May 30, 2014

Court upholds Navy Complex plans

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/may/29/navy-broadway-complex-ruling-coastal-commission/

Court upholds Navy Complex plans
By Roger Showley3:45 p.m.May 29, 2014

Plans to redevelop a key Navy property on downtown San Diego’s waterfront have been upheld once again in court.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller ruled Wednesday against the California Coastal Commission, which wanted the $1.3 billion project — a partnership between the Navy and U-T San Diego publisher “Papa” Doug Manchester — to be restudied for consistency with federal coastal law.

The commission, which has 60 days to appeal, is likely to discuss the matter at its June 11-13 meeting in Huntington Beach, a spokesman said.

~snip~

The 2.9-million-square-foot project, more than 30 years in the making, was originally intended to get the Navy a new regional office building at no cost to taxpayers.


--

And the ruling: http://www.utsandiego.com/documents/2014/may/29/court-ruling-navymanchester-project/

May 30, 2014

Ford issues 4 recalls affecting 1.4M vehicles

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2014/05/29/3217570/ford-recalls-11m-vehicles-for.html?sp=/99/261/

Ford issues 4 recalls affecting 1.4M vehicles
The Associated Press
May 29, 2014 Updated 16 hours ago

DETROIT — Ford is recalling 1.4 million SUVs and cars in North America to fix steering, rust and floor mat problems.

The recalls come as automobile safety is being watched closely by Congress, the Justice Department and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. All are investigating General Motors' delayed recall of small cars for ignition switch problems. Also, Justice recently made Toyota pay a $1.2 billion penalty for hiding information from government safety regulators.

In the largest of the Ford recalls Thursday, the company is calling back 915,000 Ford Escape and Mercury Mariner small SUVs to fix a problem with a torque sensor within the steering column. The problem could cause loss of power-assisted steering, making the SUVs more difficult to control and increasing the risk of a crash, Ford says.

The company recommends one of three fixes: replacing the sensor, updating software or replacing the steering column. The recall affects model year 2008 through 2011 vehicles built between Aug. 18, 2006 and Sept. 11, 2010.

May 30, 2014

Lacey company ups minimum wage to $17 per hour

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2014/05/29/3217728/lacey-company-ups-minimum-wage.html?sp=/99/261/



Eco-friendly detergent is blended and packaged for sale during a regular production run at Earth Friendly Products. The Lacey-based company said its starting wage will now be $17 an hour.

Lacey company ups minimum wage to $17 per hour
By C.R. Roberts
Staff writer
May 29, 2014 Updated 16 hours ago

Voters in SeaTac approve a new minimum wage, and the battle is joined in Washington.

The rallying cry: $15 per hour.

~snip~

However, the actions of cities and states do not mean much at one Lacey company.

At Earth Friendly Products, workers earn a minimum of $17 per hour – and have since last April, on Earth Day. The company produces a large line of environmentally friendly cleaning products.

May 30, 2014

Anchorage's USGS Map Store falls victim to the digital age

http://www.adn.com/2014/05/29/3492616/anchorages-usgs-map-store-falls.html?sp=/99/171/



FILE -- The Alaska Natural History Map Store at USGS is in Grace Hall on the APU campus.

Anchorage's USGS Map Store falls victim to the digital age
By CRAIG MEDRED
May 29, 2014 Updated 7 hours ago

Less than two weeks after Kenneth Baitsholts lost his job for breaking a gag order about the proposed closure of the U.S. Geological Survey's Map Store in Anchorage, the federal agency has announced the iconic business on the campus of Alaska Pacific University will close at the end of October.

Baitsholts thinks this a good thing. Not necessarily the loss of his job, but the public notification at last of the impending closure of what used to be an Anchorage institution where Alaskans would go to roam among the tall stacks of maps or try to track down aerial photographs of more remote corners of the 49th state.

It was a disagreement over what should be said about the fate of the store -- once visited by almost every outdoorsperson in the city -- that caused Baitsholts to part ways with Alaska Geographic, the nonprofit entity the USGS contracted to run the store.

"I lost my job because I was fairly vocal about telling customers the store was going to close," said Baitsholts, a store employee for seven years and the manager for the last five and a half. "I'm really driven by wanting to support the customers. There have been people coming there for 25 years."

May 30, 2014

Snowden: NSA Revealed Only One Email, Shows NSA Lied Before... Also: None Of This Matters

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140529/18000127398/snowden-nsa-revealed-only-one-email-shows-nsa-lied-before-also-none-this-matters.shtml

Snowden: NSA Revealed Only One Email, Shows NSA Lied Before... Also: None Of This Matters
from the the-battle-continues dept
by Mike Masnick
Fri, May 30th 2014 3:41am

After NBC confirmed Ed Snowden's earlier claims that he had tried to make use of internal channels to question NSA surveillance programs, James Clapper released a single email from Snowden to the legal department at the NSA, which they claim shows he never actually raised these issues. Snowden quickly responded, noting that this is not the only email, that he raised the issue more directly with his supervisors... and, most importantly, that none of this really matters.

