Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Domestic Surveillance:
Democracy Now! - Glenn Greenwald: As Obama Makes "False" Surveillance Claims, Snowden Risks Life to Spark NSA Debate
"...Greenwald calls Obama’s statements 'outright false' for omitting the warrantless spying on phone calls between Americans and callers outside the United States. 'It is true that the NSA can’t deliberately target U.S. citizens for [warrantless] surveillance, but it is also the case they are frequently engaged in surveillance of exactly that kind of invasive technique involving U.S. persons,' Greenwald says. After moderating Snowden’s online Q&A with Guardian readers, Greenwald says of the whistleblower: 'I think what you see here is a person who was very disturbed by this massive surveillance apparatus built in the U.S. that spies not only on American citizens, but the world, with very little checks, very little oversight. He’s making clear his intention was to inform citizens even at the expense of his own liberty or even life',"
Kevin Poulsen: Justice Department Fought to Conceal NSA’s Role in Terror Case From Defense Lawyers
"When a senior FBI official told Congress the role the NSA’s secret surveillance apparatus played in a San Diego terror financing case today, nobody was more surprised to hear it than the defense attorney who fought a long and futile court battle to get exactly the same information while defending the case in court..."
Matt Blaze: Phew, NSA Is Just Collecting Metadata. (You Should Still Worry)
"...With today’s communications technology, is metadata really less revealing than content? Especially when we’re dealing with metadata at the scale that we now know the NSA and FBI are receiving? Because at such a scale, people’s intuition about the relative invasiveness of content and metadata starts to fail them. Phone records can actually be more revealing than content when someone has as many records and as complete a set of them as the NSA does..."
The Guardian (UK) - NSA surveillance is an attack on American citizens, says Noam Chomsky
"...'Governments should not have this capacity. But governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy – which is their own population,' he told the Guardian. In his first public comment on the scandal that has enveloped the US, UK and other governments, as well as internet companies such as Google and Microsoft, Chomsky said he was not overly surprised technology and corporations were being used in this way. 'This is obviously something that should not be done. But it is a little difficult to be too surprised by it,' he said. 'They [governments and corporations] take whatever is available, and in no time it is being used against us, the population. Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.' Chomsky, who has strongly supported the Occupy movement and spoken out against the Obama administration's use of drones, warned that young people were much less shocked at being spied on and did not view it as such a problem. 'Polls in the US indicate there is generational issue here that someone ought to look into – my impression is that younger people are less offended by this than the older generation. It may have to do with the exhibitionist character of the internet culture, with Facebook and so on," he said. "On the internet, you think everything is going to be public.' Other technologies could also come to be used to spy more effectively on people, he added. 'They don't want people to know what they're doing. They want to be able to use [new technology] against their own people. 'Take a look at drones, and what is developing. You will find new drone technology being used in 10 or 12 years from now. They are looking at [trying to make] tiny drones that can go in your living room, like a fly on the wall,'..."
The Guardian (UK) - FBI admits to using surveillance drones over US soil
"The FBI has admitted it sometimes uses aerial surveillance drones over US soil, and suggested further political debate and legislation to govern their domestic use may be necessary. Speaking in a hearing mainly about telephone data collection, the bureau's director, Robert Mueller, said it used drones to aid its investigations in a 'very, very minimal way, very seldom'. However, the potential for growing drone use either in the US, or involving US citizens abroad, is an increasingly charged issue in Congress, and the FBI acknowleged there may need to be legal restrictions placed on their use to protect privacy..."
Purging History:
Bill Bigelow: Camouflaging the Vietnam War: How Textbooks Continue to Keep the Pentagon Papers a Secret
"...Corporate textbook writers seem to work from the same list of must-include events and individuals. Thus, all the new U.S. history textbooks on my shelf mention the Pentagon Papers. But none grapples with the actual import of the Pentagon Papers. None quotes Ellsberg or the historical documents themselves, and none captures Ellsberg’s central conclusion about the United States in Vietnam: 'It wasn’t that we were on the wrong side; we were the wrong side.' Textbooks resist telling students that the U.S. government consistently lied about the war, preferring more genteel language. Prentice Hall’s America: History of Our Nation includes only one line describing the content of the Pentagon Papers: “They traced the steps by which the United States had committed itself to the Vietnam War and showed that government officials had concealed actions and often misled Americans about their motives.” The textbook offers no examples..."
Dirty Energy:
Russell Mokhiber: The Price of Justice: Greed, Corruption and Big Coal
"Check out this cast of characters..."
