U.S. Air Force Transported 24 Tons of Cocaine from Costa Rica to Miami, Allegedly to be Destroyed *wink*
August 7th, 2013Via: Costa Rica Star:
According to an official press release from the Organization of Judicial Investigations (OIJ in Spanish), Costa Rica will no longer send cocaine or other controlled substances to the United States, at least for the time being. The announcement comes in the wake of news reports about nearly 24 tons of cocaine transported by the U.S. Air Force to Miami on Saturday, July 27th 2013.
The OIJ further explained that officials in Costa Rica had spoken to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) about the temporary lack of an incinerator to destroy seized powder cocaine, marijuana and other illegal drugs. Prior to the massive airlift of cocaine to Miami in late July, the OIJ had managed to destroy almost 23 tons of drugs over the years at a cement factory in Cartago, but a couple of unfortunate incidents resulted in the stockpiling of confiscated drugs, and the OIJ ended up with too much coke.
Anonymouth to Combat Stylometry
August 7th, 2013Via: I-Programmer:
An open source project to combat “stylometry”, the study of attributing authorship to documents based only on the linguistic style they exhibit, is proving that it is possible to change writing style so as to evade detection.
Artificial Intelligence techniques are routinely used to detect plagiarism and recently were employed to reveal that Harry Potter author J K Rowling is indeed the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling published under the byline of Robert Galbraith. Now software is tackling the opposite problem – anonymizing writing style to protect the identity of the originator.
Students from the Privacy, Security and Automation Lab (PSAL) at Drexel University recently won the Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Award at the 12th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium for their paper “Use Fewer Instances of the Letter “i”: Toward Writing Style Anonymization,” which explains this new framework for anonymizing writing style.
The idea behind Anonymouth is that sylometry can be a threat in situations where individuals want to ensure their privacy while continuing to interact with others over the Internet.
Biotech Industry PSYOP Against Public Demands for GMO Labeling
August 7th, 2013Via: Alternet:
Monsanto and Big Food are taking the battle for consumers’ hearts and minds to the next level. And it’s no coincidence that they’re pulling out the big guns just as the Washington State I-522 campaign to label genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food products is gaining steam.
Can industry front groups and slick public relations firms convince us that the products they’re peddling are not only safe, but good for us? Will the millions they spend on websites and advertorials pay off?
We’re guessing not, given the latest New York Times poll stating that 93 percent of Americans want labels on foods containing GMOs.
Still, it can’t hurt to know who’s behind the latest salvo of lies and misinformation.
Children Given Lifetime Gag Order In Pennsylvania Fracking Suit Settlement
August 7th, 2013Via: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
The non-disclosure agreement prohibiting Chris and Stephanie Hallowich from talking about the 2011 settlement of their high-profile Marcellus Shale damage case in Washington County, or saying anything about gas drilling and fracking, isn’t unusual. It happens often in settling such cases.
But the insistence that their two minor children, then ages 7 and 10, are also bound by the “gag order” is.
Several independent legal scholars and attorneys involved in the Hallowich side of the case say they know of no other settlement agreements that gag the children of parents involved in legal settlements, and questioned whether such an agreement is enforceable.
Research Credit: almaverdad2
Android App: DronePatrol
August 7th, 2013Looks like fun for the whole family!
Via: DronePatrol:
DronePatrol is a citizen-based government watchdog organization which reports on domestic surveillence drones flying over the United States and its territories. DronePatrol.org features a database of drone sightings submitted by citizens throughout the U.S. just like you.
Key Figure in Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp Now Thinks It Should Never Have Been Built
August 6th, 2013Via: Daily Mail:
The Pentagon official in charge of Guantanamo Bay has admitted that if he had his time over, he would have argued that the notorious detention camp should never have been built.
William Lietzau, America’s Deputy Assistant Defence Secretary for Detainee Affairs, told The Mail on Sunday in an exclusive interview that Guantanamo’s detainees should have been legally designated as prisoners of war and held in Afghanistan, or if charged with crimes, taken to prisons in America.
Mr Lietzau – who, after three and a half years in his job, last week announced he will be stepping down to take a private sector job in September – added that the best way for President Obama to close Guantanamo would be to announce that the ‘war’ with Al Qaeda is over.
