POLICE STATE 2010: DHS Patrolling U.S., Mexico Border With Drones

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Burning Man fans say cops too heavy-handed

Burned at Burning Man? Revelers say heavy hand of law a downer at Nevada desert festival

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Congress may sneak through Internet ‘kill switch’ in defense bill

(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/

I was once a Green who believed in man-made global warming

Since time immemorial people have been inventing or exaggerating scares to gain power. I used to think carbon dioxide posed a real threat, and I even used to be an active member of the Australian Greens. Then I discovered all the things we weren’t being told (like this and this), and how much money was involved and I was shocked.

There are many good people among the Greens who will be outraged when they realize how they have been used.

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Senate To Sneak Through Internet Kill Switch Bill

Legislation likely to be attached to Defense Authorization bill in bid to pass cyber-security before midterms

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FDA uses massive egg recall to push for egg pasteurization

(NaturalNews)   Amid the massive egg recall currently underway over potential salmonella poisoning, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been working hard to push its pasteurization agenda. The agency recently made an announcement recommending that all grocery stores and restaurants begin stocking pasteurized eggs instead of raw ones.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of salmonella cases being reported has been steadily increasing throughout the summer. Rather than the average 50 illnesses reported each week, June and July saw numbers as high as 200 per week, prompting a response from the FDA.

However, in typical FDA fashion, the agency has decided to ignore the actual cause of illness and contamination — filthy, industrialized food production systems — and instead call for all eggs to be cooked before being sold to consumers.

Other recent outbreak scares include both spinach and tomato recalls, after which the FDA made similar recommendations urging produce irradiation as the solution. But this philosophy fails to address the real problem with the current food system.

The industrial food system is both unsustainable and unhealthy. Whether with animals or produce, the methods typically used to raise food commercially are toxic and unsanitary, and are actually responsible for causing food contamination. Animals and produce that are raised organically and naturally, the way nature intended, do not become contaminated with salmonella.

But none of this phases the nation’s regulatory agencies, which continue to push for killing food rather than trying to clean up the system and fix the problem at the source.

http://www.naturalnews.com/029538_FDA_egg_pasteurization.html

U.S. Court Rules That Government Can Secretly Track You With GPS, Privacy is For Rich People Only

TIME report details legal ruling that befits activity of KGB or the East German Stasi

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Doubts surface on North Korea’s role in ship sinking

 

The way U.S. officials see it, there’s little mystery behind the most notorious shipwreck in recent Korean history.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calls the evidence “overwhelming” that the Cheonan, a South Korean warship that sank in March, was hit by a North Korean torpedo. Vice President Joe Biden has cited the South Korean-led panel investigating the sinking as a model of transparency.

But challenges to the official version of events are coming from an unlikely place: within South Korea.

Armed with dossiers of their own scientific studies and bolstered by conspiracy theories, critics dispute the findings announced May 20 by South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, which pointed a finger at Pyongyang.

They also question why Lee made the announcement nearly two months after the ship’s sinking, on the very day campaigning opened for fiercely contested local elections. Many accuse the conservative leader of using the deaths of 46 sailors to stir up anti-communist sentiment and sway the vote.

The critics, mostly but not all from the opposition, say it is unlikely that the impoverished North Korean regime could have pulled off a perfectly executed hit against a superior military power, sneaking a submarine into the area and slipping away without detection. They also wonder whether the evidence of a torpedo attack was misinterpreted, or even fabricated.

“I couldn’t find the slightest sign of an explosion,” said Shin Sang-chul, a former shipbuilding executive-turned-investigative journalist. “The sailors drowned to death. Their bodies were clean. We didn’t even find dead fish in the sea.”

Shin, who was appointed to the joint investigative panel by the opposition Democratic Party, inspected the damaged ship with other experts April 30. He was removed from the panel shortly afterward, he says, because he had voiced a contrary opinion: that the Cheonan hit ground in the shallow water off the Korean peninsula and then damaged its hull trying to get off a reef.

“It was the equivalent of a simple traffic accident at sea,” Shin said.

The Defense Ministry said in a statement that Shin was removed because of “limited expertise, a lack of objectivity and scientific logic,” and that he was “intentionally creating public mistrust” in the investigation.

The doubts about the Cheonan have embarrassed the United States, which will s begin joint military exercises Sunday in a show of unity against North Korean aggression. On Friday, an angry North Korea warned that “there will be a physical response” to the maneuvers.

Two South Korean-born U.S. academics have joined the chorus of skepticism, holding a news conference this month in Tokyo to voice their suspicions about the “smoking gun:” a piece of torpedo propeller with a handwritten mark in blue ink reading “No. 1″ in Korean.

“You could put that mark on an iPhone and claim it was manufactured in North Korea,” scoffed one of the academics, Seunghun Lee, a professor of physics at the University of Virginia.

Lee called the discovery of the propeller fragment five days before the government’s news conference suspicious. The salvaged part had more corrosion than would have been expected after just 50 days in the water, yet the blue writing was surprisingly clear, he said.

“The government is lying when they said this was found underwater. I think this is something that was pulled out of a warehouse of old materials to show to the press,” Lee said.

South Korean politicians say they’ve been left in the dark about the investigation.

“We asked for very basic information: interviews with surviving sailors, communication records, the reason the ship was out there,” said Choi Moon-soon, an assemblyman with the Democratic Party.

