Iceland may ban MasterCard, Visa over WikiLeaks censorship

Credit card companies that prevented card-holders from donating money to the secrets outlet WikiLeaks could have their operating licenses taken away in Iceland, according to members of the Icelandic Parliamentary General Committee. Representatives from Mastercard and Visa were called before the committee Sunday to discuss their refusal to process donations to the website, reports Reykjavik [...]

Bioethics Commission to Investigate Guatemala Experiments and Current U.S. Human Research

President Barack Obama has asked his bioethics council to look into the recent disclosure that in the mid-1940s, a United States Public Health Service scientist deliberately infected patients in Guatemala with syphilis. In a letter sent Wednesday to University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann, chair of the 13-member Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical [...]

Ignoring You is Not a Cognitive Defect

So a bunch of high school teachers are upset that their students are bored with them. Well, that’s not how they say it. Instead, the New York Times has the backs of boring, stupid teachers everywhere: “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction.” If kids didn’t have iPhones, they would pay attention in school. Really? What’s [...]

US contacts allies about WikiLeaks move

The United States has briefed its key allies, including Britain, France, Germany and Saudi Arabia ahead of the mass release of classified documents by WikiLeaks. Whistleblower website WikiLeaks plans to release around three million leaked documents, including cables sent to Washington from American embassies throughout the world. The website had previously posted online secret details [...]

Britain illegally harvests organs for test

An inquiry has found that organs and bones from the bodies of dead British nuclear industry workers at Sellafield were illegally harvested without their consent over a period of 30 years. The inquiry’s findings revealed that the relatives of 64 staff discovered their loved ones had been stripped of livers, tongues and even legs decades [...]

News videographer at center of media battle after shooting video of abusive cops

Source A freelance news videographer in Seattle lost his gig with a television station over a police abuse video they rejected after he posted the video on Youtube. The video showed the customary abuse we expect from the Seattle Police Department; a cop kicking a detained suspect in the head after threatening to beat the [...]

A Tutorial on the Classified Information Procedures Act

Last week, prosecutors in the case of Thomas A. Drake, the former National Security Agency official who is charged with unlawfully retaining classified information that he allegedly disclosed to a reporter, asked the court to hold a pre-trial conference on the use of the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) in that case. CIPA was passed [...]

U.S. Forest Service Employees on “Stand-Down” from Talking to the Media

The Rural Blog brings us this post about the U.S. Forest Service prohibiting its law enforcement and investigations (LEI) employees from speaking to local media without approval from Washington. The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility obtained a memo outlining the policy, which critics say stifles access to government records. “Until further notice all LEI employees [...]

FBI Adds Electronic Form for FOIA Requests

The FBI has a new electronic form designed to make requesting information easier. In addition, the bureau has retooled it records website, including a guide for research in FBI Records. Of course, filing a request has always been the easiest part of making a FOIA request of the FBI. George Washington University’s National Security Archive [...]

Bluebear: Exploring Privacy Threats in BitTorrent

BitTorrent is arguably the most efficient peer-to-peer protocol for content replication. However, BitTorrent has not been designed with privacy in mind and its popularity could threaten the privacy of millions of users. Surprisingly, privacy threats due to BitTorrent have been overlooked because BitTorrent popularity gives its users the illusion that finding them is like looking [...]

US confronts its reputation abroad

Argument transcript released in Ontario v. Quon U.S. Supreme Court case

A 70-page transcript of Monday’s argument in the U.S. Supreme Court case involving Ontario Police Department has been posted to the court’s website. Click here for background on the case. Court takes up Ontario employees’ privacy case By MARK SHERMAN (AP) WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court appears likely to rule against public employees who claimed [...]

Three More Domestic Spying Programs Revealed

The Department of Homeland Security is acknowledging the existence of three more government programs charged with spying on American citizens in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The programs — Pantheon, Pathfinder and Organizational Shared Space — used a variety of software tools to gather and analyze information about Americans, according to [...]

