look here boy.., you have NO rights that the man is legally bound to respect!

cnn | Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who broke the news about secret U.S. surveillance programs, said the authorities who took his partner into custody at London's Heathrow Airport "are going to regret what they did."

"I am going to write my stories a lot more aggressively now," the Guardian reporter told Brazil's Globo TV on Monday in Rio de Janeiro.

"I am going to publish many more documents now. I am going to publish a lot about England, too, I have a lot of documents about the espionage system in England. Now my focus is going to be that as well."

Greenwald's partner, 28-year-old David Miranda, was held for nearly nine hours. He was reportedly passing through the airport on his way home to Brazil after leaving Berlin. Authorities seized his laptop, phone, and other materials.

The White House knew the move was coming.

"There was a heads up that was provided by the British government," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday.

So the United States knew it "was likely to occur, but it's not something that we've requested and it's something that was done specifically by the British law enforcement officials there," he said.

He would not comment on whether the United States has obtained material from Miranda's laptop -- and would not say whether President Barack Obama condemns the detention.

Agents asked 'about my entire life'

Miranda, also speaking to Globo TV in Rio, said agents were asking him questions "about my entire life."

"I was in a room, there were six different agents coming in and out and talking to me," he said. "They took my computer, video games, cell phone, everything."

The detention was reported by The Guardian. Before releasing him, authorities seized Miranda's laptop, cell phone, video game consoles and USB sticks, Greenwald wrote for The Guardian.

"This is obviously a rather profound escalation of their attacks on the news-gathering process and journalism," he said.

"It's bad enough to prosecute and imprison sources. It's worse still to imprison journalists who report the truth. But to start detaining the family members and loved ones of journalists is simply despotic. Even the Mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they felt threatened by."

legal stop, frisk, and confiscate - international - worldwide...,

guardian | Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act has been widely criticised for giving police broad powers under the guise of anti-terror legislation to stop and search individuals without prior authorisation or reasonable suspicion – setting it apart from other police powers.

Those stopped have no automatic right to legal advice and it is a criminal offence to refuse to co-operate with questioning under schedule 7, which critics say is a curtailment of the right to silence.

Last month the UK government said it would reduce the maximum period of detention to six hours and promised a review of the operation on schedule 7 amid concerns it unfairly targets minority groups and gives individuals fewer legal protections than they would have if detained at a police station.

The government of Brazil issued a statement in which it expressed its "grave concern" over the detention of one of its citizens and the use of anti-terror legislation. It said: "This measure is without justification since it involves an individual against whom there are no charges that can legitimate the use of that legislation. The Brazilian government expects that incidents such as the one that happened to the Brazilian citizen today are not repeated."

Widney Brown, Amnesty International's senior director of international law and policy, said: "It is utterly improbable that David Michael Miranda, a Brazilian national transiting through London, was detained at random, given the role his partner has played in revealing the truth about the unlawful nature of NSA surveillance.

"David's detention was unlawful and inexcusable. He was detained under a law that violates any principle of fairness and his detention shows how the law can be abused for petty, vindictive reasons.

"There is simply no basis for believing that David Michael Miranda presents any threat whatsoever to the UK government. The only possible intent behind this detention was to harass him and his partner, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, for his role in analysing the data released by Edward Snowden."

you realize "stop and frisk" is a tactic used by the military in occupied-territories?

HuffPo | When the FBI finally located Whitey Bulger in 2010 after searching for 16 years, the reputed mobster was suspected of involvement in 19 murders in the 1970s and '80s, and was thought to be armed with a massive arsenal of weapons. He was also 81 at the time, in poor physical health, and looking at spending the rest of his life in prison. Of all the people who might meet the criteria for arrest by a SWAT team, one might think that Bulger would top the list.

Yet instead of sending in a tactical team to tear down Bulger’s door in the middle of the night, the FBI took a different appraoch. After some investigating, FBI officials cut the lock on a storage locker Bulger used in the apartment complex where he was staying. They then had the property manager call Bulger to tell him someone may have broken into his locker. When Bulger went to investigate, he was arrested without incident. There was no battering ram, there were no flash grenades, there was no midnight assault on his home.

That peaceful apprehension of a known violent fugitive, found guilty this week of participating in 11 murders and a raft of other crimes, stands in stark contrast to the way tens of thousands of Americans are confronted each year by SWAT teams battering down their doors to serve warrants for nonviolent crimes, mostly involving drugs. 

On the night of Jan. 5, 2011, for example, police in Framingham, Mass., raided a Fountain Street apartment that was home to Eurie Stamps and his wife, Norma Bushfan-Stamps. An undercover officer had allegedly purchased drugs from Norma's 20-year-old son, Joseph Bushfan, and another man, Dwayne Barrett, earlier that evening, and now the police wanted to arrest them. They took a battering ram to the door, set off a flash grenade, and forced their way inside.

As the SWAT team moved through the apartment, screaming at everyone to get on the floor, Officer Paul Duncan approached Eurie Stamps. The 68-year-old, not suspected of any crime, was watching a basketball game in his pajamas when the police came in.

By the time Duncan got to him in a hallway, Stamps was face-down on the floor with his arms over his head, as police had instructed him. As Duncan moved to pull Stamps' arms behind him, he says he fell backwards, somehow causing his gun to discharge, shooting Stamps. The grandfather of 12 was killed in his own home, while complying with police orders during a raid for crimes in which he had no involvement.

