Tuesday, 18 March 2014

USAHitman | Conspiracy News

Obama administration censoring records more than ever before

Posted: 17 Mar 2014 05:10 PM PDT

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Despite promising he’d preside over the most transparent administration in United States history, President Barack Obama’s White House is setting new records with regards to not releasing government documents.
Never mind Obama’s assurances on the campaign trail and the vow he made in 2009 about being “committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government.” Journalists at the Associated Press say that their research indicates that the US government has withheld more information from ever under the authority of Pres. Obama.
Journalists Jack Gillum and Ted Bridis have been investigating just how hard it is to successfully request documents from the White House through the US Freedom of Information Act, and in an article published by the AP on Sunday they wrote that the current administration “more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them.”
“The administration cited more legal exceptions it said justified withholding materials and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy,” they wrote. “Most agencies also took longer to answer records requests, the analysis found.”
According to the AP’s research, the Obama administration has exhibited anything but what the president promised with regards to maintaining an open and transparent White House.
Last year’s National Security Agency revelations without a doubt rekindled interest in the secrecy with which the US operate and has caused a number of calls for reform from the likes of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches. And even though Pres. Obama has advocated on his own part in the months since for some sort of reform to the way the NSA does business, the AP’s report suggests that the current administration is continuing to largely censor information sought by the public and the press.
In 2013, the AP acknowledged, the US government cited “national security” a record 8,496 times as a reason to withhold documents requested through FOIA filings. Relying on that excuse in 2013 to avoid handing over documents demonstrated a 57 percent increase when compared to statistics from a year earlier, the AP found, suggesting that the NSA revelations have indeed caused Americans to be more interested in ever in the way their government operates.
The NSA alone, the AP reported, saw a surge in requests of roughly 138 percent last year, largely from Americans who wanted to know if their telephony metadata and other information was among the intelligence routinely collected by the surveillance programs exposed by former contractor Edward Snowden last year.
In all, the AP said, citizens, journalists, businesses and others made a record 704,394 requests for information last year — or 8 percent more than what occurred in the previous year.
Despite this, though, the government responded to only 678,391 of those requests last year — an increase of 2 percent from the previous year — completely ignoring tens-of-thousands of requests.
Even when the government did respond, paperwork was largely edited to keep certain information under wraps.
“The AP analysis showed that the government more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully denied access to them, in 244,675 cases or 36 percent of all requests. On 196,034 other occasions, the government said it couldn’t find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the government determined the request to be unreasonable or improper,” the journalists wrote.
“The AP counted more than 700,000 FOIA requests in 2013. Of those requests, 36 percent were denied or the documents provided were censored,” they added.
At least two elected officials — US Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) — were willing to go on the record for the AP’s report and rally against the eroding ability to access government documents.
“I’m concerned the growing trend toward relying upon FOIA exemptions to withhold large swaths of government information is hindering the public’s right to know,” Leahy told the AP. “It becomes too much of a temptation. If you screw up in government, just mark it top secret.”
“The public is frustrated and unhappy with the pace of responses and the amount of information provided,” added Blumenthal. “There’s a common reaction for anybody who has any experience with it that it doesn’t function well.”
Others, however, say the government’s response is better than ever. According to the AP, the White House said that the government has answered FOIA requests faster than ever before, but Gillum and Bridis acknowledged that the administration “did not immediately explain how it determined that.”
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One-tenth of government computers under increased threat of hack after April 8

