Las Vegas testing presently , coming soon to Chicago , Ashbury Park , Detroit , Auburn hills , Stadiums - wake up folks .....
http://www.infowars.com/company-admits-new-
smart-street-lights-can-analyze-voices-track-
people/
Company Admits New ‘Smart’ Street Lights Can Analyze Voices, Track People
To aid Homeland Security in “protecting its citizens”
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
November 11, 2013
Infowars.com
November 11, 2013
The company behind a new ‘smart’ street lighting system which is being rolled out in major cities like Las Vegas admits that the technology has the capability of analyzing voices and tracking people, features that will aid the Department of Homeland Security in “protecting its citizens.”
We first reported on Intellistreets bragging of its product’s “homeland security” applications back in 2011, with the backlash from privacy advocates causing the company to remove a promotional video from YouTube. The video was later restored (see above), although comments were disabled.
However, Illuminating Concepts, the company behind Intellistreets, seems to be more comfortable in acknowledging the “security” aspects of its devices now that it has secured numerous lucrative government contracts to supply street lighting in several major cities.
A page on the Intellistreets website which highlights “benefits and applications” features a section on security wherein it is admitted that the hi-tech system includes “voice stress analyzers,” amongst several other sophisticated sensors that “assist DHS in protecting its citizens and natural resources.”
The ability to record street conversations is merely one special feature of the Intellistreets lighting system, which is linked back to a central data hub via a ubiquitous wi-fi connection. The ‘smart’ street lights can also act as surveillance cameras, make loudspeaker security announcements (See Something, Say Something), as well as track “RFID equipped staff,” which could be any of us given the increasing amount of clothing and products which are RFID tagged.
The company’s website highlights how the system is now being installed in areas of Las Vegas, Chicago, Detroit, Auburn Hills, Asbury Park, and at stadiums like the Mercedes Benz Superdome in New Orleans.
As we reported on Sunday, the Las Vegas Public Works Department has begun testing the devices although they denied they would be used for surveillance, at least for the time being.
Authorities in New York City also recently announced that they would be replacing the city’s 250,000 street lights with new LEDs by 2017, although it is not known how many of these if any will be provided by Intellistreets.
As we reported earlier, Intellistreets are just one component of a huge network of microphones embedded in everything from games consoles to gunshot detectors that are beginning to blanket our streets and dominate our home life.
A 2012 New York Times report on ShotSpotter audio sensors, which are installed in at least 70 major US cities, acknowledged that they can and have been used to record conversations on the street.
The next level of NSA snooping, which will rely on systems like Intellistreets to record people’s conversations and detect antagonism or political extremism, will make the recent revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden pale in comparison, and represents the potential for a ubiquitous wiretapping system that outstrips George Orwell’s worst nightmare.
and.....
Feds Deploy National Spy System of Microphones Capable of Recording Conversations
Hidden in plain sight: The next level of NSA snooping will detect dissent via ubiquitous audio sensors
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Infowars.com
November 11, 2013
Infowars.com
November 11, 2013
The revelations of Edward Snowden shone fresh light on NSA spying targeting the American people, but what has gone largely unnoticed is the fact that a network of different spy systems which can record real time conversations are already in place throughout many urban areas of the United States, as well as in the technology products we buy and use on a regular basis.
These systems are no secret – they are hiding in plain view – and yet concerns about the monolithic potential for their abuse have been muted.
That lack of discussion represents a massive lost opportunity for the privacy community because whereas polls have shown apathy, indifference, or even support for NSA spying, anecdotal evidence suggests that people would be up in arms if they knew the content of their daily conversations were under surveillance.
The dystopian movie V for Vendetta features a scene in which goons working for the totalitarian government drive down residential streets with spy technology listening to people’s conversations to detect the vehemence of criticism against the state.
Such technology already exists or is rapidly being introduced through a number of different guises in America and numerous other developed countries.
The Washington Post recently published a feature length article on gunshot detectors, known as ShotSpotter, which detailed how in Washington DC there are now, “at least 300 acoustic sensors across 20 square miles of the city,” microphones wrapped in a weather-proof shell that can detect the location of a sound down to a few yards and analyze the audio using a computer program.
While the systems are touted as “gunshot detectors,” as the New York Times reported in May 2012, similar technology is already installed in over 70 cities around the country, and in some cases it is being used to listen to conversations.
“In at least one city, New Bedford, Mass., where sensors recorded a loud street argument that accompanied a fatal shooting in December, the system has raised questions about privacy and the reach of police surveillance, even in the service of reducing gun violence,” states the report.
Frank Camera, the lawyer for Jonathan Flores, a man charged with murder, complained that the technology is “opening up a whole can of worms.”
“If the police are utilizing these conversations, then the issue is, where does it stop?” he said.
This led the ACLU to warn that the technology could represent a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment if misused.
The ACLU’s Jay Stanley asked, “whether microphones can be remotely activated by police who want to listen to nearby conversations,” noting that it was illegal for police “to make audio recordings of conversations in which they are not a participant without a warrant.”