The Obama administration has begun talking about reforming the criminal justice system, notably this week, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced changes to how federal prosecutors will consider mandatory minimum sentences. If government leaders are looking for another issue to tackle, they might consider the astonishing evolution of America’s police forces over the last 30 years.

Today in America, SWAT teams are deployed about 100 to 150 times per day, or about 50,000 times per year -- a dramatic increase from the 3,000 or so annual deployments in the early 1980s, or the few hundred in the 1970s. The vast majority of today's deployments are to serve search warrants for drug crimes. But the use of SWAT tactics to enforce regulatory law also appears to be rising. This month, for example, a SWAT team raided the Garden of Eden, a sustainable growth farm in Arlington, Texas, supposedly to look for marijuana. The police found no pot, however, and the real intent of the raid appears to have been for code enforcement, as the officers came armed with an inspection notice for nuisance abatement.

Where these teams were once used only in emergency situations, they're used today mostly as an investigative tool against people merely suspected of crimes. In many police agencies, paramilitary tactics have become the first option, where they once were the last. 

“It’s really about a lack of imagination and a lack of creativity,” says Norm Stamper, a retired cop who served as police chief of Seattle from 1994 to 2000. “When your answer to every problem is more force, it shows that you haven’t been taught and trained to consider other options."

remember: hunger is now "extremism/terrorism"

motherboard | Conflict continues to sweep Egypt, and the death toll is rising fast. Demonstrators protesting ex-president Mohammed Morsi's ouster are the latest victims, and they number at least in the hundreds. The region has been wracked with conflict for months now, and, while the West is fond of blaming Morsi's incompetence as a governor, the problem may be much more fundamental than that—Egypt is starving. 

When people are hungry, societies tend to unravel, regardless of whether it's led by an authoritarian tyrant or a democratic body. When food is too expensive, people can't eat. And all over the world, food is way too expensive right now.

Two years ago, the New England Complex Systems Institute published a famous paper that sussed out the mathematical correlation between food prices and unrest: Every time food prices breached a certain threshold, riots broke out worldwide.

That all-important threshold is about 210 on the FAO Food Price Index. That's the "measure of the monthly change in international prices of a basket of food commodities," according to the United Nations.

In 2008, the wake of the global economic crash, food prices skyrocketed to 220. Violent protests and riots swept the globe. In 2011, food prices spiked, and breached the threshold again—and the Arab Spring was born. Today, most of us remember of the millions-strong demonstrations and the toppled dictators, but recall that the uprising began when one man was so desperate and humiliated that he couldn't feed his family that he set himself on fire. 

In May 2013, right before millions of angry Egyptians took to Tahrir Square, the index was at 213. For most of the spring, it had hovered well above 210, meaning that food was prohibitively expensive for Egypt's poor for a full three months before people took to the streets in dissent. 

And sure enough, food acces is a crippling problem in Egypt even today. UPI reports that "Bassem Ouda, the minister of supplies in the government of President Mohamed Morsi—who was ousted by the army July 3—admitted last week the state has less than two months' supply of imported wheat in stock, or about 500,000 metric tons."

Food supplies were and are dwindling, a problem that's exacerbated Egypt's political woes. It's even more expensive to import foreign wheat, and aid contracts are being widely disputed. The government apparently only has three million tons of homegrown wheat left from the spring harvest. As UPI explains, "That means bread shortages, and with about 40 percent of the population living below the poverty line—subsisting on heavily subsidized bread that sells at the equivalent of 1 U.S. cent a loaf—that could trigger widespread social unrest."

Egypt isn't alone. I recently spoke to Yaneer Bar-Yam, the chief author of the NECSI paper, and he told me that much of the unrest of the past year—in Turkey, Brazil, and Syria as the highest-profile examples—can be tied to rising food prices.

ripping off young america...,

rollingstone | But the dirty secret of American higher education is that student-loan interest rates are almost irrelevant. It's not the cost of the loan that's the problem, it's the principal – the appallingly high tuition costs that have been soaring at two to three times the rate of inflation, an irrational upward trajectory eerily reminiscent of skyrocketing housing prices in the years before 2008.

How is this happening? It's complicated. But throw off the mystery and what you'll uncover is a shameful and oppressive outrage that for years now has been systematically perpetrated against a generation of young adults. For this story, I interviewed people who developed crippling mental and physical conditions, who considered suicide, who had to give up hope of having children, who were forced to leave the country, or who even entered a life of crime because of their student debts.

They all take responsibility for their own mistakes. They know they didn't arrive at gorgeous campuses for four golden years of boozing, balling and bong hits by way of anybody's cattle car. But they're angry, too, and they should be. Because the underlying cause of all that later-life distress and heartache – the reason they carry such crushing, life-alteringly huge college debt – is that our university-tuition system really is exploitative and unfair, designed primarily to benefit two major actors.

First in line are the colleges and universities, and the contractors who build their extravagant athletic complexes, hotel-like dormitories and God knows what other campus embellishments. For these little regional economic empires, the federal student-loan system is essentially a massive and ongoing government subsidy, once funded mostly by emotionally vulnerable parents, but now increasingly paid for in the form of federally backed loans to a political constituency – low- and middle-income students – that has virtually no lobby in Washington.