Posted: 17 Mar 2014 05:10 PM PDT

Come April, hundreds of thousands of computers used by the US government could become susceptible to hackers and cyberattacks, largely due to the fact that they’ll be running an out-of-date operating system.
Microsoft will officially pull the plug on free support for Windows XP on April 8, meaning that any computer still running the operating system will no longer feature the kind of security patches routinely delivered by the company. The federal government has been rushing to upgrade its computers over the last two years, but many systems will still be vulnerable once the deadline passes.
According to the Washington Post, as many as 10 percent of the government’s computers could be left out of date, including networks carrying classified military and diplomatic information.
“Once XP goes out of support and is no longer patched, you’ve just raised the vulnerability significantly on the whole Windows platform in your organization if you haven’t moved off XP,” Richard Spires, a former Department of Homeland Security chief information officer, said to the Post.
Typically when an operating system is still being serviced by Microsoft, the company offers security upgrades any time the system is exploited around the world. After April 8, however, this service will be halted, leaving many computers at risk. One unnamed State Department official told the Post the government approached Microsoft about extending the deadline, but the company declined to do so.
For its part, Microsoft said it does not believe computers will be at a “substantially greater risk” after the deadline, though it emphasized that the newest operating systems – such as Windows 7 or Windows 8 – are the most secure.
Although the upgrading process began two years ago, budget battles and a lack of clear direction has bogged up the effort considerably. Slowing the process down even more is the fact that many government programs have been specifically built for use on XP, meaning that moving on to the another system requires redesigning and reprogramming custom software.
“There is something broken in the process if they are letting this many machines be un-updated at this point,” Steve Bellovin, former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission, told the Post. “Some of it is budget cuts. Some of it is not very good management, I suspect.”
As a rough estimate, Defense and State Department officials said most of their computers would be off XP by the time the deadline passed. Approximately 75 percent of the Justice Department’s computers will be updated as well. Meanwhile, officials said that many of the classified networks still on XP aren’t even connected to the internet, reducing the risk of attack.
Still, critics argue the fact that so many computers won’t be updated is another sign the government is not fully prepared to defend against cyberattacks. As RT reported in February, the latest Senate report found federal agencies were not implementing even the most basic deterrents, such as using strong passwords and updating anti-virus software. According to the report, some agencies stored sensitive information on shared, unprotected drives, while “hundreds of vulnerabilities” were detected in Homeland Security networks, mostly stemming from issues that could be easily fixed.

US, UK ‘Enemies of the Internet’ for first time

Posted: 17 Mar 2014 05:09 PM PDT

The United Kingdom and the US have been branded ‘Enemies of the Internet’ for the first time by Reporters Without Borders on their annual list of countries which disrupt freedom of information through surveillance and censorship.
Both the US and the UK were included in the list for first time as a result of revelations from the Whistleblower Edward Snowden into the activities of the American and British spy agencies.
In fact Edward Snowden branded the UK, where the government has largely ignored calls to reign in the nation’s spooks and the public remain apathetic, as “worse than the US”.
Snowden outlines various “widespread surveillance practices” operated by GCHQ as part of its plan called “Mastering the internet”.
“The Internet was a collective resource that the NSA and GCHQ turned into a weapon in the service of special interests, in the process flouting freedom of information, freedom of expression and the right to privacy,” say the report’s authors.
The UK, says the press watchdog, paid scant heed to any legal considerations when harvesting huge amounts of data.
“Supported by the NSA and with the prospect of sharing data, the British agency brushed aside all legal obstacles and embarked on mass surveillance of nearly a quarter of the world’s communications,” the report says.
The authors go on to note that the UK is in a unique global position to scoop up internet traffic because many of the landing points of global cables down which internet information travels land on British soil.
“The best known is at Bude in Cornwall, which hosts seven cables including Apollo North which links the UK and the United States, and more particularly TAT-14, which connects the United States and Europe – which US diplomatic cables have called an “essential resource”.”
This means that GCHQ can eavesdrop on exchanges between citizens in Europe and people in the US.
The report also blasts Britain for “confusing journalism and terrorism”, and criticizes the UK government for putting excessive pressure on the Guardian newspaper “to suppress the scandal of the GCHQ wiretaps” and of wrongfully arresting David Miranda.
Miranda was the partner of former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and was stopped and held for the maximum permitted nine hours under anti-terrorism laws by UK authorities on his way through London Heathrow airport carrying what were deemed sensitive encrypted documents from US film maker Laura Poitras in Berlin.
While Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger was hauled up in front of a committee of MPs and peers and grilled about his papers role in publishing the Snowden revelations. There were also calls from some members of the right wing establishment for him to be investigated by the police and prosecuted although this was quickly dropped when it became clear there was no case against the newspaper.
Reporters Without Borders make it quite clear that in most cases it is not actually governments that are to blame, but much smaller government units, such as the Operations and Analysis Centre in Belarus and GCHQ in the UK.
The fact that countries such as the UK, US and India – another new addition on the list – are now in the same boat as authoritarian regimes such as North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabiya and Belarus is cause for considerable concern. Russia’s FSB is also on the list as an agency that has gone beyond its core duty of national security. While China is also labeled as “an expert in information control” even since it created “the Electronic Great Wall”.
“The mass surveillance methods employed in these three countries, many of them exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, are all the more intolerable because they will be used and indeed are already being used by authoritarians countries such as Iran, China, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain,” states the report.
“How will so-called democratic countries be able to press for the protection of journalists if they adopt the very practices they are criticizing authoritarian regimes for?” the authors add.
The study also notes that the activities of the Enemies of the Internet would not be possible without the tools developed by private sector companies and that here the contradictory behavior of the western democracies should be noted.
One of the major forums or trade fairs specializing in this technology was recently hosted by France despite the French government’s vocal criticism of the activities of the NSA.
Reporters without Borders urged the EU, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, to guarantee unrestricted internet access and digital freedoms in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.
The report concludes by recommending that international bodies such as the United Nations be pressed to protect internet data and regulate surveillance. It also says that journalists and other information providers should learn how to protect their data and communications.
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Spy agencies seek to store Aussies’ web-browsing histories, end encryption

