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Documents are largely from what is referenced by interesting films, Prison Planet/Infowars and the Corbett Report. This database is a quick reference and for your analysis, more independent from others' interpretations. The database includes almost all source documents and articles from these films: Loose Change (Final Cut & 2nd Edition), Fabled Enemies, The Obama Deception, End Game, Martial Law 9/11, American Dictators, Matrix of Evil, Zeitgeist: Addendum, Who Killed The Electric Car?, The World According To Monsanto, Mind The Gap, and 7/7 Ripple Effect.
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What is Julian Assange Up To? Aaron Bady won the internet last week with his explication of a pair of essays Julian Assange wrote in 2006. Paddling against a vomit-tide of epithets and empty speculations that threatened to bury Assange under a flood of banalities, Bady proposed and executed a fairly shocking procedure: he sat down and read ten pages of what Assange had actually written about the motivations and strategy behind Wikileaks.
The central insight of Bady’s analysis was the recognition that Assange’s strategy stands at significant remove from a philosophy it might easily be confused for: the blend of technological triumphalism and anarcho-libertarian utopianism that takes “information wants to be free” as its gospel and Silicon Valley as its spiritual homeland. Noting the “certain vicious amorality about the Mark Zuckerberg-ian philosophy that all transparency is always and everywhere a good thing,” Bady argued that Assange's philosophy is crucially different:
The question for an ethical human being -- and Assange always emphasizes his ethics -- has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets.
As Assange told Time: “It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it's our goal to achieve a more just society.” (3 Quarks Daily)
Save Obama's presidency by challenging him on the left People who used to say, "Give President Obama more time" when the president was criticized for capitulating to the right, or who argued that Obama must have a plan to turn things around, are now largely depressed and angry. To many liberals and progressives, the president's unwillingness to veto any measure that includes continued tax relief for billionaires is the last straw, building on a record of spinelessness that includes his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, abandonment of a public option for health-care reform, refusal to prosecute those who tortured in Iraq or lied us into that war, and unwillingness to tax carbon emissions.
With his base deeply disillusioned, many progressives are starting to believe that Obama has little chance of winning reelection unless he enthusiastically embraces a populist agenda and worldview
soon. Yet there is little chance that will happen without a massive public revolt by his constituency that goes beyond rallies, snide remarks from television personalities or indignant op-eds.
Those of us who worry that a full-scale Republican return to power in 2012 would be a disaster not just for those hurting from the Republican-policy-inspired economic meltdown but also for the environment, social justice and world peace believe it is critical to get Obama to become the candidate whom most Americans believed they elected in 2008. Despite the outcome of last month's election, it is unlikely that the level of his base's alienation will register with the president until late in the 2012 election cycle
far too late for society today and our future tomorrow. (Washington Post)
FCC Adopts Its Fighting Stance: Net Neutrality Is the Future We've been waiting for this, given many teasing leaks this week, but now it's here: The FCC, via its chairman Julius Genachowsky, has officially staked its claim on the future of the Webs. Net Neutrality all the way.
Genachowski made a speech concerning the matter, and it's a lengthy high-minded affair. We've boiled it down to its simplest essence to make the word cloud up there (more on this later) but Genachowski also thoughtfully released a blog posting clarifying the FCC's position. In it he simplifies the arguments about Net Neutrality down to three key points:
1. "Americans have the freedom to access lawful content on the Internet, without discrimination." Meaning "no one should be able to tell you what you can or can't do" from a company right up to government level, as long as what you're doing is legal.
2. "You have a right to basic information about your broadband service." The FCC shows by this that it's going to get strict with ISPs about making it clear to consumers exactly what they're paying for, which makes it easier to choose between competitors.
3. "The Internet will remain a level playing field." People must be able to exercise free speech, shop, sell products or services and innovate "without permission from a corporation" or a corporate gatekeeper "prioritizing access to one person's content over another."
That's pretty damn straightforward. Say what you will about who has a right to make decisions like this, and listen if you will to the arguments of ISPs that say traffic-shaping is an absolute must if the Net is to continue to grow, placing a strain on their resources: Genachowski has simplified the debate right down to its core principles here. (Fast Company)
Senate Passes Sweeping Food-Safety Bill After stalling for more than a year, a sweeping food-safety bill passed with bipartisan support in the Senate on Tuesday, paving the way for increased federal inspections and other preventative measures. The vote was 73 to 25.
Though the bill has yet to be reconciled with a previous version passed by the House in July 2009, there has been some indication that the House will adopt the Senate's bill, a senior Democratic aide tells HuffPost.
The Food Safety Modernization Act would strengthen the power of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which oversees 80 percent of the nation's food supply, vastly improving its ability to ensure safety.
The law will focus on the areas of food-borne illness prevention, detection and response. It will also protect American consumers from unsafe food made overseas by subjecting imported foods to the same standards as food produced in the United States.
