Vote All You Want—The Secret Government Won’t Change
October 20th, 2014The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.
—Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time
Via: Boston Globe:
The voters who put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.
But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.
Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.
Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.
Corpus of Data Automatically Shared with Apple by a Standard Installation of OS X Yosemite
October 20th, 2014Via: GitHub:
This repository provides a corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by OS X Yosemite; we’re using this dataset to explore how Yosemite shares user data with Apple.
The provided data was collected using our Net Monitor toolkit; more information regarding usage and methodology is provided below.
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Having read DuckDuckGo’s privacy statements, you might decide to switch Safari’s default search to DuckDuckGo. If we enter a new search in Safari, we can then search the logged data to see who the search terms are actually sent to.
The logs show that a copy of your Safari searches are still sent to Apple, even when selecting DuckDuckGo as your search provider, and ‘Spotlight Suggestions’ are disabled in System Preferences > Spotlight.
Virginia Police Have Been Secretively Stockpiling Private Phone Records
October 20th, 2014Via: Wired:
While revelations from Edward Snowden about the National Security Agency’s massive database of phone records have sparked a national debate about its constitutionality, another secretive database has gone largely unnoticed and without scrutiny.
The database, which affects unknown numbers of people, contains phone records that at least five police agencies in southeast Virginia have been collecting since 2012 and sharing with one another with little oversight. Some of the data appears to have been obtained by police from telecoms using only a subpoena, rather than a court order or probable-cause warrant. Other information in the database comes from mobile phones seized from suspects during an arrest.
The five cities participating in the program, known as the Hampton Roads Telephone Analysis Sharing Network, are Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Chesapeake and Suffolk, according to the memorandum of understanding that established the database. The effort is being led in part by the Peninsula Narcotics Enforcement Task Force, which is responsible for a “telephone analysis room” in the city of Hampton, where the database is maintained.
The unusual and secretive database contains telecom customer subscriber information; records about individual phone calls, such as the numbers dialed, the time the calls were made and their duration; as well as the contents of seized mobile devices. The information is collected and shared among police agencies to enhance analysis and law enforcement intelligence.
U.S. Humanitarian Aid Going to ISIS
October 20th, 2014Via: Daily Beast:
While U.S. warplanes strike at the militants of the so-called Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq, truckloads of U.S. and Western aid has been flowing into territory controlled by the jihadists, assisting them to build their terror-inspiring “Caliphate.”
The aid—mainly food and medical equipment—is meant for Syrians displaced from their hometowns, and for hungry civilians. It is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, European donors, and the United Nations. Whether it continues is now the subject of anguished debate among officials in Washington and European. The fear is that stopping aid would hurt innocent civilians and would be used for propaganda purposes by the militants, who would likely blame the West for added hardship.
Updated Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) – IP Chapter
October 16th, 2014Via: WikiLeaks:
Today, Thursday 16 October 2014, WikiLeaks released a second updated version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Intellectual Property Rights Chapter. The TPP is the world’s largest economic trade agreement that will, if it comes into force, encompass more than 40 per cent of the world’s GDP. The IP Chapter covers topics from pharmaceuticals, patent registrations and copyright issues to digital rights. Experts say it will affect freedom of information, civil liberties and access to medicines globally. The WikiLeaks release comes ahead of a Chief Negotiators’ meeting in Canberra on 19 October 2014, which is followed by what is meant to be a decisive Ministerial meeting in Sydney on 25–27 October.
Despite the wide-ranging effects on the global population, the TPP is currently being negotiated in total secrecy by 12 countries. Few people, even within the negotiating countries’ governments, have access to the full text of the draft agreement and the public, who it will affect most, none at all. Large corporations, however, are able to see portions of the text, generating a powerful lobby to effect changes on behalf of these groups and bringing developing country members reduced force, while the public at large gets no say.
Our Imperial Rulers Are Deranged: Leon Panetta’s Memoir Proves It
October 16th, 2014Via: David Stockman’s Contra Corner:
Which brings us to the question of just what is being “defended” here. It sure isn’t South Korea, which would be obliterated in the event of a nuclear exchange with the North. So then what is it?
The answer is the sacred principle of American “world leadership,” which supposedly gives us a mandate to intervene everywhere and anywhere in the name of preserving the “world order.”
Research Credit: Pookie
Russia: Reduction in Gas Exports to Europe Possible
October 16th, 2014Via: CNBC:
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said Russia will have to reduce gas supplies to Europe if Ukraine steals gas. Pipelines that supply Europe crosses Ukraine en route.
In June, Moscow halted gas supplies to Ukraine due to mounting debts and pricing disagreements.
Disturbance of Russian gas supplies to Europe has happened two times in the past ten years, in 2006 and 2009. A third of Europe’s gas comes from Russia.
New Lithium Ion Batteries Charge 70 Percent in 2 Minutes
October 16th, 2014Via: cNet:
The freedom to hold computers in our hands, pop wireless headphones in our ears and pilot drones through our backyards is all brought to us by batteries — especially rechargeable lithium ion batteries. The portable powerhouses are a critical component of our march toward tech mobility, yet most require hours of being plugged in to wall outlets to achieve a full charge.
A brand-new kind of battery to come out of the labs of scientists at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) is set to change that. They’ve created a lithium ion battery that can get up to a 70 percent charge in just 2 minutes and can allegedly last up to 20 years.
The difference between their battery and the standard lithium ion type has to do with the substance used for the anode — the negative terminal.
Current lithium ion batteries have graphite anodes. Instead of graphite, the team at NTU used a titanium dioxide gel they developed that dramatically speeds up the chemical reaction that takes place in the battery, meaning it can charge much faster.
Saudi Arabia Beheaded 59 People So Far This Year – But Hardly Anyone is Talking About It
October 16th, 2014Via: Vice:
The string of beheadings of American and British hostages at the hands of the Islamic State has drawn horror and intense media scrutiny the world over, redoubling international determination to defeat the extremist group.
But with IS dominating headlines, it is easy to forget that Saudi Arabia, a member of the UN’s Human Rights Council and a close ally of America in the war against the Islamist fighters, is itself routinely carrying out the practice of beheading.
Since January of this year, 59 people have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia under the country’s antiquated legal system based primarily around sharia law.
Last month saw Saudi Arabia behead at least 8 people — twice the number of Western hostages who have so far featured in IS’s barbaric execution videos. In August those executed by Riyadh were sentenced to death for crimes such as apostasy, adultery and “sorcery.” In one case, four members of the same family were executed for “receiving large quantities of hashish,” a sentence imposed, according to Amnesty International, on the basis of “forced confessions extracted through torture.”
Why No Protective Gear For Man With Dallas Ebola Patient?
October 16th, 2014Via: CBS:
As the world watched the loading of Ebola patient Amber Joy Vinson onto a CDC plane Wednesday, something seemed odd to us, and a lot of you as well. On social media, and on the CBS 11 News phone lines, the biggest question became – who was the guy not wearing protective hazmat gear? CBS 11 News did some digging and got answers.
A news crew spoke with a number of different agencies that were involved in Vinson’s transport. Officials with AMR, the ambulance company that transported Vinson from Texas Health Presbyterian Dallas to Dallas Love Field Airport, said it wasn’t one of their guys.
From the CBS 11 Chopper video (seen at the top of this post) it looks like the man left with Vinson on the plane.
A spokesperson with Emory University Hospital in Atlanta said that, to her knowledge, none of their people were on the plane.
That pretty much leaves a worker from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
