ACLU: Border Agents Violate Constitution When They Search Electronic Devices
May 2nd, 2019Via: NPR:
The American Civil Liberties Union says it has uncovered new evidence that federal border agents are violating the Constitution when they search travelers’ electronic devices.
The ACLU, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sued the federal government in 2017, alleging that its “warrantless and suspicionless searches” of electronic devices at the U.S. ports of entry violated the First and Fourth amendments. Lawyers now say that, through depositions of border agents, they have learned that the scope of the warrantless searches has expanded far beyond the mere enforcement of immigration and customs laws.
Border officers have the authority to search belongings for contraband, or to determine who is admissible into the U.S., the ACLU said. But agents now “claim authority to search travelers’ devices for general law enforcement purposes, such as looking for potential evidence of illegal activity beyond violations of immigration and customs laws,” plaintiffs wrote.
“That claimed authority extends to enforcing ‘hundreds’ of federal laws, including tax, bankruptcy, environmental, and consumer protection laws. Defendants’ asserted purposes for conducting warrantless or suspicionless device searches also include intelligence gathering or advancing pre-existing investigations.”
These practices violate the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the ACLU wrote. They also violate the First Amendment, attorneys said, because people traveling to the U.S. might censor themselves, knowing that a border agent might look through their phone.
In a filing this week in the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, the lawyers asked the government to rule in their favor without a trial.
“Let’s get one thing clear,” the ACLU said in a statement. “The government cannot use the pretext of the ‘border’ to make an end run around the Constitution.”
Virgin Orbit
May 1st, 2019Via: The Verge:
Right now, hundreds of space startups are racing to develop newer, smaller rockets, in order to take advantage of the proliferation of smaller satellites within the aerospace industry. Many of these companies want to get to space the old-fashioned way, by making a rocket that takes off vertically from the ground. But one company has eyed another method for getting to space — by launching underneath the wing of a giant airplane.
This is the strategy of Virgin Orbit, the sibling company to Richard Branson’s space tourism venture Virgin Galactic. Virgin Orbit has developed a small rocket called LauncherOne that can put satellites the size of washing machines into orbit. And its launchpad resides at 35,000 feet. Virgin Orbit owns a Boeing 747 airplane, called Cosmic Girl, which carries LauncherOne up into the sky. From there, the rocket will drop from underneath Cosmic Girl’s left wing and then ignite, climbing the rest of the way to orbit.
U.S. Military Stops Releasing Afghanistan War Information
May 1st, 2019Via: AP:
Amid a battlefield stalemate in Afghanistan , the U.S. military has stopped releasing information often cited to measure progress in America’s longest war, calling it of little value in fighting the Taliban insurgency.
The move fits a trend of less information being released about the war in recent years, often at the insistence of the Afghan government, which had previously stopped the U.S. military from disclosing the number of Afghans killed in battle as well as overall attrition within the Afghan army.
The latest clampdown also aligns with President Donald Trump’s complaint that the U.S. gives away too much war information, although there is no evidence that this had any influence on the latest decision.
A government watchdog agency that monitors the U.S. war effort, now in its 18th year, said in a report to Congress on Wednesday that the U.S. military command in Kabul is no longer producing “district control data,” which shows the number of Afghan districts — and the percentage of their population — controlled by the government compared to the Taliban.
With Trump’s Assistance, Oswald’s CIA Files Remain Classified
May 1st, 2019Agent Oswald.
Dark Journalist: “He was, without a doubt, an intelligence asset for the CIA.”
Must Read: JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass
Via: Just Security:
I awaited the promise of the JFK Records Act of 1992: full disclosure. The law, passed unanimously by Congress, mandated the release of all of the government’s JFK files within 25 years, that is to say, by 2017. The promise, alas, was betrayed by President Trump. He used the one loophole provided in the law, allowing for continued postponement of release of assassination records. Trump, the conspiracy theorist, certified that disclosure would cause “an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations” and that “the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
In his October 2017 White House directive, Trump stated he had “no choice” (curious phrase) but to allow federal agencies to continue to withhold thousands of JFK assassination files from public view– including the Joannides files. In April 2018, the National Archives reported that 15,834 assassination records remain redacted, most of them by CIA and FBI. These files will remain sealed until April 2021 at the earliest.
U.S. Searches of Phones, Laptops at Airports Rising
May 1st, 2019Via: AP:
U.S. government searches of travelers’ cellphones and laptops at airports and border crossings nearly quadrupled since 2015 and were being done for reasons beyond customs and immigration enforcement, according to papers filed Tuesday in a federal lawsuit that claims scouring the electronic devices without a warrant is unconstitutional.
The government has vigorously defended the searches, which rose to 33,295 in fiscal 2018, as a critical tool to protect America. But the newly filed documents claim the scope of the warrantless searches has expanded to assist in enforcement of tax, bankruptcy, environmental and consumer protection laws, gather intelligence and advance criminal investigations.
Agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement consider requests from other government agencies in determining whether to search travelers’ electronic devices, the court papers said. They added that agents are searching the electronic devices of not only targeted individuals but their associates, friends and relatives.
