Gavin Andresen, Project Lead of Bitcoin, Invited to Speak at CIA
May 19th, 2011Via: Bitcoin Forum:
I want to get this out in the open because it is the kind of thing that will generate conspiracy theories: I’m going to give a presentation about Bitcoin at CIA headquarters in June at an emerging technologies conference for the US intelligence community.
I accepted the invitation to speak because the fact that I was invited means Bitcoin is already on their radar, and I think it might be a good chance to talk about why I think Bitcoin will make the world a better place. I think the goals of this project are to create a better currency, create a more competitive and efficient international payment system, and give people more direct control over their finances. And I don’t think any of those goals are incompatible with the goals of government.
I’m only very slightly worried that talking about bitcoin at the CIA will increase the chances they’ll try to do something we don’t want them to do. I think accepting their invitation and being open about exactly what bitcoin is will make it less likely they’ll see it as a threat.
PS: Full disclosure: I’ll be paid a one-time fee of $3,000 to cover expenses and pay me for my time. I don’t want any “Gavin is on the CIA’s payroll” rumors to get started, either…
As always, comments and questions and discussion welcome. I’d really rather not hear any conspiracy theories about how they’ll secretly implant a mind-control chip in my head while I’m there, though….
Burzynski – Cancer Is Serious Business
May 18th, 2011Via: Burzynski: The Movie:
The Strange Case of Solar Flares Changing Rates of Radioactive Decay
May 18th, 2011Via: Standford University News:
No one knows how neutrinos could interact with radioactive materials to change their rate of decay.
“It doesn’t make sense according to conventional ideas,” Fischbach said. Jenkins whimsically added, “What we’re suggesting is that something that doesn’t really interact with anything is changing something that can’t be changed.”
And Now… J.P. Morgan’s Hunt for Afghan Gold
May 18th, 2011Ultimately, victory will mean that Afghanistan becomes pacified in a manner that facilities effortless corporate rape. The purpose of the U.S. military is to tie the victim down. Then, the people in the suits step into the room…
J.P. Morgan bankers, who just happen to be former British SAS members, are working with the U.S. military and its puppet Afghan regime to set up mining operations throughout Afghanistan.
If any article belongs at the top of your Must Read pile, this is it.
Via: Fortune/CNN:
To Hannam, chairman of J.P. Morgan Capital Markets, Afghanistan represents a gigantic, untapped opportunity — one of the last great natural-resource frontiers. Landlocked and pinioned by imperial invaders, Afghanistan has been cursed by its geography for thousands of years. Now, for the first time, Hannam believes, that geography could be an asset. The two most resource-starved nations on the planet, China and India, sit next door to Afghanistan, where, according to Pentagon estimates, minerals worth nearly $1 trillion lie buried. True, there is a war under way. And it’s unclear how the death of Osama bin Laden will impact the country’s political and economic environment. But Hannam is not your usual investment banker: A former soldier, he has done business in plenty of strife-torn countries. So have all the members of his team, two of them former special forces soldiers who have fought here.
Toxin from GM Crops Found in Human Blood
May 18th, 2011Via: India Today:
Fresh doubts have arisen about the safety of genetically modified crops, with a new study reporting presence of Bt toxin, used widely in GM crops, in human blood for the first time.
Genetically modified crops include genes extracted from bacteria to make them resistant to pest attacks.
These genes make crops toxic to pests but are claimed to pose no danger to the environment and human health. Genetically modified brinjal, whose commercial release was stopped a year ago, has a toxin derived from a soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis ( Bt).
Till now, scientists and multinational corporations promoting GM crops have maintained that Bt toxin poses no danger to human health as the protein breaks down in the human gut. But the presence of this toxin in human blood shows that this does not happen.
Scientists from the University of Sherbrooke, Canada, have detected the insecticidal protein, Cry1Ab, circulating in the blood of pregnant as well as non-pregnant women.
They have also detected the toxin in fetal blood, implying it could pass on to the next generation. The research paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Reproductive Toxicology. The study covered 30 pregnant women and 39 women who had come for tubectomy at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke (CHUS) in Quebec.
None of them had worked or lived with a spouse working in contact with pesticides.
They were all consuming typical Canadian diet that included GM foods such as soybeans, corn and potatoes. Blood samples were taken before delivery for pregnant women and at tubal ligation for non-pregnant women. Umbilical cord blood sampling was done after birth.
Cry1Ab toxin was detected in 93 per cent and 80 per cent of maternal and fetal blood samples, respectively and in 69 per cent of tested blood samples from non-pregnant women. Earlier studies had found trace amounts of the Cry1Ab toxin in gastrointestinal contents of livestock fed on GM corn. This gave rise to fears that the toxins may not be effectively eliminated in humans and there may be a high risk of exposure through consumption of contaminated meat.
Avoid Gate Grope, Become a ‘Trusted Traveler’
May 18th, 2011Via: USA Today:
Upset with being frisked and having a naked image taken of you at airports?
Increasingly, stringent air security screening methods such as these are under question. And they’re not just being questioned by travelers upset at being groped. A consensus is building among the airline industry, business and leisure travel groups and even top government officials that something needs to change.
