And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.
Nothing for 7 weeks, and then 4 in the past 4 weeks.
Not sure if I see anything in the numbers right now.
So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):
Inadvertent, My Ass
The fact that Barack Obama is being sent out to tell blatant lies by the state security apparatus like some sort of poodle does not fill me with confidence.
No I’m serious. He is saying that because the system sorked”, because a strongly worded report was issued:
President Barack Obama said in an interview that aired Friday that recent revelations the National Security Agency had collected Americans’ emails prove that oversight for such surveillance programs is working properly.
Obama told CNN’s “New Day” the data collection was “inadvertent” and attributed it to “technical problems,” which were then presented to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
“The court said, ‘This isn’t going to cut it. You’re going to have to improve the safeguards, given these technical problems.’ That’s exactly what happened,” he said. “So the point is, is that all these safeguards, checks, audits, oversight worked.”
He claims that the errors were unintentional. He is lying through his teethe:
Some National Security Agency analysts deliberately ignored restrictions on their authority to spy on Americans multiple times in the past decade, contradicting Obama administration officials’ and lawmakers’ statements that no willful violations occurred.
“Over the past decade, very rare instances of willful violations of NSA’s authorities have been found,” the NSA said in a statement to Bloomberg News. “NSA takes very seriously allegations of misconduct, and cooperates fully with any investigations – responding as appropriate. NSA has zero tolerance for willful violations of the agency’s authorities.”
The incidents, chronicled in a new report by the NSA’s inspector general, provide more evidence that U.S. agencies sometimes have violated legal and administrative restrictions on domestic spying, and may add to the pressure to bolster laws that govern intelligence activities.
The inspector general documented an average of one case per year over 10 years of intentionally inappropriate actions by people with access to the NSA’s vast electronic surveillance systems, according to an official familiar with the findings. The incidents were minor, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified intelligence.
BTW, one a year is a lie from the inspector general is a gross understatement, because we know that for years, NSA agents listened to and recorded for later amusement phone sex between overseas soldiers and their loved ones:
There have been allegations of abuse. Back in 2008 it was widely reported that NSA employees were listening to phone sex calls between American soldiers and their partners. NSA employees would save these calls and share them around for their own personal amusement. This is a textbook example of abuse. This is the kind of invasion of privacy that deeply concerns most Americans.
The most likely reasons we haven’t heard about more abuses is because the NSA is incredibly secretive, basically never audited, and the Obama administration has engaged in such an aggressive war on whistleblowers people are scared to come forward.
I would also note that one of the controls that Obama taunts is the FISA court, and they say that the NSA program was unconstitutional and also that the NSA lied to them:
In a strongly worded opinion, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court expressed consternation at what he saw as a pattern of misleading statements by the government and hinted that the NSA possibly violated a criminal law against spying on Americans.
“For the first time, the government has now advised the court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe,” John D. Bates, then the surveillance court’s chief judge, wrote in his Oct. 3, 2011, opinion.
This really is a profile in cowardice.
Update:
I did not realize that the video clip was auto-playing. I have corrected this. Sorry.
The NASDAQ exchange shut down for 3 hours today:
The United States stock market showed again on Thursday that it remained vulnerable to technological breakdowns even as regulators and market operators work to keep up with trading that is increasingly electronic and driven by speed.
The latest trouble shut down trading on the Nasdaq market and its more than 3,000 stocks — including some of the most popular among investors, like Apple and Google — for more than three hours Thursday afternoon.
The disruption on the nation’s second-largest stock market, after the New York Stock Exchange, reverberated up and down Wall Street, affecting other markets as investors cautiously stepped back. Brokers scrambling to trade elsewhere discovered that they could not complete trades while in the dark about prices on Nasdaq.
“It is everybody — nobody can trade,” Manoj Narang, the chief executive of Tradeworx, said during the afternoon. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Some expressed relief that the problems came in August, typically a slow time for Wall Street.
“We didn’t lose any money on the shutdown, but we also made very little money today,” said the chief executive of one Wall Street firm, who asked not to be named.
Nasdaq officials said the halt was prompted by a problem with the data system that disseminates prices and that its cause had been “identified and addressed.”
I’m thinking that high frequency algorithmic trading is somehow tied into all of this.
The fact that this occurred a day after Goldman Sachs reported a major loss from a programming error for such a program further buttresses my suspicion.
The New York City Council just overrode Bloomberg’s veto of police reforms:
The City Council voted Thursday to greatly increase oversight of the New York Police Department and of its widespread use of stop-and-frisk tactics.