“If the courts start allowing recordings of conversations picked up by these devices to be admitted as evidence, then it will provide an additional incentive to the police to install microphones in our public spaces, over and above what is justified by the level of effectiveness the technology proves to have in pinpointing gun shots,” wrote Stanley.
Eventually, if indeed it is not already happening in some major metropolitan areas, voices will be linked to biometric facial profiles via the Trapwire system, which allows the government to monitor citizens via public and private CCTV networks.
As we have also previously highlighted, numerous major cities in the Unites States are currently being fitted with Intellistreets ‘smart’ street lighting systems that also have the capability of recording conversations and sending them directly to authorities via wi-fi.
As we reported on Sunday, the Las Vegas Public Works Department has begun testing the devices, which act as surveillance cameras, Minority Report-style advertising hubs, and Homeland Security alert systems. As ABC 7 reported in 2011, they are “also capable of recording conversations.”
Televisions, computers and cellphones are already utilizing technology that records conversations in order to bombard users with invasive targeted advertising. Last year, Verizon followed Google’s lead and officially filed a patent for a set-top box that will actively spy on Americans in their own homes by turning TVs into wiretaps.
The patent application says that the technology will be capable of detecting “ambient action” including “cuddling, fighting and talking” in people’s living rooms.
The box will even listen to your conversations, according to the communication giant’s patent.
“If detection facility detects one or more words spoken by a user (e.g., while talking to another user within the same room or on the telephone), advertising facility may utilize the one or more words spoken by the user to search for and/or select an advertisement associated with the one or more words,” the document states.
In an article we published back in 2006, we highlighted the fact that, “Digital cable TV boxes, such as Scientific Atlanta, have had secret in-built microphones inside them since their inception in the late 1990′s.”
This technology is now commonplace, with products like the Xbox utilizing in-built microphones to allow voice control. Microsoft promises that it won’t use the microphones to record your conversations, which is a fairly hollow guarantee given that Microsoft collaborated with the NSA to allow the federal agency to bypass its encryption services in order to spy on people.
App providers on the Android network also now require users to agree to a condition that, “Allows the app to record audio with the microphone,” on cellphones and other ‘smart’ devices. “This permission allows the app to record audio at any time without your confirmation,” states the text of the agreement.
Image: David Petraeus welcomes the ‘smart’ spy grid.
Virtually every new technological device now being manufactured that is linked to the Internet has the capability to record conversations and send them back to a central hub. Is it really any wonder therefore that former CIA director David Petraeus heralded the arrival of the “smart home” as a boon for “clandestine statecraft”?
Whistleblowers such as William Binney have warned that the NSA has virtually every US citizen under surveillance, with the ability to record all of their communications. The agency recently completed construction of a monolithic heavily fortified $2 billion facility deep in the Utah desert to process and analyze all of the information collected.
If the revelations of Edward Snowden taught us one thing then it’s that if the NSA has the capability to use a technology to spy on its primary target – the American people – then it is already doing so.
The state has already had blanket access to phone records since at least 1987 under the Hemisphere program, under which AT&T gave the Drug Enforcement Agency access to call logs.
This network of computer programs, urban wi-fi infrastructure and technological products inside our homes that all have the capability of recording our conversations represents an even more invasive and Orwellian prospect than anything Edward Snowden brought to light, and yet discussion of its threat to fundamental privacy has been virtually non-existent.
Seattle.....
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/you-are-a-rogue-device/Content?oid=18143845
You Are a Rogue Device
A New Apparatus Capable of Spying on You Has Been Installed Throughout Downtown Seattle. Very Few Citizens Know What It Is, and Officials Don’t Want to Talk About It.
PHOTOS BY MALCOLM SMITH
TOOLS
If you're walking around downtown Seattle, look up: You'll see off-white boxes, each one about a foot tall with vertical antennae, attached to utility poles. If you're walking around downtown while looking at a smartphone, you will probably see at least one—and more likely two or three—Wi-Fi networks named after intersections: "4th&Seneca," "4th&Union," "4th&University," and so on. That is how you can see the Seattle Police Department's new wireless mesh network, bought from a California-based company called Aruba Networks, whose clients include the Department of Defense, school districts in Canada, oil-mining interests in China, and telecommunications companies in Saudi Arabia.
The question is: How well can this mesh network see you?
Stranger Personals
How accurately can it geo-locate and track the movements of your phone, laptop, or any other wireless device by its MAC address (its "media access control address"—nothing to do with Macintosh—which is analogous to a device's thumbprint)? Can the network send that information to a database, allowing the SPD to reconstruct who was where at any given time, on any given day, without a warrant? Can the network see you now?
The SPD declined to answer more than a dozen questions from The Stranger, including whether the network is operational, who has access to its data, what it might be used for, and whether the SPD has used it (or intends to use it) to geo-locate people's devices via their MAC addresses or other identifiers.