Next up is the government itself. While it's not commonly discussed on the Hill, the government actually stands to make an enormous profit on the president's new federal student-loan system, an estimated $184 billion over 10 years, a boondoggle paid for by hyperinflated tuition costs and fueled by a government-sponsored predatory-lending program that makes even the most ruthless private credit-card company seem like a "Save the Panda" charity. Why is this happening? The answer lies in a sociopathic marriage of private-sector greed and government force that will make you shake your head in wonder at the way modern America sucks blood out of its young. Fist tap Arnach.

stop playing, where's my gold at?

endoftheamericandream | The demand for physical gold is exploding all over the world, and bullion banks are now experiencing a supply crunch that is absolutely unprecedented.  As physical demand continues to rise, the massive Ponzi scheme that the bullion banks have been engaged in is going to become increasingly obvious, and at some point the lack of physical gold is going to break the back of the paper gold market and we are going to see the price of gold go to levels that we have never seen before.  You see, the truth is that the central banks of the world and the bullion banks have made “paper promises” that vastly exceed the amount of actual physical gold in existence.  This kind of scheme works fine if everyone does not come asking for their gold at the same time.  Unfortunately for the ones running this scheme, people are now starting to ask for their gold back and it is causing huge problems.

It started earlier this year when Germany asked for 300 metric tons of their gold which was supposedly being held at the New York Fed.  If the New York Fed really did have as much physical gold as they claim that they do, that request should have been no problem.  Instead, the Germans were told that it would take seven years to fulfill the request.

At that point, alarm bells started to go off in financial circles all over the planet.  People all over the globe began asking for their gold back, and now this is causing serious stress for the bullion banks.  The following is what Hong Kong hedge fund manager William Kaye told King World News the other day…

There are serious strains in the (gold) system. I’ve never witnessed such a serious strain in my lifetime in terms of the backwardation of gold, and in terms of the lease rates being negative for such an extended period of time. This suggests that there are two forces at work: One is that there are serious strains in the system — that the bullion banks are struggling to come up with the physical gold for spot delivery that the market demands.

Right now the bullion banks are experiencing unprecedented difficulties coming up with the physical gold and physical silver that they are supposed to have.  Evidence of this supply squeeze is starting to pop up all over the place.  Some of this evidence was summarized in a recent article by Jim Willie…

egypt a tissue of lies...,

tariqramadan | It’s dangerous to be a friend of the United States in the Middle East. A fact the US government knows better than any political player in the Arab world, starting with America’s best friends! The strategy is simple: cover your tracks, forget history, don’t let cold hard facts get in the way. For the last sixty years, the United States has supported the Egyptian army and the successive dictatorial regimes (Nasser, despite tense relations, then Sadat and Mubarak) that protected their geostrategic interests, promoted “regional security” and, of course, defended Israel. Nothing has changed: the American administration was squarely behind the June 30 military coup, which was planned well in advance by the army high command and its civilian allies, including Mohammed el-Baradei. As early as 2008-2009 el-Baradei, one of the US’s key Egyptian strategic assets, had been advancing by stealth. In my Islam and the Arab Awakening I published comments by American officials about him and his involvement in the April 6 Movement (1). On the day of the coup, the US refused to describe it as such in order not to interrupt support for its military allies and the new political power structure. Secretary of State John Kerry could only confirm what serious analysts already knew when he stated a few days later that on June 30 the army had “restored the democratic process.” There can be no doubt that the US government fully supports the Egyptian armed forces. Its regional allies quickly swung into action: billions of dollars poured in from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait.

Covering tracks is the strategy of choice. Domestically, the propaganda machine is in high gear: the United States had been meddling in Egyptian affairs by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). The new political authorities (the interim president, prime minister and, of course, el-Baradei) are playing their parts to perfection: they claim to be “disappointed” by the lack of American backing. In the Washington Post and not in an Egyptian newspaper, General al-Sisi even—astonishingly—accused the US government of abandoning him: “You turned your back on the Egyptians, and they won’t forget that.” (2)Washington Post, August 3, 2013 It was a clever gambit, one that managed to fool a section of the Egyptian population. That would make the armed forces and the civilian transitional government out to be courageous and independent patriots, while American agents and foreign powers had all along propped up the MB. The Americans know well the power of such propaganda, and the symbolic gestures needed to make it convincing. But it was a lie from start to finish.

The facts and figures produced are a bigger lie: 30 million Egyptians took to the streets, they tell us, and 16 million signed an anti-government petition. Where do these figure, intoned like a mantra in the media, come from? By comparing images from the pilgrimage to Mecca with those produced on June 30 (by the Egyptian military, which transmitted them to press agencies around the world: Google claims not to have broadcast them), experts estimate the total turnout at no more than four or five million. In fact, the figure of 30 million is preposterous, as are the 16 million signatures, especially for anyone familiar with social conditions on the ground in Egypt. New propaganda; new lies.

feds threaten to arrest lavabit founder for shutting service down...,

techdirt | The saga of Lavabit founder Ladar Levison is getting even more ridiculous, as he explains that the government has threatened him with criminal charges for his decision to shut down the business, rather than agree to some mysterious court order. The feds are apparently arguing that the act of shutting down the business, itself, was a violation of the order:

... a source familiar with the matter told NBC News that James Trump, a senior litigation counsel in the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., sent an email to Levison's lawyer last Thursday – the day Lavabit was shuttered -- stating that Levison may have "violated the court order," a statement that was interpreted as a possible threat to charge Levison with contempt of court.

