Give NSA Unlimited Access to Digital Data, Says Federal Judge
December 8th, 2014Via: Computerworld:
The U.S. National Security Agency should have an unlimited ability to collect digital information in the name of protecting the country against terrorism and other threats, an influential federal judge said during a debate on privacy.
“I think privacy is actually overvalued,” Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, said during a conference about privacy and cybercrime in Washington on Thursday.
“Much of what passes for the name of privacy is really just trying to conceal the disreputable parts of your conduct,” Posner added. “Privacy is mainly about trying to improve your social and business opportunities by concealing the sorts of bad activities that would cause other people not to want to deal with you.”
Congress should limit the NSA’s use of the data it collects — for example, not giving information about minor crimes to law enforcement agencies — but it shouldn’t limit what information the NSA sweeps up and searches, Posner said. “If the NSA wants to vacuum all the trillions of bits of information that are crawling through the electronic worldwide networks, I think that’s fine,” he said.
In the name of national security, U.S. lawmakers should give the NSA “carte blanche,” Posner added. “Privacy interests should really have very little weight when you’re talking about national security,” he said. “The world is in an extremely turbulent state — very dangerous.”
Energy Crisis: Turn the Wind Turbines Off When the Electricity Prices Get Too Low
December 7th, 2014What we’re dealing with in New Zealand is sort of mini, South Pacific version of Enron.
—New Zealand: Commercial Solar Boom Underway
Most people in New Zealand haven’t heard of Enron’s numerous and insidious scams, but they should familiarize themselves with what happened:
Before passage of the deregulation law, there had been only one Stage 3 rolling blackout declared. After passage, California had a total of 38 blackouts defined as Stage 3 rolling blackouts, until federal regulators intervened during June 2001. These blackouts occurred mainly as a result of a poorly designed market system that was manipulated by traders and marketers. Enron traders were revealed as intentionally encouraging the removal of power from the market during California’s energy crisis by encouraging suppliers to shut down plants to perform unnecessary maintenance, as documented in recordings made at the time. These acts contributed to the need for rolling blackouts, which adversely affected many businesses dependent upon a reliable supply of electricity, and inconvenienced a large number of retail consumers. This scattered supply increased the price exponentially, and Enron traders were thus able to sell power at premium prices, sometimes up to a factor of 20x its normal peak value.
And now…
Via: Electricity Authority New Zealand (.pdf):
Breach alleged of TrustPower Limited
Alleged breach reported by the system operator.
TrustPower reduced output at its Tararua wind farm from around 80MW to 0MW between 02:27 and 02:41on 21 May 2014 due to low prices, without notifying Transpower New Zealand Limited as the system operator. TrustPower denied the breaches.
More: Meridian Removed Reserves During Grid Emergency Without Physical Justification
A Charred Eye Socket Provides Proof That 43 Missing Mexico Students Are Dead
December 7th, 2014Via: McClatchyDC:
One of Mexico’s most horrific mass murders in recent decades has come to rest, in part, on a fragment of a charred human eye socket.
Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said Sunday that Austrian forensic experts have confirmed that the bone fragment is from one of 43 student teachers who went missing 10 weeks ago in a heinous crime that has shaken the country.
“The remains found at one of the scenes coincide with the genetic profile of Alexander Mora Venancio,” Murillo Karam said, naming one of the students.
The World Cracks Down on the Internet
December 6th, 2014Via: The New Yorker:
On Thursday, Freedom House published its fifth annual report on Internet freedom around the world. As in years past, China is again near the bottom of the rankings, which include sixty-five countries. Only Syria and Iran got worse scores, while Iceland and Estonia fared the best. (The report was funded partly by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the United States Department of State, Google, and Yahoo, but Freedom House described the report as its “sole responsibility” and said that it doesn’t necessarily represent its funders’ views.)
China’s place in the rankings won’t come as a surprise to many people. The notable part is that the report suggests that, when it comes to Internet freedom, the rest of the world is gradually becoming more like China and less like Iceland. The researchers found that Internet freedom declined in thirty-six of the sixty-five countries they studied, continuing a trajectory they have noticed since they began publishing the reports in 2010.
