Slain MassMutual Executive Held Wall Street “Trade Secrets”
December 9th, 2014In other news: “Riddles” Surround 36th Dead Banker Of The Year.
Via: Wall Street On Parade:
On Thursday, November 20, 2014, the body of 54-year old Melissa Millan, a divorced mother of two school-age children, was found at approximately 8 p.m. along a jogging path running parallel to Iron Horse Boulevard in Simsbury, Connecticut. A motorist had spotted the body and called the police.
According to the coroner’s report, it was determined that Millan’s death was attributable to a stab wound to the chest with an “edged weapon.” Police ruled the death a homicide, a rarity for this town where residents feel safe enough to routinely jog by themselves on the same path used by Millan.
Information has now emerged that Millan had access to highly sensitive data on bank profits resulting from the collection of life insurance proceeds from her insurance company employer on the death of bank workers – data that a Federal regulator of banks has characterized as “trade secrets.”
…
Four of Wall Street’s largest banks are the largest owners of BOLI according to December 31, 2013 data from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), holding a combined total of $68.1 billion. The four banks’ individual BOLI assets are as follows as of the end of last year:
Bank of America $22.7 billion
Wells Fargo 18.7 billion
JPMorgan Chase 17.9 billion
Citigroup 8.8 billion
The BOLI assets, however, support a far greater amount of life insurance coverage in force on the workers’ lives – potentially as much as a ten to one ratio – meaning that just these four banks could be holding $681 billion on the lives of their current and past employees.
Since details on the number of workers insured and the annual amounts that big Wall Street banks report as profits on the death of their current and former workers are closely guarded secrets, in March of this year Wall Street On Parade wrote to the regulator of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), asking for BOLI information under the Freedom of Information Act.
Because JPMorgan Chase has experienced a number of tragic deaths among young workers in their 30s this year, we asked the OCC for the number of deaths from 2008 through March 21, 2014 on which JPMorgan Chase collected death benefits; the total face amount of BOLI life insurance in force at JPMorgan; the total number of former and current employees of JPMorgan Chase who are insured under these policies; and any peer studies showing the same data comparing JPMorgan Chase with Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup.
The OCC responded to our request on April 18, 2014, advising that they did have documents responsive to our request but that all documents were going to be withheld because they were “privileged or contains trade secrets, or commercial or financial information, furnished in confidence, that relates to the business, personal, or financial affairs of any person,” or relate to “a record contained in or related to an examination.”
Research Credit: pookie
The Vending Machine Of The Future Is Here, And It Knows Who You Are
December 9th, 2014I haven’t bought anything from a vending machine since 2005. Then again, I haven’t been to a town with traffic lights in nearly two years.
In any event, here’s one for your bulging Not-The-Onion file folder.
Via: Telegraph:
The Luce X2 Touch TV vending machine, which was debuted to industry professionals in Hertfordshire in October, is claimed to be the first in the world to use facial recognition technology.
The machines are able to identify and greet a user, remember a person’s preferences and even refuse to vend a certain product based on a shopper’s age, medical record, dietary requirements or purchase history.
Mesosphere Data Center OS
December 9th, 2014Via: TechCrunch:
Besides the funding though, the bigger news was the announcement of their first data center operating system (DCOS). This is a new kind of operating system that operates on the scale of the entire data center, which means instead of controlling a single machine, the operating system sits on top of the data center and enables administrators to treat all of the resources in the data center as a single, virtual entity. This allows for much simpler management and lets administrators spin servers and software up and down as needs require much more quickly than with current methods.
Give NSA Unlimited Access to Digital Data, Says Federal Judge
December 8th, 2014Via: Computerworld:
The U.S. National Security Agency should have an unlimited ability to collect digital information in the name of protecting the country against terrorism and other threats, an influential federal judge said during a debate on privacy.
“I think privacy is actually overvalued,” Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, said during a conference about privacy and cybercrime in Washington on Thursday.
“Much of what passes for the name of privacy is really just trying to conceal the disreputable parts of your conduct,” Posner added. “Privacy is mainly about trying to improve your social and business opportunities by concealing the sorts of bad activities that would cause other people not to want to deal with you.”
Congress should limit the NSA’s use of the data it collects — for example, not giving information about minor crimes to law enforcement agencies — but it shouldn’t limit what information the NSA sweeps up and searches, Posner said. “If the NSA wants to vacuum all the trillions of bits of information that are crawling through the electronic worldwide networks, I think that’s fine,” he said.
