Navy Research Blimp Hovering Over Maryland
September 30th, 2013[???]
Via: CBS:
The U.S. Navy research laboratory says the blimp is a government research airship conducting aerial mapping, and that the MZ-3A lighter than air blimp began roaming above the D.C. area on Sept. 21 and can remain stationary for more than 12 hours.
The blimp is mapping in the flight restriction zones around Washington, D.C. It includes places like the Department of Agriculture and some of our major airports like BWI.
Swiss War Game Envisages Invasion by Bankrupt French
September 30th, 2013[???]
Via: Telegraph:
Hordes of bankrupt French invade Switzerland to get their hands on their “stolen” money — such is the imaginary scenario cooked up by the Swiss military in simulations revealed over the weekend.
Carried out in August, the apparently outlandish army exercise was based on the premise of an attack by a financially stricken France split into warring regions, according to Matin Dimanche, the Lausanne-based daily.
One of these, “Saônia,” corresponding to the existing Jura region, was preparing attacks on Switzerland to retrieve money it had apparently swiped from France.
Operation “Duplex-Barbara” went as far as imagining a three-pronged invasion from points near Neufchâtel, Lausanne and Geneva, according to a map published in the Swiss newspaper.
Behind the dastardly raid was a paramilitary organisation dubbed BLD, the Dijon Free Brigade bent on grabbing back “money that Switzerland had stolen from Saônia”.
“For its credibility, the Swiss army must work (to ward against) threats of the 21st century,” Antoine Vielliard, Hauate-Savoie councillor, told Matin Dimanche.
However, Daniel Berger, captain of the Swiss armoured brigade, sought to play down the specificity of the threat.
“The exercise has strictly nothing to do with France, which we appreciate” he told the Swiss press. “It was prepared in 2012, when fiscal relations between both countries were less tense.” “French towns were cited to provide soldiers with a real scale,” he said.
Related: Swiss Transportation Infrastructure Rigged to Blow in Event of Invasion
DARPA’s Plan to Flood the Sea With Drones, Carrying More Drones
September 30th, 2013Via: Wired:
DARPA, the Pentagon’s research agency, has recently revealed its plans to boost the Navy’s response to threats in international waters by developing submerged unmanned platforms that can be deployed at a moment’s notice.
Hydra, named after the serpent-like creature with many heads in Greek mythology, would create an undersea network of unmanned payloads and platforms to increase the capability and speed the response to threats like piracy, the rising number of ungoverned states, and sophisticated defenses at a time when the Pentagon is forced to make budget cuts. According to DARPA, the Hydra system ”represents a cost effective way to add undersea capacity that can be tailored to support each mission” that would still allow the Navy to conduct special operations and contingency missions. In other words, the decreasing number of naval vessels can only be in one place at a time.
Russian Scientists Report Asteroid Near-Miss
September 30th, 2013Via: RIA Novosti:
A 15-meter (approximately 50 feet) asteroid, similar to the one that exploded above Russia in February, was detected hours before it narrowly missed the Earth over the weekend, Russian scientists said.
Vladimir Lipunov of the Moscow State University and the Sternberg Astronomical Institute said on Sunday a network of telescopes operated by his team recorded a celestial body approaching the planet.
“[The asteroid] was discovered on Friday night by our station near Lake Baikal and nine hours later it flew within 11,300 kilometers of the Earth surface, below the orbit of geostationary satellites. It was about 15 meters in size,” he said.
India’s Booming ‘Rent-A-Womb’ Industry
September 30th, 2013Via: Reuters:
India opened up to commercial surrogacy in 2002. It is among just a handful of countries – including Georgia, Russia, Thailand and Ukraine – and a few U.S. states where women can be paid to carry another’s genetic child through a process of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) and embryo transfer.
The low-cost technology, skilled doctors, scant bureaucracy and a plentiful supply of surrogates have made India a preferred destination for fertility tourism, attracting nationals from Britain, the United States, Australia and Japan, to name a few.
There are no official figures on how large the fertility industry is in India. A U.N.-backed study in July 2012 estimated the surrogacy business at more than $400 million a year, with over 3,000 fertility clinics across India.
The Akanksha clinic in Anand is the best-known at home and abroad, giving the small town in Gujarat state the reputation as India’s “surrogacy capital”.
NASA Images of Pakistan’s ‘Earthquake Island’
September 29th, 2013Via Russia Today:
Amidst the destruction caused by the devastating earthquake in Pakistan that killed more than 500 people, a new island emerged from the depth of the sea. NASA has released images of the newly formed islet.
NASA has released before and after photos of a new terrestrial body that was born on September 24 during a quake that struck Pakistan.
