Edward Snowden may be seeking that country’s protection, and at least one member of its parliament says she’s ready to help.

On Sunday evening Icelandic member of parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir and Smari McCarthy, executive director of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, issued a statement of support for Snowden, the Booz Allen Hamilton staffer who identified himself to the Guardian newspaper as the source of a series of top secret documents outlining the NSA’s massive surveillance of foreigners and Americans.

 “Whereas IMMI is based in Iceland, and has worked on protections of privacy, furtherance of government transparency, and the protection of whistleblowers, we feel it is our duty to offer to assist and advise Mr. Snowden to the greatest of our ability,” their statement reads. “We are already working on detailing the legal protocols required to apply for asylum, and will over the course of the week be seeking a meeting with the newly appointed interior minister of Iceland, Mrs. Hanna Birna Kristjánsdóttir, to discuss whether an asylum request can be processed in a swift manner, should such an application be made.”

It’s not yet clear whether Snowden has officially applied for asylum in Iceland. A press contact for the Icelandic Ministry of Interior, which handles asylum requests, said that he hadn’t yet seen an application from Snowden and that the ministry couldn’t comment until one was received.

Snowden, who left his home in Hawaii in May and is taking refuge in a Hong Kong hotel, noted his interest in seeking asylum in Iceland in the Guardian’s interview, telling the newspaper that his ”predisposition is to seek asylum in a country with shared values, The nation that most encompasses this is Iceland,” he said. “They stood up for people over internet freedom.”

kwestin numero uno: BoozAllenHamilton black employment demographics?

So, I'm wondering to myself, "self?" 

What percentage of the Booz Allen Hamilton workforce is black?

Cause, well, you know - as a military contractor, (intelligence industrial complex to be exact) they've got certain regulatory quotas they've got to meet.

I'm saying to myself, "self?" 

Why'na phuk during the height of black nationalist foment in the U.S., when the first and arguably greatest barrier crossing brothers and sisters went to work in everything from the national nuclear security adminstration, to bell labs, to the NSA - why were there NEVER any such breaches of security?

But now, when hiring practices are outsourced to 3rd party private entities, (is that because you can't possibly train up a federal, general schedule work force in the type of massively scalable open source technologies?), or, because you can gerrymander employment in that space through private auspices such that black folk never receive consideration - that now you wind up with the human capital management nightmare that GED, parents worked for the Feds, SNOWDEN comprises?

Somebody with more perspicacious online query skills look into this one for me please? I need not only the first line demographic, but also Booz Allen's second-tier black supply chain data, as well. 

Finally, I'd like to know whether the http://www.nmsdc.org/nmsdc/#.UbZzL5ycV_Q has been providing mimetic cover for these busters for some time now, as well. Inquiring minds want to know, I want to know....,

how a GED-having, army reserve washout, get a $200K Booz gig capable of hurting the NSA?

politico | According to The Guardian, Snowden was raised in North Carolina and suburban Maryland. Though he did not graduate from high school, the paper said he later received a GED.

The former CIA computer technician who leaked last week’s explosive details about American classified surveillance programs spent just five months in the Army Reserve before he was discharged, records show.

Edward Snowden, the self-proclaimed whistleblower who sent the information to The Guardian and The Washington Post, joined up in 2004, but separated just five months later, an Army official told POLITICO.

“His records indicate he enlisted in the Army Reserve as a Special Forces Recruit (18X) on 7 May 2004 but was discharged 28 September 2004. He did not complete any training or receive any awards,” the spokesman said.

PRISM is simply putting people’s Gmail, Google, Facebook and Skype data all in one place...,

NYTimes | Edward Snowden, a former Central Intelligence Agency worker who disclosed on Sunday that he was the one who leaked government surveillance documents to The Guardian newspaper, ranks high among the disturbed. In an interview with the newspaper, he called the Internet “the most important invention in all of human history.” But he said that he believed its value was being destroyed by unceasing surveillance. 

“I don’t see myself as a hero,” he told the paper, “because what I’m doing is self-interested: I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.” 