The U.S. Has a Battery Problem in the Race for Electric Car Supremacy
April 30th, 2019Via: Bloomberg:
The U.S. push to challenge China’s dominance in the production and sale of electric vehicles has at least one weak link: Most of the raw materials needed to make the batteries are dug elsewhere.
Both Chinese and U.S.-based companies have invested heavily in lithium mining projects in Chile, Australia and Argentina, some of the world’s top producing nations. But unlike the U.S., Chinese companies have also invested at home, with the Asian nation producing almost eight times more lithium domestically than the U.S.
FCC Approves SpaceX’s Plans to Fly Internet-Beaming Satellites in Lower Orbit
April 30th, 2019In case you’re not being hit with enough EM smog already…
Via: The Verge:
The Federal Communications Commission has approved SpaceX’s request to fly a large swath of its future internet-beaming satellites at a lower orbit than originally planned. The approval was a major regulatory hurdle the company needed to clear in order to start launching its first operational satellites from Florida next month.
In November, SpaceX sent a request to the FCC to partially revise plans for the company’s satellite internet constellation, known as Starlink. Under SpaceX’s original agreement with the commission, the company had permission to launch 4,425 Starlink satellites into orbits that ranged between 1,110 to 1,325 kilometers up. But then SpaceX decided it wanted to fly 1,584 of those satellites in different orbits, thanks to what it had learned from its first two test satellites, TinTin A and B. Instead of flying them at 1,150 kilometers, the company now wants to fly them much lower at 550 kilometers.
And now the FCC is on board. “This approval underscores the FCC’s confidence in SpaceX’s plans to deploy its next-generation satellite constellation and connect people around the world with reliable and affordable broadband service,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement.
SpaceX argues that by operating satellites at this orbit, the Starlink constellation will have much lower latency in signal, cutting down transmission time to just 15 milliseconds.
Norway: Whale Possibly Trained by Russian Military
April 30th, 2019The U.S. has been doing this sort of thing for many decades: United States Navy Marine Mammal Program.
Via: Guardian:
Marine experts in Norway believe they have stumbled upon a white whale that was trained by the Russian navy as part of a programme to use underwater mammals as a special ops force.
Fishermen in waters near the small Norwegian fishing village of Inga reported last week that a white beluga whale wearing a strange harness had begun to harass their fishing boats.
“We were going to put out nets when we saw a whale swimming between the boats,” fisherman Joar Hesten told Norwegian broadcaster NRK. “It came over to us, and as it approached, we saw that it had some sort of harness on it.”
The strange behaviour of the whale, which was actively seeking out the vessels and trying to pull straps and ropes from the sides of the boats, as well as the fact it was wearing a tight harness which seemed to be for a camera or weapon, raised suspicions among marine experts that the animal had been given military-grade training by neighbouring Russia. Inside the harness, which has now been removed from the whale, were the words “Equipment of St. Petersburg”.
The fisherman said the whale was very tame and seemed used to human beings.
SpaceX’s Unnerving Silence on an Explosive Incident
April 30th, 2019Via: The Atlantic:
The smoke was visible for miles.
The day, April 20, was sunny on the Florida coast, with few clouds. The plumes, thick and glowing orange, rose over the horizon and crawled across the sky. Beachgoers stopped to stare. A photographer for Florida Today, on assignment to cover a surf festival, turned the lens away from the waves and snapped some pictures.
The ashy clouds were coming from Cape Canaveral. The only time you want to see smoke wafting from that vicinity, the site of historic space launches, is after a successful liftoff—and there were no rockets in the sky that day.
The smoke turned out to be from a failed test of a SpaceX spacecraft designed to carry humans to orbit. Strapped to a test stand so it couldn’t fly away, the capsule had ignited its engines. “The initial tests completed successfully, but the final test resulted in an anomaly on the test stand,” SpaceX said in a statement at the time.
The smoke suggested an outcome more serious than an “anomaly”—like a full-blown explosion. But SpaceX wouldn’t say anything else.
A day later, a grainy video, which looked like a recording of a screen, appeared on Twitter. The footage showed what appeared to be the SpaceX capsule, known as Dragon, on the test stand.
For about 10 seconds, everything is still. And then, suddenly, there’s an explosion, and the whole thing is engulfed in flames. Off camera, people exclaim in shock and swear. (No one was near the capsule, so there were no injuries.)
SpaceX declined to verify the authenticity of the video. But this week, NASA sent an internal email warning launch-support employees that they can be fired if they share the video. The message, reported by The Orlando Sentinel, confirmed the footage was real.
Film on Catholic Priests Using Nuns as ‘Sex Slaves’ Pulled
April 30th, 2019Via: AFP:
A hit documentary about how some Catholic priests allegedly abused nuns in different parts of the world has been pulled from the Franco-German television channel Arte after a priest complained to a German court.
The big-budget media investigation, “Sex Slaves in the Catholic Church”, was broadcast in March and has been sold widely internationally since.
Its broadcast came weeks after Pope Francis admitted that some rogue priests had used nuns as “sexual slaves” and that the Vatican had to dissolve a French order because its founder was preying on its sisters.
The Vatican’s women’s magazine, Women Church World, also reported that some nuns had been forced into having abortions.