In the name of national security, U.S. lawmakers should give the NSA “carte blanche,” Posner added. “Privacy interests should really have very little weight when you’re talking about national security,” he said. “The world is in an extremely turbulent state — very dangerous.”
Energy Crisis: Turn the Wind Turbines Off When the Electricity Prices Get Too Low
December 7th, 2014What we’re dealing with in New Zealand is sort of mini, South Pacific version of Enron.
—New Zealand: Commercial Solar Boom Underway
Most people in New Zealand haven’t heard of Enron’s numerous and insidious scams, but they should familiarize themselves with what happened:
Before passage of the deregulation law, there had been only one Stage 3 rolling blackout declared. After passage, California had a total of 38 blackouts defined as Stage 3 rolling blackouts, until federal regulators intervened during June 2001. These blackouts occurred mainly as a result of a poorly designed market system that was manipulated by traders and marketers. Enron traders were revealed as intentionally encouraging the removal of power from the market during California’s energy crisis by encouraging suppliers to shut down plants to perform unnecessary maintenance, as documented in recordings made at the time. These acts contributed to the need for rolling blackouts, which adversely affected many businesses dependent upon a reliable supply of electricity, and inconvenienced a large number of retail consumers. This scattered supply increased the price exponentially, and Enron traders were thus able to sell power at premium prices, sometimes up to a factor of 20x its normal peak value.
And now…
Via: Electricity Authority New Zealand (.pdf):
Breach alleged of TrustPower Limited
Alleged breach reported by the system operator.
TrustPower reduced output at its Tararua wind farm from around 80MW to 0MW between 02:27 and 02:41on 21 May 2014 due to low prices, without notifying Transpower New Zealand Limited as the system operator. TrustPower denied the breaches.
More: Meridian Removed Reserves During Grid Emergency Without Physical Justification
A Charred Eye Socket Provides Proof That 43 Missing Mexico Students Are Dead
December 7th, 2014Via: McClatchyDC:
One of Mexico’s most horrific mass murders in recent decades has come to rest, in part, on a fragment of a charred human eye socket.
Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said Sunday that Austrian forensic experts have confirmed that the bone fragment is from one of 43 student teachers who went missing 10 weeks ago in a heinous crime that has shaken the country.
“The remains found at one of the scenes coincide with the genetic profile of Alexander Mora Venancio,” Murillo Karam said, naming one of the students.
The World Cracks Down on the Internet
December 6th, 2014Via: The New Yorker:
On Thursday, Freedom House published its fifth annual report on Internet freedom around the world. As in years past, China is again near the bottom of the rankings, which include sixty-five countries. Only Syria and Iran got worse scores, while Iceland and Estonia fared the best. (The report was funded partly by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the United States Department of State, Google, and Yahoo, but Freedom House described the report as its “sole responsibility” and said that it doesn’t necessarily represent its funders’ views.)
China’s place in the rankings won’t come as a surprise to many people. The notable part is that the report suggests that, when it comes to Internet freedom, the rest of the world is gradually becoming more like China and less like Iceland. The researchers found that Internet freedom declined in thirty-six of the sixty-five countries they studied, continuing a trajectory they have noticed since they began publishing the reports in 2010.
Report: Freedom House
Afghanistan: The Making of a Narco State
December 6th, 2014Oh yes, the big “mystery” as to why the Taliban cut off opium production baffles Rolling Stone.
9/11 scratches more itches than anyone in the corporate media could possibly imagine. I’d say that one of main purposes of 9/11 was to restart the flow of hundreds of billions of dollars of heroin money into the global financial system.
Mission accomplished.
I suppose that readers are supposed to believe that all of this is the result of incompetence, bad luck and coincidences.
Via: Rolling Stone:
Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan is named for the wide river that runs through its provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, a low-slung city of shrubby roundabouts and glass-fronted market blocks. When I visited in April, there was an expectant atmosphere, like that of a whaling town waiting for the big ships to come in. In the bazaars, the shops were filled with dry goods, farming machinery and motorcycles. The teahouses, where a man could spend the night on the carpet for the price of his dinner, were packed with migrant laborers, or nishtgar, drawn from across the southern provinces, some coming from as far afield as Iran and Pakistan. The schools were empty; in war-torn districts, police and Taliban alike had put aside their arms. It was harvest time.
