Today's oddities.....
Screenshot from the Senate.gov website.
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/15/2013 18:16 -0400
Source: AP
Contractors demolishing Sandy Hook Elementary School are being required to sign confidentiality agreements forbidding public discussion of the site, photographs or disclosure of any information about the building where 26 people were fatally shot last December.
Selectman Will Rodgers said officials want to protect the Newtown school where the 20 children and six educators were killed, The News-Times reported (HTTP://BIT.LY/1AMZP8L ).
"It's a very sensitive topic," he said Monday. "We want it to be handled in a respectful way."
Project manager Consigli Construction has barricaded the property and intends to screen the perimeter to prevent onlookers from taking photographs. Full-time security guards will ensure the site is not disturbed.
Families of the victims and school staff visited the site, but public access is barred.
Read More...
Contractors demolishing Sandy Hook Elementary School are being required to sign confidentiality agreements forbidding public discussion of the site, photographs or disclosure of any information about the building where 26 people were fatally shot last December.
Selectman Will Rodgers said officials want to protect the Newtown school where the 20 children and six educators were killed, The News-Times reported (HTTP://BIT.LY/1AMZP8L ).
"It's a very sensitive topic," he said Monday. "We want it to be handled in a respectful way."
Project manager Consigli Construction has barricaded the property and intends to screen the perimeter to prevent onlookers from taking photographs. Full-time security guards will ensure the site is not disturbed.
Families of the victims and school staff visited the site, but public access is barred.
Read More...
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2013/10/15/police-search-for-dry-ice-bomb-suspect-after-3-more-found-at-lax/
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Detectives Tuesday continued their efforts to find the suspect wanted for planting dry ice bombs around Los Angeles International Airport.
One dry ice bomb exploded and two plastic bottles containing the dangerous material were found around 8:30 p.m. Monday at the Tom Bradley International Terminal in a restricted area, Los Angeles Police Department Det. Gus Villanueva said.
No one was injured, and no flights were delayed.
Airport police and a bomb squad cleared the items around 9:45 p.m.
Extra police patrols and bomb sniffing dogs remained were at the airport Monday.
“We’re doing what we usually do, but we’re just more exposed today just because of what’s going on,” LAX Airport Police Officer Robert Corchado said.
On Sunday, another dry ice device exploded inside an employee bathroom at LAX’s Terminal 2. No injuries were reported in that incident.
In both instances, the bombs were left in an area of the airport that requires special clearance for access. Officials are investigating whether they may have been set up by an employee.
“At least they found unexploded ones,” passenger Bing Smith said. “I don’t know frankly what to think about somebody getting to limited access areas that require a badge.”
KNX 1070′s Ed Mertz reports LAPD Counter Terrorism Chief Michael Downing said part of the problem for investigators is a gap in security camera coverage throughout the airport.
- Ed Mertz
00:00
“We’re looking at all the evidence, all the footage we can, but there is an issue with some of the restricted areas,” Downing said. “They don’t have cameras, so this produces a bit of a challenge.”
Authorities said there was no indication that either incident was part of a terrorist act.
The FBI is aiding the LAPD in the investigation.
“We will vigorously prosecute this individual and somebody is going to go to prison over this,” LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said.
Authorities asked anyone who took cell phone video during either incident to contact them.
US Senate Says Right to Keep & Bear Arms is Debatable
Suggests 2nd Amendment may not apply to individuals, despite Supreme Court ruling
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
October 15, 2013
Infowars.com
October 15, 2013
According to the U.S. Senate, the individual right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment is debatable.
Image: Gun Show.
A Senate.gov guide to the Constitution contains an “explanation” next to every section and amendment of America’s founding document.
The Second Amendment guarantees, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
However, according to the Senate website, “Whether this provision protects the individual’s right to own firearms or whether it deals only with the collective right of the people to arm and maintain a militia has long been debated.”