That same article suggests that the decision to shut down Lavabit was over something much bigger than just looking at one individual's information -- since it appears that Lavabit has cooperated in the past on such cases. Instead, the suggestion now is that the government was seeking a tap on all accounts:

Levison stressed that he has complied with "upwards of two dozen court orders" for information in the past that were targeted at "specific users" and that "I never had a problem with that." But without disclosing details, he suggested that the order he received more recently was markedly different, requiring him to cooperate in broadly based surveillance that would scoop up information about all the users of his service. He likened the demands to a requirement to install a tap on his telephone.

It sounds like the feds were asking for a full on backdoor on the system, not unlike some previous reports of ISPs who have received surprise visits from the NSA.

murdering the wretched of the earth...,

truthdig | What is happening in Egypt is a precursor to a wider global war between the world’s elites and the world’s poor, a war caused by diminishing resources, chronic unemployment and underemployment, overpopulation, declining crop yields caused by climate change, and rising food prices. Thirty-three percent of Egypt’s 80 million people are 14 or younger, and millions live under or just above the poverty line, which the World Bank sets at a daily income of $2 in that nation. The poor in Egypt spend more than half their income on food—often food that has little nutritional value. An estimated 13.7 million Egyptians, or 17 percent of the population, suffered from food insecurity in 2011, compared with 14 percent in 2009, according to a report by the U.N. World Food Program and the Egyptian Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). Malnutrition is endemic among poor children, with 31 percent under 5 years old stunted in growth. Illiteracy runs at more than 70 percent.

In “Les Misérables” Victor Hugo described war with the poor as one between the “egoists” and the “outcasts.” The egoists, Hugo wrote, had “the bemusement of prosperity, which blunts the sense, the fear of suffering which is some cases goes so far as to hate all sufferers, and unshakable complacency, the ego so inflated that is stifles the soul.” The outcasts, who were ignored until their persecution and deprivation morphed into violence, had “greed and envy, resentment at the happiness of others, the turmoil of the human element in search of personal fulfillment, hearts filled with fog, misery, needs, and fatalism, and simple, impure ignorance.”

The belief systems the oppressed embrace can be intolerant, but these belief systems are a response to the injustice, state violence and cruelty inflicted on them by the global elites. Our enemy is not radical Islam. It is global capitalism. It is a world where the wretched of the earth are forced to bow before the dictates of the marketplace, where children go hungry as global corporate elites siphon away the world’s wealth and natural resources and where our troops and U.S.-backed militaries carry out massacres on city streets. Egypt offers a window into the coming dystopia. The wars of survival will mark the final stage of human habitation of the planet. And if you want to know what they will look like, visit any city morgue in Cairo.

still at it...,

dailykos | Yes, what you see is TIME devoting its cover in international markets to a critical moment in Egypt's revolution – perhaps the most important global story this week – while offering Americans the chance to contemplate their collective navels (with a rather banal topic and supposition, to boot).

This is not an isolated incident, for perusing TIME's covers reveals countless examples of the publication tempting the world with critical events, ideas or figures, while dangling before Americans the chance to indulge in trite self-absorption.

we return to our regularly scheduled coverage of the all-seeing eye....,

 slate | Last night the Washington Post published a major scoop, one showing that the the NSA has "broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year" since 2008. If you're only going to read one NSA story today, make it that one. But for those who want a sneak peek inside the often-frustrating world of national security reporting, journalist Barton Gellman provides it with a complementary post detailing how the Obama administration responded when asked to comment on the leaked documents at the heart of the paper's rather damning report.

In short, the administration directed all questions to John DeLong, NSA's director of compliance, who then proceeded to speak with Gellman at length—albeit with some pre-established conditions—about the internal audit given to the paper by Edward Snowden. DeLong, in the paper's words, "answered questions freely in a 90-minute interview," with the agreement that he could be quoted by name and title on at least some of his answers. But following the interview, and before the story went live, the White House stepped in and more or less redacted the entire interview. Instead, the administration offered a prepared statement to be attributed to DeLong—written remarks that the Postrefused to run in its main story.

Here's the relevant passage from the Post's rundown on the government statements:

The Obama administration referred all questions for this article to John DeLong, the NSA’s director of compliance, who answered questions freely in a 90-minute interview. DeLong and members of the NSA communications staff said he could be quoted “by name and title” on some of his answers after an unspecified internal review. The Post said it would not permit the editing of quotes. Two days later, White House and NSA spokesmen said that none of DeLong’s comments could be quoted on the record and sent instead a prepared statement in his name. The Post declines to accept the substitute language as quotations from DeLong. The statement is below.

We want people to report if they have made a mistake or even if they believe that an NSA activity is not consistent with the rules. NSA, like other regulated organizations, also has a “hotline” for people to report — and no adverse action or reprisal can be taken for the simple act of reporting. We take each report seriously, investigate the matter, address the issue, constantly look for trends, and address them as well — all as a part of NSA’s internal oversight and compliance efforts. What’s more, we keep our overseers informed through both immediate reporting and periodic reporting. Our internal privacy compliance program has more than 300 personnel assigned to it: a fourfold increase since 2009. They manage NSA’s rules, train personnel, develop and implement technical safeguards, and set up systems to continually monitor and guide NSA’s activities. We take this work very seriously.