Coming after historic crime declines stretching 20 years and aimed at a police force whose tactics long enjoyed strong support in City Hall and among many New Yorkers, the move on two bills marked a decisive swing of the pendulum toward reining in the practices of officers and the policies of their leaders.
The votes, a week and a half after a federal judge ruled aspects of police stops in the city unconstitutional, amounted to a stinging personal defeat for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. He has considered the policy to be central to one of his main achievements: a city safer than many hardened residents had thought possible.
The two bills, which the mayor had vetoed and will now become law, represented an effort by frustrated elected officials to force changes on the police from the outside — one through an outside inspector general with subpoena power to study and make policy recommendations to the department; and the other by opening state courts up to individual claims of bias-based policing and by expanding the categories of people entitled to sue.
Mr. Bloomberg immediately denounced the new laws as an effort to “outsource management of the N.Y.P.D. to unaccountable officials,” and he vowed to sue to stop the bill on expanding profiling claims. “It is a dangerous piece of legislation,” he said, “and we will ask the courts to step in before innocent people are harmed.”
For the mayor, who argued strenuously and repeatedly in public to head off the passage of the bills, the votes offered a stark reminder of his diminished ability to influence city politics in the waning months of his administration.
The 51-member Council, led by its speaker, Christine C. Quinn, enacted the two measures by voting to override Mr. Bloomberg’s earlier veto of both bills.
The Council voted overwhelmingly to create an independent inspector general for the department, with 39 in favor and 10 opposed. The second bill, which would expand the ability of New Yorkers to sue the police over bias-based profiling, passed with exactly the 34 votes necessary for an override. Ms. Quinn, who is running for mayor, voted against it. (Two members were absent from the vote.)
There are a lot of people who are just plain sick and tired of Michael Bloomberg.
I don’t know what is going on there.
I find it improbable that the Syrians would engage in a massive chemical weapons attack, and while the videos appear to show the use of some sort of nerve agent, but if it was Sarin, the doctors treating the victims should have been exposed as well.
It does seem to be some sort of appear to be the action of a cholinesterase inhibitor, probably an organophosphate, but it was odd.
The problem is that there a profound lack of transparency here.
It could be the Syrian army launching a massive Sarin attack.
It could be the rebels using Sarin that they are rumored to have gotten from Libyan stockpiles.
It could be some other sort of nerve agent, such as certain insecticides, which would explain why the doctors did not get dosed. (The toxicity and the secondary contamination characteristics could be quite different, even if the symptoms are largely identical.)
I do hope that the UN team manages to get in and collect samples.
The NSA still is not sure what information Edward Snowden took from the NSA, despite the firm assurances of NSA Chief Gen. Keith Alexander:
More than two months after documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden first began appearing in the news media, the National Security Agency still doesn’t know the full extent of what he took, according to intelligence community sources, and is “overwhelmed” trying to assess the damage.
Officials, including NSA Director Keith Alexander, have assured the public that the government knows the scope of the damage, but two separate sources briefed on the matter told NBC News that the NSA has been unable to determine how many documents he took and what they are.
Sources said authorities believe the trove of unreleased materials includes details of data collection by U.S. allies, including the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These English-speaking allies, known along with the U.S. as the “Five Eyes,” are critical to U.S. intelligence efforts.
So, not only is the NSA lying with impunity, but they cannot find their ass with both hands.
That makes me feel much better about their spying on me.
This was the sentence rendered by the judge against Bradley Manning.
This is actually a mild sentence, as he is eligable for parole in about 8-1/2 years. (The military has parole, unlike civilian Federal sentences)
While the defense asked for 25 years, this is still a relatively mild sentence, particularly considering the prosecution’s request of 60 years.
Still, the fact that the ringleader of the Abu Ghraib torturers only got 6 years indicates a problem with our priorities. The damage done to both the military, and the country, was far greater.
IMNSHO, Obama will never pardon manning.
The SEC just settled with a hedge fund that misused funds and manipulated markets, and in addition to a fine, and a 5 year ban for the principal, they got an explicit admission of wrongdoing:
Wall Street’s regulator sent a message on Monday that it was now taking a more aggressive stance on securities settlements as it extracted its first admission of wrongdoing under a new policy.
The regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, said that the hedge fund manager Philip A. Falcone had agreed to admit wrongdoing and to be banned from the securities industry for at least five years to settle market manipulation accusations. As part of the settlement, he and his fund, Harbinger Capital Partners, must also pay more than $18 million.
The deal comes a month after the commission had in a rare move overruled its own enforcement staff to reject a settlement struck with Mr. Falcone and Harbinger.