Democracy Now! - Glenn Greenwald: As Obama Makes "False" Surveillance Claims, Snowden Risks Life to Spark NSA Debate
"...Greenwald calls Obama’s statements 'outright false' for omitting the warrantless spying on phone calls between Americans and callers outside the United States. 'It is true that the NSA can’t deliberately target U.S. citizens for [warrantless] surveillance, but it is also the case they are frequently engaged in surveillance of exactly that kind of invasive technique involving U.S. persons,' Greenwald says. After moderating Snowden’s online Q&A with Guardian readers, Greenwald says of the whistleblower: 'I think what you see here is a person who was very disturbed by this massive surveillance apparatus built in the U.S. that spies not only on American citizens, but the world, with very little checks, very little oversight. He’s making clear his intention was to inform citizens even at the expense of his own liberty or even life',"
Kevin Poulsen: Justice Department Fought to Conceal NSA’s Role in Terror Case From Defense Lawyers
"When a senior FBI official told Congress the role the NSA’s secret surveillance apparatus played in a San Diego terror financing case today, nobody was more surprised to hear it than the defense attorney who fought a long and futile court battle to get exactly the same information while defending the case in court..."
Matt Blaze: Phew, NSA Is Just Collecting Metadata. (You Should Still Worry)
"...With today’s communications technology, is metadata really less revealing than content? Especially when we’re dealing with metadata at the scale that we now know the NSA and FBI are receiving? Because at such a scale, people’s intuition about the relative invasiveness of content and metadata starts to fail them. Phone records can actually be more revealing than content when someone has as many records and as complete a set of them as the NSA does..."
The Guardian (UK) - NSA surveillance is an attack on American citizens, says Noam Chomsky
"...'Governments should not have this capacity. But governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy – which is their own population,' he told the Guardian. In his first public comment on the scandal that has enveloped the US, UK and other governments, as well as internet companies such as Google and Microsoft, Chomsky said he was not overly surprised technology and corporations were being used in this way. 'This is obviously something that should not be done. But it is a little difficult to be too surprised by it,' he said. 'They [governments and corporations] take whatever is available, and in no time it is being used against us, the population. Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.' Chomsky, who has strongly supported the Occupy movement and spoken out against the Obama administration's use of drones, warned that young people were much less shocked at being spied on and did not view it as such a problem. 'Polls in the US indicate there is generational issue here that someone ought to look into – my impression is that younger people are less offended by this than the older generation. It may have to do with the exhibitionist character of the internet culture, with Facebook and so on," he said. "On the internet, you think everything is going to be public.' Other technologies could also come to be used to spy more effectively on people, he added. 'They don't want people to know what they're doing. They want to be able to use [new technology] against their own people. 'Take a look at drones, and what is developing. You will find new drone technology being used in 10 or 12 years from now. They are looking at [trying to make] tiny drones that can go in your living room, like a fly on the wall,'..."
The Guardian (UK) - FBI admits to using surveillance drones over US soil
"The FBI has admitted it sometimes uses aerial surveillance drones over US soil, and suggested further political debate and legislation to govern their domestic use may be necessary. Speaking in a hearing mainly about telephone data collection, the bureau's director, Robert Mueller, said it used drones to aid its investigations in a 'very, very minimal way, very seldom'. However, the potential for growing drone use either in the US, or involving US citizens abroad, is an increasingly charged issue in Congress, and the FBI acknowleged there may need to be legal restrictions placed on their use to protect privacy..."
Purging History:
Bill Bigelow: Camouflaging the Vietnam War: How Textbooks Continue to Keep the Pentagon Papers a Secret
"...Corporate textbook writers seem to work from the same list of must-include events and individuals. Thus, all the new U.S. history textbooks on my shelf mention the Pentagon Papers. But none grapples with the actual import of the Pentagon Papers. None quotes Ellsberg or the historical documents themselves, and none captures Ellsberg’s central conclusion about the United States in Vietnam: 'It wasn’t that we were on the wrong side; we were the wrong side.' Textbooks resist telling students that the U.S. government consistently lied about the war, preferring more genteel language. Prentice Hall’s America: History of Our Nation includes only one line describing the content of the Pentagon Papers: “They traced the steps by which the United States had committed itself to the Vietnam War and showed that government officials had concealed actions and often misled Americans about their motives.” The textbook offers no examples..."
Dirty Energy:
Russell Mokhiber: The Price of Justice: Greed, Corruption and Big Coal
"Check out this cast of characters..."