Gellman says that he would have normally refused to allow the administration to review the quotes in the first place, but reluctantly agreed given he was dealing with classified information. Still, he says, he made it crystal clear to everyone involved that he would draw the line at the editing of DeLong's quotes—a promise he lived up to.

Main WaPo story here; NSA comment timeline here.

consumption

Excerpted from the documentary Samsara

because they can...,

eater | Ray's & Stark Bar, the Patina Group's restaurant and bar located at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, will be adding a 20-item Water Menu to its beverage list next week. Eater LA reports that Ray's & Stark GM and water sommelier Martin Riese created the list which includes waters from ten different countries including Spain, France, Germany, and Canada. The bottles range in size from .75 - 1 liter, and are priced from $8 - $16. The most expensive bottle is Riese's own California-made water 9OH2O. Eater LA had previously reported that 9OH2O retails for $14 per bottle because it's made "in limited editions of 10,000 individually numbered glass bottles."

According to a press release, waters on "LA's most extensive Water Menu" will be for sale by the bottle and also as part of a $12 water tasting menu. Riese is quoted in the press release saying: "We are already accustomed to pairing food with wine or beer, but many people don't know that water is just as important to the entire dining experience." The menu is a booklet that features descriptions of each water varietal, including information on origin, mineral content, and tasting notes. Here's the water menu in full and the press release:

defcon 20 documentary

DEFCON is the world's largest hacking conference, held in Las Vegas, Nevada. In 2012 it was held for the 20th time. The conference has strict no-filming policies, but for DEFCON 20, a documentary crew was allowed full access to the event. The film follows the four days of the conference, the events and people (attendees and staff), and covers history and philosophy behind DEFCON's success and unique experience.

the all-seeing eye only wants to protect you...,

this writing has been on the wall for a while, but I reminded you of this fact two weeks ago...,

Logical outcomes from this?

1. FBI/NSA just shut down the #1 biggest hosting site and #1 most wanted person on Tor

2. Silkroad is next on their list, being the #2 most wanted (#1 was Child Porn, #2 is drugs)

3. Bitcoin and all crypto currenecies set to absolutely CRASH as a result since the feds can not completely control this currency as they please.

I don't always call the Feds agenda transparent, but when i do, I say they can be trying harder. 

Once you grok the fact that the bankster $$ system is the ultimate technology for governance and control, then you can easily understand why they're fitna loosen up their 80 year weed prohibition (cause people will transact for weed in traceable dollars and schmoking is likely to blunt a little bit of the riotous reaction to continuing economic contraction and malaise). Genuine anonymization and well-established virtual currencies are a response to the ever-tightening grip of the "top which lives off the yield of the bottom." Matter fact, they're the only pure genius games in progress at this moment in time - and constitute a genuine and growing threat to unilateral top-down governance and the system of 1% global supremacy. (psychedelics do too, but they'll be easy enough to track and monitor as they'll be an epiphenomenal component of the larger ebb and flow of legalized weed)

NYTimes | State and federal officials are starting broad investigations into shortcomings in the oversight of upstart virtual currencies like bitcoin.

The Senate’s committee on homeland security sent a letter this week to the major financial regulators and law enforcement agencies asking about the “threats and risks related to virtual currency.” These currencies, whose popularity has grown in recent years, are often used in online transactions that are not monitored by traditional financial institutions.

“This is something that is clearly not going away, and it demands a whole government response,” said a person involved in the Senate committee’s investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry is continuing.

The Senate letter went out the same day that New York’s top financial regulator, Benjamin M. Lawsky, sent subpoenas to 22 companies that have had some involvement with bitcoin, according to a person briefed on the investigation.

Previously, there have been isolated efforts to crack down on those who took advantage of virtual currencies. But the two investigations made public this week appear to be the most wide-ranging government efforts to exert more coordinated control over what has been a largely faceless and borderless phenomenon.

Bitcoin, the most well-known digital currency, was started by anonymous Japanese computer programmers in 2009 and was intended to serve as an alternative to national currencies. Only a limited number of bitcoins can be created. And an online community has bid up the price of individual bitcoins, which are stored digitally on a decentralized network of computers. On Tuesday, a bitcoin was being sold for about $108 online.

Lawmakers are worried that bitcoin and other alternative forms of money can be used to evade taxes, defraud investors and assist trade in illegal products like drugs and pornography.

laura poitras: smiting the all-seeing eye

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

sigurdur thordarson: greazy grima wormtongue serving the all seeing eye...,

slate | When he met Julian Assange for the first time, Sigurdur Thordarson admired the WikiLeaks founder’s attitude and quickly signed up to the cause. But little more than a year later, Thordarson was working as an informant spying on WikiLeaks for the U.S. government—embroiling himself as a teenager in one of the most complicated international events in recent history.

In a series of interviews with Slate, Thordarson has detailed the full story behind how, in an extraordinary sequence of events, he went from accompanying Assange to court hearings in London to secretly passing troves of data on WikiLeaks staff and affiliated activists to the FBI. The 20-year-old Icelandic citizen’s account is partly corroborated by authorities in Iceland, who have confirmed that he was at the center of a diplomatic row in 2011 when a handful of FBI agents flew in to the country to meet with him—but were subsequently asked to leave after a government minister suspected they were trying to “frame” Assange.

