George Smith, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, believes the judge’s ruling, although “commensurate with the times we live in,” not only infringes on people’s rights, but also sets a very dangerous precedent, one that extends government intrusion well into a person’s private life …
“There is now a long history of governments using and misusing private digital materials against citizens,” Smith told SecurityNewsDaily. “Because this is a small-time criminal case is not an even half decent reason to attempt to nullify that.”
Presented with the hypothesis that an ecrypted hard drive might be analogous to a wall safe containing incriminating documents, Smith dismissed it.
“You can keep a lot of your life, or at least a very good description of your years of personal communications, hobbies, work, loves, vices, likes, dislikes and activities from start to finish, etc., on your hard disk and removable drives these days,” he said. “You can’t keep your life in a wall safe.”
For clarification, some law-and-order desire for a conviction in what amounts to a trivial criminal case, the defendant is accused of being a small town mortgage scam artist, is no reason to take chip away everyone’s right to privacy as enforced by personal encryption.
In comments from the last post tagged to the Made In China tab Chuck pointed to comprehensive National Science Foundation/National Science Board analyses of trends and statistics in US research and development as compared to the rest of the developed world.
The above plot, just one from many, clearly shows the US national research and development commitment to homeland security and bombing paupers worldwide as a result of the war on terror. It is the only area of research funding not particularly affected by the worldwide economic downturn. Although a leveling is seen in the last two years, the overall level of commitment to finding new applications in bombing and hounding others less fortunate outside national borders remains quite high. (The larger original version, if you don’t know how to use the browser magnifier, is here.)
Non-military research funding from the federal government shows a clear spike associated with Barack Obama’s stimulus package. When the stimulus abated, in comparison to allocations for bombing paupers, spending plunged.
General Electric, the largest US industrial group by market capitalisation, reported a 3 per cent rise in earnings per share from continuing operations in the fourth quarter, thanks to another strong performance at GE Capital, its finance division …
Jeff Immelt, the chief executive, warned of “continued volatility in 2012???, but said the company was preparing for it by investing in new products and technology, expanding in emerging economies and strengthening risk management.
He said GE Capital, which provided 46 per cent of last year’s post-tax earnings from continuing operations, was “safe and secure and rebounding sharply???, and the group overall was “positioned for a strong 2012???.
GE has been widely criticised for its low corporate tax rate, which has benefited from writing off losses at GE Capital, its finance division. The tax rate is rising as those losses are exhausted …
Earlier this week, the President praised his jobs council for their recommendations on how to improve employment in the US.
About the opposite of the populist stance the President has been taking since starting his re-election campaign. Perhaps coincidentally, later in the week the President gave an initial thumbs down on the Keystone Canadian oil sands pipeline project, one that was billed as an allegedly big jobs creator.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, also a member of the jobs council, avoided the meeting at which it handed in its report this week.
Instead, he wrote a dissent, part of which is excerpted here:
Perhaps most profoundly, the [jobs council report] does not ask the critical question: why is our country suffering a manufacturing crisis, complete with massive job loss and a structural trade deficit, when countries with higher overall taxes, higher wages, and more robust health, safety and environmental regulations are enjoying trade surpluses?
The answer lies in the view that we share with so many of our fellow Americans: that our country has become dominated by the interests of the wealthiest 1% at the expense of the remaining 99%. It turns out that a country run in the interests of the wealthiest 1% systematically underinvests in public goods; systematically silences, disempowers, and underinvests in its workers; and in the end is less competitive and creates fewer jobs than a country that focuses on the interests of the 99%.
GE & Jeff, best corporate song and advert, ever. Not like the one where the fake cancer patient wants to thank the token employees who bolted the GE CAT scan machine together.
GE over the land, they made a real good plan
Pay no taxes to the man, no cash money for Uncle Sam.
Fire all that labor now, they’re all just real fat cows
Gonna implement a real good plan, no money to the man
A week or so ago the census released information on the ten poorest counties in the country.
I’m posting them with the way they voted in 2008. They’re very sparsely populated and all in red states.