Seattle Police detective Monty Moss, one of the leaders of the mesh-network project—one part of a $2.7 million effort, paid for by the Department of Homeland Security—wrote in an e-mail that the department "is not comfortable answering policy questions when we do not yet have a policy." But, Detective Moss added, the SPD "is actively collaborating with the mayor's office, city council, law department, and the ACLU on a use policy." The ACLU, at least, begs to differ: "Actively collaborating" is not how they would put it. Jamela Debelak, technology and liberty director of the Seattle office, says the ACLU submitted policy-use suggestions months ago and has been waiting for a response.
Detective Moss also added that the mesh network would not be used for "surveillance purposes... without City Council's approval and the appropriate court authorization." Note that he didn't say the mesh network couldn't be used for the surveillance functions we asked about, only that it wouldn't—at least until certain people in power say it can. That's the equivalent of a "trust us" and a handshake.
His answer is inadequate for other reasons as well. First, the city council passed an ordinance earlier this year stating that any potential surveillance equipment must submit protocols to the city council for public review and approval within 30 days of its acquisition and implementation. This mesh network has been around longer than that, as confirmed by Cascade Networks, Inc., which helped install it. Still, the SPD says it doesn't have a policy for its use yet. Mayor McGinn's office says it expects to see draft protocols sometime in December—nearly nine months late, according to the new ordinance.
Second, and more importantly, this mesh network is part of a whole new arsenal of surveillance technologies that are moving faster than the laws that govern them are being written. As Stephanie K. Pell (former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee) and Christopher Soghoian (senior policy analyst at the ACLU) wrote in a 2012 essay for the Berkeley Technology Law Journal:
The use of location information by law enforcement agencies is common and becoming more so as technological improvements enable collection of more accurate and precise location data. The legal mystery surrounding the proper law enforcement access standard for prospective location data remains unsolved. This mystery, along with conflicting rulings over the appropriate law enforcement access standards for both prospective and historical location data, has created a messy, inconsistent legal landscape where even judges in the same district may require law enforcement to meet different standards to compel location data.
In other words, law enforcement has new tools—powerful tools. We didn't ask for them, but they're here. And nobody knows the rules for how they should be used.
This isn't the first time the SPD has purchased surveillance equipment (or, as they might put it, public-safety equipment that happens to have powerful surveillance capabilities) without telling the rest of the city. There was the drones controversy this past winter, when the public and elected officials discovered that the SPD had bought two unmanned aerial vehicles with the capacity to spy on citizens. There was an uproar, and a few SPD officers embarked on a mea culpa tour of community meetings where they answered questions and endured (sometimes raucous) criticism. In February, Mayor Mike McGinn announced he was grounding the drones, but a new mayor could change his mind. Those SPD drones are sitting somewhere right now on SPD property.
Meanwhile, the SPD was also dealing with the port-camera surveillance scandal. That kicked off in late January, when people in West Seattle began wondering aloud about the 30 cameras that had appeared unannounced on utility poles along the waterfront. The West Seattle neighborhood blog (westseattleblog.com) sent questions to city utility companies, and the utilities in turn pointed at SPD, which eventually admitted that it had purchased and installed 30 surveillance cameras with federal money for "port security." That resulted in an additional uproar and another mea culpa tour, much like they did with the drones, during which officers repeated that they should have done a better job of educating the public about what they were up to with the cameras on Alki. (Strangely, the Port of Seattle and the US Coast Guard didn't seem very involved in this "port security" project—their names only appear in a few cursory places in the budgets and contracts. The SPD is clearly the driving agency behind the project. For example, their early tests of sample Aruba products—beginning with a temporary Aruba mesh network set up in Pioneer Square for Mardi Gras in 2009—didn't have anything to do with the port whatsoever.)
The cameras attracted the controversy, but they were only part of the project. In fact, the 30 pole-mounted cameras on Alki that caused the uproar cost $82,682—just 3 percent of the project's $2.7 million Homeland Security–funded budget. The project's full title was "port security video surveillance system with wireless mesh network." People raised a fuss about the cameras. But what about the mesh network?
Detective Moss and Assistant Chief Paul McDonagh mentioned the downtown mesh network during those surveillance-camera community meetings, saying it would help cops and firefighters talk to each other by providing a wireless network for their exclusive use, with the potential for others to use overlaid networks handled by the same equipment. (Two-way radios already allow police officers to talk to each other, but officers still use wireless networks to access data, such as the information an officer looks for by running your license plate number when you've been pulled over.)
As Brian Magnuson of Cascade Networks, Inc., which helped install the Aruba system, explained the possible use of such a system: "A normal cell-phone network is a beautiful thing right up until the time you really need it—say you've just had an earthquake or a large storm, and then what happens? Everybody picks up their phone and overloads the system." The network is most vulnerable precisely when it's most needed. A mesh network could be a powerful tool for streaming video from surveillance cameras or squad car dash-cams across the network, allowing officers "real-time situational awareness" even when other communication systems have been overloaded, as Detective Moss explained in those community meetings.
But the Aruba mesh network is not just for talking, it's also for tracking.
After reviewing Aruba's technical literature, as well as talking to IT directors and systems administrators around the country who work with Aruba products, it's clear that their networks are adept at seeing all the devices that move through their coverage area and visually mapping the locations of those devices in real time for the system administrators' convenience. In fact, one of Aruba's major selling points is its ability to locate "rogue" or "unassociated" devices—that is, any device that hasn't been authorized by (and maybe hasn't even asked to be part of) the network.