Thordarson, who first outed himself as an informant in a Wired story in June, provided me with access to a pseudonymous email account that he says was created for him by the FBI. He also produced documents and travel records for trips to Denmark and the United States that he says were organized and paid for by the bureau.

The FBI declined to comment on Thordarson’s role as an informant or the content of the emails its agents are alleged to have sent him. In a statement, it said that it was “not able to discuss investigative tools and techniques, nor comment on ongoing investigations.” But emails sent by alleged FBI agents to Thordarson, which left a digital trail leading back to computers located within the United States, appear to shine a light on the extent of the bureau’s efforts to aggressively investigate WikiLeaks following the whistle-blower website’s publication of classified U.S. military and State Department files in 2010.

Late last month, Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was convicted on counts of espionage, theft, and computer fraud for passing the group the secrets.  During the Manning trial, military prosecutors portrayed Assange as an “information anarchist,” and now it seems increasingly possible that the U.S. government may next go after the 42-year-old Australian for his role in obtaining and publishing the documents. For the past 14 months, Assange has been living in Ecuador’s London Embassy after being granted political asylum by the country over fears that, if he is sent to Sweden to face sexual offense allegations, he will be detained and subsequently extradited to the United States.

Meanwhile, for more than two years, prosecutors have been quietly conducting a sweeping investigation into WikiLeaks that remains active today. The FBI’s files in the Manning case number more than 42,000 pages, according to statements made during the soldier’s pretrial hearings, and that stack of proverbial paper likely continues to grow. Thordarson’s story offers a unique insight into the politically-charged probe: Information he has provided appears to show that there was internal tension within the FBI over a controversial attempt to infiltrate and gather intelligence on the whistle-blower group. Thordarson gave the FBI a large amount of data on WikiLeaks, including private chat message logs, photographs, and contact details of volunteers, activists, and journalists affiliated with the organization. Thordarson alleges that the bureau even asked him to covertly record conversations with Assange in a bid to tie him to a criminal hacking conspiracy. The feds pulled back only after becoming concerned that the Australian was close to discovering the spy effort.

dr. sanjay gupta changed his mind...,

CNN | Over the last year, I have been working on a new documentary called "Weed." The title "Weed" may sound cavalier, but the content is not.

I traveled around the world to interview medical leaders, experts, growers and patients. I spoke candidly to them, asking tough questions. What I found was stunning.

Long before I began this project, I had steadily reviewed the scientific literature on medical marijuana from the United States and thought it was fairly unimpressive. Reading these papers five years ago, it was hard to make a case for medicinal marijuana. I even wrote about this in a TIME magazine article, back in 2009, titled "Why I would Vote No on Pot."

Well, I am here to apologize.

I apologize because I didn't look hard enough, until now. I didn't look far enough. I didn't review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis.

Instead, I lumped them with the high-visibility malingerers, just looking to get high. I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have "no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse."

They didn't have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true. It doesn't have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works. Take the case of Charlotte Figi, who I met in Colorado. She started having seizures soon after birth. By age 3, she was having 300 a week, despite being on seven different medications. Medical marijuana has calmed her brain, limiting her seizures to 2 or 3 per month.

I have seen more patients like Charlotte first hand, spent time with them and come to the realization that it is irresponsible not to provide the best care we can as a medical community, care that could involve marijuana.

We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that.

 I hope this article and upcoming documentary will help set the record straight. Fist tap Arnach.

An Oral History of the War on Drugs & The American Criminal Justice System

vimeo | The Land of the Free punishes or imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation. This collection of testimonials from criminal offenders, family members, and experts on America’s criminal justice system puts a human face on the millions of Americans subjugated by the US Government's 40 year, one trillion dollar social catastrophe: The War on Drugs; a failed policy underscored by fear, politics, racial prejudice and intolerance in a public atmosphere of "out of sight, out of mind."

The United States has only 5% of the world's population, yet a full 25% of the world's prisoners. At 2.5 million, the US has more prisoners than even China does with five times the population of the United States. 8 million Americans (1 in every 31) languish under some form of state monitoring known as "correctional supervision." On top of that, the security and livelihood of over 13 million more has been forever altered by a felony conviction. 

The American use of punishment is so pervasive, and so disproportionate, that even the conservative magazine The Economist declared in 2010, "never in the civilized world have so many been locked up for so little."

The project will unfold over a two year period, beginning with the release of this feature-length documentary and then continuing on with the release of short films and complete interviews from each of the 100 participants in the project, meant to represent the 1 in 100 Americans that are currently sitting behind bars.

The Exile Nation Project is made possible by a generous grant from the Tedworth Charitable Trust and the openDemocracy group, in association with Exile Nation Media. All content produced is non-commercial and available for free distribution under a Creative Commons license.

cause the federal penitentaries are too crowded?

AP | With the U.S. facing massive overcrowding in its prisons, Attorney General Eric Holder called Monday for major changes to the nation's criminal justice system that would scale back the use of harsh sentences for certain drug-related crimes.

In remarks to the American Bar Association in San Francisco, Holder said he also favors diverting people convicted of low-level offenses to drug treatment and community service programs and expanding a prison program to allow for release of some elderly, non-violent offenders.