Order, poorest at bottom:
Allendale County, S.C. — Obama, 75 percent for Obama
Corson County, S.D. — Corson, 60 percent Obama
Holmes County, Miss. — Obama, 82 percent for Obama
Sioux County, N.D. — Obama, 83 percent for Obama
Washington County, Miss. — Obama, 67 percent for Obama
Humphreys County, Miss. — Obama, 70 percent for Obama
Issaquena County, Miss. — Obama, 61 percent for Obama
Shannon County, S.D. — Obama, 89 percent for Obama
Todd County, S.D. — Obama, 78 percent for Obama
Ziebach County, S.D. — Obama, 62 percent for Obama, 242 votes cast overall
The statistics, unsurprisingly, show extreme poverty to be linked with race. And in this country that also now equals class. This is, obviously, not the entire picture. For example, whites make up the majority of those on food stamps. And, over the months, this blog has discussed other linked issues affecting everyone.
In any case, the counties in South Dakota and North Dakota on the list are places where native Americans are the chief demographic. Those in the south, are almost entirely African American. For instance, the counties in Mississippi are all along or clustered near the river.
… American society being what it is, there are racial implications to the way our incomes have been pulling apart. And in any case, King — who was campaigning for higher wages when he was assassinated — would surely have considered soaring inequality an evil to be opposed.
But around 1980 the relative economic position of blacks in America stopped improving. Why? An important part of the answer, surely, is that circa 1980 income disparities in the United States began to widen dramatically, turning us into a society more unequal than at any time since the 1920s
Last week Alan Krueger, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, gave an important speech about income inequality, presenting a relationship he dubbed the “Great Gatsby Curve.??? Highly unequal countries, he showed, have low mobility: the more unequal a society is, the greater the extent to which an individual’s economic status is determined by his or her parents’ status. And as Mr. Krueger pointed out, this relationship suggests that America in the year 2035 will have even less mobility than it has now, that it will be a place in which the economic prospects of children largely reflect the class into which they were born.
If you have been reading Krugman’s blog, over the weekend you saw him post the actual “Great Gatsby Curve.”
You’d want to shoot yourself if you had to write stories like this one, at Career Bilker, every week. In examining trends from the economy that makes zip you must come up with fake-enthusiastic crap about where up-and-comers need to go.
The answer, to everyone’s misfortune, is into services.
And the hardest services are the worst for compensation, so to make a list which dresses this up, there must be a comparison with other jobs based on expressing their annual gains relative to themselves — by percentage.
3. Customer account representative: Manages orders primarily for large and repeat customers. Provides service and support to customers, providing information on products, orders in process and other information.
Annual salary: $25,000
Increase: 7 percent
9. Customer service adviser: Handles and resolves complex customer queries, complaints, special orders or in-store returns via email, telephone and/or in-person contact.
Annual salary: $26,000
Increase: 6 percent
12. Home health aide: Assists in providing simple or uncomplicated patient care in caring for elderly, convalescent or disabled people in a patient’s home.
Annual salary: $25,000
Increase: 5 percent
The piece is odious on so many levels it’s difficult to know where to begin in the castigation of it.
For example, just above the “home health aide’s” gain of 5 percent in earnings is “top information technology officer” with a net annual gain, 6 percent, deemed comparable.
The latter makes over six times the former, at $160,000.
Only a moron could make such a list/comparison. Or an entity that’s part of the rip-off services economy turning out worthless content packaged as career guidance.
The list of jobs — twenty deep — is evidence of a broken economy, one that produces nothing of any substantial worth to most of its members. It’s also intelligence-insulting deceit using trivial statistics.
The highest paid jobs are in insurance, process management, finance or degree’d shoeshining in maintenance of computer networks and software for the 1 percent.
The lowest paid jobs are those that provide much more in terms of basic human needs — home health aides and physical therapists.
During my friend Don’s final days he relied on hospice care. And home health aides and physical therapists are part of that. They did the finest work daily and, in this country, they are not paid nearly enough.
“Justin Thompson is a writer and blogger for CareerBuilder.com and its job blog, The Work Buzz,” reads the tagline. “He researches and writes about job search strategy …” in the rentier capitalist economy*.
* — Marxism joke.
The President’s weekly address and a tacit admission: ” … we’ll be able to rebuild an economy that’s not known for paper profits and financial speculation, but for making products like these, products made in America.”
A good speech but having more American businessmen to the Whitehouse to discuss how to make stuff here rather than in ha ha ha China won’t fix it. The pickings, on display, are too slim: “a padlock, a pair of boots, a candle and a pair of socks … “
The work would take a decade, at least.
And in case you missed it — the Mitt Romney Blues — one from the album you damn well better rush out and buy right now: Vulture Capitalism — the Greatest Hits.
But there’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation …
Consider what happens when a business engages in ruthless cost-cutting. From the point of view of the firm’s owners (though not its workers), the more costs that are cut, the better. Any dollars taken off the cost side of the balance sheet are added to the bottom line.
