U.S. Federal Debt Has Apparently Exceeded Legal Limit
July 26th, 2013Via: ETF Guide:
U.S. federal debt has been stuck at $16,699,396,000,000.00 for 68 straight days, according to the Daily Treasury Statement on July 24. That amount is exactly $25 million less than the legal borrowing limit of $16,699,421,000,000.00 set on May 17, 2013. But that’s only part of the story.
A digger deep at the numbers actually shows the U.S. Treasury has already blown past the federal legal borrowing limit! And the mainstream media, as usual, is out to lunch. The table below shows how “Total Public Debt Outstanding” is already $38.82 billion above the statuary debt ceiling and now at $16,738,106,000,000.00.
Hacker Dies a Week Before Showing Techniques for Attacking Implanted Heart Devices That He Said Could Kill a Man from 30 Feet Away
July 26th, 2013Via: Reuters:
Well-known hacker Barnaby Jack has died in San Francisco, a week before he was due to show off techniques for attacking implanted heart devices that he said could kill a man from 30 feet away.
The San Francisco Medical Examiner’s office said he died in the city on Thursday. It gave no details.
Jack, a security expert, became one of the most famous hackers on the planet after a 2010 demonstration in which he forced ATMs to spit out cash, dubbed “Jackpotting.”
The hacking community expressed shock as the news of his death spread via Twitter early on Friday. Jack was due to appear at the Black Hat hacking convention in San Francisco next week, demonstrating how he could attack heart devices.
…
Jack’s genius was finding bugs in the tiny computers that are embedded in equipment such as medical devices and banking machines. He received standing ovations at hacking conventions for his creativity and showmanship.
Flashback 2008: Has Cheney Been Fitted with a Kill Switch?
Neuroscientists Plant False Memories in the Brains of Mice
July 26th, 2013Via: MIT News Office:
In a step toward understanding how these faulty memories arise, MIT neuroscientists have shown that they can plant false memories in the brains of mice. They also found that many of the neurological traces of these memories are identical in nature to those of authentic memories.
“Whether it’s a false or genuine memory, the brain’s neural mechanism underlying the recall of the memory is the same,” says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience and senior author of a paper describing the findings in the July 25 edition of Science.
The study also provides further evidence that memories are stored in networks of neurons that form memory traces for each experience we have — a phenomenon that Tonegawa’s lab first demonstrated last year.
Neuroscientists have long sought the location of these memory traces, also called engrams. In the pair of studies, Tonegawa and colleagues at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory showed that they could identify the cells that make up part of an engram for a specific memory and reactivate it using a technology called optogenetics.
Cnet Source Claims U.S. Government Trying to Obtain Keys to Encrypted Web Sessions from Companies
July 25th, 2013Via: Cnet:
The U.S. government has attempted to obtain the master encryption keys that Internet companies use to shield millions of users’ private Web communications from eavesdropping.
These demands for master encryption keys, which have not been disclosed previously, represent a technological escalation in the clandestine methods that the FBI and the National Security Agency employ when conducting electronic surveillance against Internet users.
If the government obtains a company’s master encryption key, agents could decrypt the contents of communications intercepted through a wiretap or by invoking the potent surveillance authorities of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Web encryption — which often appears in a browser with a HTTPS lock icon when enabled — uses a technique called SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer.
“The government is definitely demanding SSL keys from providers,” said one person who has responded to government attempts to obtain encryption keys. The source spoke with CNET on condition of anonymity.
The person said that large Internet companies have resisted the requests on the grounds that they go beyond what the law permits, but voiced concern that smaller companies without well-staffed legal departments might be less willing to put up a fight. “I believe the government is beating up on the little guys,” the person said. “The government’s view is that anything we can think of, we can compel you to do.”
Japan to Mull Pre-Emptive Strike Capabilities
July 25th, 2013Via: Reuters:
Japan is likely to start considering acquiring the ability to launch pre-emptive military strikes in a planned update of its basic defense policies, the latest step away from the constraints of its pacifist constitution.
The expected proposal, which could sound alarm bells in China, is part of a review of Japan’s defense policies undertaken by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government, an interim report on which could come as early as Friday. The final conclusions of the review are due out by the end of the year.