Which is to say, your device. The cell phone in your pocket, for instance.
The user's guide for one of Aruba's recent software products states: "The wireless network has a wealth of information about unassociated and associated devices." That software includes "a location engine that calculates associated and unassociated device location every 30 seconds by default... The last 1,000 historical locations are stored for each MAC address."
For now, Seattle's mesh network is concentrated in the downtown area. But the SPD has indicated in PowerPoint presentations—also acquired by The Stranger—that it hopes to eventually have "citywide deployment" of the system that, again, has potential surveillance capabilities that the SPD declined to answer questions about. That could give a whole new meaning to the phrase "real-time situational awareness."
So how does Aruba's mesh network actually function?
Each of those off-white boxes you see downtown is a wireless access point (AP) with four radios inside it that work to shove giant amounts of data to, through, and around the network, easily handling bandwidth-hog uses such as sending live, high-resolution video to or from moving vehicles. Because this grid of APs forms a latticelike mesh, it works like the internet itself, routing traffic around bottlenecks and "self-healing" by sending traffic around components that fail.
As Brian Magnuson at Cascade Networks explains: "When you have 10 people talking to an AP, no problem. If you have 50, that's a problem." Aruba's mesh solution is innovative—instead of building a few high-powered, herculean APs designed to withstand an immense amount of traffic, Aruba sprinkles a broad area with lots of lower-powered APs and lets them figure out the best way to route all the data by talking to each other.
Aruba's technology is considered cutting-edge because its systems are easy to roll out, administer, and integrate with other systems, and its operating system visualizes what's happening on the network in a simple, user-friendly digital map. The company is one of many firms in the networking business, but, according to the tech-ranking firm Gartner, Aruba ranks second (just behind Cisco) in "completeness of vision" and third in "ability to execute" for its clever ways of getting around technical hurdles.
Take the new San Francisco 49ers football stadium, which, Magnuson says, is just finishing up an Aruba mesh network installation. The stadium has high-intensity cellular service needs—70,000 people can converge there for a single event in one of the most high-tech cities in America, full of high-powered, newfangled devices. "Aruba's solution was ingenious," Magnuson says. It put 640 low-power APs under the stadium's seats to diffuse the data load. "If you're at the stadium and trying to talk to an AP," Magnuson says, "you're probably sitting on it!"
Another one of Aruba's selling points is its ability to detect rogue devices—strangers to the system. Its promotional "case studies" trumpet this capability, including one report about Cabela's hunting and sporting goods chain, which is an Aruba client: "Because Cabela's stores are in central shopping areas, the company captures huge quantities of rogue data—as many as 20,000 events per day, mostly from neighboring businesses." Aruba's network is identifying and distinguishing which devices are allowed on the Cabela's network and which are within the coverage area but are just passing through. The case study also describes how Cabela's Aruba network was able to locate a lost price-scanner gun in a large warehouse by mapping its location, as well as track employees by the devices they were carrying.
It's one thing for a privately owned company to register devices it already owns with a network. It's another for a local police department to scale up that technology to blanket an entire downtown—or an entire city.
Aruba also sells a software product called "Analytics and Location Engine 1.0." According to a document Aruba has created about the product, ALE "calculates the location of associated and unassociated wifi devices... even though a device has not associated to the network, information about it is available. This includes the MAC address, location, and RSSI information." ALE's default setting is anonymous, which "allows for unique user tracking without knowing who the individual user is." But, Aruba adds in the next sentence, "optionally the anonymization can be disabled for richer analytics and user behavior tracking." The network has the ability to see who you are—how deeply it looks is up to whoever's using it. (The Aruba technology, as far as we know, does not automatically associate a given MAC address with the name on the device's account. But figuring out who owns the account—by asking a cell-phone company, for example—would not be difficult for a law-enforcement agency.)
Geo-location seems to be an area of intense interest for Aruba. Last week, theOregonian announced that Aruba had purchased a Portland mapping startup called Meridian, which, according to the article, has developed software that "pinpoints a smartphone's location inside a venue, relying either on GPS technology or with localized wireless networks." The technology, the article says, "helps people find their way within large buildings, such as malls, stadiums, or airports and enables marketing directed at a phone's precise location."
How does that geo-location work? Devices in the network's coverage area are "heard" by more than one radio in those APs (the off-white boxes). Once the network hears a device from multiple APs, it can compare the strength and timing of the signal to locate where the device is. This is classic triangulation, and users of Aruba's AirWave software—as in the Cabela's example—report that their systems are able to locate devices to within a few feet.
In the case of large, outdoor installations where APs are more spread out, the ability to know what devices are passing through is useful—especially, perhaps, to policing agencies, which could log that data for long-term storage. As networking products and their uses continue to evolve, they will only compound the "legal mystery" around how this technology could and should be used that Pell and Soghoian described in their Berkeley Technology Law Journal piece. Aruba's mesh network is state-of-the-art, but something significantly smarter and more sensitive will surely be on the market this time next year. And who knows how much better the software will get.