The “explanation” makes no mention of a 2008 Supreme Court ruling (District of Columbia v. Heller), which affirmed that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to own guns.
A separate Supreme Court ruling in 2010 confirmed that the Second Amendment right for an individual to keep and bear arms applied to both state and local gun control laws.
The Senate website reads like a signing statement for the entire Constitution. Every single section and right is ‘explained’ and in some cases re-interpreted.
Screenshot from the Senate.gov website.
As Ali Papademetriou highlights, schools are also erroneously using the Senate’s interpretation of the Second Amendment to suggest that the right for Americans to own firearms is restricted to state militias.
American History students at Denton Guyer High School in Texas are being taught that, “The people have a right to keep and bear arms in a state militia,” under the Second Amendment, implying that there is no individual right to own guns.
The First Amendment is also summarized as meaning only that, “Congress may not favor one religion over another.”
Many Americans would be concerned to realize that the very body concerned with upholding and protecting their rights under the mandate of the Constitution – the U.S. Senate – refuses to fully acknowledge the fundamental right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.
http://thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/10/15/personal-preparation-for-grid-ex-ii/
http://thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/10/15/personal-preparation-for-grid-ex-ii/
Personal Preparation for Grid Ex II
News not in the " News "
Source: Washington's Blog
Debunking Government’s Justification for Mass Surveillance
Debunking Government’s Justification for Mass Surveillance
Preface: The Bush and Obama administrations have claimed for more than a decade that spying on Americans was justified by 9/11.
Senator Diane Feinstein – head of the Senate Intelligence Committee – is now trotting out the same old tired justification.
However – as demonstrated below – that claim is totally false.
No Stopped Terrorist Plots
TechDirt notes:
While the group the money was sent to was, in fact, designated as a terrorist organization in 2008 by the U.S., the FBI itself admits that the cab driver’s donation was more in the nature of a political – or eventribal – affiliation, rather than a terrorist one.
So there’s not a single terrorist attack proven to have been thwarted by the NSA. Instead, the entireOrwellian surveillance program is being justified by one San Diego cabbie sending his loose change ($8,500 divided by 4 is $2,125) to the other side of the world as a political/tribal contribution?
Initially, an FBI informant hosted and rented a room to Mihdhar and another 9/11 hijacker in 2000.
Investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House.
As the New York Times notes:
Moreover, the NSA actually did intercept Mihdhar’s phone calls before 9/11.
We reported in 2008:
Binney responded:
Another high-level NSA whistleblower – Thomas Drake – testified in a declaration last year that an NSA pilot program he and Binney directed:
And U.S. and allied intelligence heard the 9/11 hijackers plans from their own mouths:
ProPublica notes:
In other words, the NSA had the technical ability and legal authority to intercept calls between Midhar and Yemen before 9/11 … and it actually did so.
In addition, Gawker notes that Feinstein’s own statement is illogical on its face, since the CIA had issued urgent alerts:
In reality – despite the government continually grasping at strawsto justify its massive spying program – top security experts say that mass surveillance of Americans doesn’t keep us safe. Indeed, they say that mass spying actually hurts U.S. counter-terror efforts (more here and here).
As one amusing example, the NSA’s databases are getting clogged with spam emails from accounts they’re snooping on.
Veteran FBI agent Colleen Rowley (the one in the middle) – the one who tried to warn her superiors about hijakckers taking flying lessons – pointed out in June:
Senator Diane Feinstein – head of the Senate Intelligence Committee – is now trotting out the same old tired justification.
However – as demonstrated below – that claim is totally false.
No Stopped Terrorist Plots
TechDirt notes:
Feinstein goes on to make … claims that have already been debunked:Specifically, the cab driver and 3 other men raised a total of $8,500 and sent it to Somalia.
