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Vangelakos, 45, his wife Cathy and their three children are the only residents in the 32-story Oasis I condo on the east edge of downtown Fort Myers.

The 45-year-old Weehawken, N.J., firefighter bought the condo from Miami-based The Related Group for $430,000 and closed on it in November. He planned to make it a vacation getaway and eventually his full-time residence when he retires in four years.

But prices have fallen hard since the real estate bubble burst in early 2006. Only a handful of those who put down deposits on the tower’s units actually closed on the deal. Those who did have swapped their Oasis I units for condos in Oasis II next door.

Vangelakos didn’t, because he was unable to convince his lender to agree to the swap, said Betsy Lu McCoy, vice president and associate corporate counsel for Related.

That leaves the Vangelakos family splitting their time between New Jersey and a creepy, surreal life in Oasis I.

They’re the only ones using a well-appointed clubhouse, but they can’t watch the big plasma TV.

“We haven’t found the remote controls,” Victor said.

Pause for a moment anywhere in the building during the day and the silence is deafening.

At night, Vangelakos said, they often hear people on the grounds or even inside the building itself. It’s not hard to break in one of the many entrances.

Once, late at night, “Somebody banged on our door,” Vanelakos said.

It wouldn’t have been hard to find the person in the otherwise darkened building.
“At night,” he said, “you can see our TV from the street.”

To liquefy the banking system, the Fed drastically expanded its balance sheet, which, as you can see in the chart to the right, has led to an explosion of excess reserves at banks.

For decades they never rose above $10 billion. Now they’re above $700 billion. To understand why this level of excess reserves has some worried about hyperinflation, it helps to understand what they are.

The Fed requires banks to keep a certain level of assets in reserve against deposits, either cash in the vault or reserves held at the Fed. Reserves held over this required amount are referred to as “excess” reserves which banks are free to lend out.

When banks lend money into the economy, the money borrowed typically ends up as a deposit in another bank. Say I borrow to buy a house; the mortgage I get from the bank is money I give to the seller, who then deposits the cash in his own bank.

Lent money turns into a new deposit, which turns into more lent money, which turns into another deposit, and so on. As the supply of money multiplies, you get inflation. If it multiplies too quickly, you get hyperinflation. The multiplication of money that might come from banks lending out over $700 billion of excess reserves is the stuff of inflationary nightmares.

But banks aren’t lending it out. Why not? As Dudley points out in his speech, it’s because the Fed is now paying them an interest rate.

Before last October, banks lent out all their excess reserves. After all, excess cash in the vault earns the bank no profit. But then Congress gave Ben Bernanke the power to pay interest on excess reserves, which means banks now can earn a return by keeping them on deposit at the Fed. Money that could be lent isn’t, inflation remains a potential threat, not a kinetic one.

But there’s a catch. When the economy recovers banks won’t any longer want to keep their excess reserves on deposit at the Fed, not unless the Fed is willing to pay a much higher interest rate.

Walker Todd of the American Institute of Economic Research argues that “the economy won’t be able to handle the high interest rates the Fed will be forced to charge in order to keep excess reserves immobilized in its vault.”

The Fed argues it has other tools to shrink its balance sheet when the time is right. For one, its emergency lending facilities are priced high enough such that banks will stop drawing on them when the economy recovers. But even after its lending facilities are wound down the Fed acknowledges the level of excess reserves will still be huge. To keep them immobilized will require substantially higher rates.

The card will be offered to members of the public in the Greater Manchester area from the end of this year.

Ministers plan to launch the £30 biometric ID card nationwide in 2011 or 2012 – but it will not be compulsory.

Opposition spokesmen said it was a “colossal waste of money” and civil liberty groups said it was “as costly to our pockets as to our privacy”.

Ministers say the card, which follows the launch of the foreign national ID card, will provide an easy way of safely proving identity.

They say this system, backed up by a national identity register, will help combat identity fraud, crime and terrorism.

The card is very similar in look to a UK driving licence but holds more data, including two fingerprints and a photograph encoded on a chip.

Ghulam Nabi Azad, the Health and Family Welfare Minister, has called for the country to redouble its efforts to bring electricity to all of its huge rural population.

