Tuesday, 29 October 2013

USAHitman | Conspiracy News

Pentagon’s DARPA works on reading brains in real time

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 09:59 PM PDT

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is investing $70 million to develop a new implant that can track, and respond to, brain signals in real time.
The goal of the new project, dubbed “Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies” (SUBNETS), is to gather new information via more advanced brain implants in order to reach the next level of effective neuropsychological treatment. DARPA is hoping to have the new implant developed within five years.
Already, roughly 100,000 people worldwide live with a Deep Brain Stimulation implant, a device that helps patients cope with Parkinsons disease. While scientists are currently studying the possibility of using these devices to combat other diseases, the problem is current technology can only treat symptoms, not record the brain’s signals or analyze the effectiveness of any administered treatment.
“There is no technology that can acquire signals that can tell [scientists] precisely what is going on with the brain,” Justin Sanchez, DARPA’s program manager, told the New York Times.
The SUBNETS program intends to change the current landscape significantly. Not only does DARPA want to map out exactly how diseases establish themselves in an individuals brain, the agency also wants its implant to be able to record the signs of illness in real time, deliver treatments, and monitor the treatment’s effectiveness.
Considering the toll that mental illnesses are taking on military veterans, there’s a new level of urgency surrounding the ambitious initiative. Ten percent of servicemembers receiving treatment from the Veteran’s Health Administration are being treated for mental health conditions or substance abuse, and mental disorders are now the primary reason for hospital bed stays.
“If SUBNETS is successful, it will advance neuropsychiatry beyond the realm of dialogue-driven observations and resultant trial and error into the real of therapy driven by quantifiable characteristic of neural state,” Sanchez said on DARPA’s website. “SUBNETS is a push toward innovative, informed and precise neurotechnological therapy to produce major improvements in quality of life for servicemembers and veterans who have very few options with existing therapies.”
The new project is part of President Obama’s BRAIN initiative, which sets aside $100 million in its first year to develop new innovations in neuroscience. DARPA is collaborating with the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation on SUBNETS, and it is currently soliciting proposals from various research teams.
Whether the agency can actually achieve its goal in five years is a question mark – one neuroscientist told the New York Times that, like nearly all DARPA projects, it’s “overambitious” – but new discoveries concerning how the brain functions are expected regardless. Whether the implant itself becomes a reality or not, Sanchez said that new medical devices will be developed as a result.
“We’re talking about a whole systems approach to the brain, not a disease-by-disease examination of a single process or a subset of processes,” Sanchez said. “SUBNETS is going to be a cross-disciplinary, expansive team effort and the program will integrate and build upon historical DARPA research investments.”
Source

