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The circumstances surrounding the death of the consultant, Jack M. Shaw, are “suspicious,” said Edward J. DeFazio, the Hudson County prosecutor. He said it did not appear to be a homicide. “It could be natural, it could be accidental, it could be suicide,” he said, refusing to elaborate. An autopsy is set for Wednesday.

His death, reported by a companion to the authorities at 5:17 p.m., came hours after Dennis Elwell, the mayor of Secaucus, stepped down, becoming the first elected official to quit after being charged in the sprawling political corruption case.

Mr. Shaw, 61, once an adviser to some of New Jersey’s most influential Democrats, more recently worked mainly for developers doing business in Hudson County. A top client was Metrovest Equities, developer of the Beacon, a 10-building apartment complex on the site of the former Jersey City Medical Center.

But that type of work appears to have led him into the cross hairs of federal prosecutors.

He was charged on Thursday with accepting $10,000 cash from Solomon Dwek, the federal informant at the center of the corruption scandal, who was posing as a real estate developer seeking political help for his projects.

Prosecutors said Mr. Shaw proposed that Mr. Dwek make $10,000 in donations to the re-election campaign of the Jersey City mayor, Jerramiah T. Healy, in exchange for approvals.

According to a federal complaint, Mr. Shaw later told Mr. Dwek that he had given the money to Mr. Healy.

Aides to Mr. Healy, who has not been charged and has denied any wrongdoing, did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday night.

Prosecutors say that Mr. Shaw also introduced Mr. Dwek to several other officials who were eventually charged.

Mr. Shaw was a longtime Democratic operative who cut his teeth working for Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago and later was a campaign aide to Gov. Jim Florio.

The data, which was removed after Threat Level disclosed the situation to the NYSE, included several directories of files containing logs; server names; IP addresses; lists of hardware; lists of software versions running on the network; and configuration and patch histories, including what patches have not yet been installed. It was all available on a publicly accessible, unprotected FTP server maintained by EMC, a company that sells storage systems and managed services to the NYSE and other companies.

The Copyright Office is considering a request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to legalize the widespread practice of jailbreaking, in which iPhone owners hack their devices to accept software that hasn’t been approved for distribution through the iPhone App Store. Apple made the claim in comments filed last week with the agency.

The company’s filing explained that jailbreaking could allow hackers to altering the iPhone’s BBP — the “baseband processor” software, which enables a connection to cell phone towers.

By tinkering with this code, “a local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands (such as a denial of service attack) that could crash the tower software, rendering the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data,” Apple wrote the government. “Taking control of the BBP software would be much the equivalent of getting inside the firewall of a corporate computer — to potentially catastrophic result.

“The technological protection measures were designed into the iPhone precisely to prevent these kinds of pernicious activities, and if granted, the jailbreaking exemption would open the door to them,” Apple added.

Threat Level had no idea the iPhone was so dangerous. We’re gratified that Apple locked down this potential weapon of mass disruption before hackers could unleash cybarmageddon. This also explains why Apple rejected the official Google Voice App for the iPhone this week. We thought it was because Google Voice posed a threat to AT&T’s exclusivity deal with Apple. Now we know it threatened national security.

At stake for Apple is the closed business model it has enjoyed since 2007, when the iPhone debuted. More than 30 million phones have been sold. Apple has told the Copyright Office that its locked-down platform is what made the iPhone’s success possible.

The EFF has asked the regulators for the DMCA exemption, (.pdf) which would allow consumers to run any app on the phone, including those not authorized by Apple.

Fred von Lohmann, the EFF attorney who made the request, said Apple’s latest claims are preposterous. During a May public hearing on the issue in Palo Alto, California, he told regulators there were as many as a million unauthorized, jailbroken phones.

In an interview Tuesday, he said he suspected those phones have not been used to destroy mobile phone towers. “As far as I know, nothing like that has ever happened,” he said.

He added that, if Apple’s argument was correct, the open-source Android phone from Google on T-Mobile networks would also be a menace to society. ”This kind of theoretical threat,” von Lohmann said, “is more FUD than truth.”

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 says “no person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” But under the law, every three years the Librarian of Congress and the Copyright Office must consider the public’s requests for exemptions to that anti-circumvention language.

In a deal that presages its departure from a market it once dominated, Yahoo will essentially scrap its own efforts to best Google in search and instead rely on Microsoft’s recently debuted Bing search engine, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal and the BoomTown blog. Ads placed next to those search results would be served up not by Yahoo’s ad platform, dubbed Panama, but by a Microsoft technology called AdCenter, says another report from Advertising Age. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz “is essentially giving up on search,” says Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land.

Yahoo salespeople likely will continue to sell the search ads that appear both on Yahoo sites and on Bing. And the company that sells an ad—in this case, Yahoo—may get as much as 80% of the resulting revenue. But Microsoft would nevertheless reap a reward that’s more valuable in the long run. The data on computer users’ online search and buying habits would ultimately reside on Microsoft’s computers, thereby improving its ability to automatically serve up the most relevant ads. “If Microsoft is running the underlying ad technology, it doesn’t matter who is selling the ads,” Sullivan says. “In the end, Microsoft will hold all the cards.”