But the story is very different when a government slashes spending in the face of a depressed economy. Look at Greece, Spain, and Ireland, all of which have adopted harsh austerity policies. In each case, unemployment soared, because cuts in government spending mainly hit domestic producers. And, in each case, the reduction in budget deficits was much less than expected, because tax receipts fell as output and employment collapsed …
America certainly needs better economic policies than it has right now — and while most of the blame for poor policies belongs to Republicans and their scorched-earth opposition to anything constructive, the president has made some important mistakes. But we’re not going to get better policies if the man sitting in the Oval Office next year sees his job as being that of engineering a leveraged buyout of America Inc.
“America is not, in fact, a corporation.” A remarkable sentence to have run in the New York Times since the ideology that it is is held by many more than Mitt Romney. America has, in fact, been run like a predatory corporation for the benefit of those running the world’s other predatory corporations for the last decade, at least.
And the corporate motto, as ably shown in this old video, has been: Go fuck yourself.
Keenly aware of conventional U.S. military dominance in the region, Iran has adopted what strategists describe as an “asymmetric” approach.
Missiles mounted on civilian trucks can be concealed around the coastline, tiny civilian dhows and fishing vessels can be used to lay mines, and midget submarines can be hidden in the shallows to launch more sophisticated “smart mines” and homing torpedoes.
Iran is also believed to have built up fleets of perhaps hundreds of small fast attack craft including tiny suicide speedboats, learning from the example of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels who used such methods in a war with the government.
Sri Lanka, the island country which a long time ago was known as Ceylon — most will instinctively know, doesn’t have a Fifth Fleet.
“Assymetric,” of course, is the sickeningly overused jargon-word used to make something sound intellectual and fancy for stupid people — in this case, the description of the natural state of affairs that exists when a really small or lousy (or small and lousy) military is compared to ours.
It’s assymetric! We spend 100,000 times as much or even more as Iran does on our military, forcing them into assymetry! A comparison chart of the US and Iranian navies appears to be greatly assymetrical! That is, it lacks symmetry!
This is only to say the best minds aren’t our military theorists and national security experts. A number of whom are consulted for the news piece linked above, furnishing stuff you could have come up with for much less. Which also informs us their purpose is not really to provide any great value. It never is, the real function being to add a pseudo-scholarly quality to the assessment of war.
After all, where are we if we do not have our natsec think tank experts and retired military men to tell us such things? Rhetorical, obviously.
“They [Iran] can cause a great deal of mischief… but it depends how much pain they are willing to accept,” one of these personnel, Nikolas Gvosdev, “professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island,” tells the news agency.
The US Naval War College, for those from abroad who don’t, is not quite the same thing as the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, MD.
The former’s website is here. Located in the capitol for old swank money in Rhode Island, Newport, its website announces the school recently awarded someone you don’t know the “Hattendorf Prize.”
The Hattendorf Prize!
“The Hattendorf Prize was established on 7 December 2010 and first awarded in 2011,” informs Wiki.
Anyway, the “Nicholas Gvosdev” also posts at SITREP, the GlobalSecurity.Org blog to which this place syndicates posts.
The Atlantic Community has launched a new series of essays looking at the future of European security, specifically in resourcing and procurement …
Well, you’ve had enough of that to get the idea.
So now you know what you need to about potential war with the Iranian navy and our national security scholars for today. Iran loses 99 percent of its assets right quick in a shooting war over blocking Hormuz.
Some fop at the Atlantic, partnered with the National Journal, entitled a representative piece on the spectacle of Iowa Republicans: 11 things you might not know about Santorum.
No link.
Google the man’s name and you get a headache of varying proportion, thereby defining the reality of “low information voters.”
However, the press exacerbates, creating a fantasy, inventing article after article, all sort of portraying Rick Santorum as something he is not: a decent thinking human being.
This in contrast to what he is: A mild-looking psychopath theocrat with a beamish smile.
The only way to describe this media malpractice is by paraphrasing something I posted as a one-liner at Pine View Farm earlier today.
Media handling of Rick Santorum is like someone looking at the little boy next door who tortures the pet cat once or twice a week and, instead of being moved to strike him down, idly says they think he’d make a good vet when he grows up.
If you met the person at the Atlantic, Molly Ball is the name — some staffer used for SEO whoring, who wrote such a 90 second thing, you’d punch her (and the magazine’s editor) into a double concussion — as a public service — for practicing cynical nihilism and off-the-cuff inhumanity in grasping for web eyeballs.