NSA tracked 46mln Italian phone calls

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 05:45 PM PDT

The NSA bugged 46 million phone calls in Italy in a month, according to digital library host Cryptome. The report is the latest in the revelations that the agency tapped hundreds of millions of phone lines across Europe.
The snooping, between Dec. 10, 2012 and Jan. 8, 2013, reportedly did not appear to track the content of calls but rather telephony metadata, including the origin and duration of the calls.
The alleged monitoring of citizens’ phone calls follows an article in the Italian weekly, L’Espresso, which claimed that US intelligence had monitored Italian telecoms networks, targeting the government and companies as well as suspected terrorists.
Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) also reportedly monitored telephone, Internet and email traffic carried through three undersea fiber-optic cables in Italy as a part of its Tempora program.
“In this mass collection, our secret services had a role,” the publication cited Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who helped publish leaked documents obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, as saying.
Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta said Thursday that the alleged monitoring of Italian telecommunications by US and British intelligence would be both “inconceivable and unacceptable.”
Letta questioned US Secretary of State John Kerry about the reported bugging during talks in Rome on Wednesday.
Ahead of an EU summit Friday, Letta said: “Obviously, all checks should be done, but we want the whole truth. It’s not acceptable or conceivable that there are activities of this kind.”
In regards to the Cryptome report, Italian intelligence agencies had no information on the alleged monitoring and were unable to confirm it had taken place.
A statement released by an Italian parliamentary committee tasked with state security, however, said there was a difference between “spying” and “monitoring.”
“There is no evidence that the United States is spying on Italian citizens,” the statement from the Parliamentary Committee for the Intelligence and Security Services and for State Secret Control read.
The committee said that agreements on cooperation in the security sphere precluded the possibility that either side would spy on each other.
“The implementation of such activities would be a threat to national security,” it said.
Meanwhile, Cryptome reported that during the same period, the NSA monitored 361 million phone calls in Germany, 70 million in France, 61 million in Spain, and 1.8 million in the Netherlands.
With the aid of its Boundless Informant data analysis and visualization system, the agency tracked 124.8 billion calls worldwide in that period.
The revelation is part and parcel of the deepening scandal over the United States vast spying apparatus. Last week, the Germany daily Der Spiegel reported that Washington was directly spying on least 35 world leaders, including several US allies.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone has reportedly been on an NSA target list since 2002, US intelligence sources telling Germany’s Bild am Sonntag that US President Barack Obama was aware of the snooping.
Despite Obama’s assurances that he has ordered a review of the US intelligence gathering operations, a coalition of over 20 countries led by Brazil and Germany are now pushing for a UN resolution condemning the US for its “indiscriminate” wiretapping and “extra-territorial” surveillance. The countries are also calling for “independent oversight” of electronic monitoring.
Source

Big Brother tax: US roads to be funded by tracked cars?

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 05:08 PM PDT

Black boxes installed on cars in the US may soon track all their movements to determine how much wear they cause to American roads and, thus, how much each owner should pay. Adoption of the scheme however is being held back by privacy concerns.
Maintaining roads in America currently relies on a gas tax, which is paid by motorists as they fill their tanks at pumps. However the cash flow is steadily drying up as cars become more fuel efficient and with authorities reluctant to raise tax rates. The advancement of hybrid and electric cars is also causing this means of taxation to be perceived as unjust.
Taxing per mile is one possible solution, however, the federal government is reluctant to proceed with it. A $90-million pilot project involving some 10,000 cars was approved by the Senate two years ago, but was axed by the House.
But some states are more enthusiastic. For instance California is planning to tax every motorist in the state by mileage by 2025, reported on Saturday Los Angeles Times.
“This really is a must for our nation. It is not a matter of something we might choose to do,” told the newspaper Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments. “There is going to be a change in how we pay these taxes. The technology is there to do it.”
Oregon so far is the most eager. It launched a pilot vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax project as early as 2007 and currently has 5,000 cars taxed by their mileage in a follow-up experiment. A similar if smaller-scale test was conducted in Nevada, and New York City is considering one.
Privacy concerns remain a big hurdle. A black box device tracking mileage is usually not just a simple odometer, but a GPS-enable device, which tracks the location of a car in real time. This allows the use of different tax rates for different kinds of roads, and also for the splitting of taxes fairly for drivers who cross state borders. They can also be used for extensive surveillance, privacy advocates warn.
“It would be fairly easy to turn these devices into full-fledged tracking devices,” warned Nevada’s branch of the American Civil Liberties Union as the trial was underway in the state. “There is no need to build an enormous, unwieldy technological infrastructure that will inevitably be expanded to keep records of individuals’ everyday comings and goings”
Some states want do address those fears by offering less-invasive devices, which don’t use positioning to track mileage, or offering to pay a state-average tax. Others believe they can appease the fears by offering extra value to driver, allowing the black boxes to provide “pay-as-you-drive” insurance, pay parking meter fees, and warn of traffic jams.
There are alternatives to per-mile taxing, which would not discriminate in favor of hybrids. For example money for road maintenance could come from taxing tires.
A conservative approach would be to simply raise the gas tax and replenish depleted road funds.
“There is no need for radical surgery when all you need to do is take an aspirin,” said Randy Rentschler from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the San Francisco Bay. “If we do this, hundreds of millions of drivers will be concerned about their privacy and a host of other things.”
Source

