All the Ways That The TSA Is A Waste of Money (Infographic)

Note that over 1.1 trillion dollars has been spent on “homeland security” since 9/11. It’s a booming business, and represents the next market frontier for the military-industrial complex.

 

US Trained Iranian Terrorist Group in Nevada: Report

Through secret flights into the US, the terrorist group Mujahedin-e Khalq (also known as The People’s Muhjahedin of Iran) was trained at a US Department of Energy site in Nevada. The M.E.K. has been on the US terrorist watch list for over a decade now, and was implicated in the recent sabotage and bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities as well as the assassination of an Iranian physicist.

Despite the growing ties, and a much-intensified lobbying effort organized by its advocates, M.E.K. has remained on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations—which meant that secrecy was essential in the Nevada training. “We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told me. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications—coördinating commo is a big deal.” (A spokesman for J.S.O.C. said that “U.S. Special Operations Forces were neither aware of nor involved in the training of M.E.K. members.”)

Robert Hersh uncovered this story with his piece in The New Yorker.

So it comes to training terrorists to fight the war on terror. Ironic.

Democracy Now! has a great interview with Hersh:

http://www.democracynow.org/embed/show/2012/4/10

Goldman Sachs Held 44 Trillion In Bets At End of 2011

For comparison, the U.S. in 2011 had an estimated GDP of 15 trillion. Any regulations the Obama admin was to implement over financial institutions are clearly toothless.

The Newest Internet Spying Bill: CISPA

HR 3523, known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is just one of a number of cybersecurity bills recently introduced to Congress. Rather than focusing on copyright enforcement as do SOPA and ACTA, CISPA is all about information gathering for the Department of Defense.

The bill, slated to pass soon with over 100 sponsors, allows the government to ask ISPs for collected user information in the name of “cybersecurity”. The broad wording of this bill has many worried about domestic spying (by the NSA) and an erosion of the right to privacy.

And what comes through loud and clear is that the Rogers-Ruppersberger CISPA bill will allow for much greater information sharing of companies sending private communication data to the government — including the NSA, who has been trying very, very hard to get this data, not for cybersecurity reasons, but to spy on people. CISPA has broad definitions, very few limits on who can get the data, almost no limitations on how the government can use the data (i.e. they can use it to monitor, not just for cybersecurity reasons) and (of course) no real oversight at all for how the data is (ab)used.

Techdirt has the lowdown.

RT briefly describes the bill, and provides some commentary from Kendall Burman, senior national security fellow for the Center for Democracy and Technology:

Bashar al-Assad Resorts to Firebombing Syrians

Being that the rebel stronghold is located in Homs, the Assad regime has dramatically stepped up its use of force over the past few weeks, now using helicopters and military jets to bomb the city.

As Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi & Oskar Svadkovsky report, the military is now using thermobaric bombs (fuel-air bombs) in a tactic similar to that used by Russia in Chechnya. These arms effectively turn the air into fire, and are among the most destructive weapons available:

One YouTube video identifies these as napalm bombs. Well, the balls of fire are certainly not entirely unlike videos of napalm bombing that can be found on YouTube. However, napalm is normally delivered with bombs and these are probably thermobaric or fuel-air bombs of the kind the Russians used in Chechnya. Given the regime’s connections to Russia, it comes rather natural that Mr. Putin would share with Bashar Assad his rich experience in waging counter-insurgency in the Caucuses.

See their article, including a number of video clips, in The American Spectator.

Massive Dolphin Death Toll Linked to Mining & Navy Sonars

For over a decade now, news sources have been reporting on mass deaths in dolphin and whale communities. Since the effect was first discovered, it has been well linked to be naval and mining sonars, which plumb great depths with powerful sound discharges.

What does this mean? Since dolphins and whales normally navigate using echolocation, powerful interference from human sonar is enough to disorient them and cause them to behave erratically, making swift ascents and descents. When this happens, these mammals are likely to experience the bends (decompression sickness) as nitrogen normally dissolved in their blood forms bubbles due to a rapid pressure change. When these bubbles lodge in the body, they create joint pain, headaches, and sometimes a loss of consciousness or even death.