"We need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, deter and rehabilitate — not merely to convict, warehouse and forget," Holder said.

In one important change, the attorney general said he's altering Justice Department policy so that low-level, non-violent drug offenders with no ties to large-scale organizations, gangs or cartels won't be charged with offenses that impose mandatory minimum sentences.

Mandatory minimum prison sentences, a product of the government's war on drugs that began in the 1980s, limit the discretion of judges to impose shorter prison sentences.

Under the changed policy, the attorney general said defendants will be charged with offenses for which accompanying sentences "are better suited to their individual conduct, rather than excessive prison terms more appropriate for violent criminals or drug kingpins."

how has this been allowed to go on for so long?

the hon.bro.preznit caricatures himself...,

has the gubmint lied about its snooping?

propublica | Since Edward Snowden leaked a trove of documents detailing the NSA's sweeping surveillance programs, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged that part of his congressional testimony in March was "erroneous." But that's not the only questionable comment by administration officials about the programs.

Here are six claims by administration officials about NSA surveillance that have been undermined by recent disclosures.

feature, benefit, what exactly?

dailymail | Apple is following Google's lead by adding a feature to its upcoming operating system that can track a user's every step.

German security firm Protecus has found a setting in the fifth beta release of Apple's iOS 7 software called Feature Locations that tracks a user's GPS coordinates over time and plots them on a map.

This news comes after code was discovered in Google's Android 4.3 software that lets devices scan for nearby networks, in order to determine a person's location, even when Wi-Fi is turned off.

The Apple feature is relatively hidden away on the iOS 7 software - due to be released in October - in Settings, Privacy, Location Services, System Services and Frequent Locations.

It is unclear whether the feature is turned on by default but according to the Protecus security expert: '[The feature] kept track of my complete movement profile (location and time tracking) without me knowing anything.'

9/11 in the academic community...,

911inacademia | Coming this fall, “9/11 in the Academic Community,” a Winner of the University of Toronto Film Festival, is a unique film that documents academia’s treatment of critical perspectives on 9/11 by exploring the taboo that shields the American government’s narrative from scholarly examination. Through a powerful reflection on intellectual courage and the purpose of academia, the film aims at changing intellectual discourse on 9/11 and the War on Terror.

As well as probing the repercussions several scholars have endured due to their investigation of 9/11, this documentary provides an analysis of impairments in professional inquiry, ranging from the failure to critically reflect on terms functioning as thought-stoppers (such as “conspiracy theory”) to the structural approach that restricts inquiry to the broad implications of 9/11 while shutting out enquiry into the events of the day itself. Morton Brussel, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has stated: “The main thesis of the film concerns the silence of the academic community on this vital issue. I think it is extremely important and very well produced.”

As 9/11 served as the rationale for the Global War on Terror, the expansion of the military and intelligence complex, the invasion of other countries in violation of international law, and the curtailing of civil liberties, the film provides an inspiring demonstration of intellectual courage that will cause many scholars to reflect on the academy’s role and strength to dismantle the war system. As Alvin A. Lee, President Emeritus of McMaster University, has stated in his endorsement of the film: academics should “stand sufficiently outside society intellectually to see, understand, and interpret what is going on.”

operation everyone talk like a terrorist all the time...,

does C=hf?

quiet as it's kept, 1% sprang a leak too...,

NYTimes | Hervé Falciani is a professed whistle-blower — the Edward Snowden of banking — who has been hunted by Swiss investigators, jailed by Spaniards and claims to have been kidnapped by Israeli Mossad agents eager for a glimpse of the client data he stole while working for a major financial institution in Geneva. 

“I am weak and alone,” Mr. Falciani said, as three round-the-clock bodyguards provided by the French government looked on with hard stares. The protection was needed, he insisted, because he faces constant risk as the sole key to decipher the encrypted data — five CD-ROMs containing a list of nearly 130,000 account holders that may be the biggest leak ever in the secretive world of Swiss banking. 

But as he settled into a deserted bistro for a two-hour lunch, Mr. Falciani, a former computer technician who has been on the run since 2008, seemed oddly relaxed for a fugitive. And why not? 

He is in high demand these days, having cast himself as a crusader against the murky world of Swiss banking and money laundering. Once dismissed by many European authorities, he and other whistle-blowers are now being courted as the region’s governments struggle to fill their coffers and to stem a populist uprising against tax evasion and corruption. 

“It’s an economic war,” said Mr. Falciani, an angular man of 41 with a dark goatee who sometimes dons disguises, though on a muggy summer afternoon favored an innocuous beige tie and short-sleeved dress shirt. “In Switzerland, the banks are so organized that they are able to circumvent new rules and laws to continue to enable tax evasion.” 

Critics, not least at his former employer HSBC, dismiss Mr. Falciani as a manipulator more dazzled by money than high ideals. The data he has leaked — some say sold — since 2008 has wreaked havoc within the banking world, as well as the moneyed and political classes of Europe. 

Mr. Falciani’s information formed the basis for the now famous “Lagarde list” that has roiled Greek politics with its revelations of oligarchs and politicians who avoided taxes by stashing millions in Switzerland.

His data is also credited with helping Spain collect 260 million euros ($345 million) in taxes and identify more than 650 tax evaders, including the president of Banco Santander.