Posted: 17 Mar 2014 05:04 PM PDT

The Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) is pushing for laws that would make telecommunications companies retain their customers’ web-browsing data, as well as forcing web users to decrypt encrypted messages.
In these post-Snowden times, when people around the world are furious over revelations that their communications’ ‘metadata’ has been scooped up by a vast, US-built surveillance network, Australia’s ASIO is looking to further bolster its phishing powers, as opposed to scaling them back as many people clearly favor.
With no loss of irony, the agency is pointing to the sensational case of Edward Snowden – the former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower who last year departed from US shores with thousands of files on the American spy program – to expedite the process of creating a data-retention regime that would store users’ data for two years, or possibly longer.
“These changes are becoming far more significant in the security environment following the leaks of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden,” ASIO said in its parliamentary submission to modify the Telecommunications Interception and Access Act.
Although retaining ‘content’ data has been declared off-limits to the surveillance program, several security agencies, including the Northern Territory Police and Victoria Police, want web-browsing histories stored.
Metadata gathered on web-browsing would include an IP address and the IP addresses of web servers visited, or uniform resource locators (URLs) and the time at which they were visited. Email metadata, meanwhile, might include information such as addresses, times and the subject field.
Australia’s intelligence agencies accessed metadata 330,640 times during criminal and financial investigations in 2012-13, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
Northern Territory Police said in its submission that meta-data found in browser histories were “as important to capture as telephone records”.
Additionally, the agency is calling for enhanced powers to sift intelligence data from emails and social media sites, as well as forcing web users to decrypt encrypted material if requested to do so by the spy agency.
“Under this approach, the person receiving a notice would be required to provide ‘information or assistance’ to place information obtained under the warrant into an intelligible form,” the submission said.
“The person would not be required to hand over copies of the communication in an intelligible form, and a notice would not compel a person to do something which they are not reasonably capable of doing. Failure to comply with a notice would constitute a criminal offense, consistent with the Crimes Act.”
ASIO points to the Snowden leaks, and the increased popularity of encryption technology on the internet, as a reason for resisting changes.
“In direct response to these leaks, the technology industry is driving the development of new internet standards with the goal of having all web activity encrypted, which will make the challenges of traditional telecommunications interception for necessary national security purposes far more complex.”
However, a number of organizations, including the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association, the communications lobby group, warned against widening surveillance capabilities and what it means for privacy rights.
“The associations also note that a data retention scheme will involve an increased risk to the privacy of Australians and provide an incentive to hackers and criminals. Data retention is at odds with the prevailing policy to maximize and protect privacy and minimize the data held by organizations,” the submission said.
“Industry believes it is generally preferable for consumers that telecommunications service providers retain the least amount of data necessary to provision, maintain and bill for services.”
ASIO is not only fighting back against any restrictions on its work, it is actually calling for more spying powers.
For example, when the Australian Law Reform Commission argued for the creation of a “public interest monitor” to assert some guidelines on intelligence gathering, ASIO said it “has reservations about this, if the effect would be simply to insert yet another approval step into the authorization of a TI warrant.”
Meanwhile, the Australian Federal Police said it wanted to store data “to ensure a national and systematic approach is taken to safeguarding the ongoing availability of telecommunications data for legitimate, investigative purposes.” At the same time, however, it admitted work needed to be done to understand what type of data got retained and for how long.
Electronic Frontiers Australia, the online rights group, is lobbying against the amendments, arguing that storing web meta-data was “an ineffective method to curb terrorism.”
“The ease with which data retention regimes can be evaded is grossly disproportionate to the cost and security concerns of the data retention regime,” it said.
Meanwhile, the Coalition government’s Attorney-General George Brandis said on Monday that the government was “not currently considering any proposal relating to data retention” despite the push from the country’s intelligence agencies.
Shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said Labor was waiting for the Coalition’s response to an inquiry that had opened in June of last year before it announces its position.
“There was insufficient time while Labor was in office to formulate a considered response to the matters discussed in the Committee’s report, including the merits of a data retention scheme,” Dreyfus said, as quoted by the paper.
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Toy helicopter helped change Feinstein’s mind about surveillance drones