Across the province, hundreds of thousands of people were taking part in the largest opium harvest in Afghanistan’s history. With a record 224,000 hectares under cultivation this year, the country produced an estimated 6,400 tons of opium, or around 90 percent of the world’s supply. The drug is entwined with the highest levels of the Afghan government and the economy in a way that makes the cocaine business in Escobar-era Colombia look like a sideshow. The share of cocaine trafficking and production in Colombia’s GDP peaked at six percent in the late 1980s; in Afghanistan today, according to U.N. estimates, the opium industry accounts for 15 percent of the economy, a figure that is set to rise as the West withdraws. “Whatever the term narco state means, if there is a country to which it applies, it is Afghanistan,” says Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies illicit economies in conflict zones. “It is unprecedented in history.”
…
In the summer of 2000, the country’s fundamentalist leaders announced a total ban on opium cultivation, “a decision by the Taliban that we welcome,” as former Secretary of State Colin Powell said. It remains a mystery why the Taliban’s reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, made the call. But the Taliban enforced his decision with their customary harshness. In Helmand, those caught planting poppy were beaten and then paraded through the village with their faces blackened with motor oil. The following spring, the only significant opium harvest was in the corner of the northeast that was still controlled by the Taliban’s rivals, the Northern Alliance. Opium production fell from an estimated 3,276 tons in 2000 to 185 tons in 2001.
Then history intervened. After the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the Bush administration, seeking a “light footprint,” partnered with anti-Taliban warlords, including the Northern Alliance, to take control of the country. In its quest for vengeance, the U.S. allowed figures accused of being involved in grave civil-war-era human rights abuses to come to power; these included people like Mohammad Qasim Fahim and Abdul Rab Rassoul Sayyaf, whose rival mujahedeen factions shelled Kabul to rubble and who would later become the country’s vice president and a leading member of Parliament, respectively.
These were the first in a series of decisions that helped revive the Afghan opium economy in a drastically expanded form. Within six months of the U.S. invasion, the warlords we backed were running the opium trade, and the spring of 2002 saw a bumper harvest of 3,400 tons. Meanwhile, the international community and the Afghan government paid lip service to counternarcotics, with the latter adopting an official strategy that fantasized about opium production being reduced by 75 percent in five years and eliminated entirely within 10.
Operation Auroragold: How the NSA Hacks Cellphone Networks Worldwide
December 6th, 2014Via: First Look:
According to documents contained in the archive of material provided to The Intercept by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA has spied on hundreds of companies and organizations internationally, including in countries closely allied to the United States, in an effort to find security weaknesses in cellphone technology that it can exploit for surveillance.
The documents also reveal how the NSA plans to secretly introduce new flaws into communication systems so that they can be tapped into—a controversial tactic that security experts say could be exposing the general population to criminal hackers.
Codenamed AURORAGOLD, the covert operation has monitored the content of messages sent and received by more than 1,200 email accounts associated with major cellphone network operators, intercepting confidential company planning papers that help the NSA hack into phone networks.
One high-profile surveillance target is the GSM Association, an influential U.K.-headquartered trade group that works closely with large U.S.-based firms including Microsoft, Facebook, AT&T, and Cisco, and is currently being funded by the U.S. government to develop privacy-enhancing technologies.
Karsten Nohl, a leading cellphone security expert and cryptographer who was consulted by The Intercept about details contained in the AURORAGOLD documents, said that the broad scope of information swept up in the operation appears aimed at ensuring virtually every cellphone network in the world is NSA accessible.
Research Credit: winstonsmith
UK to Establish £15m Permanent Mid East Military Base
December 6th, 2014Via: BBC:
Britain is to establish its first permanent military base in the Middle East since it formally withdrew from the region in 1971.
The base, at the Mina Salman Port in Bahrain, will host ships including destroyers and aircraft carriers.
The UK said it was an “expansion of the Royal Navy’s footprint” and would “reinforce stability” in the Gulf.
Bahrain will pay most of the £15m ($23m) needed to build the base, with the British paying ongoing costs.
UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, who signed the deal at a security conference in Manama, Bahrain, said it was “just one example of our growing partnership with Gulf partners to tackle shared strategic and regional threats”.