The bill is thought to be the most significant overhaul of the food-safety system in decades, and, as noted by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) on the Senate floor on Monday, it has attracted uncommonly broad support.
"I realize that the bipartisan road is not always easy to follow, but I can confidently say when we approach legislation in this manner, we often end up with a better, stronger and more responsive law in the end," said Dodd. "I think this bill is an example of just that."
The $1.4 billion measure has the backing of Congressional Democrats and has been touted by the likes of environmental activist Michael Pollan, who, in a New York Times op-ed on Sunday, called the measure "the best opportunity in a generation to improve the safety of the American food supply." (Huffington Post)
United States of America v. $333,520.00 in United States Currency et al Plaintiff: United States of America
Defendants: $333,520.00 in US Currency and Saturn Aura XE 2007, VIN 1G8ZS57N97F136757
Case Number: 4:2010cv00703
Filed: November 30, 2010
Court: Arizona District Court
Office: Tucson Division Office
County: Santa Cruz
Presiding Judge: A Wallace Tashima
Nature of Suit: Forfeiture / Penalty
Other
Cause: Bulk cash smuggling into or out of the United States
Jurisdiction: U.S. Government Plaintiff
Jury Demanded By: None (Justia.com)
Re-Post: Wikileaks, Legitimate Whistleblowers or CointelPro? *I have received multiples tips from our sources that indicate Wikileaks is part of a massive government operation. Rather than posting an article with quotes from sources that must remain unnamed, I have decided to let what we know about Wikileaks speak for itself.*
Wikileaks and their founder, Julian Assange have been the focus of intense media scrutiny for what has been dubbed the “New Pentagon Papers.” With all the attention focused on how they received the information and what it means, most media outlets have overlooked some very important questions. Who is Julian Assange and how has Wikileaks managed to out run both the CIA and NSA? Why has the world elite stood by and let a group fronted by a former hacker release information that is perceived to damage them? Is it possible that Wikileaks has been set up as a shill group, used to spread misinformation on a massive scale?
From its inception, Wikileaks has been hailed as a mysterious entity, capable of exposing government corruption on every level. Even more mysterious, Wikileaks founder and public face, Julian Assange, has been able to out maneuver multiple federal agency’s on his supposed quest for truth. Alternative news outlets across the globe have applauded Wikileaks for its exposure of our disastrous military policies and there implications for the people of Afghanistan. Basically,Wikileaks has been given a free pass within the “truther” community. In our info battle against this so called “New World Order,”[Old World Order] we tend to overlook the shady tendencies of the people and groups we perceive to be allies. Clearly this is the case with Julian Assange and his supposed release of classified material. Could Wikileaks be a well place group of Cointelpro Agents, started not only to take the spotlight off other, more legitimate whistleblowers, but to be used as a pawn in order to demonize all whistleblowers as potential threats to national security? (The Intel Hub)
China, Russia quit dollar China and Russia have decided to renounce the US dollar and resort to using their own currencies for bilateral trade, Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin announced late on Tuesday.
Chinese experts said the move reflected closer relations between Beijing and Moscow and is not aimed at challenging the dollar, but to protect their domestic economies.
"About trade settlement, we have decided to use our own currencies," Putin said at a joint news conference with Wen in St. Petersburg.
The two countries were accustomed to using other currencies, especially the dollar, for bilateral trade. Since the financial crisis, however, high-ranking officials on both sides began to explore other possibilities. (China Daily)
Corporate Profits Hit New Record, U.S. Workers Still Struggling Happy days are back! During the summer months, corporations logged their biggest profits since the government started counting way back in the age of Elvis, and the economy expanded at a slightly faster pace than previously thought. Surely, when Caterpillar and Morgan Stanley are swimming in lucre, life must be getting more wonderful for everyone.
Alas, no. Word that American businesses sucked in profits at an annualized pace of $1.66 trillion between July and September is certainly better than the alternative. Ditto, the wholly expected news that the economy grew faster than an initially reported 2 percent annual rate, reaching a still modest 2.5 percent. But none of this has translated into the sort of job growth that will be required to cut into an unemployment rate stuck at 9.6 percent. Worse, there is little reason to suspect it will anytime soon.
We have been hearing for so long now that, once companies start making real money, they will feel the urge to expand. Then, they will hire lots of people, and we can stop worrying and resume shopping. Yet so far--this most recent quarter included--all we have gotten is an extended lesson in the modern workings of a stubbornly lean job market and a display of what now stands as American management's core competency: How to rack up profits and reward shareholders while keeping the cubicles empty. (Huffington Post)
LPA Cambridge 2010 (Part 1 of 3) Charlie Veitch talks to a policeman
Time Reference: 24:21
Description: From The Love Police Academy in Cambridge earlier this year. (Love Police)
My TSA Encounter: "You don’t need to see his identification." On November 21, 2010, I was allowed to enter the U.S. through an airport security checkpoint without being x-rayed or touched by a TSA officer. This post explains how.
