Monday 15 December 2014

USAHitman | Conspiracy News

The Supreme Court Says Unanimously Your Boss Can Make You Work For Free

Posted: 14 Dec 2014 04:02 PM PST

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The Supreme Court ruled unanimously this week that your boss does not have to pay you for all the time they force you to spend at work. At issue was a lawsuit filed by Amazon warehouse workers suing for wages they were not paid while they were forced to wait in long lines for post-shift security searches. Workers report that sometimes they can be waiting in line for as long as 25 minutes.
The ruling from SCOTUS hinges on the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, as well as a 1947 statute known as the “Portal-to-Portal Act.” Under the FLSA, workers have a right to compensation for their “principal activities.” But the Portal-to-Portal Act allows certain pre- and post-shift activities to be exempt. A typical example of this is that most places of employment will not allow you to clock in before you put on your uniform.

SCOTUS based their ruling in the Amazon case on a 1956 ruling which found that “workers must be paid for activities that are ‘integral and indispensable’ to the job itself.”

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Anonymous hacks Swedish govt emails over seizure of Pirate Bay servers

Posted: 14 Dec 2014 02:29 PM PST

Swedish government email accounts have been hacked by the Anonymous hacktivist group, in response to last week’s seizure of The Pirate Bay servers by Swedish police.
The group also claimed to have hacked into the government email accounts of Israel, India, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico.
The hacktivist group also left a message at the end of the leak: “Warning: Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year to all!! Bye :*”
On Tuesday, The Pirate Bay and several other torrent websites temporarily disappeared from the internet. The sites were downed in a raid by Swedish police, which seized the servers, computers, and equipment of previously elusive web pirates.
The Pirate Bay appeared back online later that day, changing its web domain to .cr (Costa Rica).
Earlier in September, The Pirate Bay announced new cloud technology which made its servers “raid proof,” adding that the 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) were scattered around the globe with cloud-hosting providers.
The cloud technology reportedly made the site more portable and harder to take down.
Source
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Shadowy forces controlling online conversations

Posted: 14 Dec 2014 12:50 PM PST

IT was perhaps a bit unfortunate, but in October, about a hundred journalists, civil rights advocates and representatives from non-governmental organisations, Internet rights activists, academics and lawyers from across Asia were gathered in Kuala Lumpur to discuss Internet rights and freedoms.
But while the Regional Conference on Media and Internet Freedom was an important event in itself, across town, a group of technologists, security professionals and hackers was attending a talk at the Hack In The Box Security Conference (HITBSecConf 2014) that had a direct relevance on the issues being discussed at the first conference.
At the HITB event, Haroon Meer and his team from South African-based Thinkst, an applied research company that focuses on information security, spoke about how certain parties – whether individuals with mischief in mind, organisations with vested interests, or certain nation-states – have been using false identities to control online conversations.
Unknown forces are making sure their voices are the loudest in online discourse.
In his talk Weapons of Mass Distraction: Sock Puppetry for Fun and Profit, Haroon and his team demonstrated how they successfully gamed systems ranging from mailing lists, online polls, Twitter and Reddit, to major news sites and comment systems. More importantly, they also collected forensic evidence that such tampering has already been going on.
“It’s the concept of rent-a-crowd, brought to the Internet age using sock puppets – essentially accounts that are created online that don’t really represent real people, and are used to sway people’s opinions in forums and other online get-togethers,” he told a rapt audience at HITBSecConf.
“So we thought, if we were an evil corporation or an ‘Evil.Gov,’ what would we do with sock puppets to try and influence hearts and minds? We looked at how we could control the narrative, how we could either get more attention to things or distract people from things, using sock puppets – essentially how we could increase or decrease eyeballs on the things we want.
“We looked at what can be done; what we think will be done; and what we see is already being done,” he added.
Haroon, who has spoken at previous HITBSecConf events, said that Thinkst’s efforts in this research was made possible by a grant by the Washington-based Open Technology Fund, which support projects that develop open and accessible technologies promoting human rights and open societies.
“In 2010, there was a very nice book by Tim Wu (The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires) which spoke about how all new technologies promise freedom, but then get subverted by the powers-that-be and actually end up working against you.
“He went through examples like radio, TV, the telegraph, and so on … and we’re already seeing signs of this, in terms of Internet control,” he added.
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Navy’s 100lb robotic ‘spy fish’ could take to sea next year