President Obama, trying to play down the uproar, said Prism targets only foreign nationals and that it was worth giving up a little privacy for more security. 

“I think that’s a dangerous statement,” said Bob Taylor, a computer scientist who played a major role in the 1960s in formulating what would become the Internet. “The government should have told us it was doing this. And that suggests the more fundamental problem: that we’re not in control of our government.” 

For some tech luminaries with less than fond feelings for Washington, the disclosures about Prism had special force. This was personal. 

Bob Metcalfe, the acclaimed inventor of the standard method of connecting computers in one location, wrote on Twitter that he was less worried about whatever the National Security Agency might be doing “than about how Obama Regime will use their data to suppress political opposition (e.g. me).”

But if Silicon Valley is alarmed about the ways that the personal data now coursing through every byway of the Internet can be misused, it has been a long time coming.

um..., they're not just collecting metadata..,

washingtonsblog | The reason that Business Insider is speculating about the use of private Israeli companies to thwart the law is that 2 high-ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee – Senators Wyden and Udall – have long said that the government has adopted a secret interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act which would shock Americans, because it provides a breathtakingly wide program of spying.

Last December, top NSA whistleblower William Binney – a 32-year NSA veteran with the title of senior technical director, who headed the agency’s global digital data gathering program (featured in a New York Times documentary, and the source for much of what we know about NSA spying) – said that the government is using a secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act which allows the government to obtain:

Any data in any third party, like any commercial data that’s held about U.S. citizens ….

(relevant quote starts at 4:19).

I called Binney to find out what he meant.

I began by asking Binney if Business Insider’s speculation was correct. Specifically, I asked Binney if the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act was that a foreign company – like Narus, for example – could vacuum up information on Americans, and then the NSA would obtain that data under the excuse of spying on foreign entities … i.e. an Israeli company.

Binney replied no … it was broader than that.

Binney explained that the government is taking the position that it can gather and use any information about American citizens living on U.S. soil if it comes from:

Any service provider … any third party … any commercial company – like a telecom or internet service provider, libraries, medical companies – holding data about anyone, any U.S. citizen or anyone else.

I followed up to make sure I understood what Binney was saying, asking whether the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act was that the government could use any information as long as it came from a private company … foreign or domestic. In other words, the government is using the antiquated, bogus legal argument that it was not using its governmental powers (called “acting under color of law” by judges), but that it was private companies just doing their thing (which the government happened to order all of the private companies to collect and fork over).

Binney confirmed that this was correct. This is what the phone company spying program and the Prism program – the government spying on big Internet companies – is based upon. Since all digital communications go through private company networks, websites or other systems, the government just demands that all of the companies turn them over.

the surveillance state is built upon perversely incentivized corporate watchers

usnews | The spy in your pocket. And that doesn’t even get into the personal, portable surveillance tools practically everyone in the country voluntarily carries around with them: mobile phones and other wireless devices. Pew Research reported this week that for the first time a majority of Americans own a smart phone of some kind, while fully 91 percent of the adult population now owns some flavor of cell phone. (The wireless industry lobbying group CTIA reports that wireless devices have now reached 102 percent penetration in the U.S. and its territories, which means that the machines now outnumber the people.)

And if you’re using your mobile phone, you’re being tracked. “I don’t think people realize they’re revealing their location to their carrier just by using their device,” says Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy researcher and consultant. A 2011 investigation by the Wall Street Journal (on which Soltani consulted) found that Apple and Android smart phones routinely send location information, including information about local Wi-Fi networks, back to Apple and Google. Separately, the Journal reported in 2011, Apple’s iPhone collected and stored location data even when users had turned off “location services” – which is to say when they thought they had opted out of being tracked.

Why? This information is a potential treasure trove for these companies. From the Journal:

Google and Apple are gathering location information as part of their race to build massive databases capable of pinpointing people’s locations via their cellphones. These databases could help them tap the $2.9 billion market for location-based services – expected to rise to $8.3 billion in 2014, according to research firm Gartner, Inc.