Working in combination, the call-records database and other NSA programs have aided efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to disrupt terrorism in the U.S. approximately a dozen times in recent years, according to the NSA. This summer, the agency disclosed that 54 terrorist events have been interrupted—including plots stopped and arrests made for support to terrorism. Thirteen events were in the U.S. homeland and nine involved U.S. persons or facilities overseas. Twenty-five were in Europe, five in Africa and 11 in Asia.[The NSA chief himself admits the numbers are wildly inflated, and there were only "one or two" terrorist plots foiled.]
Note the all important “and other NSA programs” language here. Also the use of “terrorist events” not plots. And, remember, those “thirteen events… in the U.S. homeland,” have since been whittled down to only one that actually relied on the call records program that she’s defending — and that wasn’t a terrorist plot but a cab driver in San Diego sending some cash to a Somali group judged to be a terrorist organization.
While the group the money was sent to was, in fact, designated as a terrorist organization in 2008 by the U.S., the FBI itself admits that the cab driver’s donation was more in the nature of a political – or eventribal – affiliation, rather than a terrorist one.
So there’s not a single terrorist attack proven to have been thwarted by the NSA. Instead, the entireOrwellian surveillance program is being justified by one San Diego cabbie sending his loose change ($8,500 divided by 4 is $2,125) to the other side of the world as a political/tribal contribution?
The Government Actually DID Spy On the Bad Guys Before 9/11
ProPublica notes:In defending the NSA’s sweeping collection of Americans’ phone call records, Obama administration officials have repeatedly pointed out how it could have helped thwart the 9/11 attacks: If only the surveillance program been in place before Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. authorities would have been able to identify one of the future hijackers who was living in San Diego [named Khalid al Mihdhar].
Last weekend, former Vice President Dick Cheney invoked the same argument.
***The reality is different.
Indeed, the Obama administration’s invocation of the Mihdhar case echoes a nearly identical argument made by the Bush administration eight years ago when it defended the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program.
Initially, an FBI informant hosted and rented a room to Mihdhar and another 9/11 hijacker in 2000.
Investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House.
As the New York Times notes:
Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the White House on Tuesday of covering up evidence ….The accusation stems from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s refusal to allow investigators for a Congressional inquiry and the independent Sept. 11 commission to interview an informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who had been the landlord in San Diego of two Sept. 11 hijackers.So mass surveillance of Americans isn’t necessary, when the FBI informant should have apprehended the hijackers.
Moreover, the NSA actually did intercept Mihdhar’s phone calls before 9/11.
We reported in 2008:
The U.S. government heard the 9/11 plans from the hijackers’ own mouth. Most of what we wrote about involved the NSA and other intelligence services tapping top Al Qaeda operatives’ phone calls outside the U.S.We asked top NSA whistleblower William Binney – a highly-credible 32-year NSA veteran with the title of senior technical director, who headed the agency’s digital data gathering program (featured in a New York Times documentary, and the source for much of what we know about NSA spying) – what he thought of the government’s claim that mass surveillance of Americans would have caught Mihdhar and prevented 9/11.
However, as leading NSA expert James Bamford – the Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings for almost a decade, winner of a number of journalism awards for coverage national security issues, whose articles have appeared in dozens of publications, including cover stories for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and the only author to write any books (he wrote 3) on the NSA – reports, the NSA was also tapping the hijackers’ phone calls inside the U.S.
Specifically, hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi lived in San Diego, California, for 2 years before 9/11. Numerous phone calls between al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in San Diego and a high-level Al Qaeda operations base in Yemen were made in those 2 years.
The NSA had been tapping and eavesdropping on all calls made from that Yemen phone for years. So NSA recorded all of these phone calls.
Indeed, the CIA knew as far back as 1999 that al-Mihdhar was coming to the U.S. Specifically, in 1999, CIA operatives tailing al-Mihdhar in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, obtained a copy of his passport. It contained visas for both Malaysia and the U.S., so they knew it was likely he would go from Kuala Lumpur to America.
