cryptogon.com

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

Efforts to reach Mr. Cheney through relatives and associates were unsuccessful.

…

The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.

An intelligence agency spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, declined on Saturday to comment on the report of Mr. Cheney’s role.

…

Members of Congress have differed on the significance of the program, whose details remained secret and which even some Democrats have said was properly classified. Most of those interviewed, however, have said that it was an important activity that should have been disclosed to the intelligence committees.

Intelligence and Congressional officials have said the unidentified program did not involve the C.I.A. interrogation program and did not involve domestic intelligence activities. They have said the program was started by the counterterrorism center at the C.I.A. shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but never became fully operational, involving planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year.

In the tense months after 9/11, when Bush administration officials believed new Qaeda attacks could occur at any moment, intelligence officials brainstormed about radical countermeasures. It was in that atmosphere that the unidentified program was devised and deliberately concealed from Congress, officials said.

Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House intelligence committee, said last week that he believed Congress would have approved of the program only in the angry and panicky days after 9/11, on 9/12, he said, but not later, after fears and tempers had begun to cool.

One intelligence official, who would speak about the classified program only on condition of anonymity, said there was no resistance inside the C.I.A. to Mr. Panetta’s decision to end the program last month.

The FDIC is concerned that standing behind CIT debt would put taxpayer money at risk because the company’s credit quality is worsening, said people familiar with the regulator’s thinking who declined to be identified because the talks are private. The FDIC has backed $274 billion in bond sales under its Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program since Nov. 25.

“Skadden is one of the principal law firms representing CIT,” Curt Ritter, a spokesman for New York-based CIT, said in an e-mail. “They represent the firm on a wide variety of corporate matters. CIT will not comment on any specific aspect of their engagement.”

The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? Or both?

These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — informally known as the United States’ Science Czar. In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man now firmly in control of science policy in this country wrote that:

* Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;

* The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;

* Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;

* People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.

* A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.

Impossible, you say? That must be an exaggeration or a hoax. No one in their right mind would say such things.

Well, I hate to break the news to you, but it is no hoax, no exaggeration. John Holdren really did say those things, and this report contains the proof. Below you will find photographs, scans, and transcriptions of pages in the book Ecoscience, co-authored in 1977 by John Holdren and his close colleagues Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich. The scans and photos are provided to supply conclusive evidence that the words attributed to Holdren are unaltered and accurately transcribed.

This report was originally inspired by this article in FrontPage magazine, which covers some of the same information given here. But that article, although it contained many shocking quotes from John Holdren, failed to make much of an impact on public opinion. Why not? Because, as I discovered when discussing the article with various friends, there was no proof that the quotes were accurate — so most folks (even those opposed to Obama’s policies) doubted their veracity, because the statements seemed too inflammatory to be true. In the modern era, it seems, journalists have lost all credibility, and so are presumed to be lying or exaggerating unless solid evidence is offered to back up the claims. Well, this report contains that evidence.

The patent calls for a large fleet of specially equipped ships which would mix warm water from the ocean surface with colder water down below, according to five new patents that include Microsoft’s chairman as a co-inventor. That could then reduce or perhaps eliminate the heat-driven condensation which hurricanes feed upon, thus significantly reducing their intensity.

Patent-watcher “theodp” first spotted the new patent filings, and told TechFlash that the scheme reminded him of something Mr. Burns might have concocted in “The Simpsons” — if the fictional industrialist hadn’t already blown his master plan on blocking out the sun.

The hurricane-stopper plan apparently hatched from a meeting of Intellectual Ventures, a patent house which regularly gathers scientists and technologists to brainstorm together. TechFlash notes that the official filings came through an Intellectual Ventures affiliate, Searete LLC.

Doctors tracking the pandemic say they see a pattern in hospital reports from Glasgow to Melbourne and from Santiago to New York. People infected with the bug who have a body mass index greater than 40, deemed morbidly obese, suffer respiratory complications that are harder to treat and can be fatal.

With the new virus on a collision course with the obesity epidemic, the World Health Organization says it’s gathering statistics to confirm and understand this development. Drugmaker Roche Holding AG is combing through studies to determine whether heavier people should get bigger doses of its Tamiflu antiviral.

“Morbid obesity is one of the most common findings turning up in severely ill patients,” said Nikki Shindo, who is leading the investigation of swine flu patients at the WHO in Geneva. “It’s a huge problem.”

“Here it is,” Medvedev told reporters today in L’Aquila, Italy, after a summit of the Group of Eight nations. “You can see it and touch it.”

The coin, which bears the words “unity in diversity,” was minted in Belgium and presented to the heads of G-8 delegations, Medvedev said.

The question of a supranational currency “concerns everyone now, even the mints,” Medvedev said. The test coin “means they’re getting ready. I think it’s a good sign that we understand how interdependent we are.”

