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+ - US intelligence officials to monitor federal employees with clearances->

Submitted by Trachman
Trachman writes "We are going to the next level. The people who are entrusted with the state secrets will now have be officially under automated surveillance. Sounds fair? Except that all those with the clearances have been monitored in the past albeit in less organized way. For decades employees have been taught to snitch on each other by reporting "suspicious" behavior in any self respecting organization, private or state funded. So it does not appear to illogical, in fact, quite a reasonable justifications for 5 million or so of people with clearance to completely and officially lose their privacy, right? So who knows, perhaps in ten years when federal employee tracking will be "accepted social norm", there will be a new push (under whatever the issue of the day) called "entrusted citizen and taxpayer". In order to be deemed to be trusted citizen and taxpayer one will be subjected to the scrutiny currently extended to the federal security apparatus employees. The icing of the cake is the comment made by the program leaders : “The system only works well, if it has thoughtful, educated, careful human beings behind it” . I am happy to remind that this a less romantic quote of Soviet Cheka (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A7%D0%9A), who have described themselves as patriots with flaming heart and cold mind."
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+ - Homeland Security Used Intercepted Emails to Quiz Woman About Her Sex Life->

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes "The ACLU is filing a lawsuit on behalf of Christine Von Der Haar after she was detained by Customs and Border Patrol at at Indianapolis International Airport during an incident in 2012.

"CBP officers grossly exceeded their jurisdiction. Dr. Von Der Haar’s US citizenship was never questioned; she wasn’t trying to enter, leave, or ship and goods in or out of the country; and she was never accused of any crime. In general, immigration (as distinct from customs) offenses are handled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol, not CBP. We’re curious what basis CBP will claim for its officers’ authority to detain and interrogate Dr. Von Der Haar or obtain her email," asks Papers Please.

Either the DHS is obtaining Americans' emails via their own undeclared (and illegal) snoop program, or they are being aided by the National Security Agency or some other government entity."
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+ - BP Finds Way to Bypass US Crude Export Ban

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Bloomberg reports that the oil industry is pressuring President Barack Obama to end the 41-year-old ban on most crude exports but British Petroleum (BP) isn’t waiting for a decision. The British oil giant has signed on to take at least 80 percent of the capacity of a new $360 million mini-refinery in Houston that will process crude just enough to escape restrictions on sales outside the country. “It’s a relatively inexpensive way around the export prohibition,” says Judith Dwarkin “You can lightly ruffle the hydrocarbons and they are considered processed and then they aren’t subject to the ban.” Amid a flood of new US oil, the demand for simple, one-step plants capable of transforming raw crude into exportable products such as propane is feeding a construction boom along the Gulf Coast. The first such mini-refinery, built for 1/10 the cost of a complex, full-scale refinery, is scheduled to open the first phase of its 100,000 barrel-a-day crude processing plant in July, The mini-refineries take advantage of the law that allows products refined from oil to be sold overseas, though not the raw crude itself. "The international buyers of these products will likely need to refine them further, so this is basically a veiled form of condensate exports,” says Leo Mariani."

+ - Drone pilot wins case against FAA->

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes "In a David vs. Goliath battle that pitted the Federal Aviation Administration against the operator of a small model airplane, a federal administrative judge has sided with the aircraft's pilot.

The judge has dismissed a proposed $10,000 fine against businessman Raphael Pirker, who used a remotely operated 56-inch foam glider to take aerial video for an advertisement for the University of Virginia Medical Center"
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+ - Bear on EBAY->

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes "TU- 95MS: A Soviet Era strategic bomber manufactured in 1987. The restricted shipping destinations ironically include most of the former soviet union, but not North Korea."
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+ - NSA Chief Pushes Legislation To Stifle The First Amendment->

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes " Recently, what came out with the justices in the United Kingdom they looked at what happened on Miranda and other things, and they said it's interesting: journalists have no standing when it comes to national security issues. They don't know how to weigh the fact of what they're giving out and saying, is it in the nation's interest to divulge this.
— General Keith Alexander, Director of the NSA

Although General Alexander states the above with regard to the UK justice system, he clearly agrees with the assessment. Read the passage above again and think about how scary that statement is. It becomes clear that one of the reasons abuses at the NSA are so egregious is because of the attitude of the person in charge. Alexander genuinely thinks that intelligence officials know best, and should not be subject to any sort of accountability. You don't need to be a card-carrying member of the ACLU to see how dangerous this perspective is. To endorse this notion that "journalists have no standing when it comes to national security issues," is to effectively make illegal one of the most important free speech rights in any democracy. This sort of attitude represents the antithesis of American values.