Binney responded:
Of course they could have and did have data on hijackers before 9/11. And, Prism did not start until 2007. But they could get the data from the “Upstream” collection. This is the Mark Klein documentation of Narus equipment in the NSA room in San Francisco and probably other places in the lower 48. They did not need Prism to discover that. Prism only suplemented the “Upstream” material starting in 2007 according to the slide.Details here and here.
Another high-level NSA whistleblower – Thomas Drake – testified in a declaration last year that an NSA pilot program he and Binney directed:
Revealed the extent of the connections that the NSA had within its data prior to the [9/11] attacks. The NSA found the array of potential connections among the data that it already possessed to be potentially embarrassing. To avoid that embarrassment, the NSA suppressed the results of the pilot program. I had been told that the NSA had chosen not to pursue [the program] as one of its methods for combatting terrorism. Instead, the NSA had previously chosen to delegate the development of a new program, named “Trailblazer” to a group of outside contractors.Moreover, widespread spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here, here, here, here andhere.
And U.S. and allied intelligence heard the 9/11 hijackers plans from their own mouths:
- According to Le Monde, the intelligence services of America’s close ally France and of other governments had infiltrated the highest levels of Al-Qaeda’s camps, and actually listened to the hijackers’ debates about which airlines’ planes should be hijacked, and allied intelligence services also intercepted phone conversations between Al-Qaeda members regarding the attacks
- According to journalist Christopher Ketcham, America’s close ally Israel tracked the hijackers’ every move prior to the attacks, and sent agents to film the attack on the World Trade Centers
- The National Security Agency and the FBI were each independently listening in on the phone calls between the supposed mastermind of the attacks and the lead hijacker. Indeed, the FBI built its own antenna in Madagascar specifically to listen in on the mastermind’s phone calls
- According to various sources, on the day before 9/11, the mastermind told the lead hijacker “tomorrow is zero hour” and gave final approval for the attacks. The NSA intercepted the message that day and the FBI was likely also monitoring the mastermind’s phone calls
- Shortly before 9/11, the NSA also intercepted multiple phone calls to the United States from Bin Laden’s chief of operations
- The CIA and the NSA had been intercepting phone calls by the hijackers for years (see also this)
- According to the Sunday Herald, two days before 9/11, Bin Laden called his stepmother and told her “In two days, you’re going to hear big news and you’re not going to hear from me for a while.” U.S. officials later told CNN that “in recent years they’ve been able to monitor some of bin Laden’s telephone communications with his [step]mother. Bin Laden at the time was using a satellite telephone, and the signals were intercepted and sometimes recorded.” Indeed, before 9/11, to impress important visitors, NSA analysts would occasionally play audio tapes of bin Laden talking to his stepmother.
- And according to CBS News, at 9:53 a.m on 9/11, just 15 minutes after the hijacked plane had hit the Pentagon, “the National Security Agency, which monitors communications worldwide, intercepted a phone call from one of Osama bin Laden’s operatives in Afghanistan to a phone number in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia”, and secretary of Defense Rumsfeld learned about the intercepted phone call in real-time (if the NSA monitored and transcribed phone calls in real-time on 9/11, that implies that it did so in the months leading up to 9/11 as well)
ProPublica notes:
“There were plenty of opportunities without having to rely on this metadata system for the FBI and intelligence agencies to have located Mihdhar,” says former Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who extensively investigated 9/11 aschairman of the Senate’s intelligence committee.And see this PBS special.
These missed opportunities are described in detail in the joint congressional reportproduced by Graham and his colleagues as well as in the 9/11 Commission report.
***
Mihdhar was on the intelligence community’s radar at least as early as 1999. That’s when the NSA had picked up communications from a “terrorist facility” in the Mideast suggesting that members of an “operational cadre” were planning to travel to Kuala Lumpur in January 2000, according to the commission report. The NSA picked up the first names of the members, including a “Khalid.” The CIA identified him as Khalid al Mihdhar.