~snip~

More importantly, though, Snowden points out that none of this really matters:

Ultimately, whether my disclosures were justified does not depend on whether I raised these concerns previously. That’s because the system is designed to ensure that even the most valid concerns are suppressed and ignored, not acted upon. The fact that two powerful Democratic Senators - Ron Wyden and Mark Udall - knew of mass surveillance that they believed was abusive and felt constrained to do anything about it underscores how futile such internal action is -- and will remain -- until these processes are reformed.

Still, the fact is that I did raise such concerns both verbally and in writing, and on multiple, continuing occasions - as I have always said, and as NSA has always denied. Just as when the NSA claimed it followed German laws in Germany just weeks before it was revealed that they did not, or when NSA said they did not engage in economic espionage a few short months before it was revealed they actually did so on a regular and recurring basis, or even when they claimed they had “no domestic spying program” before we learned they collected the phone records of every American they could, so too are today’s claims that “this is only evidence we have of him reporting concerns” false.

May 30, 2014

Mr. Kerry: Why Snowden can’t “Make his Case” in “Our System of Justice”

http://www.juancole.com/2014/05/snowden-system-justice.html

Mr. Kerry: Why Snowden can’t “Make his Case” in “Our System of Justice”
By Juan Cole | May. 30, 2014

Secretary of State John Kerry said that Edward Snowden should “return home and come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case.” Kerry seems to have a high opinion of the Department of Justice and the US courts when it comes to national security issues. I can’t imagine for the life of me why. Kerry is either amazingly ignorant or being disingenuous when he suggests that Snowden would be allowed to “make his case” if he returned to the US. No one outside the penal justice system would ever see him again, the moment he set foot here, assuming he was not given a prior deal. He could maybe try to explain himself to the prison guards, assuming they didn’t stick him in solitary. Here are some reasons Mr. Snowden would be unwise to trust himself to that system, given the charges against him:

1. The United Nations Special Rapporteur found that the US was guilty of cruel and inhuman treatment of Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, who was responsible for the Wikileaks and revelations of US killing of unarmed journalists in Iraq. Manning was kept in solitary confinement and isolated 23 hours a day for months on end, was kept naked and chained to a bed, and was subjected to sleep deprivation techniques, all three well known forms of torture, on the trumped up pretext that he was suicidal (his psychiatrist disagreed).

2. The Espionage Act under which Snowden would likely be tried is a fascist law from the time when President Woodrow Wilson (like Obama a scholar of the constitution) was trying to take the US into the war, and was used to repeal the First Amendment right of Americans to protest this action. It was used to arbitrarily imprison thousands and is full of unconstitutional provisions. In recent decades the act was used against whistleblowers only three times, but Barack Obama loves it to death. It is an embarrassment that it is still on the books and it reflects extremely badly on Obama and on Eric Holder that they have revived it as a tool against whistleblowing (which is most often a public service).

3. John Kiriakou, who revealed CIA torture under Bush-Cheney, was prevented by the Espionage Act from addressing the jury to explain the intentions behind his actions and therefore forced into a plea bargain. None of the CIA officers who perpetrated the torture or their superiors, who ordered it, have been punished, but Kiriakou is in prison and his family is in danger of losing the house because of the lack of income. The US public deserved to know about the torture rather than having Obama bury it the way he has buried so many other things wrong with the system.

May 30, 2014

Posterity Will Hate Us: Building a Lasting Legacy of Death

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/chris-floyd/56127/posterity-will-hate-us-building-a-lasting-legacy-of-death

Posterity Will Hate Us: Building a Lasting Legacy of Death
by Chris Floyd | May 28, 2014 - 9:25am

What do we aim at? Houses! Who do we kill? Everyone inside the houses! What are their names? We don’t know! What did they do? We don’t know! Are they civilians? We don’t care!

~snip~

Some of these operations are carried out at the direct order of the president of the United States, who meets with his advisors every Tuesday to draw up death lists of victims to be killed. Others are slaughtered by the innumerable officers and agents upon whom the White House has bestowed a license to kill as they see fit.

But as the Bureau points out, even when the name of the target is known — although of course there is no need for any proof to be offered as to the target’s ostensible death-deserving guilt — they are most often blown to pieces in domestic homes, along with family members, friends and, often, neighbors who live nearby.

