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In July, Issa sent a letter to top government regulators demanding that they back off and provide more justification for new margin requirements for financial firms dealing in derivatives. A standard practice on Capitol Hill is to end a letter to a government agency with contact information for the congressional staffer responsible for working on the issue for the committee. In most cases, the contact staffer is the one who actually writes such letters. With this in mind, it is important to note that the Issa letter ended with contact information for Peter Haller, a staffer hired this year to work for Issa on the Oversight Committee.

Issa’s demand to regulators is exactly what banks have been wishing for. Indeed, Goldman Sachs has spent millions this year trying to slow down the implementation of the new rules. In the letter, Issa explicitly mentions that the new derivative regulations might hurt brokers “such as Goldman Sachs.”

In presentations obtained by ThinkProgress from the e-mail dump detailing the tactics potentially used against progressives, HBGary Federal floated the idea of using “fake insider personas” to infiltrate left-leaning groups critical of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s policies. As HBGary Federal executive Aaron Barr described in several emails, his firm could work with partner companies Palantir and Berico Technologies to manipulate fake online identities, using networks like Facebook, to gain access to private information from his targets. Other presentations are more specific and describe efforts to use social media to hack computers and find vulnerabilities among even the families of people who work at organizations critical of the Chamber.

Without comment, the entire bench of the Idaho Supreme Court has ruled that the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution no longer applies within the boundary of Idaho. This result was obtained from the summary dismissal of a complaint lodged against Assistant US Attorney Traci Whelan by Attorney Edgar J. Steele, formerly admitted to practice before all courts in the states of Idaho, Washington, Oregon and California, as well as virtually all Federal Courts up to and including the US Supreme Court.

Steele’s complaint about AUSA Whelan’s behavior first was sent to the Idaho State Bar (ISB), and then was forwarded to the Idaho Supreme Court because Whelan herself sits on the ISB attorney committee.

Attorney Steele’s complaint went much further than making out a prima-facie case of criminal behavior on the part of AUSA Whelan and the entire justice department of the United States of America up to and including President Barrack Obama, not to mention his Attorney General, Eric Holder, who nominally heads up the US Justice Department as all of them are complicit in the intrusion into the former right to confidential attorney/client communication.

“I asked them (the Idaho Supreme Court Judges) to take judicial notice of documents in the custody of both the justice department and Idaho’s Federal District Court,” said Steele, reached today in his jail cell in downtown Moscow, Idaho.

“I wrote letters to attorneys plainly marked ‘Legal Mail’ and addressed to lawyers with the title Attorney at Law. The FEDS opened those sealed letters, photo copied them, then sent them back to me as part of their pre-trial document production, a clear violation of US Constitution’s Sixth Amendment guarantee of ‘Assistance of Counsel’ to criminal defendants like me.”

For over 200 years the US Supreme Court has held that a criminal defendant’s right to “Assistance of Counsel” is among the oldest of rights held inviolate and necessarily includes the ability to communicate in strict confidence with any attorneys about the defendant’s situation. Until this week’s ruling by the Idaho Supreme Court, that is.

Steele alleged (and proved, by reference to documents both on file with US District Court and included with his formal complaint) that AUSA Whelan intentionally and secretly eavesdropped into conversations between Steele and all three of his to-date “attorneys of record,” Roger Peven, Robert McAllister and Wesley Hoyt. Conversations that Whelan invaded included those made by telephone at two different county jails (Spokane, Washington and Bonner, Idaho), in the attorney visiting booths at Spokane County jail. Further, eavesdropping into attorney/client communications also occurred in the previously-believed sacrosanct confines of the US District Court’s own attorney-client interview rooms in the US Federal District court building in Boise, Idaho.

The confidential conversations secretly recorded by AUSA Whelan spanned several months, both prior to and directly following Steele’s trial and conviction on four federal charges that, combined, could net him over 70 years in a federal penitentiary.

Steele alleges that the confidential information gleaned from his conversations with his lawyers is what led to his conviction in what he maintains is, “The phoniest, trumped-up, case I’ve ever seen.” The Federal Judge Lynn Winmill who presided at Steele’s trial, ruled retroactively on February 11, 2011 that Steele had “waived” his attorney-client privilege simply by daring to speak with a private attorney by phone, seeking to interview him for possible representation. Thus, the Court’s Order provided AUSA Whelan with cover from being charged with a variety of State and Federal felonies that could see her put behind bars for as long a sentence as Steele now faces.

“Now that the Idaho Supreme Court has reinforced the federal judge’s clearly illegal ruling without considering all the evidence,” said Steele. “This gives the appearance of the vast conspiracy involving the US Justice Department, the US Federal District Courts, Idaho Supreme Court, the FBI, and local counties who fraudulently tell inmates that their calls are not being recorded, then record them anyway, giving copies over to the U.S. prosecutor. This is what a police state is based on, absolutely no privacy when even the pretense of attorney confidentiality is gone. Even now, it can be seen that both Idaho’s ‘private’ state bar association and its supreme court are conspiring with the Feds to deprive its citizens of their Constitutional rights.”

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Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth’s atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.

This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by scientists at Nasa and Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make contact at some point in the future.

Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa’s Planetary Science Division and his colleagues compiled a list of plausible outcomes that could unfold in the aftermath of a close encounter, to help humanity “prepare for actual contact”.

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Stocks plunged Thursday after several economic reports in the United States raised more worries about stagnant growth and higher inflation.