Blogger Hal Turner pleaded not guilty earlier in the day to charges that he threatened to kill three Chicago-based federal appeals judges.

At his bond hearing, defense attorney Michael Orozco said the 47-year-old Turner of North Bergen was not a danger to the community as federal prosecutors claim. Turner deserved to be released on bond, Orozco said, adding that he had served as an FBI confidential informant.

“He provided information about the potential assassination of President Obama,” Orozco told U.S. Magistrate Judge Martin C. Ashman.

Orozco acknowledged that he had no independent confirmation concerning a potential assassination and had only the word of his client — a political extremist whose views the lawyer himself repeatedly described as “outlandish.”

The attorney also acknowledged that at some time in the past Turner had taken medicine for an emotional condition but said he no longer does because “he doesn’t need it.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney William Hogan told Ashman he “never heard anything about that” potential assassination. He said Turner’s contacts with the FBI ended “quite some time ago.”

The proposal is awaiting final approval from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The officials would not be identified because the proposal from U.S. Northern Command’s Gen. Victor Renuart has not been approved by the secretary.

The plan calls for military task forces to work in conjunction with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There is no final decision on how the military effort would be manned, but one source said it would likely include personnel from all branches of the military.

It has yet to be determined how many troops would be needed and whether they would come from the active duty or the National Guard and Reserve forces.

Civilian authorities would lead any relief efforts in the event of a major outbreak, the official said. The military, as they would for a natural disaster or other significant emergency situation, could provide support and fulfill any tasks that civilian authorities could not, such as air transport or testing of large numbers of viral samples from infected patients.

As a first step, Gates is being asked to sign a so-called “execution order” that would authorize the military to begin to conduct the detailed planning to execute the proposed plan.

The guided-missile subs, called “SSGNs” by the Navy, had their nuclear missiles removed starting in 2002. The boats’ nuke missile tubes now contain clusters of conventional Tomahawk cruise missiles or serve as “payload tubes” for equipment, including robots. The SSGNs have accommodations for up to 66 SEALs or other commandos.

The Navy’s submarine force is notoriously publicity-shy — it’s not for no reason submariners call themselves the “silent service.” U.S. Special Operations Command is equally hush-hush. Now combine the two — and you’ll understand why the Kenny interview is so surprising. He detailed three robots now found aboard the Ohio boats:

* Sea Stalker, a torpedo-size underwater robot that specializes in snooping on radio signals and other communications. “The [concept] is to launch these from submarines at night,” Kenny said. “They will transit to offshore, anchor, put their antennas out and begin collection. Ideally you would have a series of these … to cover different ports or hotbeds of terrorist activity. And then you would collate that information on board the ship.”

* Scan Eagle, the 45-pound aerial bot that has seen heavy use by the Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kenny says Special Operations Command is looking at boosting Scan Eagle with extra fuel and sensors — and maybe even weapons, like the Air Force’s armed Predators and Reapers. It seems Scan Eagle is launched from a sub’s deck while she is surfaced, but that could change. “We’re looking at launch and recovery from an SSGN payload tube to allow clandestine close-in operations,” Kenny said.

* BUSTER, a 15-pound UAV that Kenny says is particularly useful when working with foreign armies. “We’ve … done some very successful operations with allies, doing foreign internal defense, training them to operate this vehicle.” The allied armies launch BUSTER from land, while the submarine “pull[s] in the full motion video and the infrared, correlate[s] it and fuse[s] it in our battle management centers on board.”

Some groups of workers are already facing official unemployment rates in the double digits. As of May, unemployment rates for black, Hispanic, and teenage workers were already 14.9%, 12.7% and 22.7%, respectively. Workers without a high-school diploma confronted a 15.5% unemployment rate, while the unemployment rate for workers with just a high-school degree was 10.0%. Nearly one in five (19.2%) construction workers were unemployed. In Michigan, the hardest hit state, unemployment was at 12.9% in April. Unemployment rates in seven other states were at double-digit levels as well.

As bad as they are, these figures dramatically understate the true extent of unemployment. First, they exclude anyone without a job who is ready to work but has not actively looked for a job in the previous four weeks. The Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies such workers as “marginally attached to the labor force” so long as they have looked for work within the last year. Marginally attached workers include so-called discouraged workers who have given up looking for job-related reasons, plus others who have given up for reasons such as school and family responsibilities, ill health, or transportation problems.

Second, the official unemployment rate leaves out part-time workers looking for full-time work: part-time workers are “employed” even if they work as little as one hour a week. The vast majority of people working part time involuntarily have had their hours cut due to slack or unfavorable business conditions. The rest are working part time because they could only find part-time work.

To its credit, the BLS has developed alternative unemployment measures that go a long way toward correcting the shortcomings of the official rate. The broadest alternative measure, called “U-6,” counts as unemployed “marginally attached workers” as well as those employed “part time for economic reasons.”