Under international law, this would end any justification for continuing to hold prisoners who had not been charged with crimes.
Lietzau’s words will be seen as explosive, because alone of senior officials who serve the Obama administration in this field now, he played a key role in creating Guantanamo under George W. Bush.
As a senior military lawyer from early 2002 to mid-2003, he designed the Guantanamo ‘military commissions’ – special tribunals set up to try terrorist suspects.
These have proved a dismal failure. Their rules have repeatedly changed, and more than a decade after five men accused of plotting 9/11 were captured, their case is bogged down in pre-trial hearings which have no end in sight.
China’s Slow Economy Forces College Grads to Live in ‘Ant Colonies’
August 6th, 2013Via: CBS:
Despite having a college degree, wages are low for job seekers. At a recent Beijing job fair, graduates know the odds: only 35 percent have found work.
More than a million recent graduates have ended up crammed into cheap subdivided apartments. They’re packed in so tight, they’re nicknamed “ants.”
These apartments — “ant colonies” — are illegal. CBS NEws took a hidden camera to see one with 20 beds and one bathroom. Another unit we saw slept 30.
How’s That Working Out For Ya? China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities
Research Credit: ottilie
GMO Feed Harmed Pigs in Long Term Study
August 5th, 2013Via: Journal of Organic Systems [pdf]:
Pigs fed a GMO diet exhibited heavier uteri and a higher rate of severe stomach inflammation than pigs fed a comparable non-GMO diet.
FUKUSHIMA: HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE WATER SEEPING INTO THE OCEAN
August 5th, 2013Via: Reuters:
Highly radioactive water seeping into the ocean from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is creating an “emergency” that the operator is struggling to contain, an official from the country’s nuclear watchdog said on Monday.
This contaminated groundwater has breached an underground barrier, is rising toward the surface and is exceeding legal limits of radioactive discharge, Shinji Kinjo, head of a Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) task force, told Reuters.
Countermeasures planned by Tokyo Electric Power Co are only a temporary solution, he said.
Tepco’s “sense of crisis is weak,” Kinjo said. “This is why you can’t just leave it up to Tepco alone” to grapple with the ongoing disaster.
“Right now, we have an emergency,” he said.
U.S. COMMUNICATIONS INTELLIGENCE SECRETLY SHARED WITH LAW ENFORCEMENT FOR USE AGAINST AMERICANS IN CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS
August 5th, 2013“It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used.”
—Former Stasi Lieutenant Colonel On NSA’s Mass Surveillance
The United States is using the most awesome and terrifying surveillance infrastructure ever created to target its own citizens for criminal investigations.
Intuitively obvious in activist circles for several decades —> conspiracy theory —> Reuters
I love the reaction of the ignoramus Harvard Law School professor who has to choke on the familiar It’s-Ok-for-Terrorism line. “I have never heard of anything like this at all.” haha.
When I wrote, “The United States is a banana republic with nuclear weapons. Anything goes,” I was referring to fiscal and monetary absurdities, but this concept becomes more widely applicable in the U.S. with each passing day.
Via: Reuters:
A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
“I have never heard of anything like this at all,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
“It is one thing to create special rules for national security,” Gertner said. “Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.”
THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS DIVISION
The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.
Today, much of the SOD’s work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive,” a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.
“Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function,” a document presented to agents reads. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD’s involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. Agents are instructed to then use “normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD.”
A spokesman with the Department of Justice, which oversees the DEA, declined to comment.
But two senior DEA officials defended the program, and said trying to “recreate” an investigative trail is not only legal but a technique that is used almost daily.
A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” the agent said.
“PARALLEL CONSTRUCTION”
After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as “parallel construction.”
The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. “Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day,” one official said. “It’s decades old, a bedrock concept.”
A dozen current or former federal agents interviewed by Reuters confirmed they had used parallel construction during their careers. Most defended the practice; some said they understood why those outside law enforcement might be concerned.
“It’s just like laundering money – you work it backwards to make it clean,” said Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008 and now a member of a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which advocates legalizing and regulating narcotics.
Some defense lawyers and former prosecutors said that using “parallel construction” may be legal to establish probable cause for an arrest. But they said employing the practice as a means of disguising how an investigation began may violate pretrial discovery rules by burying evidence that could prove useful to criminal defendants.