The U.S. got photos of those attending the January 2000 meeting in Malaysia, including of Mihdhar, and the CIA also learned that his passport had a visa for travel to the U.S.
***
Using their true names, Mihdhar and Hazmi for a time beginning in May 2000 evenlived with an active FBI informant in San Diego.
***
Let’s turn to the comments of FBI Director Robert Mueller before the House Judiciary Committee last week.
Mueller noted that intelligence agencies lost track of Mihdhar following the January 2000 Kuala Lumpur meeting but at the same time had identified an “Al Qaida safe house in Yemen.”
He continued: “They understood that that Al Qaida safe house had a telephone number but they could not know who was calling into that particular safe house. We came to find out afterwards that the person who had called into that safe house was al Mihdhar, who was in the United States in San Diego. If we had had this [metadata] program in place at the time we would have been able to identify that particular telephone number in San Diego.”
In turn, the number would have led to Mihdhar and potentially disrupted the plot, Mueller argued.
(Media accounts indicate that the “safe house” was actually the home of Mihdhar’s father-in-law, himself a longtime al Qaida figure, and that the NSA had been intercepting calls to the home for several years.)
The congressional 9/11 report sheds some further light on this episode, though in highly redacted form.
The NSA had in early 2000 analyzed communications between a person named “Khaled” and “a suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East,” according to this account. But, crucially, the intelligence community “did not determine the location from which they had been made.”
In other words, the report suggests, the NSA actually picked up the content of the communications between Mihdhar and the “Yemen safe house” but was not able to figure out who was calling or even the phone number he was calling from.
***
Theories about the metadata program aside, it’s not clear why the NSA couldn’t or didn’t track the originating number of calls to Yemen it was already listening to.
Intelligence historian Matthew Aid, who wrote the 2009 NSA history Secret Sentry, says that the agency would have had both the technical ability and legal authority to determine the San Diego number that Mihdhar was calling from.
“Back in 2001 NSA was routinely tracking the identity of both sides of a telephone call,” [9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow] told ProPublica.
***
There’s another wrinkle in the Mihdhar case: In the years after 9/11, media reports also suggested that there were multiple calls that went in the other direction: from the house in Yemen to Mihdhar in San Diego. But the NSA apparently also failed to track where those calls were going.
In 2005, the Los Angeles Times quoted unnamed officials saying the NSA had well-established legal authority before 9/11 to track calls made from the Yemen number to the U.S. In that more targeted scenario, a metadata program vacumming the phone records of all Americans would appear to be unnecessary.
In other words, the NSA had the technical ability and legal authority to intercept calls between Midhar and Yemen before 9/11 … and it actually did so.
In addition, Gawker notes that Feinstein’s own statement is illogical on its face, since the CIA had issued urgent alerts:
Feinstein includes this paragraph right up front:Moreover, Wikipedia notes:
In the summer of 2001, the CIA’s then-director, George Tenet, painted a dire picture for members of the Senate Intelligence Committee when he testified about the terrorist threat posed by al Qaeda. As Mr. Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission, “the system was blinking red” and by late July of that year, it could not “get any worse.”Huh. So… the CIA did issue dire warnings prior to 9/11…. This directly contradicts Feinstein’s point about the necessity of the NSA’s phone spying.
Mihdhar was placed on a CIA watchlist on August 21, 2001, and a note was sent on August 23 to the Department of State and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) suggesting that Mihdhar and Hazmi be added to their watchlists.Similarly, even though the alleged Boston bombers’ phones were tapped – and NBC News reports, “under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, the government has been collecting records on every phone call made in the U.S.” – mass surveillance did not stop the other terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.
***
On August 23, the CIA informed the FBI that Mihdhar had obtained a U.S. visa in Jeddah. The FBI headquarters received a copy of the Visa Express application from the Jeddah embassy on August 24, showing the New YorkMarriott as Mihdhar’s destination.