Citadel, one of the world’s most successful hedge fund firms, sued a former top executive in its highly successful quantitative trading unit and two others for setting up their own firm — the same firm hired Sergey Aleynikov, the former Goldman Sachs computer programmer accused of stealing secret codes the bank uses to make lucrative, rapid-fire trades in the financial markets.

Chicago-based Citadel, founded by 40-year-old billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin, said in a lawsuit filed Thursday that Mikhail Malyshev, 40, and two other former employees had violated their non-compete clauses by starting their own firm, Teza Technologies.

“This is a case of industrial espionage,” Citadel said in a complaint filed Thursday in Illinois state court in Chicago.

Teza Technologies made headlines this week when it was identified as the firm that had hired Mr. Aleynikov, who was arrested by federal agents last Friday evening for allegedly stealing proprietary, “black box” computer programs that allowed Goldman to “engage in sophisticated high-speed and high-volume trades on various stock and commodities markets.” He has pleaded not guilty to charges of theft of trade secrets and transporting them abroad.

Mr. Malyshev, a Russian emigre with a doctorate in astrophysics from Princeton, left Citadel’s quantitative trading unit in February after the funds he helped run returned about 40 percent last year. Their performance stood out at a time when most hedge funds lost money and Citadel’s flagship portfolios tumbled 50 percent.

Aleynikov, 39, told the agent around 1 a.m. on July 4 that he had logged into Goldman’s computers through remote access from his home and sent encrypted files to a repository server with the URL identifier svn.xp-dev.com, according to a copy of his FBI statement in court files in Manhattan federal court.

Xp-dev.com is registered to London resident Roopinder Singh, who describes himself on a blog linked to the site as a trading systems developer working in London’s financial services industry. The site offers “subversion hosting,” letting users track current and previous versions of programming code and other documents.

Singh told his customers in the blog yesterday that he’d been contacted by “local UK authorities,” who had seized his hard drives to examine them and shut his service down for 45 hours, beginning on July 6, two days after Aleynikov’s arrest.

“It turns out that some idiotic moron a user had uploaded data on to the service that he/she was not authorized to have,” he said, crossing out the words “some idiotic moron.” “This is your basic intellectual property theft case here.”

Singh didn’t immediately respond to phone calls and e- mails. FBI spokesman Jim Margolin and Rebekah Carmichael, a spokeswoman for Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin, declined to comment.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti said at Aleynikov’s arraignment July 4 that the alleged theft is the “most substantial” that the bank can recall.

‘Worth Millions’

“The proprietary code, worth millions of dollars, lets the firm do “sophisticated, high-speed and high-volume trades on various stock and commodities markets,” prosecutors said in court papers. Facciponti said a person misusing the code might be able to “manipulate markets.”

On his personal blog, Singh wrote that he provides his service free and that any code stored there is kept safe and encrypted before being backed up every night “off-site.”

Aleynikov, who holds dual U.S. and Russian citizenship, told the agent the files he sent to Singh’s server “have been not shared with any person or corporation” and that it “was not my intent be involved in any malicious action.”

Facciponti said at the arraignment that Aleynikov transferred the code to a computer server in Germany and that others may have had access to it, a claim that Aleynikov denied in his statement to the Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, Michael McSwain. The prosecutor said the U.S. was investigating whether other code was sent to the server.

Internet records indicate Singh’s Web site is located in Bavaria.

Other Instances

Aleynikov told McSwain he used the server on other instances.

“I have uploaded files to svn.xp-dev.com on multiple occasions over the last couple months,” Aleynikov said in the FBI statement. The phrase, “over the last couple months” is crossed out.

It was unclear if he used the server to store Goldman software or other code.

“The files that are proprietary information of Goldman Sachs has not been shared with any individual or corporation,” Aleynikov repeated near the conclusion of the three-page statement.

In the statement, Aleynikov laid out what had happened from the downloading of the files to their transfer to the server and his retrieval of them from it. He said that on June 5 he “created a tarball in an effort to collect open source work on Goldman Sachs server to which I had an account.”

Tarball

A tar file, which is sometimes called a tarball, is a compressed file.

“I had previously worked on the files,” he said.

He said he encrypted the files, then erased the encryption software and the tarball.

“I then erased the bash history,” he said, referring to a method of recalling commands used in previous computer sessions.

Goldman security measures prevent such deletions, which tipped the firm off to his activities, prosecutors said.

Aleynikov said in his statement that he downloaded the Goldman software to his home computer, his laptop computer and his thumb drive.

“The reason I uploaded to svn.xp-dev.com was because it was not blocked by Goldman Sachs security policy,” Aleynikov wrote. The phrase, “not blocked by Goldman Sachs security policy,” was crossed out and he added: “I wanted to inspect the work later in a more usable environment.”

More Than Intended

Aleynikov said that he later opened the files to inspect them.

