Local and State Police Involved in Sensitive Hemisphere Program
September 14th, 2014Via: The Declaration:
Federal, state, and local police, with the assistance of phone company employees embedded within DEA narcotics intelligence units, are utilizing an unclassified but “law enforcement sensitive” program, known as Hemisphere, which provides nearly unfettered access to an enormous database containing call records of all telephone calls passing through phone company switches likely owned by AT&T, according to a partially-redacted 24-slide presentation obtained by The Declaration.
The program is part of counterdrug operations within the Philadelphia-Camden High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (PC-HIDTA), which encompasses Philadelphia, Delaware & Chester Counties as well as Camden County, NJ.
Hemisphere is funded by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) as part of the administration’s High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area initiative, with AT&T receiving an undisclosed amount of federal dollars to add nearly five billion calls per day, nationwide, to the Hemisphere database, and to assist authorities in maintaining the program’s secrecy from an investigation’s launch up to and including actual trials.
Hemisphere differs from – and far exceeds in scope – the National Security Agency’s phone record collection program, called Section 215, as the NSA maintains its own database and stores records for just five years. The Hemisphere database stores call detail records (CDR) dating as far back as 1987.
It is not known whether other carriers including Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, have a similar arrangement with DEA to allow access to their call switches. What is clear: all calls from those carriers which pass through AT&T switches are immediately entered into the database.
…
Additionally, state and local investigators are required to perform what is called “parallel subpoenaing” – a keystone of the DEA’s recently revealed and legally problematic “parallel construction” policy involving its Special Operations Division – in order to “maintain the integrity” of Hemisphere.
With each request for call records submitted to Hemisphere analysts, investigators must also subpoena the call carrier after the Hemisphere records are obtained, thus “walling off” the program by creating a seemingly innocuous paper trail for investigators and any subsequent trial.
Mysterious Men Dropping from Helicopters to Chop Down NorCal Marijuana Grows
September 13th, 2014Via: CBS:
There’s been some mysterious activity in the skies over Mendocino County lately. Folks who live there want to know: Who are the armed men dropping out of helicopters to chop down their marijuana grows?
They dress in combat camouflage, some of them hide their faces. This summer, a group of men in Mendocino County loaded into helicopters and flew missions to eradicate marijuana. They’re not police officers. They work for a security company called Lear Asset Management.
According to their promotional poster, the group works with law enforcement .That’s why Susan Schindler suspected the posse, when her medical marijuana garden was hit last month.
“They took hand saws and just cut the trunks,” Schindler said.
Schindler said the armed men in camouflage dropped into her garden from an unmarked helicopter and refused to identify themselves. “There was no paperwork, no copies of any warrants they didn’t leave any inventory of what they took,” she said.
She told KPIX 5 that she is following all the county regulations: 25 plants per parcel, the legal limit in Mendocino County. And she said the strain of cannabis she grows has no street value: It really is medicinal.
Will Superintelligent Machines Destroy Humanity?
September 13th, 2014My money would be on nukes.
How about, superintelligent machines somehow in control of nukes?
Via: Reason:
In Frank Herbert’s Dune books, humanity has long banned the creation of “thinking machines.” Ten thousand years earlier, their ancestors destroyed all such computers in a movement called the Butlerian Jihad, because they felt the machines controlled them. Human computers called Mentats serve as a substitute for the outlawed technology. The penalty for violating the Orange Catholic Bible’s commandment “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” was immediate death.
Should humanity sanction the creation of intelligent machines? That’s the pressing issue at the heart of the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom’s fascinating new book, Superintelligence. Bostrom cogently argues that the prospect of superintelligent machines is “the most important and most daunting challenge humanity has ever faced.” If we fail to meet this challenge, he concludes, malevolent or indifferent artificial intelligence (AI) will likely destroy us all.
Book: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom
Farmed Artificial Micro Humans
September 13th, 2014Via: IB Times:
As an attempt to save millions of animal lives that are lost during laboratory testing, scientists are creating artificial micro humans that would replace these animals. Up to 90 million animal lives are lost each year due to experiments conducted on them.
The artificial human machines that are being developed will be as small as a microchip. Researchers also said that they would produce the same responses that humans would when exposed to certain substances, “either when inhaled, absorbed in the gut or circulated through the bloodstream.”
Uwe Marx, a tissue engineer from Technische Universität Berlin and founder of TissUse, a firm developing the technology said that if their system is approved by the regulators, then it would result in the shutting down of several animal testing laboratories in the country. The Times reported that within three years this machine would become a substitute for the animals.
How the West Created the Islamic State
September 13th, 2014Via: Counterpunch:
“This is an organisation that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision which will eventually have to be defeated,” Gen Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon press conference in August.
Military action is necessary to halt the spread of the ISIS “cancer,” said President Obama. Yesterday he called for expanded airstrikes across Iraq and Syria, and new measures to arm and train Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces.
