Former intelligence officials and technology industry executives reacted with anger and anxiety over the latest revelations that the National Security Agency is reportedly infiltrating some of the world's biggest technology companies and making off with the private communications of millions of their customers. And if the reports are accurate, it could be very bad news for U.S. technology companies, who have been complaining for months that their government's secretive intelligence operations are threatening their business and driving customers towards their foreign competitors.

"I think they're in an almost impossible situation," Rep. Adam Schiff, a senior member of the Intelligence Committee, told The Cable. Speaking of Silicon Valley firms who are obligated to cooperate with the NSA, Schiff said recent leak revelations threatened to negatively impact their bottom lines. "It's definitely going to hurt their business and I think we ought to do everything we can to mitigate that damage. I'm very sympathetic to what they have to confront."

The Washington Post reported today that the agency "has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world." According to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the agency is intercepting emails, documents, and other electronic communications as they move between the companies' privately controlled facilities and the public Internet, giving the NSA access to data in nearly real-time.

The latest revelations are likely to inflame an already tense relationship between the Obama administration and American technology companies, many of whose customers live outside the United States and are not protected by laws that prohibit the NSA from spying on Americans en masse.

"Why in the world would we burn a relationship with Google by breaking into a data center?" one former intelligence officer asked.

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/10/30/nsa_bombshell_shocks_former_spooks_why_in_the_world_would_we_burn_google

An interview with ex-CIA No. 2 Mike Morell opens a rare window into the inside affairs of the U.S. intelligence agency during a trying time in U.S. history. John Miller reports.

Toronto Police have recovered the video that appears to show Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine, Toronto police Chief Bill Blair said Thursday.

Blair said at a press conference, “The video files depict images that are consistent with what has previously been reported” in the media. Ford has long denied the video existed.

Blair also said Alexander Sandro Lisi will face an extortion charge related to the video. The Star earlier reported that Lisi was involved in attempts to recover the video.

Ford has been the target of a police investigation that witnessed and photographed him taking part in meetings with Lisi, according to police documents released Thursday.

Blair told reporters they recovered two videos from a computer hard drive that are relevant to their investigation. At least one will eventually be presented in court. The Star has been told by sources that the 90-second video its reporters saw was an edited version of the original.

“It's safe to say the mayor does appear in the video,” Blair told reporters

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/10/31/rob_ford_crack_cocaine_scandal_police_photographed_mayor_in_multiple_meetings_with_alleged_drug_dealer.html

The steady trickle of revelations of government snooping that continues to seep from the Edward Snowden documents is serving to keep attention riveted on how privacy in the digital age ought to be defined.

That' most probably not to the liking of Google and Facebook. In January 2010, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg infamously declared that the expectation of privacy was no longer a social norm, and, in October 2010, then Google chairman Eric Schmidt said "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."

By rationing out details of the NSA's bag of tricks on a regular basis, the Guardian and the Washington Post have orchestrated sustained attention on the true cost of using free services from Google and Facebook , whose business models revolve around unfettered access to your online persona.

So far the NSA and White House have taken much of the heat for the varied methodologies we now know, thanks to Snowden, that the NSA uses to tap into the trove of data compiled and packaged by search engines, social websites ad popular apps.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/cybertruth/2013/10/30/how-snowden-is-returning-privacy-to-a-social-norm/3318559/

Maurice Rowland knew that the closure notice stuck on the front door of his workplace meant the assisted-living residential facility was to be closed Thursday night because of a license revocation.

But why, he wondered, were 19 of the center's 32 residents still there - some with Alzheimer's, others with what he believed to be schizophrenia, all of them hungry and wanting dinner.

Almost all the caregivers had left. The manager and owners were nowhere to be found. Rowland was the cook, hired three months earlier to prepare meals for the residents at Valley Springs Manor in Castro Valley.

"I didn't know what was going on, but I couldn't just leave them there," Rowland said Tuesday from his Hayward home. "We had built a friendship. So I did the best I could."

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Cook-caregivers-struggled-to-aid-center-s-4937888.php

When televangelist Pat Robertson announced his support for legalizing marijuana last year, pot backers wasted no time in putting his picture on an electronic billboard in Colorado.

Marijuana billboards have popped up along busy freeways from Seattle to Florida. In September, one greeted fans going to Sports Authority Field at Mile High Stadium in Denver for the first NFL game of the season. In July, pot supporters tried to get a video ad on a jumbo screen outside a NASCAR event in Indianapolis, but objections forced them to pull it in the last minute.

In the latest twist, pro-pot billboards are emblazoned on city buses in Portland, Maine, aimed at winning votes for a Nov. 5 ballot measure that would make the city the first on the East Coast to legalize marijuana for recreational use.