Google Reveals Number Of Goverment Censorship Requests Around The World

Google has done something pretty cool: it has released information on the number of government requests received to remove content, and the percentage of those requests Google complied with: Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about [...]

WikiLeaks: Collateral Murder

WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot [...]

Pentagon investigating alleged spy operation

WASHINGTON — A Department of Defense official is under investigation for allegedly hiring private contractors to gather intelligence on suspected insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a U.S. official said Monday. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the case, told The Associated Press that Michael D. Furlong directed a defense contract to [...]

Cubans Nominate their Candidates

Havana, February 26 (RHC) –Thousands of Cubans began attending community meetings countrywide to nominate candidates suitable for the post of delegates to be elected by direct, secret voting in the upcoming polls, scheduled for April 25. As part of the Cuban electoral system, based on mass participation of the population, nearly 51,000 such meetings have [...]

Google, NSA alliance posing security threats to users

A deal between internet giant Google and the US National Security Agency on cyber-attacks may pose serious threats to other countries’ national security and internet users. Analysts worry the collaboration would allow Google’s data to flow to the spy agency. Journalists and experts have announced their concern over the deal as the National Security Agency [...]

RIP: DARPATech Mad-Science Fair Lives No More

The Pentagon’s biannual mad-science fair is no more. A Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency representative confirmed to IEEE Spectrum that the agency will no longer host its defense-technology showcase. Bummer! The conferences were a favorite among defense and tech media: the latest-and-greatest in gear, gadgets and science, along with Pentagon-themed M&Ms and heaps of free [...]

Idaho Bill Would Remove Personal Information of Law Enforcement Officials from Public Record

Idaho law enforcement officials support legislation that would remove personal information, such as home addresses and phone numbers, from the public record. Proponents say the measure is designed to promote the safety of law enforcement. The Idaho Press Club opposes the bill as it does goes against the presumption of openness in government. Read more [...]

North Carolina County Seeks to Remove Public Officials from Online Property Database

Mecklenburg County wants the public to use an online survey to weigh in on a debate over access to public officials’ tax information online. Arguing that it is too easy for violent criminals to find out where public officials live, some North Carolina county and federal officials sent a letter to county commissioners asking them [...]

Homeland Security Releases Annual FOIA Report

The Department of Homeland Security has released the 2009 Freedom of Information Act Report. The report shows that the Department processed over 160,000 requests in the past year, with 27,182 requests remaining pending. Of the requests processed, 11% were granted in full, 60% were classified as “partial grants/partial denials,” and the remaining 29% were denied [...]

Proposed Law Would Extend FOIA Reach to Private Prisons

Congress is considering proposed legislation to extend the Freedom of Information Act to private prisons that contract with government agencies. At present, the companies that run private prisons say they are not subject to FOIA because they are not public agencies. Read more about H.R. 2450 here. (Private Prison Information Act of 2009)

Announcing Venezuela’s first and only English Language Newspaper, THE CORREO DEL ORINOCO INTERNATIONAL

Caracas, 22 January 2010 – This Friday, Venezuela celebrates the launching of its first and only English language newspaper, the Correo del Orinoco International. While in the past other English-language publications have existed, none remain in circulation today, and no others have been created during the Bolivarian Revolution. Editor-in-Chief Eva Golinger explained, “This will be [...]

War Criminals: Arrest Warrants Requested

International arrest warrants have been requested for George W. Bush, Richard B. Cheney, Donald H. Rumsfeld, George J. Tenet, Condoleeza Rice and Alberto R. Gonzales at the International Criminal Court, The Hague, Netherlands. Professor of Law Francis Anthony Boyle of the University of Illinois College of Law in Champain, United States of America, has issued [...]

Pentagon Report Calls for Office of “Strategic Deception”

The Department of Defense needs to get better at lying and fooling people about its intentions. That’s the conclusion from an influential Pentagon panel, the Defense Science Board (DSB), which recommends that the military and intelligence communities join in a new agency devoted to “strategic surprise/deception.” Tricking battlefield opponents has been a part of war [...]

