In a lot of cities people will try to sell you all kinds of things, some legal, some not, while you’re waiting in traffic. Roses were a common thing in San Diego for some reason.
Getting shot for jaywalking is pretty damn unbelievable, but it happens too often here since they started militarizing the police.
]]>Yeah, I think you are correct about the Corporations. It sounds to me like they are behind a lot of this crap. Why else would CIA/NSA be targeting civilian infrastructure now? Even in wartime, that’s a no-no!
Regarding the debacle in Ferguson, I found a good illustrated timeline of events on Buzzfeed:
A Timeline Of The Crisis In Ferguson Since The Death Of Michael Brown
And this:
A Witness To The Police Shooting Of Michael Brown Live-Tweeted The Entire Event
]]>When another Twitter user asked about the photo, @TheePharoah said police shot Brown seven times, including twice in the back.
—-@TheePharoah from behind ?
@SLIKK_DARKO the first two was, the next 5 werent, he turned around
Rick Perry Indicted After Cutting the Funding for a State Corruption Investigation
This is a copy of the actual Grand Jury indictment for 2 counts. đ Hopefully they will stick and that will be one less crooked moron to cause trouble. đ
And here By Phil Plait (old gold):
Did Rick Perry just admit to violating the US Constitution?
The GOP are running out of candidates! LOL
]]>This brings to mind WarGames, since we are making old movie allusions. No matter how often you tell people that computers can’t think and are no better than the algorithms used to program them, which is written by coders, not geo-political analysts, they still continue to believe that computer systems are the ‘Holy Grail’ that will solve all problems.
They have these massive collections of data that they have no good way of analyzing, but they expect to find the answer to all their problems by doing something with it. They are delusional.
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Ed Snowden with former CIA and NSA chief General Michael Hayden at a gala event in 2011.
Interestingly, his older sister, Jessica, is a lawyer at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington. His mother, Wendy, worked for the US District Court in Baltimore, while his father was a WO in the US Coast Guard. Not really a family the US Gov would want to take on I’d think. đ
I don’t understand the Military’s attitude either. *shrug*
LOL That was part of the reason for my comment that those cop’s think they are Rambo. I love irony! đ
Here’s anothr interesting piece from the Snowden interview:
Much of Snowdenâs focus while working for Booz Allen was analyzing potential cyberattacks from China. His targets included institutions normally considered outside the militaryâs purview. He thought the work was overstepping the intelligence agencyâs mandate. âItâs no secret that we hack China very aggressively,â he says. âBut weâve crossed lines. Weâre hacking universities and hospitals and wholly civilian infrastructure rather than actual government targets and military targets. And thatâs a real concern.â
The last straw for Snowden was a secret program he discovered while getting up to speed on the capabilities of the NSAâs enormous and highly secret data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah. Potentially capable of holding upwards of a yottabyte of data, some 500 quintillion pages of text, the 1 million-square-foot building is known within the NSA as the Mission Data Repository. (According to Snowden, the original name was Massive Data Repository, but it was changed after some staffers thought it sounded too creepyâand accurate.) Billions of phone calls, faxes, emails, computer-to-computer data transfers, and text messages from around the world flow through the MDR every hour. Some flow right through, some are kept briefly, and some are held forever.
The massive surveillance effort was bad enough, but Snowden was even more disturbed to discover a new, Strangelovian cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind. The program, disclosed here for the first time, would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. Software would constantly be on the lookout for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. When it detected an attack, MonsterMind would automatically block it from entering the countryâa âkillâ in cyber terminology.
Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability: Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. Thatâs a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. âThese attacks can be spoofed,â he says. âYou could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?â
In addition to the possibility of accidentally starting a war, Snowden views MonsterMind as the ultimate threat to privacy because, in order for the system to work, the NSA first would have to secretly get access to virtually all private communications coming in from overseas to people in the US.
MonsterMind is a very bad and stupid idea! It’s a disaster waiting to happen! It’s the kind of insane thing Nth. Korea would do, if they could.
]]>This is just another victim of Rumsfeld’s move to privatize the Pentagon, and the overtly political nature that arose in the military. When you add in the Fundamentalist Christian factor that is too dominate, you end up with a dysfunctional mess.
It never ceases to amaze me how absolutely blind the military is to the threat posed by its relationship with the Israelis. How many Israeli spies do we have to arrest before someone wakes up to the fact that they are not our BFF, but only operate in their own best interests, as determined by their whacko and corrupt politicians. It is more of the politicization of the Pentagon, because there is no strategic upside for the US in the relationship.
I have been amused by the people comparing the actions of police in Ferguson with Rambo. They seem to forget that at the end of the movie Rambo blew up the police station.
]]>And nothing at all will happen to them. It’s the USA after all… the land of make believe and zero responsibility.
Anyway, here’s something that makes me smile for a change! đ
Snowden was recently interviewed by WIRED And it’s a hilarious commentary on the uselessness of the NSA.
Snowden: I Left the NSA Clues, But They Couldnât Find Them
By Andy Greenberg 08.13.14If the NSA still doesnât know the full extent of the greatest leak of secrets in its history, itâs not because of Edward Snowdenâs attempts to cover his tracks. On the contrary, the NSAâs most prolific whistleblower now claims he purposefully left a trail of digital bread crumbs designed to lead the agency directly to the files heâd copied.
In a WIRED interview published today, the 31-year-old megaleaker has revealed that he planted hints on NSA networks that were intended to show which of its documents heâd smuggled out among the much larger set he accessed or could have accessed. Those hints, he says, were intended to make clear his role as a whistleblower rather than a foreign spy, and to allow the agency time to minimize the national security risks created by the documentsâ public release.
The fact that NSA officials have told the press that his haul may have been as large as 1.7 million documents, says Snowden, is a sign that the agency has either purposely inflated the size of his leak or lacks the forensic skills to see the clues he left for its auditors. âI figured they would have a hard time,â Snowden tells WIRED, describing the agencyâs attempts to reverse-engineer his leak. âI didnât figure they would be completely incapable.â
…
Just bloody hilarious! Reminds me so much of ASIO! đ
Snowden: I Left the NSA Clues, But They Couldnât Find Them
Also (the above is basically a summary of this, more in depth interview) It raises the near certainty that there is in fact a 2nd whistle-blower/leaker who is probably still at the NSA! Which would show how inept the NSA truly is. It’s an excellent read that fills in a lot of the gaps, and eliminates some of the US falsehoods and outright lies.
The Most Wanted Man in the World
Such as this, which goes to your comment and mine about the way the USA is bound to Israel:
Among the discoveries that most shocked him was learning that the agency was regularly passing raw private communicationsâcontent as well as metadataâto Israeli intelligence. Usually information like this would be âminimized,â a process where names and personally identifiable data are removed. But in this case, the NSA did virtually nothing to protect even the communications of people in the US. This included the emails and phone calls of millions of Arab and Palestinian Americans whose relatives in Israel-occupied Palestine could become targets based on the communications. âI think thatâs amazing,â Snowden says. âItâs one of the biggest abuses weâve seen.â
It’s Government sanctioned.
]]>The SWAT teams in my time were heavily weighted towards scoped bolt action rifles, although they had both M-16s and Uzis in their arsenal. Marksmanship was the key selector for joining. I don’t ever remember seeing either type of automatic weapon out of the truck in photos or TV reporting on SWAT incidents.
]]>What baffles me, though, is how a town that is 2/3rds black has a white city council, white mayor, and nearly-all-white police force. Now how does that happen, one wonders?
– Badtux the “I smell racism” Penguin
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