Not only does General Alexander see things this way, apparently he is lobbying for Congressional legislation that would solidify this authoritarian view within the law itself. For example, the Guardian reported yesterday that:

General Keith Alexander, who has furiously denounced the Snowden revelations, said at a Tuesday cybersecurity panel that unspecified "headway" on what he termed "media leaks" was forthcoming in the next several weeks, possibly to include "media leaks legislation." The general, who is due to retire in the next several weeks, said that the furore over Snowden's surveillance revelations — which he referred to only as "media leaks" - was complicating his ability to get congressional support for a bill that would permit the NSA and the military Cyber Command he also helms to secretly communicate with private entities like banks about online data intrusions and attacks. "
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+ - 1 in 10 Americans think HTML is an STD, study finds ->

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes "If you're talking tech with Americans, you may want to avoid using any jargon.

A recent study found that many Americans are lost when it comes to tech-related terms, with 11% saying that they thought HTML — a language that is used to create websites — was a sexually transmitted disease.

The study was conducted by Vouchercloud.net, a coupons website, as a way to determine how knowledgeable users are when it comes to tech terms.

"Technology is a huge interest for our user base, and month after month we see thousands of people visiting our site to look for coupons and deals to use when purchasing their favorite tech products," a company spokeswoman said in a statement. "It seems that quite a few of us need to brush up on our tech definitions.""
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+ - Retired NASA manager sues Discovery channel over Challenger disaster movie->

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes "A retired NASA manager is suing the Discovery Channel for its false portrayal of him in a movie about the Challenger shuttle accident.

The suit says that in the movie’s crucial scene Lovingood is shown testifying falsely that the odds of a shuttle failure were much higher than other NASA engineers calculated. “The clear statement and depiction was that Lovingood lied about the probability of total failure being 1 in 100,000 when NASA’s own engineers said it was 1 in 200,” the lawsuit says. “This movie scene never took place in real life at any hearing. (Lovingood) was never asked to give any testimony as depicted and he did not give testimony to the question shown in the movie in this made up scene.”

“It makes it look like (NASA leadership) ignored a highly risky situation” in deciding to launch Challenger that day, Lovingood’s attorney Steven Heninger of Birmingham said Friday. Heninger said the movie was the network’s “first attempt at a scripted program and they took shortcuts because they were writing for drama.” The testimony in the movie was not in the investigation commission’s records or Feynman’s book “What Do You Care What Other People Think?,” both of which were sources for the film, the suit claims.

Though NASA management did consistently claim the shuttle was safer than it actually was, to falsely portray this specific individual as the person who said those lies when he did not is slander."
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+ - Do NDAs trump the law? Florida cops say it does when using their stingray->

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes "Police in Florida have offered a startling excuse for having used a controversial “stingray” cell phone tracking gadget 200 times without ever telling a judge: the device’s manufacturer made them sign a non-disclosure agreement that they say prevented them from telling the courts.

The shocking revelation, uncovered by the American Civil Liberties Union, came during an appeal over a 2008 sexual battery case in Tallahassee in which the suspect also stole the victim’s cell phone. Using the stingray — which simulates a cell phone tower in order to trick nearby mobile devices into connecting to it and revealing their location — police were able to track him to an apartment."
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+ - How Facebook Exploits Underage Girls in its Quest for Ad Revenue->

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes "Sophie Bean, 14, of Sequim, Wash., said she was thought she was “liking” a Facebook ad related to fashion modeling. Instead, it promoted a Facebook page that recruited adult webcam models.

“I just thought it was for modeling, and I’m interested in that, and I thought it would help me out,” Sophie said.

Sophie wasn’t the only teen connecting with the page, which Facebook statistics show is most popular with users 13 to 17. Clicking on it didn’t pull the teens into nude webcam modeling, but did mean they would receive the page’s updates and could be mentioned in future versions of the ad.

- From the Wall Street Journal’s recent article:Nude Webcams and Diet Drugs: the Facebook Ads Teens Aren’t Supposed to See"
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You can do more with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word. - Al Capone

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