California Governor Declares Drought Emergency
January 18th, 2014Via: USA Today:
In what could become one of California’s biggest crises in years, Gov. Jerry Brown declared a statewide drought emergency Friday, an action that sets the stage for new state and federal efforts.
The governor also wants to focus Californians on the possibility of water shortages.
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The situation in most of California and northern Nevada is extremely dry, according to the most recent report Thursday from the U.S. Drought Monitor, a federal website that tracks drought nationwide. Almost 99% of California is considered abnormally dry or worse; almost two-thirds of the state is in extreme drought.
2013 became the driest year on record in California; San Francisco had the least rain since record keeping there began during the gold rush of 1849.
NSA Collects 200 Million Text Messages Daily; ‘Untargeted’ Global Sweep
January 16th, 2014Via: Guardian:
The National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents.
The untargeted collection and storage of SMS messages – including their contacts – is revealed in a joint investigation between the Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News based on material provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The documents also reveal the UK spy agency GCHQ has made use of the NSA database to search the metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” communications belonging to people in the UK.
The NSA program, codenamed Dishfire, collects “pretty much everything it can”, according to GCHQ documents, rather than merely storing the communications of existing surveillance targets.
The NSA has made extensive use of its vast text message database to extract information on people’s travel plans, contact books, financial transactions and more – including of individuals under no suspicion of illegal activity.
Blackphone, for Whatever Ails Ya
January 15th, 2014
Via: ZDnet:
On Wednesday, Silent Circle and Geeksphone announced the formation of a new Switzerland-based joint venture and its first surveillance-thwarting product, the Blackphone.
Powered by a security-oriented Android build named PrivatOS, Blackphone is touted as a carrier and vendor-independent smartphone which allows consumers and businesses to make and receive secure phone calls, exchange secure texts, transfer and store files, and video chat without compromising privacy on the device.
The smartphone is the brainchild of security and technology specialists including Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP; Javier Aguera, co-founder of Geeksphone; Jon Callas, co-founder of PGP Inc. and CTO of Silent Circle; Rodrigo Silva-Ramos, co-founder of Geeksphone; and Mike Janke, CEO of Silent Circle and former U.S. Navy SEAL.
“I have spent my whole career working towards the launch of secure telephony products,” said Zimmermann. “Blackphone provides users with everything they need to ensure privacy and control of their communications, along with all the other high-end smartphone features they have come to expect.”
Britain: ‘Pedophile Network at the Heart of Government’
January 15th, 2014Via: Express:
A FORMER female MP was involved in a paedophile network at the heart of government, police have been told.
She is alleged to have forced a boy in care to perform a “vile” sex act at one of a series of drug-fuelled parties in Westminster in the Eighties where boys and girls as young as 13 were allegedly abused.
Last night her alleged victim told the Sunday Express: “I want justice.”
Andrew Ash, now 45, said he has given Scotland Yard the name of the former MP. We cannot name her for legal reasons.
Mr Ash claims he was frequently ferried down to London from the North of England, where he was in care, to take part in sex parties.
He says they were organised by a paedophile ring involving David Smith, Jimmy Savile’s former chauffeur who killed himself last year before he was due to stand trial for sex offences.
He said: “It wasn’t just politicians, there were also a number of celebrities, including Jimmy Savile, who seemed to have a lot of good links to MPs and powerful businessmen.
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Mr Ash claims officers have footage which shows a senior male MP in the same frame as him, although no abuse takes place on camera. He said he is speaking out now because he is frustrated by the lack of action after being interviewed for 70 hours by the Met Police’s Paedophile Unit.
He says he was abused by the male MP on another occasion too. He said: “I remember being filmed with this MP, who was abusing me in a garage of a very prominent building behind a Rolls-Royce.
“Another politician turned up with a video camera but the man abusing me just smirked and joked, ‘OK, OK, I’ll vote any way you want’ as if he was being blackmailed. What I want to know is why they haven’t arrested him yet if they have this evidence.
Research Credit: noguru
Recovery: JCPenny to Cut 2,000 Jobs, Close 33 Stores
January 15th, 2014Via: Business Insider:
JCPenney is cutting 2,000 jobs and closing 33 stores as the battered department store seeks to revive revenue growth, the company announced Wednesday.
The move will save about $65 million annually beginning in 2014, the company said.
JCPenney, which has about 1,100 stores, has struggled to turn a profit since former CEO Ron Johnson was fired in April.
‘Chasing the Dream of Half-Price Gasoline from Natural Gas’
January 15th, 2014Frack that.
