B or D's Posts - 12160 Social Network2024-03-29T06:08:21ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorgehttps://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1798382264?profile=RESIZE_48X48&width=48&height=48&crop=1%3A1https://12160.info/profiles/blog/feed?user=3s6r37lrjxbz5&xn_auth=noBen Carson: It's Time to Stand Up to Politically Correct Bulliestag:12160.info,2014-03-21:2649739:BlogPost:14314782014-03-21T18:56:00.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>American people are too afraid, in this time of political correctness, to stand up and speak for what they believe, says Dr. Ben Carson, the renowned neurosurgeon and conservative commentator.<br></br> <br></br> "It's time for people to stand up and proclaim for what they believe and stop being bullied," said Carson, a potential contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, at Saturday's Conservative Political Action Conference.<br></br>
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<strong>Editor's Note: …</strong></p>
<p>American people are too afraid, in this time of political correctness, to stand up and speak for what they believe, says Dr. Ben Carson, the renowned neurosurgeon and conservative commentator.<br/> <br/>
"It's time for people to stand up and proclaim for what they believe and stop being bullied," said Carson, a potential contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, at Saturday's Conservative Political Action Conference.<br/>
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<strong>Editor's Note: </strong><a href="https://www.newsmaxstore.com/nm_mag/america-the-beautiful.cfm?promo_code=10158-1" target="_self"><span><strong>Ben Carson in 2016? See His Vision. </strong></span></a><br/>
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Carson, the former director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, said that most people in this country have common sense, but "the problem is, they have been beaten into submission" by the "PC police," and are afraid to speak up for what they believe.</p>
<p><span><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/B5P6PgS1X6g?feature=player_embedded&wmode=opaque" frameborder="0" height="360" width="640"><br/></iframe>
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<p><a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newswidget/ben-carson-political-correctness-believe/2014/03/08/id/556829?promo_code=10158-1&utm_source=Opposing%20Views&utm_medium=nmwidget&utm_campaign=widgetphase1" target="_blank">Read the rest of the story here</a></p>
<p>By Sandy Fitzgerald</p>10 Incredible Ways You Are Being Tracked, Catalogued and Controlledtag:12160.info,2014-03-14:2649739:BlogPost:14230412014-03-14T15:55:42.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>Author John Whitehead has a terrifying new book out called “Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State.” The basic thrust and premise of the book is that America’s basic freedoms are under heavy assault on all fronts, and are in danger of being washed away entirely.</p>
<p>He outlines exactly what these various attacks are, how they are manifesting themselves, and precisely how we are being kept under round the clock surveillance at this point, by our own government and forces…</p>
<p>Author John Whitehead has a terrifying new book out called “Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State.” The basic thrust and premise of the book is that America’s basic freedoms are under heavy assault on all fronts, and are in danger of being washed away entirely.</p>
<p>He outlines exactly what these various attacks are, how they are manifesting themselves, and precisely how we are being kept under round the clock surveillance at this point, by our own government and forces cooperating with them (mega corporations).</p>
<p>There are more than just these touched on in the book, but to provide a brief overview, among others, these are just some of the ways you are being tracked, around the clock in the “land of the free.”</p>
<p>Based on your consumer activities: Federal and State law enforcement agencies have begun acting in partnership, sharing data collected on you, and they’ve collected a lot of data in an attempt to identify what they term as “suspicious persons.”</p>
<p>What kinds of things can land you on the “suspicious persons” list, you ask? Great question. It turns out that it could be almost anything, up to and including people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilot’s license. Major retailers are getting in on the fun as well, and are often eager participants.</p>
<p>Big Box retailers like Target have been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers for years. In 2015, mega-food corporations will be rolling out high-tech shelving outfitted with cameras in order to track the shopping behavior of customers, as well as information like the age and sex of shoppers.</p>
<p>Based on your public activities: It’s not hard to see which way the wind is blowing. Following the lead of big government, private corporations are jumping into the fray as well, negotiating incredibly lucrative contracts with various law enforcement agencies (at all levels) around the country.</p>
<p>The major goal here is to create an interlocking, utterly inescapable web of surveillance that encompasses all major urban centers. Companies like NICE and Bright Planet are selling services, expertise, and equipment to police departments with the promise of monitoring large groups of people seamlessly (think protests and rallies).</p>
<p>They are also engaging in extensive online surveillance, looking for any hints of “large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals.” Defense contractors are attempting to take a bite out of this lucrative market as well. Raytheon has recently developed a software package known as Riot, which promises to predict the future behavior of an individual based upon his social media posts.</p>
<p>Based on your phone activities: The CIA is on record as having paid AT&T over $10 million dollars a year for years on end, in order to gain access to data on Americans’ phone calls abroad.</p>
<p>Based on your computer activities: Federal agents now employ a number of increasingly sophisticated hacking methods (oftentimes by hiring the world’s best hackers into their own ranks) in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor.</p>
<p>Hacking software can be installed any number of ways, including USB, or via an email attachment or software update. It can then be used to search through files stored on a hard drive, log keystrokes, or take real time screenshots of whatever a person is looking at on their computer, whether personal files, web pages, or email messages. It can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones.</p>
<p>Based on your behavior: Thanks to a flood of federal money, police departments nationwide are able to fund a variety of new surveillance systems that turn the most basic human behaviors into suspicious situations to be studied and analyzed. Police in California and Massachusetts have received federal funds to create systems like that operated by the New York Police Department, which “links 3,000 surveillance cameras with license plate readers, radiation sensors, criminal databases and terror suspect lists.”</p>
<p>Police all across the country are also now engaging in unprecedented, large scale data mining operations, oftentimes with the help, and even blessing of private companies, in order to develop city-wide nets of surveillance. For example, police in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, now work with IBM in order to “integrate new data and analytics tools into everyday crime fighting.”</p>
<p>Based on your face: Facial recognition software promises to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily lives. The goal here is for government agents to be able to scan a crowd of people and instantly identify everyone present. Facial recognition programs are being rolled out in states all across the country (only twelve states do not use facial recognition software).</p>
<p>For example, in Ohio, 30,000 police officers and court employees are able to access the driver’s license images of people in the state, without any form of oversight to track their views or why they’re accessing them. The FBI is developing a $1 billion program, Next Gen Identification, which involves creating a massive database of mugshots for police all across the country.</p>
<p>Based on your car: License plate scanners, which can read plates from a distance of several hundred feet, can identify the owner of any car that comes within its sights, are growing in popularity among police agencies. High resolution cameras are affixed to overpasses or cop cars, these devices give police a clear idea of where your car was at a specific date and time, whether the doctor’s office, the bar, the mosque, or at a political rally.</p>
<p>State police in Virginia used license plate readers to record every single vehicle that arrived to President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 from Virginia. They also recorded the license plates of attendees at rallies prior to the election, including for then-candidate Obama and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. This data collection came at the request of the U.S. Secret Service.</p>
<p>Based on your social media activities: The use of social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen Popkin, writing for NBC News observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads, or run sweeps for insurance companies seeking non-smokers confessing to lapsing back into the habit.</p>
<p>Instead of that one guy getting busted for a lame joke misinterpreted as a real threat, the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”</p>
<p>Based on your metadata: Metadata is innocuous and almost unnoticed by most, but it is an incredibly invasive dataset. Indeed, with access to one’s metadata, one can “identify people’s friends and associates, detect where they were at a certain time, acquire clues to religious or political affiliations, and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner or exchanges with a fellow plotter.”</p>
<p>The National Security Agency (NSA) has been particularly interested in metadata, compiling information on Americans’ social connections “that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information.”</p>
<p>Mainway, the main NSA tool used to connect the dots on American social connections, collected 700 million phone records per day in 2011. That number increased by 1.1 billion in August 2011. The NSA is now working on creating “a metadata repository capable of taking in 20 billion ‘record events’ daily and making them available to N.S.A. analysts within 60 minutes.”</p>
<p>From the skies: Absolutely nothing will escape the government’s all seeing eyes, especially when drones take to the skies in 2015. These smart devices, ranging from the size of small aircraft to as small as a grasshopper will have the ability to see through the walls of your home, and be capable of tracking your every movement.</p>
<p>Interestingly and compellingly, however, one of the major contributing factors to our loss of privacy, and with it, freedom, goes unmentioned by the author. The fact that we are actively participating in our own surveillance.</p>
<p>Remember the Boston Bombings? Remember how the culprits were identified? It wasn’t from government placed cameras on buildings or signal lights, but rather, pictures taken off of someone’s cell phone.</p>
<p>We document ourselves and our lives. We document each other, and we gleefully pass that information on to the State. Even if we didn’t, there is little to prevent them from getting it anyway, but we cannot pretend that We, the People, have no culpability.</p>
<p>In the end, the author concludes that the surest way to allow the Police State to come to full flower is our own, continued inaction. All we need to do is…nothing. Nothing at all. If we do that, the Police State is inevitable. The author ends on a chilling note: “Thus, we have arrived in Orwell’s world. The question now is: will we take a stand and fight to remain free or will we go gently into the concentration camp?” "</p>The Inverse of Oversight: CIA Spies On Congresstag:12160.info,2014-03-09:2649739:BlogPost:14315442014-03-09T07:12:07.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>In the wake of an explosive new allegation that the CIA spied on Senate intelligence committee staffers, one senator felt this morning that he needed to make something clear.</p>
<p>“The Senate Intelligence Committee oversees the CIA, not the other way around,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M) said in a press release.</p>
<p>In normal circumstances, that would have been a statement of the obvious. Today, it was more a cry for help.</p>
<p>McClatchy News Service on Tuesday reported that the CIA’s…</p>
<p>In the wake of an explosive new allegation that the CIA spied on Senate intelligence committee staffers, one senator felt this morning that he needed to make something clear.</p>
<p>“The Senate Intelligence Committee oversees the CIA, not the other way around,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M) said in a press release.</p>
<p>In normal circumstances, that would have been a statement of the obvious. Today, it was more a cry for help.</p>
<p>McClatchy News Service on Tuesday reported that the CIA’s inspector general has asked for a criminal investigation into CIA monitoring of computers used by Senate aides who were investigating the agency’s prominent role in the Bush-era torture of detainees.</p>
<p>Specifically, McClatchy reported: “The committee determined earlier this year that the CIA monitored computers – in possible violation of an agreement against doing so – that the agency had provided to intelligence committee staff in a secure room at CIA headquarters that the agency insisted they use to review millions of pages of top-secret reports, cables and other documents, according to people with knowledge.”</p>
<p>In a letter to President Obama on Tuesday, Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) referred to what he called “unprecedented action against the Committee in relation to the internal CIA review,” and described it as “incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight responsibilities and for our democracy.”</p>
<p>The allegation comes on the heels of a fruitless quest by members of the House and Senate to get NSA officials to confirm or deny whether information on phone calls by members of Congress has been swept up in the agency’s metadata dragnet. (Since it’s so indiscriminate, presumably they have, but the NSA won’t say so.)</p>
<p><a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/03/05/congress-intelligence-community-whos-overseeing/" target="_blank">Rest of story here</a></p>The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Programtag:12160.info,2014-03-09:2649739:BlogPost:14309932014-03-09T06:23:36.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>he National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.</p>
<p>According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA, the agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone…</p>
<p>he National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.</p>
<p>According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA, the agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies. Rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using.</p>
<p>The drone operator, who agreed to discuss the top-secret programs on the condition of anonymity, was a member of JSOC’s High Value Targeting task force, which is charged with identifying, capturing or killing terrorist suspects in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.</p>
<p>His account is bolstered by top-secret NSA documents previously provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It is also supported by a former drone sensor operator with the U.S. Air Force, Brandon Bryant, who has become an outspoken critic of the lethal operations in which he was directly involved in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.</p>
<p>In one tactic, the NSA “geolocates” the SIM card or handset of a suspected terrorist’s mobile phone, enabling the CIA and U.S. military to conduct night raids and drone strikes to kill or capture the individual in possession of the device.</p>
<p>The former JSOC drone operator is adamant that the technology has been responsible for taking out terrorists and networks of people facilitating improvised explosive device attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But he also states that innocent people have “absolutely” been killed as a result of the NSA’s increasing reliance on the surveillance tactic.</p>
<p>One problem, he explains, is that targets are increasingly aware of the NSA’s reliance on geolocating, and have moved to thwart the tactic. Some have as many as 16 different SIM cards associated with their identity within the High Value Target system. Others, unaware that their mobile phone is being targeted, lend their phone, with the SIM card in it, to friends, children, spouses and family members.</p>
<p>Some top Taliban leaders, knowing of the NSA’s targeting method, have purposely and randomly distributed SIM cards among their units in order to elude their trackers. “They would do things like go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave,” the former drone operator says. “That’s how they confuse us.”</p>
<p>As a result, even when the agency correctly identifies and targets a SIM card belonging to a terror suspect, the phone may actually be carried by someone else, who is then killed in a strike. According to the former drone operator, the geolocation cells at the NSA that run the tracking program – known as Geo Cell –sometimes facilitate strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cell phone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike.</p>
<p>“Once the bomb lands or a night raid happens, you know that phone is there,” he says. “But we don’t know who’s behind it, who’s holding it. It’s of course assumed that the phone belongs to a human being who is nefarious and considered an ‘unlawful enemy combatant.’ This is where it gets very shady.”</p>
<p>The former drone operator also says that he personally participated in drone strikes where the identity of the target was known, but other unknown people nearby were also killed.</p>
<p><a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/" target="_blank">Read the rest of the story here</a></p>
<p>This article is a month or so old but has some good info.</p>Connecticut halts plans to round up firearms after finding most cops in the state are on the listtag:12160.info,2014-03-07:2649739:BlogPost:14244112014-03-07T20:14:04.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<h1 class="name post-title entry-title">Connecticut halts plans to round up firearms after finding most cops in the state are on the list</h1>
<p>Connecticut has been making news due to their hastily passed gun registration laws. According to some sources as few as 15% of gun owners have actually registered their firearms. News Blogs have been warning state officials are talking about mass confiscations of the unregistered firearms.…</p>
<h1 class="name post-title entry-title">Connecticut halts plans to round up firearms after finding most cops in the state are on the list</h1>
<p>Connecticut has been making news due to their hastily passed gun registration laws. According to some sources as few as 15% of gun owners have actually registered their firearms. News Blogs have been warning state officials are talking about mass confiscations of the unregistered firearms.</p>
<div id="attachment_2864" class="wp-caption alignright"><img src="http://cdn.1starriving.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2014/03/AR15-Magazine-300x196.jpg" alt="Ar-15" width="300" height="196" class="size-medium wp-image-2864"/><p class="wp-caption-text">An AR-15 and high capacity magazine.</p>
</div>
<p>Plans for these confiscations hit a snag when a legislative intern dared to ask a question. “Who will be going door to door to take all the guns away?” asked the 21-year-old college senior.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Reportedly multiple people in the room in the most sarcastic voices they could muster said “the police”.</p>
<p>The unnamed intern then pointed at the list and said, “my dad’s name is on the list, and he is the police chief. I see three other names on this list of family members, all cops.”</p>
<p>With in hours a print off of all sworn Law Enforcement officers in the state was obtained. Comparisons of the list of gun owners who failed to comply with registration requirements and sworn LEOs showed a startling figure. Just over 68% of Connecticut cops had failed to register firearms according to the new law.</p>
<p>An anonymous source in the Governors office said lawmakers were dumbfounded. “Someone suggest firing all the cops who failed to register. But the reality of hiring and training that many new police officers is not practical.” The source goes on to say “Senator [redacted to protect our source] said maybe we should issue an official order to all cops to comply with registration or face termination. I mean seriously these people are a special kind of stupid to think that <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BYE6PNC/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00BYE6PNC&linkCode=as2&tag=politeac-20" title="AR15 t-shirt" target="_blank">gun-loving cops</a> are going to go along with this blatant violation of the 2nd Amendment.”</p>
<p>So now Connecticut is in little quagmire. The powers that be are making all kinds of threats, but there is no one to follow through on the threats.</p>
<p>No police officers or police administrators were willing to go on record for this story. Emails to members of the Connecticut legislator and Governors office were not returned by the time of publication.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.callthecops.net/connecticut-halts-plans-round-firearms-finding-cops-state-list/?fb_action_ids=10202739594082970&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%5B676016122461932%5D&action_type_map=%5B%22og.likes%22%5D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D" target="_blank">You can read the story here.</a></p>
<p></p>In Response To Call For Bitcoin Ban, Congressman Suggests End To Cashtag:12160.info,2014-03-06:2649739:BlogPost:14238802014-03-06T14:53:59.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>Last week, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia wrote to the heads of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, FDIC, SEC, CFTC and the Comptroller of Currency to demand a ban of Bitcoin, saying the <a href="http://consumerist.com/2014/03/04/bitcoin-what-the-heck-is-it-and-how-does-it-work/" target="_blank">virtual currency</a> “has allowed users to participate in illicit activity, while also being highly unstable and disruptive to our economy.” Using almost identical arguments, another lawmaker has…</p>
<p>Last week, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia wrote to the heads of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, FDIC, SEC, CFTC and the Comptroller of Currency to demand a ban of Bitcoin, saying the <a href="http://consumerist.com/2014/03/04/bitcoin-what-the-heck-is-it-and-how-does-it-work/" target="_blank">virtual currency</a> “has allowed users to participate in illicit activity, while also being highly unstable and disruptive to our economy.” Using almost identical arguments, another lawmaker has written the same regulators calling for an end to cash money.</p>
<p></p>
<p>“The exchange of dollar bills, including high denomination bills, is currently unregulated and has allowed users to participate in illicit activity, while also being highly subject to forgery, theft, and loss,” writes Colorado Congressman Jared Polis in his tongue-in-cheek letter [see full text below] to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen, Comptroller of Currency Thomas Curry, Acting CFTC Chairman Mark Wetjen, FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg, and SEC Chairwoman Mary Jo White.</p>
<p>In the <b>original Manchin letter</b>, the Senator had claimed that the anonymity of Bitcoin make it attractive to “criminals who are able to disguise their actions from law enforcement… Anonymity combined with Bitcoin’s ability to finalize transactions quickly, makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to reverse fraudulent transactions.”</p>
<p>But Polis counters that “Dollar bills are present in nearly all major drug busts in the United States and many abroad,” pointing to the discovery of piles of cash found in the hands of international bad guys like Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega.</p>
<p>As for Manchin’s assertion that Bitcoin should be banned because hackers have been able to steal large amounts of the currency, Polis cites Justice Dept. stats showing that only about 3% of the $1 billion in stolen cash from 2012 was recovered.</p>
<p>“The clear use of dollar bills for transacting in illegal goods, anonymous transactions, tax fraud, and services or speculative gambling make me wary of their use,” concludes Polis. “Before the United States gets too far behind the curve on this important topic, I urge the regulators to work together, act quickly, and prohibit this dangerous currency from harming hard-working Americans.”</p>
<p>And here is the full text of the Polis letter:</p>
<blockquote><p>March 5, 2014</p>
<p>Dear Secretary Lew, Chairwoman Yellen, Comptroller Curry, Acting Chairman Wetjen, Chairman Gruenberg, Chairwoman White:</p>
<p>I write today to express my concerns about United States dollar bills. The exchange of dollar bills, including high denomination bills, is currently unregulated and has allowed users to participate in illicit activity, while also being highly subject to forgery, theft, and loss. For the reasons outlined below, I urge regulators to take immediate and appropriate action to limit the use of dollar bills.</p>
<p>By way of background, a physical dollar bill is a printed version of a dollar note issued by the Federal Reserve and backed by the ephemeral “full faith and credit” of the United States. Dollar bills have gained notoriety in relation to illegal transactions; suitcases full of dollars used for illegal transactions were recently featured in popular movies such as American Hustle and Dallas Buyers Club, as well as the gangster classic, Scarface, among others. Dollar bills are present in nearly all major drug busts in the United States and many abroad. According to the U.S. Department of Justice study, “Crime in the United States,” more than $1 billion in cash was stolen in 2012, of which less than 3% was recovered. The United States’ Dollar was present by the truck load in Saddam Hussein’s compound, by the carload when Noriega was arrested for drug trafficking, and by the suitcase full in the Watergate case.</p>
<p>Unlike digital currencies, which are carbon neutral allowing us to breathe cleaner air, each dollar bill is manufactured from virgin materials like cotton and linen, which go through extensive treatment and processing. Last year, the Federal Reserve had to destroy $3 billion worth of $100 bills after a “printing error.” Certainly this cannot be the greenest currency.</p>
<p>Printed pieces of paper can fit in a person’s pocket and can be given to another person without any government oversight. Dollar bills are not only a store of value but also a method for transferring that value. This also means that dollar bills allow for anonymous and irreversible transactions.</p>
<p>The very features of dollar bills, such as anonymous transactions, have created ubiquitous uses from drug purchases, to hit men, to prostitutes, as dollar bills are attractive to criminals who are able to disguise their actions from law enforcement. Due to the dollar bills’ anonymity, the dollar bill market has been extremely susceptible to forgers, tax fraud, criminal cartels, and armed robbers stealing millions of dollars from their legitimate owners. Anonymity, combined with a dollar bills’ ability to finalize transactions quickly, makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to reverse fraudulent transactions.</p>
<p>Many of our foreign counterparts already understand the wide range of problems that physical currencies can have. Many physical currencies have enormous price fluctuations, and even experience deflation. 20 years ago Brazil had an inflation rate of 6281%. In 4 years (2001 to 2005), the Turkish Lira went from 1,650,000: $1 to 1.29 to $1. In 2009, Zimbabwe discontinued it’s dollar. Before it was eliminated, the Zimbabwe dollar was the least valuable currency in the world and their central bank even issued a $100 trillion dollar banknote. A person would starve on a billion Zimbabwe dollars and it took an entire wheelbarrow full of $100 billion dollars in notes to purchase a loaf of bread.</p>
<p>The clear use of dollar bills for transacting in illegal goods, anonymous transactions, tax fraud, and services or speculative gambling make me wary of their use. Before the United States gets too far behind the curve on this important topic, I urge the regulators to work together, act quickly, and prohibit this dangerous currency from harming hard-working Americans.</p>
<p>Sincerely,</p>
<p>Jared Polis<br/>Member of Congress</p>
</blockquote>No Place To Hide - One Michigan Town Expands Surveillance Cameras To Every Neighborhoodtag:12160.info,2014-03-05:2649739:BlogPost:14229932014-03-05T20:02:33.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>The prevalence and scope of camera surveillance seems to be rising with each passing day. A town in Michigan will soon have surveillance cameras in every neighborhood – and residents will be required to pay for the related ongoing operational expenses.</p>
<p>Infowars.com has recently reported that officials in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan are working with police to put surveillance cameras in every single neighborhood. Mike Radzik, the director of the Office of Community Standards,…</p>
<p>The prevalence and scope of camera surveillance seems to be rising with each passing day. A town in Michigan will soon have surveillance cameras in every neighborhood – and residents will be required to pay for the related ongoing operational expenses.</p>
<p>Infowars.com has recently reported that officials in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan are working with police to put surveillance cameras in every single neighborhood. Mike Radzik, the director of the Office of Community Standards, justified the program by claiming that the cameras were no different than police officers constantly standing in the neighborhood, and that “They are only in public places.”</p>
<p>Indications are that, far from being an isolated incident, questionable surveillance practices are now gaining momentum countrywide. Examples recently reported by Infowars.com include:</p>
<p>- Police in Austin, Texas are now demanding live access to surveillance cameras inside public schools, using the remote possibility of school shootings as justification.</p>
<p>- In Modesto, California, an armored police surveillance truck was unveiled this week, which video and audio records local residents while traveling throughout the city. The Armadillo, a refurbished armored truck, is equipped with four high definition cameras, four wide-angle lens cameras and advanced audio recording capabilities. Several other departments across the country including a precinct in Fort Lauderdale have implemented the use of surveillance vehicles as well, with real-time video footage feeding directly into police headquarters.</p>
<p>- The Seattle Police Department recently announced its plan to begin using a new facial recognition software program, which will analyze surveillance footage of alleged criminal activity. With the city facing mounting opposition for several other privacy issues, police were quick to claim that the software would only be used when surveillance video of a suspected crime was obtained. “An officer has to reasonably believe that a person has been involved in a crime or committed a crime,” Seattle Police Asst. Chief Carmen Best said.</p>
<p>Despite reassurances from the city and police, surveillance-weary residents pointed to the city’s continued abuses with surveillance technology. While promising to focus the new software on suspected criminals only, papers released by WikiLeaks in 2012 revealed Seattle’s secret participation in TrapWire, a sophisticated facial recognition program run through the city’s CCTV cameras. Given that the Seattle government willingly scanned the faces of countless innocent residents without their knowledge, few trust the new pledge to suddenly use the technology in a lawful manner. Although the city claims it will release regular reports regarding data requests made by outside agencies, several recent reports already show that the city is sharing innocent individuals’ data with Homeland Security.</p>
<p>Critics seem to mainly have the following issues regarding these surveillance programs:</p>
<p>While the government continues to expand its surveillance grid against the public, daily reports of citizens being violently attacked for legally filming police and elected officials fill the news feed.</p>
<p>According to infowars.com, APD’s move to monitor school children is just one more way the public school system is used to condition young Americans to accept the shackles of a prison-like culture where constant surveillance is a normal part of everyday life, and where guilty until proven innocent is standard fare.</p>
<p>Studies have proven that surveillance cameras do little to deter crime. For instance, The British Security Industry Authority (BSIA) estimates there are as many as 5.9 million cameras there, or one for every 11 people. Yet, despite blanket surveillance, the UK still has the highest homicide rate in all of Northern Europe. Moreover, a review by the London police department regarding the effectiveness of surveillance found, “For every 1,000 cameras in London, less than one crime is solved per year.” And furthermore, a 2005 report put out by the British government also found that surveillance cameras “produced no overall effect” on crime.</p>
<p>Privacy groups are quite unsurprisingly the most vocal of the critics, claiming that largely inadequate and unconvincing assurances are provided by authorities regarding privacy protection concerns. “Where does it end?” Jim Harrington, the Director of The Texas Civil Rights Project reportedly asked. “Are we eventually going to end up in a police state? And a police state is when people watch you all the time. It’s crazy.”</p>
<p>Nonetheless, the authorities still disagree. For instance according to a report by KEYE news, APD Chief Art Acevedo contends “…When you look at the issue of active shooters, and they come in and try to hurt our kids…the Austin Police Department, in a very short order, will be able to know what’s going on. Citizens concerned the cameras will violate their privacy needn’t worry because his department’s camera feeds “would never tap into private places.”</p>
<p>Really? With all the reports about lights, cars, traffic systems, cellphones, televisions and computers being programmed or “bugged” to spy on people, one would have to take those statements with a pinch of salt. The various public revelations and personal testimonies tell quite a different story about the extent of privacy violations. And that’s only what has become public knowledge – so how much else is happening out there that is still being kept secret? And is this ever-increasing trend in public surveillance hiding a much bigger and more sinister plan?</p>
<p>A clue may be available from a recent storyleak.com report: “This week the U.S. Army announced that it would be giving away 13,000 Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles, designed for the streets of Afghanistan and Iraq, to law enforcement agencies here at home. Last August, a former Marine Corps Colonel in Concord, New Hampshire warned that the DHS was building a “domestic army” of militarized police. Only days prior, Concord’s police chief secretly told the DHS that his department needed an armored vehicle to deal with the “threat” posed by libertarians and Occupy activists.</p>
<p>Other agencies like the Department of Defense have unloaded countless military vehicles on police departments also, with police in Utah recently receiving armored vehicles and grenade launchers. Incredibly, even Ohio State University campus police obtained an armored vehicle last year, ignoring requests by media to explain the acquisition. While police across the country argue that such equipment will only be used against suspected criminals, burgeoning surveillance revelations have only worked to create distrust among the public.”</p>
<p>Perhaps such distrust is indeed warranted and reasonable in the light of previous revelations and experience. And in addition, many unanswered questions come to mind: Why would the local authorities be allowed to acquire military equipment usually reserved for U.S military use against external enemies and threats? Given the “clear and present” dangers and vulnerabilities that the U.S faces from China, North Korea, Iran and other nations, why are these critical war tools and equipment not being redeployed to counter those external threats?</p>
<p>Could it be that with the dire state of the U.S economy and all the doomsday predictions of an economic collapse, preparations are being made to contain massive civil unrest – due to lack of food, water and other basic necessities? It needs to be borne in mind that it isn’t just economic disasters that could provoke such responses. A successful EMP attack or various other nuclear attacks against the U.S could also have the exact same effect, prompting the activation of emergency civil unrest measures.</p>
<p>Or could it be that the NSA or DHS have collected information about you that profiles you as a potential terrorist and wants to protect the public from poor little you? Besides, even local departments such as the U.S post office have been stockpiling ammunition and the DHS has profiled Christians and as 2nd Amendment proponents as potential terrorists - not to mention those profiled as “libertarians and Occupy activists”.</p>
<p>Combining RFID/biometric technologies, extensive surveillance strategies and massive state-of-the-art military equipment, it seems that the ultimate goal will be total control: with no place to run or to hide. And while it is all being set up, you just might be required to pay for it in one way or another – just like with the Michigan surveillance cameras.</p>New Scottish "Guardian" Law Should Concern Every Family As Government Looks To Control Life Inside The Hometag:12160.info,2014-03-04:2649739:BlogPost:14230372014-03-04T22:43:49.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>Scottish National Parliament Ministers took it upon themselves in the fall of 2013 to ensure that all of Scotland’s parents are properly qualified to care for their children, purportedly to protect their “rights”.</p>
<p>Even in the face of threatened legal action and angered outcries from numerous parents and organizations opposing the ludicrous legislation, the SNP pushed through its plans that will require every child under the age of 18 to have a state-appointed “guardian” to look after…</p>
<p>Scottish National Parliament Ministers took it upon themselves in the fall of 2013 to ensure that all of Scotland’s parents are properly qualified to care for their children, purportedly to protect their “rights”.</p>
<p>Even in the face of threatened legal action and angered outcries from numerous parents and organizations opposing the ludicrous legislation, the SNP pushed through its plans that will require every child under the age of 18 to have a state-appointed “guardian” to look after it.</p>
<p>On the 19th of February, 2014, the Parliament debated and passed the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill, which is meant to implement the UNCRC (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child) in Scotland.</p>
<p>Under the Bill, the NHS (National Health Service for Scotland) will appoint a health worker to act as a “named person” for every child up until five years of age. Thereafter, the responsibility is passed to councils (teachers will likely be asked to assume the role) until the child reaches 18. The measure is designed to identify and act upon any potential cases of abuse or developmental difficulties at an early stage, but in the process, the named person will have legal access to information about a child and his family from law enforcement and health authorities.</p>
<p>Part 1, Article 5 of the UNCRC, which was adopted in September of 1989, declares:</p>
<p>States Parties shall respect the responsibilities, rights and duties of parents or, where applicable, the members of the extended family or community as provided for by local custom, legal guardians or other persons legally responsible for the child, to provide, in a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child, appropriate direction and guidance in the exercise by the child of the rights recognized in the present Convention.</p>
<p>The UNCRC protects specific rights of children under 18, categorized by four major themes: survival, development, protection and participation.</p>
<p>Once every five years, each state that has ratified the convention is required to report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child for a periodic review on how it is fulfilling its obligations.</p>
<p>The Scottish Parliament seems to be taking its responsibility to an extreme, and legal watchdogs are crying foul, citing a clear breach of the European convention on Human Rights (ECHR).</p>
<p>Conservatives in the Nationalist-dominated Parliament unsuccessfully argued that a guardian should only become involved if the well-being or safety of a child is at stake, attempting also to reduce the upper age limit from 18 to 16.</p>
<p>Liz Smith, the Scottish Tory young people spokeswoman, had this to say after her amendments were voted down,</p>
<p>“This will tip the balance of family responsibility away from parents towards the state – something which most parents find completely unacceptable…Forcing all young people to have a named person will, inevitably, dilute the resources available for our most vulnerable children.”</p>
<p>The Christian Institute charity, intent on “dragging” the Scottish government into court “in defense of family life against state intrusion”, obtained legal advice from one of the UK’s most distinguished QCs (British Counsel of high rank), and said it would initiate a £30,000 legal challenge due to the legislation’s “dreadful extension of the state’s tentacles into family life.</p>
<p>The Charity’s director, Colin Hart, said, “We do not take such action lightly. However, there is a clear need to take such an unusual step… Senior politicians and the law officers have the powers to act as and when required. It is clear that this Bill breaches European rules through its attack on the family. This is Big Brother politics writ large. Ordinary Scots should be very afraid.”</p>
<p>Instead of drawing down the government’s already shrinking cashbox for child welfare in the form of this new layer of family surveillance, why not use existing “agencies”—whether formal or not—that are perfectly capable of capturing early warning signs of neglect or abuse? Perhaps the SNP could use a reminder of the fabulous resources already in place: the immediate family and relatives, friends, neighbors, teachers, doctors, health visitors, police, social workers, and the charities that specialize in child welfare issues.</p>
<p>The Guardian’s Kevin McKenna opined, “What (the Scottish) people do not need is another well-meaning, middle-class, professional nanny peering into their lives. I'll be surprised if this piece of legislative suburban junk isn't deemed contrary to article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.’”</p>
<p>McKenna foresees the nasty consequences of this law in action, in the form of many working-class people being labeled “guilty” of something “unstated and inferred,” envisioning cases where innocent families will be pulled apart simply “on the whim of a government that doesn't know when to stop and that wants us to sign up to its ‘one-size-fits-all’ model of family life. Soon, they will be designing the family and telling us how big it ought to be, according to postcode, of course.”</p>
<p>In a chilling new idea proposed by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, in his weekly column, he advocates that parents with radical political beliefs should have their children taken into custody by the state, a notion already apparently taking shape for parents that support major political parties like UKIP (UK Independence Party), who are already being targeted by social services.</p>
<p>In 2012, under far less extreme circumstances, a couple who were members of the UKIP and whose record for fostering children was exemplary, had their foster children taken by a council of local government. Social workers explained to the foster parents that the children were removed from their care because they (the parents) belonged to a “racist party.” What the council deemed as “racist” was the party’s opposition to “active promotion of multiculturalism.” Ironically, the UKIP is the third largest political party in the United Kingdom and is expected to win upcoming European Parliamentary elections.</p>
<p>While the Mayor’s idea is being ostensibly promoted as a means of curbing “child abuse” by stopping the radicalization of children so they won’t become “potential killers or suicide bombers,” Johnson suggests its application might also be appropriate for children who are taught to be “full of hate.”</p>
<p>The Mayor presented another example in which children, in “extreme circumstances” could be taken into state custody: if their parents support the right-wing British National Party—vehemently opposed to immigration.</p>
<p>Due to the U.S. DHS (Dept. of Homeland Security) characterization of liberty lovers as extremists and even violent terrorists, it is no longer hard to imagine the same standard being applied in America, where parents with conservative and libertarian views could face having their children seized.</p>
<p>The world will observe with great interest how far Scottish and British citizens will allow their governments to intrude into their personal family lives. If these new dystopian measures are met with only minimal resistance in this part of the world, it can quickly become a portal of entry for many other world governments to exercise ever greater control through ever more pervasive surveillance.</p>
<p>Coming to America ? Already in America?</p>Giant virus revived from deep freeze in Siberian tundratag:12160.info,2014-03-04:2649739:BlogPost:14228932014-03-04T22:25:41.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>A 30,000-year-old giant virus has been revived from the frozen Siberian tundra, sparking concern that increased mining and oil drilling in rapidly warming northern latitudes could disturb dormant microbial life that could one day prove harmful to man.</p>
<p>The latest find, described online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, appears to belong to a new family of mega-viruses that infect only amoeba. But its revival in a laboratory stands as “a proof of principle…</p>
<p>A 30,000-year-old giant virus has been revived from the frozen Siberian tundra, sparking concern that increased mining and oil drilling in rapidly warming northern latitudes could disturb dormant microbial life that could one day prove harmful to man.</p>
<p>The latest find, described online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, appears to belong to a new family of mega-viruses that infect only amoeba. But its revival in a laboratory stands as “a proof of principle that we could eventually resurrect active infectious viruses from different periods,” said the study’s lead author, microbiologist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University in France.</p>
<p>“We know that those non-dangerous viruses are alive there, which probably is telling us that the dangerous kind that may infect humans and animals -- that we think were eradicated from the surface of Earth -- are actually still present and eventually viable, in the ground,” Claverie said.</p>
<p>With climate change making northern reaches more accessible, the chance of disturbing dormant human pathogens increases, the researchers concluded. Average surface temperatures in the area that contained the virus have increased more steeply than in more temperate latitudes, the researchers noted.</p>
<p>“People will go there; they will settle there, and they will start mining and drilling,” Claverie said. “Human activities are going to perturb layers that have been dormant for 3 million years and may contain viruses.”</p>
<p>Claverie’s co-author, Chantal Abergel, nonetheless cautioned that their finding is limited to one innocuous virus infecting an amoeba.“We cannot definitely say that there are some human pathogens in there,” she said.</p>
<p>They will reexamine the drill core samples, Abergel said, to “find out if there is anything there that is dangerous to humans and animals.”</p>
<p>Claverie’s laboratory was behind the discovery, in Chile, more than a decade ago, of the first giant DNA virus, dubbed Mimivirus. They next identified a far larger virus of an entirely different family in 2011, dubbing it Pandoravirus salinus, in homage to the mythical Pandora’s box that first unleashed evil on the world.</p>
<p>This time, they used an amoeba commonly found in soil and water as bait to draw out a virus from a Siberian permafrost core that had been dated to 30,000 years ago.</p>
<p>The finding described Monday looked like another Pandora, except it was 50% larger.</p>
<p>"Giant" in virology is still pretty tiny. A virus of one micron in size, or a thousandth of a millimeter, is considered huge. That's big enough to be seen with a normal light microscope. The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, measures one tenth of a micron.</p>
<p>The genome of the newly described virus, however, contained only about a quarter of the number of paired DNA building blocks as Pandora, and the prevailing type of these base pairs was similar to the kind that dominate the Mimivirus genome.</p>
<p>Researchers kept with the ominous mythological theme and dubbed their find Pithovirus, from the Greek pithos, the type of amphora, or jar, that Pandora opened (it was not a box, after all).</p>
<p>Pithovirus still has an unusually large genome -- 600,000 base pairs, which the researchers predict would include genes that code 467 proteins. The genome of Pandora virus contains more than 2.8 million base pairs and about 2,500 coding genes. For comparison: the tiny HIV retrovirus has 9,749 base pairs and nine coding genes; the virus that causes mononucleosis has about 172,000 base pairs and about 80 genes.</p>
<p>The prospect of finding additional viruses that prove to be viable in a host remains uncertain. Microbiologist Brent C. Christner, of Louisiana State University, who has done similar work on frozen microbes but was not involved in the study, cautioned that DNA is easily damaged and that viruses cannot replicate or mutate without a host. “They have no source of energy,” he said. “They have to hijack the mechanisms of the host cell.”</p>
<p>Nonetheless, the study further challenges the notion that viruses can be fully eradicated, Christner said. The genome described in the study, he noted, encodes 125 proteins involved in transcription, DNA repair and replication.</p>
<p>The researchers plan to reexamine large viruses that have been mistaken for bacteria in the past -- one such specimen, found in 2008, had infected an amoeba living in a 17-year-old woman’s contact lens solution.</p>
<p>They also plan to look more deeply into the Siberian ice cores. "We have a sample that dates to 3 million years old,” Abergel said.</p>
<p>Those samples could harbor ancient forms of relatively modern human pathogens, including smallpox, which was rampant in Siberia. Fragments of a smallpox virus, for example, have been identified in Siberian mummies dating from the late 17th century.</p>
<p>“I would not be surprised that those viruses are still in the ground,” Claverie said.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-giant-virus-revived-20140302,0,4662287.story#ixzz2uvwls53Y">http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-giant-virus-revived-20140302,0,4662287.story#ixzz2uvwls53Y</a></p>
<p></p>Biotech is Creating GMO Human Babies: What Could Possibly go Wrong?tag:12160.info,2014-03-04:2649739:BlogPost:14227002014-03-04T17:59:59.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<h1 class="post-title single">With the human race slowly being killed off by GMO food, environmental poisons, petroleum, plastics, chemtrails, pharmaceuticals, vaccinations, radiation, and weaponized warfare, the powers that be are working on new strain of stronger ‘humans’ to carry on our existence. Forget designer babies with specific gene preferences determined by parents, we’re talking about the utter transformation by a technocracy of the human genome. <strong>It is…</strong></h1>
<h1 class="post-title single">With the human race slowly being killed off by GMO food, environmental poisons, petroleum, plastics, chemtrails, pharmaceuticals, vaccinations, radiation, and weaponized warfare, the powers that be are working on new strain of stronger ‘humans’ to carry on our existence. Forget designer babies with specific gene preferences determined by parents, we’re talking about the utter transformation by a technocracy of the human genome. <strong>It is <a href="http://naturalsociety.com/transhumanism-ceo-ai-singularity-very-badly-humans/">called transhumanism</a> and scientists in the UK and US have already submitted proposals to legally create GMO babies. Actually, GMO human embryos have <a href="http://www.anh-usa.org/gmo-human-embryos-have-already-been-created/" target="_blank">already been created</a>.</strong></h1>
<p>Techno-eugenics, you might call it – a way to appropriate humanity for the use of an elite class. It seems innocuous at first – using stem cells to help women with fertility issues get pregnant or to help develop a healthy fetus in a woman who has damaged DNA, but it isn’t something to be taken lightly, or without deep moral concern.</p>
<p>The same energy that created the atom bomb could have been used for less malevolent purposes, and this is no different. Sure, a bionic arm for a Vietnam vet who has lost his due to an IED explosion is a good thing - but ‘improving’ upon the human form until we look more like Iron Man than a human being? What is the good in that? For some, it is considered our destiny.</p>
<p>To understand transhumanism, you have to understand the philosophical leanings of some of its earliest members. <a href="http://www.zengardner.com/transhumanism-techno-eugenics-usurping-humanity/" target="_blank">Julian Huxley</a>, brother of Aldous who authored Brave New World, first used this word: Transhumanism. Huxley was a <b>member of the <a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JQGAAAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=British+Eugenics+Society&ots=GGXD4sdZrN&sig=Z1nDuuswozlgc8ocosEUX-BGfzs#v=onepage&q=British%20Eugenics%20Societ" target="_blank">British Eugenics Society</a></b>, eugenics being the touchstone of this movement.</p>
<p><strong>Read: <a href="http://naturalsociety.com/worlds-first-genetically-modified-babies-created-in-us/" target="_blank">Genetically Modified Babies Created in U.S.</a></strong></p>
<p>Members of the FDA say they are worried that not enough testing had been done on animals or in vivo to start creating GMO babies, and <a href="http://www.sanfordburnham.org/talent/pages/EvanSnyder.aspx" target="_blank">Dr. Evan Snyder</a> of the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., who chairs the 25-member committee which will determine if this is the right direction for humanity to go in, said:</p>
<blockquote><p>“<em>I think there was a sense of the committee that at this particular point in time, there was probably not enough data either in animals or in vitro to conclusively move on to human trials … without answering a few additional questions.”</em></p>
<p><em>Read the rest of the story below:</em></p>
<p><em><a href="http://naturalsociety.com/gmo-human-babies-new-slave-race/">http://naturalsociety.com/gmo-human-babies-new-slave-race/</a></em></p>
<p></p>
</blockquote>Consumers Willing To Embrace Biometric Technologiestag:12160.info,2014-02-24:2649739:BlogPost:14189252014-02-24T04:03:50.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>It has been the norm for biometric technologies to be driven by governmental authorities purportedly keen to control criminal and terrorist individuals, as well as to leverage medical, economic and technological benefits. However a new reverse type trend now seems to be taking root: the preference of consumers to willingly embrace the access of secure online sites, devices and information via biometrics.</p>
<p>According to Larry Barrett’s comments published by zdnet.com, “The relentless…</p>
<p>It has been the norm for biometric technologies to be driven by governmental authorities purportedly keen to control criminal and terrorist individuals, as well as to leverage medical, economic and technological benefits. However a new reverse type trend now seems to be taking root: the preference of consumers to willingly embrace the access of secure online sites, devices and information via biometrics.</p>
<p>According to Larry Barrett’s comments published by zdnet.com, “The relentless consumerization of enterprise IT policies and practices will extend to mobile device security over the next few years as more and more companies turn to biometric authentication technologies to lock down corporate data and devices.</p>
<p>A new Gartner report predicts that at least 30 percent of organizations will use technology similar to the Touch ID feature on the latest iteration of the iPhone to efficiently and effectively secure and manage mobile devices connected to their networks without irritating users in the process.”</p>
<p>"Mobile users staunchly resist authentication methods that were tolerable on PCs and are still needed to bolster secure access on mobile devices," Ant Allan, a Gartner research vice president, said in the report. "Security leaders must manage users' expectations and take into account the user experience without comprising security."</p>
<p>Gartner reportedly recommends that IT security leaders implement and evaluate biometric authentication methods where "higher-assurance" authentication is required, and that they should be used in conjunction with passwords.</p>
<p>Voice recognition, face topography, interface interactivity and iris structure are among the authentication modes companies should explore to improve security without significantly impacting user behavior.</p>
<p>For example, users who have become accustomed to using their mobile devices to securely make purchases are said to “expect nothing less when they bring those devices to work or use company-issued smartphones and tablets”.</p>
<p>Traditional PC authentication and access methods such as the use of usernames, email addresses and other special code identifiers in addition to passwords now seem to be so outdated and cumbersome. Why bother going through those tedious processes when biometric solutions can grant access much faster and more securely?</p>
<p>Apparently, consumer appetites for more biometric options and enhancements have been further whetted by a taste of the latest available smartphone features.</p>
<p>In relation to these developments, Larry also makes reference to a recent Ericsson survey of more than 100,000 mobile users worldwide. The survey revealed that 74 percent of respondents expect biometric smartphones to become mainstream this year.</p>
<p>Some would wonder if biometrics can actually become globally widespread and enforceable. In their thinking, much of the non-Western world is too far behind technologically for this to happen. However, the latest reports from around the world disprove this notion. A few recent examples illustrate the point:</p>
<p>- February 19th: Uzbekistan's citizens will travel abroad only by biometric passports as of July 1, 2014. The news was announced in a governmental decree on "Measures on Improving Uzbek citizens' Traveling Abroad". Plane and railway tickets for them will be formalized and sold on the basis of biometric passports.</p>
<p>- February 17th: Nairobi, Kenya: MPs could lose jobs if new biometric system exposes rate of absenteeism.</p>
<p>- February 17th: The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has given all banks 18 months to begin and conclude the biometric registration of all customers across the country.</p>
<p>- February 10th: Two hundred-thousand Israelis have applied for biometric identity cards or ePassports, following last year’s launch of a biometric database pilot program in the Middle Eastern country. According to a report in the Yeshiva World News, officials have said that more than 50% of the visitors to ministry offices come looking to opt in (voluntarily request) for biometrics.</p>
<p>- February 7th: The largest biometric program in history – collecting iris and fingerprint patterns of 1.2 billion people in three years – aims to improve the quality of life for some of India's most disadvantaged and marginalized citizens by "giving the poor an identity."</p>
<p>Could the timing of all these, and other biometric initiatives and events be a mere co-incidence, or are we witnessing a coordinated, concerted and accelerated effort to ensure that all “small and great, rich and poor, free and bond” are fully identifiable and trackable as soon as possible?</p>
<p>It certainly helps the globalists to know that the fears and suspicions surrounding biometrics seem to be wearing off on the general populace.</p>Globalists Unveil New World Tax Regimetag:12160.info,2014-02-24:2649739:BlogPost:14188472014-02-24T04:02:33.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p></p>
<p>A deeply controversial global tax information sharing regime has been unveiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).</p>
<p>Inspired by a U.S. tax scheme that was adopted in 2010 known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, the scheme, whose key component would be information sharing among governments, would require the collection of sensitive personal information on individuals from banks and other financial institutions in their…</p>
<p></p>
<p>A deeply controversial global tax information sharing regime has been unveiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).</p>
<p>Inspired by a U.S. tax scheme that was adopted in 2010 known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, the scheme, whose key component would be information sharing among governments, would require the collection of sensitive personal information on individuals from banks and other financial institutions in their jurisdictions, which information would be automatically exchanged between all participating governments in the scheme.</p>
<p>Developed at the behest of the G-20, and lead by the OECD, the tax scheme is a multilateral form of the American FATCA agreement. Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration describes the scheme, which is funded in large part by U.S. taxpayers, as a sort of “global taxman.”</p>
<p>OECD leaders admitted in a brief that FATCA is a key catalyst for automatic exchange of information and that FATCA has the ardent support of central bankers and G-20 countries. OECD hopes to have the controversial international tax-information regime in place by September of 2014.</p>
<p>OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria, said “Globalization of the world's financial system has made it increasingly simple for people to make, hold and manage investments outside their country of residence.” Referring to the new tax-information system as “a real game changer,” he added that this new standard on automatic exchange of information would ramp up international tax co-operation as well as put governments back on a more even footing as they seek to protect the integrity of their tax systems and fight tax evasion.</p>
<p>Angel Gurria also reported that the organization was working closely with interested countries and stakeholders to design global solutions to global problems for the benefit of governments and businesses around the world.</p>
<p>If and when it goes into effect, governments all over the world will have instant access to citizens most sensitive financial records including bank accounts, assets, income, insurance, interest paid, capital gains, property ownership, investments, sale of real estate, changes of address and much more. Authorities would not require any warrants to search through personal information in search of potential crimes. Financial privacy would be a relic of the past.</p>
<p>Compliance costs are expected to be massive. National governments must obey the global tax schemers — and taxpayers and consumers must pay for the schemes — or face consequences. If authorities do not bow down to the OECD demands, they can be blacklisted as “uncooperative,” or worse, with economic sanctions being the implicit threat.</p>
<p>The repercussions for Americans, locally and abroad, as well as for people around the globe — especially when it comes to financial privacy and economic freedom — would be crushing. Critics are already warning of economic and human devastation when it happens. Analysts are also sounding the alarm on the vast array of possible abuses and problems that could result from the scheme. Very worrying is the collaboration with member tyrannical regimes famous for human rights abuses.</p>
<p>Andrew Quinlan, President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity observed that “The global tax bureaucracy is determined to implement policies that benefit the global political class at the expense of taxpayers and domestic economies, and are further prepared to punish jurisdictions that choose not to comply with their demands.”</p>
<p>Already, owing largely to FATCA, machinations are underway to force U.S. financial institutions to gather data on their foreign clients to share with foreign regimes. Analysts say the effects of such a scheme could prove devastating to American banks as foreign capital flees the United States, ravaging the U.S. economy in the process. Multiple experts have warned about the prospect, but Congress has largely refused to provide oversight.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, the scheme has the backing of Socialist International, the premier alliance of socialist and communist political parties around the world. The powerful coalition, which met last year in South Africa, called for global taxes, a planetary currency, and a global tax information-sharing regime in one of its most recent resolutions.</p>
<p>Social International also said there was a pressing need to dismantle tax havens, close loopholes and create automatic tax record exchange systems and that this could only be achieved under the auspices of a new Global Financial Architecture, one that would significantly increase transparency and strengthen enforcement of the regulations.</p>
<p>Over 40 governments, including Argentina, Brazil, China, India, the Russian Federation and South Africa, have already committed to adopt the controversial scheme. In a joint statement, participating countries endorsed the scheme and called on other countries and jurisdictions to commit to join this initiative at the earliest opportunity with the aim of rapidly creating a truly global system of automatic information exchange.</p>
<p>Sounding suspiciously like a threat, the participating governments also claimed that only countries with rulers who submit to the draconian new regime will “prosper in the future.” In other words, join the global tax regime and violate the privacy rights of everyone in the jurisdiction, or suffer financial penalties. As critics say, the nightmare begins.</p>Fighting corruption with bumper stickers and public toilets: ambient accountabilitytag:12160.info,2014-02-16:2649739:BlogPost:11237632014-02-16T21:39:20.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="color: #888888;"><span class="font-size-6" style="color: #000000;">Fighting corruption with bumper stickers and public toilets: ambient accountability</span></span></strong></p>
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<p>Anti-corruption activists try to make those in power answerable to people. We call this accountability.</p>
<p>NGOs try to make “accountability” happen by training citizens to audit local government…</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="color: #888888;"><span style="color: #000000;" class="font-size-6">Fighting corruption with bumper stickers and public toilets: ambient accountability</span></span></strong></p>
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<p style="text-align: left;"></p>
<p>Anti-corruption activists try to make those in power answerable to people. We call this accountability.</p>
<p>NGOs try to make “accountability” happen by training citizens to audit local government or monitor elections, often using social media to report and collaborate.</p>
<p>But when the initial enthusiasm for what are often called social accountability instruments fails or issues become too complex or time-consuming for the average citizen, how will we ensure that we achieve our goals: giving people a voice to combat social injustice and corruption in their daily life?</p>
<p><a href="http://blog.transparency.org/2012/11/02/fighting-corruption-with-bumper-stickers-and-public-toilets-ambient-accountability/" target="_blank">It's a start click here for rest of the story</a></p>
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<p></p>The Internet is Growing More Dangerous. But Does Anyone Care?tag:12160.info,2013-04-04:2649739:BlogPost:11691212013-04-04T23:00:10.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p></p>
<p>Bruce Schneier says “we as a society are heading down a dangerous path”</p>
<p><br></br>Whenever I start pursuing a story about a technology that purports to make the Internet more secure, or about a privacy-protecting measure that an Internet company is promoting, I try to check in with the cryptologist and security expect Bruce Schneier. It’s always a good day when Schneier gets back to you–but what he says is usually sobering.</p>
<p>And lately, what he says is downright dystopian.…</p>
<p></p>
<p>Bruce Schneier says “we as a society are heading down a dangerous path”</p>
<p><br/>Whenever I start pursuing a story about a technology that purports to make the Internet more secure, or about a privacy-protecting measure that an Internet company is promoting, I try to check in with the cryptologist and security expect Bruce Schneier. It’s always a good day when Schneier gets back to you–but what he says is usually sobering.</p>
<p>And lately, what he says is downright dystopian. He’s speaking tomorrow night at Harvard with Jonathan Zittrain. Since most of you can’t attend, I thought I’d take the liberty of sharing what he’s thinking about lately – because what Schneier is thinking about is usually worth other people thinking about.</p>
<p>The passage below is from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s promotion of the event, quoting Schneier:</p>
<p>From Bruce Schneier:</p>
<p>What I’ve Been Thinking About:</p>
<p>I have been thinking about the Internet and power: how the Internet affects power, and how power affects the Internet. Increasingly, those in power are using information technology to increase their power. This has many facets, including the following:</p>
<p>1. Ubiquitous surveillance for both government and corporate purposes – aided by cloud computing, social networking, and Internet-enabled everything – resulting in a world without any real privacy.</p>
<p>2. The rise of nationalism on the Internet and a cyberwar arms race, both of which play on our fears and which are resulting in increased military involvement in our information infrastructure.</p>
<p>3. Ill-conceived laws and regulations on behalf of either government or corporate power, either to prop up their business models (copyright protections), enable more surveillance (increased police access to data), or control our actions in cyberspace.</p>
<p>4. A feudal model of security that leaves users with little control over their data or computing platforms, forcing them to trust the companies that sell the hardware, software, and systems.</p>
<p>On the one hand, we need new regimes of trust in the information age. (I wrote about the extensively in my most recent book, Liars and Outliers.) On the other hand, the risks associated with increasing technology might mean that the fear of catastrophic attack will make us unable to create those new regimes.</p>
<p>It is clear to me that we as a society are headed down a dangerous path, and that we need to make some hard choices about what sort of world we want to live in. It’s not clear if we have the social or political will to address those choices, or even have the conversations necessary to make them. But I believe we need to try.</p>
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<p></p>Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Disappearing Messages Are Everywheretag:12160.info,2013-04-04:2649739:BlogPost:11688482013-04-04T22:54:06.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>Smartphone apps that send disappearing messages are gaining in popularity.</p>
<p>By Rachel Metz on April 4, 2013</p>
<p>WHY IT MATTERS</p>
<p>Your digital past has a longer life than you’d probably prefer.</p>
<p>You’ve heard it an eye-rolling number of times: anything you post online, or any message you send—be it a seemingly benign text or a photo taken when you were drunk—can come back to haunt you.</p>
<p>Does it have to be true, though? A growing number of startups, led by rapidly…</p>
<p>Smartphone apps that send disappearing messages are gaining in popularity.</p>
<p>By Rachel Metz on April 4, 2013</p>
<p>WHY IT MATTERS</p>
<p>Your digital past has a longer life than you’d probably prefer.</p>
<p>You’ve heard it an eye-rolling number of times: anything you post online, or any message you send—be it a seemingly benign text or a photo taken when you were drunk—can come back to haunt you.</p>
<p>Does it have to be true, though? A growing number of startups, led by rapidly growing photo-sharing app Snapchat, are challenging the assumption with apps that allow you to send text and multimedia messages that—like in Mission Impossible or Inspector Gadget—quickly self-destruct (minus, of course, an actual explosion). Even Facebook has gotten in on the action, releasing a Snapchat lookalike app called Poke for sending friends notes, pictures, and videos.</p>
<p>While technology allowing us to send and receive expiring messages is not new, these apps offer a very simple way to exercise control over your data in a world where your so-called permanent record is now documented across the Web. If their appeal continues to climb, such ephemeral media could soon become more far-reaching, and will perhaps even extend to some of the social networks that now mine our every move in an effort to serve up targeted online ads.</p>
<p>“One of the reasons these services are popular is they’re hearkening back to a time when the context was all that mattered,” says Lee Rainie, director of Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. “You’re just having a little shared thing that goes away after it’s been shared.”</p>
<p>That was the idea behind Snapchat, a smartphone app created by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy as Stanford students in 2011. The free app, which is whimsically styled with a smiley faced, tongue-bared ghost mascot, allows a user to take a photo or video and it send to friends who can see it for up to 10 seconds.</p>
<p>Snapchat recipients must keep a finger on the smartphone’s screen while viewing a picture, which makes it tricky, but not impossible, to take a screenshot (when this happens, the person who sent the image is notified). This hasn’t hampered its popularity, though. In December, users were sharing 50 million snaps per day; this has since risen to 100 million. Snapchat, which declined to comment for this article, doesn’t release user figures, but as of Wednesday it was the seventh-most-popular free iPhone app and 20th most-popular free Android app.</p>
<p>Jeremy Liew, a partner at Snapchat investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, explains its rapid ascent as a result of people’s growing discomfort with sharing their lives on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Some critics decry Snapchat as a tool for sexting, but Liew says people mostly send snaps during the day, making it unlikely that much racy content is being shared. “People were already feeling like they wanted to have an avenue that was less of a broadcast media model, where they could be a little bit more intimate, more raw and authentic,” he says.</p>
<p>Snapchat isn’t the only startup benefitting from this apparent change in attitude. Wickr, a startup cofounded and led by security expert and Defcon organizer Nico Sell, is also gaining users for its own disappearing-message app.</p>
<p>Sell, who says she stays off Facebook because of the way it collects users’ personal information, came up with the idea for Wickr two years ago as a way to let family and friends share photos and have conversations without handing over personal data, too.</p>
<p>Wickr lets users send encrypted text, audio, video, or photo messages that the recipient can read for up to six days before it evaporates. You can attach documents from online storage services like Google Drive or Dropbox, and a secure VoIP calling feature is coming soon. Though currently available only for the iPhone, an Android version is coming this summer. It is possible to take screenshots, but quite difficult for anything beyond a text-based message, since viewing the image requires you to tap a camera icon at the bottom of the display, then keep your finger perfectly still to keep the picture onscreen. I tried—and failed—several times to make a screenshot of a photo Sell sent me.</p>
<p>“I’ll send someone a picture, just while walking down the street, of some stupid thing that isn’t a pretty picture and is really about the moment, and is going to go away,” Sell says. “It definitely is very freeing.”</p>
<p>Disappearing messages could prove popular beyond social sharing, and could also be profitable, if businesses can be persuaded to pay for the services. Another company, Gryphn, which released a free Android app in February (an iPhone version is coming out shortly), is seeing a lot of interest from paying enterprise users—including hospitals, a police department, and a financial institution.</p>
<p>Gryphn cofounder and chief marketing officer Bobby Saini believes this relates to the growing “bring your own device” trend, where many businesses are moving away from forcing employees to carry company-owned BlackBerrys (which are known for their secure e-mail capabilities).</p>
<p>On Android, Gryphn’s app replaces the stock SMS texting app and encrypts outgoing messages and decrypts incoming messages. The app doesn’t allow users to take screen shots, and encryption can prevent a message recipient from saving or forwarding a message or set a picture message to disappear shortly after being viewed.</p>
<p>Enterprise apps like Gryphn’s could also help companies comply with various laws that dictate how long they must hang on to certain information—such as messages pertaining to a stockbroker’s sale of a client’s stock. Wickr, too, is compliant with a number of communications rules that affect business users.</p>
<p>In addition, Gryphn can determine if you’re talking to a colleague in one message and your husband in another, Saini says, and know to archive and place only the conversation with your colleague into the company’s audit trail.</p>
<p>If ephemeral messaging startups gain in popularity among both consumers and business users, it’s more likely that this kind of capability will bleed into other apps and services, too. “I do believe ephemeral data’s the future. Every single messaging, social, communications app in the future will have ephemeral capabilities,” Sell says. “Now that we’ve done it, it’s really obvious.”</p>NASA Says Meteor Likely Caused Flash In Sky Above East Coast Of U.S.tag:12160.info,2013-03-24:2649739:BlogPost:11570692013-03-24T00:31:24.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>NEW YORK -- East Coast residents were buzzing on social media sites and elsewhere Friday night after a brief but bright flash of light streaked across the early-evening sky _in what experts say was almost certainly a meteor coming down.</p>
<p>Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environmental Office said the flash appears to be "a single meteor event." He said it "looks to be a fireball that moved roughly toward the southeast, going on visual reports."</p>
<p>"Judging from the brightness, we're…</p>
<p>NEW YORK -- East Coast residents were buzzing on social media sites and elsewhere Friday night after a brief but bright flash of light streaked across the early-evening sky _in what experts say was almost certainly a meteor coming down.</p>
<p>Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environmental Office said the flash appears to be "a single meteor event." He said it "looks to be a fireball that moved roughly toward the southeast, going on visual reports."</p>
<p>"Judging from the brightness, we're dealing with something as bright as the full moon," Cooke said. "The thing is probably a yard across. We basically have (had) a boulder enter the atmosphere over the northeast."</p>
<p>He noted that the meteor was widely seen, with more than 350 reports on the website of the American Meteor Society alone.</p>
<p>"If you have something this bright carry over that heavily populated area, a lot of people are going to see it," he said. "It occurred around 8 tonight, there were a lot of people out, and you've got all those big cities out there."</p>
<p>Matt Moore, a news editor with The Associated Press, said he was standing in line for a concert in downtown Philadelphia around dusk when he saw "a brilliant flash moving across the sky at a very brisk pace... and utterly silent."</p>
<p>"It was clearly high up in the atmosphere," he said. "But from the way it appeared, it looked like a plane preparing to land at the airport."</p>
<p>Moore said the flash was visible to him for about two to three seconds – and then it was gone. He described it as having a "spherical shape and yellowish and you could tell it was burning, with the trail that it left behind."</p>
<p>"Set as it was against a cloudless sky over Philadelphia, it was amazing," he said.</p>
<p>Derrick Pitts, chief astronomer at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, agreed that the sightings had all the hallmarks of a "fireball." These include lasting 7-10 seconds, being bright and colorful, and seeming to cross much of the sky with a long stream behind it.</p>
<p>He said what people likely saw was one meteor – or "space rock" – that may have been the size of a softball or volleyball and that fell fairly far down into the Earth's atmosphere.</p>
<p>He likened it to a stone skipping across the water – getting "a nice long burn out of it."</p>
<p>Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society told USA Today "it basically looked like a super bright shooting star."</p>
<p>The newspaper reports that the sky flash was spotted as far south as Florida and as far north as New England.</p>
<p>Pitts said meteors of varying sizes fall from the sky all the time, but that this one caught more eyes because it happened on a Friday evening – and because Twitter has provided a way for people to share information on sightings.</p>
<p>He said experts "can't be 100 percent certain of what it was, unless it actually fell to the ground and we could actually track the trajectory." But he said the descriptions by so many people are "absolutely consistent" with those of a meteor.</p>New Drone Could Snatch Humans Off The Streettag:12160.info,2013-03-20:2649739:BlogPost:11548272013-03-20T01:59:53.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>Justin Thomas and his colleagues at the GRASP Lab have produced an �avian-inspired� claw drone that mimics the way an eagle uses its talons to grab a fish out of the ocean.<br></br> <br></br> A video clip of the drone shows the UAV swooping down at high speed to snatch an object using its 3D printed mechanical claw. By mimicking how a bald eagle sweeps its legs and claws backwards to aerodynamically close in on its prey without the need to slow down, the drone is able to grasp a stationary object…</p>
<p>Justin Thomas and his colleagues at the GRASP Lab have produced an �avian-inspired� claw drone that mimics the way an eagle uses its talons to grab a fish out of the ocean.<br/> <br/> A video clip of the drone shows the UAV swooping down at high speed to snatch an object using its 3D printed mechanical claw. By mimicking how a bald eagle sweeps its legs and claws backwards to aerodynamically close in on its prey without the need to slow down, the drone is able to grasp a stationary object with precise efficiency.<br/> <br/> Drexel University�s Christopher Korpela is simultaneously developing flight stability software for drones with arms that would enable the UAV�s to carry a weighty object without them falling out of the air. The eventual purpose of the drones would be focused around �interacting with people or the environment,� although that is still a long way off according to Korpela.<br/> <br/> Technology journalist Adario Strange envisages a future scenario where a larger version of the eagle claw drone could be used by law enforcement or military to pluck humans off the ground.<br/> <br/> �The optimistic view of this development offers a vision of an emergency situation in which a drone could rapidly fly in and save a person from a perilous situation, but it�s also fairly easy to imagine law enforcement and the military using this development to grab human targets in coming years,� writes Strange, reporting for DVice.com.<br/> <br/> �We may be about to see a return to the days when unseen hunters lurking in the sky could easily snatch a human right off the street,� he adds, referring to the pterosaur, a flying reptile that existed during the time of the Dinosaurs.<br/> <br/> Although this incarnation of the eagle claw drone is far too small to snatch and grab a human, the potential that larger models could be deployed for that very purpose in future is sure to make many nervous.<br/> <br/> As we reported yesterday, military insiders like Lt. Col. Douglas Pryer are warning that drone technology will soon metastasize into armies of remorseless killer robots which will be used to stalk and incapacitate human targets.<br/> <br/> Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, has also repeatedly warned that the robots currently being developed under the auspices of DARPA will eventually be used to kill.<br/> <br/> �Of course if it�s used for combat, it would be killing civilians as well as it�s not going to be able to discriminate between civilians and soldiers,� said Sharkey.</p>
<p>Does give us something to think about right? What's next?</p>First Cyprus and Then The World - How Safe Is Your Money???tag:12160.info,2013-03-20:2649739:BlogPost:11547502013-03-20T01:19:57.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>Cyprus is a beta test. The banksters are trying to commit bank robbery in broad daylight, and they are eager to see if the rest of the world will let them get away with it. <br></br> <br></br> Cyprus was probably chosen because it is very small (therefore nobody will care too much about it) and because there is a lot of foreign (i.e. Russian) money parked there. <br></br> <br></br> The IMF and the EU could have easily bailed out Cyprus without any trouble whatsoever, but they purposely decided not to do…</p>
<p>Cyprus is a beta test. The banksters are trying to commit bank robbery in broad daylight, and they are eager to see if the rest of the world will let them get away with it. <br/> <br/> Cyprus was probably chosen because it is very small (therefore nobody will care too much about it) and because there is a lot of foreign (i.e. Russian) money parked there. <br/> <br/> The IMF and the EU could have easily bailed out Cyprus without any trouble whatsoever, but they purposely decided not to do that. Instead, they decided that this would be a great time to test the idea of a "wealth tax". <br/> <br/> The government of Cyprus was given two options by the IMF and the EU - either they could confiscate money from private bank accounts or they could leave the eurozone. <br/> <br/> Apparently this was presented as a "take it or leave it" proposition, and many are using the world "blackmail" to describe what has happened. Sadly, this decision is going to set a very ominous precedent for the future and it is going to have ripple effects far beyond Cyprus. <br/> <br/> After the banksters steal money from bank accounts in Cyprus they will start doing it everywhere. If this "bank robbery" goes well, it will only be a matter of time before depositors in nations such as Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal are asked to take "haircuts" as well. <br/> <br/> And what will happen one day when the U.S. financial system collapses? Will U.S. bank accounts also be hit with a "one time" wealth tax? That is very frightening to think about.<br/> <br/> Cyprus is a very small nation, so it is not the amount of money involved that is such a big deal. Rather, the reason why this is all so troubling is that this "wealth tax" is shattering confidence in the European banking system. Never before have the banksters come directly after bank accounts.<br/> <br/> If everything goes according to plan, every bank account in Cyprus will be hit with a "one time fee" this week. Accounts with less than 100,000 euros will be hit with a 6.75% tax, and accounts with more than 100,000 euros will be hit with a 9.9% tax.<br/> <br/> How would you feel if something like this happened where you live?<br/> <br/> How would you feel if the banksters suddenly demanded that you hand over 10 percent of all the money that you had in the bank?<br/> <br/> And why would anyone want to still put money into the bank in nations such as Greece, Italy, Spain or Portugal after all of this?<br/> <br/> One writer for Forbes has called this "probably the single most inexplicably irresponsible decision in banking supervision in the advanced world since the 1930s." <br/> <br/> And I would agree with that statement. I certainly did not expect to see anything like this in Europe. This is going to cause people to pull money out of banks all over the continent. <br/> <br/> If I was living in Europe (and especially if I was living in one of the more financially-troubled countries) that is exactly what I would be doing.<br/> <br/> The bank runs that we witnessed in Cyprus over the weekend may just be a preview of what is coming. When this "wealth tax" was announced, it triggered a run on the ATMs and many of them ran out of cash very rapidly. A bank holiday was declared for Monday, and all electronic transfers of money were banned.<br/> <br/> Needless to say, the people of Cyprus were not too pleased about all of this. In fact, one very angry man actually parked his bulldozer outside of one bank branch and threatened to physically bulldoze his way inside.<br/> <br/> But this robbery by the banksters has not been completed yet. First, the Cypriot Parliament must approve the new law authorizing this wealth confiscation on Monday. If it is approved, then the actually wealth confiscation will take place on Tuesday morning.<br/> <br/> According to Reuters, the new president of Cyprus is warning that if the bank account tax is not approved the two largest banks in Cyprus will collapse and there will be complete and total financial chaos in his country...<br/> <br/> President Nicos Anastasiades, elected three weeks ago with a pledge to negotiate a swift bailout, said refusal to agree to terms would have led to the collapse of the two largest banks.<br/> <br/> "On Tuesday ... We would either choose the catastrophic scenario of disorderly bankruptcy or the scenario of a painful but controlled management of the crisis," Anastasiades said in written statement.<br/> <br/> In several statements since his election, he had previously categorically ruled out a deposit haircut.<br/> <br/> The fact that the new president had previously ruled out any kind of a wealth tax has a lot of people very, very upset. They feel like they were flat out lied to...<br/> <br/> "I'm furious," said Chris Drake, a former Middle East correspondent for the BBC who lives in Cyprus. "There were plenty of opportunities to take our money out; we didn't because we were promised it was a red line which would not be crossed."<br/> <br/> But apparently the wealth confiscation could actually have been far worse. According to one report, the IMF and the EU were originally demanding a 40% wealth tax on bank account holders in Cyprus...<br/> <br/> As the President of Cyprus proclaims to his people that "we' should all take responsibility as his historic decision will "lead to the permanent rescue of the economy," it appears that the settled-upon 9.9% haircut is a 'good deal' compared to the stunning 40% of total deposits that Germany's FinMin Schaeuble and the IMF demanded.<br/> <br/> Could you imagine?<br/> <br/> How would you feel if you woke up someday and 40% of all your money had been taken out of your bank accounts?<br/> <br/> At this point, there is still some doubt about whether this plan will actually be adopted or not.<br/> <br/> Right now the new president of Cyprus does not have the votes that he needs, but you can be sure that there is some high level arm twisting going on.<br/> <br/> Originally the vote was supposed to happen on Sunday, but it was delayed until Monday to allow for some extra "persuading" to be done.<br/> <br/> And of course the people of Cyprus are overwhelmingly against this wealth tax. In fact, one poll found that 71 percent of the entire population of Cyprus wants this plan to be voted down.<br/> <br/> The funny thing is that Cyprus is not even in that bad of shape.<br/> <br/> The unemployment rate is around 12 percent, but in other European nations such as Greece and Spain the unemployment rate is more than double that.<br/> <br/> Cyprus has a debt to GDP ratio of about 87 percent, but the United States has a debt to GDP ratio of well over 100 percent.<br/> <br/> So if they will go directly after bank accounts in Cyprus, what will stop them from going after bank accounts in larger nations when the time comes?<br/> <br/> In the final analysis, this is a game changer. No longer will any bank account in the western world be considered to be 100 percent safe.<br/> <br/> Trust is a funny thing. It takes a long time to build, but it can be destroyed in a single moment.<br/> <br/> Trust in European banks has now been severely damaged, and that damage is not going to be undone any time soon.<br/> <br/> A recent blog post by the CEO of Saxo Bank, Lars Christensen, did a great job of explaining how incredibly damaging this move by the IMF and the EU truly is...<br/> <br/> This is a breach of fundamental property rights, dictated to a small country by foreign powers and it must make every bank depositor in Europe shiver. <br/> <br/> Although the representatives at the bailout press conference tried to present this as a one-off, they were not willing to rule out similar measures elsewhere - not that it would have mattered much as the trust is gone anyway. It is now difficult to expect any kind of limitation to what measures the Troika and EU might take when the crisis really starts to bite.<br/> <br/> if you can do this once, you can do it again. if you can confiscate 10 percent of a bank customer's money, you can confiscate 25, 50 or even 100 percent. I now believe we will see worse as the panic increases, with politicians desperately trying to keep the EUR alive.<br/> <br/> Depositors in other prospective bailout countries must be running scared - is it safe to keep money in an Italian, Spanish or Greek bank any more? I dont know, must be the answer. <br/> <br/> Is it prudent to take the risk? You decide. I fear this will lead to massive capital outflows from weak Eurozone countries, just about the last thing they need right now.<br/> <br/> This is the biggest moment that we have witnessed since the beginning of the European financial crisis.<br/> <br/> Financial authorities in Europe could try to calm nerves by at least pretending that this will never happen again in any other country, but so far they are refusing to do that...<br/> <br/> Jeroen Dijsselbloem, president of the group of euro-area ministers, on Saturday declined to rule out taxes on depositors in countries beyond Cyprus, although he said such a measure was not currently being considered.</p>
<p>Such a measure is "not currently being considered" for other members of the eurozone?<br/> <br/> Yeah, that sure is going to make people feel a lot more confident in what is coming next.</p>Electronic Sensors Printed Directly on the Skintag:12160.info,2013-03-20:2649739:BlogPost:11547462013-03-20T01:11:34.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>New electronic tattoos could help monitor health during normal daily activities.</p>
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<p>Taking advantage of recent advances in flexible electronics, researchers have devised a way to “print” devices directly onto the skin so people can wear them for an extended period while performing normal daily activities. Such systems could be used to track health and monitor healing near the skin’s surface, as in the case of surgical wounds.</p>
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<img alt="arm with band-aid shaped skin graph" height="226" src="http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/printable.skin_.electronics.2x299.jpg" width="299"></img><br />
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<p><b>Skin signals:</b> This…</p>
<p>New electronic tattoos could help monitor health during normal daily activities.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Taking advantage of recent advances in flexible electronics, researchers have devised a way to “print” devices directly onto the skin so people can wear them for an extended period while performing normal daily activities. Such systems could be used to track health and monitor healing near the skin’s surface, as in the case of surgical wounds.</p>
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<img src="http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/printable.skin_.electronics.2x299.jpg" alt="arm with band-aid shaped skin graph" height="226" width="299"/><br />
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<p><b>Skin signals:</b> This device, applied directly to the skin, can record useful medical information.</p>
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<p></p>
<p>So-called “epidermal electronics” were demonstrated previously in <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/news/424989/stick-on-electronic-tattoos/">research</a> from the lab of <a href="http://rogers.matse.illinois.edu/" target="_blank">John Rogers</a>, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the devices consist of ultrathin electrodes, electronics, sensors, and wireless power and communication systems. In theory, they could attach to the skin and record and transmit electrophysiological measurements for medical purposes. These early versions of the technology, which were designed to be applied to a thin, soft elastomer backing, were “fine for an office environment,” says Rogers, “but if you wanted to go swimming or take a shower they weren’t able to hold up.” Now, Rogers and his coworkers have figured out how to print the electronics right on the skin, making the device more durable and rugged.</p>
<p>“What we’ve found is that you don’t even need the elastomer backing,” Rogers says. “You can use a rubber stamp to just deliver the ultrathin mesh electronics directly to the surface of the skin.” The researchers also found that they could use commercially available “spray-on bandage” products to add a thin protective layer and bond the system to the skin in a “very robust way,” he says.</p>
<p>Eliminating the elastomer backing makes the device one-thirtieth as thick, and thus “more conformal to the kind of roughness that’s present naturally on the surface of the skin,” says Rogers. It can be worn for up to two weeks before the skin’s natural exfoliation process causes it to flake off.</p>
<p>During the two weeks that it’s attached, the device can measure things like temperature, strain, and the hydration state of the skin, all of which are useful in tracking general health and wellness. One specific application could be to monitor wound healing: if a doctor or nurse attached the system near a surgical wound before the patient left the hospital, it could take measurements and transmit the information wirelessly to the health-care providers.</p>
<p>Rogers says his lab is now focused on developing and refining wireless power sources and communication systems that could be integrated into the system. He says the technology could potentially be commercialized by <a href="http://www.mc10inc.com/" target="_blank">MC10</a> (see “<a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/demo/428944/making-stretchable-electronics/">Making Stretchable Electronics</a>”), a company he cofounded in 2008. If things go as planned, says Rogers, in about a year and half the company will be developing more sophisticated systems “that really do begin to look like the ones that we’re publishing on now.”</p>Advances in genetic engineering have some biologists convinced they’ll re-create extinct species.tag:12160.info,2013-03-20:2649739:BlogPost:11545792013-03-20T01:07:38.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>Passenger pigeons once darkened the skies over the eastern United States. Huge flocks would roost on chestnut trees, their weight snapping off branches. By 1914, though, humans had hunted the bird to extinction.</p>
<p>Now, a project to reanimate the pigeon using genetic engineering is drawing new attention to the question of “de-extinction,” or whether biotechnology can help conserve rare animals and even restore others that dissapeared eons ago.</p>
<p>The passenger pigeon effort, known as…</p>
<p>Passenger pigeons once darkened the skies over the eastern United States. Huge flocks would roost on chestnut trees, their weight snapping off branches. By 1914, though, humans had hunted the bird to extinction.</p>
<p>Now, a project to reanimate the pigeon using genetic engineering is drawing new attention to the question of “de-extinction,” or whether biotechnology can help conserve rare animals and even restore others that dissapeared eons ago.</p>
<p>The passenger pigeon effort, known as Revive and Restore, is being paid for by the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit led by entrepreneur and author Stewart Brand (see “<a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/404000/environmental-heresies/">Environmental Heresies</a>”), who has been stirring interest in the idea of de-extinction by organizing meeting of key researchers, including <a href="http://www.ted.com/tedx/events/7650" target="_blank">one last week at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.</a></p>
<p>Some scientists are convinced the technology is feasible. “Not only is sequencing of extinct genomes a reality, but revival of extinct species is within reach,” said Hendrik Poinar, a researcher at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. </p>
<p>The idea of reviving extinct species first gained <a href="https://www.mcdb.ucla.edu/Research/Goldberg/HC70A_W05/pdf/CloningNoahsArk.pdf" target="_blank">attention a decade ago</a>, after Dolly the sheep was born via cloning. Since then, advances in DNA sequencing have made it theoretically possible to bring back even ancient species, like the woolly mammoth. Already, researchers have re-created some micoörganisms, like the 1918 flu virus, from genetic material found in corpses from the period. Some leading scientists are also creating a startup company that intends to help implement de-extinction (see “<a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512671/a-stealthy-de-extinction-startup/">A Stealthy De-Extinction Startup</a>”.)</p>
<p>“It’s going to be iterative and a convergence of technologies,” said Ryan Phelan, a biotech entrepreneur who is married to Brand. “I think de-extinction is an empowering face for applying genomics in new domains.”</p>
<p>Globally, there appear to be about half a dozen projects aimed at re-creating extinct animals. Those most likely to succeed in the near term involve cases where researchers have access to cells preserved in liquid nitrogen.</p>
<p>In Australia, for instance, researcher Mike Archer of the University of New South Wales says he is now trying to clone the gastric breeding frog, an species known for gestating its young in its stomach and giving birth through its mouth. Archer says he’s using cells frozen by a colleague in the 1970s, shortly before the last of the animals disappeared.</p>
<p>Archer has been trying to re-create the amphibian by cloning those cells into eggs of another frog species. So far he’s been able to make embryos, but not yet a live animal. “I do want to test this question: Does extinction have to be forever?” says Archer.</p>
<p>Realistically, biotechnology might play its biggest role in saving species whose numbers are dwindling. When few members of a species remain, they’re often closely related, with a limited gene pool, and get caught in an “extinction vortex,” says Oliver Ryder, of the San Diego Zoo. For instance, he says, there are only seven northern white rhino left, all in captivity, and the four that are able to reproduce are one another’s uncles or children.</p>
<p>Ryder heads project called the <span class="font-size-3"><strong>Frozen Zoo</strong></span>, which is deep-freezing cells from rare species, including 170 types of birds, to create a bank of genetic information for future use. <span style="line-height: 1.538em;">That effort is now being expanded upon by researcher Jeanne Loring of the Scripps Institute, who is attempting</span> <a style="line-height: 1.538em;" href="http://www.rockethub.com/projects/22021-the-regenerative-zoo" target="_blank">to raise crowdfunding donations</a> <span style="line-height: 1.538em;">to transform some of those banked cells into supplies of stem cells, which might later be used to produce sperm or eggs. With sperm and eggs, says Ryder, researchers could deliver a shot of new DNA into an endangered species, a process he calls “genetic rescue” or “artificial migration.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">So far, says Loring, the team has made stem cell supplies for the white rhino, the Somali wild ass, and two other species (see “</span><a style="line-height: 1.538em;" href="http://www.technologyreview.com/news/425324/stem-cell-engineering-offers-a-lifeline-to-endangered-species/">Stem-Cell Engineering Offers a Lifeline to Endangered Species</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">”).</span></p>
<p>More difficult is recovering species lost long ago. To do so, scientists have to first find and sequence DNA from whatever ancient bones, pelts, or stuffed specimens they can locate. Using such techniques, researchers have already produced partial copies of both the genome of the Neanderthal and of the woolly mammoth.</p>
<p>Once an extinct animal’s DNA code is in hand, researchers would try to progressively modify a related species, using genetic engineering. For instance, to make a mammoth, researchers could add key mammoth genes to the cells of an African elephant, such those that result in thicker fat and denser hair. </p>
<p>That is the strategy being considered for the passenger pigeon, a project Brand says he’s paying for “out of my own pocket.” The effort’s single employee, Ben Novak, is a graduate student who began sequencing passenger pigeon DNA from museum specimens last year, and plans to complete the job at a University of California, Santa Cruz, laboratory specializing in ancient DNA, or paleogenomics.</p>
<p>Novak says the closest species to the passenger pigeon is the band-tailed pigeon. “We don’t know yet if we will have to move 1 percent or 10 percent of a genome over, or just the things that are functionally important,” says Novak.</p>
<p>To bring such hybrids to life, scientists need a way to make a complete animal from a cell in a dish. In mammals, cloning and related technologies provide ways to do that. Embryos carrying the new DNA could then be carried to term in a related species.</p>
<p>However, reproductive technology is less advanced in birds, and no bird has ever been cloned. That means there’s as yet no way to bring the passenger pigeon’s genome back to life. “All I am doing right now is analyzing the passenger pigeon’s genome,” says Novak. “Right now, it’s impossible to create a breeding pair.”</p>
<p>Even if it were possible, Novak says, other daunting challenges would follow. Would he dye other pigeons brown to fool the young birds into thinking they were its real parents? Passenger pigeons were also an unusually social species, so it’s unclear if creating a few animals would really re-create the species’ behavior.</p>
<p>Some conservationists view the whole idea with skepticism. Because nature marches on once a species goes extinct, reintroducing long-lost animals to the wilderness could actually be as damaging to habitats as an invasive species. Mankind’s use of the enviroment has changed, too. Flocks of passenger pigeons, said to reach a billion birds that would cover the sky for hours, might be an unacceptable threat to modern aviation.</p>
<p>“The birds will live in a cage labeled ‘Passenger Pigeon,’ but they won’t be, not really,” said David Ehrenfeld, a conservation biologist at Rutgers University, at the National Geographic event. <span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Ehrenfeld noted that there are currently conservationists risking their lives to save the last African elephants from heavily armed poachers: “So why are we sitting in this auditorium talking about bringing back the woolly mammoth? Think about it.”</span></p>The Things Bankers Say, the London Whale Editiontag:12160.info,2013-03-17:2649739:BlogPost:11530872013-03-17T20:51:29.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>Another Wall Street investigation. Another trove of e-mails, instant messages and telephone conversations capturing executives, bankers and traders discussing their compromising positions.</p>
<p>First, it was the evidence that depicted questionable behavior at Barclays, UBS and the Royal Bank of Scotland, where traders discussed their rate-rigging activities. Then it was the Justice Department’s complaint against Standard & Poor’s over toxic mortgage securities, which included an…</p>
<p>Another Wall Street investigation. Another trove of e-mails, instant messages and telephone conversations capturing executives, bankers and traders discussing their compromising positions.</p>
<p>First, it was the evidence that depicted questionable behavior at Barclays, UBS and the Royal Bank of Scotland, where traders discussed their rate-rigging activities. Then it was the Justice Department’s complaint against Standard & Poor’s over toxic mortgage securities, which included an employee’s subprime version of the Talking Heads song, “Burning Down the House.”</p>
<p>Now, JPMorgan Chase finds its communications in the cross hairs, as a Senate subcommittee released its finding on the bank’s multibillion-dollar trading loss last year. Buried with the 300-plus document are choice e-mails, instant messages and phone recordings that demonstrate how traders hid “substantial losses for months at a time,” according to the report by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.</p>
<p>The bulk of the evidence centers on a little-known unit, the chief investment office, at the center of the trading blowup. After initially brushing aside media reports about the troubled bets in the London-based group, JPMorgan disclosed a multibillion-dollar loss in May 2012. The losses swelled to more than $6 billion.</p>
<p>In the report, the Congressional committee details the last-ditch efforts by the group to salvage the bets and the increasing concerns that the losses were insurmountable.</p>
<p>Months before JPMorgan disclosed the trading blowup, one of the top traders in the group, Bruno Iksil, worried about the mounting losses on the positions, and the strategy to essentially double down on the bet rather than pare back. In an e-mail on Jan. 30, 2012, Mr. Iksil, who earned the nickname the London Whale for his outsize bets, wrote to his manger, Javier Martin-Artajo, that the strategy had “become scary” and the “upside is limited unless we have really unexpected scenarios.”</p>
<p>Achilles Macris, the executive in charge of the international chief investment office, wrote the same day to Mr. Martin-Artajo, expressing similar doubts. “The current strategy doesn’t seem to work-out. The intention was to be more bullish, but the book doesn’t behave as intended,” Mr. Macris wrote in an e-mail. “The financial [p]erformance is worrisome.”</p>
<p>While Mr. Iksil and others continued to trade in the weeks that followed, the doubts persisted. On Feb. 28, Mr. Iksil commented on a document that there was “more bleeding.” A few days later, Mr. Macris wrote in an e-mail to Mr. Martin-Artajo that he was “worried” that the strategy was “too aggressive,” adding that “if we need to [a]ctually reduce the book, we will not [be] able to defend our positions.”</p>
<p>With the size of the bet increasing dramatically, Ina Drew, the head of the chief investment office, said in an e-mail on March 22 that she “was confused” by the strategy. The comments prompted one risk manager in the group to e-mail another, saying “Ina is freaking — really! Call me.” A day later, Ms. Drew told the traders to “put phones down” and stop trading, according to the report.</p>
<p>Despite the problems, the losses — at least on paper — still didn’t look that bad. All along, the traders were able to mask the losses by pricing the derivatives in favorable manner, according to the report.</p>
<p>In mid-March, a low-level trader, Julien Grout, who worked for Mr. Iksil and was responsible for marking the trading book, started tracking on a spreadsheet the difference between the bank’s favorable valuations on the derivatives and the midpoint prices.</p>
<p>In doing so, the traders, according to the subcommittee, were able to hide losses. On March 16, Mr. Iksil told Mr. Martin-Artajo via instant message that the “divergence” between the midpoint and the bank’s valuations “has increased to 300 now,” meaning $300 million.</p>
<p>Mr. Iksil later added that it could grow to “1000″ or $1 billion by the end of the month.” One colleague responded “ouch,” to which Mr. Iksil replied “well that is the pace.”</p>
<p>The reported losses didn’t appear all that bad. On March 19, Mr. Iksil discussed that the portfolio had millions of dollars of losses. That day, though, the chief investment office only reported a daily loss of $3 million, according to the report.</p>
<p>The traders quickly started to realize the losses — and the mismarking of the book — were unsustainable. “I can’t keep this going,” Mr. Iksil told Mr. Grout over the phone. “I think what he’s expecting is a remarking at the end of the month,” Mr. Iksil said, referring to his boss Mr. Martin-Artajo. “I don’t know where he wants to stop, but it’s getting.”</p>
<p>“Now it’s worse than before…there’s nothing that can be done, absolutely nothing that can be done, there’s no hope…The book continues to grow, more and more monstrous.”</p>JPMorgan Faulted on Controls and Disclosure in Trading Losstag:12160.info,2013-03-17:2649739:BlogPost:11530822013-03-17T20:48:53.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s biggest bank, ignored internal controls and manipulated documents as it racked up trading losses last year, while its influential chief executive, Jamie Dimon, briefly withheld some information from regulators, a new Senate report says.</p>
<p>The findings by the Congressional investigators shed new light on the multibillion-dollar trading blunder, which has claimed the jobs of several top executives and prompted an inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.…</p>
<p>JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s biggest bank, ignored internal controls and manipulated documents as it racked up trading losses last year, while its influential chief executive, Jamie Dimon, briefly withheld some information from regulators, a new Senate report says.</p>
<p>The findings by the Congressional investigators shed new light on the multibillion-dollar trading blunder, which has claimed the jobs of several top executives and prompted an inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The 300-page report, released a day before a Senate subcommittee plans to question bank executives and regulators at a hearing, will escalate the debate over how to police complex risk-taking on Wall Street. It may also foreshadow a criminal case against employees at the heart of the troubled wager.</p>
<p>A spokeswoman for the bank said on Thursday, “While we have repeatedly acknowledged significant mistakes, our senior management acted in good faith and never had any intent to mislead anyone.”</p>
<p>Mr. Dimon, whose reputation as an astute manager of risk has been undercut by the trading losses, comes under the harshest criticism yet from the Senate investigators. The chief executive signed off on changes to an internal alarm system that underestimated losses, seemingly contradicting his earlier statements to lawmakers, according to the report.</p>
<p>He is also accused of withholding from regulators details about the investment bank’s daily losses — and then raising “his voice in anger” at a deputy who later turned over the information.</p>
<p>While people close to the matter dispute whether the outburst actually happened, it illustrates a broader problem at JPMorgan: after emerging from the financial crisis in far better shape than rivals, the bank saw itself as being above its regulators. The bank was so filled with hubris, Senate investigators said, that an executive once screamed at examiners and called them “stupid.”</p>
<p>The bipartisan report, citing some of the same private documents that F.B.I. agents are now poring over, also highlighted how JPMorgan managers “pressured” traders to lowball losses by $660 million, a previously undisclosed figure, and then played down the problems to authorities.</p>
<p>The bank’s trader who became known as the London Whale — because of the outsize derivatives trades at the center of the bank’s losses, which now total more than $6 billion — told a colleague last year that the bank’s estimated losses were “getting idiotic,” according to a transcript of their phone conversation cited by the subcommittee. The trader, Bruno Iksil, added that “I can’t keep this going” and that he didn’t know where his boss in London “wants to stop.”</p>
<p>Federal investigators, seeking Mr. Iksil’s side of the story, now plan to interview the trader overseas, according to people briefed on the investigation.</p>
<p>After examining hundreds of e-mails and hours of taped phone calls, the people said, federal investigators also plan to interview top JPMorgan executives in the coming weeks, including Mr. Dimon. While authorities do not suspect the chief executive of wrongdoing, the meetings signal that the case is at an advanced stage.</p>
<p>The breakdowns at both the bank and at its regulators, in particular the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, could galvanize support for new curbs on Wall Street trading.</p>
<p>Calling the bank’s trading strategy a “runaway train that barreled through every risk warning,” Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who runs the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said that the bank “exposed daunting vulnerabilities” in the financial system.</p>
<p>Demands from regulators for more information were met with resistance at JPMorgan, the subcommittee said. The pushback extended to the highest levels of the bank, the report found, and was not limited to requests about the bank’s chief investment office, where the losses took place.</p>
<p>For a brief period in 2012, the subcommittee said, JPMorgan stopped providing profit and loss reports for the investment bank to the comptroller’s office. Mr. Dimon, the subcommittee said, had choked off delivery of the reports because he thought “it was too much information to provide.”</p>
<p>Some people briefed on the matter dispute that characterization, noting that the reports were briefly halted because of security concerns.</p>
<p>Yet at other times, the bank was not fully forthcoming, Senate investigators said. During a meeting in January 2012 with the comptroller’s office, JPMorgan said it intended to reduce the size of the complex trading bet. Instead, the bank increased the positions.</p>
<p>Ina Drew, who headed the chief investment office, balked at the regulator’s demands for more information, resisting them as “unnecessary and intrusive,” the subcommittee said in its report.</p>
<p>Bryan Hubbard, a spokesman for the currency office, said the agency acknowledged there “were shortcomings in the O.C.C. supervision leading up to and responding to the unfolding events” with JPMorgan’s chief investment office.</p>
<p>He added that “as the bank revealed the true nature of the C.I.O. operation and the level of loss exposure, the comptroller escalated the agency’s response and ordered a two-pronged review into the bank’s actions as well as the O.C.C.’s.”</p>
<p>JPMorgan faces the most scrutiny over its lowball estimates of losses, the topic of the F.B.I.’s investigation. While traders have leeway to value their losses, the bank in 2012 moved from marking them in a “middle range” to some of the most generous possible figures.</p>
<p>One junior trader in London, Julien Grout, told Mr. Iksil in a recorded phone conversation: “I am not marking at mids as per a previous conversation.” For five days in March, Mr. Grout also kept a spreadsheet that tracked the difference between his valuations and the midpoint. The documents, according to the subcommittee, showed that his valuations underestimated the losses by $432 million.</p>
<p>The bank’s controller, alerted to potential problems, issued an internal report in May 2012 that essentially cleared the traders of wrongdoing. The marks, according to the report, were “consistent with industry practices.”</p>
<p>But JPMorgan, the subcommittee noted, later had to restate its earnings to reflect the overly rosy estimates.</p>
<p>“The bank said the markings complied with the standards of the industry,” Mr. Levin said. “We don’t think that’s true.”</p>
<p>Mr. Levin called for new rules that would force banks to strengthen their methods for valuing their trades. He also urged regulators to finalize the so-called Volcker Rule, which would prevent banks from making such bets with their own money.</p>
<p>JPMorgan, the subcommittee noted, “mischaracterized high risk trading as hedging,” or mitigating risk, which is allowed under the Volcker Rule. Douglas Braunstein, the bank’s chief financial officer, told analysts in April that the position “is consistent” with a proposed version of the Volcker Rule, a conclusion that the subcommittee dismissed as false.</p>
<p>One regulator wrote in a May 2012 e-mail that the position was a “make believe voodoo magic ‘composite hedge.’ ”</p>
<p>As the traders in London assembled increasingly complex bets, JPMorgan ignored its own risk alarms, according to investigators. In the first four months of 2012 alone, the report found, the chief investment office breached five of its critical risk controls more than 330 times.</p>
<p>Instead of scaling back the risk, though, JPMorgan changed how it measured it, in a metric known as value at risk, or VaR, in January 2012, enabling the traders to continue building the big bets, the subcommittee found.</p>
<p>The report provides further detail about what Mr. Dimon knew about the changed alarm system. Mr. Dimon told the subcommittee that he couldn’t “recall any details in connection with approving the VaR limit increase.”</p>
<p>But Mr. Dimon personally authorized JPMorgan to temporarily increase the measure, writing in a January 2012 e-mail, “I approve.”</p>Ally of China's disgraced Bo sentenced on graft chargestag:12160.info,2013-03-16:2649739:BlogPost:11520382013-03-16T01:37:48.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>(Reuters) - An ally of disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai has received a suspended death sentence for taking millions of yuan in bribes, a Beijing lawyer said on Thursday, in the latest fallout from one of China's biggest political scandals.</p>
<p>Tang Jianhua, once deputy police chief in the southwestern city of Chongqing, where Bo was Communist Party chief, was found guilty of taking 17 million yuan ($2.7 million) in bribes, according to Li Zhuang, a lawyer and prominent opponent of Bo…</p>
<p>(Reuters) - An ally of disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai has received a suspended death sentence for taking millions of yuan in bribes, a Beijing lawyer said on Thursday, in the latest fallout from one of China's biggest political scandals.</p>
<p>Tang Jianhua, once deputy police chief in the southwestern city of Chongqing, where Bo was Communist Party chief, was found guilty of taking 17 million yuan ($2.7 million) in bribes, according to Li Zhuang, a lawyer and prominent opponent of Bo during his time as party boss.</p>
<p>The sentence was handed down by a Chongqing court more than a month ago, Li said.</p>
<p>Asked about the sentencing, an official in Chongqing city's propaganda department said "we are not clear about this so far."</p>
<p>The Chongqing court that sentenced Tang did not immediately reply to a faxed request for comment.</p>
<p>Bo was ousted from his post last year after his estranged police chief, Wang Lijun, fled briefly to a U.S. consulate and accused Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, of poisoning a British businessman, Neil Heywood.</p>
<p>Gu and Wang have since been convicted and jailed.</p>
<p>Bo, 63, had once been widely tipped for promotion to the party's elite inner core.</p>
<p>No criminal charges against him have been announced but Tang's conviction, if confirmed, would indicate that prosecutors are gradually resolving cases linked to him.</p>
<p>The Central Discipline Inspection Commission, the anti-corruption authority that is investigating Bo and his allies, last year ordered Tang to face questioning. He was arrested in September.</p>
<p>A suspended death sentence means Tang will likely face life in prison as long as he does not commit any offences in the next two years.</p>
<p>(Additional reporting by Sally Huang; Editing by Jonathan Standing and Robert Birsel)</p>North Korea Cyber Attacks: Pyongyang Accuses South, U.S. Of 'Persistent And Intensive' Cyber Attacktag:12160.info,2013-03-16:2649739:BlogPost:11520332013-03-16T01:13:42.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>North Korea on Friday accused the United States and South Korea of carrying out a "persistent and intensive" cyber attack against its official websites in recent days.</p>
<p>A number of official North Korean websites, including those of the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the daily Rodong Sinmun newspaper, and Air Koryo airline became inaccessible early Wednesday.</p>
<p>"Internet servers operated by our republic have come under daily cyber attack(s) which are persistent and intensive",…</p>
<p>North Korea on Friday accused the United States and South Korea of carrying out a "persistent and intensive" cyber attack against its official websites in recent days.</p>
<p>A number of official North Korean websites, including those of the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the daily Rodong Sinmun newspaper, and Air Koryo airline became inaccessible early Wednesday.</p>
<p>"Internet servers operated by our republic have come under daily cyber attack(s) which are persistent and intensive", said KCNA, which noted that the problem coincided with an ongoing South Korea-US joint military drill.</p>
<p>Accusing the United States and its South Korean "puppets" of building up their cyber-war capabilities, KCNA said the attack was a "cowardly and despicable act" motivated by fear.</p>
<p>Military tensions on the Korean peninsula have escalated dramatically since the North conducted its third nuclear test last month.</p>
<p>Pyongyang responded to the subsequent UN sanctions -- and joint military exercise -- with threats of "all-out war" backed by nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>"We'll never sit idle in the face of such cyber attacks by the enemy... which have reached an extremely reckless and grave stage," KCNA said.</p>
<p>Read rest of the story here <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/15/north-korea-cyber-attacks_n_2881767.html?utm_hp_ref=world&icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl1%7Csec3_lnk2%26pLid%3D284211" target="_blank">Click here</a></p>
<p></p>Plague Graves Unearthed: Rail Dig May Shed Light On Black Death Bacteriatag:12160.info,2013-03-16:2649739:BlogPost:11519222013-03-16T01:10:11.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>LONDON, March 15 (Reuters) - Archaeologists said on Friday they had found a graveyard during excavations for a rail project in London which might hold the remains of some 50,000 people killed by the "Black Death" plague more than 650 years ago.</p>
<p>Thirteen skeletons laid out in two neat rows were discovered 2.5 metres (8 feet) below the road in the Farringdon area of central London by researchers working on the 16 billion pound ($24 billion) Crossrail project.</p>
<p>Historical records…</p>
<p>LONDON, March 15 (Reuters) - Archaeologists said on Friday they had found a graveyard during excavations for a rail project in London which might hold the remains of some 50,000 people killed by the "Black Death" plague more than 650 years ago.</p>
<p>Thirteen skeletons laid out in two neat rows were discovered 2.5 metres (8 feet) below the road in the Farringdon area of central London by researchers working on the 16 billion pound ($24 billion) Crossrail project.</p>
<p>Historical records had indicated the area, described as a "no man's land", had once housed a hastily established cemetery for victims of the bubonic plague which killed about the third of England's population following its outbreak in 1348.</p>
<p>"At this early stage, the depth of burials, the pottery found with the skeletons and the way the skeletons have been set out, all point towards this being part of the 14th century emergency burial ground," said Jay Carver, Crossrail's lead archaeologist.</p>
<p>Limited records suggest up to 50,000 victims were buried in less than three years in the Farringdon cemetery as the plague ravaged the capital.</p>
<p>The archaeologists hope that the skeletons, which have been taken away for scientific tests, will shed light on the DNA signature of the plague and confirm the burial dates.</p>
<p>The cemetery find could be the second significant medieval discovery in England recently, after archaeologists confirmed last month they had discovered the remains of King Richard III, who died in battle in 1485, under a car park in central England.</p>
<p>Building works for Crossrail, a new railway link under central London and Europe's largest infrastructure project, have already uncovered skeletons from more than 300 burials at a cemetery near the site of the notorious Bedlam Hospital for the mentally ill in the heart of the city of London. (Reporting by Michael Holden)</p>Facebook Reveals Secrets You Haven’t Sharedtag:12160.info,2013-03-15:2649739:BlogPost:11510052013-03-15T03:26:55.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>The increasing amount of personal information that can be gleaned by computer programs that track how people use Facebook has been revealed by an extensive academic study.</p>
<p>Such programs can discern undisclosed private information such as Facebook users’ sexuality, drug-use habits and even whether their parents separated when they were young, according to the study by the University of Cambridge academics.</p>
<p>In one of the biggest studies of its kind, scientists from the…</p>
<p>The increasing amount of personal information that can be gleaned by computer programs that track how people use Facebook has been revealed by an extensive academic study.</p>
<p>Such programs can discern undisclosed private information such as Facebook users’ sexuality, drug-use habits and even whether their parents separated when they were young, according to the study by the University of Cambridge academics.</p>
<p>In one of the biggest studies of its kind, scientists from the university’s psychometrics team and a Microsoft-funded research centre analysed data from 58,000 Facebook users to predict traits and other information that were not provided in their profiles.</p>
<p>The algorithms were 88 per cent accurate in predicting male sexual orientation, 95 per cent for race and 80 per cent for religion and political leanings. Personality types and emotional stability were also predicted with accuracy ranging from 62-75 per cent.</p>
<p>Facebook declined to comment.</p>
<p>The study highlights growing concerns about social networks and how data trails can be mined for sensitive information, even when people attempt to keep information about themselves private. Less than 5 per cent of users predicted to be gay, for example, were connected with explicitly gay groups.</p>
<p>Michal Kosinksi, one of the report’s authors, told the Financial Times that the university’s techniques could easily be replicated by companies to infer personal attributes a person did not wish to share, such as sexual orientation or political views: “We used very simple and generic methods. Marketing companies and internet companies could spend much more time and resources, and hence get much higher accuracy than we did.”</p>
<p>Last week, the EU agreed to water down proposals for a radical overhaul of data privacy regulation. The move reflects governments’ reluctance to impede internet businesses that might spur economic growth, and follows fierce lobbying from technology companies including Facebook and Google.</p>
<p>Personal data has become big business. Wonga, the UK online lender, makes credit judgments within seconds based on thousands of pieces of information, including an applicant’s Facebook profile. Tesco, the supermarket chain, this month started to use its customers’ shopping histories to sell targeted online advertising.</p>
<p>The report also revealed some unexpected correlations – such as people who liked ‘curly fries’ having higher IQs, while those who like Facebook’s “Sliding on Floors With Your Socks On” page were unlikely to use drugs.</p>
<p>Mr Kosinski said, however, that the study was not designed to discourage online sharing: “I would discourage people from abstaining from the technology – the milk is to some extent already spilt and there’s a lot of information about you online anyway. I would suggest raising privacy settings and exerting consumer pressure by trying to use the services that are protecting your privacy best.”</p>Why Europe Is Still Ripe For A Dictator: Austrians Reflect On Hitler 75 Years Latertag:12160.info,2013-03-15:2649739:BlogPost:11510032013-03-15T03:23:08.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>Seventy-five years after the Nazi invasion and occupation of Austria, a newspaper in country has asked citizens about their opinion of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi annexation during World War II. Jewish leaders who have been raising the alarm about anti-Semitism in Austria say the results were not surprising.</p>
<p>Forty-two percent said life was not all bad under Hitler, while 61 percent said they would be interested in a strong-armed leader who did not have to deal with democratic challenges…</p>
<p>Seventy-five years after the Nazi invasion and occupation of Austria, a newspaper in country has asked citizens about their opinion of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi annexation during World War II. Jewish leaders who have been raising the alarm about anti-Semitism in Austria say the results were not surprising.</p>
<p>Forty-two percent said life was not all bad under Hitler, while 61 percent said they would be interested in a strong-armed leader who did not have to deal with democratic challenges like political opponents and elections.</p>
<p>The survey, published this weekend, is getting prominent play in the media in Israel, which is home to some 250,000 Holocaust survivors. That’s half the number of survivors who arrived in the country since Israel was founded in 1948.</p>
<p>Reuters reports:</p>
<p>Timed to coincide with the 75th anniversary next week of Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany, the Market Institut poll for newspaper Der Standard found 61 per cent of respondents, mostly the elderly, liked the idea of a strong man as leader.</p>
<p>Many Austrians wanted a union, or Anschluss , with Germany in 1938. A few Austrians put up resistance that grew over time.</p>
<p>In the latest poll, 53 per cent thought the Anschluss was voluntary and 46 per cent saw Austria as a victim. Forty-two per cent said “not everything was bad under Hitler” while 57 per cent saw no good aspects to the Hitler era.</p>
<p>Additionally, 54 percent said they believed neo-Nazi groups would succeed in Austrian elections this September if they were not banned there.</p>
<p>The poll also showed that most Austrians believe their country has dealt adequately with its Nazi history and that victims of the Holocaust have been fully compensated.</p>
<p>“If accurate, the results are extremely alarming, but not entirely surprising,” Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, told TheBlaze. “Austria is a country which has a long tradition of anti-Semitism and which produced some of the biggest Nazi war criminals.”</p>
<p>“In recent years, there are efforts to fight against anti-Semitism and more honestly face Austrians’ participation in Holocaust crimes, but there has not been a successful prosecution in Austria of a Nazi war criminal in more than 30 years,” Zuroff said.</p>
<p>The head of Vienna’s Jewish community said in January he’d seen a doubling of the number of anti-Semitic incidents reported in Austria in the last year.</p>
<p>Recent incidents include a rabbi’s report that he was verbally abused by neo-Nazi hooligans even as police stood nearby, while a far-right politician posted a cartoon viewed as anti-Semitic on his website.</p>
<p>Before the Nazis annexed Austria, its Jewish population numbered 195,000. According to figures cited by Reuters, two-thirds of them were exiled in the “Aryanization” program and besides 2,000 left behind, all the rest were killed in concentration camps.</p>
<p>The Anschluss anniversary will be marked Tuesday in Austria, the place where the Nazis tested their plan for the extermination of Europe’s Jews.</p>
<p>“Vienna was a very important place for the fate of all European Jews because the automated driving out of Jews was perfected here,” Joachim Riedl, the author of several books on Jewish history and Vienna, told Reuters.</p>China's Drone Swarms Rise To Challenge US Powertag:12160.info,2013-03-15:2649739:BlogPost:11508782013-03-15T03:15:53.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>China is building one of the world's largest drone fleets aimed at expanding its military reach in the Pacific and swarming U.S. Navy carriers in the unlikely event of a war, according to a new report. The Chinese military — known as the People's Liberation Army (PLA) — envisions its drone swarms scouting out battlefields, guiding missile strikes and overwhelming opponents through sheer numbers. China's military-industrial complex has created a wide array of homegrown drones to accomplish…</p>
<p>China is building one of the world's largest drone fleets aimed at expanding its military reach in the Pacific and swarming U.S. Navy carriers in the unlikely event of a war, according to a new report. The Chinese military — known as the People's Liberation Army (PLA) — envisions its drone swarms scouting out battlefields, guiding missile strikes and overwhelming opponents through sheer numbers. China's military-industrial complex has created a wide array of homegrown drones to accomplish those goals over the past decade, according to the report released by the Project 2049 Institute on March 11. "The PLA now fields one of the world's most expansive UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] fleets," said Ian Easton and L.C. Russell Hsiao, researchers at the Project 2049 Institute and authors of the new report. U.S. military forces still operate the largest drone fleet, with at least 679 drones in 2012, according to data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies reported by the Guardian. But the new Project 2049 Institute report estimates that China had 280 military drones as of mid-2011 — a number that has likely grown since then. Chinese military drones have already entered the frontlines of China's territorial disputes with neighboring countries such as Japan by flying maritime patrols over disputed areas. The Project 2049 Institute report warned that China could be tempted to use drones more aggressively without risking human lives, or even consider "plausibly deniable" drone attacks blamed upon mechanical failure or cyberhackers. Chinese strategists have also discussed using swarms of drones to overwhelm the U.S. Navy's carrier groups in the unlikely possibility of a shooting war. The drones could act as decoys, use electronic warfare to jam communications and radar, guide missile strikes on carriers, fire missiles at U.S. Navy ships or dive into ships like kamikaze robots. "In particular, numerous authoritative studies indicate a strong emphasis on developing UAVs for locating, tracking and targeting U.S. aircraft carriers in support of long range anti-ship cruise and ballistic missile strikes," the Project 2049 Institute report says. All the main branches of the Chinese military field operational drone units. The new report identifies those military units along with major academic, industry and military organizations involved in building Chinese drones. The report goes on to examine the state of Chinese drone technology. China is developing drones such as the rumored "Dark Sword" stealth drone that have low radar profiles to escape radar detection. It also wants to build "space" drones that could loiter at heights of 31 miles (50 kilometers) above the Earth to provide constant surveillance. (Scientists typically consider 62 miles (100 km) to mark the boundary for the edge of space.) Chinese engineers have even begun working on drones that have the software brains to fly in formation, do aerial refueling and takeoff and land autonomously — capabilities that the U.S. military has also developed or begun testing for its own drones. The risk of war between the U.S. and China remains low. But the report cautions that the U.S. military could prepare for the worst-case scenario by hardening its existing air bases in Asia and developing energy weapons (such as lasers) for better air and missile defense.</p>Holocaust Researchers Catalog 42,500 Nazi Ghettos, Camps; Numbers Are 'Unbelievabletag:12160.info,2013-03-04:2649739:BlogPost:11387182013-03-04T02:26:01.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>Researchers from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have concluded that over 40,000 Nazi camps and ghettos existed during Hitler's reign of terror between 1933 to 1945.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2" target="_hplink">The total is far higher than most historians had previously estimated</a>, according to The New York Times.</p>
<p>Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, the lead editors of…</p>
<p>Researchers from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have concluded that over 40,000 Nazi camps and ghettos existed during Hitler's reign of terror between 1933 to 1945.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2" target="_hplink">The total is far higher than most historians had previously estimated</a>, according to The New York Times.</p>
<p>Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, the lead editors of the project, have compiled the thousands of sites in a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-Memorial-Encyclopedia-Ghettos-1933-1945/dp/0253355990" target="_hplink">multivolume encyclopedia</a> that is being published by the Holocaust Museum. <a href="http://www.ushmm.org/museum/press/archives/detail.php?category=07-general&content=2012-06-05" target="_hplink">Each volume catalogs thousands of sites</a>, providing a comprehensive history of the "living and working conditions, activities of the Jewish councils, Jewish responses to persecution, demographic changes, and details of the liquidation of the ghettos."</p>
<p>The Holocaust Museum team also created maps of the sites, which were scattered across Europe, and which imprisoned or killed between 15 and 20 million people.</p>
<p>Essentially, this study shows the Holocaust was far more extensive than even historians comprehended.</p>
<p>Hartmut Berghoff, <a href="http://www.ghi-dc.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=179&Itemid=75" target="_hplink">director of the German Historical Institute</a>, said the research is simply astounding, reports The Times.</p>
<p>"We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was," he said, "but the numbers are unbelievable."</p>The FISA Amendments Act Is Clearly Unconstitutional; And Congress Doesn't Caretag:12160.info,2013-03-01:2649739:BlogPost:11361122013-03-01T05:28:47.000ZB or Dhttps://12160.info/profile/BrianGeorge
<p>from the but-but-terrorism dept<br></br>We've been discussing the now annual rush to re-approve the FISA Amendments Act, despite the fact that the original bill was on shaky constitutional ground, and it's been made much (much, much) worse due to a secret interpretation of what the law means (a secret interpretation that many in Congress apparently have no interest in finding out about). Andrew Napolitano, a former judge, has penned an interesting column laying out many of the reasons why the…</p>
<p>from the but-but-terrorism dept<br/>We've been discussing the now annual rush to re-approve the FISA Amendments Act, despite the fact that the original bill was on shaky constitutional ground, and it's been made much (much, much) worse due to a secret interpretation of what the law means (a secret interpretation that many in Congress apparently have no interest in finding out about). Andrew Napolitano, a former judge, has penned an interesting column laying out many of the reasons why the whole thing is completely unconstitutional. First, he notes that the establishment of FISA itself is likely a violation of the 4th Amendment:<br/>The constitutional standard for all search warrants is probable cause of crime. FISA, however, established a new, different and lesser standard -- thus unconstitutional on its face since Congress is bound by, and cannot change, the Constitution -- of probable cause of status. The status was that of an agent of a foreign power. So, under FISA, the feds needed to demonstrate to a secret court only that a non-American physically present in the U.S., perhaps under the guise of a student, diplomat or embassy janitor, was really an agent of a foreign power, and the demonstration of that agency alone was sufficient to authorize a search warrant to listen to the agent's telephone calls or read his mail.<br/>Already troubling enough, but, as Napolitano notes, things weren't just left there. They've continued to stretch and change the conditions, taking it further and further into unconstitutional realms:<br/>Over time, the requirement of status as a foreign agent was modified to status as a foreign person. This, of course, was an even lesser standard and one rarely rejected by the FISA court. In fact, that court has rarely rejected anything, having granted search warrants in well over 97 percent of applications. This is hardly harmless, as foreign persons in the U.S. are frequently talking to Americans in the U.S. Thus, not only did FISA violate the privacy rights of foreigners (the Fourth Amendment protects "people," not just Americans); it violated the rights of those with whom they were communicating, American or non-American.</p>
<p>It gets worse. The Patriot Act, which was enacted in 2001 and permits federal agents to write their own search warrants in violation of the Fourth Amendment, actually amended FISA so as to do away with the FISA-issued search warrant requirement when the foreign person is outside the U.S. This means that if you email or call your cousin in Europe or a business colleague in Asia, the feds are reading or listening, without a warrant, without suspicion, without records and without evidence of anything unlawful.<br/>It's just those Patriot Act amendments (the FISA Amendments Act) that is being debated right now. And given some of the questions being asked by politicians who understand the "secret interpretation" of the FISA Amendments Act, it appears that it actually gives law enforcement the ability to go even further. So it's not even just about emailing or calling your cousin in Europe, but as long as law enforcement (a) claims that it's related to a terrorism investigation and (b) they have no specific knowledge at the time of acquisition only that the communication is domestic -- then they can collect just about anything. So, under that interpretation, it appears that the NSA can just collect well, almost anything, by saying that it's all for the sake of a permanent and all encompassing terrorism investigation, and since they're just collecting absolutely everything, they have no specific knowledge at the time of acquisition that the communication is domestic.</p>
<p>Considering that Napolitano's argument starts from the idea that FISA itself is unconstitutional, looking at where we are now from where we started, we're no longer just in "unconstitutional" mode, in which we've tip toed over the boundary. We're now in a full on, 100% "let's mock the Constitution" mode. And, Napolitano, like many others, wonders why almost no one in Congress is willing to point this out:<br/>Moreover, everyone in Congress has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, which could not be more clear: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..." shall not be violated, except via a warrant issued by a neutral judge upon the judge finding probable cause of crime. If we let Congress, which is a creature of the Constitution, change the Constitution, then no one's liberty or property is safe, and freedom is dependent upon the political needs of those in power.</p>
<p>The President and the leadership of both political parties in both houses of Congress have abandoned their oaths to uphold the Constitution. They have claimed that foreigners and their American communicants are committed to destroying the country and only the invasion of everyone's right to privacy will keep us safe. They are violating the privacy of us all to find the communications of a few. Who will keep us safe from them?<br/>It's no secret that politicians use fear to increase their own power and to cut away at civil liberties. We have plenty of history that demonstrates that. It's just a real shame that so few people seem willing to speak out about this -- or that so few people even seem to care that the government has done this.</p>