Monday, June 10, 2013
Domestic Surveillance:
Wired: NSA Is Wired Into Top Internet Companies’ Servers, Including Google and Facebook
"As if news of the National Security Agency collecting phone records on millions of Americans wasn’t enough, a new report reveals that the NSA and FBI are directly tapped into central servers at nine U.S. internet firms, in order to provide constant monitoring of audio, video, photos, emails and documents as well as connection logs. The companies whose servers are being mined are reportedly Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. The classified program, dubbed PRISM, has been in operation since 2007 and has been a leading source of intelligence fed to the president in his daily intelligence briefings, according to the Washington Post, which broke the story at the same time as the Guardian today...
...According to the Post, the system is not a dragnet, per se, since the program doesn’t vacuum everything indiscriminately. But it allows NSA analysts at Ft. Meade to sit at their desks and fish the data stream for key terms. The program is supposed to focus on data pertaining to foreigners. But search terms the analysts use to pull data are only designed to be at least 51 percent accurate in determining a target’s 'foreignness.' This means a lot of U.S. content is bound to get caught in the net. But training materials obtained by the Post aren’t too concerned about accidental collections of U.S. content, calling it “nothing to worry about” and telling analysts to simply report those accidental collections in a quarterly report..."
Wired: Also Revealed by Verizon Leak: How the NSA and FBI Lie With Numbers
"Here’s a seemingly comforting statistic: In all of 2012, the Obama administration went to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court only 200 times to ask for Americans’ 'business records' under the USA Patriot Act. Every year, the Justice Department gives Congress a tally of the classified wiretap orders sought and issued in terrorist and spy cases – it was 1,789 last year. At the same time, it reports the number of demands for 'business records' in such cases, issued under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. And while the number of such orders has generally grown over the years, it has always managed to stay relatively low. In 2011, it was 205. There were 96 orders in 2010, and only 21 in 2009. Thanks to the Guardian’s scoop, we now know definitively just how misleading these numbers are. You see, while the feds are required to disclose the number of orders they apply for and receive (almost always the same number, by the way), they aren’t required to say how many people are targeted in each order. So a single order issued to Verizon Business Solutions in April covered metadata for every phone call made by every customer. That’s from one order out of what will probably be about 200 reported in next year’s numbers. The public numbers are the one bit of accountability around the surveillance court, and the Justice Department used them to misdirect the public away from a massive domestic NSA spying operation that, as several Senators approvingly noted today, has been running for seven years..."
The Guardian (UK) - Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations
"The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA's history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows...
...In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: 'I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.' Despite his determination to be publicly unveiled, he repeatedly insisted that he wants to avoid the media spotlight. 'I don't want public attention because I don't want the story to be about me. I want it to be about what the US government is doing.' He does not fear the consequences of going public, he said, only that doing so will distract attention from the issues raised by his disclosures. 'I know the media likes to personalise political debates, and I know the government will demonise me.' Despite these fears, he remained hopeful his outing will not divert attention from the substance of his disclosures. 'I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in.' He added: 'My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them,'"
Energy:
The Guardian (UK) - Methane leaks could negate climate benefits of US natural gas boom: report
"Methane leaks could undo the climate change benefits of America's natural gas boom, a new report said on Tuesday. The report, produced by the Centre for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), said America's shift from coal to gas had produced important climate gains. Carbon dioxide emissions fell last year to their lowest point since 1994, according to the Department of Energy. Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions were 12% below 2005 levels. But the report said those reductions were not enough, on their own, to escape the most catastrophic consequences of climate change. They were also being offset by a sharp rise in methane, the most powerful greenhouse gas on a human timescale, that was being released into the atmosphere at well sites, compressor stations and along pipelines. Methane is up to 105 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas on a 20-year timescale..."
AutoBlogGreen: VW XL1 'only' gets 120 mpg in new test drive
"You've got to love this brave new world we're in, where getting 120 miles per gallon can be considered a disappointment. That's the upshot of an Automobile magazine test drive of the Volkswagen XL1 plug-in hybrid diesel, which the German automaker has said can get as much as 261 miles per gallon, Hybrid Cars says. Automobile, which admitted it weighed down the car a bit by employing a 264-pound test driver, got about 160 miles per gallon on a highway drive from Lucerne to Geneva. More mixed driving yielded results as low as 118 miles per gallon for the 1,750-pound car, which can go about 30 miles on electric power alone. Automobile did praise the super aerodynamic car for its steering, brakes and handling, though. VW plans to make only about 250 XL1s and said late last month that the sleek little ride (read our test drive here) would likely be made available via lease only, and that it would probably be available only in Europe."