Edit: For the sake of brevity, most of the quotes below are paraphrases. I have uploaded the actual audio and it is available here.
This past Sunday, I was returning from a trip to Europe. I flew from Paris to Cincinnati, landing in Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.
As I got off my flight, I did all of the things that are normally requested from U.S. citizens returning from abroad. I filled out the customs declarations, confirmed that I hadn’t set foot on any farmland, and answered questions about the chocolates that I had purchased in Switzerland. While I don’t believe that these questions are necessary, I don’t mind answering them if it means some added security. They aren’t particularly intrusive. My passport was stamped, and I moved through customs a happy citizen returning home. (No Blasters!)
IPCC Official: "Climate Policy Is Redistributing The World's Wealth" Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world's resources will be negotiated.
Interview: Bernard Potter
NZZ am Sonntag: Mr. Edenhofer, everybody concerned with climate protection demands emissions reductions. You now speak of "dangerous emissions reduction." What do you mean?
Ottmar Edenhofer: So far economic growth has gone hand in hand with the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. One percent growth means one percent more emissions. The historic memory of mankind remembers: In order to get rich one has to burn coal, oil or gas. And therefore, the emerging economies fear CO2 emission limits.
But everybody should take part in climate protection, otherwise it does not work.
That is so easy to say. But particularly the industrialized countries have a system that relies almost exclusively on fossil fuels. There is no historical precedent and no region in the world that has decoupled its economic growth from emissions. Thus, you cannot expect that India or China will regard CO2 emissions reduction as a great idea. And it gets worse: We are in the midst of a renaissance of coal, because oil and gas (sic) have become more expensive, but coal has not. The emerging markets are building their cities and power plants for the next 70 years, as if there would be permanently no high CO 2 price.
The new thing about your proposal for a Global Deal is the stress on the importance of development policy for climate policy. Until now, many think of aid when they hear development policies.
That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.
That does not sound anymore like the climate policy that we know.
Ottmar Edenhofer was appointed as joint chair of Working Group 3 at the Twenty-Ninth Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The deputy director and chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Professor of the Economics of Climate Change at the Berlin Institute of Technology will be co-chairing the Working Group “Mitigation of Climate Change” with Ramón Pichs Madruga from Cuba and Youba Sokona from Mali. (Global Warming Policy Foundation)
'Space-time cloak' could conceal events Scientists compare bending light around an event to enabling a pedestrian to cross a road without interrupting the traffic flow.
New materials with the ability to manipulate the speed of light could enable the creation of a "space-time cloak" capable of masking events or even creating an illusion of "Star Trek"-style transportation, according to scientists in London.
The cloak, while currently only existing in mathematical theory, takes advantage of the potential properties of "metamaterials" -- artificial materials designed and manipulated at a molecular level to interact with and control electromagnetic waves.
Scientists have previously demonstrated that one possible use of metamaterials could be to render objects invisible by bending light around them. But Professor Martin McCall of Imperial College London says he has now extended the concept of invisibility to a cloak also capable of hiding events both in time and space.
"In some senses our work is mathematically quite closely related to the idea of invisibility cloaking," McCall told CNN. "It's just that we're doing it in space and time instead of just in space. It's added a new dimension to cloaking, quite literally." (CNN)
TSA: Despite objections, all passengers must be screened In response to a video of a California man's dispute with airport security officials, the Transportation Security Administration said Monday it tries to be sensitive to individuals, but everyone getting on a flight must be screened.
The video, in which software engineer John Tyner refuses an X-ray scan at the San Diego, California, airport, has sparked a debate over screening procedures.
Tyner told CNN on Sunday that he was surprised to see so many people take an interest in his refusal and the dispute with airport screeners that followed it. But he said he hoped the video will focus attention on what he calls a government invasion of privacy.
"Obviously, everybody has their own perspective about their personal screening," TSA administrator John Pistole told CNN. "The question is, how do we best address those issues ... while providing the best possible security?" (CNN)
Airport body-scan radiation under scrutiny They're arriving at airports across the country. Some complain they are invasive and an assault on our privacy. But are body scanners at security checkpoints dangerous?
Some scientists and two major airline pilots unions contend not enough is known about the effects of the small doses of X-ray radiation emitted by one of the two types of airport scanning machines.
The Transportation Security Administration's advanced imaging technology machines use two separate means of creating images of passengers -- backscatter X-ray technology and millimeter-wave technology.
At the end of October, 189 backscatter units and 152 millimeter-wave machines were in use in more than 65 airports. The total number of imaging machines is expected to near 1,000 by the end of 2011, according to the TSA.
While the TSA says the machines are safe, backscatter technology raises concerns among some because it uses small doses of ionizing radiation. The use of millimeter-wave technology hasn't received the same attention, and radiation experts say it poses no known health risks. (CNN)
Senate Judiciary Slates Piracy Bill Markup: Markup on S. 3804 scheduled Nov. 18 The Senate Judiciary Committee could vote an online piracy bill out of committee next week.
