cryptogon.com

It’s hardly the first military contract for Virginia-based Blackbird, originally founded in 1997 as an Internet security firm. In August, Blackbird won a massive, $450 million contract from the U.S. Navy to provide ”tagging, tracking and locating” gear and training to a wide swath of military units. In addition, Blackbird is currently assisting the armed forces in “locating people held captive or hostage under duress and assessing enemy vulnerabilities.” U.S. forces say they need the company to continue to “provid[e] staff and mission area expertise for PR [personnel recovery] operations, serve as a fusion nexus for intelligence operations to support PR, and operational oversight for subordinate operations.” In addition, the military expects Blackbird to provide everything from “crisis action planning” to “non-attributable internet research.”

“We’re not the guys that go out and kick down doors and bring out the Jessica Lynches of the world,” says retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Timur Eads, who serves as Blackbird’s vice president of government relations. “We’re the guys in the background, assembling the forensic information, bringing all the threads together.” Sometimes, Eads tells Danger Room, that entails online research “where you appear to be entering the Internet from somewhere else.”

Beyond that, Eads won’t say much. “I can’t give the specifics of what we do, because the work is classified. But the reason we got this contract is because we have people with very unique skillsets that we can quickly bring together.”

The company says they’ve already got a crack team assembled for their rescue operations. But Blackbird is openly recruiting for “personnel recovery mission officers,” apparently to service this contract. Only applicants with a very specific background need apply. Blackbird wants each of the eight officers to have 10 years of special operations missions and a clearance of “Top Secret/SSBI with SCI eligibility.” But despite the sensitivity of this mission, and despite the exclusive resumes applicants need to provide, these positions are only “part-time.”

Blackbird is headquartered in Herndon, VA, with five branch offices nationwide. Blackbird’s website states that the company is a “technology solutions provider whose mission is to solve challenging problems for customers in the Defense, Intelligence, and Law Enforcement Communities.” They also advertise that the majority of their staff hold high-level clearances and handle “the most sensitive government and commercial matters.”

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.

The unpopular legislation is needed to allow the federal government to issue bonds to fund programs and prevent a first-time default on obligations. It promises to be a challenging debate for Democrats, who, as the party in power, hold the responsibility for passing the legislation.

…

The record increase in the so-called debt limit is required because the budget deficit has spiraled out of control in the wake of a recession that cut tax revenues, the Wall Street bailout, and increased spending by the Democratic-controlled Congress. Last year’s deficit hit a phenomenal $1.4 trillion, and the current year’s deficit promises to be as high or higher.

Congress has never failed to increase the borrowing limit.

“We have gone to the restaurant. We have eaten the meal. Now the only question is whether we will pay the check,” said Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont. “We simply must do so.”

Friends, in letters in support of his successful 1995 application for a concealed weapons permit, called him “an upstanding, Christian young man” and “very mature and responsible.”

But something happened in recent years that changed Speight, friends say.

It started when his mother died in 2006. “He said he had a ‘zinging’ in his ears. I can’t explain it the way he explained it,” said David Anderson, 54, who worked with Speight and became friendly with him. Anderson said Speight told him that he began seeing a therapist but that it didn’t help much. He had grown worse recently, a change that Anderson and other co-workers attributed to tensions in his house on Snapps Mill Road. “He had gotten quieter in the past six months,” Anderson said.

Something must have been building, Anderson said. On Tuesday, Speight, 39, allegedly shot his sister, his brother-in-law and their two children, along with four family friends, in a rampage that left eight dead. It was the worst mass slaying in Virginia since a single shooter killed 33 people at Virginia Tech in 2007.

State police released the victims’ names late Wednesday, and family friends described their relationships to Speight and his family. Killed were Lauralee Sipe, 38, Speight’s sister; Dwayne Sipe, 38, his brother-in-law; Morgan Dobyns, 15, Speight’s niece; Joshua Sipe, 4, his nephew; Emily A. Quarles, 15, Morgan’s friend; Karen Quarles, 43, Emily’s mother; Jonathan L. Quarles, 43, Emily’s father; and Ronald “Bo” Scruggs II, 16, Morgan’s friend. Four victims were found inside Speight’s house, three immediately outside it and one in the middle of a nearby road.

Speight never married, and his sister appeared to be his only family.

Although a motive for the shootings remained elusive, friends said Speight had talked of a dispute with his family about ownership of the house and land, which sits off a dirt road in wooded farmland about 200 miles from Washington. Speight’s mother had left the 34-acre property jointly to Speight and his sister, court records show.

Speight thought that his sister and brother-in-law were seeking to force him out of the house and dispossess him of it, Anderson said. Speight said that the couple, who had just moved into the three-bedroom house about a year ago, promised to help him build a home on the property and that they cleared timber for the site — a job for which Speight thought he had done the lion’s share of work. But the house was not built, and Speight confided that he felt as if he had chopped wood mostly to fill the stove, Anderson said.

On Wednesday, Speight, donning a bulletproof vest and camouflage pants, emerged from the Appomattox woods where he had fled after the shootings and turned himself in to a police SWAT team, ending a 20-hour hunt during which he used a high-powered rifle to hold police at bay, authorities said. Police said his well-aimed shots forced a state police helicopter to make an emergency landing after its fuel tank was pierced, and more than 150 law enforcement officials had been combing the woods for him overnight.

Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones.

And because so many of them are multitasking — say, surfing the Internet while listening to music — they pack on average nearly 11 hours of media content into that seven and a half hours.

