And what is FB's mission?

[...]
Consider cases in which science communication is intentionally undermined for political and financial gain. Imagine if in L’Aquila, scientists themselves had made every effort to communicate the risks of living in an earthquake zone. Imagine that they even advocated for a scientifically informed but costly earthquake readiness plan.
If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus findings of seismology, and for that reason no preparations were made, then many of us would agree that the financiers of the denialist campaign were criminally responsible for the consequences of that campaign. I submit that this is just what is happening with the current, well documented funding of global warming denialism.

[...]
What are we to make of those behind the well documented corporate funding of global warming denial? Those who purposefully strive to make sure “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” is given to the public? I believe we understand them correctly when we know them to be not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life. It is time for modern societies to interpret and update their legal systems accordingly.


https://theconversation.com/is-misinformation-about-the-climate-criminally-negligent-23111#comment_333276

An exhibit at the “Feminist Museum” at the University of Oregon (UO) has attacked hardware stores for selling tools that have been painted pink.

Britt Bowen, a UO graduate student and co-creator of “Feminist Museum” told Campus Reform that fellow student Mattie Reynolds created the project to protest “the way that certain companies will target female customers by painting things pink.”

“I have this huge problem with going into hardware stores and seeing these traditionally ‘male’ tools that companies make applicable to women by making them pink,” Reynolds said in an article published in Daily Emerald, a student newspaper.






http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=5483&app=cro

Too much of anything is bad. Everybody knows that. Too much salt, too much sunlight, too much freedom of the press...

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1086612-dhs-noc-mmc-sop-7-30-13-version-3-1-foia-redacted.html


A newly obtained document released under the Freedom of Information Act confirms that the Department of Homeland Security keeps tabs on the Drudge Report as part of its media monitoring program.


According to the document, the function of the DHS’ Media Monitoring Capability (MMC) desk is to track news websites and social media in order to gather critical information, “during normal operations, crises and extraordinary events.”
“It is essential to monitor the media’s storylines and integrate their focus into the Department’s situational awareness and operations analytical process,” states the document, adding that such work is necessary in shaping “public statements” made by the DHS.
The program also serves to monitor stories about Homeland Security itself, although analysts are directed not to focus on public reaction to DHS policies like long TSA wait lines.

“Your tweets and Facebook posts and other social media discussions are being monitored by the Department of Homeland Security,” writes investigative journalist Jason Leopold, who obtained the document.
According to the document, the program treats mainstream news sources such as BBC, AP, Reuters and U.S. television networks as “first tier” platforms that do not require additional corroboration.

Included on a list of “other sources,” ones that need to be verified by a first tier source before being circulated to DHS fusion centers, is Drudge Report.com, along with NationalTerrorAlert.com, DisasterNews.net, Opensourceintelligence.org, Homelandsecurityleader.com and HomelandSecurityToday.com.


http://www.infowars.com/foia-doc-homeland-security-monitors-drudge-report/

As Western leaders prepare a bailout package for embattled Ukraine, they face a startling irony: Thanks to the almost bizarre structure of a bond deal between Ukraine and Russia, billions of those dollars are almost certain to go directly into the coffers of the Putin government.

As CNBC has reported, some aid money is bound to go into Russia as a result of energy trade and other economic factors. But the situation is actually much more acute than just that: An existing agreement between the two countries makes an immediate, direct transfer from Ukraine to Russia legally enforceable.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101491011#_gus

The top sheriff in a rural part of northern Nevada told residents this week that one of his deputies acted appropriately by confiscating tens-of-thousands of dollars and a handgun from two men who were never charged with crimes.

Humboldt County Sheriff Ed Kilgore defended his department during an open meeting on Tuesday this week in Winnemucca, NV, where around 40 residents of the region turned up to talk to law enforcement about two headline-making lawsuits that have propelled the area into the national spotlight as of late.

The federal suits — both filed last month in United States District Court — allege that Deputy Lee Dove of the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office acted unlawfully when he pulled over two drivers in September and December of last year for routine traffic violations, only to confiscate large sums of money and, in one instance, a handgun, without ever charging either individual with a crime.