On August 28, the FBI New York field office requested that a criminal case be opened to determine whether Mihdhar was still in the United States, but the request was refused. The FBI ended up treating Mihdhar as an intelligence case, which meant that the FBI’s criminal investigators could not work on the case, due to the barrier separating intelligence and criminal case operations. An agent in the New York office sent an e-mail to FBI headquarters saying, “Whatever has happened to this, someday someone will die, and the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’” The reply from headquarters was, “we [at headquarters] are all frustrated with this issue … [t]hese are the rules. NSLU does not make them up.”
The FBI contacted Marriott on August 30, requesting that they check guest records, and on September 5, they reported that no Marriott hotels had any record of Mihdhar checking in. The day before the attacks, the New York office requested that the Los Angeles FBI office check all local Sheraton Hotels, as well as Lufthansa and United Airlines bookings, because those were the two airlines Mihdhar had used to enter the country. Neither the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network nor the FBI’s Financial Review Group, which have access to credit card and other private financial records, were notified about Mihdhar prior to September 11.
***
Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Congressman Curt Weldon alleged in 2005 that the Defense Department data mining project Able Danger identified Mihdhar and 3 other 9/11 hijackers as members of an al-Qaeda cell in early 2000.
In reality – despite the government continually grasping at strawsto justify its massive spying program – top security experts say that mass surveillance of Americans doesn’t keep us safe. Indeed, they say that mass spying actually hurts U.S. counter-terror efforts (more here and here).
As one amusing example, the NSA’s databases are getting clogged with spam emails from accounts they’re snooping on.
Veteran FBI agent Colleen Rowley (the one in the middle) – the one who tried to warn her superiors about hijakckers taking flying lessons – pointed out in June:
Think about how Bush administration officials defended themselves from not following up on the incredibly specific intelligence warnings urgently going to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet and National Counterterrorism Director Richard Clark in the months leading up to 9/11. Their common response back then was something along the line of: intelligence is like a fire hose, and you can’t get a sip from a fire hose. There was apparently too much for top officials to even read the key memos addressed to them.
But if intelligence was a fire hose before 9/11, it quickly became Niagara Falls.
And now, with so much data (almost all of it irrelevant) that has been sucked into government databases and computers, one might liken the “intelligence flow” to a tsunami, with analysts asked to find just the right drop of water. Good luck.
In fact, The Washington Post’s well-researched series in 2010 on “Top Secret America” reported that the NSA was collecting and storing around 1.7 billion pieces of information every 24 hours, even back then.
To switch metaphors, it does not make it easier to find a needle in a haystack if you continue to add hay. No one has ever explained why it was left to fellow passengers or alert street vendors, not the “intelligence” agencies, to stop the last four major terrorist attacks or attempted attacks on U.S. soil.
Source: Motherboard
Image via Wikimedia
It's been almost six months since the United Nations urged the world's armies to take a moment and think about what they're doing before creating killer robots. Not an all-out ban like Human Rights Watch or the International Committee for Robot Arms Control are pushing for, mind you—just the suggestion to cool it for a bit and make sure the development of lethal machines isn't going to lead to, you know, the destruction of the human race. Yet a couple reports suggest the Pentagon has no intention of slowing its forward charge toward robot warfare.
Most recently, Computerworld reported that US Army leaders were testing out remote-controlled robots with machine guns. A handful of private companies that are developing weaponized robots modeled their products for the military last week at Fort Benning in Georgia, to judge how they could be used in combat. Lieutenant Col. Willie Smith said at the event that he hopes to unleash the killing machines onto the battlefield within five years—not as weapons their own right, but as trusted members of the squad.
Notably, the weaponized robots modeled last week are only semi-autonomous—a human holding the controller still has to make the decision to shoot. The real, looming threat futurists are concerned with are lethal autonomous robots—the key distinction being that the fully autonomous machines can make the decision to kill on their own, without any human intervention. At this point there's no telling if LARs will ever be used in battle, but according to a report by former intelligence analyst Joshua Foust, published in Defense One this month, it’s something the US is seriously considering.