The alternative they’re looking to: traveler verification systems akin to trusted traveler programs, in which people’s backgrounds are checked beforehand, and they verify who they are when they get ready to board a flight.
The Transportation Security Administration and airlines already are testing a verification program for airline crews, which could end aggressive screening of them. It’s time, airlines around the world say, that similar programs — and tiered programs — should be extended to trusted or known travelers.
Caption Contest: Bill Gates Promotes Vaccinations
May 18th, 2011Via: Reuters:
Research Credit: Noble
NATO in Libya: Besides the Oil, Is It Also a Gold Robbery?
May 17th, 2011Pookie let me know about issue #5 of The Gold Standard (.pdf), which includes an interesting comment from this Wall Street Journal piece about Gaddafi’s vast gold holdings. The comment is no longer posted at the Wall Street Journal:
PvC from Belgium comments on Wall Street Journal Blog: “It seems to me that the war in Libya is not only an oil grab anymore, but a gold grab as well. It is reported that Libya’s central banks are hoarding 140+ tons of gold. The central banks are in three locations. Two of them were attacked. Too many coincidences piling up here…”
Here’s some more info on the gold via BBC:
The IMF data show Libya’s reserves to be 4.6 million ounces, a figure of nearly 144 tons. At current market prices the value is over $6bn.
Related: Libya’s Sea of Fresh Water Beneath the Desert, But Wait, There’s More
Coast Guard Closes Mississippi River Near Natchez
May 17th, 2011Update: Re-Opened, With Restrictions
Via: CBS News:
Shipping already curtailed because of flooding that is plaguing the Mississippi River was halted for much of Tuesday when officials closed the waterway north of New Orleans in the latest tough decision to try to reduce pressure on levees protecting cities and towns.
By late in the day, barges that haul coal, timber, iron, steel and more than half of America’s grain exports were allowed to pass, but at the slowest possible speed. Such interruptions could cost the U.S. economy hundreds of millions of dollars for each day the barges are idled, as the toll from the weeks-long flooding from Arkansas to Louisiana continues to mount.
—End Update—
Via: Reuters:
The key waterway for U.S. grain exports was cut off on Monday when the U.S. Coast Guard closed the Mississippi River near Natchez, Mississippi.
The Coast Guard said 15 miles of the Mississippi was closed to all traffic to protect ships and flood control structures because flooding has raised the river to record levels.
Two vessels were waiting to move northbound on the river by the closure and one ship was waiting to move southbound, the Coast Guard said.
About 60 percent of U.S. grain exports go out through the Mississippi.
Eight Louisiana refineries dependent on the river to bring crude oil from the Gulf of Mexico and to move refined products into the Gulf, are not affected by Monday’s closure.
The Coast Guard gave no estimate for when the River would re-open.
The Secret Sharer
May 17th, 2011Yet again, we learn that there was a desire to generate dossiers on people that, besides the Internet, financial transactions and telephone surveillance data, included physical tracking information.
Bill Binney, the NSA employee who led the team that created the ThinThread system (described below), also alleges that all email “transmitted in America” is archived and keyword searchable.
Via: The New Yorker:
As Binney imagined it, ThinThread would correlate data from financial transactions, travel records, Web searches, G.P.S. equipment, and any other “attributes” that an analyst might find useful in pinpointing “the bad guys.” By 2000, Binney, using fibre optics, had set up a computer network that could chart relationships among people in real time. It also turned the N.S.A.’s data-collection paradigm upside down. Instead of vacuuming up information around the world and then sending it all back to headquarters for analysis, ThinThread processed information as it was collected—discarding useless information on the spot and avoiding the overload problem that plagued centralized systems. Binney says, “The beauty of it is that it was open-ended, so it could keep expanding.”
…
When Binney heard the rumors, he was convinced that the new domestic-surveillance program employed components of ThinThread: a bastardized version, stripped of privacy controls. “It was my brainchild,” he said. “But they removed the protections, the anonymization process. When you remove that, you can target anyone.” He said that although he was not “read in” to the new secret surveillance program, “my people were brought in, and they told me, ‘Can you believe they’re doing this? They’re getting billing records on U.S. citizens! They’re putting pen registers’ ”—logs of dialled phone numbers—“ ‘on everyone in the country!’ ”
Drake recalled that, after the October 4th directive, “strange things were happening. Equipment was being moved. People were coming to me and saying, ‘We’re now targeting our own country!’ ” Drake says that N.S.A. officials who helped the agency obtain FISA warrants were suddenly reassigned, a tipoff that the conventional process was being circumvented. He added, “I was concerned that it was illegal, and none of it was necessary.” In his view, domestic data mining “could have been done legally” if the N.S.A. had maintained privacy protections. “But they didn’t want an accountable system.”
Aid, the author of the N.S.A. history, suggests that ThinThread’s privacy protections interfered with top officials’ secret objective—to pick American targets by name. “They wanted selection, not just collection,” he says.
…
Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”
Research Credit: coxsone
