POLICE STATE 2010: DHS Patrolling U.S., Mexico Border With Drones
September 2, 2010 by POPEYE
Filed under Establishing The Police State, Featured Stories
Scientist Report 22 Mile Long Undersea Gulf Oil Plume
September 1, 2010 by POPEYE
Filed under Featured Stories, US News
12 U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan in 2 days
September 1, 2010 by POPEYE
Filed under Afghanistan, Featured Stories
The fatalities Monday and Tuesday bring the total since Saturday to 19. An Estonian soldier and three Afghan Supreme Court clerks are also killed.
FEMA: US evacuations may be required for Earl
August 31, 2010 by POPEYE
Filed under Featured Stories, US News
(RAW STORY) FEMA says US evacuations may be required if Category 4 Hurricane Earl tracks toward coast
Federal officials urged U.S. residents to prepare for possible evacuations and islanders in the Turks and Caicos braced for high winds Tuesday as powerful Hurricane Earl howled over open seas toward the East Coast of the U.S.
The Category 4 hurricane, with winds of 135 mph (215 kilometers), was expected to remain over the open ocean before turning north and running parallel to the U.S. coast, potentially reaching the North Carolina coastal region by late Thursday or early Friday. It was projected then to curve back out to sea, perhaps swiping New England or far-eastern Canada.
“We can’t totally rule out a very close approach to either of the Cape Hatteras areas or Cape Cod and southern New England as the storm progresses further,” said Bill Read, director of the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami.
Earl delivered a glancing blow to several small Caribbean islands on Monday, tearing roofs off of homes and cutting electricity to people in Anguilla, Antigua, and St. Maarten. Cruise ships were diverted and flights canceled across the region. But there were no reports of death or injury.
In Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos, a British territory, Benson Capron was among several fishermen tying their boats to trees lining a beach.
“I hear it is going to pass, but I will not take any chances,” Capron said. “Today I will not go out to fish.”
Forecasters said it was too early to say what effect Earl would have in the U.S., but warned it could at least kick up dangerous rip currents. A surfer died in Florida and a Maryland swimmer had been missing since Saturday in waves spawned by former Hurricane Danielle, which weakened to a tropical storm Monday far out in the north Atlantic.
Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said evacuations may be necessary along the eastern seaboard later this week if the storm does not veer away from the coast as expected.
“Today is the day to make sure you have your plan completed and your supplies in place,” Fugate said.
The storm’s center passed just north of the British Virgin Islands on Monday afternoon. Despite a few lost fishing boats and several uprooted trees in Tortola and Anegada, there were no reports of major damage or injuries, said Sharleen DaBreo, disaster management agency director.
By midday Tuesday, Earl’s center was about 205 miles (335 kilometers) east of Grand Turk island as it headed west-northwest at 14 mph (22 kph), according to the hurricane center. Hurricane strength winds extended up to 70 miles (110 kilometers) from the center, it said.
Tropical storm conditions were expected to spread into the Turks and Caicos by Tuesday afternoon.
Close on Earl’s heels, Tropical Storm Fiona formed Monday afternoon in the open Atlantic. The storm, with maximum winds of 40 mph (65 kph), was projected to pass just north of the Leeward Islands by Wednesday and stay farther out in the Atlantic than Earl’s northward path. Fiona was not expected to reach hurricane strength over the next several days.
Residents were cleaning up debris and assessing damage Tuesday on islands across the northeastern Caribbean.
In Puerto Rico, nearly 187,000 people were without power and another 60,000 without water, Gov. Luis Fortuno said. More than a dozen roads along the north coast remained closed as crews removed trees and downed power lines.
In St. Maarten, sand and debris littered the streets, and winds knocked down trees and electricity poles and damaged roofs. But police spokesman Ricardo Henson said there was no extensive damage to property.
In Antigua, at least one home was destroyed but there were no reports of serious injuries. Governor General Dame Louise Agnetha Lake-Tack declared Monday a public holiday to keep islanders off the road and give them a chance to clean up.
___
Associated Press Writers Vivian Tyson in Providenciales, Turks and Caicos; Ben Fox in Fajardo, Puerto Rico; Anika Kentish in St. John’s, Antigua; Judy Fitzpatrick in Philipsburg, St. Maarten; and David McFadden, Mike Melia and Danica Coto in San Juan and contributed to this report.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/0831/fema-evacuations-required-earl/
Bush White House willfully left Plamegate leaker’s emails unrestored: watchdog
(RAW STORY) Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington might not really be composed of superheroes but many agree that — through the years — CREW has done a kickass job exposing corruption by both Democrats and Republicans, despite often being derided as partisan.
