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5/7/2005

U.S. to Spend Billions More to Alter Security Systems :.

Boondoggle:

After spending more than $4.5 billion on screening devices to monitor the nation's ports, borders, airports, mail and air, the federal government is moving to replace or alter much of the antiterrorism equipment, concluding that it is ineffective, unreliable or too expensive to operate.

Many of the monitoring tools - intended to detect guns, explosives, and nuclear and biological weapons - were bought during the blitz in security spending after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In its effort to create a virtual shield around America, the Department of Homeland Security now plans to spend billions of dollars more. Although some changes are being made because of technology that has emerged in the last couple of years, many of them are planned because devices currently in use have done little to improve the nation's security, according to a review of agency documents and interviews with federal officials and outside experts.

"Everyone was standing in line with their silver bullets to make us more secure after Sept. 11," said Randall J. Larsen, a retired Air Force colonel and former government adviser on scientific issues. "We bought a lot of stuff off the shelf that wasn't effective."


5/6/2005

Driver's License = National ID Card :.

Starting three years from now, if you live or work in the United States, you'll need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly any government service. Practically speaking, your driver's license likely will have to be reissued to meet federal standards.


5/5/2005

S&P SLASHES GM, FORD RATINGS TO JUNK :.

.gov bailout. Wait for it:

Standard & Poor's, in a double whammy hitting the heart of American industry, cut General Motors and Ford debt ratings to "junk" Thursday.

S&P pinned its decision on a combination of flagging product lines, crushing overheads and intense overseas competition facing the nation's two carmakers.



Massive Fraud: Iraq Reconstruction Spending Triggers Criminal Investigation :.

This is a fly farting in the wind compared to the previous $2.3 trillion that went to money heaven. The corpament criminals that run these rackets thank you for paying your taxes on time:

Investigators have opened a criminal inquiry into millions of dollars missing in Iraq after auditors uncovered indications of fraud in nearly $100 million in reconstruction spending that could not be properly accounted for.

The money had been intended for rebuilding projects in south-central Iraq. But auditors with the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found that of $119.9 million allocated, $7.2 million could not be accounted for at all, and $89.4 million in reported spending could not be backed up with sufficient documentation, according to a report released yesterday.


5/4/2005

NSA Analyst Dares to Question Authority, Sent to Motorpool :.

This is really weird. I like the furniture warehouse and motorpool bits. NSA furniture warehouse. Um, yep. How does NSA find workers for their "furniture" operations---when they're not being busted down from analyst positions!?

I can see it now. Help Wanted: Warehouse personnel, be able to lift 75 pounds, SCI clearance required:

Russ Tice, an intelligence analyst for the heavily secret National Security Agency, has announced that he was fired from his job earlier this week after he stood up to protest the way the agency harassed him. Tice was one of several intelligence agents who had joined former FBI translator Sibel Edmond's new group, the National Security Whistleblowers. He appeared at an April 28 press conference on Capitol Hill to describe how the NSA treats employees it doesn't like, specifically ones who dare to be critical.

Tice's security clearance was taken away and he was ordered out as of May 16. In the intelligence community, having your security clearance lifted is like being sent to Siberia.

"Until the [intelligence community] can no longer use security clearances as weapons of retaliation without any fear of any form of oversight, there will be no incentive for them to stop this outrageous practice," he said at last week's press conference.

His problems started when he asked the agency to look into the activities of an employee he thought might be engaged in espionage. Instead, the NSA called him in for an emergency psychological evaluation, one of the usual procedures in blackballing an employee. He was duly determined to be crazy and put on administrative leave. Tice was later assigned to unload furniture from trucks at a warehouse, where he hurt his back. He also served an eight-month tour of duty in the NSA motor pool, where the analyst worked at maintaining the agency's fleet of vehicles, gassing them up, cleaning them and checking the fluids, and driving NSA big shots around town.

Tice had done intelligence work for nearly 20 years with the Air Force, with Navy intelligence, and with the Defense Intelligence Agency, before landing at the NSA. He has conducted intelligence missions related to Kosovo, Afghanistan, the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, and the Iraq war. Most recently he was nominated for an award for outstanding service because of his work on Iraq. It has since been withdrawn, along with the security clearance.


5/3/2005

Malaysia to Fingerprint All Newborn Babies :.

Police officers hope to store the information on a computer database to help catch criminals in the future.

They are proposing that all newborns should also have their palm prints and footprints recorded.

Rights groups have described the proposal as ill-conceived and accuse the police of wanting to treat all children as potential criminals.

'Improved detection rate'

Police hope that computer software could allow for the growth of baby hands and feet to adult proportions, and match marks found at crime scenes to innocent dabs given years before.

Officers believe the move would improve the force's detection rate, and they may ask for a change in the law to allow it.


Research Credit: JW



Microphones to Catch Noisy Neighbours :.

Noisy neighbours have become a scourge of modern life, resulting in stress, sleepless nights and even violence.

Now Westminster Council hopes a new wireless microphone could help tackle the problem.

It plans to attach the device to lamp posts outside houses, allowing inspectors to monitor sound levels.



That's No Slave Vessel - It's an Outsourcing Innovation :.

These guys could forget the slave ship concept, "offshore" these jobs to Eugene, Oregon and pay even less! I know someone in IT up there and they're treated like dirt and paid about the same:

The public reaction was predictable when word first got out of SeaCode Inc.'s proposal to house 600 foreign software engineers on a cruise ship moored three miles off the California coast, thus undercutting U.S. wage rates and circumventing local labor rules.