An official spokesperson for Aruba wrote in an e-mail that the company could not answer The Stranger's questions because they pertained "to a new product announcement" that would not happen until Thanksgiving. "Aruba's technology," the spokesperson added, "is designed for indoor (not outdoor) usage and is for consumer apps where they opt in." This is in direct contradiction to Aruba's own user's manuals, as well as the fact that the Seattle Police Department installed an outdoor Aruba mesh network earlier this year.
One engineer familiar with Aruba products and similar systems—who requested anonymity—confirmed that the mesh network and its software are powerful tools. "But like anything," the engineer said, it "can be used inappropriately... You can easily see how a user might abuse this ability (network admin has a crush on user X, monitors user X's location specifically)." As was widely reported earlier this year, such alleged abuses within the NSA have included a man who spied on nine women over a five-year period, a woman who spied on prospective boyfriends, a man who spied on his girlfriend, a husband who spied on his wife, and even a man who spied on his ex-girlfriend "on his first day of access to the NSA's surveillance system," according to theWashington Post. The practice was so common within the NSA, it got its own classification: "LOVEINT."
Other Aruba clients—such as a university IT director, a university vice president, and systems administrators—around the country confirmed it wouldn't be difficult to use the mesh network to track the movement of devices by their MAC addresses, and that building a historical database of their movements would be relatively trivial from a data-storage perspective.
As Bruce Burton, an information technology manager at the University of Cincinnati (which uses an Aruba network), put it in an e-mail: "This mesh network will have the capability to track devices (MAC addresses) throughout the city."
Not that the SPD would do that—but we don't know. "We definitely feel like the public doesn't have a handle on what the capabilities are," says Debelak of the ACLU. "We're not even sure the police department does." It all depends on what the SPD says when it releases its mesh-network protocols.
"They're long overdue," says Lee Colleton, a systems administrator at Google who is also a member of the Seattle Privacy Coalition, a grassroots group that formed in response to SPD's drone and surveillance-camera controversies. "If we don't deal with this kind of thing now, and establish norms and policies, we'll find ourselves in an unpleasant situation down the road that will be harder to change."
The city is already full of surveillance equipment. The Seattle Department of Transportation, for example, uses license-plate scanners, sensors embedded in the pavement, and other mechanisms to monitor individual vehicles and help estimate traffic volume and wait time. "But as soon as that data is extrapolated," says Adiam Emery of SDOT, "it's gone." They couldn't turn it over to a judge if they tried.
Not that license-plate scanners have always been so reliable. Doug Honig of the ACLU remembers a story he heard from a former staffer a couple of years ago about automatic license-plate readers on police cars in Spokane. Automatic license-plate readers "will read a chain-link fence as XXXXX," Honig says, "which at the time also matched the license plate of a stolen car in Mississippi, resulting in a number of false alerts to pull over the fence."
Seattle's mesh network is only one instance in a trend of Homeland Security funding domestic surveillance equipment. Earlier this month, the New York Times ran a story about a $7 million Homeland Security grant earmarked for "port security"—just like the SPD's mesh-network funding—in Oakland.
"But instead," the Times reports, "the money is going to a police initiative that will collect and analyze reams of surveillance data from around town—from gunshot- detection sensors in the barrios of East Oakland to license plate readers mounted on police cars patrolling the city's upscale hills."
The Oakland "port security" project, which the Times reports was formerly known as the "Domain Awareness Center," will "electronically gather data around the clock from a variety of sensors and databases, analyze that data, and display some of the information on a bank of giant monitors." The Times doesn't detail what kind of "sensors and databases" the federally funded "port security" project will pay for, but perhaps it's something like Seattle's mesh network with its ability to ping, log, and visually map the movement of devices in and out of its coverage area.
Which brings up some corollary issues, ones with implications much larger than the SPD's ability to call up a given time on a given day and see whether you were at work, at home, at someone's else home, at a bar, or at a political demonstration: What does it mean when money from a federal agency like the Department of Homeland Security is being funneled to local police departments like SPD to purchase and use high-powered surveillance gear?
For federal surveillance projects, the NSA and other federal spying organizations have at least some oversight—as flawed as it may be—from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (also known as the FISA court) and the US Congress. But local law enforcement doesn't have that kind of oversight and, in Seattle at least, has been buying and installing DHS-funded surveillance equipment without explaining what it's up to. The city council's surveillance ordinance earlier this year was an attempt to provide local oversight on that kind of policing, but it has proven toothless.
It's reasonable to assume that locally gleaned information will be shared with other organizations, including federal ones. An SPD diagram of the mesh network, for example, shows its information heading to institutions large and small, including the King County Sheriff's Office, the US Coast Guard, and our local fusion center.
Fusion centers, if you're unfamiliar with the term, are information-sharing hubs, defined by the Department of Homeland Security as "focal points" for the "receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing" of surveillance information.