While sonar tech has been instrumental in the recovery of crude oil from undersea reservoirs, its power in recent years has grown enormously, and now resembles a threat similar to the military’s LRAD sonic weapon. One might imagine that an animal sensitive to sound waves would be in living hell when struck by high-powered sonar waves.

Due to a recent explosion of dolphin deaths in the Gulf Coast, some sonar activities have been halted:

With sick and dead dolphins turning up along Louisiana’s coast, federal regulators are curbing an oil and natural gas exploration company from doing seismic tests known to disturb marine mammals.

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has told Global Geophysical Services Inc. to not conduct deep-penetration seismic surveys off the Louisiana coast until May when the bottlenose dolphin calving season ends. The agency says the surveys are done with air-guns that can disrupt mother and calf bonding.

The company says it laid off about 30 workers because of the restriction, which it called unnecessary.

Environmental groups are suing BOEM over the use of underwater seismic equipment and say the restrictions should be extended to surveyors across the Gulf of Mexico.

This article sourced from CBS News.

The real causes are disputed, as the die off coincides with the recent BP oil spill, but humans remain the prime suspects.

Incidents have been reported over the past decade in Britain, through most recently in Cape Cod, which occurred only a month ago.

Supreme Court Allows Strip Searches for Any Offense

Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that strip searches may be conducted under any arrest circumstances, no matter how minor. The court asserted a concern over smuggled drugs or weapons, and stated that the Fourth Amendment provision against unreasonable searches and seizures did not apply to strip searches in the event of an arrest. The specific case involved the wrongful arrest of an Albert W. Florence over a purportedly unpaid fine (already paid), after which Florence was transferred between two jails and strip-searched at each one while he was held for over a week on false pretense.

The procedures endorsed by the majority are forbidden by statute in at least 10 states and are at odds with the policies of federal authorities. According to a supporting brief filed by the American Bar Association, international human rights treaties also ban the procedures.

Furthermore, Justice Stephen Breyer declared how this legal provision had already been abused:

According to opinions in the lower courts, people may be strip-searched after arrests for violating a leash law, driving without a license and failing to pay child support. Citing examples from briefs submitted to the Supreme Court, Justice Breyer wrote that people have been subjected to “the humiliation of a visual strip-search” after being arrested for driving with a noisy muffler, failing to use a turn signal and riding a bicycle without an audible bell.

A nun was strip-searched, he wrote, after an arrest for trespassing during an antiwar demonstration.

There is no doubt that strip search techniques has been and will be used by law enforcement as a method of coercion, and a way to intimidate and humiliate detainees. Read the New York Times article here.

As for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy‘s concern over drugs, we acknowledge that the drug war has long been a failure: More persons are incarcerated in the U.S. than were in Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago, and this rate of imprisonment has been caused by the “War on Drugs” that began in the early 1970’s. The U.S. currently has the largest, most expensive prison system in the world, which has created a massive lower caste in American society–one that is hindered from voting, getting a job, and achieving higher education.

The Pirate Bay Signs Lease for Greek Airspace

We blogged on The Pirate Bay‘s incursion into the world of drone technology a couple weeks ago, as the  P2P (peer-to-peer) media group announced that it would introduce flying servers to the world. The LOSS (Low Orbit Server Station) program now has a domain of operation in Greece, the “birthplace of democracy”. The drones’ design is to bolster the strength of The Pirate Bay’s anonymous and decentralized networks.

The full release:

Athens, Greece – Political power in Athens, Greece, today signed an agreement with representatives for The Pirate Bay (TPB) about exclusive usage of the greek airspace at 8000-9000ft.

– This might come as a shock for many but we believe that we need to both raise money to pay our debts as well as encourage creativity in new technology. Greece wants to become a leader in LOSS, says Lucas Papadams, the new and crisply elected Prime Minister of Greece.