“Top aides to President George W. Bush seemed unconcerned amid multiple warnings as early as 2002 that the White House risked losing millions of e-mails that federal law required them to preserve, according to an extensive review of records set for release Monday,” Ed O’Keefe reported for The Washington Post Sunday night.
The review, conducted by the nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, follows a settlement reached last December between President Obama’s administration, CREW and the National Security Archive, a George Washington University research institute. The groups sued the Bush White House in 2007, alleging it violated federal law by not preserving millions of e-mails sent between 2003 and 2005.
The settlement resulted in the restoration of 94 days worth of e-mail and the release of documents detailing when the Bush White House learned of the missing e-mails and how it responded. The restored e-mails are part of the National Archives and Records Administration’s historic record of the Bush administration, but presidential historians and others seeking information in the coming decades about the major decisions of Bush’s presidency likely will be starved of key details, including messages sent between White House officials and drafts of final policy decisions, according to CREW.
“The net effect of this is we’ve probably lost some truly valuable records that would have provided insight” into the administration’s decision-making process on several policy issues, said CREW Chief Counsel Anne L. Weismann, who led the review.
The cover for the report (pdf link), “THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE BUSH WHITE HOUSE EMAILS,” sports an illustration of a CREW member — perhaps Executive Director Melanie Sloan — garbed like a superhero as she attempts to bring the missing emails to the light.
A CREW press release states,
Just how far did the Bush White House go to hide its actions from the American people? A new report released today by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), “The Untold Story of the Bush White House Emails,” attempts to answer the question by providing a wealth of details regarding the Bush White House’s failure to prevent millions of emails from vanishing forever.
….
“A democratic system of government requires transparency,” said Melanie Sloan, CREW’s Executive Director. “But the Bush administration prided itself on keeping secrets from the American people, ignoring federal records laws requiring White House emails be preserved for future generations.” Sloan continued, “Emails that might shed light on our nation’s recent history – including records created in the lead up to the U.S. war in Iraq – have been wiped away.”
…“Sadly, the American people will never know the full truth of just what went on inside the Bush White House as decisions affecting all of our lives were made,” said Ms. Sloan. “Despite repeated warnings that information was being lost, Bush administration officials repeatedly and willfully turned a blind eye to the problem.”
At TPMMuckraker, Rachel Sladja notes, “The 54-page report reads like an IT horror story, with staffers manually saving each email through Outlook and using four different tools to search for emails to answer a subpoena in the Valerie Plame leak investigation.”
“The report also notes that, when trying to recover emails related to the Plame investigation, the White House did not attempt to restore Scooter Libby’s mailbox even though he was at the center of the investigation,” Sladja adds.
The executive summary of the report notes,
Missing emails included emails from the Office of the Vice President for a critical period in the fall of 2003 that were sought by the Department of Justice as part of its investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA identity.
Files that should have contained these emails also were missing from backup tapes for that period and in its efforts to restore those emails from individual users’ mailboxes, the Bush White House excluded the mailbox of I. Lewis Libby from those being restored.
More relevant passages from the report follow:
Other documents provide tantalizing tidbits of information that suggest more nefarious conduct. Why, for example, in attempting to recover missing emails from backup tapes to respond to the special counsel’s document subpoenas did the White House not restore email from the mailbox of Scooter Libby?
….
As OA began to investigate the missing email problem in October 2005, it made an additional and deeply troubling discovery: the archives contained little or no email from the OVP for an important group of days in September and October 2003. While any missing email should have been cause for concern, this discovery set off alarm bells at the White House. DOJ, as part of its investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA identity, had served the White House with several subpoenas and document requests for OVP emails for the September and October 2003 time-frame. In the absence of any preserved OVP emails for those days, the White House’s responses clearly were incomplete. In addition, the discovery coincided with the end of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the leak. A federal grand jury indicted I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice on October 25, 2005. His defense team soon began demanding that the special counsel turn over documents, including emails, received from the White House.116 Faced with these issues, OA launched a specific investigation into the extent of the problem with missing OVP emails.