Inhabitat: World's First Carbon Negative Building Block Unveiled in the UK
"The Carbon Buster is the world’s first building block to capture more carbon dioxide than is emitted during its manufacturing (14kg per ton). The high-performing masonry product, developed by British company Lignacite, Ltd. in partnership with Carbon8 Aggregates, is made up of more than 50% recycled material – including Carbon8 pellets (which are made of thermal residue from waste to energy plants), water and carbon dioxide. The resulting aggregate is incorporated into the company’s products to create the carbon negative building block..."
Wired: NSA Is Wired Into Top Internet Companies’ Servers, Including Google and Facebook
"As if news of the National Security Agency collecting phone records on millions of Americans wasn’t enough, a new report reveals that the NSA and FBI are directly tapped into central servers at nine U.S. internet firms, in order to provide constant monitoring of audio, video, photos, emails and documents as well as connection logs. The companies whose servers are being mined are reportedly Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. The classified program, dubbed PRISM, has been in operation since 2007 and has been a leading source of intelligence fed to the president in his daily intelligence briefings, according to the Washington Post, which broke the story at the same time as the Guardian today...
...According to the Post, the system is not a dragnet, per se, since the program doesn’t vacuum everything indiscriminately. But it allows NSA analysts at Ft. Meade to sit at their desks and fish the data stream for key terms. The program is supposed to focus on data pertaining to foreigners. But search terms the analysts use to pull data are only designed to be at least 51 percent accurate in determining a target’s 'foreignness.' This means a lot of U.S. content is bound to get caught in the net. But training materials obtained by the Post aren’t too concerned about accidental collections of U.S. content, calling it “nothing to worry about” and telling analysts to simply report those accidental collections in a quarterly report..."
Wired: Also Revealed by Verizon Leak: How the NSA and FBI Lie With Numbers
"Here’s a seemingly comforting statistic: In all of 2012, the Obama administration went to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court only 200 times to ask for Americans’ 'business records' under the USA Patriot Act. Every year, the Justice Department gives Congress a tally of the classified wiretap orders sought and issued in terrorist and spy cases – it was 1,789 last year. At the same time, it reports the number of demands for 'business records' in such cases, issued under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. And while the number of such orders has generally grown over the years, it has always managed to stay relatively low. In 2011, it was 205. There were 96 orders in 2010, and only 21 in 2009. Thanks to the Guardian’s scoop, we now know definitively just how misleading these numbers are. You see, while the feds are required to disclose the number of orders they apply for and receive (almost always the same number, by the way), they aren’t required to say how many people are targeted in each order. So a single order issued to Verizon Business Solutions in April covered metadata for every phone call made by every customer. That’s from one order out of what will probably be about 200 reported in next year’s numbers. The public numbers are the one bit of accountability around the surveillance court, and the Justice Department used them to misdirect the public away from a massive domestic NSA spying operation that, as several Senators approvingly noted today, has been running for seven years..."
The Guardian (UK) - Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations
"The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA's history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows...
...In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: 'I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.' Despite his determination to be publicly unveiled, he repeatedly insisted that he wants to avoid the media spotlight. 'I don't want public attention because I don't want the story to be about me. I want it to be about what the US government is doing.' He does not fear the consequences of going public, he said, only that doing so will distract attention from the issues raised by his disclosures. 'I know the media likes to personalise political debates, and I know the government will demonise me.' Despite these fears, he remained hopeful his outing will not divert attention from the substance of his disclosures. 'I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in.' He added: 'My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them,'"
Energy:
The Guardian (UK) - Methane leaks could negate climate benefits of US natural gas boom: report
"Methane leaks could undo the climate change benefits of America's natural gas boom, a new report said on Tuesday. The report, produced by the Centre for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), said America's shift from coal to gas had produced important climate gains. Carbon dioxide emissions fell last year to their lowest point since 1994, according to the Department of Energy. Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions were 12% below 2005 levels. But the report said those reductions were not enough, on their own, to escape the most catastrophic consequences of climate change. They were also being offset by a sharp rise in methane, the most powerful greenhouse gas on a human timescale, that was being released into the atmosphere at well sites, compressor stations and along pipelines. Methane is up to 105 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas on a 20-year timescale..."
