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Be Alert! - March 19, 2007
Greetings in Christ Jesus,
Ephesians 6:12
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.
Revelation 13:16-17
And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name
Daniel 11:38a
"But instead he will honor a god of fortresses
2 Thessalonians 2:7a
For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work
Matthew 16:2-3
But He replied to them, "When it is evening, you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.' "And in the morning, 'There will be a storm today, for the sky is red and threatening.' Do you know how to discern the appearance of the sky, but cannot discern the signs of the times?
1 Thessalonians 5:4-6
But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that the day would overtake you like a thief; for you are all sons of light and sons of day. We are not of night nor of darkness; so then let us not sleep as others do, but let us be alert and sober.
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1) Navy is blocking WND site, contractor says
WORLDNETDAILY - By Bob Unruh - March 2, 2007
A contractor that runs much of the Internet service functions for the U.S. Marine Corp and the U.S. Navy says it is a Navy operation that appears to be blocking access to WorldNetDaily, a leading news source on the Web.
Barbara Mendoza of EDS marketing strategy and communications said her company runs the Navy Marine Corps Intranet, servicing bases in those two military branches across the nation. But after checking, she says her system is not responsible for the trouble that has prompted a flood of military service member contacts with WND about why they are not able to access the site.
"The WND website is not blocked on the NMCI enterprise ISA policy nor by the NMCI DNS black hole," she said. "It appears the website is blocked by the Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command (NCDOC) government website," she said.
Further calls by WND trying to contact those with access to that operation were unsuccessful. - - -
Mendoza said she uncovered a link that revealed the NCDOC computer was blocking a series of Web addresses that appeared to encompass the WND location, but that was outside of her jurisdiction.
"It looks like it's an NCDOC block list problem," she confirmed. A Web address contact for that location yesterday gave WND a security warning and an advisory against proceeding.
WND readers have told the news site that they noticed filters began blocking Marine and Navy computer access to WND at least 18 months ago.
"The first time I was unable to access WND from NMCI was about 18 months ago," wrote one man, who wasn't identified by WND because of his position. "I was attempting to access using www.WorldNetDaily.com and was denied access. I then tried www.WND.com and was able to use that URL for about four months until it, too, was banned.
"When the WND.com URL was banned, I had good reason to believe that the WorldNetDaily.com had not been banned by accident. There was/is a deliberate attempt to ban WorldNetDaily," he wrote. "As would be expected, I was a little upset." - - - -
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2) Navy admits WND blockade
WORLDNETDAILY - By Bob Unruh - March 6, 2007
The U.S. Navy has confirmed officials made a deliberate decision to block WorldNetDaily's news from computers on Navy and Marine bases nationwide, but in a prepared statement said it had nothing to do with the "content" or "views" of the Web's leading independent news site.
The military investigation was launched a week ago after WND requested an explanation of the blocking, and the announcement came from the base at Quantico, Va., where the Navy Marine Corps Intranet is managed.
From there, Capt. Teresa Ovalle was asked if there had been a decision to block the site. "Yes," she said, even though she didn't have access to those who made the decision, or a time frame for when that happened. And she said it was an issue of security on the WND server.
"WND is hosted by one of the largest and most secure server farms in America – the Planet in Dallas. If the Navy is suggesting there is something wrong with our hosting facility, then it should be able to show the public that all websites using that facility are being treated the same. I don't think the Navy is prepared to do that," said Joseph Farah, founder, editor and CEO of WND. - - -
"While I was optimistic we would be able to resolve this censorship by the Navy amicably and quickly, it appears that is not the case," Farah said. "It appears we will be forced to litigate this blatant First Amendment violation and seek compensatory damages from the taxpayers of the United States. That is very sad indeed. But WND has proved its willingness to fight for freedom of speech in the past and we will uphold that tradition in the future no matter what the cost. I now urge every concerned American to protest this unprecedented and unwarranted muzzling of WND by the Department of Defense and the government of the United States."
WND readers have told the news site that the blocking problem might date back as long as four years.
"When I reported for duty --- in Oct. 2003, I was not able to access WND's site," one reader wrote, saying he'd even asked about the problem but "never received a satisfactory answer." His name was withheld by WND because of his positions on at least two ships and one other base. - - -
"WND.com, its content, policies, views or any other aspect of [the] site has nothing to do with this decision [to block this website]," the officers said in a prepared statement. "WND unfortunately is hosted by a service provider that does not police its customers who elect to send unauthorized network traffic to Government and Military networks."
Ovalle said the Navy would recommend "that the WND.com site maintainers transition to a secure hosting facility that monitors network activity to and from its customers so that malicious activity from selected customers does not affect legitimate sites/customers."
She declined to describe "malicious activity" or specify what traffic raised any concerns, but said "that's the reasons it's blocking – the host provider isn't secure enough."
Mendoza said she uncovered the problem in the Navy computer by reviewing a series of Web addresses that were marked for blocking, and that series encompassed the numerical Web address assigned to WND.
Personnel in the Navy and Marines have been contacting WND over recent weeks and months as their attempts to read the latest U.S. and world news, as well as columnists such as Ann Coulter, Joseph Farah, Chuck Norris, Pat Boone, and Judge Roy Moore, were refused.
WND's own server statistics show the news site has a huge following among members of the military. Statistics gathered over just a few days show that from computers with an address ending in ".mil," indicating a military source, there have been readers coming through almost 1,000 Internet service providers. - - - -
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3) 'Sinister' speech plan to track Americans
Bill would list ordinary citizens as lobbyists, disclose all contacts
WORLDNETDAILY - March 16, 2007
A new plan proposed in Congress would establish that every American is a "citizen-lobbyist" and force executive branch officials to record and publish all contacts with them, virtually eliminating the free exchange of ideas needed for open representative government, say critics.