American authorities charge UK man with hacking Army, Missile Defense Agency and NASA websites

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 05:04 PM PDT

A 28-year-old man from Stradishall, England has been charged in the United States with hacking into US government and military computers, stealing sensitive data and causing millions of dollars in damages.
The New Jersey US Attorney’s Office announced on Monday that Lauri Love of the United Kingdom was indicted with breaching thousands of computer systems, including those belonging to the Army, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency and NASA. A separate complaint filed in the Eastern District of Virginia also accuses Love of participating in an operation earlier this year spearheaded by the hacktivist movement Anonymous.

An arrest warrant for Love was signed last week and he was detained on Friday by investigators with the UK’s Cyber Crime Unit of the National Crime Agency (NCA) in connection with an ongoing probe conducted by that agency, US Attorney for the District of New Jersey Paul Fishman said Monday.
Fishman’s investigative team say Love and unnamed co-conspirators hacked into those computers during the last year, installing hidden “shells” or “backdoors” within the networks allowing them to return at later times and pilfer private data.
The indictment accuses Love of stealing personally identifiable information for thousands of military servicemen and government employees.
In July 2013 chat logs monitored by federal investigators, Love allegedly told his co-conspirators he had obtained “basically every piece of information you’d need to do full identity theft on any employee or contractor” for the government agency that he had last hacked.
Conversations earlier that year with co-conspirators reveal that Love announced in the IRC channel, “we might be able to get at real confidential shit” after compromising US networks.
“Collectively, the hacks described herein substantially impaired the functioning of dozens of computer servers and resulted in millions of dollars of damages to the Government Victims,” US prosecutors claim.
In New Jersey, Love was charged with one count of accessing a US department or agency computer without authorization and one count of conspiring to do the same.
A separate criminal complaint filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is ripe with testimony from a Federal Bureau of Investigation officer who says Love also accessed without authorization protected computers belonging to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the US Sentencing Commission, Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, and US Department of Energy.
Read More Here

9/11 Suspects Can’t Mention being Tortured during Trial Testimony because Their Torture is Classified

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 05:03 PM PDT

In the Alice in Wonderland meets 1984 world of the U.S. concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, official state secrecy about matters already known the world over trumps the human rights of the prisoners still languishing there, according to lawyers trying to represent them despite the bizarre rules that hamper their efforts.
Take the issue of torture, which arose at a recent Guantánamo Bay hearing. It is an indisputable fact that the U.S. tortured detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, during interrogations between 2001 and 2006. Yet when defense attorney Jason Wright pointed out at a recent hearing that his client “was subjected to waterboarding for 183 sessions,” Judge James Pohl ruled him out of order for discussing classified information that can be uttered only behind closed doors.
Fellow defense attorney Cheryl Bormann complained that such rulings undermine the defense team, whose efforts keep coming up against “a brick wall because of the classification issue.”
“You can’t gag somebody about talking about torture and then want to kill them,” she argued.
Defense attorneys want to raise the issue of torture both because its practice is illegal under U.S. and international law and because it is believed by most experts to yield inherently unreliable information. At the hearing, the defense team said the secrecy of their clients’ detention and torture in secret CIA prisons “violated the U.N. Convention against Torture,” which the U.S. ratified in 1994, and prevented them from filing complaints with the U.N. under that treaty.
Because they are being prevented from even raising the issue in their clients’ defense, the defense team asked that the death penalty be ruled out as a possible sentence.
“You have the power to dismiss the death penalty or dismiss these charges because of the obstacles we face in this case,” argued Walter Ruiz, who represents detainee Mustafa al-Hawsawi. Although the Convention against Torture “gives certain rights” to the accused, “those rights do not exist, certainly not in front of this commission,” said Ruiz.
But prosecutor Clay Trivett argued that if detainees felt they were “mistreated in U.S. custody” they could file a complaint in federal court, and that should be sufficient.
Source