The committee has scheduled a markup Nov. 18 on S. 3804, Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, which is sponsored by Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) among many others, including Republicans like Orrin Hatch of Utah and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.
It is possible the committee could get caught up in a number of nomination also scheduled for a vote at the meeting, but online protection is an important subject for the chairman. A separate piracy bill, S. 3728, the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Protection Act, is also scheduled for mark-up.
The bill would give the Justice Department more power to shut down Web sites that illegally stream or sell TV shows and movies. (Broadcasting & Cable)
Child Abuse Rate At Zero Percent In Lesbian Households, New Report Finds
The Williams Institute, a research center on sexual orientation law and public policy at UCLA School of Law, has announced new findings from the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS), the longest-running study ever conducted on American lesbian families (now in its 24th year). In an article published today in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, the 17-year-old daughters and sons of lesbian mothers were asked about sexual abuse, sexual orientation, and sexual behavior.
The paper found that none of the 78 NLLFS adolescents reports having ever been physically or sexually abused by a parent or other caregiver. This contrasts with 26 percent of American adolescents who report parent or caregiver physical abuse and 8.3 percent who report sexual abuse. (The Stranger)
Obama Visits a Nation That Knew Him as Barry The two houses where he spent part of his boyhood stand pretty much the way they did when he went back to Hawaii four decades ago. The two schools he attended have grown larger but, in spirit, remain unchanged. Some of his old friends can still be found around the neighborhood.
Near one of his homes here, the same family still runs a wooden stall selling gado-gado, an Indonesian salad covered in peanut sauce. Agus Salam, who took over the business from his mother years ago, played soccer with the American boy everybody here called Barry.
“His house — all the houses around here — haven’t changed,” said Mr. Salam, 56.
When President Obama visits Jakarta on Tuesday, he will find a city that, in some ways, has changed beyond recognition. A city of one luxury hotel and one shopping mall when Mr. Obama lived here between 1967 and 1971, Jakarta is now the overextended and overcrowded capital of the world’s fourth most populous nation. But Jakarta’s neighborhoods, including the two where Mr. Obama lived, retain enough of their former selves that the president would quickly find his bearings. (New York Times)
On the frontline of cyber warfare In the future, warfare may shift from a battlefield to a keyboard.
Superpowers might deem a nuclear exchange too destructive, but already they are developing Weapons of Mass Disruption; software viruses that are designed to cripple the operating systems of power stations, dams, traffic lights and public transport.
This is the stark warning from Datuk Mohammed Noor Amin Chairman of the International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats (IMPACT).
"It's not just superpowers, even medium-powers are increasingly equipping themselves with the skills to do harm. The only issue is whether it is going to be used or not," said Amin.
If you think of computer viruses in equivalent terms to pathological viruses in the real world, then IMPACT is akin to the Center for Disease Control.
It's not just superpowers, even medium-powers are increasingly equipping themselves with the skills to do harm. (CNN)
The Citizens United Effect: 40 percent of outside money made possible by Supreme Court ruling In 2002 former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once flippantly described connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda terrorists by saying, "There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns; there are things we do not know we don’t know." Little did Rumsfeld know that his remark would be the most accurate description for a murky midterm election eight years down the road.
The 2010 midterm election is filled with both "known unknowns," outside groups raised and spent $126 million on elections without disclosing the source, and "unknown unknowns," we don't know what those undisclosed donors want. We do know one thing: the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling allowed this election to be the costliest and least transparent midterm in recent history.
The impact of Citizens United can be judged by simply following the money. The $126 million in undisclosed money represents more than a quarter of the total $450 million spent by outside groups. Add the $60 million spent by groups that were allowed to raise unlimited money, but still had to disclose, to the undisclosed money and the total amount of outside money made possible by the Citizens United ruling reaches $186 million or 40 percent of the total spent by outside groups. (Sunlight Foundation)
Yemen Brings Terror Charges Against US-Born Radical Cleric Al-Awlaki Yemen, under intense U.S. pressure to crack down on al-Qaida, put an American-born radical cleric on trial in absentia Tuesday on charges of plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of the terrorist group.
It was Yemen's first formal legal action against Anwar al-Awlaki and the court brought the same charges against two other men.
Yemen has come under heavy U.S. pressure to crack down on al-Qaida militants following the interception of two mail bombs in Dubai and Britain last week. The U.S. suspects Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, an offshoot of Osama bin Laden's network, was behind the plot.
Al-Awlaki, 39, was born in New Mexico and is based in Yemen. U.S. investigators say e-mails link him to the Army psychiatrist accused of last year's shooting spree at the Fort Hood, Texas military base that killed 13 people. They also allege he helped prepare Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab for the attempt to bomb an airliner over Detroit last Christmas and they link him to the failed bombing in New York City's Times Square in May. (FOX)
The Digital Disruption: Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power Increased connectivity allows for the spread of liberal, open values but also poses a number of dangers. To foster the free flow of information and challenge authoritarian regimes, democratic states will have to learn to create alliances with people and companies at the forefront of the information revolution.