Called Zalzala Jazeera, or a an earthquake island, the terrestrial formation can now be found 380 kilometers from the earthquake’s epicenter in Paddi Zirr Bay near Swadar, Pakistan in the Arabian Sea.
The first image of the island was taken by NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite on September 26, while the second snapshot shows the same bay on April 17 with water and no landmass around the coordinates that the new island now inhabits.
Cryptogon Readers Send Contributions
September 29th, 2013Thank you very much.
JG2 $20
Eileen $100
KL $10
PC 2 Bitcoins [!!!]
UR $50
I continue to recommend bitnz.com for your bitcoin needs in New Zealand. Yes, it’s true: You might get a slightly better deal at MtGox at times (buy side is actually NZ$16.21 cheaper on bitnz vs. MtGox at the moment!), but if you consider that MtGox is routinely unusable and the wire fees that they charge, bitnz.com is the better way to go. I’ve cleared everything out of MtGox. That place is a total mess.
When considering the spreads between bitnz and MtGox, at first glance, you might think that there’s enough slop in there for an arbitrage opportunity. Take out the calculator and include the commissions on both exchanges, though, and *poof* there’s no arbitrage opportunity (for us at the retail level anyway).
To Protect and Serve? MRAPS Come Home
September 28th, 2013Via: Dallas Observer:
Now that the war in Iraq is officially over and the one in Afghanistan winding down, the Department of Defense found itself facing a conundrum. It had just spent billions of dollars buying heavily armored personnel carriers designed to stand up to insurgent attacks only to find that it had run out of wars to use them in.
The initial plan was to shove the vehicles, called MRAPS (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) into a warehouse and let them collect dust. That changed when someone decided that, having served so admirably overseas, it would be only just to bring the MRAPs stateside and deploy them in the domestic war on crime.
And so, for the past couple of months, news reports have been popping up announcing that places like Murfreesboro, Tennessee and Ohio State University have been receiving their very own military-grade armored SUVs.
Now, it’s Dallas’ turn. Dallas County sheriff’s deputies traveled to Fort Hood earlier this month and picked up their very own International MaxxPro MRAP. This particular truck has never seen any actual combat, having only been deployed stateside for training exercises, so it doesn’t have any cool battle scars, but with the dealer’s $600,000 price tag knocked down to nothing, and with just 10,000 miles on it, the deal was too good to pass up.
Related: U.S. Scrapping Billions of Dollars Worth of Military Equipment in Afghanistan
NSA Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens
September 28th, 2013Via: New York Times:
Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.
The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs in November 2010 to examine Americans’ networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after N.S.A. officials lifted restrictions on the practice, according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.
The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011. The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.
The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.
Related:
NSA Building Dossiers on Every American
U.S. Government Building Extensive Travel Dossiers on Americans
No. 2 U.S. Nuke Commander Under Investigation, Counterfeit Gambling Chips?
September 28th, 2013Via: AP:
The No. 2 officer at the military command in charge of all U.S. nuclear war-fighting forces is suspected in a case involving counterfeit gambling chips at a western Iowa casino and has been suspended from his duties, officials said.
Navy Vice Adm. Tim Giardina has not been arrested or charged, Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation special agent David Dales said Saturday. The state investigation is ongoing.
Giardina, deputy commander at U.S. Strategic Command, was suspended on Sept. 3 and is under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, a Strategic Command spokeswoman said.
The highly unusual action against a high-ranking officer at Strategic Command was made more than three weeks ago but not publicly announced at that time. The command is located at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Neb.
Air Force Gen. Robert Kehler, who heads Strategic Command, suspended Giardina, according to the command’s top spokeswoman, Navy Capt. Pamela Kunze. Giardina is still assigned to the command but is prohibited from performing duties related to nuclear weapons and other issues requiring a security clearance, she said.
Kehler has recommended to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that Giardina be reassigned, Kunze said. Giardina has been the deputy commander of Strategic Command since December 2011. He is a career submarine officer and prior to starting his assignment there was the deputy commander and chief of staff at U.S. Pacific Fleet.
DCI agents stationed at the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa, discovered the counterfeit chips, Dales said. He would not say when the discovery was made or how much in counterfeit chips was found, only that “it was a significant monetary amount.”
Council Bluffs is located across the Missouri River from Omaha.
“We were able to detect this one pretty quickly and jump on it,” Dales said. He declined to give specifics on how authorities determined that casino chips had been counterfeited or how Giardina might have been involved.
Strategic Command oversees the military’s nuclear fighter units, including the Navy’s nuclear-armed submarines and the Air Force’s nuclear bombers and nuclear land-based missiles.