AutoBlogGreen: VW XL1 'only' gets 120 mpg in new test drive
"You've got to love this brave new world we're in, where getting 120 miles per gallon can be considered a disappointment. That's the upshot of an Automobile magazine test drive of the Volkswagen XL1 plug-in hybrid diesel, which the German automaker has said can get as much as 261 miles per gallon, Hybrid Cars says. Automobile, which admitted it weighed down the car a bit by employing a 264-pound test driver, got about 160 miles per gallon on a highway drive from Lucerne to Geneva. More mixed driving yielded results as low as 118 miles per gallon for the 1,750-pound car, which can go about 30 miles on electric power alone. Automobile did praise the super aerodynamic car for its steering, brakes and handling, though. VW plans to make only about 250 XL1s and said late last month that the sleek little ride (read our test drive here) would likely be made available via lease only, and that it would probably be available only in Europe."
Inhabitat: World's First Carbon Negative Building Block Unveiled in the UK
"The Carbon Buster is the world’s first building block to capture more carbon dioxide than is emitted during its manufacturing (14kg per ton). The high-performing masonry product, developed by British company Lignacite, Ltd. in partnership with Carbon8 Aggregates, is made up of more than 50% recycled material – including Carbon8 pellets (which are made of thermal residue from waste to energy plants), water and carbon dioxide. The resulting aggregate is incorporated into the company’s products to create the carbon negative building block..."
Monday, June 03, 2013
Science
New information about Cannabis & Type2 Diabetes, Crohn's Disease, HIV, and PTSD your government would like you to ignore.
Paul Armentano: The Latest Cannabis Discoveries That the Federal Government Doesn’t Want You to Know About
"Despite issuing a highly publicized memorandum in 2009 stating, 'Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration,' it remains clear that federal lawmakers and the White House continue to willfully ignore science in regards to the cannabis plant and the federal policies which condemn it to the same prohibitive legal status as heroin..."
Energy:
The Hill: Gov. Hickenlooper a bad example on oil-and-gas issues
"The cozy relationship between politicians and big business has been a fact of life in America since the days of the robber barons. Today, this affiliation is especially strong between certain governors and the oil and gas industry. And, the consequences could include drastic impacts on the health and safety of their constituents. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Colorado’s Gov. John Hickenlooper. Given that Colorado is the epicenter of both the gas boom and the controversy over its impacts, the governor has become a leading national figure on oil and gas. Earlier this year, Hickenlooper appeared in front of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee during a hearing and stated that he drank fracking fluid, implying that it’s safe. Shortly after, he was forced to clarify that what he drank isn’t actually used commercially, stating that: 'I don’t think there’s any frack fluid right now that I’m aware of that people are using commercially that you want to drink.' It turns out that this wasn’t the last time that the governor would go to bat for the oil-and-gas industry. In fact, Hickenlooper has mastered the rhetoric of a concerned elected official, while at the same time working to help his billion-dollar oil-and-gas industry boosters cheat the rules that protect public health and water. While Hickenlooper has claimed he would increase fines and hold industry polluters accountable, behind closed doors he helped weaken and kill legislation aimed at doing just that..."
New information about Cannabis & Type2 Diabetes, Crohn's Disease, HIV, and PTSD your government would like you to ignore.
Paul Armentano: The Latest Cannabis Discoveries That the Federal Government Doesn’t Want You to Know About
"Despite issuing a highly publicized memorandum in 2009 stating, 'Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration,' it remains clear that federal lawmakers and the White House continue to willfully ignore science in regards to the cannabis plant and the federal policies which condemn it to the same prohibitive legal status as heroin..."
Energy:
The Hill: Gov. Hickenlooper a bad example on oil-and-gas issues
"The cozy relationship between politicians and big business has been a fact of life in America since the days of the robber barons. Today, this affiliation is especially strong between certain governors and the oil and gas industry. And, the consequences could include drastic impacts on the health and safety of their constituents. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Colorado’s Gov. John Hickenlooper. Given that Colorado is the epicenter of both the gas boom and the controversy over its impacts, the governor has become a leading national figure on oil and gas. Earlier this year, Hickenlooper appeared in front of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee during a hearing and stated that he drank fracking fluid, implying that it’s safe. Shortly after, he was forced to clarify that what he drank isn’t actually used commercially, stating that: 'I don’t think there’s any frack fluid right now that I’m aware of that people are using commercially that you want to drink.' It turns out that this wasn’t the last time that the governor would go to bat for the oil-and-gas industry. In fact, Hickenlooper has mastered the rhetoric of a concerned elected official, while at the same time working to help his billion-dollar oil-and-gas industry boosters cheat the rules that protect public health and water. While Hickenlooper has claimed he would increase fines and hold industry polluters accountable, behind closed doors he helped weaken and kill legislation aimed at doing just that..."
