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.
Feds Are Suspects in New Malware That Attacks Tor Anonymity
August 5th, 2013Update: Phoned Home to NSA
Really?!
I find it very hard to believe that this is some sort of screw up. If you don’t know much about this type of thing, you might think, “Oh the government is incompetent, so someone made a mistake and used one of their own IPs for this attack.” No way. The whole point of something like this would be deniability from top to bottom. They definitely have extensive resources for hiding their attacks.
Someone must want people to know who did this. For what reason, though, I have no idea.
Via: Ars Technica:
Malware planted on the servers of Freedom Hosting—the “hidden service” hosting provider on the Tor anonymized network brought down late last week—may have de-anonymized visitors to the sites running on that service. This issue could send identifying information about site visitors to an Internet Protocol address that was hard-coded into the script the malware injected into browsers. And it appears the IP address in question belongs to the National Security Agency (NSA).
This revelation comes from analysis done collaboratively by Baneki Privacy Labs, a collective of Internet security researchers, and VPN provider Cryptocloud. When the IP address was uncovered in the JavaScript exploit—which specifically targets Firefox Long-Term Support version 17, the version included in Tor Browser Bundle—a source at Baneki told Ars that he and others reached out to the malware and security community to help identify the source.
Initial investigations traced the address to defense contractor SAIC, which provides a wide range of information technology and C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) support to the Department of Defense. The geolocation of the IP address corresponds to an SAIC facility in Arlington, Virginia.
Further analysis using a DNS record tool from Robotex found that the address was actually part of several blocks of IP addresses permanently assigned to the NSA. This immediately spooked the researchers.
—
Via: Wired:
Security researchers tonight are poring over a piece of malicious software that takes advantage of a Firefox security vulnerability to identify some users of the privacy-protecting Tor anonymity network.
The malware showed up Sunday morning on multiple websites hosted by the anonymous hosting company Freedom Hosting. That would normally be considered a blatantly criminal “drive-by” hack attack, but nobody’s calling in the FBI this time. The FBI is the prime suspect.
“It just sends identifying information to some IP in Reston, Virginia,” says reverse-engineer Vlad Tsrklevich. “It’s pretty clear that it’s FBI or it’s some other law enforcement agency that’s U.S.-based.”
If Tsrklevich and other researchers are right, the code is likely the first sample captured in the wild of the FBI’s “computer and internet protocol address verifier,” or CIPAV, the law enforcement spyware first reported by WIRED in 2007.
Court documents and FBI files released under the FOIA have described the CIPAV as software the FBI can deliver through a browser exploit to gathers information from the target’s machine and send it to an FBI server in Virginia. The FBI has been using the CIPAV since 2002 against hackers, online sexual predator, extortionists and others, primarily to identify suspects who are disguising their location using proxy servers or anonymity services, like Tor.
The code has been used sparingly in the past, which kept it from leaking out and being analyzed or added to anti-virus databases.
FBI Agents Gave Informants Permission to Break the Law Thousands of Times in 2011
August 4th, 2013Via: USA Today:
The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation’s top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.
The U.S. Justice Department ordered the FBI to begin tracking crimes by its informants more than a decade ago, after the agency admitted that its agents had allowed Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger to operate a brutal crime ring in exchange for information about the Mafia. The FBI submits that tally to top Justice Department officials each year, but has never before made it public.
Agents authorized 15 crimes a day, on average, including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies. FBI officials have said in the past that permitting their informants — who are often criminals themselves — to break the law is an indispensable, if sometimes distasteful, part of investigating criminal organizations.
Britain: Companies Give GCHQ Unlimited Access to Data on Undersea Fiber Optic Cables
August 3rd, 2013Via: Guardian:
Some of the world’s leading telecoms firms, including BT and Vodafone, are secretly collaborating with Britain’s spy agency GCHQ, and are passing on details of their customers’ phone calls, email messages and Facebook entries, documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden show.
BT, Vodafone Cable, and the American firm Verizon Business – together with four other smaller providers – have given GCHQ secret unlimited access to their network of undersea cables. The cables carry much of the world’s phone calls and internet traffic.
In June the Guardian revealed details of GCHQ’s ambitious data-hoovering programmes, Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. It emerged GCHQ was able to tap into fibre-optic cables and store huge volumes of data for up to 30 days. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for 20 months.
On Friday Germany’s Süddeutsche newspaper published the most highly sensitive aspect of this operation – the names of the commercial companies working secretly with GCHQ, and giving the agency access to their customers’ private communications. The paper said it had seen a copy of an internal GCHQ powerpoint presentation from 2009 discussing Tempora.
The document identified for the first time which telecoms companies are working with GCHQ’s “special source” team. It gives top secret codenames for each firm, with BT (“Remedy”), Verizon Business (“Dacron”), and Vodafone Cable (“Gerontic”). The other firms include Global Crossing (“Pinnage”), Level 3 (“Little”), Viatel (“Vitreous”) and Interoute (“Streetcar”). The companies refused to comment on any specifics relating to Tempora, but several noted they were obliged to comply with UK and EU law.