….
OA devised a three-step plan to try to recover the OVP email from September 30 through October 6, 2003, a vital period because it immediately followed DOJ’s request for documents.
First, OA would try to recover the missing emails from PST files on the backup tapes.125 If that failed, OA would restore the Journal mailboxes and try to retrieve the emails from them.126 The last resort would be to restore the mailboxes of individual OVP employees.127 The plan was presented to and approved by the White House Counsel’s Office.128
….
It appears, however, OA did not restore and search Scooter Libby’s mailbox, even though he was a central focus of the leak investigation. Mr. Libby’s mailbox, with 1,649 emails, was among the individual mailboxes on the backup tapes OA estimated would take weeks to restore.134 The backup tapes also included mailboxes belonging to non-OVP employees.135 To ensure restoration of the correct mailboxes, OA asked human resources for a list of OVP employees dating back to October 2003.136 Apparently and inexplicably that list did not contain Mr. Libby’s name.137 OA then asked the OVP to validate the list.138 In response, the OVP “reviewed and confirmed” the list, a process that resulted in Mr. Libby’s continuing exclusion.139
Thus, neither the list of OVP users whose mailboxes were to be restored140 nor the final list of restored mailboxes validated by the OVP included Mr. Libby.141Beyond this, the documents do not indicate why OA apparently did not search and restore Mr. Libby’s mailbox. Perhaps Mr. Libby was not listed as an OVP employee because he was considered an employee of the White House Office. Yet, as a January 23, 2004 email from the vice president’s counsel to Mr. Libby notes, he had a“unique status” as a commissioned officer of the president in WHO, but one who principally served the vice president.142 Given Mr. Libby’s function of serving the vice president, his title in October 2003 of Chief of Staff to the Vice President, and his indictment two months earlier as a result of the special counsel’s investigation, the apparent failure of the Bush White House to restore and search his mailbox is both inexplicable and deeply disturbing.
The Administration Office later proposed a plan to fully restore the missing e-mails in 2005, but White House counsel Harriet E. Miers rejected the plan, according to the report. Miers did not return requests for comment.
….
Scott Stanzel, a former Bush spokesman, said CREW is a liberal group that “likes to sue for sport and for years has tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard IT issues.”
“Nearly two years after President Bush left office, their interest in launching partisan attacks through misleading press releases has not waned,” Stanzel said. “The Bush Administration has complied with the Presidential Records Act requirements and this matter is closed, yet CREW’s tiresome effort to score political points continues.”
Although the Bush administration has been a frequent target of CREW’s efforts, the organization was also critical of several government-funded projects constructed in the district of former Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), has called for the resignation of embattled Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) and has accused South Carolina Democratic Senate candidate Alvin M. Greene of violating election laws.
Sloan has been representing Plame and former Ambassador Joe Wilson in their — so far — unsuccessful efforts to sue over the leak. Plame and Wilson have campaigned for Democrats, so this is one reason why many conservatives defending the Bush administration in the Plamegate controversy have been blasting CREW as partisan.
AP source: Unlikely 2 men were plotting terror
August 31, 2010 by POPEYE
Filed under Featured Stories, World
(AP)
AP Source: FBI investigates 2 men arrested in Amsterdam but does not suspect terror activity
EILEEN SULLIVAN
AP News
Aug 31, 2010 10:31 EDT
A U.S. government official says the FBI’s investigation of two men detained in Amsterdam is finding that it’s unlikely they were on a test run for a future terror attack, even as Dutch authorities continued to hold the pair on suspicion of conspiring to commit a terrorist act.
The U.S. official says the two men arrested in Amsterdam did not know each other and were not traveling together.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation, says both men missed flights to Dulles International Airport from Chicago, and United Airlines then booked them on the same flight to Amsterdam. The men were sitting near each other on the flight.
Another U.S. official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, says that when Customs officials discovered one passenger was not on the flight from Dulles to Dubai, they called the plane back to the gate and removed his luggage. It was then they discovered suspicious items in his bag.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.
AMSTERDAM (AP) — Dutch prosecutors say two Yemeni citizens who arrived in Amsterdam on a flight from the United States are suspects in a conspiracy to commit a terrorist act.
Prosecutors said the two men flew in from Chicago on Monday and were bound for Sana’a, the Yemeni capital. They were detained due to information provided by U.S. authorities.