In each case, the plaintiffs were stopped by Dove for minor infractions and eventually released without being booked. Both times, however, he came upon large amounts of cash in their vehicles and confiscated it by evoking a controversial “civil forfeiture” provision that lets law enforcement take money if an officer thinks it was either obtained illegally or will be used for illicit means.

Both cases attracted the attention of Associated Press reporter Scott Sonner, who profiled the lawsuits earlier this month in a story that set the stage for Tuesday’s meeting in the county center.

“Two men who were traveling alone through the high desert last year offer strikingly similar accounts of their stops by the same Humboldt County deputy near the town of Winnemucca, about 165 miles east of Reno,” Sonner wrote last week. “Neither search produced drugs or an arrest, but in one case Deputy Lee Dove took a briefcase filled with $50,000 and in the other he seized $13,800 and a handgun, according to the lawsuits filed in US District Court in Reno.”

Attorneys for Tan Nguyen, 37, filed their suit on February 12, and in it they alleged that Dove pulled over their client the previous September for driving 78 miles-per-hour in a 75 mph zone.

“Dove stopped Plaintiff in a ‘profile stop,’ suspecting that Plaintiff was transporting illegal drugs, which he was not,” they wrote. Upon inspecting the vehicle, however, the deputy came across a briefcase containing $50,000 in US currency and two cashier’s checks, which were promptly confiscated.

“Plaintiff was neither arrested nor cited for any violation of the law in relation to this encounter with Dove,” attorneys wrote. “Rather, Dove gave the plaintiff only a warning.”

According to the suit, Dove told Nguyen that he would be arrested unless he “got in his car and drove off and forgot this ever happened.” The fifty-grand — winnings from a Nevada casino, according to Nguyen’s attorneys — was never returned.

http://rt.com/usa/nevada-lawsuits-forfeiture-kilgore-610/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=aplication_chrome&utm_campaign=chrome

Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee


The federal committee crafting the 2015 “Dietary Guidelines for Americans” features radical nutritionists who favor Americans moving to “plant-based” diets and a vice chair that laughs about sending Ronald McDonald to the guillotine.

The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) is responsible for creating new nutrition standards that are used to create policy at the federal level. The committee will meet for the third time on Friday, and though the group has not yet released an agenda, past meetings have heavily focused on climate change.

During DGAC’s second meeting on Jan. 13, Kate Clancy, a food systems consultant and Senior Fellow in the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Minnesota, was brought to speak on “sustainability.”

“After 30 years of waiting, the fact that this committee is addressing sustainability issues brings me a lot of pleasure,” she began. Clancy went on to advocate that Americans should become vegetarians in order to achieve sustainability in the face of “climate change.”

“What pattern of eating best contributes to food security and the sustainability of land air and water?” Clancy asked. “The simple answer is a plant-based diet.”

“Now, this is not new, this idea of how important plant-based diets are has been around for, gosh, 30-40 years,” she said. “Before that for people who long ago were eating vegetarian.”

Clancy said plant-based diets lower the risk of cardiovascular disease and have a “smaller ecological impact” on “drought, climate change, soil erosion, pesticides and antibiotics in water supplies.”

“In terms of keeping a broader idea of food security in your minds it would be perilous, I would think, for this committee or anybody else to not be taking climate change into account in any of the deliberations about sustainability,” she said.

Clancy said beef production is the “greatest concern.”

Meat production is harmful to the environment because of manure runoff and “methane production by cattle,” she said, which has “a much stronger effect on climate change than carbon dioxide does per unit of methane.”

Following the talk, Dr. Miriam Nelson, a member of the DGAC committee, thanked Clancy for her “really, really wonderful presentation.”

“I think the good news here, in my mind, is that when we look at actually the current dietary guidelines—with the exception of fish, because I think fish is an issue—really we are talking about eating more plants, fewer animals,” she said.


http://freebeacon.com/meet-the-radicals-creating-the-new-federal-dietary-guidelines/

Salon.com is the author of the subject line.