If federally funded, locally built surveillance systems with little to no oversight can dump their information in a fusion center—think of it as a gun show for surveillance, where agencies freely swap information with little restriction or oversight—that could allow federal agencies such as the FBI and the NSA to do an end-run around any limitations set by Congress or the FISA court.
If that's their strategy in Seattle, Oakland, and elsewhere, it's an ingenious one—instead of maintaining a few high-powered, herculean surveillance agencies designed to digest an immense amount of traffic and political scrutiny, the federal government could sprinkle an entire nation with lots of low-powered surveillance nodes and let them figure out the best way to route the data by talking to each other. By diffusing the way the information flows, they can make it flow more efficiently.
It's an innovative solution—much like the Aruba mesh network itself.
The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to requests for comment. 
Grid EX 2.....
http://www.infowars.com/dhs-and-fema-prepare-for-power-grid-drill/
DHS and FEMA Prepare for Power Grid Drill
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
November 11, 2013
Infowars.com
November 11, 2013
The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency will participate in GridEx II, an international electric system security exercise that will be held between November 13-14.
“The scenario will build on lessons learned from GridEx 2011 and include both cybersecurity and physical security components,” explains NERC, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. “GridEx is a biennial international grid security exercise that uses best practices and other contributions from the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.”
The New York Times provided details on the drill back in August.
The newspaper reported “thousands of utility workers, business executives, National Guard officers, F.B.I. antiterrorism experts and officials from government agencies in the United States, Canada and Mexico are preparing for an emergency drill in November that will simulate physical attacks and cyberattacks that could take down large sections of the power grid.”
The exercise will involve 5,800 major power plants and 450,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines.
The Times reports that the federal government and private industry worked together to establish the Electricity Sub-Sector Coordinating Council comprised of high-level executives and federal officials.
GridEx II was “being planned as conferences, studies and even works of fiction are raising near-apocalyptic visions of catastrophes involving the grid,” the Times notes.
In 2012, former CIA boss R. James Woolsey and others began pressuring legislatures in the states to force private sector utility companies to protect electrical infrastructure against the catastrophic effect of an EMP, or electromagnetic pulse. The assumption is that North Korea or rogue elements within government will stage an EMP, take out the power grid, and plunge civilization into the dark ages.
Former Congressman Newt Gingrich wrote a novel published in 2009 about an EMP attack. In another novel, Gingrich spins a fictional account of terrorists taking down the U.S. power grid with the help of Iran.
NERC is responsible for planning the exercise.
“NERC is running a simulated exercise to practice crisis response and information sharing. No real power outages will occur due to this exercise. The scenario does not involve EMP,” NERC responded when asked about a potential blackout.
http://www.infowars.com/food-bank-ceo-people-are-scared-to-death/
Food Bank CEO: “People Are Scared to Death”
Demand for food overwhelms pantries in Wyoming
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
November 11, 2013
Infowars.com
November 11, 2013
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
The CEO of a major food bank in Wyoming warns that “people are scared to death” over the impact of a stimulus withdrawal which has left millions of Americans short of groceries, as demand begins to overwhelm food banks in the state and across the country.
Jay Martin, CEO of Joshua’s Storehouse in Casper, Wyoming told the Star-Tribune that the number of families using the food bank in October was already significantly up from a year ago and that the November 1st food stamp cut caused “an immediate upswing” in demand.
“People are scared to death of the lack of food availability,” Martin said.
Food banks across the state have also seen hikes in demand since the beginning of the month. “And we expect to see an increase for the rest of the year,” said Brittany Ogden, office manager for the Food Bank of Sweetwater County, which has seen 90 new families needing assistance in 2013.
From November 1st, $5 billion was wiped off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as a result of a planned stimulus withdrawal. Almost 50 million Americans who are supported by the program face an average loss of $36 dollars a month, which is a significant amount for those living near the poverty line. Additional cuts are also in the pipeline.
The Northeast Iowa Food Bank has also seen a spike in demand for food, with a 50 per cent increase in October before the food stamp cut even took effect. “The numbers are all up even without the cuts,” NEIFB executive director Barb Prather told the WCF Courier.
“The need is just huge,” said Rev. Debra Lincoln of Jordan River, the church that operates the food bank, “We have new people, new families everyday.”
Meanwhile, Margarette Purvis, president and CEO of the Food Bank for New York City, gave a speech yesterday in which she drew attention to the fact that 40 per cent of veterans in New York City were relying on soup kitchens and pantries, and that these numbers would grow with the cut in food stamps.
Purvis previously warned that millions of Americans going hungry could lead to civil unrest when she told Salon.com, “If you look across the world, riots always begin typically the same way: when people cannot afford to eat food.”
Last week, CEO of the Food Bank of South Jersey Val Traore warned that the $5 billion welfare cut is causing a “nightmare ripple effect” for both businesses and hungry citizens in the region.
As the New York Post highlights today, some of the money that was withdrawn from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program was used to pay for Michelle Obama’s ‘Let’s Move’ campaign.
“Some of the funding [for the lunch program] comes from rolling back temporary increases in food-stamp benefits,” Barack Obama said back in 2010, adding that the cuts would start in the fall of 2013.