David Kelly post mortem to be kept secret for 70 years as doctors accuse Lord Hutton of concealing vital information

Vital evidence which could solve the mystery of the death of Government weapons inspector Dr David Christopher Kelly will be kept under wraps for up to 70 years. In a draconian – and highly unusual – order, Lord Hutton, the peer who chaired the controversial inquiry into the Dr Kelly scandal, has secretly barred the [...]

United Nations report blasts US over human rights abuses

A United Nations report says the US has been violating basic human rights by kidnapping and holding terrorism suspects in secret detention centers during the past nine years. The US is among dozens of countries that have kidnapped suspects, four independent UN rights investigators said in a year-long study based on flight data and interviews [...]

Government posting wealth of data to Internet

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday is posting to the Internet a wealth of government data from all Cabinet-level departments, on topics ranging from child car seats to Medicare services. The mountain of newly available information comes a year and a day after President Barack Obama promised on his first full day on the [...]

Police increasingly use false wiretapping charges to prevent video recordings

A South Florida model films a cop who is threatening to arrest her son and she gets arrested on felony charges. An Oregon man films a cop who is roughing up his mentally ill friend and he gets arrested on felony charges. And a Boston man films a cop arresting a drug suspect and he [...]

Gerald Celente Interview – Words of wisdom

Gerald Celente in Wikipedia Trends Research Institute Trends Journal

Time for full disclosure of DNA databases

Editorial: Time for full and frank data disclosure WHEN a defendant’s DNA appears to match DNA found at a crime scene, the probability that this is an unfortunate coincidence can be central to whether the suspect is found guilty. The assumptions used to calculate the likelihood of such a fluke – the “random match probability” [...]

Federal Agencies Need Not Confirm or Deny Electronic Surveillance under FOIA

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed that the National Security Agency and the Department of Justice do not need to confirm or deny the existence of electronic surveillance records under the Freedom of Information Act. The appellate court found that federal agencies are allowed to file “Glomar” responses, which were [...]

Ohio bill would prohibit broadcasting of 911 calls

Two Ohio state senators have proposed a bill that would prohibit the broadcasting of 911 telephone calls and levy a $10,000 fine for infractions. The Society of Professional Journalists wrote a letter to the bill co-sponsors urging them to reconsider the proposed measure, saying it would diminish the media’s ability to report on breaking events. [...]

Obama Curbs Secrecy of Classified Documents

WASHINGTON — President Obama declared on Tuesday that “no information may remain classified indefinitely” as part of a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch’s system for protecting classified national security information. In an executive order and an accompanying presidential memorandum to agency heads, Mr. Obama signaled that the government should try harder to make information [...]

CRS Report – Privacy: An Overview of Federal Statutes Governing Wiretapping and Electronic Eavesdropping

Privacy: An Overview of Federal Statutes Governing Wiretapping and Electronic Eavesdropping, December 3, 2009 “Depending on one’s perspective, wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping are either “dirty business,” essential law enforcement tools, or both. This is a very general overview of the federal statutes that proscribe wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping and of the procedures they establish for [...]

Top Secret Brit Laptop Stolen

The theft of laptops with ‘top secret’ gov­ern­ment and military data has become a punch-​​​​line in the United Kingdom. There were 28 lap­tops lost or stolen in the last four months and 66 in total since January 1, 2009. Looking back over the last 4 years there were 658 that van­ished. A major hunt is now [...]

FBI Releases Michael Jackon Files

Michael Joseph Jackson, a celebrity pop star, was born on August 29, 1958. He died unexpectedly on June 25, 2009 at the age of 50. Between 1993 and 1994 and separately between 2004 and 2005, Mr. Jackson was investigated by California law enforcement agencies for possible child molestation. He was acquitted of all such charges. [...]