AMAZING VIBE IN TEXAS (+ Yellow Lambo outside) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mr7ExdkZyk

"Sing, sing companio
your voice is shot
that the hands of the people
there will be disarmed song
Sing, sing companion
sing, sing companion
sing, sing companion"

ObamaCare’s implementers continue to roam the battlefield and shoot their own wounded, and the latest casualty is the core of the Affordable Care Act—the individual mandate. To wit, last week the Administration quietly excused millions of people from the requirement to purchase health insurance or else pay a tax penalty.

This latest political reconstruction has received zero media notice, and the Health and Human Services Department didn’t think the details were worth discussing in a conference call, press materials or fact sheet. Instead, the mandate suspension was buried in an unrelated rule that was meant to preserve some health plans that don’t comply with ObamaCare benefit and redistribution mandates. Our sources only noticed the change this week.

That seven-page technical bulletin includes a paragraph and footnote that casually mention that a rule in a separate December 2013 bulletin would be extended for two more years, until 2016. Lo and behold, it turns out this second rule, which was supposed to last for only a year, allows Americans whose coverage was cancelled to opt out of the mandate altogether.

In 2013, HHS decided that ObamaCare’s wave of policy terminations qualified as a “hardship” that entitled people to a special type of coverage designed for people under age 30 or a mandate exemption. HHS originally defined and reserved hardship exemptions for the truly down and out such as battered women, the evicted and bankrupts.

But amid the post-rollout political backlash, last week the agency created a new category: Now all you need to do is fill out a form attesting that your plan was cancelled and that you “believe that the plan options available in the [ObamaCare] Marketplace in your area are more expensive than your cancelled health insurance policy” or “you consider other available policies unaffordable.”

This lax standard—no formula or hard test beyond a person’s belief—at least ostensibly requires proof such as an insurer termination notice. But people can also qualify for hardships for the unspecified nonreason that “you experienced another hardship in obtaining health insurance,” which only requires “documentation if possible.” And yet another waiver is available to those who say they are merely unable to afford coverage, regardless of their prior insurance. In a word, these shifting legal benchmarks offer an exemption to everyone who conceivably wants one.


http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304250204579433312607325596?mg=reno64-wsj

Me too...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElJFYwRtrH4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05ro6fcj6Ek

With Turbine, no humans are required to exploit phones, PCs, routers, VPNs.

Since 2010, the National Security Agency has kept a push-button hacking system called Turbine that allows the agency to scale up the number of networks it has access to from hundreds to potentially millions. The news comes from new Edward Snowden documents published by Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept today. The leaked information details how the NSA has used Turbine to ramp up its hacking capacity to “industrial scale,” plant malware that breaks the security on virtual private networks (VPNs) and digital voice communications, and collect data and subvert targeted networks on a once-unimaginable scale.

Turbine is part of Turbulence, the collection of systems that also includes the Turmoil network surveillance system that feeds the NSA’s XKeyscore surveillance database. While it is controlled from NSA and GCHQ headquarters, it is a distributed set of attack systems equipped with packaged “exploits” that take advantage of the ability the NSA and GCHQ have to insert themselves as a “man in the middle” at Internet chokepoints. Using that position of power, Turbine can automate functions of Turbulence systems to corrupt data in transit between two Internet addresses, adding malware to webpages being viewed or otherwise attacking the communications stream.

Since Turbine went online in 2010, it has allowed the NSA to scale up from managing hundreds of hacking operations each day to handling millions of them. It does so by taking people out of the loop of managing attacks, instead using software to identify, target, and attack Internet-connected devices by installing malware referred to as “implants.” According to the documents, NSA analysts can simply specify the type of information required and let the system figure out how to get to it without having to know the details of the application being attacked.

The “selectors” that analysts can use to target victims through Turbine are significant. Using Turmoil as a targeting system, Turbine can look for identifying cookies from a number of Web services, including Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, Hotmail, and DoubleClick, as well as those from the Russian services Mail.ru, Rambler, and Yandex. Those cookies are all available for targeting purposes, as is user account information from a whole host of services.