Google uses this information to help show on its maps where automobile traffic is especially heavy or light. Verizon sells aggregate location data to advertisers, according to Soltani, so they can know where to place billboards. The wireless companies' viewpoint, according to Soltani, is “we got this information for free, let’s use it for this other use-case, which is the marketing data.”

And there are a lot of companies trying to get a piece of this financial pie. In another story, the Journal surveyed 101 popular iPhone and Android apps and found that “56 transmitted the phone’s unique device ID to other companies without users’ awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone’s location in some way. Five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders.” As Soltani told a Senate subcommittee in 2011, “applications can access and transmit data which includes text messages, emails, phone numbers, contacts stored and even browser history stored on the device.”

So if you woke yourself up this morning with an alarm clock app on your phone, the instant it went off, says Soltani, not only did it transmit noise to your ears but location data back to people you don't know. “There are times where there are 50 or 100 third parties – companies that you’ve never had a relationship with – who are able to monitor your … activities,” he says.

Not big on apps? Consider your next visit to the local mall. Carriers and other companies are installing sensors around shopping malls, Soltani says, allowing them to track where people are lingering, what’s popular and what’s not, analytics that then go to the mall.

Perverse incentive. All of this creates what Soltani calls a “perverse incentive that creates this worst case scenario for consumers.” Companies have an incentive to collect and keep user data; and that trove proves an irresistible target for the government in its ongoing war on terrorists.

Which brings us back to the current uproar over the NSA’s data collection and data mining. The outrage is justified, as is the broader concern about how the cult of secrecy has infected and distorted the government. But there is something somewhat comforting to the notion that government agencies are ultimately responsible to the voters, even if that process has become calcified and overly complex.

But the surveillance state is built upon its corporate counterpart. And who watches those watchers?

if this is in the WaPo and the Guardian, you KNOW sum'n not right....,

WaPo | Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former undercover CIA employee, unmasked himself Sunday as the principal source of recent Washington Post and Guardian disclosures about top-secret National Security Agency programs.

Snowden, who has contracted for the NSA and works for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, denounced what he described as systematic surveillance of innocent citizens and said in an interview that “it’s important to send a message to government that people will not be intimidated.”

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said Saturday that the NSA had initiated a Justice Department investigation into who leaked the information — an investigation supported by intelligence officials in Congress.

Snowden, whose full name is Edward Joseph Snowden, said he understands the risks of disclosing the information but felt it was important to reveal.

“I intend to ask for asylum from any countries that believe in free speech and oppose the victimization of global privacy,” Snowden told The Post from Hong Kong, where he has been staying. The Guardian was the first to publicly identify Snowden. Both media organizations made his name public with his consent.

“I’m not going to hide,” Snowden said Sunday afternoon. “Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest.”

Asked whether he believed his disclosures would change anything, he said: “I think they already have. Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.”

Snowden said nobody was aware of his actions, including those closest to him. He said there wasn’t a single event that spurred his decision to leak the information.

“It was more of a slow realization that presidents could openly lie to secure the office and then break public promises without consequence,” he said.

Snowden said President Obama hasn’t lived up to his pledges of transparency. He blamed a lack of accountability in the Bush administration for continued abuses. The White House could not immediately be reached for comment Sunday afternoon.

“It set an example that when powerful figures are suspected of wrongdoing, releasing them from the accountability of law is ‘for our own good,’ ” Snowden said. “That’s corrosive to the basic fairness of society.”

when genes became information...,

whyevolutionistrue | The great step forward made by Watson and Crick in their second paper was to take these pre-existing ideas and reshape them in a less literal form. The sequence of bases was no longer seen in terms of a physical template for protein synthesis, but as something far more abstract – a code carrying genetical information.

What is intriguing is where this novel interpretation came from. The first person who explicitly suggested that genes contained a ‘code-script’ was the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, in 1943. Although his ideas were widely-read, there were few attempts to explore the idea of a ‘code’, because the physical nature of the gene was unknown.

