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2/10/2006
Employees get microchip implants Company requires controversial device for certain workers - A Cincinnati company is requiring any employee who works in its secure data center to be implanted with a microchip (World Net Daily)
Hidden history of US germ testing Biological pathogens they developed were tested on volunteers from a pacifist church and were also released in public places (BBC)
The White House memo Revealed: Bush and Blair discussed using American Spyplane in UN colours to lure Saddam into war - Channel 4 News tonight reveals extraordinary details of George Bush and Tony Blair's pre-war meeting in January 2003 at which they discussed plans to begin military action on March 10th 2003, irrespective of whether the United Nations had passed a new resolution authorising the use of force.
Channel 4 News has seen minutes from that meeting, which took place in the White House on 31 January 2003. The two leaders discussed the possibility of securing further UN support, but President Bush made it clear that he had already decided to go to war. The details are contained in a new version of the book 'Lawless World' written by a leading British human rights lawyer, Philippe Sands QC.
President Bush said that:
"The US would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would 'twist arms' and 'even threaten'. But he had to say that if ultimately we failed, military action would follow anyway.''
Prime Minister Blair responded that he was: "solidly with the President and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam." (Channel 4)
Postage Is Due for Companies Sending E-Mail Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.
America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.
The Internet companies say that this will help them identify legitimate mail and cut down on junk e-mail, identity-theft scams and other scourges that plague users of their services. They also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted. (New York Times)
Blair 'made secret US Iraq pact' Tony Blair and George W Bush decided to invade Iraq weeks earlier than they have admitted, a new book by a human rights lawyer has claimed (BBC)
U.S. Intel Chief Doubts Iran Has Nukes National Intelligence Director John Negroponte told Congress on Thursday that Iran probably does not yet have nuclear weapons, nor has it obtained the material central to producing them (Associated Press)
Cold Front: Hurricane Debate Shatters Civility Of Weather Science --
Worsened by Global Warming? Spats Are So Tempestuous, Sides Are Barely Talking
-- Charge of 'Brain Fossilization' The 2,000-plus scientists at this week's annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society had plenty to talk about, from last year's droughts to flash floods and wildfires. But the biggest question at the meeting in Atlanta -- why last hurricane season was the worst since recordkeeping began 151 years ago -- was almost too hot to handle.
William Gray, America's most prominent hurricane scientist and an ardent foe of the belief that global warming has worsened hurricanes, was supposed to join a panel discussing the storms. So was Greg Holland of the National Center on Atmospheric Research -- who disagrees with Dr. Gray. But the organizers withdrew the invitations after deciding the dispute had grown so nasty it was too risky to put the two in the same room.
"It was looking like it would totally dominate everything else," says Joe Schaefer, a planner and the director of the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center. (Wall Street Journal)
The White House Meeting That Took Us To War New revelations about discussions between Tony Blair and George Bush in 2003 show that concerns about the second UN resolution were a mere obstacle for the PM to steer around (London Guardian)
The End of the Internet? The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.
Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.
Under the plans they are considering, all of us--from content providers to individual users--would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received. (The Nation)
Iran already has the bomb Rafi Eitan suspects that Iran already has enough enriched uranium fissionable material to manufacture at least one or two atom bombs of the Hiroshima type (Jerusalem Post)
Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming (New York Times)
US plans to 'fight the net' revealed: A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks. - Bloggers beware.
As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.
From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.
The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.
Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.
The "roadmap" calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military's ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare. - "Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.