 

In 2012, Mr. Falciani passed his information to American authorities. They, in turn, used the data to pursue an investigation into whether HSBC flouted controls on money laundering, eventually forcing a $1.92 billion settlement with the bank in December. 

More than a few rich and powerful people await his next move. Mr. Falciani asserts that only a small portion of the data has been decrypted and used.

nbc's pasty lester calls snowden "alleged american spy"

HuffPo | Esquire's Charles Pierce wrote Thursday that Lester Holt, filling in for Brian William as "NBC Nightly News" anchor, described former NSA contractor Edward Snowden the night before as an "alleged American spy."

While the Obama administration has invoked the Espionage Act in charging Snowden, part of a pattern in cracking down on unsanctioned leaks to the media, there's no evidence Snowden spied for any foreign country.

News organizations typically go with the more neutral "leaker" rather than "whistleblower," as many view Snowden. So did Holt really use "spy"?

Here's what Holt said at the beginning of Wednesday's 6:30 p.m. broadcast in New York, according to TVEyes, a service that allows for searching past TV broadcasts: (emphasis mine)

"While the cold war has been over for more than 20 years, the growing chill of late between Washington and Moscow became downright frosty today as President Obama called off his planned meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin, a response to Russia's grant of asylum to accused American spy Edward Snowden..."

But a clip of the broadcast on the NBC News website features Holt using a different description:

"While the cold war has been over for more than 20 years, the growing chill of late between Washington and Moscow became downright frosty today as President Obama called off his planned meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin, a response to Russia's grant of asylum to admitted NSA leaker Edward Snowden..."

It appears that NBC News tweaked the language for the West Coast broadcast, which would air three hours later. Holt describes Snowden as an "admitted NSA leaker" in the broadcast that aired in Los Angeles, according to a TVEyes search. 

Update: An NBC spokesperson confirmed the language was changed. The spokesperson added that while the original language is correct, based on the espionage charges against Snowden, the network "made an editorial decision to update the broadcast for the sake of clarity and consistency with past reporting." Fist tap Dale.

two providers of secure email shutdown rather than submit...,

NYTimes | Two major secure e-mail service providers on Thursday took the extraordinary step of shutting down service. 

A Texas-based company called Lavabit, which was reportedly used by Edward J. Snowden, announced its suspension Thursday afternoon, citing concerns about secret government court orders. 

By evening, Silent Circle, a Maryland-based firm that counts heads of state among its customers, said it was following Lavabit’s lead and shutting its e-mail service as a protective measure. 

Taken together, the closures signal that e-mails, even if they are encrypted, can be accessed by government authorities and that the only way to prevent turning over the data is to obliterate the servers that the data sits on.

Mike Janke, Silent Circle’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview late Thursday that his company had destroyed its server. “Gone. Can’t get it back. Nobody can,” he said. “We thought it was better to take flak from customers than be forced to turn it over.” 

The company, in a blog post dated Friday, Aug. 9, said it had taken the extreme measure even though it had not received a search order from the government. 

Ladar Levison, the owner of Lavabit, suggested — though did not say explicitly — that he had received a search order, and was opting to shut the service so as not to be “complicit in crimes against the American people.”

a free man is a dangerous man at the end of the constitutional era...,

reuters | "What bothers me is the hypocritical bit - we demonize China when we've been doing these things and probably worse."

Alexander took a conciliatory tone during his Black Hat speech, defending the NSA but saying he looked forward to a discussion about how it could do things better.

Black Hat attracts professionals whose companies pay thousands of dollars for them to attend. Def Con costs $180 and features many of the same speakers.

At Black Hat, a casual polling station at a vendor's exhibition booth asking whether Snowden was a villain or a hero produced a dead heat: 138 to 138. European attendees were especially prone to vote for hero, the vendor said.

Def Con would have been much rougher on Alexander, judging by interviews there and the reception given speakers who touched on Snowden and other government topics.

Christopher Soghoian, an American Civil Liberties Union technologist, drew applause from hundreds of attendees when he said the ACLU had been the first to sue the NSA after one of the spy programs was revealed.

Peiter Zatko, a hacker hero who funded many small projects from a just-departed post at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, told another large audience that he was unhappy with the surveillance programs and that "challenging the government is your patriotic duty."

The disenchanted give multiple reasons, citing previous misleading statements about domestic surveillance, the government's efforts to force companies to decrypt user communications, and the harm to U.S. businesses overseas.

"I don't think anyone should believe anything they tell us," former NSA hacker Charlie Miller said of top intelligence officials. "I wouldn't work there anymore."

Stamos and Moss said the U.S. government is tilting too much toward offense in cyberspace, using secret vulnerabilities that their targets can then discover and wield against others.

Closest to home for many hackers are the government's aggressive prosecutions under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which has been used against Internet activist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in January, and U.S. soldier Bradley Manning, who leaked classified files to anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.

A letter circulating at Def Con and signed by some of the most prominent academics in computer security said the law was chilling research in the public interest by allowing prosecutors and victim companies to argue that violations of electronic "terms of service" constitute unauthorized intrusions.

Researchers who have found important flaws in electronic voting machines and medical devices did so without authorization, the letter says.

If there is any silver lining, Moss said, it is that before Snowden's leaks, it had been impossible to have an informed discussion about how to balance security and civil liberties without real knowledge of government practices. Fist tap Arnach.

"The debate is just starting," he said. "Maybe we can be a template for other democracies."