ERIC SCHMIDT is Chair and CEO of Google. He is a Member of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology and Chair of the New America Foundation. JARED COHEN is Director of Google Ideas. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Children of Jihad and One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide.
The advent and power of connection technologies -- tools that connect people to vast amounts of information and to one another -- will make the twenty-first century all about surprises. Governments will be caught off-guard when large numbers of their citizens, armed with virtually nothing but cell phones, take part in mini-rebellions that challenge their authority. For the media, reporting will increasingly become a collaborative enterprise between traditional news organizations and the quickly growing number of citizen journalists. And technology companies will find themselves outsmarted by their competition and surprised by consumers who have little loyalty and no patience.
Today, more than 50 percent of the world's population has access to some combination of cell phones (five billion users) and the Internet (two billion). These people communicate within and across borders, forming virtual communities that empower citizens at the expense of governments. New intermediaries make it possible to develop and distribute content across old boundaries, lowering barriers to entry. Whereas the traditional press is called the fourth estate, this space might be called the "interconnected estate" -- a place where any person with access to the Internet, regardless of living standard or nationality, is given a voice and the power to effect change. (Foreign Affairs)
High alert in U.S. after suspicious package found in UK Two packages found abroad that were bound for Jewish organizations in the United States contained a massive amount of explosive material that would have triggered a powerful blast, a source close to the investigation has told CNN.
U.S. officials believe that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, commonly referred to as AQAP, is behind the plot.
President Barack Obama confirmed that the packages -- intercepted in the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates -- originated in Yemen, the stronghold of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. (CNN)
Mandelson's dept mulls UK internet power grab -- Dark Lord to Nominet: Justify thyself Ministers led by Peter Mandelson are considering a power grab at the independent company at the centre of UK's internet infrastructure, The Register can reveal.
Mandelson's Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) has asked Nominet, which is in charge of the .co.uk registry, to justify its independence from Whitehall.
In a letter dated October 15, senior civil servant David Hendon, BERR's Director of Business Relations, asked Nominet chairman Bob Gilbert: "What arguments would you employ to convince my Ministers that the present relationship between government and the company is appropriate in ensuring that public policy objectives in relation to the management of the domain name system and the standing of the UK in the internet community are understood and taken into account?" (The Register)
End the War on Pot I dropped in on a marijuana shop here that proudly boasted that it sells “31 flavors.” It also offered a loyalty program. For every 10 purchases of pot — supposedly for medical uses — you get one free packet.
“There are five of these shops within a three-block radius,” explained the proprietor, Edward J. Kim. He brimmed with pride at his inventory and sounded like any small businessman as he complained about onerous government regulation. Like, well, state and federal laws.
But those burdensome regulations are already evaporating in California, where anyone who can fake a headache already can buy pot. Now there’s a significant chance that on Tuesday, California voters will choose to go further and broadly legalize marijuana.
I hope so. Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has failed as abysmally as Prohibition did, and California may now be pioneering a saner approach. Sure, there are risks if California legalizes pot. But our present drug policy has three catastrophic consequences. (New York Times)
The Chamber of Commerce's Agenda: Killing Net Neutrality and Censoring the Internet The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's attempt to throw next week's elections is cause for widespread alarm -- their agenda includes privatizing social security, undoing worker and consumer rights, blocking environmental protections, keeping banking regulations loose, and stymieing important health care reforms.
You can help Demand Progress fight back by signing on to our campaign that calls on local chambers of commerce to disaffiliate from the U.S. Chamber. The movement's already begun, with one New Hampshire chapter breaking off, and several others publicly distancing themselves from the national's shenanigans.
2. The Chamber supports the Internet Blacklist bill that we told you about last month -- the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). COICA vastly expands the government's ability to block access to certain websites -- in ways that run roughshod over due process rights and violate the First Amendment. (Huffington Post)
Air Force manual describes shadowy cyberwar world A new Air Force manual for cyberwarfare describes a shadowy, fast-changing world where anonymous enemies can carry out devastating attacks in seconds and where conventional ideas about time and space don't apply.
Responsibility for civilian and government cybersecurity is less clear. Congress is debating between giving more power to the Homeland Security Department or the White House and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Homeland Security and the National Security Agency announced this month they would cooperate to strengthen the nation's cybersecurity.
Much of the 62-page manual is a dry compendium of definitions, acronyms and explanations of who reports to whom. But it occasionally veers into scenarios that sound more like computer games than flesh-and-blood warfare.
Enemies can cloak their identities and hide their attacks amid the cascade of data flowing across international computer networks, it warns. (Washington Post)
Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues -- Why can't we have a civil conversation about climate? In trying to understand the Judith Curry phenomenon, it is tempting to default to one of two comfortable and familiar story lines.