Turmoil can also key in on Windows Update identifiers, software serial numbers passed over the Internet, and signatures from physical devices such as phones’ International Mobile Station Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers and Wi-Fi MAC addresses. All of these things can be indexed as metadata by Turmoil and tied by other metadata to a specific target.

Once installed, implants give the NSA and GCHQ a way to extract data from the target, monitor its communications, or launch attacks against the network the target resides on. Turbine implants have even allowed the NSA and GCHQ to hack IPSec VPN connections by inserting an implant on routers that break VPNs’ key exchange process, opening virtually any VPN to direct surveillance.

Hammer time

The documents published today include slides from the NSA’s Turbulence team detailing the “phases” of the NSA’s capabilities to monitor VPN and Voice over IP (VoIP) traffic using a set of attacks known as Hammerstein and Hammerchant. Previously, it was known that the NSA could exploit the older Point to Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) for VPNs. But the new documents show how Turbine and Turbulence can be used to attack VPNs using the more secure Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) standard.

At the most basic level, Turbulence simply captures metadata from Internet Key Exchange (IKE) messages between systems connecting over an IPSec VPN. The NSA can apparently perform a “static tasking” against an IPSec VPN based on its IP addresses using the Hammerstein implant. (Hammerstein is a piece of malware injected into a router sitting in the path of the VPN traffic, which forwards key exchanges and encrypted data to a Turbulence system.)

Hammerstein allows the NSA and GCHQ to tap into networks that don’t pass through the Turbulence checkpoint. The data can then be pushed through a specialized VPN-cracking “blade” in the Turmoil server hardware to decrypt the content.



The Hammerchant implant does roughly the same thing with digital voice calls and video conferences that Hammerstein does with VPNs. It can intercept call traffic based on the SIP and H.323 protocols, allowing “call surveys” that collect metadata or capture the actual voice content.

Turbine added the capability of “dynamic tasking” to these attacks. It can send identifying information on the fly to Hammerstein or Hammerchant automatically based on a set of parameters set by an NSA operator with a few mouse clicks.




Search and destroy

Other man-in-the-middle and “man on the side” attack systems are also tied into Turbine. Quantum Insert, the attack tool used to hack the networks of OPEC and the Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom, can also be controlled by Turbine by using webpage request data collected by Turmoil to automatically trigger an attack. Turbine can push an HTML request posing as a response from a visited site back through a Quantum Insert implant on a server or router closer to the server the request is sent to. It does this because of a microseconds-long response time advantage to convince the target’s browser that it’s the response being sought out. It then delivers malware that allows the NSA (or GCHQ) to poke around the target’s computer and network.



These capabilities give the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit the ability to conduct not just tailored attacks, but multilayered, massive operations that can scoop up vast amounts of data not accessible via XKeyscore. As if that’s not enough, there’s also an attack tool designed for wholesale exploits of traffic passing through a specific Internet “choke point”—a peering point for a specific Internet Service Provider, an Internet exchange at a national border or at a submarine cable meeting point, or any other routing point on the Internet that could host an implant.

Called SecondDate, the capability was described in a 2012 NSA document as a tool “to influence real-time communications between client and server.” It has the ability to redirect Web browsers to the NSA’s FoxAcid malware servers, and it may have been used as part of an attack on Tor users. SecondDate can serve as part of a targeted attack, but it can also be used, according to NSA documents, for “mass exploitation potential for clients passing through network choke points.” In other words, SecondDate can be used in concert with the NSA’s other systems to attack whole swaths of the Internet, infecting systems with surveillance malware.

All of these capabilities give the NSA and GCHQ considerable reach. But they also run the risk of allowing others to stand on the agencies’ shoulders and take advantage of the exploits the NSA has already seeded into parts of the Internet’s infrastructure. Regardless of the scope of the NSA’s ongoing surveillance, the chance that someone else could hijack or repackage a capability like Hammerstein or SecondDate for criminal or other malicious means poses a risk to the entire Internet.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/nsas-automated-hacking-engine-offers-hands-free-pwning-of-the-world/