That original agreement had called for a two-year ban from raising new capital and no admission of wrongdoing. It also did not include an injunction against committing fraud in the future — language common to nearly every single securities settlement.
The original settlement terms had irritated the S.E.C.’s new chairwoman, Mary Jo White, people briefed on the matter said, and frustrated many others within the agency who saw that deal as too lax.
The new, tougher terms reflect a wider policy change that Ms. White outlined this year, aiming to shift the burden of admission of guilt onto the defendant, overturning a longstanding policy of allowing defendants to “neither admit nor deny” wrongdoing.
If this is a start of a trend, then this is a big deal.
I hope that this is not just political atmospherics.
When a government detains someone who is very clearly not a terrorist for nine hours without access to an attorney under a terrorism statute, that government has proven every point Greenwald wanted to make. The argument is over right there.
And every “progressive” with a beef against Greenwald who attempts to defend the UK’s actions does nothing more than prove Greenwald’s point. Governments that detain civil libertarian bloggers and journalists as terrorists deserve every heaping of scorn they get, as do those who defend them.
In the Washington Post, Neil Irwin looks at the Federal Reserve Chairman selection process, and discovers that the Obama administration is full of a bunch of sexist assholes:
Why don’t they like Janet Yellen?
It’s no wonder that Anita Dunn told Ron Suskind that the Obama administration, “Actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.”(She later denied it, but Suskind had the tape)
And all this is about making Larry Summers the Fed Chair.
Larry Summers, who is pretty much the epitome of, “Does not work well with others,” is the guy that Barack wants to head a consensus driven organization.
Larry Summers is bad policy, and its bad politics, and that is ignoring Summers’ record of cashing in on Wall Street, which makes him suspect as a regulator.
Look at this video.
Rachel Maddow is pissed off, and she is pissed off at Barack Obama.
Here are the high points, but you should watch the whole 8:02:
Journalism is not terrorism. Journalism can be enraging to people in power; journalism can sometimes even be frightening to people in power, but journalism is not terrorism. Reporting on what governments do, even when those governments prefer to keep those actions secret, is not terrorism. Terrorism is a real and discrete thing in the world. It is not an all-encompassing term you apply to everything the government doesn’t want you to do.
The White House today said it had been given a heads-up in advance that the detention of David Miranda was likely to happen…. The White House went out of their way today to say that it was Britain’s decision to detain Glenn Greenwald’s partner — it was not something the US asked Britain to do; and okay fine, but the White House did know about it in advance and it still happened.
We have that kind of special relationship with Britain where if our government were outraged that this detention was going to happen, we could have objected, right? We could have at least asked our dear friends, the British government, to not do this, maybe in the interests of not intimidating the activities of the free press, if not for any other reason. Did our government make any objections when it got advance notice from Britain that this detention was going to happen? Did our government protest? And if not, why not? I tend to think we did not protest, since it went ahead.
I know the US government is not happy about Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald and their reporting about US surveillance. The president said that the disclosures from their source have led to a disorderly debate about these issues and even though we ought to have a debate about these issues, it ought to be more orderly. Fine. But if the United States wants to convince the world that the Glenn Greenwalds and Laura Poitras’ of the world are correct when they say the US government is going too far — if they want to underline and put flashing red lights on that reporting that says that counter-terrorism is being used to justify all sorts of things that are not justified by the actual threat of terrorism, and that in fact have just greenlit gross government overreach and intrusion and intimidation of legitimate activity including journalism — then putting journalists and their families through marathon interrogations and seizing all their electronics is a really great way to start convincing the world that all that reporting is accurate.
Letting our closest allies do it while we stand silent is the same thing as us doing it. Journalism is not terrorism. Pretending otherwise is outrageous, and ridiculous, and a dangerous affront to who we are as a country and a democracy. It’s an absolute outrage.
My opinion is even stronger. I believe that the British called for permission, and they got it.
That being said, Obama has lost Maddow, at least on this specific instance, and this is significant.
H/t Dallasdoc at Daily Kos.,who dutifully transcribed the above quote.
The kids spent some gift money from Pappa Ron on laptops.
So I’ve spent most of tonight getting their computers up and running.
More for Natalie, who got a laptop with Windows 8, that we are downgrading to Windows 7, because Windows 8 sucks like a thousand hoovers all going at once.
Still gotta wait for the Win 7 disk to arrive, but I have all the Win 7 drivers located and downloaded.
It also mean that all our primary computers will be running the same OS.
Sigh….