“It’s come to this. Some 76 million meals a year will vanish from this city — poof! — partly because the president diverted money from SNAP to the first lady’s signature program, part of her Let’s Move anti-obesity initiative — the bean-sprout-heavy, $4.5 billion Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act,” writes Andrea Peyser.
http://www.infowars.com/atlanta-police-shoot-family-dog-on-false-alarm-call/
Atlanta Police Shoot Family Dog on False Alarm Call
Adan Salazar
Infowars.com
November 11, 2013
Infowars.com
November 11, 2013
An Atlanta couple is still reeling from a tragic accident that took place this weekend involving an Atlanta police officer and their two-year-old dog Jane.
Labrador pit bull mix Jane.
“The cops called because I accidentally dialed 911, but I told them everything was ok,” Rodriguez described to My Fox Atlanta.
When Rodriguez answered her door, one of her two labrador pit bull mixes, Jane, ran out into their fenced yard.
“She was running down the porch with her whole body wagging,” Rodriguez said. “And the Atlanta police officer shot our dog Jane in the head.”
Jane was rushed to an emergency animal hospital where she didn’t survive the surgery to remove the bullet from her face. Rodriguez says the surgery would have been expensive, but she would have gladly paid the price.
2-year-old Jane dead after excitedly rushing door.
The Rodriguez family says they publicized their case to remind police to exercise discretion when it comes to dog interactions.
“The biggest thing is I just would hope that officers of the law would learn how to use mace or a taser gun or shoot a dog in the leg, and not shoot a dog wagging its tail in the head.”
Atlanta PD told Fox they’d have to wait until after Veteran’s Day for a comment.
Pet casualties at the hands of police unfortunately seem to occur with regularity.
In July, we covered a video showing Hawthorne, California police confronting a passerby for filming and then shooting his dog when it jumped out of the man’s car.
And last year, we wrote about the Austin Police Department’s new dog policy after an officer shot an Austin resident’s pet even after being told he would not bite.
However, sometimes pets live through the ordeal.
In September, we reported on Ammo the puppy, who miraculously survived being shot in the head at point blank range by Jones County, Georgia police. According to a Facebook support page, Ammo is recovering well.
One group is raising money to fund a documentary dedicated to raising awareness of the issue. A description of “Puppycide” on the documentary’s Kickstarter page estimates that “Every 98 minutes, a dog is shot by law enforcement.”
http://www.infowars.com/schumer-chicken-slaughtered-raised-in-china-could-pose-major-risk/
Schumer: Chicken Slaughtered, Raised In China Could Pose Major Risk
CBS New York
November 11, 2013
November 11, 2013
USDA plans to green-light poultry raised and slaughtered in China.
As WCBS 880’s Jim Smith reported Sunday, Schumer said first, the U.S. Department of Agriculture only allowed chickens that had been processed in China to be sold in the U.S. Now, he said the USDA plans to green-light poultry raised and slaughtered in China.
This has never happened before, and it is a bad idea, Schumer argued.
“China has a terrible record on health safety, and chickens are one of the things that need the most care and inspections,” he said.
And we now want to import chicken from China - where they have bird flu ? This a set up ?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-17/bird-flu-s-return-in-china-seen-sped-by-new-year-chicken.html
The avian flu strain that killed 45 people in Asia last spring is poised to return as poultry flocks swell before Chinese New Year, amplifying the virus that hides undetected in birds.
A 35-year-old man from the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang is in serious condition after being infected with the new H7N9 flu strain, health authorities said this week. It’s the first confirmed human case in two months, according to the World Health Organization in Geneva.
A health worker sprays disinfectant at a poultry farm on April 11, 2013 in Huaibei, China. Human cases of H7N9 were first reported in China in March and spiked in April before agriculture authorities closed live poultry markets to limit human exposure. Photo: ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images
April 8 (Bloomberg) -- Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the World Health Organization, discusses the outbreak of H7N9 avian influenza in China. He speaks from Geneva with Francine Lacqua and Guy Johnson on Bloomberg Television's "The Pulse." (Source: Bloomberg)
Human cases of H7N9 were first reported in China in March and spiked in April before agriculture authorities temporarily closed live poultry markets to limit human exposure. The WHO counts 136 laboratory-confirmed cases to date. Three patients remain hospitalized and 88 have been discharged, the United Nations health agency said in an Oct. 16 statement.
“If an H7N9 outbreak starts again now it could spread much further in China and infect a large amount of people unless intensive measures are taken to control the outbreak in birds,” said Ben Cowling, an associate professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong’s school of public health, in an interview.
The more people who get infected with H7N9, the greater the chances of the virus mutating into a form that spreads more easily among people, Cowling said.
Even though H7N9 hasn’t mutated to become as contagious as seasonal flu, strains that emerge in China are of special interest to researchers. The 1957-58 Asian Flu and 1968-69 Hong Kong Flu pandemics were first identified in the world’s most populous nation, and an earlier bird flu strain known as H5N1 is thought to have come from the southern province of Guangdong in 1996. Years later, a new seasonal flu was found in neighboring Fujian and triggered explosive epidemics worldwide.