The veteran technology columnist John Dvorak described the vessel as a "slave ship." Other critics preferred the label "sweatshop." The words "exploitative" and "inhumane" caromed around the Web. The image that first leaped to my own rather more literary mind was of the floating prison hulks that housed the convict Abel Magwitch in "Great Expectations."

Roger Green tried to take the rhetoric philosophically. "We know we'll be a lightning rod," Green, 58, a co-founder and chief operating officer of the San Diego company, told me. "But my hope is we'll get our story out."

The story is SeaCode's plan to help clients overcome the drawbacks of outsourcing sophisticated engineering work overseas. The chief benefit of offshoring — the low pay scales in India and elsewhere — often is offset by the cost of flying executives out to monitor progress, the time difference (you have to be awake at 10:30 p.m. in California to reach India at noon) and the doubtful security of intellectual property abroad.

When a mutual friend hooked up Green, a manager of corporate software projects, with David Cook, 42, a former tanker captain who had moved into the information technology business, their complementary skills suggested a way to bring low-cost offshore labor near to hand. (The mutual friend, Joe Conway, is SeaCode's third co-founder.)

For all the skepticism that has greeted this proposal, it hardly sounds like the launch of a slave ship. SeaCode says it will pay two to three times the going rate for foreign IT workers, which works out to as much as $24,000 for lower-level jobs and $60,000 for senior programmers. They'll work in two shifts of 12 hours each, spending four months on board and two months off, with flights home provided by contract. Assuming they're cleared by immigration authorities, they'll be able to take shore leave whenever they're off duty.



Sony Robot Attending Nursery School in California :.

Kids, meet your master:

Sony's Qrio, a humanoid robot, has been attending a Californian nursery school for the past three months where it plays with young children in a test designed to see if robots can "live in harmony with humans in the future." The robot is accompanied to its classes by a researcher.

Research Credit: SA



E-Cobra Electric Motorcycle :.

WOW! Too bad it costs about $4000 too much. Must see:

The E-Cobra is Global Hybrid's latest addition to its Lithium lineup. Reaching speeds of up to 60 MPH with a range of up to 120 miles, this lightweight electric motorcycle performs exceptionally well and is ideal for the rental market, or for personal transportation in urban areas.


5/2/2005

Mission Accomplished. Really. :.

It's been two years since the photo-op that defined the Homeland's "War President." How's the accomplishment coming along?



U.S. in Race to Unlock New Energy Source :.

Dr. Strangelove, energy style?

More than a mile below the choppy Gulf of Mexico waters lies a vast, untapped source of energy. Locked in mysterious crystals, the sediment beneath the seabed holds enough natural gas to fuel America's energy-guzzling society for decades, or to bring about sufficient climate change to melt the planet's glaciers and cause catastrophic flooding, depending on whom you talk to.

No prizes for guessing the US government's preferred line. This week it will dispatch a drilling vessel to the region, on a mission to bring this virtually inexhaustible new supply of fossil fuel to power stations within a decade.



Unborn Baby Ornament - U.S. Troop Model :.

Brutal satire works for me. If you find this offensive, you haven't spent enough time familiarizing yourself with recent U.S. atrocities:

Protect our troops - from the womb to the war. What if the fetus you were going to abort would grow up to be a soldier bringing democracy to a godless dictatorship?

Plastic replica of an 11-12 week old fetus, 3" long, holding a firearm in its precious little hand, with an assortment of other military paraphernalia, encased in a translucent plastic ornament, with a patriotic yellow ribbon on top. Includes a metal ornament hanger. If only a womb were this safe, attractive and reasonably priced!

Show that you support the "culture of life" by buying and proudly displaying one of these patriotic unborn Americans.

Also available in a "Brown" model.


5/1/2005

Cryptogon Reader Contributes $50

PT has contributed several times. His continuous and generous support is helping to keep Cryptogon open for all readers. Thanks again, PT.



Joseph Ratzinger and Niel Bush: Co-Founders of Swiss Religious Foundation :.

One has to wonder: Does The Foundation for Interreligious and Intercultural Research and Dialogue contain a crypt, a dungeon or a portal?

All of the above, perhaps...

Be sure to check out the sources that are listed at the bottom of this astonishing Moscow Times article. This nexus makes Danny Casolaro's Octopus look like a walk in the park:

It seemed, at first, like nothing more than a novelty item in the news briefs, the kind of odd, meaningless side-fact thrown off by most major stories: "New Pope, President's Brother Had Link in Swiss Group." But a look beneath the surface of this innocuous connection reveals a vast web of sinister alliances -- and moral corruption on a world-shaking scale.

The network links a bewildering line-up of players -- the Bushes, the Vatican, bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and China's Communist overlords, among others -- in a staggering array of crime and turpitude: prostitution, pedophilia, mass death and war profiteering. Yet this is not some grand "conspiracy theory," a serpent's egg hatched in Bilderberg or Bohemian Grove. It's simply the way the Bush boys do business, trawling the globe for sweetheart deals and gushers of blood money from the war and terror they foment.


Research Credit: GH



Copy-and-Paste Reveals Classified U.S. Documents :.

Maybe. Maybe not. I'm posting it anyway. Make up your own mind.




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