While there are a number of problems, a protracted development process, unrealistic (and constantly changing) requirements, “cost as an independent variable”, and the need for jointness, but this article makes the point that when we look at the performance issues of the airframe, they are almost entirely a function of the STOVL requirements foisted on the airframe by the US Marine Corps:
………
But the chorus of praise is wrong. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — a do-it-all strike jet being designed by Lockheed Martin to evade enemy radars, bomb ground targets and shoot down rival fighters — is as troubled as ever. Any recent tidbits of apparent good news can’t alter a fundamental flaw in the plane’s design with roots going back decades.
Owing to heavy design compromises foisted on the plane mostly by the Marine Corps, the F-35 is an inferior combatant, seriously outclassed by even older Russian and Chinese jets that can fly faster and farther and maneuver better. In a fast-moving aerial battle, the JSF “is a dog … overweight and underpowered,” according to Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C.
And future enemy planes, designed strictly with air combat in mind, could prove even deadlier to the compromised JSF.
It doesn’t really matter how smoothly Lockheed and the government’s work on the new warplane proceeds. Even the best-manufactured JSF is a second-rate fighter where it actually matters — in the air, in life-or-death combat against a determined foe. And that could mean a death sentence for American pilots required to fly the vulnerable F-35.
‘Can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run’
The F-35’s inferiority became glaringly obvious five years ago in a computer simulation run by John Stillion and Harold Scott Perdue, two analysts at RAND, a think tank in Santa Monica, California. Founded in 1948, RAND maintains close ties to the Air Force. The air arm provides classified data, and in return RAND games out possible war scenarios for government planners.
In Stillion and Perdue’s August 2008 war simulation, a massive Chinese air and naval force bore down on Beijing’s longtime rival Taiwan amid rising tensions in the western Pacific. A sudden Chinese missile barrage wiped out the tiny, outdated Taiwanese air force, leaving American jet fighters based in Japan and Guam to do battle with Beijing’s own planes and, hopefully, forestall a bloody invasion.
………
To add insult to strategic injury, one of the most modern Chinese prototype warplanes might actually be an illicit near-copy of the F-35 — albeit a more intelligent copy that wisely omits the most compromising aspects of the U.S. plane. It’s possible that in some future war, America’s JSFs could be shot down by faster, deadlier, Chinese-made JSF clones.
The Chinese J-31 appears to be based on the F-35. Via Chinese Internet
The F-35 that could have been
At least twice since 2007 Chinese hackers have stolen data on the F-35 from the developers’ poorly-guarded computer servers, potentially including detailed design specifications. Some of the Internet thieves “appear to be tied to the Chinese government and military,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel claimed.
The September 2012 debut of China’s latest jet fighter prototype, the J-31, seemed to confirm Hagel’s accusation. The new Chinese plane, built by the Shenyang Aircraft Corporation, bears an uncanny external resemblance to the F-35: same twin tail fins, same chiseled nose, same wing shape. “It certainly looks like the Chinese got their hands on some [F-35] airframe data,” said Richard Aboulafia, a vice president at the Teal Group, an arms industry consultancy in Virginia.
But the J-31 lacks many of the features that were included in the F-35 “mainly or entirely because of STOVL,” according to Aviation Week writer and fighter expert Bill Sweetman.
Namely, the J-31 does not have a lift fan or even a space for a lift fan. The omission apparently allowed Chinese engineers to optimize the new plane for speed, acceleration, maneuverability and flying range — and to add good pilot visibility and a second rearward engine — instead of having to build the plane around a pretty much useless vertical-takeoff capability that slows it down, limits it to one motor and blocks the pilot’s view.
………
Jet design like any engineering practice requires disciplined choices. The JSF is the embodiment of ambivalence — a reflection of the government and Lockheed’s inability to say that some things could not or should not be done. “It’s not clear with the F-35 that we had a strong sense of what the top priority was — trying to satisfy the Marines, the Navy or the Air Force,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Dan Ward, an expert in weapons acquisition who has been critical of complex, expensive development efforts.
By contrast, the Chinese J-31 does not appear compromised at all. Surrounded by rivals with powerful air forces — namely India, Russia, Japan and U.S. Pacific Command — and with no grudge-holding Marine Corps to hijack fighter design, it would make sense that China prioritized the air-combat prowess of its new jet over any historical score-settling.
That apparently apolitical approach to (admittedly illicit) warplane design appears to have paid dividends for the Shenyang-made jet. “With no lift fan bay to worry about, the designers have been able to install long weapon bays on the centerline,” Sweetman wrote. The centerline bay helps keep the J-31 skinny and therefore likely fast and maneuverable — in any event, faster and more maneuverable than the F-35, which in a decade’s time could be pretty much the only new U.S. jet the Chinese air force might face in battle.