No one not a dipshit/moron, frankly evil or insane could cast a vote for a person like Rick Santorum. He is an example of the worst old white paranoid and ignorant America can produce. There is nothing in his biography to be proud of other than the tale of a mediocre student aligned with the religious right, educated at big yawningly mediocre schools for the sub average and athletically favored muscle-bound — Penn State and Pitt. Who started his career as a flunky/low rent fixer for the steroidal fakes in second-tier professional wresting.
Rick Santorum is an insult to people his age, like me. His success is a symptom of why this country is experiencing epic fail. In the class room at university, or on any wrestling mat in Pennsylvania in the Eighties, I would have stomped his face and dislocated his shoulder in less than 60 seconds. From science to mathematics to any subject in liberal arts, I buried him, like tens of thousands of Americans who would have never thought to conflate theocracy and corporate monarchy with democracy. So would have readers of this blog.
Rick Santorum doesn’t believe in science. He despises sex unless it’s his crabbed vision of it. He hates the idea of women’s reproductive rights in modern America. He wants war with Iran and believes in various right wing GOP conspiracy theories. He uses his religion to damn everyone not like him. And he’s a toady for the 1 percent in corporate America. This only scratches the surface.
That Rick Santorum gets any votes is a measure of pathology, proof there’s an incurable necrotic tumor in the demographic that, even if elimination doesn’t cure the patient, still must be disintegrated by beams of ionizing radiation. Because it’s the right thing to do, from a scientific standpoint as well as a humanitarian one.
Back when I still had hope, twenty years ago, I once wrote about a very secretive government agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, for a daily newspaper in the heartland. The NRO operated our spy satellites and I’d discovered (I was not the first) that its head had graduated from the same school I had, Lehigh University in Bethlehem.
I’ll get back to this in a minute.
On Christmas Day the AP published a story on declassification of HEXAGON, one of the NRO’s old spy satellite programs. The piece created the impression that it was still a big secret.
However, even by the time I stumbled across it, 1991, it wasn’t, really. HEXAGON, along with the spy satellite agency, was an open secret. And while it may not have been known to average Americans it had been written about for years by a number of DC journalists and authors who delved intelligence matters.
For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.
They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized “cleanroom” where the equipment was stored.
They spoke in code.
Few knew the true identity of “the customer” they met in a smoke-filled, wood-paneled conference room where the phone lines were scrambled. When they traveled, they sometimes used false names.
At one point in the 1970s there were more than 1,000 people in the Danbury area working on The Secret …
“The Secret” was the “Big Bird” spy satellite, its optics made by Perkin-Elmer in Danbury, also called the Hexagon KH-9.
The AP story informs HEXAGON was declassified in September. And for its piece it digs up a bunch of the old pensioners who worked at Perkin-Elmer, delivering its custom-ordered mirrors, lenses and machinery for the government’s spy birds.
However, now it’s just odd and quaint. Two decades has been a very long time.
In passing e-mail today, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy blog, remarked it “seems excessive.”
In the intervening period the country has seen radical change. The old threats are gone. And all of the people involved in the matter are either retired and nearing the end or passed on.
Even Lehigh University, the engineering and science school in Bethlehem that trained the National Reconnaissance Office chief who was the subject of my old news piece is no longer the home of “the Engineers.”
Now, it’s the school of the “Mountain Hawks,” a lame change, made because it currently enrolls more liberal arts majors than those working toward technical degrees.
The Associated Press interviews the spouses and offspring of some of the satellite workers long since departed. And it seems a bit cruel that they all had to wait until just a couple months ago to find it was OK to be told what their loved ones worked on.
“He was a Cold War warrior doing something incredibly important for our nation,” one son says of his father to the news agency.
“To know that this was more than just a company selling widgets … that he was negotiating contracts for our country’s freedom and security,” a departed engineer’s wife adds at the piece’s conclusion.
However, two decades ago it wasn’t really a secret, anymore. If you wanted to know you just had to do a little digging.
In 1991, for the Morning Call newspaper, I tried to interview Martin Faga, then the head of the National Reconnaissance Office, although not identified as such anywhere in the government record. His press officer/secretary successfully fended off the effort.
The Call was also interested in getting some background on the man from his alma mater. None of the engineering people I called at Lehigh were interested in admitting much. Even though I was nice in the newspaper they were clearly annoyed anyone would inquire about such important and allegedly still “secret” things.