LOSS that he is referring to is not the state of finances in the country but rather Low Orbit Server Stations, a new technology recently invented by TPB. Being a leader for a long time in other types of LOSS, TPB has been working hard on making LOSS a viable solution for achieving 100% uptime for their services.

– Greece is one of few countries that understands the value of LOSSes. We have been talking to them ever since we came up with the solution seeing that we have equal needs of being able to find financially sustainable solutions for our projects, says Win B. Stones, head of R&D at TPB.

The agreement gives TPB a 5 year license to use and re-distribute usage of the airspace at 8000-9000 ft as well as unlimited usage of the radio space between 2350 to 24150 MHz. Due to the financial situation of both parties TPB will pay the costs with digital goods, sorely needed by the citizens of Greece.

The original page here.

This represents an exciting foray into a new level of communication sophistication, and seems to be evolving in concert with the surveillance industry; as security grows in oversight, so does the ability to evade that security (but only for users that take advantage of it).

FDA Declines To Ban BPA in Food Packaging

Yesterday, the FDA rejected a petition by environmental groups to ban BPA (Bisphenol A) from food packaging. The organic compound is used as a hardening agent in plastics, though has been found to leach into the products it contains. This leaching is exacerbated in direct contact with sunlight, and has led many to switch from purchasing water in plastic bottles to purchasing glass and metal containers with less risk and a longer product lifespan.

BPA tends to break down under environmental wear, forming compounds that become processed as estrogen in living organisms.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports on the FDA ruling:

About 90 percent of Americans have traces of BPA in their bodies, mainly because it leaches out of bottles, canned food and other food containers.

Some scientists believe exposure to BPA can harm the reproductive and nervous systems, particularly in babies and small children, potentially leading to cancer and other diseases. They point to results from dozens of BPA studies in rodents and other animals.

But FDA reiterated in its response that that those findings cannot be applied to humans. The agency said the studies cited by NRDC were often too small to be conclusive. In other cases they involved researchers injecting BPA into animals, whereas humans ingest the chemical through their diet over longer periods of time. The agency also said that humans digest and eliminate BPA much more quickly than rats and other lab animals.

Avoiding plastics is difficult in a throw-away society, but there are a few alternatives for the determined and resourceful. And public standards are changing, as scientific findings are met with mandates for new social and environmental standards.

This decision by the FDA comes as no surprise, given its acknowledged history of corruption and collusion with chemical companies.

Supreme Court Declares Human Gene Patents Invalid

A landmark decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on monday, 3/26.

The Associated Press reports (via Yahoo!):

In 2010, a federal judge ruled that genes cannot be patented. U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet said he invalidated the patents because DNA’s existence in an isolated form does not alter the fundamental quality of DNA as it exists in the body nor the information it encodes.

But last year, a divided panel of the federal appeals court in Washington that handles patent cases reversed Sweet’s ruling. The appeals court said genes can be patented because the isolated DNA has a “markedly different chemical structure” from DNA within the body.

The Supreme Court threw out that decision, and sent the case back to the lower courts for rehearing. The high court said it sent the case back for rehearing because of its decision in another case last week saying that the laws of nature are unpatentable.

In that case, the court unanimously threw out patents on a Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., test that could help doctors set drug doses for autoimmune diseases like Crohn’s disease.

“The question before us is whether the claims do significantly more than simply describe these natural relations,” said Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote the opinion in the Prometheus Laboratories case. “To put the matter more precisely, do the patent claims add enough to their statements of the correlations to allow the processes they describe to qualify as patent-eligible processes that apply natural law? We believe the answer to this question is no.”

The article goes on to mention that the U.S. Patent Office has been issuing patents on human genes for nearly three decades. Thirty years of pharmaceutical investment, which means a lot of drug company money will be spent defending these valuable patents.

We applaud the court, but realize that the battle is far from over, especially given that this decision concerns specifically human genes (not plant genes).