The legislature also has not been allowed to see the full report by the investigative committee, only a five-page synopsis.

“I don’t know why they haven’t released the report. They are trying to cover up small inconsistencies, and that has cost them credibility,” said Kim Chul-woo, a former Defense Ministry official who is now an analyst with the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, a government think tank.

A military oversight body, the Board of Inspection and Audit, has accused senior naval officers of lying and concealing information.

“Military officers deliberately left out or distorted key information in their report to senior officials and the public because they wanted to avoid being held to account for being unprepared,” an official of the inspection board was quoted as telling the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo.

The Cheonan, a 1,200-ton corvette, sank the night of March 26 about 12 miles off North Korea. The first report issued by Yonhap, the official South Korean news agency, said the ship had been struck by a torpedo, but soon afterward the story changed to say the ship sank after being grounded on a reef.

The military repeated that version for days. The audit board found that sailors on a nearby vessel, the Sokcho, who fired off 35 shots with a 76-millimeter cannon around the time of the sinking, were instructed to say they’d been shooting at a flock of birds, even though at first they had said they’d seen a suspected submarine on radar.

On April 2, as Defense Minister Kim Tae-young was testifying before the National Assembly, a cameraman shooting over his right shoulder managed to capture an image of a handwritten note from the president’s office instructing him not to talk about North Korean submarines.

Such inconsistencies and reversals have fueled the suspicions of government critics. U.S. officials, however, say the panel’s conclusion is irrefutable.

Rear Adm. Thomas J. Eccles, the senior U.S. representative on the panel, said investigators considered all possibilities: a grounding, an internal explosion, a collision with a mine. But they quickly concluded that the boat was sunk by a bubble-jet torpedo, which exploded underneath the vessel and didn’t leave the usual signs of an explosion, he said.

“The pattern of damage was exactly aligned with that kind of weapon,” Eccles said in a telephone interview. “Torpedoes these days are designed to drive underneath the target and explode. They use the energy of their explosion to make a bubble that expands and contracts. It is designed to break the back of the ship.”

Pyongyang, meanwhile, denies involvement in the sinking and calls the accusation against it a fabrication.

South Koreans themselves appear to be confused: Polls show that more than 20% of the public doesn’t believe North Korea sank the Cheonan.

Wi Sung-lac, South Korea’s top envoy for North Korean affairs, says the criticism from within has made it difficult to get China and Russia on board to punish Pyongyang for the attack.

“They say, ‘But even in your own country, many people don’t believe the result,’ ” Wi said.

barbara.demick@latimes.com

john.glionna@latimes.com

Ju-min Park of The Times’ Seoul Bureau and David S. Cloud of the Washington bureau contributed to this report.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-korea-torpedo-20100724,0,4196801,full.story

EPA Rejects Calls to Ban Lead in Ammo, Fishing Tackle

 

(FOXNEWS)    The Environmental Protection Agency has denied a petition filed by environmental activists seeking to ban lead in ammunition and fishing tackle, saying such regulation is beyond the agency’s authority.

The agency’s decision, announced Friday shortly after FoxNews.com published its report on the issue, sided with hunters and fishermen who had argued that the such regulations weren’t allowed under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.

“EPA is taking action on many fronts to address major sources of lead in our society, such as eliminating childhood exposures to lead,” the agency said in a written statement. “However, EPA was not and is not considering taking action on whether the lead content in hunting ammunition poses an undue threat to wildlife.”

A coalition of conservation groups had filed its petition earlier this month arguing that the use of lead in ammo and tackle is poisoning the nation’s lakes, ponds and forests and asking the EPA to ban the “manufacture, processing and distribution” of lead shot, bullets and fishing.

According to the petitioners, who include the Center for Biological Diversity and the American Bird Conservancy, up to 20 million birds and other animals are killed each year due to lead poisoning in the United States, and at least 75 wild bird species — including bald eagles, ravens and endangered California condors — are poisoned by spent lead ammunition. They say roughly 3,000 tons of lead are expelled into U.S. hunting grounds annually, with another 80,000 tons released at shooting ranges, and another 4,000 tons of lead fishing lures and sinkers are lost in ponds and streams.

But sportsmen don’t want anyone tinkering with the tools of their trade.

The Toxic Substances Control Act allows the EPA to regulate “chemical substances” under certain circumstances, but Congress explicitly excluded from regulation any article subject to excise taxes — including pistols, revolvers, firearms, shells and cartridges.

Chris Cox, executive director of the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action, objected to the pettion, saying the conservationists were trying to circumvent this rule by suggesting that while ammunition itself is exempt from regulation, the chemical components of the ammo and fishing lures — specifically, the lead — can fall under the EPA’s jurisdiction.

But environmental activists like Michael Fry of the American Bird Conservancy told FoxNews.com that the petitioners waited to submit their request until nontoxic alternatives such as steel, copper and alloy became readily available.

“Ammunition itself cannot be regulated [under the Act], but the components itself can be regulated,” Fry said in an interview before the EPA’s decision was announced. “In other words, you cannot ban ammunition, but you can require nontoxic ammunition. … We’re not trying to ban handgun ammunition. This is strictly a toxicity issue, with lead poisoning wildlife.”

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/27/epa-rejects-calls-ban-lead-ammo-fishing-tackle/?test=latestnews

POLICE STATE 2010: Backscatter Van Screening System

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