The importance of ‘information’ as an abstract concept – so widespread in our modern view – was a direct product of war-time work on electronic transmissions by Claude Shannon, and on the development of control systems to guide anti-aircraft guns carried out by Norbert Wiener. In 1948, these two mathematicians each published a popular book – Information Theory and Cybernetics, respectively. (For best-sellers they contained a surprising number of mathematical formulae. Maybe people were more maths-savvy back then. Or more tolerant of things they didn’t quite understand.)

There were a growing number of meetings at which physicists, mathematicians and biologists tried to see how they could forge a new way of looking at life (the cyberneticians were particularly bold in this respect). In the end, nothing came of these attempts, but at some point along the way, the idea of seeing that genes contain ‘information’ seeped its way into Watson and Crick’s thinking, leading them to explain the implications of the double helix structure in this radically novel way.

How exactly the pair came up with the idea is not known (that’s why yesterday I asked Jerry to ask Watson this question when they met – we should get a post on this later today). We know that Crick wrote most of this article, in a terrible hurry. Did either of them read Shannon or Wiener? Or were these just terms they heard floating about on the Cambridge air, or idly discussed in the corridors at conferences? Whatever the case, today it is impossible to think about genes – or evolution – without using this powerful metaphor.

schrodinger: what is life?

wikipedia | What Is Life? is a 1944 non-fiction science book written for the lay reader by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. The book was based on a course of public lectures delivered by Schrödinger in February 1943, under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. The lectures attracted an audience of about 400, who were warned "that the subject-matter was a difficult one and that the lectures could not be termed popular, even though the physicist’s most dreaded weapon, mathematical deduction, would hardly be utilized."^[1] Schrödinger's lecture focused on one important question: "how can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?"^[1]

In the book, Schrödinger introduced the idea of an "aperiodic crystal" that contained genetic information in its configuration of covalent chemical bonds. In the 1950s, this idea stimulated enthusiasm for discovering the genetic molecule. Although the existence of DNA had been known since 1869, its role in reproduction and its helical shape were still unknown at the time of Schrödinger's lecture. In retrospect, Schrödinger's aperiodic crystal can be viewed as a well-reasoned theoretical prediction of what biologists should have been looking for during their search for genetic material. Both James D. Watson,^[2] and independently, Francis Crick, co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, credited Schrödinger's book with presenting an early theoretical description of how the storage of genetic information would work, and each respectively acknowledged the book as a source of inspiration for their initial researches.^[3]

A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid

exploratorium | We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.

A structure for nucleic acid has already been proposed by Pauling (4) and Corey¹. They kindly made their manuscript available to us in advance of publication. Their model consists of three intertwined chains, with the phosphates near the fibre axis, and the bases on the outside. In our opinion, this structure is unsatisfactory for two reasons:

(1) We believe that the material which gives the X-ray diagrams is the salt, not the free acid. Without the acidic hydrogen atoms it is not clear what forces would hold the structure together, especially as the negatively charged phosphates near the axis will repel each other.

(2) Some of the van der Waals distances appear to be too small.

Another three-chain structure has also been suggested by Fraser (in the press). In his model the phosphates are on the outside and the bases on the inside, linked together by hydrogen bonds. This structure as described is rather ill-defined, and for this reason we shall not comment on it.

We wish to put forward a radically different structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (5). This structure has two helical chains each coiled round the same axis (see diagram). We have made the usual chemical assumptions, namely, that each chain consists of phosphate diester groups joining beta-D-deoxyribofuranose residues with 3',5' linkages. The two chains (but not their bases) are related by a dyad perpendicular to the fibre axis. Both chains follow right-handed helices, but owing to the dyad the sequences of the atoms in the two chains run in opposite directions (6) . Each chain loosely resembles Furberg's² model No. 1 (7); that is, the bases are on the inside of the helix and the phosphates on the outside. The configuration of the sugar and the atoms near it is close to Furberg's "standard configuration," the sugar being roughly perpendicular to the attached base. There is a residue on each every 3.4 A. in the z-direction. We have assumed an angle of 36° between adjacent residues in the same chain, so that the structure repeats after 10 residues on each chain, that is, after 34 A. The distance of a phosphorus atom from the fibre axis is 10 A. As the phosphates are on the outside, cations have easy access to them.

increasing human grasp of GOD...,

wired | At the most basic level, scientists create phylogenetic trees by grouping species according to their degree of relatedness. Lining up the DNA of humans, chimpanzees and fish, for example, makes it readily apparent that humans and chimps are more closely related to each other than they are to fish.