The introduction of the electric light and television sets to those vast areas that still did not have them would discourage procreation, he argued.

“If there is electricity in every village, then people will watch TV till late at night and then fall asleep. They won’t get a chance to produce children,” Mr Azad said. “When there is no electricity there is nothing else to do but produce babies.”

Chairman of the US House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Edolphus Towns said the documents had been discovered with file-sharing program LimeWire.

Other sensitive documents found with the peer-to-peer program included FBI files, medical records and social security numbers.

Mr Town used evidence of the leaks to argue for the regulation of file-sharing programs.

“As far as I am concerned, the days of self-regulation should be over for the file-sharing industry,” Mr Towns said.

“In the last administration, the Federal Trade Commission took a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach to the file sharing software industry.

“I hope the new administration is revisiting that approach.”

Mr Towns, a New York Democrat, said he planned to introduce legislation that would ban unsecure peer-to-peer software from all government and contractor computers and networks.

He also planned the request Federal Trade Commission investigate whether inadequate safeguards on file-sharing software like LimeWire constituted an unfair trade practice.

LimeWire founder and chairman Mark Gorton defended his company, saying any inadvertent sharing had been fixed in the newest version of the software and steps had been taken to put the user more in control.

“Are we perfect? No, (but) we have made enormous strides in the last few years,” he told the committee.

“In order for a LimeWire user to change their default settings to enable document sharing, they have to click nine times and disregard three warnings.”

Evidence of the leaked documents was given to the committee by online security and intelligence company Tiversa.

…

Peer-to-peer, or P2P, is a type of network in which files are stored on many computers at once rather than one central server. It is used by most current file-sharing programs.

This is not the first time Tiversa has revealed sensitive documents found on file-sharing networks.

Lawyers bringing the case against Jeppesen UK on behalf of the former Guantánamo Bay detainee, Binyam Mohamed, claimed last night the climbdown had wide-ranging legal implications that could help expose which countries and governments knew the CIA was using their air bases to spirit terrorist suspects around the world.

Jeppesen UK, a division of the Jeppesen Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Boeing, is alleged to have provided a range of services that allowed planes owned by shell companies operating on behalf of the CIA to fly suspected terrorists to “black sites”.

In this regard, it is worth noting that in January 2009, a piece of legislation entitled the National Emergency Centers Establishment Act (HR 645) was introduced in the US Congress.The bill calls for the establishment of six national emergency centers in major regions in the US to be located on existing military installations, which could be used to quarantine people in the case of a public health emergency or forced vaccination program.

The bill goes far beyond previous legislation (including H.R 5122). The stated purpose of the “national emergency centers” is to provide “temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance to individuals and families dislocated due to an emergency or major disaster.” In actuality, what we are dealing with are FEMA internment camps. HR 645 states that the camps can be used to “meet other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security.” (Michel Chossudovsky, Preparing for Civil Unrest in America Legislation to Establish Internment Camps on US Military Bases, Global Research, March 2009)

There has been virtually no press coverage of HR 645, which is currently being discussed by several congressional committees. There are no indications that the bill is on its way to being adopted.

These “civilian facilities” on US military bases are to be established in cooperation with the US Military.

Once a person is arrested and interned in a FEMA camp located on a military base, that person would in all likelihood, under a public health emergency, fall under the de facto jurisdiction of the Military: civilian justice and law enforcement including habeas corpus would no longer apply.

HR 645 could be used, were it to be adopted, in the case of public health emergency. It obviously bears a direct relationship to the economic crisis and the likelihood of mass protests across America. It constitutes a further move to militarize civilian law enforcement, repealing the Posse Comitatus Act.

In the words of Rep. Ron Paul:

“…the fusion centers, militarized police, surveillance cameras and a domestic military command is not enough… Even though we know that detention facilities are already in place, they now want to legalize the construction of FEMA camps on military installations using the ever popular excuse that the facilities are for the purposes of a national emergency. With the phony debt-based economy getting worse and worse by the day, the possibility of civil unrest is becoming a greater threat to the establishment. One need only look at Iceland, Greece and other nations for what might happen in the United States next.” (Daily Paul, September 2008, emphasis added)

The circumstances surrounding the death of the consultant, Jack M. Shaw, are “suspicious,” said Edward J. DeFazio, the Hudson County prosecutor. He said it did not appear to be a homicide. “It could be natural, it could be accidental, it could be suicide,” he said, refusing to elaborate. An autopsy is set for Wednesday.