For most of her career, Curry, who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been known for her work on hurricanes, Arctic ice dynamics and other climate-related topics. But over the past year or so she has become better known for something that annoys, even infuriates, many of her scientific colleagues. Curry has been engaging actively with the climate change skeptic community, largely by participating on outsider blogs such as Climate Audit, the Air Vent and the Blackboard. Along the way, she has come to question how climatologists react to those who question the science, no matter how well established it is. Although many of the skeptics recycle critiques that have long since been disproved, others, she believes, bring up valid points—and by lumping the good with the bad, climate researchers not only miss out on a chance to improve their science, they come across to the public as haughty. “Yes, there’s a lot of crankology out there,” Curry says. “But not all of it is. If only 1 percent of it or 10 percent of what the skeptics say is right, that is time well spent because we have just been too encumbered by groupthink.”
She reserves her harshest criticism for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For most climate scientists the major reports issued by the United Nations–sponsored body every five years or so constitute the consensus on climate science. Few scientists would claim the IPCC is perfect, but Curry thinks it needs thoroughgoing reform. She accuses it of “corruption.” “I’m not going to just spout off and endorse the IPCC,” she says, “because I think I don’t have confidence in the process.”
The uncertainty lies in both the data about past climate and the models that project future climate. Curry asserts that scientists haven’t adequately dealt with the uncertainty in their calculations and don’t even know with precision what’s arguably the most basic number in the field: the climate forcing from CO2—that is, the amount of warming a doubling of CO2 alone would cause without any amplifying or mitigating effects from melting ice, increased water vapor or any of a dozen other factors.
Things get worse, she argues, when you try to add in those feedbacks to project likely temperature increases over the next century, because the feedbacks are rife with uncertainty as well: “There’s a whole host of unknown unknowns that we don’t even know how to quantify but that should be factored into our confidence level.” One example she cites is the “hockey stick” chart showing that current temperatures are the warmest in hundreds of years. If you are going to say that this year or that decade is the hottest, you had better have a good idea of what temperatures have actually been over those hundreds of years—and Curry, along with many skeptics, does not think we have as good a handle on that as the scientific community believes. (Scientific American)
Heresy and the creation of monsters I’m having another “Alice down the rabbit hole” moment, in response to the Scientific American article, the explication of the article by its author Michael Lemonick, Scientific American’s survey on whether I am a dupe or a peacemaker, and the numerous discussions in blogosphere. My first such moment was in 2005 in response to the media attention associated with the hurricane wars, which was described in a Q&A with Keith Kloor at collide-a-scape. While I really want to make this blog about the science and not about personalities (and especially not about me), this article deserves a response.
The title of the article itself is rather astonishing. The Wikipedia defines heresy as: “Heresy is a controversial or novel change to a system of beliefs, especially a religion, that conflicts with established dogma.” The definition of dogma is “Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization: it is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from.” Use of the word “heretic” by Lemonick implies general acceptance by the “insiders” of the IPCC as dogma. If the IPCC is dogma, then count me in as a heretic. The story should not be about me, but about how and why the IPCC became dogma.
What happened? Did the skeptics and the oil companies and the libertarian think tanks win? No, you lost. All in the name of supporting policies that I don’t think many of you fully understand. What I want is for the climate science community to shift gears and get back to doing science, and return to an environment where debate over the science is the spice of academic life. And because of the high relevance of our field, we need to figure out how to provide the best possible scientific information and assessment of uncertainties. This means abandoning this religious adherence to consensus dogma. (Judith Curry)
What the Feds Can Do About Prop 19: The attorney general will have a tough decision to make if California legalizes marijuana. Assume for a moment that California voters approve Proposition 19 on Nov. 2. The state will have just enacted a process for legalizing, regulating, and taxing marijuana use that no one else in the world has ever attempted. But Attorney General Eric Holder, President Obama’s top law-enforcement officer, has said the administration will “vigorously enforce” federal drug laws in the country’s most populous state regardless of the vote. For all the trails that approving Prop 19 would blaze, much of its impact would depend on the extent to which Holder follows through on that threat.
The attorney general has shown some willingness to scale back on marijuana enforcement; his Justice Department ended Bush-era crackdowns on medical pot dispensaries in California. Of course, the post–Prop 19 world would be different. California cities could license businesses that grow and sell marijuana on a large scale. Drug dealers in other states would surely head to California’s “coffee shops” (as weed retailers are called in Amsterdam), buy some California-grown product, and illegally transport it back home. It’s arguable that pot smokers and presumably some dealers can do that today, but they at least need a doctor’s permission and a state-issued ID card, which provides cover for authorities, however easily those cards may be obtainable. With that cover removed, Holder, whose department includes the Drug Enforcement Administration, could hardly ignore such a blatant violation of federal drug law. (Newsweek)
Why I Wrote About Judith Curry In trying to fulfill our mission to explain climate science to the public, Climate Central creates nonpartisan, nonadvocacy multimedia content for our own website and for outside media partners. When we do the latter, we normally just flag the publication or broadcast so our followers know about it.