Critics fear that the increased advertising is a sign of things to come as support for legalization continues to grow, reflected by a Gallup poll released last week that found backing from a record high 58 percent of Americans. They see the stepped-up promotion as a dangerous trend that will lead to more drug abuse among children.

While the Greater Portland Transit District has banned tobacco ads, it accepted $2,500 to display the marijuana billboards on the exterior of four of its 32 city buses and in two bus shelters. The ads, which debuted early this month, are set to run until Election Day.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/30/206794/marijuana-ads-stir-the-pot-over.html#storylink=cpy

Hours before journalist Hasting's deadly car crash, he suspected his car's system had been hacked.

Early in the morning on June 18, a brand new Mercedes C250 coupe was driving through the Melrose intersection on Highland Avenue in Hollywood when suddenly, out of nowhere, it sped up. According to an eye-witness, the car accelerated rapidly, bounced several times then fishtailed out of control before it slammed into a palm tree and burst into flames, ejecting its engine some 200 feet away.

A witness, Jose Rubalcalva, whose house stood adjacent to the crash, told Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks news network that no one could approach the burning car because it kept exploding. In a simulated full-frontal crash of a 2013 C250 coupe, the car doesn’t explode on impact nor does it launch its engine 200 feet.

In fact, said Nael Issa, a Mercedes Benz dealer in Long Beach, “The car has a crumble zone, so when it crashes it goes in like an accordion. And in some cases the engine drops down, so it doesn’t go into you.”

The driver in the fatal crash was Michael Hastings, a 33-year-old crack investigative reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, whose June 2010 article, “The Runaway General,” exposed the behind-the-scenes failure of top U.S. General Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan—and, even more damagingly, revealed McChrystal’s mocking attitude toward the Obama administration, which ultimately led to the general’s resignation.

Four months after Hastings’s so-called accident, and despite scant coverage in the mainstream media, new facts and evidence continue to emerge raising serious unanswered questions about whether the journalist was assassinated, the breadth of unconventional cyber-techniques that may have been used, and who might have been responsible.

http://www.mintpressnews.com/killed-michael-hastings/171386/

“The government empowers these private individuals and corporations to do almost everything they want,” continued Uygur, “including hiring them to kill people. And you’re going to be surprised when they keep doing that with the same impunity they’ve always had? It’s only a matter of time.”

For the young Vietnamese dope smokers rolling up outside a smart Hanoi cafe, local cannabis is just not good enough. As with their Adidas caps, iPhones and Sanskrit tattoos, so with their choice of bud: Only foreign will do.

Potent marijuana grown indoors in Canada and the United States is easy to buy in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, say regular smokers, and it sells for up to 10 times the price of locally grown weed. That's perhaps surprising given that marijuana is easy to cultivate regionally, and bringing drugs across continents is expensive and risky.

Some experts say the trade can be explained by the dominant role Vietnamese diaspora gangs play in cultivating the drug in Western countries, making sourcing the product and smuggling it to Vietnam an easier proposition than it might be otherwise.

The characteristics of cannabis use in the country also drive the trade. The drug is used mostly by foreigners and well-heeled Vietnamese, who are prepared to pay for quality. Vietnamese have long shown preferences for imported goods of all kinds — and it appears cannabis is no exception.

Regardless of the reasons, its availability in Vietnam is a sign of how hydroponic growing techniques have shaken up the global marijuana business. In the 1960s and 70s, marijuana went from plantations in countries such as Thailand, India and Morocco to wealthy consumer markets in the West. Now, many Western countries are self-sufficient in marijuana production because of indoor cultivation, and export is on the agenda.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/10/24/canadian-weed-asia/3174717/

In the heart of Northern California’s marijuana growing region, the sheriff’s office is inundated each fall with complaints about the stench of marijuana plots or the latest expropriation of public land by growers. Its tranquil communities have been altered by the emergence of a wealthy class of marijuana entrepreneurs, while nearly 500 miles away in Los Angeles, officials have struggled to regulate an explosion of medical marijuana shops.

But at a time when polls show widening public support for legalization — recreational marijuana is about to become legal in Colorado and Washington, and voter initiatives are in the pipeline in at least three other states — California’s 17-year experience as the first state to legalize medical marijuana offers surprising lessons, experts say.

Warnings voiced against partial legalization — of civic disorder, increased lawlessness and a drastic rise in other drug use — have proved unfounded.

Instead, research suggests both that marijuana has become an alcohol substitute for younger people here and in other states that have legalized medical marijuana, and that while driving under the influence of any intoxicant is dangerous, driving after smoking marijuana is less dangerous than after drinking alcohol.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/us/few-problems-with-cannabis-for-california.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0