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Biederman: “To move in the ranks from one rank, for example, at Harvard, there is instructor, from instructor you move to assistant professor, from assistant professor you move to associate professor, from associate professor you move to full professor.”

Lawyer: “Full professor?”

Biederman: “Mm-hmm.”

Lawyer: “What rank are you?”

Biederman: “Full professor.”

Lawyer: “What’s after that?”

Biederman: “God.”

Lawyer: “Did you say God?”

According to the agency, “there were 43.6 million people in poverty in 2009, up from 39.8 million in 2008 — the third consecutive increase.”

The team — from the University of New South Wales, Swinburne University of Technology and the University of Cambridge — has submitted a report of the discovery for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters. A preliminary version of the paper is currently under peer review.

The report describes how one of the supposed fundamental constants of Nature appears not to be constant after all. Instead, this ‘magic number’ known as the fine-structure constant — ‘alpha’ for short — appears to vary throughout the universe.

“After measuring alpha in around 300 distant galaxies, a consistency emerged: this magic number, which tells us the strength of electromagnetism, is not the same everywhere as it is here on Earth, and seems to vary continuously along a preferred axis through the universe,” Professor John Webb from the University of New South Wales said.

“The implications for our current understanding of science are profound. If the laws of physics turn out to be merely ‘local by-laws’, it might be that whilst our observable part of the universe favours the existence of life and human beings, other far more distant regions may exist where different laws preclude the formation of life, at least as we know it.”

We have received perhaps hundreds of pages documenting Eric’s correspondence with other people. These letters are not just kept on file – the Sacramento County Main Jail forwarded all of these letters to the Sacramento FBI field office, which then forwarded them to local field offices around the country (and to law enforcement internationally) to warn the FBI in other cities of a “possible environmental/animal rights extremist” or “a possible anarchist extremist” in their community. Originally, the FBI’s communications included a statement that “Sacramento is forwarding this communication for information purposes only.” But later, they began including a much longer statement which read, in part: “this information has been determined to be of such a nature that some follow-up as to the possibility of criminal activity is warranted…” These statements were included no matter what was the content of the letter – often the documents include the statement that the letter was “benign in nature.”

It is unclear whether or not the FBI is still forwarding Eric’s correspondence to local field offices. We have not received any documents dated after his move to a federal facility. It is also unknown whether or not all correspondence with political prisoners is treated in the same manner. What we do know is that if a person sent Eric a letter to the Sacramento County Main Jail with their full name and address on it, the local FBI field office more than likely now has that information.

We are not sharing this information to raise alarm or spread fear. We have every intention of continuing to write political prisoners, and we urge others to do the same. That said, we hope to expose the FBI’s politically motivated investigations and, unlike the FBI, we believe people have a right to know when they have been spied on. This kind of government intrusion could cause the “chilling effect” so often thrown about in conversations about 1st amendment activities. But when we give in to those fears, political prisoners are the ones who suffer. And this is exactly what the government wants. The state is constantly trying to expand its reach by gathering information about social movements and those who participate in them. Instead of letting this new information scare us into silence, we should use it to make informed decisions about how we support and prioritize political prisoners. This kind of repression has implications for more than just people involved in “activism.” Millions of people are incarcerated in this country. It is possible that the government uses similar tactics to investigate other communities that they actively repress. Writing our friends, family members and comrades should not be a justified excuse for investigation – no matter who our friends are.

We are attaching three documents. The first is typical of the documents the FBI sent towards the beginning of Eric’s time at Sac County. The second is an example of what they sent to international law enforcement agencies. The final document is an example of the later version with the language about “follow up” being “warranted.”

Users have been instructed to destroy all copies of the software, known as Haystack, and the developers have now vowed to obtain a third-party audit of the code and release most of it as open source before distributing anything to activists again.

Haystack is designed to encrypt a user’s traffic and also obfuscate it by using steganography-like techniques to hide it within innocuous or state-approved traffic, making it harder to filter and block the traffic. Despite its nascent status, Haystack got widespread media attention, including from Newsweek recently.

The tool is still in development, but an initial diagnostic version was being used by “a few dozen” activists in Iran when security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, a U.S. volunteer with WikiLeaks, discovered vulnerabilities in the source code and implementation of the system that could potentially place the lives of activists at risk.

Austin Heap, one of the tool’s developers, has faced sharp criticism from Appelbaum and others for failing to vet the tool with security professionals before distributing it for use. The media have also been criticized for failing to properly examine the system before praising it as an option for activists.

“The more I have learned about the system, the worse it has gotten,” Appelbaum said. “Even if they turn Haystack off, if people try to use it, it still presents a risk…. It would be possible for an adversary to specifically pinpoint individual users of Haystack.”

Heap told Threat Level that distribution of the test program had been highly controlled among a small group of select users, and that all of the participants, except one, had been informed beforehand that there were potential risks in using software that was still in development.

“They are all people who are aware of the risks who use other anti-censor tools and had expressed a direct interest to me or others that they would like to be part of the test program,” Heap said.

Nonetheless, he and colleagues decided to halt human testing of the program this week and use only machine testing going forward, in light of the criticism from Appelbaum and others. He said the group would open-source 90 percent of the code before releasing a version to users.

“All of the encryption routines, all the parts that are tantamount to protecting a user’s privacy will be publicly released,” he promised.

Appelbaum, a developer for the Tor Project, which developed and maintains the Tor anonymity and anti-censorship tool, disputed that distribution of Haystack was controlled. He said the tool was available for download from multiple sites on the internet, including Heap’s own web site, which Threat Level confirmed.

“When people’s civil rights are trampled it’s a federal issue,” said Gene Stilp of Harrisburg, who holds a Virginia law license but does not practice as an attorney.

Gov. Ed Rendell, speaking Downtown this morning, said he does not believe activists’ Constitutional rights were violated.

The statement was a reversal from what he said yesterday. Asked in Harrisburg on Tuesday whether monitoring activists was “tantamount to trampling” on their Constitutional rights, he said: “I would say so.”

Rendell said he is “deeply embarrassed” by the disclosure that state Homeland Security officials included information about protesters on what was supposed to be a list of possible terrorist threats.

“Being embarrassed doesn’t cut it,” Stilp said.

The list, which included information on public hearings that opponents of Marcellus gas drilling might attend, was sent to drilling companies.

Stilp said he believes he was among those monitored, based on Rendell’s comment that a 25-foot inflatable “pink pig” Stilp takes to rallies was included in the monitoring.

“The pig! They were after the pig,” Rendell said Tuesday. “That pig is what makes Harrisburg a very special place.”

Stilp owns the pig and frequently displays it at the Capitol at protests over what he sees as government excesses.

Stilp said an outside investigation is warranted, by the attorney general or federal authorities.

The state paid a Philadelphia-based nonprofit $125,000 to compile the list as part of the state Homeland Security’s federally mandated mission to protect public infrastructure.

The list included a Washington County meeting that Rendell attended to discuss Marcellus shale gas drilling, a screening of a documentary on the industry, a rally supporting Rendell’s education budget and anti-tax protesters who took an inflatable pig to Harrisburg.