Quick: Name the U.S. intelligence organization so ultra-secret the majority of Americans have never heard of it more than three decades after its creation — an organization so critical to national security that it commands a bigger budget than the CIA.
Of course you’re stumped. Top secrets are supposed to be that way.
And, odds are, you’ve never heard of Martin C. Faga, a Bethlehem native and Lehigh University graduate, who supervises the Pentagon’s clandestine National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which runs America’s most covert satellite and aerial spying programs.
Lacking any formally identified office, its letterhead classified, it is one of the last intelligence organizations that the government declines to acknowledge in any way — a status similar to that of the National Security Agency (puckishly referred to as the No Such Agency) in the mid-1970s.
Created as a joint Air Force-CIA effort to run spy satellites for the intelligence community and the military, the NRO was originally envisioned as an unclassified operation. But operating from offices on the fourth floor of the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., it quickly be came the holiest of secrets during the Kennedy administration, when Cold War tensions with its target, the Soviet Union, escalated precipitously.
[When] the Challenger blew up in the mid-1980s, derailing the civilian space program, it took with it the secret agency’s ability to lift 15-ton photo-intelligence birds at a time when close surveillance of the Soviet Union was of highest priority in the Reagan administration.
During his tenure as head of the NRO, Faga has had to grapple with the task of restoring the NRO’s capability to orbit heavy spy payloads independent of the Space Shuttle.
Because of political decisions made when the NRO was led by Hans Michael Mark, under secretary of the Air Force under Jimmy Carter, the clandestine organization had hitched its wagon firmly to NASA. Left without a means to reliably orbit key equipment, the NRO moved to restore its autonomy under Edward Aldridge (NRO chief during the Reagan years) and, later, Faga, by redesigning the retired giant Titan ICBM as its primary workhorse and expanding launch facilities at Vandenberg, Calif., and Cape Canaveral, Fla., so spy satellites could be efficiently launched from either coast.
That effort has been continually plagued with problems. Titans failed catastrophically in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster, destroying themselves and two Keyhole satellites, a HEXAGON in 1985 and a more-advanced model, known as a KENNAN, the following year.
[In 1991], the number of journalists and authors aware of NRO operations in anything more than a general sense can be counted on the fingers of one hand: William Burrows, a New York University journalism professor and author of “Deep Black”; Vince Kiernan, a military space reporter for Space News; Weiner, and Jeffrey Richelson, an investigator who has published a number of carefully researched books on the U.S. intelligence community.
Richelson, Weiner, Kiernan and FAS scientist [John Pike, now director of GlobalSecurity.Org, a national security affairs public information site for which I am a Senior Fellow] all named Faga as head of the NRO during interviews in preparation for this story.
During attempts to interview Faga for this article, his public information officer, Air Force Capt. Marty Hauser, requested a list of questions that might be asked of the assistant secretary.
After the questions were reviewed by Faga’s office, Hauser said that Faga would not be able to address two general queries concerning surveillance of Iraq’s clandestine nuclear efforts and the classification of current and future “technical collection” programs.
However, Hauser said that Faga would be willing to speak about the path that led to his career in intelligence. Later calls to his office elicited no response.
At Lehigh University, the assistant secretary studied electrical engineering and physics. Enrolled in the Air Force’s ROTC program and active in Bethlehem’s Trinity Episcopal Church, he is remembered by professors at the university as reserved, an extremely organized student who “knew his stuff,” according to LU Dean John Karakash.
After graduating from Lehigh in 1964 with a master’s degree in electrical engineering, following a bachelor of science degree in 1963, Faga entered the Air Force as a second lieutenant. He was assigned to the Air Force’s Systems Command, a huge organization which oversees the research and development of military space technologies.
While there, Faga worked on laser and infrared applications in reconnaissance.
(The NRO also operates from within Systems Command as the Office of Space Systems at Los Angeles Air Force Base, Calif.)
From 1968-’69, Faga was employed as a technical representative for Perkin-Elmer Corp., a manufacturer of scientific instrumentation.
Perkin-Elmer’s optical division, a highly classified installation in Danbury, Conn., developed the HEXAGON spy satellite’s 6-foot reflector-equipped Cassegrain-focus telescope in the early ’70s. Hughes, a defense contractor, now owns and runs the division.
Marty Faga, even in retirement, the quiet man. If he has something interesting to say no one will ever know it.
So much time has passed, the secrets — if they are told — are just curious old tales of now-antiquated technical triumphs and past glories in a country that no longer exists.