Engineers and policy makers are working to study and develop drones that are increasingly autonomous, and could eventually launch a missile at a target of its own fruition, according to Foust. While that technology doesn't exist yet, advances in artificial intelligence suggest it's a matter of when, not if. DARPA is currently working on developing smart machines that mimic the human brain. The idea is that the futuristic machines will not only be able to learn and think like a human but think on the fly to make real-time decisions based on what's going on around them.
As the Guardian noted back in May, the Pentagon spends about $6 billion a year to research and develop autonomous machines, but has claimed the autonomous weapons will only be used for "non-lethal" purposes. Drones were intended to be for surveillance and reconnaissance only—not offensive warfare. But the spy-planes are so useful as a weapon of war, it's as if Pentagon can't help itself.
Read More...
Guest Post: North Dakota Farmer Stumbles on Massive Oil Leak
Submitted by Joao Peixe via OilPrice.com,
A farming harvesting his fields in North Dakota has come across a massive oil spill, undetected long enough to become the size of seven football fields.
Local media reports cite farmer Steve Jensen as saying the crude appeared to becoming from a rupture in an underground pipeline operated by Tesoro Corp.
The farmer noted that he had smelled the crude for days but it wasn’t until he began harvesting his wheat fields that he discovered the source of the smell, as his combine got caught up in crude spewing up to six inches above the ground.
The spill, discovered on 29 September and since contained, is one of the largest ever in the history of North Dakota. A total of 20,600 barrels of crude was leaked into the field, spreading over 7.3 acres. To put this into perspective, this leak is four times larger than a leak in Arkansas in late March that prompted the evacuation of 20 residences.
It took state authorities 12 days to report the spill after the farmer alerted them.
According to Tesoro Corp., no water sources were contaminated during the spill, but the fact that it went undetected long enough to spread so far, coupled with the 12-day reporting delay by officials, has raised more questions about leak detection policies.
"There are many questions to be answered on how it occurred and how it was detected and if there was anything that could have been done that could have made a difference," state Governor Jack Dalrymple told reporters.
"Initially, it was felt that the spill was not overly large," Dalrymple said. "When they realized it was a fairly sizable spill, they began to contact more people about it."
The spill gives more ammunition to watchdog groups who have been calling for more transparency and better leak detection processes for pipeline operators.
Earlier leaks in Kalamazoo and Arkansas were massive and caused by complete pipeline ruptures. These are rare incidents that account for less than 10% of leaks. But the small leaks--those that traditional pipeline detection systems don’t catch—account for more than 90% of US pipeline leaks.
According to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Transportation Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), the majority of leaks are smaller but can persist for months or even years, and those that are even reported are generally done so by people who have stumbled upon them by accident.
In this case, the leak was larger than the Arkansas leak, but also only detected by a farmer who stumbled upon it with his harvesting equipment—and now the land will not be usable for planting for years.
According to Adrian Banica, CEO of Synodon--which has developed advanced remote sensing leak detection systems--traditional leak detection systems are only able to detect high level leaks above 1% of the pipeline flow.
Furthermore, as the Department of Transportation has recently pointed out, these systems only detect a leak at best about 40% of the time, irrespective of how big the leak is.
“For catastrophic leaks, most pipelines use these flow meters which operate 24/7. But smaller leaks can only be detected by performing an above-ground survey either by foot patrol, vehicle or aircraft. The predominant technologies used would be sampling gas sensors, thermal cameras, laser detection or our remote sensing system,”
The Way Backward ? Saturday's EBT glitch - was that a beta test for SNAP being shutdown November 1 , 2013 ?
EBT Card Users Threaten Rodney King-Style Riots
Looting hit several Walmarts after system was down for just hours
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
October 15, 2013
Infowars.com
October 15, 2013
EBT card users are threatening to stage Rodney King-style riots in Los Angeles if the electronic food stamp system crashes again, following Saturday’s failure which prompted looting at several Walmart stores.