If Stillion and Perdue’s simulation ever comes true and the U.S. goes to war with China in the air, F-35s dragged down by their lift fans could be knocked out of the sky by Chinese-made F-35 clones that are faster and more maneuverable, because they never had lift fans.
A couple of notes here.
First, much of the baggage of the lift fan occurs even with the non-lift fan variants, the tubby fuselage, the poor aft vision, and an engine that has a thrust to weight ratio of engines from the 1970s.
I would also note that the 20 year long development process did not help.
(The Guardian) Senators Wyden and Udall say that there are more revelations to come.
H/t Jesse’s Café Américain for the video.
I don’t know why I had not done this before, but now that he appears to be flipping out, (see link) it’s a good time to note this.
Google went down yesterday:
You can all relax now. The near-unprecedented outage that seemingly affected all of Google’s services for a brief time on Friday is over.
The event began at approximately 4:37pm Pacific Time and lasted between one and five minutes, according to the Google Apps Dashboard. All of the Google Apps services reported being back online by 4:48pm.
The incident apparently blacked out every service Mountain View has to offer simultaneously, from Google Search to Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, and beyond.
Big deal, right? Everyone has technical difficulties every once in a while. It goes with the territory.
But then, not everyone is Google. According to web analytics firm GoSquared, worldwide internet traffic dipped by a stunning 40 per cent during the brief minutes that the Chocolate Factory’s services were offline. Here’s the graph of what that looked like:
I’m wondering if maybe there was an issue with the latest brand of sniffer software from the NSA.
Still, this is weird.
A number of US detainees have sued the US contractor CACI International for directing torture at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The suit was dismissed, because the alleged abuse occurred in Iraq, and thus was out of the purview of the Federal Courts.
So now, CACI has counter-sued for legal fees:
Weeks after winning dismissal of a case alleging that CACI International employees directed mistreatment of Abu Ghraib detainees, the company has asked its accusers to pay a $15,580 bill for legal expenses. Lawyers for the plaintiffs, all Iraqis who served time at the prison, opposed the request in a federal court filing on Monday.
In July, CACI secured a long-fought victory when a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit against one of the company’s units, deciding that because the alleged abuse happened overseas, the U.S. District Court in Alexandria did not have jurisdiction to hear the case.
This is truly disgusting.
The boy band One Direction released a new song, Best Song Ever, which is blatantly cribbed from The Who’s 1871 asnthem Baba O’Reily. (see tape)
Pete Townshend has been remarkably sanguine about this, despite death threats from One Direction fans:
Legendary rockers The Who have announced they have no plans to ask One Direction to withdraw their new track Best Song Ever after a digital mob of rabid teenage girls bombarded them with death threats.
The English rock band issued the statement yesterday, weeks after the boy band released their hit song. From the day of its release, Best Song Ever had prompted various music columnists to make comparisons with the English band’s 1971 track Baba O’Riley.
The Twitterstorm first began brewing after a music reviewer on MTV.com commented about the track on 17 July: “[It] opens with a riff that sounds very similar to the Who’s Baba O’Riley.
A few days later, on ClickMusic, another reviewer slated the X Factor losers’ song, calling 1D’s songwriting team “creatively barren” and stating that “someone should call Trading Standards”.
The “Directioners” apparently tweeted and retweeted the article before the rumour began that Pete Townshend’s band was actually threatening legal action, although it had not.
………
Guitarist and songwriter Townshend, famed for smashing his guitar on stage, issued the following statement last night:I like One Direction. The chords I used and the chords they used are the same three chords we’ve all been using in basic pop music since Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry made it clear that fancy chords don’t mean great music – not always. I’m still writing songs that sound like Baba O’Riley – or I’m trying to!
It’s a part of my life and a part of pop’s lineage. One Direction are in my business, with a million fans, and I’m happy to think they may have been influenced a little bit by The Who. I’m just relieved they’re all not wearing boiler suits and Doc Martens, or Union Jack jackets.If you have paid any attention to the British press in recent months, you may have got the impression that nasty, nerdy male trolls were solely responsible for onine death threats. Well, it appears that teenage girls are just as bad.
This is a remarkably menschlichkeit response on the part of Townshend.
I am not particularly surprised, he has always been rather philosophical about such things.
So we have two more NSA revelations today.
First, the Washington Post uncovered an internal audit for the NSA which shows that it violated privacy regulations pretty routinely.
Additionally, the FISA court has admitted that it has no ability to verify that its orders are being followed.
It seems that every few days, another shoe drops, and each time, it reveal that both the state security apparatus and the Obama administration have been lying through their teeth.