Report: Freedom House
Afghanistan: The Making of a Narco State
December 6th, 2014Oh yes, the big “mystery” as to why the Taliban cut off opium production baffles Rolling Stone.
9/11 scratches more itches than anyone in the corporate media could possibly imagine. I’d say that one of main purposes of 9/11 was to restart the flow of hundreds of billions of dollars of heroin money into the global financial system.
Mission accomplished.
I suppose that readers are supposed to believe that all of this is the result of incompetence, bad luck and coincidences.
Via: Rolling Stone:
Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan is named for the wide river that runs through its provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, a low-slung city of shrubby roundabouts and glass-fronted market blocks. When I visited in April, there was an expectant atmosphere, like that of a whaling town waiting for the big ships to come in. In the bazaars, the shops were filled with dry goods, farming machinery and motorcycles. The teahouses, where a man could spend the night on the carpet for the price of his dinner, were packed with migrant laborers, or nishtgar, drawn from across the southern provinces, some coming from as far afield as Iran and Pakistan. The schools were empty; in war-torn districts, police and Taliban alike had put aside their arms. It was harvest time.
Across the province, hundreds of thousands of people were taking part in the largest opium harvest in Afghanistan’s history. With a record 224,000 hectares under cultivation this year, the country produced an estimated 6,400 tons of opium, or around 90 percent of the world’s supply. The drug is entwined with the highest levels of the Afghan government and the economy in a way that makes the cocaine business in Escobar-era Colombia look like a sideshow. The share of cocaine trafficking and production in Colombia’s GDP peaked at six percent in the late 1980s; in Afghanistan today, according to U.N. estimates, the opium industry accounts for 15 percent of the economy, a figure that is set to rise as the West withdraws. “Whatever the term narco state means, if there is a country to which it applies, it is Afghanistan,” says Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies illicit economies in conflict zones. “It is unprecedented in history.”
…
In the summer of 2000, the country’s fundamentalist leaders announced a total ban on opium cultivation, “a decision by the Taliban that we welcome,” as former Secretary of State Colin Powell said. It remains a mystery why the Taliban’s reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, made the call. But the Taliban enforced his decision with their customary harshness. In Helmand, those caught planting poppy were beaten and then paraded through the village with their faces blackened with motor oil. The following spring, the only significant opium harvest was in the corner of the northeast that was still controlled by the Taliban’s rivals, the Northern Alliance. Opium production fell from an estimated 3,276 tons in 2000 to 185 tons in 2001.
Then history intervened. After the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the Bush administration, seeking a “light footprint,” partnered with anti-Taliban warlords, including the Northern Alliance, to take control of the country. In its quest for vengeance, the U.S. allowed figures accused of being involved in grave civil-war-era human rights abuses to come to power; these included people like Mohammad Qasim Fahim and Abdul Rab Rassoul Sayyaf, whose rival mujahedeen factions shelled Kabul to rubble and who would later become the country’s vice president and a leading member of Parliament, respectively.
These were the first in a series of decisions that helped revive the Afghan opium economy in a drastically expanded form. Within six months of the U.S. invasion, the warlords we backed were running the opium trade, and the spring of 2002 saw a bumper harvest of 3,400 tons. Meanwhile, the international community and the Afghan government paid lip service to counternarcotics, with the latter adopting an official strategy that fantasized about opium production being reduced by 75 percent in five years and eliminated entirely within 10.
Operation Auroragold: How the NSA Hacks Cellphone Networks Worldwide
December 6th, 2014Via: First Look:
According to documents contained in the archive of material provided to The Intercept by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA has spied on hundreds of companies and organizations internationally, including in countries closely allied to the United States, in an effort to find security weaknesses in cellphone technology that it can exploit for surveillance.
The documents also reveal how the NSA plans to secretly introduce new flaws into communication systems so that they can be tapped into—a controversial tactic that security experts say could be exposing the general population to criminal hackers.