His death, reported by a companion to the authorities at 5:17 p.m., came hours after Dennis Elwell, the mayor of Secaucus, stepped down, becoming the first elected official to quit after being charged in the sprawling political corruption case.

Mr. Shaw, 61, once an adviser to some of New Jersey’s most influential Democrats, more recently worked mainly for developers doing business in Hudson County. A top client was Metrovest Equities, developer of the Beacon, a 10-building apartment complex on the site of the former Jersey City Medical Center.

But that type of work appears to have led him into the cross hairs of federal prosecutors.

He was charged on Thursday with accepting $10,000 cash from Solomon Dwek, the federal informant at the center of the corruption scandal, who was posing as a real estate developer seeking political help for his projects.

Prosecutors said Mr. Shaw proposed that Mr. Dwek make $10,000 in donations to the re-election campaign of the Jersey City mayor, Jerramiah T. Healy, in exchange for approvals.

According to a federal complaint, Mr. Shaw later told Mr. Dwek that he had given the money to Mr. Healy.

Aides to Mr. Healy, who has not been charged and has denied any wrongdoing, did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday night.

Prosecutors say that Mr. Shaw also introduced Mr. Dwek to several other officials who were eventually charged.

Mr. Shaw was a longtime Democratic operative who cut his teeth working for Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago and later was a campaign aide to Gov. Jim Florio.

The data, which was removed after Threat Level disclosed the situation to the NYSE, included several directories of files containing logs; server names; IP addresses; lists of hardware; lists of software versions running on the network; and configuration and patch histories, including what patches have not yet been installed. It was all available on a publicly accessible, unprotected FTP server maintained by EMC, a company that sells storage systems and managed services to the NYSE and other companies.

The Copyright Office is considering a request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to legalize the widespread practice of jailbreaking, in which iPhone owners hack their devices to accept software that hasn’t been approved for distribution through the iPhone App Store. Apple made the claim in comments filed last week with the agency.

The company’s filing explained that jailbreaking could allow hackers to altering the iPhone’s BBP — the “baseband processor” software, which enables a connection to cell phone towers.

By tinkering with this code, “a local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands (such as a denial of service attack) that could crash the tower software, rendering the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data,” Apple wrote the government. “Taking control of the BBP software would be much the equivalent of getting inside the firewall of a corporate computer — to potentially catastrophic result.

“The technological protection measures were designed into the iPhone precisely to prevent these kinds of pernicious activities, and if granted, the jailbreaking exemption would open the door to them,” Apple added.

Threat Level had no idea the iPhone was so dangerous. We’re gratified that Apple locked down this potential weapon of mass disruption before hackers could unleash cybarmageddon. This also explains why Apple rejected the official Google Voice App for the iPhone this week. We thought it was because Google Voice posed a threat to AT&T’s exclusivity deal with Apple. Now we know it threatened national security.

At stake for Apple is the closed business model it has enjoyed since 2007, when the iPhone debuted. More than 30 million phones have been sold. Apple has told the Copyright Office that its locked-down platform is what made the iPhone’s success possible.

The EFF has asked the regulators for the DMCA exemption, (.pdf) which would allow consumers to run any app on the phone, including those not authorized by Apple.

Fred von Lohmann, the EFF attorney who made the request, said Apple’s latest claims are preposterous. During a May public hearing on the issue in Palo Alto, California, he told regulators there were as many as a million unauthorized, jailbroken phones.

In an interview Tuesday, he said he suspected those phones have not been used to destroy mobile phone towers. “As far as I know, nothing like that has ever happened,” he said.

He added that, if Apple’s argument was correct, the open-source Android phone from Google on T-Mobile networks would also be a menace to society. ”This kind of theoretical threat,” von Lohmann said, “is more FUD than truth.”

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 says “no person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” But under the law, every three years the Librarian of Congress and the Copyright Office must consider the public’s requests for exemptions to that anti-circumvention language.