“At that point I realized that I downloaded more files than I intended,” he said.

Aleynikov, who lives in New Jersey, was arrested on July 3 after arriving at Liberty International Airport in Newark. He was charged with stealing the trading software and is free on a $750,000 bond.

Teza Technologies LLC, a Chicago-based firm co-founded by a former Citadel Investment Group LLC trader, said after his arrest that it had suspended Aleynikov, who started there on July 2. Aleynikov had told co-workers at Goldman that he was joining a new firm at triple his salary of $400,000 a year.

Michael DuVally, a spokesman for New York-based Goldman, declined to comment.

Aleynikov said Teza wasn’t involved. “I have signed an agreement with my new employer not to bring any unlicensed software,” he said. “I have not violated that agreement.”

Studied Math

Aleynikov studied applied mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Transportation Engineering before transferring to Rutgers University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 1993 and a master’s of science degree, specializing in medical image processing and neural networks, in 1996, according to his profile on the social-networking site LinkedIn.

Before joining Goldman Sachs, he worked for about eight years at IDT Corp., the U.S. vendor of prepaid calling cards, where he led the team responsible for developing routing systems, according to the profile.

His profile on LinkedIn describes him as a vice president in equity strategy at Goldman Sachs and includes two recommendations from colleagues at the firm.

”We may end up averting a crisis. That’s our hope,” said President Barack Obama, who took time away from the G-8 summit in Italy to telephone another summit back home — the 500 state and local health officials meeting to prepare for swine flu’s fall threat.

”We want to make sure we aren’t promoting panic, but we are promoting vigilance and preparation,” Obama said.

Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, told the swine flu summit some H1N1 vaccine should be ready by mid-October.

”Scientists and public health experts forecast that the impact of H1N1 may well worsen in the fall, when the regular flu season hits or even earlier, when schools start to open, which is only five or six weeks away,” she said.

Florida already is planning for such vaccinations, said Dr. Ana M. Viamonte Ros, Florida surgeon general, as she emerged from the summit.

As part of a revision to defamation legislation, the Dail (Irish Parliament) passed legislation creating a new crime of blasphemy. This attack on free speech, debated for several months in Europe, has gone largely unnoticed in the American press.

The text of the legislation is provided at the end of this post.

How does this impact free speech? Just don’t be rude.

* Atheists can be prosecuted for saying that God is imaginary. That causes outrage.
* Pagans can be prosecuted for saying they left Christianity because God is violent and bloodthirsty, promotes genocide, and permits slavery.
* Christians can be prosecuted for saying that Allah is a moon god, or for drawing a picture of Mohammed, or for saying that Islam is a violent religion which breeds terrorists.
* Jews can be prosecuted for saying Jesus isn’t the Messiah.

Is it really THAT big a deal?

Ireland’s Blasphemy Bill not only criminalizes free speech, it also gives the police the authority to confiscate anything deemed “blasphemous”. They may enter and search any premises, with force if needed, upon “reasonable suspicion” that such materials are present.

* The local Freethinkers society, with its copies of Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
* The video store, with copies of The God Who Wasn’t There.
* The history teacher, who uses The Dark Side of Christian History to teach her class.
* The library, with its collection of books deemed blasphemous.
* Even the homeowner who lets the wrong person know he has a copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses could find his door broken in by the Thought Police, his bookshelves ransacked, and his books burning in the front yard!

Satirizing religion in any way, shape, or form, if it “causes outrage”, is now a prosecutable offense in Ireland. Saying anything negative about a religion, if it “causes outrage”, can now be prosecuted as a crime. Just like in Muslim countries.

Witness the return of the Dark Ages.

The text of the legislation:

36. Publication or utterance of blasphemous matter.

(1) A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000. [Amended to €25,000]

(2) For the purposes of this section, a person publishes or utters blasphemous matter if (a) he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and (b) he or she intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.

(3) It shall be a defence to proceedings for an offence under this section for the defendant to prove that a reasonable person would find genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value in the matter to which the offence relates.

37. Seizure of copies of blasphemous statements.

(1) Where a person is convicted of an offence under section 36, the court may issue a warrant (a) authorising any member of the Garda Siochana to enter (if necessary by the use of reasonable force) at all reasonable times any premises (including a dwelling) at which he or she has reasonable grounds for believing that copies of the statement to which the offence related are to be found, and to search those premises and seize and remove all copies of the statement found therein, (b) directing the seizure and removal by any member of the Garda Siochana of all copies of the statement to which the offence related that are in the possession of any person, © specifying the manner in which copies so seized and removed shall be detained and stored by the Garda Siochana.

(2) A member of the Garda Siochana may (a) enter and search any premises, (b) seize, remove and detain any copy of a statement to which an offence under section 36 relates found therein or in the possession of any person, in accordance with a warrant under subsection (1).