"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on. (BBC)
KBR awarded Homeland Security contract worth up to $385M KBR, the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton Co., said Tuesday it has been awarded a contingency contract from the Department of Homeland Security to supports its Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in the event of an emergency (Wall Street Journal)
Last year was warmest in a century, study concludes Researchers calculated that 2005 produced the highest annual average surface temperature worldwide since instrument recordings began in the late 1800s, said James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (USA Today)
White House Received Dire Warnings Pre-Katrina Newly released documents show the White House and other officials received more dire warnings than previously thought about Hurricane Katrina's potential impact. One Homeland Security report predicted hours before the storm hit that New Orleans would likely be submerged by flooding for weeks, and even months. - Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins said today that one failure was a lack of follow up to a 2004 government exercise in Louisiana involving a make-believe storm called Hurricane Pam. That exercise exposed many of the problems that eventually occurred during Hurricane Katrina. But Collins noted that the drill was repeatedly delayed. - Still other witnesses said the Hurricane Pam exercise, which projected more than 60,000 deaths from the storm, added to the urgency with which officials responded to Katrina, encouraging far more people to evacuate than had been predicted. The committee hopes to finish its investigation in March. (National Public Radio)
US gov demands Google search records: Fishing expedition The US Department of Justice has taken Google to court, demanding it hand over all searches made in a one week period. It's a fishing expedition, unconnected with any ongoing criminal prosecution. The DOJ wants the information to back up its attempt to revive an anti-pornography law derailed by the Supreme Court two years ago.
The subpoena was issued last year, and Google refused the request - but we only learn of the case week, via a San Jose Mercury News report. The DoJ has now ordered a Federal Judge to force Google to comply.
It's a step too far even for a company with a fast and loose attitude to privacy.
(The Register)
4-year-old turns up on government 'no-fly' list: Confusion over boy's name trips up family’s journey home for the holidays Edward Allen’s reaction to being on the government’s “no-fly” list should have been the tip-off that he is no terrorist.
“I don’t want to be on the list. I want to fly and see my grandma,” the 4-year-old boy said, according to his mother.
Sijollie Allen and her son had trouble boarding planes last month because someone with the same name as Edward is on a government terrorist watch list.
“Is this a joke?” Allen recalled telling Continental Airlines agents Dec. 21 at Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport. “You can tell he’s not a terrorist.” (Associated Press)
Bush approval rating tracker Every US president's popularity among the American public is measured by approval ratings; opinion polls conducted weekly or monthly by a host of polling companies.
Chart how George W Bush has fared over the last five years in relation to key events of his presidency. (BBC)
The California Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate: A Study of the Policy Process, 1990-2004 The Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate, one of the most daring environmental policies related to transportation, was implemented in September, 1990, by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). It originally required that, starting in 1998, 2% of the in- state new light duty vehicle sales of major automakers had no emissions of criteria pollutants. The required ZEV percentage would be increased to 5% in 2001 and to 10% in 2003. CARB organized biennial reviews of the programs, to elicit stakeholder participation and monitor the evolution of the program. Through this review schedule, the program underwent several revisions resulting from intense policy debates.
This dissertation research is concerned with the study of the policy process over the ZEV mandate, from its conception, through its inception, and the biennial reviews, until 2004. The study is structured as three core chapters. The first chapter studies the origin of the ZEV mandate, trying to understand the conditions that favored and the factors that resulted in its implementation. To guide the study in this chapter, I use the Multiple Streams theoretical framework. The second chapter presents an empirical study of the policy process during the biennial reviews. This study aims at understanding the dynamics of policy change and coalition stability, identifying the policy dimensions that dominated the debate over time. I use the Advocacy Coalition Framework to frame the study in this chapter theoretically. The third core chapter presents a theoretical study of the strategic policy behavior of the main actors in the policy process. I develop a game- theoretical model of an environmental regulator (CARB) that needs to set emission standards in the presence of multiple industry players (automakers), who in turn need to
decide on their level of compliance in the presence of a competitor. The model presented improves over previous published work in the subject.
The results of these studies yield numerous conclusions with both theoretical and practical implications. I find that Multiple Streams is useful to understand the origin of the ZEV mandate, while I identify and/or confirm arguments by other scholars about significant limitations in the framework. Through the analysis of the public testimonies given by stakeholders at the biennial reviews, I identify the policy areas of major concern at different points in time along the policy process. I also identify the policy positions of each stakeholder and obtain estimates of the groups of stakeholders with similar policy beliefs (belief coalitions.) I find that these belief coalitions show some stability over time, though less than what was found by previous studies. One of the major conclusions from the model of strategic behavior is that the competitiveness of the auto industry tends to preclude collusion. The regulator may use this industry competitiveness to its advantage and achieve higher social benefits. (University of California)
The Colbert Bump is the curious phenomenon whereby anyone who appears on The Colbert Report gets a huge boost in popularity,causing them to win elections, receive massive increases in money in (making Colbert the greatest fundraiser ever), receive major awards and even get laid (The Colbert Bumpin' Uglies). (Wikiality)
Who Killed the Electric Car? s a 2006 documentary film that explores the creation, limited commercialization, and subsequent destruction of the battery electric vehicle in the United States, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the mid 1990s. The film explores the roles of automobile manufacturers, the oil industry, the US government, the Californian government, batteries, hydrogen vehicles, and consumers in limiting the development and adoption of this technology.