Google suspected of building enormous floating structure in San Francisco Bay

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 05:03 PM PDT

A mysterious four-story structure is being built atop a barge floating in the San Francisco Bay, and journalists say they are almost certain it is a new project being put together by Silicon Valley giant Google.
CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman first reported on the floating structure near the former Treasure Island Navy base on Friday, and since then a number of writers have joined in to speculate as to what could be in the works.
Google has not responded to multiple requests for comment made by CNET and others, but Terdiman says “it’s all but certain” that the search engine company is behind the mysterious structure.
Terdiman first reported last week the barge could be holding a sea-faring data center, noting that Google in fact patented the technology for such an endeavor years earlier and earned a place on Time Magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2008” list as a result. Now a report courtesy of San Francisco CBS affiliate KPIX 5 suggests that Google is perhaps working not on a new way to store information, but a space-age store of sorts.
“KPIX 5 has learned that Google is actually building a floating marketing center, a kind of giant Apple store, if you will — but for Google Glass, the cutting-edge wearable computer the company has under development,” the network reported this weekend.
According to top-secret sources who spoke with KPIX on condition of anonymity, “Google has spent millions” of dollars on the project, but have halted work in the last few weeks because the lack of a permit is preventing the company from parking the barge on the waterfront and completing further work.
“The law is crystal clear in this case: The Bay is not to be used for something that can be built on land,” San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission Executive Director Larry Goldzband told KPIX.
After KPIX published their report, another anonymous source spoke to CNET’s Terdiman and added fuel to that speculative fire. A “well-connected” Silicon Valley insider, Terdiman said, claimed he had knowledge as well that the project would be a store of sorts, and was the brainchild of either Larry Page or Sergey Brin, both Google co-founders.
That isn’t to say, though, that the data center option has been entirely ruled out. Terdiman’s sources tell him that Google was “looking at putting together a data center, or really…a backup center, in case of some kind of natural disaster,” and such a project could be materialized in the latest operation currently unfolding in the body of water between San Francisco and Oakland.
When Teridman’s source — an independent marine engineer told CNET, “I know what that is. My God, I haven’t heard anything about this in years. So they are finally building this thing.’”
A lot has changed in five years’ time, though, and meanwhile all eyes and ears are on Google as the world waits to see if the company is indeed behind the mystery barge — and, of course, what purpose it has.
Source

Obama’s Twitter, Facebook hacked by Syrian Electronic Army

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 05:01 PM PDT

US President Barack Obama’s Twitter and Facebook accounts were hacked and used to promote a video, which depicts the atrocities committed in Syria by the rebels, the Syrian Electronic Army hacker group said.
“All the links that Barack Obama’s account tweeted and posted on Facebook were redirected to a video showing the truth about Syria,” a SEA spokesperson wrote in an email to Mashable website.
The altered links on the US president’s accounts led to a graphically violent 24-minute YouTube video, entitled ‘Syria facing terrorism’.
“Obama doesn’t have any ethical issues with spying on the world, so we took it upon ourselves to return the favor,” the SEA wrote on Twitter.
According to Mashable, the Syrian hackers didn’t actually compromise Obama’s social media accounts, but changed the links in the posts by tampering with the URL shortener service for BarackObama.com.
The group appears to have hacked the electronic address one of the administrators of the website, which Obama used in his presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, to gain access to its control panel.
The links on Obama’s Twitter and Facebook pages have been currently fixed.
White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, refused to comment on the issue during his media-conference on Monday.
The initial attack on BarackObama.com took place on Sunday as it began redirecting the users to the SEA’s page.
The Syrian Electronic Army is a hacking group, supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad, which became famous in recent month after defacing the websites and Twitter accounts of many prominent media outlets, like AP, AFP, BBC, New York Times and others.
Source