Researchers once used just one gene or a handful to compare organisms. But the last decade has seen an explosion in phylogenetic data, rapidly inflating the data pool for generating these trees. These analyses filled in some of the sparse spots on the tree of life, but considerable disagreement still remains.

For example, it’s not clear whether snails are most closely related to clams and other bivalves or to another mollusk group known as tusk shells, said Rokas. And we have no idea how some of the earliest animals to branch off the tree, such as jellyfish and sponges, are related to each other. Scientists can rattle off examples of conflicting trees published in the same scientific journal within weeks, or even in the same issue.

“That poses a question: Why do you have this lack of agreement?” said Rokas.

Rokas and his graduate student Leonidas Salichos explored that question by evaluating each gene independently and using only the most useful genes — those that carry the greatest amount of information with respect to evolutionary history — to construct their tree.

They started with 23 species of yeast, focusing on 1,070 genes. They first created a phylogenetic tree using the standard method, called concatenation. This involves stringing together all the sequence data from individual species into one mega-gene and then comparing that long sequence among the different species and creating a tree that best explains the differences.

The resulting tree was accurate according to standard statistical analysis. But given that similar methods have produced trees of life that are rife with contradiction, Rokas and Salichos decided to delve deeper. They built a series of phylogenetic trees using data from individual yeast genes and employed an algorithm derived from information theory to find the areas of greatest agreement among the trees. The result, published in Nature in May, was unexpected. Every gene they studied appeared to tell a slightly different story of evolution.

“Just about all the trees from individual genes were in conflict with the tree based on a concatenated data set,” says Hilu. “It’s a bit shocking.”

They concluded that if a number of genes support a specific architecture, it is probably accurate. But if different sets of genes support two different architectures equally, it is much less likely that either structure is accurate. Rokas and Salichos used a statistical method called bootstrap analysis to select the most informative genes.

In essence, “if you take just the strongly supported genes, then you recover the correct tree,” said Donoghue. Fist tap Dale.

increasing human grasp of biological computation...,

technion | Using only biomolecules (such as DNA and enzymes), scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed and constructed an advanced biological transducer, a computing machine capable of manipulating genetic codes, and using the output as new input for subsequent computations. The breakthrough might someday create new possibilities in biotechnology, including individual gene therapy and cloning. The findings appear in (May 23, 2013) Chemistry & Biology (Cell Press).

Interest in such biomolecular computing devices is strong, mainly because of their ability (unlike electronic computers) to interact directly with biological systems and even living organisms. No interface is required since all components of molecular computers, including hardware, software, input and output, are molecules that interact in solution along a cascade of programmable chemical events.

“Our results show a novel, synthetic designed computing machine that computes iteratively and produces biologically relevant results,” says lead researcher Prof. Ehud Keinan of the Technion Schulich Faculty of Chemistry. “In addition to enhanced computation power, this DNA-based transducer offers multiple benefits, including the ability to read and transform genetic information, miniaturization to the molecular scale, and the aptitude to produce computational results that interact directly with living organisms.”

The transducer could be used on genetic material to evaluate and detect specific sequences, and to alter and algorithmically process genetic code. Similar devices, says Prof. Keinan, could be applied for other computational problems.