It was released on DVD to the home video market on November 14, 2006 by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
During an interview with CBS News, director Chris Paine announced that he would be making a sequel: Who Saved the Electric Car?, later renamed Revenge of the Electric Car. (Wikipedia)
WikiLeaks is an international organization that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous sources and leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press. Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents.
The organization has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Newspaper articles and The New Yorker magazine (June 7, 2010) describe Julian Assange, an Australian journalist and Internet activist, as its director.
WikiLeaks has won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award. In June 2009, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange won Amnesty International's UK Media Award (in the category "New Media") for the 2008 publication of "Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances", a report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in Kenya. In May 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first in a ranking of "websites that could totally change the news".
In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. forces, on a website called Collateral Murder. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review. In October the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations. (Wikipedia)
The new technology at the root of the NSA wiretap scandal When the NSA wiretapping story first hit the pages of the NYT a few days ago, there were clearly a huge number of unanswered questions. Is the wiretapping that the President has authorized illegal under the FISA act? Is it unconstitutional? If it's illegal, does the President have the authority to violate the law if he's acting in the best interests of the republic? And then there's the question of why the NYT sat on this story for over a year before going public with it.
I'm not really going to make any attempt to answer questions of legality and constitutionality, because the Internet is full of armchair constitutional scholars right now who're fighting tooth and nail over these questions, generating much heat but very little light. Instead, I'd like to point your attention to some later developments in this case that clearly indicate that there's much more going on here than we initially assumed. When the truth comes out (if it ever does), this NSA wiretapping story will almost certainly be a story not just about the Constitutional concept of the separation of powers, but about high technology. (Ars Technica)
Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Post-9/11 Order Bypassed Special Court - Authorities, including a former NSA director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, were worried that vital information could be lost in the time it took to secure a warrant from a special surveillance court (Washington Post)
Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.
"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches." - The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted. (New York Times)
Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.
"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches."
Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight. (New York Times)
Air Marshals Expand Beyond Planes The so-called "Visible Intermodal Protection and Response" teams, or VIPER teams, will patrol Amtrak's Northeast Corridor and Los Angeles rail lines; ferries in Washington state; bus stations in Houston; and mass transit systems in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore. (Associated Press)
Tonkin Gulf Intelligence "Skewed" According to Official History and Intercepts: Newly Declassified National Security Agency Documents Show Analysts Made "SIGINT fit the claim" of North Vietnamese Attack The largest U.S. intelligence agency, the National Security Agency, today declassified over 140 formerly top secret documents -- histories, chronologies, signals intelligence [SIGINT] reports, and oral history interviews -- on the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. Included in the release is a controversial article by Agency historian Robert J. Hanyok on SIGINT and the Tonkin Gulf which confirms what historians have long argued: that there was no second attack on U.S. ships in Tonkin on August 4, 1964. According to National Security Archive research fellow John Prados, "the American people have long deserved to know the full truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The National Security Agency is to be commended for releasing this piece of the puzzle. The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War make it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964 in light of new evidence." Last year, Prados edited a National Security Archive briefing book which published for the first time some of the key intercepts from the Gulf of Tonkin crisis. (George Washington University)
American Christian Fundamentalist Leader Calls For Global War If Christian fundamentalists are to be believed, America's invasion of Iraq and the consequent brutal slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians in that country are all part of a grand divine plan that will finally culminate in the 'second coming' of Jesus Christ (Countercurrents.org)
US forces 'used chemical weapons' during assault on city of Fallujah Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the appalling burns that are the signature of this weapon (The Independent)
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