YouTube War: Fighting in a World of Cameras in Every Cell Phone and Photoshop on Every Computer

Terrorist attacks today are often media events in a second sense: information and communication technologies have developed to such a point that these groups can film, edit, and upload their own attacks within minutes of staging them, whether the Western media are present or not. In this radically new information environment, the enemy no longer [...]

NYPD Must Give NYCLU Data on Race of People Shot at by Police

A Supreme Court of the State of New York judge has ordered the New York City Police Department to turn over to the New York Civil Liberties Union data concerning the race of all people who were shot at by police officers between 1997 and 2006. The NYCLU sued the NYPD in August 2008 for [...]

In secret case, court rejects ‘total and permanent’ seal

The U.S. Court of Appeals in New York (United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit) last week rejected a request to permanently seal the entire transcript of a criminal defendant’s sentencing. The appeal remains shrouded in secrecy, with court documents, the charges, the defendant’s name, and even the defense attorney’s name sealed. Prosecutors [...]

Lithuania ‘hosted at least two secret CIA prisons’

A Lithuanian inquiry has found that the US Central Intelligence Agency set up and used secret prisons on its soil following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the US. Lithuania‘s intelligence agency assisted the CIA-run secret prisons, which were used to hold at least eight al-Qaeda suspects, the parliamentary panel in charge of the [...]

2 Mossad operatives institutionalized

One of the large mental health hospitals in Israel was recently surprised to receive a young, good-looking patient in a psychotic state who was accompanied by a personal security guard, Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Sunday. The doctors, who asked why the woman was accompanied by a guard, were shocked to learn that she was a [...]

Western federal courts can now videotape some trials

The body that oversees 15 western federal trial courts announced a pilot program yesterday that will allow the videotaping of some civil trials. The Judicial Council of the Ninth Circuit – the governing body for all federal courts in Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands – [...]

FBI Linguist Leaked Classified Docs to Blogger

An Israeli-American attorney who worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a translator pled guilty yesterday to unlawfully disclosing five classified FBI documents to an unidentified blogger last April, who then published information from the documents on his blog, the Department of Justice announced. In a signed plea agreement (pdf), Shamai Leibowitz stipulated that [...]

TSA Stonewalls Congress About Screening Manual Security Breach

On Wednesday, the Transportation Security Administration‘s (TSA) acting director insisted to Congress that the mistaken posting of secret airport screening procedures online posed no threat to holiday travelers because the procedures had changed, but refused to provide members of Congress with the newest version of the TSA’s screening manual to prove it.  And current and [...]

Estimated Nuclear Weapons Locations 2009

Source The world’s approximately 23,300 nuclear weapons are stored at an estimated 111 locations in 14 countries, according to an overview produced by Federation of American Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council. Nearly half of the weapons are operationally deployed with delivery systems capable of launching on short notice. The overview is published in the [...]

Report and Recommendations of the Presidental Task Force on Controlled Unclassified Information

Report and Recommendations of the Presidental Task Force on Controlled Unclassified Information The Presidential Task Force on Controlled Information headed by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder recently released a report. This report provided findings and recommendations on current sensitive information sharing practices between federal, state, local and tribal [...]

Ex-spy chief, Sir John Scarlett, accused of misleading Iraq Inquiry

Great Britain‘s former spy chief, Sir John McLeod Scarlett, misled the Iraq Inquiry by exaggerating the reliability of crucial claims about Saddam Hussein‘s ability to launch weapons of mass destruction, according to the leading Ministry of Defence expert who assessed the intelligence behind the decision to go to war. Scarlett who was responsible for drafting [...]

Republic of Lithuania’s spy chief quits after leak of CIA prison in Lithuania

The Republic of Lithuania‘s intelligence chief has resigned after news leaked out that the Central Intelligence Agency operated a secret prison in the country between 2004 and 2005. Povilas Malakauskas, director of the Lithuanian State Security Department (Valstybės saugumo departamento), quit his job after two years in the position “partly” because of government efforts to [...]