“The only way to defeat [IS] is to stand firm and to send a very straightforward message,” declared Prime Minister Cameron. “A country like ours will not be cowed by these barbaric killers.”
Missing from the chorus of outrage, however, has been any acknowledgement of the integral role of covert US and British regional military intelligence strategy in empowering and even directly sponsoring the very same virulent Islamist militants in Iraq, Syria and beyond, that went on to break away from al-Qaeda and form ‘ISIS’, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or now simply, the Islamic State (IS).
Since 2003, Anglo-American power has secretly and openly coordinated direct and indirect support for Islamist terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda across the Middle East and North Africa. This ill-conceived patchwork geostrategy is a legacy of the persistent influence of neoconservative ideology, motivated by longstanding but often contradictory ambitions to dominate regional oil resources, defend an expansionist Israel, and in pursuit of these, re-draw the map of the Middle East.
Earnings for June, July and August
September 13th, 2014Earnings for June, July and August came to a total of $3141.10:
June $1825.99
July $500.02
August $815.09 ($250 of this was from one contributor.)
The three month average came to $1047.
My sincerest thanks go out to those who helped keep Cryptogon open in June, July and August.
Steve Jobs Didn’t Let His Own Children Use iPads
September 13th, 2014Via: New York Times:
“So, your kids must love the iPad?” I asked Mr. Jobs, trying to change the subject. The company’s first tablet was just hitting the shelves. “They haven’t used it,” he told me. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
I’m sure I responded with a gasp and dumbfounded silence. I had imagined the Jobs’s household was like a nerd’s paradise: that the walls were giant touch screens, the dining table was made from tiles of iPads and that iPods were handed out to guests like chocolates on a pillow.
Nope, Mr. Jobs told me, not even close.
Since then, I’ve met a number of technology chief executives and venture capitalists who say similar things: they strictly limit their children’s screen time, often banning all gadgets on school nights, and allocating ascetic time limits on weekends.
I was perplexed by this parenting style. After all, most parents seem to take the opposite approach, letting their children bathe in the glow of tablets, smartphones and computers, day and night.
Yet these tech C.E.O.’s seem to know something that the rest of us don’t.
Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now chief executive of 3D Robotics, a drone maker, has instituted time limits and parental controls on every device in his home. “My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists and overly concerned about tech, and they say that none of their friends have the same rules,” he said of his five children, 6 to 17. “That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”
Related: Some Parents Who Work for Elite Silicon Valley Firms Send Their Children to School with No Computers
Council on Foreign Relations: Syrian Rebels Need Al-Qaeda Now
September 12th, 2014Via: The Anti-Media:
“The Syrian rebels would be immeasurably weaker today without al-Qaeda in their ranks. By and large, Free Syrian Army (FSA) battalions are tired, divided, chaotic, and ineffective. Feeling abandoned by the West, rebel forces are increasingly demoralized as they square off with the Assad regime’s superior weaponry and professional army. Al-Qaeda fighters, however, may help improve morale. The influx of jihadis brings discipline, religious fervor, battle experience from Iraq, funding from Sunni sympathizers in the Gulf, and most importantly, deadly results. In short, the FSA needs al-Qaeda now.”
Research Credit: winstonsmith
Shocker: GCSB Conducts Mass Surveillance on New Zealanders
September 12th, 2014*yawn*
Via: New Zealand Herald:
This morning on TV3’s The Nation, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald said that New Zealand’s spying agencies had been conducting mass surveillance on New Zealanders as part of the Five Eyes arrangement between the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
…
He said New Zealand spent an “extraordinary amount of resources” for a country of its size on electronic surveillance.
Stanford Engineer Aims to Connect the World with Ant-Sized Radios
September 10th, 2014Via: Stanford:
A Stanford engineering team has built a radio the size of an ant, a device so energy efficient that it gathers all the power it needs from the same electromagnetic waves that carry signals to its receiving antenna – no batteries required.
Designed to compute, execute and relay commands, this tiny wireless chip costs pennies to fabricate – making it cheap enough to become the missing link between the Internet as we know it and the linked-together smart gadgets envisioned in the “Internet of Things.”
“The next exponential growth in connectivity will be connecting objects together and giving us remote control through the web,” said Amin Arbabian, an assistant professor of electrical engineering who recently demonstrated this ant-sized radio chip at the VLSI Technology and Circuits Symposium in Hawaii.
Much of the infrastructure needed to enable us to control sensors and devices remotely already exists: We have the Internet to carry commands around the globe, and computers and smartphones to issue the commands. What’s missing is a wireless controller cheap enough to so that it can be installed on any gadget anywhere.
“How do you put a bi-directional wireless control system on every lightbulb?” Arbabian said. “By putting all the essential elements of a radio on a single chip that costs pennies to make.”
Cost is critical because, as Arbabian observed, “We’re ultimately talking about connecting trillions of devices.”