— Sometimes when I write paragraphs like the one above — setting out undisputed facts; indeed, facts that are often celebrated in the highest reaches of the political and media elites — I find myself slack-jawed, drop-jawed to the floor with amazement. The bare, banal, widely accepted, shrugged-off realities of life in the American Imperium today would have been regarded, just a few years ago, as the wildest, most unbelievable fantasies of political paranoids. The president sits in the White House and draws up death lists. Robot-controlled missiles blow up people’s houses, killing hundreds of civilians each year. Not an eyelid is batted, scarcely a voice is raised in protest, except on the far-flung disregarded margins. This is the way the world is, and one must acknowledge that — but sometimes, the cognitive dissonance hits you like a two-by-four upside the head.

May 30, 2014

This Is What Happens When You Hack and Extort the ‘Bitcoin Jesus’

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/dfwtbj/



This Is What Happens When You Hack and Extort the ‘Bitcoin Jesus’
By Robert McMillan
05.28.14 | 6:30 am

When the man known as “The Bitcoin Jesus” got hacked, he didn’t go straight to the police. He just tapped the power of bitcoin.

Last week, Roger Ver–an American-born ex-pat living in Japan who’s long been at the heart of the worldwide bitcoin community–was contacted by a hacker who had seized control of his old Hotmail account and used it to nab his Social Security number, passport number, and other personal information. The hacker threatened to exploit this information unless Ver forked over about 37 bitcoins, the equivalent of $20,000. But then Ver used the same number of bitcoins to put out a bounty on the hacker, and this instantly transformed the brazen cyber criminal into a penitent stooge.

“Sir, I am sincerely sorry. I am just a middleman. I was being told what to tell you,” the hacker told Ver soon after the bounty was posted, before later asking: “Are you going to order a hitman to kill me now?”

Libertarians have long hailed bitcoin as a way to free the world from the control big government and big banks. But with his 37-bitcoin bounty, Ver has given the world’s most popular digital currency a new kind of libertarian cred. For Ver, the digital currency is not just a way of storing and moving money without help from the authorities. It’s also a way of seeking justice, something that’s laid out in the Skype chat logs that Ver provided of his conversation with the hacker. Sure, you can wield this type of bounty using other currencies–and many have–but there’s something particularly appropriate about doing it with bitcoin.

May 30, 2014

Snowden’s Crypto Software May Be Tainted Forever

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/truecrypt/

Snowden’s Crypto Software May Be Tainted Forever
By Robert McMillan
05.29.14 | 8:19 pm

Edward Snowden saw the power of TrueCrypt. Before he became famous for leaking NSA documents to the press, he spent an afternoon in Hawaii teaching people how they could use the encryption software to securely and privately send information over the internet. And according to Reuters, the domestic partner of journalist Glen Greenwald used TrueCrypt to ferry some of Snowden’s leaked material between Brazil and Berlin.

But TrueCrypt may have lost this power–and may never get it back.

This week, a message appeared on the website that offers TrueCrypt, saying that the software “may contain some unfixed security issues” and should not be used. It was a big shock to the millions of people who now use the software to protect their online communications, but not just because it now seemed that the software was full of holes. The message arrived so suddenly–and without explanation–that many security experts are wondering if the message was posted by hackers who had compromised the website.

It’s all a bit of a mystery, because, like a small number of other open-source projects, TrueCrypt is built by anonymous developers. It’s hard to know if the good guys have screwed up or if the bad guys are in control.

May 30, 2014

Wall Street cop’s shameful scheme: Inside an infuriating bureaucratic turf war

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/29/shame_befalls_wall_street_cop_inside_an_infuriating_bureaucratic_turf_war/



Asset managers could face a just-created super-regulator. Here's why Mary Jo White's SEC is fighting it all the way

Wall Street cop’s shameful scheme: Inside an infuriating bureaucratic turf war
David Dayen
Thursday, May 29, 2014 3:43 PM UTC

The Securities and Exchange Commission has touched off a major bureaucratic scuffle with its fellow financial regulators by proposing to, in the words of one Democratic aide, “rip the heart out of Dodd-Frank.” The SEC, following the wishes of one of its Republican commissioners, has initiated a turf war over which agency gets to monitor a key corner of the financial system.

At issue are so-called asset managers, companies like BlackRock, Fidelity and Pimco, who manage investments on behalf of individuals and groups through mutual funds and other vehicles. Asset management firms collectively control an astonishing $53 trillion in investor funds.

Historically, the SEC has regulated asset managers. But under Dodd-Frank, the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a newly created super-regulator, can designate “systemically important financial institutions,” or SIFIs, and subject them to rules previously reserved for banks. An FSOC designation puts non-bank SIFIs under the supervision of the Federal Reserve, subjecting them to tougher standards, like having to carry more capital to cover against losses. This makes sense, because non-banks like AIG were major contributors to the crisis.

Two asset managers – BlackRock, which manages $3.8 trillion in funds, and Fidelity, which manages $1.9 trillion – came under official FSOC review last November, and the SEC has fought it virtually all the way.