In the just-published November issue of Scientific American, however, we’ve published a story that calls for a bit more explanation. It’s a profile of Judith Curry, the Georgia Tech researcher who’s been stirring up powerful feelings in the climate-science community by questioning the integrity of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of individual scientists, and by befriending outsiders who are even more critical than she is. Some people see Curry as a whistleblower; others (including many climate scientists) think she’s a bit of a crank. (Climate Central)
Coast Guard checks on discolored water near La. The Coast Guard said Saturday that an area of discolored water near a Mississippi River pass south of New Orleans appears to be an algae bloom, but another spot 10 miles away could be oil.
Jeff Hall, spokesman for the Unified Area Command, said tests could determine if the suspected oil is from the BP spill.
The Coast Guard sent two flights over the West Bay area near Venice on Saturday. Two boats also went out to check the waters. (Associated Press)
Cyber Attack Strikes FreedomWorks A mysterious cyber attack apparently struck the computer servers at the pro-tea party group FreedomWorks this morning, just as it launched a major fund-raising drive.
FreedomWorks officials are investigating, but they suspect they were attacked deliberately, perhaps by a political opponent seeking the thwart its fund-raising efforts.
The attack crippled the site at about 9:45 a.m. just when the fund-raising drive was publicized on the radio by conservative talk show host Glenn Beck. The group estimates it lost about $80,000 in potential donations as it struggled to bring its site back online.
An “autopsy” showed a highly sophisticated hacker struck at 6:55 a.m., the group said, setting the stage for the eventual meltdown. The server was wiped out, though group officials said no data was lost or stolen. (Wall Street Journal)
Lindsey Williams reveals new bombshell information on the Alex Jones Show today. Williams, who has been an ordained Baptist minister for nearly 30 years, went to Alaska in 1971 as a missionary and because of the executive status accorded to him as Chaplain, he was given access to the information that is documented in his book, The Energy Non-Crisis. In 2009, Williams told Alex Jones about the plan by the global elite to sabotage the dollar, destroy the economy and America by 2012. (Prison Planet)
EXCLUSIVE: Al Qaeda Leader Dined at the Pentagon Just Months After 9/11 Anwar Al-Awlaki may be the first American on the CIA's kill or capture list, but he was also a lunch guest of military brass at the Pentagon within months of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Fox News has learned.
Documents exclusively obtained by Fox News, including an FBI interview conducted after the Fort Hood shooting in November 2009, state that Awlaki was taken to the Pentagon as part of the military’s outreach to the Muslim community in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
The incident was flagged by a current Defense Department employee who came forward and told investigators she helped arrange the meeting after she saw Awlaki speak in Alexandria, Va.
The employee "attended this talk and while she arrived late she recalls being impressed by this imam. He condemned Al Qaeda and the terrorist attacks. During his talk he was 'harassed' by members of the audience and suffered it well," reads one document.
According to the documents, obtained as part of an ongoing investigation by the specials unit "Fox News Reporting," there was a push within the Defense Department to reach out to the Muslim community. (FOX)
Pentagon Will Help Homeland Security Department Fight Domestic Cyberattacks The Obama administration has adopted new procedures for using the Defense Department’s vast array of cyberwarfare capabilities in case of an attack on vital computer networks inside the United States, delicately navigating historic rules that restrict military action on American soil.
The system would mirror that used when the military is called on in natural disasters like hurricanes or wildfires. A presidential order dispatches the military forces, working under the control of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Under the new rules, the president would approve the use of the military’s expertise in computer-network warfare, and the Department of Homeland Security would direct the work. (New York Times)
Former surgeon general calls for marijuana legalization Former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders told CNN Sunday she supports legalizing marijuana.
The trend-setting state of California is voting next month on a ballot initiative to legalize pot, also known as Proposition 19. The measure would legalize recreational use in the state, though federal officials have said they would continue to enforce drug laws in California if the initiative is approved.
"What I think is horrible about all of this, is that we criminalize young people. And we use so many of our excellent resources ... for things that aren't really causing any problems," said Elders. "It's not a toxic substance." (CNN)
DHS scoured social media sites during Obama inauguration for 'items of interest': EFF has released documents that reveal a broad range of targets, including Facebook and Twitter, as well as NPR and DailyKos An electronic rights advocacy group is expressing concern over what it contends was an overly broad surveillance of social networking sites conducted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in the days leading up to the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently obtained documents pertaining to the DHS's monitoring of social networking sites through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.
The documents show that the DHS established a unit called the Social Network Monitoring Center (SNMC) last year to scour social sites for signs of potential security threats during the presidential inauguration. (Computer World)
Faulty Paperwork Prompts Deepening Foreclosure Problem Some lenders have put a temporary hold on foreclosures and state attorney generals have launched a joint investigation to sort out problems with questionable documents. Paul Solman gives details on the flawed paperwork as part of his ongoing series on making sense of financial news. (PBS)
Apple patents 'anti-sexting' technology Apple has patented technology that could be used by parents to prevent their kids from sending sexually explicit text messages -- or "sexting."