Outside China
H7N9 has turned up outside mainland China. In late April, officials in Taiwan reported a case in a 53-year-old man who had just returned to Taiwan via Shanghai after a business trip to the eastern city of Suzhou.
The virus can circulate widely in chickens, ducks and geese without causing the mass die-offs characteristic of the H5N1 bird flu virus. Its stealth has made it difficult to track and contain a germ that’s typically more active during the colder winter months, scientists said.
New Year Threat
“We are just heading into re-emergence in November and December,” said Malik Peiris, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, who was part of an international team of flu scientists that assisted the Chinese government in April identify how people are catching the new virus. “It will of course peak at Chinese New Year because it’s the time of maximum poultry production.”
Chinese New Year is on Jan. 31 next year.
The latest H7N9 case, a man with the surname Liu, sought medical attention on Oct. 8 and is hospitalized in Shaoxing county, the Zhejiang health bureau said on Oct. 15.
Shanghai began reopening poultry markets on June 20 to cater to residents’ demand for live ducks and chickens, the official Xinhua News Agency reported last month. The Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce lists 102 live-poultry markets on its website. Shanghai’s largest, the Shuidian market in Hongkou district, reopened on Aug. 30 after glass partitions and separate exhaust pipes for areas used to store and slaughter poultry were installed, Xinhua reported on Sept 10.
Call to Cull
Agriculture authorities are counting on the measures to rebuff calls from health officials for mass culling of poultry to eradicate the virus. Doctors studying disease patterns in humans found that infected poultry are the principal source of the infections in people.
When the Ministry of Agriculture tested 68,060 samples collected from poultry markets, farms and slaughterhouses, they found only 46 -- or 0.07 percent -- tested positive for the virus, the official Xinhua news agency reported in April.
When researchers from the University of Hong Kong conducted their own survey based on 1,341 specimens from chickens, ducks and other birds, as well as 1,006 water and fecal samples from bird markets, they found H7 viruses in 60, or 2.6 percent of them, according to a study published in the journal Nature in August.
“There’s competing interests in China between economic development and human health, and there’s continual pressure on these two essentially competing interests at all levels of government,” said Hong Kong University’s Cowling.
Poultry consumers don’t want the markets to close, said Mao Zhenjin, 70, who was buying live chickens at Shanghai’s Yinghua Market on Wednesday to boil with potatoes and taro -- a local specialty and one of his granddaughter’s favorite dishes.
‘Taste the Difference’
“You can’t make this soup with frozen chicken because it’s not fresh,” Mao said as he handed over 53 yuan ($8.70) for a 1.5 kilogram (3-pound) chicken. “It’s like buying fish dead for a long time -- you can taste the difference.”
Six percent of blood specimens from 396 poultry workers in China were found to have antibodies against H7N9, according to a Sept. 18 report in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. That suggests dozens of people in contact with farmed birds have been exposed to the virus without necessarily getting sick. None of the 1,129 people from the general population had H7N9 antibodies.
“The data support the conclusion that influenza A(H7N9), or a closely related virus, is circulating in live poultry markets and that infected poultry is the principal source for human infections,” wrote the authors, who included researchers from Zhejiang University’s First Affiliated Hospital.
Cooler weather will enable viral particles to remain viable for longer in the environment, such as in the air, on surfaces or in water, Cowling said.
Death by Suffocation
In its severest form, the new strain damages the lungs so badly that it causes suffocation even as other vital organs rapidly shut down, doctors in Shanghai reported in April.
While laboratory experiments using ferrets -- the most-common animal model for human flu infections -- showed the virus is capable of spreading from person to person, the WHO said this week that there is no evidence of sustainable human-to-human transmission so far.
Cases reported to the WHO may represent “the tip of the iceberg,” the University of Hong Kong’s Peiris said in an interview.
In 2009, a novel flu virus known as H1N1 that evolved in pigs touched off the first influenza pandemic in 41 years. The H5N1 bird flu strain, which killed at least 380 people over the past decade, hasn’t acquired the ability to spread easily among people.
If H7N9 starts spreading easily from human to human, “then it’s a different ball game,” he said. “From all the evidence we have this could be much more serious than H1N1 was: looking at human lung tissue experimental studies -- seasonal flu grows on it like a weed, H5N1 really struggles, and H7N9 grows like a bomb.”
Morning Fred,
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure Bitcoin is being manipulated, there are some crazy ups and downs but may be normal profit taking but in the face of increased demand.
The Phillipines really got walloped, that is unreal and very sad. Libya, also sad. Not much in the way of good news lately. gridex is getting closer though, much closer.
Hard to say what exactly is going on with BitCoin - whether it is being manipulated at the present time , it certainly is subject to being a manipulation target . We shall see what happens in th fullness of time.....
ReplyDeleteThe aftermath of Super Typhoon Haiyan is incredibly tragic and keep the filipino people in your prayers..... Libya is also tragic but a predictable outcome based on the half - arsed intervention we saw there.
Grid Ex test looms , let's see what happens.....