Via: MIT Technology Review:
At a pilot plant in Menlo Park, California, a technician pours white pellets into a steel tube and then taps it with a wrench to make sure they settle together. He closes the tube, and oxygen and methane—the main ingredient of natural gas—flow in. Seconds later, water and ethylene, the world’s largest commodity chemical, flow out. Another simple step converts the ethylene into gasoline.
The white pellets are a catalyst developed by the Silicon Valley startup Siluria, which has raised $63.5 million in venture capital. If the catalysts work as well in a large, commercial scale plant as they do in tests, Siluria says, the company could produce gasoline from natural gas at about half the cost of making it from crude oil—at least at today’s cheap natural-gas prices.
If Siluria really can make cheap gasoline from natural gas it will have achieved something that has eluded the world’s top chemists and oil and gas companies for decades. Indeed, finding an inexpensive and direct way to upgrade natural gas into more valuable and useful chemicals and fuels could finally mean a cheap replacement for petroleum.
Law Enforcement Agencies Use of Drones Increasing
January 14th, 2014Via: Washington Post:
Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies are increasingly borrowing border-patrol drones for domestic surveillance operations, newly released records show, a harbinger of what is expected to become the commonplace use of unmanned aircraft by police.
Customs and Border Protection, which has the largest U.S. drone fleet of its kind outside the Defense Department, flew nearly 700 such surveillance missions on behalf of other agencies from 2010 to 2012, according to flight logs released recently in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-liberties group.
The records show that the border-patrol drones are being commissioned by other agencies more often than previously known. Most of the missions are performed for the Coast Guard, the Drug Enforcement Administration and immigration authorities. But they also aid in disaster relief and in the search for marijuana crops, methamphetamine labs and missing persons, among other missions not directly related to border protection.
Because they have sophisticated cameras and can remain in flight for many hours at a time, drones create novel privacy challenges. Civil libertarians have argued that these aircraft could lead to persistent visual surveillance of Americans on private property. Government lawyers have argued, however, that there is no meaningful legal distinction between the use of unmanned and piloted aircraft for surveillance.
NSA Devises Radio Pathway Into Computers
January 14th, 2014Via: New York Times:
The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks.
While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet, according to N.S.A. documents, computer experts and American officials. The technology, which has been used by the agency since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target.
The radio frequency technology has helped solve one of the biggest problems facing American intelligence agencies for years: getting into computers that adversaries, and some American partners, have tried to make impervious to spying or cyberattack. In most cases, the radio frequency hardware must be physically inserted by a spy, a manufacturer or an unwitting user.
The N.S.A. calls its efforts more an act of “active defense” against foreign cyberattacks than a tool to go on the offensive. But when Chinese attackers place similar software on the computer systems of American companies or government agencies, American officials have protested, often at the presidential level.
Among the most frequent targets of the N.S.A. and its Pentagon partner, United States Cyber Command, have been units of the Chinese Army, which the United States has accused of launching regular digital probes and attacks on American industrial and military targets, usually to steal secrets or intellectual property. But the program, code-named Quantum, has also been successful in inserting software into Russian military networks and systems used by the Mexican police and drug cartels, trade institutions inside the European Union, and sometime partners against terrorism like Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan, according to officials and an N.S.A. map that indicates sites of what the agency calls “computer network exploitation.”
DEA Struck A Deal With Mexico’s Most Notorious Drug Cartel
January 14th, 2014Via: Business Insider:
An investigation by El Universal has found that between 2000 and 2012, the U.S. government had an agreement with Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed the organisation to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs in exchange for information on rival cartels.
Sinaloa, led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, supplies 80% of the drugs entering the Chicago area and has a presence in cities across the U.S.
There have long been allegations that Guzman, considered the “world’s most powerful drug trafficker,” coordinates with American authorities.
But the El Universal investigation is the first to publish court documents that include corroborating testimony from a DEA agent and a Justice Department official.
Ex-Cops Acquitted in Beating Death of Homeless Man in California
January 13th, 2014Via: CNN:
A jury has acquitted two former Fullerton, California, police officers on trial in the beating death of Kelly Thomas, a mentally ill and homeless man.
The verdict was read in a Santa Ana courtroom Monday afternoon. Eight women and four men began deliberating the case on Thursday.
The beating of Thomas in a transit parking lot was recorded by security cameras on the night of July 5, 2011. The surveillance camera footage shows Thomas being beaten, clubbed and stunned with a Taser by police. The video sparked a nationwide outcry.
Former officer Manuel Ramos was charged with second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. A second former Fullerton officer, Jay Cicinelli, was charged with involuntary manslaughter and excessive use of force.
Both were found not guilty on all charges.