Posted: 13 Dec 2014 06:17 PM PST

The Navy has been testing a robotic spy fish designed to resemble a five-foot, 100lb bluefin tuna. If it is operational next year, it will be used to patrol harbors, enter enemy territory, and report back on the movements of enemy ships.
While the Navy is currently testing its tuna-sized biometric device, the “Ghost Swimmer,” it has already provided data for future tasks it can undertake in environments featuring tides, varied currents, waves, and changing weather conditions. The device, created by the Office of Navy Research, has an oscillating tail, high maneuverability, and runs at many speeds. It also moves like a fish.
“This is an attempt to take thousands of years of evolution – what has been perfected since the dawn of time – and try to incorporate that into a mechanical device,” Captain Jerry Lademan, a 27-year-old Marine leading the project, told The Virginian-Pilot. The idea is to “essentially reverse-engineer what nature has already done.”
The biometric fish is controlled by a video game-style joystick, but it can also be programmed to travel on a set course and is sturdy enough to carry cameras and other naval equipment.
The Navy is hoping the motion of the fish will make it far less noticeable than most underwater vehicles. The Ghost Swimmer will potentially be able to evade sonar detection and enter enemy territory undetected to patrol and protect US ships and ports from harm.
“The first time I saw it, I thought it was a living fish,” Lademan said. “It looks alive. It’s crazy.”
Additionally, the biometric fish could be used to search for sea mines or inspect ship hulls for damage – two critical tasks that often put humans in harm’s way.
The Office of Naval Research, through its Rapid Innovation Cell – a group of junior Navy and Marine Corps officers tasked with putting emerging technologies to use for the military – has been playing around with 3D printers, augmented-reality glasses, and about 10 other breakthrough gadgets.
Source
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Sandy Hook Two Years Later: Where Is The Aid Going?

Posted: 13 Dec 2014 04:13 PM PST

At a recent meeting of the state’s Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, the mother of one of the 20 children killed two years ago said trying to get help has been at best confusing, and at worst impossible, for many families.
“It is absolutely disheartening after 23 months to hear of an impacted family with unmet needs. That is a tragedy and should not be happening,” said Nelba Marquez-Greene, whose daughter, Ana, was killed. “Many of the supports that were advertised I have no idea where to get them or how to get them. In the end our own private insurance company paid for our mental health counseling and continues to do so.”
“So where is all of the mental health money going?”
A Courant review has found that since the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, the federal government has given the town of Newtown and several agencies just more than $17 million in aid that has been used primarily to enhance mental health services and school security.
Most of the money has gone into a wide variety of mental health and security needs, many of which are designed to address the broader impact on the community for many years to come. Grants from the U.S. Department of Education totaling $6.4 million have been used to hire teachers, mental-health practitioners, security guards and other personnel for the school system.
The town of Newtown and the state received $2.5 million for police overtime costs through one of three Department of Justice grants. Private organizations have received millions for therapy programs, administrative expenses and even a public relations firm.
The federal grants are in addition to the $28 million that was raised by more than 77 charities — meaning that $45 million, in total, has flowed into Sandy Hook in the last two years. About half of the charity money has yet to be spent — the state attorney general’s office in its final report on the Sandy Hook charities concluded about $15 million had been distributed with the rest earmarked for memorials or future mental health needs in the district.
Much of the money from the school grants has gone directly into the new Sandy Hook Elementary Schoolwhich reopened in a vacant school in Monroe. Two assistant principals were hired for $128,000, seven new substitute teachers were hired to assist the teaching staff, security guards were added and more nursing hours were added to handle the crush of visitors to that office. Records show there was nearly a 20 percent increase in student visits to the nurse’s office in the month after the school reopened, compared to the month before the shooting.
The funding started almost immediately after the Dec. 14 shootings, when Adam Lanza walked into the Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed 26 people, including 20 first-graders, before shooting himself.
Funding is scheduled to continue until at least the middle of 2016.
Where Is The Money Going?
Through Freedom of Information requests, The Courant has obtained grant applications and interim reports submitted by agencies that have received funding. An analysis of those records shows:
•Two agencies that received funding through the DOJ were the local United Way, which initially oversaw the victims’ fund, and the Newtown-Sandy Hook Foundation, the group formed to take over the distribution of that fund for the United Way. Records show that the United Way spent almost half of the $131,355 it received from a DOJ grant to hire the lobbying firm of Gaffney, Bennett and Associates to handle public relations. The Sandy Hook Foundation used $122,000 of federal money to hire an executive director.
•The DOJ money has funded two separate resiliency groups. The town-operated Newtown Recovery & Resiliency Plan is getting $826,443 through the latest 18-month DOJ grant. Records show more than $618,000 of that is going to hire at least four full-time staffers, including a community outreach liaison with a salary of $110,000, a project manager at about $73,000 and a case manager at about $61,000. The second group, a non-profit called the Resiliency Center of Newtown, is getting $501,000 from the second DOJ grant; of that, $408,000 is for salaries, including $82,000 each to hire an art and music therapist, records show.
•One of the education grants paid for more than 40 new school-system positions, including seven guidance counselors, five psychologists and six security guards. Several new positions were created to oversee the grant, including $61,861 to hire a project recovery director and about $32,000 to hire Melissa Brymer, aUCLA professor, to assist the community in applying for and implementing the School Emergency Response to Violence grants.
•The other big school-grant expenditure was for outside agencies brought in to assist the students and staff at the Sandy Hook school. For the first year, the Yale Child Study Center and Clifford Beers Clinic provided mental health services within the school. Clifford Beers has now become the sole provider.
Overall, about $1.3 million from the three SERVE education grants is earmarked for mental-health providers working in the school. In the first month after the school reopened, those providers assisted more than 1,500 students, records show.
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Woman f-bombs police and gets rewarded $100K compensation