The hawkish Abe took office in December for a rare second term, pledging to bolster the military to cope with what Japan sees as an increasingly threatening security environment including an assertive China and unpredictable North Korea.
Article 9 of Japan’s constitution, drafted by U.S. occupation forces after its defeat in World War Two, renounces the right to wage war and, if taken literally, rules out the very notion of a standing army. In reality, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces are one of Asia’s strongest militaries.
The Defence Ministry will call in the interim report for a study of how to “strengthen the ability to deter and respond to ballistic missiles”, the Yomiuri newspaper and other media said on Thursday.
But in a sign of the sensitivity, the report will stop short of specifically mentioning the ability to hit enemy bases when the threat of attack is imminent, the Yomiuri newspaper said.
The ministry will also consider buying unmanned surveillance drones and creating a Marines force to protect remote islands, such as those at the core of a dispute with China, media said.
“The acquisition of offensive capability would be a fundamental change in our defense policy, a kind of philosophical change,” said Marushige Michishita, a professor at the National Graduate Institute of Policy Studies.
Obtaining that capability, however, would take time, money and training, meaning any shift may be more rhetorical than real. “It’s easier said than done,” Michishita added.
The updated guidelines could also touch on Abe’s moves toward lifting a self-imposed ban on exercising the right of collective self-defense, or helping an ally under attack, such as if North Korea launched an attack on the United States.
The defense review may also urge replacing with new guidelines a self-imposed ban on arms exports that has already been eased to let Japanese contractors take part in international projects.
Clear guidelines for companies as to what and to whom they can sell could help Japanese defense contractors such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd, Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd, and Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd seek business overseas.
Some experts stressed that the changes were evolutionary rather than a sudden transformation in Japan’s defense posture.
‘If you are an American citizen and you’re fighting with al-Qaeda linked rebels in northern Syria, your passport has been found’
July 25th, 2013Via: Business Insider:
If you are an American citizen and you’re fighting with al-Qaeda linked rebels in northern Syria, your passport has been found.
Among documents recovered in northern Syria by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights was a passport issued by the United States, belonging to a 32-year-old American named Amiir Farouk Ibrahim, who has dual citizenship between the United States and Egypt.
He was born in Pennsylvania, and his passport was issued in 2012.
Ace Of Spades For Michael Hastings: DARPA Contractors Take Control Of Moving Vehicles— “And The Next Thing You Know, You’re On The News”
July 25th, 2013In his book, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan, Michael Hastings recalled the incident.
“We’ll hunt you down and kill you if we don’t like what you write,” the staffer threatened, according to Hastings, who responded: “Well, I get death threats like that about once a year, so no worries.”
—Michael Hastings Death: LAPD Rules No Foul Play In Journalist’s Crash
Ace of Spades, Vietnam Edition
See: The Death Card.
Here’s what the death card looks like in the Hastings assassination:
Most people wouldn’t connect these particular dots, but the message isn’t meant for most people. I’d suggest that if you are in a position to take down someone who has tasked an organization like the Joint Special Operations Command, this message is for you.
It’s also interesting that an incident in a garage is mentioned in this Forbes piece:
The soccer-mom mobile barreled through his garage, crushing his lawn mower and inflicting $150 worth of damage to the rear wall.
Does that ring a bell? It should, because there was a curious incident back in 2011 involving a, “soccer-mom mobile,” in a garage. See: Ashley W. Turton: Energy Lobbyist, Wife of Key White House Aide, Dies in Fire:
The wife of a key White House aide was found dead early Monday in a sport-utility vehicle that was heavily damaged by fire in the garage of the couple’s Capitol Hill home, sources familiar with the incident said. The cause of her death is uncertain.
Ashley W. Turton, 37, an energy company lobbyist and one-time top aide to former U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), was found dead shortly before 5 a.m. in a burning BMW, the back end of which was partly out of the garage, as if the vehicle had been entering or leaving when the fire started, authorities said Turton was the wife of Daniel A. Turton, 43, the White House’s deputy director of legislative affairs for the U.S. House. As such, he is President Obama’s point man on legislation moving through the House.