“All biological systems, and even entire living organisms, are natural molecular computers. Every one of us is a biomolecular computer, that is, a machine in which all components are molecules “talking” to one another in a logical manner. The hardware and software are complex biological molecules that activate one another to carry out some predetermined chemical tasks. The input is a molecule that undergoes specific, programmed changes, following a specific set of rules (software) and the output of this chemical computation process is another well defined molecule.”

what's the matter with metadata?

newyorker | Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from liberal Northern California and the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, assured the public earlier today that the government’s secret snooping into the phone records of Americans was perfectly fine, because the information it obtained was only “meta,” meaning it excluded the actual content of the phone conversations, providing merely records, from a Verizon subsidiary, of who called whom when and from where. In addition, she said in a prepared statement, the “names of subscribers” were not included automatically in the metadata (though the numbers, surely, could be used to identify them). “Our courts have consistently recognized that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in this type of metadata information and thus no search warrant is required to obtain it,” she said, adding that “any subsequent effort to obtain the content of an American’s communications would require a specific order from the FISA court.”

She said she understands privacy—“that’s why this is carefully done”—and noted that eleven special federal judges, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret, had authorized the vast intelligence collection. A White House official made the same points to reporters, saying, “The order reprinted overnight does not allow the government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls” and was subject to “a robust legal regime.” The gist of the defense was that, in contrast to what took place under the Bush Administration, this form of secret domestic surveillance was legitimate because Congress had authorized it, and the judicial branch had ratified it, and the actual words spoken by one American to another were still private. So how bad could it be?

The answer, according to the mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau, whom I interviewed while reporting on the plight of the former N.S.A. whistleblower Thomas Drake and who is also the author of “Surveillance or Security?,” is that it’s worse than many might think.

“The public doesn’t understand,” she told me, speaking about so-called metadata. “It’s much more intrusive than content.” She explained that the government can learn immense amounts of proprietary information by studying “who you call, and who they call. If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening—you don’t need the content.”

“economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man.”― Henry Hazlitt

globalresearch | Over millennia, numerous enterprises have sought the status of science. Few have succeeded because they have failed to discover anything that stood up to scrutiny as knowledge. No body of beliefs, no matter how widely accepted or how extensive in scope, can ever be scientific.

In the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the epicycle is a geometric model of the solar system and planetary motion. It was first proposed by Apollonius of Perga at the end of the 3rd century BCE and its development continued until Kepler came up with a better model in the 17th century, and the geocentric model of the solar system was replaced by Copernican heliocentrism. In spite of some very good approximations to the problems of planetary motion, the system of epicycles could never get anything right.

Phrenology was originated by Franz Joseph Gall [right] in the late 1700s. After examining the heads of a number of young pickpockets, Gall found that many of them had bumps on their skulls just above their ears and suggested that the bumps, indentations, and shape of the skull could be linked to different aspects of a person’s personality, character, and abilities. Gall measured the skulls of people in prisons, hospitals, and asylums and developed a system of 27 different “faculties” that he believed could be directly diagnosed by assessing specific parts of the head, and he chose to ignore any contradictory evidence. After Gall’s death in 1828, several of his followers continued to develop phrenology. Despite some brief popularity, it was eventually viewed as a pseudoscience much like astrology, numerology, and palmistry. All of these, too, could never get anything right.

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who is known as the father of psychoanalysis which is a clinical method for treating psychopathology by having a patient talk to a psychoanalyst. Results on the mental health of patients were scanty at best. Some contend that Freud set back the study of psychology and psychiatry “by something like fifty years or more”, and that “Freud’s method is not capable of yielding objective data about mental processes”. Others consider psychoanalysis to be perhaps the most complex and successful pseudoscience in history. Karl Popper, who argued that all proper scientific theories must be potentially falsifiable, claimed that no experiment could ever disprove Freud’s psychoanalytic theories and thus were totally unscientific. Now Freud’s work has little relevance in psychiatry. It could never cure anyone. But it was not Freud who created a pseudoscience, it was the people who uncritically adopted his views.