Posted: 12 Dec 2014 04:17 PM PST

“F*** police” is political speech, a US court ruled. A woman who was arrested for swearing and raising a middle finger at law enforcers has been acquitted and awarded $100,000 in settlement.
Amy Barnes, a well-known political activist in Marietta, Georgia, had her freedom of speech right violated when she was arrested for yelling curses at police in 2012, according to Cobb County State Judge Melodie Clayton.
“The defendant’s statements, although offensive to this court, clearly constitute political speech,” Clayton wrote in her acquittal of Barnes, cited by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”
The court decision is mainly praised in online comments, and a number draw parallels to the recent lawsuits over police brutality, in which decisions were made in favor of law enforcers.
“She’s lucky to be alive. Had a black man done the same thing he would be gunned down in self-defense,” a comment on The Huffington Post reads.
Barnes was passing two police officers on her bicycle interrogating a black man in 2012, when she screamed at the group “Cobb police suck” and “F*** the police.”
The police went after the woman, arrested her and held her in detention for around 24 hours, six of them in solitary confinement.
Barnes was charged with disorderly conduct and abuse words “to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”
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Sony Pictures suspends filming after massive hack ‘affects payments’

Posted: 12 Dec 2014 04:12 PM PST

Sony Pictures has temporarily stopped filming after hackers, with alleged links to North Korea, paralyzed its computer network. The security glitches have reportedly meant the studio has been unable to process payments.
This is the latest problem that has rocked the Hollywood studio after an attack by the hacking group, Guardians of Peace. Due to the technical problems with their computer network, the majority of which are offline, Sony Pictures have been unable to pay agencies that are filming for the company, a report in The Times newspaper stated.
The attackers, who are believed to have links to Pyongyang, have used very sophisticated methods. Joseph Demarest, the assistant director of the FBI’s cyber-division, told a US Senate hearing that the methods used by Guardians of Peace would have managed to hack into nine out of ten company’s computer systems.
Security experts have estimated that the cost to fix the breach will be in the region of $100 million.
Sony Pictures has not commented on the issue and cancelled a press conference scheduled for Friday to promote the movie ‘The Wedding Ringer,’ which stars Kevin Hart. The actor was called a ‘whore’ by a Sony executive in emails leaked by the hacking group.
Security was also tight at the premiere of ‘The Interview’, the film believed to have been the reason behind the hack. The movie caused outrage in North Korea, due to the plot involving the CIA planning to kill the secretive nation’s supreme leader Kim Jong-un.
North Korea has denied any responsibility, but did praise the mass cyber-attack against the film studio, calling it a “righteous deed.”
“The hacking into SONY Pictures might be a righteous deed of the supporters and sympathizers with the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) in response to its appeal,” a spokesman for the National Defence Commission (NDC) told the country’s KCNA news agency.
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Judge orders sweeping 9/11 trial secrecy review

Posted: 12 Dec 2014 04:10 PM PST

The judge overseeing the Sept. 11 mass murder trial has ordered prosecutors to go back and look at secrets sealed up in the court record to assess what the public can now see in light of this week’s revelations in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s so-called Torture Report.
The chief prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, declined to discuss the three-page order on Saturday — neither its substance nor its implications — because it was not yet made public.
But four attorneys who read it said the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, on Friday instructed the prosecution to carry out a sweeping review of more than two years of classified trial filings.
At issue is how much of the once-secret CIA interrogation and detention program can now be discussed in open court — and which classified filings can be unsealed — in the trial of the five men accused as conspiring to direct, train and finance the 19 hijackers who killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
The alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, 49, and four other men were formally charged May 5, 2012, but their death-penalty prosecution has been slow moving in part because of a superstructure of secrecy built around what the CIA did to them in the three and four years before they were brought to this base in September 2006 for eventual trial.
Now that the Senate Intelligence Committee has released a damning 524-page summary of its 6,700-page study of the brutal tactics the CIA used in its secret overseas prisons — and the trustworthiness of what their interrogations gleaned — information the spy agency once shielded at the Guantánamo war court as national security secrets is declassified.
One defense attorney interpreted the judge’s order to open to the public “all the torture methods” described in defense filings that are currently sealed as Top Secret.
“Judge Pohl ordered the prosecution to take a new look at the material they claimed was classified,” said Cheryl Bormann, who represents Walid bin Attash, 36, an alleged 9/11 plot deputy. “Revisiting the issue should result in the world finding out what happened to these men,” she said, adding that the public portion of the Senate report “doesn’t begin to cover the horror.”
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