US military personnel increasingly choosing liposuction to beat body fat tests

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 05:01 PM PDT

Military personnel are increasingly turning to liposuction in order to pass the Pentagon’s body fat test in an effort to maintain future prospects amid a budget-cutting environment.
US service members say that the test used by the Defense Department measures the neck and waist to estimate body fat, which can easily lead weed out muscular or bulky physiques in addition to flabbier ones.
The Pentagon’s “tape test” uses neck and waist measurements instead of the body mass index, which is based on one’s height and weight and is widely used by civilian physicians.
Thus, many are turning to liposuction for quick results. The practice is not banned by the Defense Department, though the military does not condone surgery in order to pass the test.
Amid a spike in obesity rates in the US, the amount of Army soldiers kicked out of the ranks for being overweight has likewise gone up tenfold in the past five years from 168 in 2008 to 1,815. The amount nearly doubled in the Marine Corps, from 102 in 2010 to 186 in 2011, though it dipped to 132 in 2012.
The Air Force and Navy do not track discharges from the test.
“They come in panicked about being kicked out or getting a demerit that will hurt their chances at a promotion,” Rockville, Md., surgeon Adam Tattelbaum told the AP.
Fitness experts agree with military personnel, that the military’s standards should be reviewed given that their outdated weight tables do not reflect the bigger, though no less healthy, size of Americans today.
Jeffrey Stout, a sports science professor at the University of Central Florida, said the tape test takes into account the body’s shape, not its composition such as body fat or fat-to-muscle ratio.
“I wouldn’t want my career decided on that,” he told the AP.
He recommends using callipers to measure the thickness of skin over various parts of a body.
“That way these guys are not hurt by a bad measurement,” said Stout of the more reliable method.
The Pentagon maintains its test ensures members are ready for combat, and that very few who exceed body fat limits do well on fitness tests.
“We want everybody to succeed,” said Bill Moore, director of the Navy’s Physical Readiness Program. “This isn’t an organization that trains them and says, `Hey, get the heck out.’”
Military officials claim the tape test is still the most reliable, cost-effective tool available, and that the method has a margin of error of less than 1 percent.
The Air Force is the only branch to modify its fitness program. In October, it obtained a Pentagon waiver for airmen who fail the tape test but excel in physical fitness exams that can use the body mass index.
Read More Here

British G4S security group in hot water after accusations of torturing and drugging inmates in S. Africa

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 05:00 PM PDT

British G4S, world’s largest security company and London Olympic game security provider, is under fire for allegedly torturing, electroshocking and forcibly drugging inmates of a S. African prison. G4S, which was running the jail, denies the allegations.
The allegations emerged on October, 9 South when Africa’s Department of Correctional Services announced that it was taking over the management of 3,000 inmates at Mangaung correctional center as “the contractor [G4S] has lost effective control of the facility”. The decision was provoked by a series of stabbings, riots, strikes and a hostage taking in the prison.
Based on a year-long investigation, the Wits Justice Project (WJP) alleged cases of mistreatment and miscarriages of justice in South Africa’s prison.
Prisoners, warders and health care workers told WJP that involuntary medication was regularly practiced.
Allegations of drugging inmates have been also supported by a footage that was uncovered during a research project conducted at the Mangaung Correctional Centre near Bloemfontein, roughly 400 km from Johannesburg.
The video, shot on July, 24, allegedly depicts what researchers say is electrocution and inmates having medication forced upon them.
It was leaked after the South African government had taken over control of the facility after G4S dismissed 330 warders following strikes in August and September.
Shot by the prison’s emergency security team (EST), which is legally tasked to film all its actions, the video shows inmate Bheki Dlamini, serving a 21-year sentence for armed robbery, being injected involuntarily.
Read More Here