He and Ashley Turton, who have three children, were a Washington power couple well known in Democratic circles. She was a lobbyist for North Carolina-based Progress Energy, which announced a merger Monday with Duke Energy.
Coincidences, coincidences.
Via: Fortune:
Stomping on the brakes of a 3,500-pound Ford Escape that refuses to stop–or even slow down–produces a unique feeling of anxiety. In this case it also produces a deep groaning sound, like an angry water buffalo bellowing somewhere under the SUV’s chassis. The more I pound the pedal, the louder the groan gets–along with the delighted cackling of the two hackers sitting behind me in the backseat.
Luckily, all of this is happening at less than 5mph. So the Escape merely plows into a stand of 6-foot-high weeds growing in the abandoned parking lot of a South Bend, Ind. strip mall that Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have chosen as the testing grounds for the day’s experiments, a few of which are shown in the video below. (When Miller discovered the brake-disabling trick, he wasn’t so lucky: The soccer-mom mobile barreled through his garage, crushing his lawn mower and inflicting $150 worth of damage to the rear wall.)
“Okay, now your brakes work again,” Miller says, tapping on a beat-up MacBook connected by a cable to an inconspicuous data port near the parking brake. I reverse out of the weeds and warily bring the car to a stop. “When you lose faith that a car will do what you tell it to do,” he adds after we jump out of the SUV, “it really changes your whole view of how the thing works.”
This fact, that a car is not a simple machine of glass and steel but a hackable network of computers, is what Miller and Valasek have spent the last year trying to demonstrate. Miller, a 40-year-old security engineer at Twitter, and Valasek, the 31-year-old director of security intelligence at the Seattle consultancy IOActive, received an $80,000-plus grant last fall from the mad-scientist research arm of the Pentagon known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to root out security vulnerabilities in automobiles.
Cop Fired for Speaking Out Against Ticket and Arrest Quotas
July 25th, 2013Via: Reason:
Auburn, Alabama is home to sprawling plains, Auburn University, and a troubling police force. After the arrival of a new police chief in 2010, the department entered an era of ticket quotas and worse.
“When I first heard about the quotas I was appalled,” says former Auburn police officer Justin Hanners, who claims he and other cops were given directives to hassle, ticket, or arrest specific numbers of residents per shift. “I got into law enforcement to serve and protect, not be a bully.”
Hanners blew the whistle on the department’s tactics and was eventually fired for refusing to comply and keep quiet. He says that each officer was required to make 100 contacts each month, which included tickets, arrests, field interviews, and warnings. This equates to 72,000 contacts a year in a 50,000 person town. His claims are backed up by audio recordings of his superiors he made. The Auburn police department declined requests to be interviewed for this story.
“There are not that many speeders, there are not that many people running red lights to get those numbers, so what [the police] do is they lower their standards,” says Hanners. That led to the department encouraging officers to arrest people that Hanners “didn’t feel like had broken the law.”
DARPA Hydra: Mothership That Deploys Both Submersible and Aerial Drones
July 24th, 2013Via: NBC:
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, are in the news constantly, but what about unmanned underwater vehicles? They could also be important in both war and peace, which is why the Defense Department’s research arm, DARPA, is looking into a mobile submarine base from which to launch drones.
The project, still in the earliest stages, is called “Hydra,” after the mythical beast whose heads multiplied upon being cut off. The idea is to create a sort of underwater version of an aircraft carrier.
“The rising number of ungoverned states, piracy, and proliferation of sophisticated defenses severely stretches current resources and impacts the nation’s ability to conduct special operations and contingency missions,” reads the introduction to the program in a paper issued by DARPA (PDF). “The Hydra program represents a cost-effective way to add undersea capacity that can be tailored to support each mission.”
The Hydra, itself an unmanned underwater vehicle, would be stocked with drones of various kinds and capacities, and could travel to wherever it’s needed, deploying whatever is needed.
Whether you need a drone circling overhead, scouting underwater for mines, or listening on the surface for pirates or distress calls, the Hydra could have them all ready to launch with the tap of a button.
Ireland: Teachta Dála Clare Daly on Barack Obama: “This Man Is A War Criminal”
July 24th, 2013Via: Russia Today:
More: Clare Daly’s Speech