An EBT card user interviewed in the video above (2 minutes 30) comments, “They better resolve something because if it stays like this there’s gonna be an uproar in the city of L.A.” When the man is asked to clarify, he respond, “A Rodney King baby!”
The man is referring to the 1992 L.A. riots, spurred by the Rodney King beating, which resulted in 53 deaths, 2,000 injuries and over $1 billion dollars in property damages.
Several Walmart stores suffered looting and “mini-riots” following Saturday’s EBT card shutoff, which was caused after a routine check by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure.
Managers were forced to close a Walmart in Philadelphia, Mississippi when people reacted to the failure by staging a “mini-riot.”
Meanwhile, at Walmart stores in Springhill and Mansfield, Louisiana, shoppers attempted to loot hundreds of dollars worth of groceries after the glitch temporarily allowed them to make unlimited purchases on their EBT cards.
“Walmart and local police in Springhill and Mansfield confirmed to CBS affiliate KSLA that officers were called into the stores to help maintain order Saturday as shoppers swept through the aisles at two stores and bought as much as they could carry,” reported CBS News.
A man who entered the Walmart in Mansfield just after the looters fled saw rows of empty shelves that had been stripped bare.
As we highlighted yesterday, if looting began after just hours of the EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer) system being down, imagine what would happen if food stamps were delayed for a period of five days.
That’s what will happen if the US fails to raise its debt ceiling by the end of this week. Social Security checks will also be delayed.
Numerous EBT card users also took to Twitter following Saturday’s failure and said they expected riots to occur.
Hi Fred,
ReplyDeleteA lot of quality updates since this morning. I think the scariest for me is the Fukushima/typhoon, radiation is deadly and invisible.
I've got to admit the possible EBT card shutdown and the grid exercise seem somehow connected. If they really shut down the food stamp cards then it's no doubt that they are up to no good. Maybe it's just to show everybody how "necessary" government is by removing some of programs that would be most missed. They could actually remove 50% of the damned government and nobody would even notice if it was the right 50%.
Weird Sandy Hook news/demolition.
Evening Kev - I don't recall demolition workers at 9-11, Oklahoma City , being forced to sign confidentiality agreements , just saying !
ReplyDeleteAfter the Saturday EBT " glitch " , just found it muy interesting that now we hear the whole SNAP program might be shutdown in about two weeks - really seems like Saturday was " testing " for reactions . PTBs probably disappointed urban riots didn't occur somewhere on Saturday ( never let a hostage taking opportunity go to waste. ) That would have been a good scare tactic !
Fukushima going to get a good bashing and we shall see what if anything breaks there !
Here is irony - due to the " fed put " , public boredom with unfounded hyperbolic scare tactics , trader indifference to DC Kibuki - so far we have not seen what the Pols need for cover ( a big stock market meltdown. ) And as long as there is no meltdown , the Kibuki will continue . Of course , while trying to scare Americans , the fools may terrorize or more likely piss off our creditors - like China ! Imagine if China sold 200 billion in Treasuries in one huge dump just to get DC " focused " ?
I would have to agree that Saturday's glitch looks like a test run.
ReplyDeleteHopefully Fukushima is still standing this morning.
Nothing seems to affect the stock market, I'm guessing there would be a 500 point rally if China dumped their T bills and of course gold would tank back to $400/oz. Yellen would just print enough to buy them all, yields would probably drop too. :)
Morning Kev - it looks like " Let's Make A Deal " time starts around noon today - of course , whether the House will approve whatever might be agreed upon by the Senate remains an open question ( Devil as always is in the details of whatever " Deal " is reached .) Follow the treasury Bill market - best gauge for sentiment that remains as the stock market has been " pomotized " into a unreliable signal .....
ReplyDeleteTepco will say " Everything " is fine - in a week or so , we'll find out whatever the new problems are....