“I feel like my days would be boring without it,” said Francisco Sepulveda, a 14-year-old Bronx eighth grader who uses his smart phone to surf the Web, watch videos, listen to music — and send or receive about 500 texts a day.

The study’s findings shocked its authors, who had concluded in 2005 that use could not possibly grow further, and confirmed the fears of many parents whose children are constantly tethered to media devices. It found, moreover, that heavy media use is associated with several negatives, including behavior problems and lower grades.

The third in a series, the study found that young people’s media consumption grew far more in the last five years than from 1999 to 2004, as sophisticated mobile technology like iPods and smart phones brought media access into teenagers’ pockets and beds.

Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston who directs the Center on Media and Child Health, said that with media use so ubiquitous, it was time to stop arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”

Contrary to popular wisdom, the heaviest media users reported spending a similar amount of time exercising as the light media users. Nonetheless, other studies have established a link between screen time and obesity.

While most of the young people in the study got good grades, 47 percent of the heaviest media users — those who consumed at least 16 hours a day — had mostly C’s or lower, compared with 23 percent of those who typically consumed media three hours a day or less. The heaviest media users were also more likely than the lightest users to report that they were bored or sad, or that they got into trouble, did not get along well with their parents and were not happy at school.

The study could not say whether the media use causes problems, or, rather, whether troubled youths turn to heavy media use.

“This is a stunner,” said Donald F. Roberts, a Stanford communications professor emeritus who is one of the authors of the study. “In the second report, I remember writing a paragraph saying we’ve hit a ceiling on media use, since there just aren’t enough hours in the day to increase the time children spend on media. But now it’s up an hour.”

The report is based on a survey of more than 2,000 students in grades 3 to 12 that was conducted from October 2008 to May 2009.

On average, young people spend about two hours a day consuming media on a mobile device, the study found. They spend almost another hour on “old” content like television or music delivered through newer pathways like the Web site Hulu or iTunes. Youths now spend more time listening to or watching media on their cellphones, or playing games, than talking on them.

“I use it as my alarm clock, because it has an annoying ringtone that doesn’t stop until you turn it off,” Francisco Sepulveda said of his phone. “At night, I can text or watch something on YouTube until I fall asleep. It lets me talk on the phone and watch a video at the same time, or listen to music while I send text messages.”

Francisco’s mother, Janet Sepulveda, bought his phone, a Sidekick LX, a year ago when the computer was not working, to ensure that he had Internet access for school. But schoolwork has not been the issue.

“I’d say he uses it about 2 percent for homework and 98 percent for other stuff,” she said. “At the beginning, I would take the phone at 10 p.m. and tell him he couldn’t use it anymore. Now he knows that if he’s not complying with what I want, I can suspend his service for a week or two. That’s happened.”

The Kaiser study found that more than 7 in 10 youths have a TV in their bedroom, and about a third have a computer with Internet access in their bedroom.

“Parents never knew as much as they thought they did about what their kids are doing,” Mr. Roberts said, “but now we’ve created a world where they’re removed from us that much more.”

The study found that young people used less media in homes with rules like no television during meals or in the bedroom, or with limits on media time.

Victoria Rideout, a Kaiser vice president who is lead author of the study, said that although it has become harder for parents to control what their children do, they can still have an effect.

“I don’t think parents should feel totally disempowered,” she said. “They can still make rules, and it still makes a difference.”

In Kensington, Md., Kim Calinan let her baby son, Trey, watch Baby Einstein videos, and soon moved him on to “Dora the Explorer.”

“By the time he was 4, he had all these math and science DVDs, and he was clicking through by himself, and he learned to read and do math early,” she said. “So if we’d had the conversation then, I would have said they were great educational tools.”

But now that Trey is 9 and wild about video games, Ms. Calinan feels differently.

Last year, she sensed that video games were displacing other interests and narrowing his social interactions. After realizing that Trey did not want to sign up for any after-school activities that might cut into his game time, Ms. Calinan limited his screen time to an hour and half a day on weekends only.

So last Wednesday, Trey came home and read a book — but said he was looking forward to the weekend, when he could play his favorite video game.

Many experts believe that media use is changing youthful attitudes.

“It’s changed young people’s assumptions about how to get an answer to a question,” Mr. Roberts said. “People can put out a problem, whether it’s ‘Where’s a good bar?’ or ‘What if I’m pregnant?’ and information pours in from all kinds of sources.”

The heaviest media users, the study found, are black and Hispanic youths and “tweens,” or those ages 11 to 14.

Even during the survey, media use was changing.

From Ponce de Leon Bay on the Southwest Coast down across Florida Bay to Lower Matecumbe in the Florida Keys — day after day, dead fish. Floating in the marina at Flamingo in Everglades National Park alone he counted more than 400 snook and 400 tarpon.

“I was so shook up, I couldn’t sleep,” said Frezza, an ecologist for Audubon of Florida and an expert flats fisherman. “Millions and millions of pilchards, threadfin herring, mullet. Ladyfish took it really bad. Whitewater Bay is just a graveyard.”

The business representatives were charged with attempting to pay bribes to win lucrative overseas contracts worth $15 million.

The defendants were snared in an undercover operation run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in which two undercover agents posed as representatives of the ministry of defense of an unidentified African nation.

Under the alleged scheme, the supply company executives agreed to submit invoices inflated by 20 percent to cover agreed upon bribes and kickbacks that were to be paid to the middlemen and the minister of defense.