Posted: 17 Mar 2014 05:03 PM PDT

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) now says she has some serious privacy concerns about domestic drones, but it might have been nothing more than a children’s toy that put her over the edge.
Feinstein — who also serves as the head of the US Senate Intelligence Committee — has since last year been advocating for her congressional colleagues to implement privacy safeguards to protect Americans from any potential surveillance threats brought on by the small, unmanned aerial vehicles expected to soon invade local airspace.
“The administration is looking at a rules playbook as to how these won’t be used and how they will be used,” Feinstein told MSNBC a year ago this month. “So it’s a very complicated subject of new technology and I think we have to take a pause and get it right.”
But speaking to journalists at the CBS News program 60 Minutes recently, Sen. Feinstein shared a personal story that put into better perspective why exactly she’s so worried about spy drones. During an episode that aired Sunday evening, Feinstein said an experience that she recently had with a “drone” outside of her home had something to do with how she now views UAVs.
“I’m in my home and there’s a demonstration out front. And I go to peek out the window and there’s a drone facing me. Well, whoever was running it turned it around quickly and it crashed,” Feinstein said.
The Federal Aviation Administration is currently at work on hammering out guidelines for domestic drone pilots to abide by once small aircraft are allowed to hover in American airspace en masse. Speaking to 60 Minutes, however, Sen. Feinstein said she had some ideas herself about how to handle the drone debate.
“It’s going to have to come through regulation. Perhaps regulation of size and type for private use,” she told 60 Minutes journalist Morley Safer. “Secondly, some certification of the person that’s going to operate it. And then some specific regulation on the kinds of uses it can be put to.”
Whether the senator’s encounter with an alleged drone occurred outside of her California or DC residence has yet to be disclosed, but it looks like the supposed UAV sighting she had was something entirely different.
Code Pink, a group of activists who have been extra critical of the US government’s surveillance operations and drone warfare programs alike, say that they waged a protest outside of Feinstein’s DC abode last year and used a toy helicopter, not a drone, at their demonstration.
Feinstein briefly mentioned her drone sighting during a congressional hearing earlier this year, and Code Pink campaign organizer Nancy Mancias told The Daily Beast then, “That could have been us.”
Mancias and her Code Pink colleagues weren’t deploying any sort of Predator drone, though, and told The Daily Beast’s Abby Haglage back in January that her group came equipped with the type of flying robot that’s marketed to adolescents.
“They’re just toys, they couldn’t do that much,” Mancias said then. “When we flew them, some only got seven feet off the ground and crashed.”
At the time, Mancias remarked that it was “interesting” that Feinstein was starting to show concern about the privacy repercussion that a domestic drone program could cause, and said, “She speaks out against it here, yet she’s willing to let the same thing go on abroad.”
This time around, Feinstein’s latest remarks come only days after she was called out again for acting hypocritically with regards to the policy she is personally involved in setting: Last week, she accused the Central Intelligence Agency of unlawfully monitoring the computers used by Senate staffers involved in investigating the CIA’s George W. Bush-era torture program. Previously, however, she said she had no problem with the surveillance operations waged by the US government that involved the collection of domestic telephone data.
Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has exposed an array of previously secret NSA programs since last year, was quick to condemn Feinstein after last week’s remarks.
“It’s clear the CIA was trying to play ‘keep away’ with documents relevant to an investigation by their overseers in Congress, and that’s a serious constitutional concern,” Snowden told NBC News.“But it’s equally if not more concerning that we’re seeing another ‘Merkel Effect,’ where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it’s a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them.”
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Parents, lawmakers fear cursive becoming lost art