The technology, which has not been commercialized, would let a phone's administrator block an iPhone from sending or receiving texts with certain words.
Messages containing blocked material either would not be received or would have the objectionable content redacted. Unlike other text blockers, Apple's version would also be able to filter content based on a child's grade level and claims to filter abbreviated words that maybe missed by other programs. (CNN)
Campaign finance reform: R.I.P.? For four decades, advocates for stricter campaign finance rules have been on a long, slow march to make big money in politics less important and more transparent.
Now, in 2010, they are seeing the results: Never in modern political history has there been so much secret money gushing into an American election.
By Election Day, independent groups will have aired more than $200 million worth of campaign ads using cash that can’t be traced back to its original source, predicts Fred Wertheimer, president of the nonprofit group Democracy 21.
"And this is just the beginning," Wertheimer said. "Unless we get some changes here to mitigate this problem, I would expect we will see $500 million or more in 2012." (Politico)
Urban model for cybersecurity ed: San Diego A Slovakian antivirus company with its American headquarters in San Diego is trying to make good cybersecurity just as much a part of the local fabric as good beaches and Chargers football.
Eset launched the Securing Our eCity program with the San Diego Chamber of Commerce two years ago to offer free workshops to consumers and small businesses on how to stay safe online. Today it has become a model for similar initiatives being launched in Malaysia, Buenos Aires, and London. And it helped with the creation of the Stop Think Connect campaign launched last week as part of National Cyber Security Awareness month.
"San Diego is the first community to implement the messaging in a complete awareness campaign," with billboards, public service announcements, and radio and print ads, Darin Andersen, chief operating officer at Eset, told CNET in an interview this week. (CNET News)
Oregon county decriminalizes heroin, meth, cocaine and shoplifting, among others It's crunch-time for many municipalities across the United States, but for one county in Oregon, that means a little more than in most.
The district attorney in Multnomah County, the state's most populous area with over 710,000 residents, announced recently that it can no longer prosecute dozens of crimes thanks to an ever-shrinking budget.
Caught with small amounts of heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine? It's a ticket. So's a hit-and-run accident. Small-time shoplifting? You'll still get arrested, but it's still just a violation. (The Raw Story)
Why 'Mad Men' is TV's most feminist show Historians are notorious for savaging historical fiction. We're quick to complain that writers project modern values onto their characters, get the surroundings wrong, cover up the seamy side of an era or exaggerate its evils -- and usually, we're right. But AMC's hit show "Mad Men," which ends its fourth season next Sunday, is a stunning exception. Every historian I know loves the show; it is, quite simply, one of the most historically accurate television series ever produced. And despite the rampant chauvinism of virtually all its male characters (and some of its female ones), it is also one of the most sympathetic to women. (Washington Post)
Microsoft's PC Quarantine Plan A plan by Microsoft Security Chief Scott Charney would place infected or unsecured PCs in an Internet isolation ward. And block users from Internet access.
How might this work? Let's try this potential scenario.
Hello this is your ISP. We regret to inform you that your system has been quarantined and will not be allowed to access the Internet. We have detected that your system may be infected with malware and that you are not running the approved and certified security software to protect your system. Please remove the malware and update your security software (how you can do this without an Internet connection is your problem). Sorry about any important emails, business opportunities, emergency notices and VOIP-based phone calls that you are now missing. Have a nice day. (Information Week)
Microsoft: Keep internet healthy by isolating infected PCs Computers infected with malware should be disconnected from the internet to prevent them posing a risk to the rest of the online community, a top security executive at Microsoft has urged.
In a paper delivered to the ISSE 2010 computer security conference in Berlin on Wednesday, Scott Charney, Microsoft's vice president of Trustworthy Computing, proposed the move as part of a re-think of global IT cybersecurity along public-health lines. Quarantining infected PCs would help prevent malware from spreading and could help battle botnets, he said.
"If a device is known to be a danger to the internet, the user should be notified and the device should be cleaned before it is allowed unfettered access to the internet, minimising the risk of the infected device contaminating other devices," Charney said. (ZD Net)
What Should I Consider Suspicious?
- Efforts to surveil or “case” the shopping center (e.g., taking pictures, making videos, or drawing diagrams of the location).
- Extremist literature distributed at the mall or posted on public bulletin boards. (Department of Justice)
Google CEO: "We Know Where You Are. We Know Where You've Been. We Can More Or Less Know What You're Thinking About." Google CEO Eric Schmidt really has a knack for expressing relatively benign ideas in a way that makes him and his company look incredibly creepy.
The Atlantic has posted video of the full interview in which Eric talked about 'the creepy line', and it is chock full of unsettling sound bytes. In particular, he had the following to say on privacy: "With your permission, you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about." (Business Insider)
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