Their luggage was sent on an internal flight to Washington, where U.S. authorities found suspicious items. But Dutch authorities said nothing suspicious was in the luggage that arrived in Amsterdam.
Prosecutors said Tuesday the men were being held “on suspicion of a conspiracy to a terrorist criminal act.” It will be announced in a few days if they will be charged.
Source: AP News
Burning Man fans say cops too heavy-handed
August 31, 2010 by POPEYE
Filed under Featured Stories, Police Brutality & Abuse Of Power
Burned at Burning Man? Revelers say heavy hand of law a downer at Nevada desert festival
Pentagon may apply preemptive warfare policy to the Internet
August 30, 2010 by POPEYE
Filed under Featured Stories, Science
(RAW STORY) Grappling with matters of law and policy governing the United States military’s cyber-warfare capabilities, Pentagon planners are eying ways of making preemptive strikes across the Internet part of America’s toolbox.
In a piece for Foreign Affairs, the publication of globalist policy group The Council on Foreign Relations, Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn III paints a picture of dire threat to American infrastructure, disclosing for the first time details of a devastating cyber-attack on U.S. infrastructure.
While not giving many specifics, Lynn described how malicious code on a USB thumb drive managed to spread across the Department of Defense network, establishing a “digital beachhead” that could siphon key data.
“It was a network administrator’s worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary,” he wrote. “This previously classified incident was the most significant breach of U.S. military computers ever, and it served as an important wake-up call. The Pentagon’s operation to counter the attack, known as Operation Buckshot Yankee, marked a turning point in U.S. cyberdefense strategy.”
However, “Operation Buchshot Yankee,” commenced in 2008 and lasting some 14 months, saw the Department of Defense scramble over what was essentially a very minor security threat that caught their network experts completely by surprise.
The Defense Department quickly issues an outright ban on the use of flash drives. The file which infected Pentagon computers was actually quite common — a derivative of the “SillyFDC” worm, according to Wired, which is listed by anti-virus software developer Symantec as a lowest tier threat. Users who wanted to remove the threat could have simply scanned their drives for the file “Agent.btz,” which was at the source of the Pentagon’s dilemma.
Naturally, the operation to eradicate the worm was kept secret, requiring a much larger effort on part of a smaller group.
Wired continued:
The havoc caused by agent.btz has little to do with the worm’s complexity or maliciousness — and everything to do with the military’s inability to cope with even a minor threat. “Exactly how much information was grabbed, whether it got out, and who got it — that was all unclear,” says an officer who participated in the operation. “The scary part was how fast it spread, and how hard it was to respond.”
U.S. Strategic Command, which is supposed to play a key role in military network defense, couldn’t get simple answers about the number of infected computers — or the number of computers, period.
“We got into Buckshot Yankee and I asked simple questions like how many computers do we have on the network in various flavors, what’s their configuration, and I couldn’t get an answer in over a month,” U.S. Strategic Command chief Gen. Kevin Chilton told a conference last May.
All of which, Lynn wrote in Foreign Affairs, led to the creation of the U.S. Cyber Command and the beginning of rules governing the military’s conduct of online warfare.
The Washington Post, in a Saturday report on the development of rules to govern cyber-warfare, added:
“We have to have offensive capabilities, to, in real time, shut down somebody trying to attack us,” Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the Pentagon’s new Cyber Command, told an audience in Tampa this month.
[...]
Military officials have declared that cyberspace is the fifth domain – along with land, air, sea and space – and is crucial to battlefield success.
“We need to be able to protect our networks,” Lynn said in a May interview. “And we need to be able to retain our freedom of movement on the worldwide networks.”
That line of thinking has led Pentagon planners to weigh weather or not the United States can legally reach across the Internet to attack “adversary information systems,” according to Defense Dept. documents examined by the Post. The capabilities being sought would allow U.S. cyber-warriors to “deceive, deny, disrupt, degrade and destroy” information and computers around the globe.
While it is legal for the Pentagon to block malicious software on the edges of its networks, preemptive strikes on systems thought to be in the employ of those who would harm America or its interests are still a gray area and could be subject to international escalation, should the U.S. take an overtly offensive stance.
“We are having a big debate about what constitutes the use of force or an armed attack in cyberspace,” said Herbert S. Lin, a cyber expert who spoke to the Post. “We need to know where those lines are so that we don’t cross them ourselves when we conduct offensive actions in cyberspace against other nations.”