Posted: 17 Mar 2014 05:00 PM PDT

By Cristina Corbin
Kids can text on tiny keyboards, convey their thoughts in 140 characters or less and use numbers for prepositions, but some states fear they soon may not be able to sign their own names.
In this digital age of Internet acronyms, like “LOL,” and emoticons, Tennessee is the latest state pressing for legislation that mandates students learn cursive writing in school.
Lawmakers in the state are pushing for passage of House Bill 1697, which would require all public school students to learn how to read and write in cursive, preferably by the third grade.
The bill, authored by state Republican Rep. Sheila Butt, is meant to prevent a decline in students’ ability to read handwritten notes and sign their own names as well as interpret historical documents in their original form, like the Declaration of Independence.
“Cursive writing is timeless because it connects us to our past,” Butt told FoxNews.com.
“Across the state, we have students who are able to read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights on their own,” she said, “And then we have students who can only learn about it though a third party. “These are foundational documents that are critical to our history.”
Butt said her motivation to craft the bill came after parents complained to her that their children were unable to read handwritten assignments. Upon further investigation, Butt’s findings were startling, she said.
“I found out that in my county there were high school juniors and seniors who could not read a cursive writing assignment a teacher had written on the board,” she told FoxNews.com. “And there were juniors and seniors who did not have a cursive signature to write on a legal document.”
Tennessee is one of at least six states with lawmakers urging that cursive by mandatory. Five other states — North Carolina, California, Georgia, Massachusetts and Virginia — already have laws in place to make sure students learn to read and write in script.
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Courtney Love Thinks She Found Missing Flight 370

Posted: 16 Mar 2014 05:01 PM PDT

By Joe Lynch

While the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 continues to confound the world despite more than a week of intense search, Courtney Love thinks she might have this conspiracy theory-laden mystery wrapped up.
Using a website that lets you scour satellite images called Tomnod, the Hole singer noticed what appears to be an underwater airplane.
“I’m no expert but up close this does look like a plane and an oil slick,” Love wrote on her Facebook page next to a screenshot of the satellite photo. “And it’s like a mile away Pulau Perak, where they ‘last’ tracked it 5°39’08.5″N 98°50’38.0″E but what do I know?”
While an oceanic oil slick is precisely one of the things search parties are looking for right now, the image is from March 12, so you gotta wonder if an underwater airplane would still be visible from the sky four days after it crashed. That’s a question for an airplane expert, or maybe another grunge icon. Eddie Vedder, what’s your take on the subject?
In all seriousness, the image is intriguing and if Courtney Love has solved the greatest mystery of the 21st century, she’s officially the coolest person alive.
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