cryptogon.com

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its “widest-reaching” system for developing intelligence from the internet.

The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian’s earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisa surveillance court oversight.

The files shed light on one of Snowden’s most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.

“I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email”.

US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden’s assertion: “He’s lying. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.”

But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.

XKeyscore, the documents boast, is the NSA’s “widest reaching” system developing intelligence from computer networks – what the agency calls Digital Network Intelligence (DNI). One presentation claims the program covers “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet”, including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata.

Melanoma skin cancer, which has become one of the leading cancer among adults ages 25 to 29 in North America, is oddly resistant to chemotherapy. Treatment, then, is limited to surgical excision of the primary tumor site followed by immunotherapy and mostly ineffective chemotherapy for metastasized melanoma. Not only do standard treatments often prove to be inadequate, but patients suffer harsh side effects, seemingly for nothing.

To meet the challenge of finding an effective and alternative therapy, Pandey and his colleagues recently investigated the effect of dandelion root extract (DRE) on human melanoma cell lines in vitro. Specifically, they prepared extracts of dandelion root using a variety of techniques, including filtration, lyophilization, constitution, and sterilization. After they prepared the DRE, they treated in vitro cells (A375 and G361 human melanoma cells, along with normal human fibroblasts — a common cell within the connective tissue) with the DRE, experimenting with different specific concentrations and time points.

What did they find?

The extract they had created targets the mitochondria, the site of cellular respiration, and generates reactive oxygen species, molecules which damage the cell. Although it is unclear which components of the DRE were active when successfully destroying the human melanoma cells, it clearly acted as a “natural chemotherapeutic agent that may be extended to other chemo-resistant cancer lines,” write the authors.

Kela Israeli Intelligence has increasingly become a popular service on Wall Street. The firm employs about 40 former intelligence operatives and analysts, most of them ex-members of the Israeli army’s secretive 8200 unit, which is often described as Israel’s equivalent to the National Security Agency and believed to be behind the Stuxnet computer worm that attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities. Kela also employs former agents of Israel’s Mossad spy agency and the company was founded with the help of Shabtai Shavit, the director general of the Mossad from 1989 to 1996, who sits on Kela’s advisory board.

The suit, brought by Olson’s family in federal court in Washington, was filed too late and is barred under an earlier settlement, a judge ruled today. Eric and Nils Olson alleged their father, who the CIA admitted was given LSD a few days before his death, didn’t jump from a 13th floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York, but rather was pushed.

“While the court must limit its analysis to the four corners of the complaint, the skeptical reader may wish to know that the public record supports many of the allegations that follow, farfetched as they may sound,” U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said in the ruling.

Olson’s family has tried to piece together the circumstances surrounding Frank Olson’s death ever since a 1975 government report on CIA activities in the U.S. said he committed suicide after being given LSD without his knowledge. They claim the agency has covered up the cause of their father’s death for almost six decades.

Censorship proponents argue that the filter isn’t a bad thing – keeping ones family safe from dodgy online content can only be a good thing right? The filter can also be turned off – even if that does mean an embarrassing call to your ISP.

Sadly it just isn’t that simple. Although there’s lots of examples of objectionable online content, the term objectionable is so hopelessly broad that it could encompass all manner of seemingly harmless content. Already reports are surfacing that the filter will block way more content than just the adult content that was originally talked up by the UK government.

Worse still, the arbiter of what is objectionable appears to be the UK government, which scarily has the potential for some nightmarish Orwellian form of social control.

The experiment was conducted in June this year, with the permission of the owners of a 65-metre (213ft) superyacht worth US$80 million (A$87 million), the White Rose that sailed from Monaco to the island of Rhodes in the Mediterranean.

A team of mechanics students from the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas in Austin were on board the White Rose, with the experiment taking place some 50 kilometres off the coast of Italy in international waters.

According to Izvestia (Google Translate), Andrey Mokhov, the operations chief of the Moscow Metro system’s police department, said that the system will have a range of five meters (16 feet). “If the [SIM] card is wanted, the system automatically creates a route of its movement and passes that information to the station attendant,” Mokhov said.

Many outside experts, both in and outside Russia, though, believe that what local authorities are actually deploying is a “stingray,” or “IMSI catcher”—a device that can fool a phone and SIM into reading from a fake mobile phone tower. (IMSI, or an International Mobile Subscriber Identity number, is a 15-digit unique number that sits on every SIM card.) Such devices can be used as a simple way to see what phone numbers are being used in a given area or even to intercept the audio of voice calls.

Quiet American legal limbo was the fate of all 10 men uncovered in the AP review. The reason: While the U.S. wanted them out, no other country was willing to take them in.

That’s currently the case of Vladas Zajanckauskas in Sutton, Massachusetts. It’s the case of Theodor Szehinskyj in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Of Jakiw Palij in New York City. And of John Kalymon in Troy, Michigan.