The U.S. Cyber Command, comprised of 1,000 hackers and spies, will assume command on Oct. 1, led by NSA director General Keith Alexander. The group’s creation was announced in 2009, with the full support of President Obama.
Civil liberties’ activists have warned against allowing the secretive NSA to take the lead in overseeing cyber security, saying it would place too much power in one agency with the NSA policing the same networks that it exploits to carry out eavesdropping.
In unveiling his plans to create a new White House post to oversee cyber security, Obama promised privacy rights would be carefully safeguarded even as the government moves to step up efforts to protect sensitive civilian and military networks.
There have been reported breaches of the US electricity grid and the F-35 fighter jet program, and Obama mentioned a cyber attack — blamed by some accounts on foreign spy services — on the computer hub for his own 2008 presidential campaign.
Audio of a round-table interview with Deputy Defense Secretary Lynn on U.S. cyber-security is available online [mp3 link].
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/0829/pentagon-weighs-applying-preemptive-warfare-tactics-internet/
Congress may sneak through Internet ‘kill switch’ in defense bill
August 30, 2010 by POPEYE
Filed under Establishing The Police State, Featured Stories
(RAW STORY) A federal cybersecurity bill that critics say creates a presidential “kill switch” for the Internet could be added on to a defense spending bill and passed without much debate, technology news sources report.
Sen. Thomas Carper (D-DE), one of the sponsors of the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, told GovInfoSecurity.com that the Senate is considering attaching the bill as a rider to a defense authorization bill likely to pass through Congress before the mid-term elections.
“It’s hard to get a measure like cybersecurity legislation passed on its own,” Carper said.
Carper, along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), introduced the bill in June in an effort to combat cyber-crime and the threat of online warfare and terrorism. Critics say the bill would allow the president to disconnect Internet networks and force private websites to comply with broad cybersecurity measures. Future US presidents would have those powers renewed indefinitely.
The bill (PDF) states that Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet-related businesses “shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed” by the Department of Homeland Security.
But many observers point out that that doesn’t necessarily amount to a “kill switch” — and, in fact, the president already has the power to shut off the Internet. As Time magazine points out, the Communications Act of 1934 grants the president the power to shut down wire communications during a time of war, and the Internet is now recognized as a wire communication medium.
Yet the proposed law authorizes the president to declare “cyber emergencies” — potentially expanding the president’s power to shut down the Internet to times when the US is not technically at war.
And even some backers of the proposed legislation argue the bill is too broad and vague, and the powers granted to the executive branch could be unpredictable as a result.
A summary (DOC) of the bill issued by Sen. Lieberman’s office describes the powers granted to the president:
The Act will provide a responsible framework, developed in coordination with the private sector, for the President to authorize emergency measures, limited in both scope and duration, to protect the nation’s most critical infrastructure if a cyber vulnerability is being exploited or is about to be exploited. The President must notify Congress in advance about the threat and the emergency measures that will be taken to mitigate it. Any emergency measures imposed must be the least disruptive necessary to respond to the threat. These emergency measures will expire after 30 days unless the President orders an extension. The bill does not authorize any new surveillance authorities, or permit the government to “take over” private networks.
The bill “authorizes the president to declare ‘cyber emergencies,’ without spelling out what would happen next,” states an editorial at the Scranton Times-Tribune. “It is certain that the Internet will be a prime means of communication during an emergency. Given the history of the government over-stepping even constitutional constraints during such times, the bill’s sponsors should retool it to be more specific.”
Security expert and Cryptography Research CEO Paul Kocher describes the bill as a “Rorschach blot — on one level it’s absurd, and on others it’s impractical and frightening.”
Kocher said, “When you build something that will shut down a massively critical piece of infrastructure that people have tried to make reliable, that’s a more frightening prospect than anything that could have inspired such a defense … It’s a very blunt weapon.”
GovInfoSecurity notes that the House of Representatives passed a version of the defense authorization bill last spring that included cyber-security measures. If the Senate follows suit, a final version of the cyber-security legislation would be worked out in conference committee.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/0828/congress-internet-kill-switch-defense-bill/
Report: Israel planning to attack Hezbollah arms depots in Syria
August 30, 2010 by POPEYE
Filed under Featured Stories, Israel