Codenamed AURORAGOLD, the covert operation has monitored the content of messages sent and received by more than 1,200 email accounts associated with major cellphone network operators, intercepting confidential company planning papers that help the NSA hack into phone networks.
One high-profile surveillance target is the GSM Association, an influential U.K.-headquartered trade group that works closely with large U.S.-based firms including Microsoft, Facebook, AT&T, and Cisco, and is currently being funded by the U.S. government to develop privacy-enhancing technologies.
Karsten Nohl, a leading cellphone security expert and cryptographer who was consulted by The Intercept about details contained in the AURORAGOLD documents, said that the broad scope of information swept up in the operation appears aimed at ensuring virtually every cellphone network in the world is NSA accessible.
Research Credit: winstonsmith
UK to Establish £15m Permanent Mid East Military Base
December 6th, 2014Via: BBC:
Britain is to establish its first permanent military base in the Middle East since it formally withdrew from the region in 1971.
The base, at the Mina Salman Port in Bahrain, will host ships including destroyers and aircraft carriers.
The UK said it was an “expansion of the Royal Navy’s footprint” and would “reinforce stability” in the Gulf.
Bahrain will pay most of the £15m ($23m) needed to build the base, with the British paying ongoing costs.
UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, who signed the deal at a security conference in Manama, Bahrain, said it was “just one example of our growing partnership with Gulf partners to tackle shared strategic and regional threats”.
Camp Pendleton Marines To Conduct Training In Downtown Los Angeles
December 6th, 2014Via: CBS:
Residents in and around downtown Los Angeles could hear helicopters or other military aircraft over the coming days as Marines and sailors from Camp Pendleton train in preparation for a deployment.
The training is part of a two-week military exercise that starts Friday and extends through Dec. 16 and involves about 2,400 members of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, according to the Associated Press.
While residents could see as many as six military helicopters buzzing over the downtown area over the next week, raids being held at several undisclosed locations in the city will be off limits to the public for safety reasons, Capt. Brian Block told the Associated Press.
“It’s not going to look like ‘Apocalypse Now’ by any stretch of the imagination,” Block said.
Enphase Says Solar + Solar Market “Infinite,” Ahead of Australia Battery Pilot
December 5th, 2014Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in NZ.
Via: RenewEconomy:
When the world’s biggest supplier of solar inverters (sometimes described as the “brains” of solar PV systems) sets up camp in Australia, it’s probably a development worth noting. California-based “solar-tech” company Enphase opened offices in Sydney and Melbourne around 18 months ago, and since then, has been working on some fairly big plans.
These plans involve its Enphase AC Battery: an astonishingly compact (see picture right) modular plug-and-play energy storage system which, when used with the company’s cloud-based Enphase Energy Management System, allows consumers to store and manage their rooftop solar energy supply and control their overall household energy use – all with an eye to cutting the cost of electricity bills.
As Enphase CEO Paul Nahi puts it: “if the idea is to give more control to the consumer over their energy, with the goal, initially, of reducing their energy bill, then you have to have storage. You need to be able to use your energy when the solar isn’t there, and that needs storage.”
…
“It’s very hard to out-lobby traditional fossil fuels. In the US, they’re very entrechned in the system. So really what we have to do is we have to outcompete them.
“I have no interest in beating them in Washington, I want to beat them at the consumer. I want to provide a better solution, and I can do that through technology and innovation. And that’s exactly what’s happening.
“Solar is growing as fast as it is because it is a cheaper, cleaner alternative. And the dynamics behind that are doing nothing but getting better. Solar’s costs are coming down, the utility prices are going up.”
Sears to Accelerate Closings, Shutter 235 Stores
December 5th, 2014Via: CNBC:
Sears shares fell Thursday, after the struggling department store announced an adjusted net loss of $296 million—in line with the updated guidance it gave in November.
The retailer also said it’s accelerating the number of stores it plans to close this year, boosting its list from the 130 underperforming stores it announced in its second-quarter earnings release, to a total of 235 stores.