Today the great fraudulent science is economics, but I don’t intend to beat that carcass. It has been shown not to be a science by numerous astute people. Even some renowned economists have been convinced of it. Paul Samuelson has said, “Economics has never been a science—and it is even less now than a few years ago.” Even Nassau William Senior knew it: “The confounding Political Economy with the Sciences and Arts to which it is subservient, has been one of the principal obstacles to its improvement.”

Yet many working economists continue to claim that it is or at least that it is more of a science than its siblings in the social enterprises of study. Perhaps these people feel that their work lacks dignity if it is not scientific, being unable to say exactly what it is if it is not science. So let’s look at some things that economists regularly do to see if what they are doing can be defined.

these jokers have no coherent conception of their subject matter either?

project-syndicate | One of the dirty secrets of economics is that there is no such thing as “economic theory.” There is simply no set of bedrock principles on which one can base calculations that illuminate real-world economic outcomes. We should bear in mind this constraint on economic knowledge as the global drive for fiscal austerity shifts into top gear.

Unlike economists, biologists, for example, know that every cell functions according to instructions for protein synthesis encoded in its DNA. Chemists begin with what the Heisenberg and Pauli principles, plus the three-dimensionality of space, tell us about stable electron configurations. Physicists start with the four fundamental forces of nature.

Economists have none of that. The “economic principles” underpinning their theories are a fraud – not fundamental truths but mere knobs that are twiddled and tuned so that the “right” conclusions come out of the analysis.

The “right” conclusions depend on which of two types of economist you are. One type chooses, for non-economic and non-scientific reasons, a political stance and a set of political allies, and twiddles and tunes his or her assumptions until they yield conclusions that fit their stance and please their allies. The other type takes the carcass of history, throws it into the pot, turns up the heat, and boils it down, hoping that the bones will yield lessons and suggest principles to guide our civilization’s voters, bureaucrats, and politicians as they slouch toward utopia.

Not surprisingly, I believe that only the second kind of economist has anything useful to say. So what lessons does history have to teach us about our current global economic predicament?

the phoenix program, informants, interrogation, and penetration

douglasvalentine | "Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers. As a result, its detractors charge that Phoenix violated that part of the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing protection to civilians in time of war. "By analogy," said Ogden Reid, a member of a congressional committee investigating Phoenix in 1971, "if the Union had had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon, Georgia."

"Under Phoenix, or Phung Hoang as it was called by the Vietnamese, due process was totally non-existent. South Vietnamese civilians whose names appeared on blacklists could be kidnapped, tortured, detained for two years without trial, or even murdered simply on the word of an anonymous informer. At its height, Phoenix managers imposed a quota of eighteen hundred neutralizations per month on the people running the program in the field, opening up the program to abuses by corrupt security officers, policemen, politicians, and racketeers, all of whom extorted innocent civilians as well as VCI. Legendary CIA officer Lucien Conein described Phoenix as, "A very good blackmail scheme for the central government: 'If you don't do what I want, you're VC.'"

"Because Phoenix "neutralizations" were often conducted at midnight while its victims were home, sleeping in bed, Phoenix proponents describe the program as a "scalpel" designed to replace the "bludgeon" of search and destroy operations, air strikes, and artillery barrages that indiscriminately wiped out entire villages and did little to "win the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese population. Yet the scalpel cut deeper than the U.S. government admits. Indeed, Phoenix was, among other things, an instrument of counter-terror - the psychological warfare tactic in which members of the VCI were brutally murdered along with their families or neighbors as a means of terrorizing the entire population into a state of submission. Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, often made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy.

"This book questions how Americans, who consider themselves a nation ruled by laws and an ethic of fair play, could create a program like Phoenix. By scrutinizing the program and the people who participated in it, and by employing the program as a symbol of the dark side of the human psyche, the author hopes to articulate the subtle ways in which the Vietnam War changed how Americans think about themselves. This book is about terror and its role in political warfare. It will show how, as successive American governments sink deeper and deeper into the vortex of covert operations - ostensibly to combat terrorism and Communist insurgencies - the American people gradually lose touch with the democratic ideals that once defined their national self-concept. This book asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost."