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dkf's JournalExclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."
And there is it. The war on drugs has gone all big brother and they are hiding that fact so you can't use their unlawful search to defend yourself in court.
Defenders and apologists what do you say now?
Funny thing is I knew where this would go once I saw other agencies were clamoring for NSA data. I should have known they were already doing it and hiding it.
So everyone who has been using drugs including pot, they've already got everything they need to target you, at least 5 years of all your communications. You are a sitting duck.
I just thank God I don't do any of this because this would scare the crap out of me, especially if I were addicted. Addicts are so screwed.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805
The rise of one-party rule in the states
“Washington may be gridlocked these days, but the governors are not,” Delaware Gov. Jack Markell declared at the annual meeting of the National Governors Association in Milwaukee.
If that’s true, it may be because governors have one thing going for them these days that Washington doesn’t: one-party rule.
Recent elections have produced an explosion in the number of states (like Wisconsin) where the same party controls the governor’s office and both legislative chambers.
States with one-party rule have soared from 19 a decade ago to 37 today.
The number of states with divided government — 12 — is at its lowest level in 60 years:
http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/218243481.html?ipad=y
Anonymous Web Host 'Freedom Hosting' Owner Arrested, TorMail Compromised
Owner arrested in Ireland, FBI makes extradition request, malicious JavaScript discovered on a number of important hidden services.
What happened?
Eric Eoin Marques, the 28 year old owner and operator of the Tor-based internet host 'Freedom Hosting' has been arrested in Ireland and charged with distributing and promoting child pornography on the internet, reports the Independent.
Since the arrest, internet users have reported noticing malicious JavaScript designed to compromise their identities inserted into pages hosted by Freedom Hosting, including the 'Tormail' service, as well as a number of pedophile messageboards.
Why?
'Freedom Hosting' provides hosting for anonymous 'hidden services' on the Tor network. These services can range from everything from anonymous email and library services, to online marketplaces for drug distribution and the production and exchange of child pornography.
As this is part of an ongoing FBI investigation, there is no conclusive evidence that the injection of this JavaScript is the result of a government operation, however, this does fall under a known pattern of FBI behavior related to child porn sting operations. It is possible that the attack, which delivers a weaponized exploit to Firefox users running Windows systems, is the work of non-government cyber criminals, although the timing of the arrest and the appearance of this code on a number of hidden services hosted by Freedom Hosting does seem to imply a government operation.
https://openwatch.net/i/200/anonymous-web-host-freedom-hosting-owner-arrested
The Tor Blog: Hidden Services, Current Events, and Freedom Hosting
Posted August 4th, 2013 by phobos in facts freedom hosting hidden services hidservs tor network
Around midnight on August 4th we were notified by a few people that a large number of hidden service addresses have disappeared from the Tor Network. There are a variety of rumors about a hosting company for hidden services: that it is suddenly offline, has been breached, or attackers have placed a javascript exploit on their web site.
A Hidden service is a server – often delivering web pages – that is reachable only through the Tor network. While most people know that the Tor network with its thousands of volunteer-run nodes provides anonymity for users who don´t want to be tracked and identified on the internet, the lesser-known hidden service feature of Tor provides anonymity also for the server operator.
Anyone can run hidden services, and many do. We use them internally at The Tor Project to offer our developers anonymous access to services such as SSH, IRC, HTTP, and our bug tracker. Other organizations run hidden services to protect dissidents, activists, and protect the anonymity of users trying to find help for suicide prevention, domestic violence, and abuse-recovery. Whistleblowers and journalists use hidden services to exchange information in a secure and anonymous way and publish critical information in a way that is not easily traced back to them. The New Yorker's Strongbox is one public example.
Hidden service addresses, aka the dot onion domain, are cryptographically and automatically generated by the tor software. They look like this http://idnxcnkne4qt76tg.onion/, which is our torproject.org website as a hidden service.
There is no central repository nor registry of addresses. The dot onion address is both the name and routing address for the services hosted at the dot onion. The Tor network uses the .onion-address to direct requests to the hidden server and route back the data from the hidden server to the anonymous user. The design of the Tor network ensures that the user can not know where the server is located and the server can not find out the IP-address of the user, except by intentional malicious means like hidden tracking code embedded in the web pages delivered by the server. Additionally, the design of the Tor network, which is run by thousands of volunteers, ensures that it is impossible to censor or block certain .onion-addresses.
The person, or persons, who run Freedom Hosting are in no way affiliated or connected to The Tor Project, Inc., the organization coordinating the development of the Tor software and research. In the past, adversarial organizations have skipped trying to break Tor hidden services and instead attacked the software running at the server behind the dot onion address. Exploits for PHP, Apache, MySQL, and other software are far more common than exploits for Tor. The current news indicates that someone has exploited the software behind Freedom Hosting. From what is known so far, the breach was used to configure the server in a way that it injects some sort of javascript exploit in the web pages delivered to users. This exploit is used to load a malware payload to infect user's computers. The malware payload could be trying to exploit potential bugs in Firefox 17 ESR, on which our Tor Browser is based. We're investigating these bugs and will fix
them if we can.
As for now, one of multiple hidden service hosting companies appears to be down. There are lots of rumors and speculation as to what's happened. We're reading the same news and threads you are and don't have any insider information. We'll keep you updated as details become available.
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-current-events-and-freedom-hosting
Members of Congress denied access to basic information about NSA
From the beginning of the NSA controversy, the agency's defenders have insisted that Congress is aware of the disclosed programs and exercises robust supervision over them. "These programs are subject to congressional oversight and congressional reauthorization and congressional debate," President Obama said the day after the first story on NSA bulk collection of phone records was published in this space. "And if there are members of Congress who feel differently, then they should speak up."
But members of Congress, including those in Obama's party, have flatly denied knowing about them. On MSNBC on Wednesday night, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Ct) was asked by host Chris Hayes: "How much are you learning about what the government that you are charged with overseeing and holding accountable is doing from the newspaper and how much of this do you know?" The Senator's reply:
The revelations about the magnitude, the scope and scale of these surveillances, the metadata and the invasive actions surveillance of social media Web sites were indeed revelations to me."
And the most ludicrous:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/04/congress-nsa-denied-access
Drug users beware...the DEA wants to use NSA data for their investigations. Where will that stop?
Agencies working to curb drug trafficking, cyberattacks, money laundering, counterfeiting and even copyright infringement complain that their attempts to exploit the security agency’s vast resources have often been turned down because their own investigations are not considered a high enough priority, current and former government officials say.
“The other agencies feel they should be bigger players,” said Mr. Edgar, who heard many of the disputes before leaving government this year to become a visiting fellow at Brown University. “They view the N.S.A. — incorrectly, I think — as this big pot of data that they could go get if they were just able to pry it out of them.”
Smaller intelligence units within the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security have sometimes been given access to the security agency’s surveillance tools for particular cases, intelligence officials say.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/us/other-agencies-clamor-for-data-nsa-compiles.html?hp&_r=2&
Americans offer to serve Manning’s prison term for him
Supporters of Bradley Manning are willing to put their life on the line and serve part of his potential 136-year prison sentence and are urging the military judge in charge of the case to consider this option.
The online petition titled "I Will Proudly Serve Part of Bradley Manning's Sentence," has gathered more than 1,700 signatures out of 2000 needed to submit it to Major General Jeffrey S. Buchanan, who will review the sentence of Bradley Manning once the military judge Colonel Denise Lind makes the ruling.
The petitioners in their request claim that “If we each volunteer to serve part of his sentence... it would bring attention to the amount of time this young man has been sentenced to and, hopefully reduce his sentence to time served.”
In submitting their signatures, the petitioners must acknowledge that “Bradley Manning provided information to the American people which our own government would not provide. He did us all a favor and, in turn I am willing to serve part of his sentence.”
If such a request is to get accepted by the US authorities, it would mean that each participant would serve less than a month, if divided into equal parts.
http://rt.com/usa/manning-petition-serve-term-011/
Congress does not know the full extent of the NSA's collection efforts...
Thus Sen. Durbin had to add a request to learn the full extent of mass data collection:
WASHINGTON — The Senate’s No. 2 Democrat on Friday joined the growing push in Congress against the National Security Agency’s sweeping collection of cellphone records, announcing that the Senate Appropriations Committee had approved a measure that would require the agency to make public declarations about the once-secret program.
Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., who’s the assistant Senate majority leader and the chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, said the measure was inserted into a Defense Department spending bill. A spokesman for Durbin called it the first legislative action a congressional committee has approved since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the agency’s data collection program. The full Senate will debate the spending bill when it returns from its five-week recess in September.
The measure would require the agency to report the number of phone records it’s gathered and to make public the details of any other bulk data-collection programs it operates, including when they began, how much they cost and what types of records are being collected, and to list any terrorist plots that the programs have thwarted.
The added reporting requirements would do nothing to rein in the agency’s ability to collect the data, which may be one reason the bill soared through the Appropriations Committee. Durbin’s office was optimistic that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle will support the added transparency measures, but most senators had left Washington on Friday to begin their vacation and were unavailable for comment.
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/02/198458/no-2-senate-democrat-joins-calls.html#.Uf11yMu9KSM#storylink=cpy
How Google Glass may change the NFL
Kluwe has already posted some of his Google Glass videos to YouTube. They are marginally more fascinating than videos of, say, Bon Jovi's keyboard player wearing Glass.
Kluwe insists that Google Glass is a much more pleasant fit under his helmet than, say, a GoPro camera. The Vikings' Adrian Peterson had a camera embedded into his helmet this week. I have embedded the results below.
Kluwe believes that one day technology will allow players to have plays projected into their visors. But where does it stop? Wouldn't it feel like cheating if, as Kluwe suggests, quarterbacks would get a little flashing light to tell them a receiver is open? Where's the fun in that?
Football, though, is a wild sport. And Google Glass can capture the wildness with vast intimacy.
Kluwe told Forbes: "You can see the rush coming in, what it's like going down the field. That's the revolutionary part. When you have the view of running down the field with 21 other guys all moving at real time -- that first person perspective -- no one has gotten that sense before. That's what people want. The speed of the game, how chaotic it is."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57596828-93/how-google-glass-may-change-the-nfl/
Senate Approps Comm directs NSA to report on all bulk collection programs
@_cypherpunks_: Senate Approps Comm directs NSA to report on all bulk collection programs http://t.co/Ik7mn53xGY max unclassified possible (via @saftergood)
Calendar No. 163
113th Congress Report
SENATE
1st Session 113-85
======================================================================
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS BILL, 2014
_______
August 1, 2013.--Ordered to be printed
_______
Mr. Durbin, from the Committee on Appropriations,
submitted the following
REPORT
[To accompany S. 1429]
[...]
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY REPORTS
The Committee directs the National Security Agency [NSA] to
provide to the congressional intelligence committees, and the
Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and the House Committee on
the Judiciary, no later than 90 days after enactment of this
act:
--A report, unclassified to the greatest extent possible,
setting forth:
--For the last 5 years, on an annual basis, the number of
records acquired by NSA as part of the bulk
telephone metadata program authorized by the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, pursuant
to section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, and the
number of such records that have been reviewed by
NSA personnel in response to a query of such
records;
--To the extent possible, an estimate of the number of
records of United States persons that have been
acquired by NSA as part of the bulk telephone
metadata program and the number of such records
that have been reviewed by NSA personnel in
response to a query.
--A report, unclassified to the greatest extent possible, and
with a classified annex if necessary, describing all
NSA bulk collection activities, including when such
activities began, the cost of such activities, what
types of records have been collected in the past, what
types of records are currently being collected, and any
plans for future bulk collection.
--A report, unclassified to the greatest extent possible, and
with a classified annex if necessary, including a list
of terrorist activities that were disrupted, in whole
or in part, with the aid of information obtained
through NSA's telephone metadata program and whether
this information could have been promptly obtained by
other means.
[...]
NYT: How Exercise Changes Fat and Muscle Cells
One powerful means of affecting gene activity involves a process called methylation, in which methyl groups, a cluster of carbon and hydrogen atoms, attach to the outside of a gene and make it easier or harder for that gene to receive and respond to messages from the body. In this way, the behavior of the gene is changed, but not the fundamental structure of the gene itself. Remarkably, these methylation patterns can be passed on to offspring – a phenomenon known as epigenetics.
What is particularly fascinating about the methylation process is that it seems to be driven largely by how you live your life. Many recent studies have found that diet, for instance, notably affects the methylation of genes, and scientists working in this area suspect that differing genetic methylation patterns resulting from differing diets may partly determine whether someone develops diabetes and other metabolic diseases.
But the role of physical activity in gene methylation has been poorly understood, even though exercise, like diet, greatly changes the body. So several groups of scientists recently set out to determine what working out does to the exterior of our genes.
The answer, their recently published results show, is plenty.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/how-exercise-changes-fat-and-muscle-cells/?src=me&ref=general&_r=1&
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