The "Executive Branch Reform Act," or H.R. 984, filed by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has been endorsed by the Committee of Government Oversight and Reform 20-0 and continues to advance in the U.S. House.
Records show it would impose vast new requirements on executive branch officials to keep track of the names of citizens who contact them, and the subjects of any conversations, so that information could be compiled four times a year and published for all the world to see.
"In Waxman's brave new world, Joe Q. Citizen is no longer viewed as a welcome source of input to the federal government," said Rev. Ted Pike, of Truth Tellers. "Rather, only Waxman and select colleagues, primarily in Congress, the intelligence community, and the military, are allowed to communicate freely with one another.
"The common American is viewed as a potential source of unhealthy opinions (i.e., grassroots lobbying efforts)," he said.
The plan follows by only weeks a different proposal, Section 220 of the Senate's Lobby Reform bill, which was attacking free speech at the other end of the spectrum.
That plan would have required organizations that do grassroots work, encouraging constituents to contact Washington about its latest plans and actions, to do the paperwork. But after its intent was publicized, the very grassroots activism that it sought to crush rose up and triggered its defeat.
It would have required any organizations making grassroots contacts to document phone calls, personal visits, e-mails, magazines, broadcasts, phone banks, appearances, travel, fund-raising for government tabulation, verification and audits.
Officials said it would have virtually eliminated the ability of organizations to publicize Washington actions and encourage citizens to comment.
Now Pike has concluded that the new bill is "just as sinister."
It would "bring the democratic process to a crawl, not just on the grassroots level but at its furthest extreme, among more than 9,000 employees of the executive branch of government."
"Because of such potential 'corruption' of federal officials by heartland America, H.R. 984 will require all members of the executive branch to keep records of every call from concerned citizens," Pike said.
"Such federal employees must even keep records of conversations during work or at a bar after work or even from their spouses in bed – input which might be construed as desiring to influence national policy. These records must include names, date, and detailed information about the content of each conversation."
"The federal government will then take this data and publish it for the world to see. This, Waxman contends, is 'openness in government,'" Pike said. - - - -
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4) US: Homeland Security revives supersnoop
THE WASHINGTON TIMES - By Audrey Hudson - March 8, 2007
Homeland Security officials are testing a supersnoop computer system that sifts through personal information on U.S. citizens to detect possible terrorist attacks, prompting concerns from lawmakers who have called for investigations.
The system uses the same data-mining process that was developed by the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that was banned by Congress in 2003 because of vast privacy violations.
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation of the project called ADVISE -- Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement -- was requested by Rep. David R. Obey, Wisconsin Democrat and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
The investigation focuses on whether the program violates privacy laws, and the findings will be released after completion of the Iraq war supplemental spending bill, possibly as early as this week, a panel aide said.
The ADVISE and TIA data-mining projects rely on personal data to track individual behavior and consumer transactions to develop computer algorithms that create a pattern that some behavioral scientists say can predict terrorist behavior.
Data can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details, medical records, travel and banking information. - - -
"Many Americans are understandably concerned about the idea of secret government programs analyzing their personal information. Congress needs to know more about the operational aspects and privacy implications of data-mining programs before these programs are allowed to go forward," Mr. Feingold said. - - - -
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5) Web censorship spreading globally
FINANCIAL TIMES of LONDON - By Richard Waters in San Francisco - March 14 2007
Internet censorship is spreading rapidly, being practised by about two dozen countries and applied to a far wider range of online information and applications, according to research by a transatlantic group of academics.
The warning comes a week after a Turkish court ordered the blocking of YouTube to silence offensive comments about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, marking the most visible attack yet on a website that has been widely adopted around the world.
A recent six-month investigation into whether 40 countries use censorship shows the practice is spreading, with new countries learning from experienced practitioners such as China and benefiting from technological improvements.
OpenNet Initiative, a project by Harvard Law School and the universities of Toronto, Cambridge and Oxford, repeatedly tried to call up specific websites from 1,000 international news and other sites in the countries concerned, and a selection of local- language sites.
The research found a trend towards censorship or, as John Palfrey, executive director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said, “a big trend in the reverse direction”, with many countries recently starting to adopt forms of online censorship.
Ronald Deibert, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, said 10 countries had become “pervasive blockers”, regularly preventing their citizens seeing a range of online material. These included China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Burma and Uzbekistan.
New censorship techniques include the periodic barring of complete applications, such as China’s block on Wikipedia or Pakistan’s ban on Google’s blogging service, and the use of more advanced technologies such as “keyword filtering”, which is used to track down material by identifying sensitive words.
Methods such as these are being copied as countries new to censorship learn from those with more experience. “There’s a growing awareness of best practice – or rather, worst practice,” Mr Deibert said.
Ken Berman, head of technology for the US state department arm that broadcasts Voice of America, said some countries were learning from China, which has the most experience in internet censorship, with Zimbabwe appearing to use the same technology.
While internet censors are learning to apply new technologies to expand their efforts, activists wanting to circumvent the controls are using the latest internet methods to advantage.
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6) Putin media decree arouses press freedom worries
SABC [SOUTH AFRICAN BROADCASTING CORP] - March 15, 2007
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has decreed the creation of a new super-agency to regulate media and the internet, sparking fears among Russian journalists of a bid to extend tight publishing controls to the relatively free web. Putin signed a decree this week merging two existing agencies into one entity that will license broadcasters, newspapers and websites and oversee their editorial content.
The move, which comes before national elections next year, unites Rosokhrankultura, the organisation supervising media and culture, with Rossvyaznadzor, the federal body controlling telecommunications and information technology. Officials said this would improve efficiency by putting a single entity in charge of media content and technology but some of Russia's top journalists expressed concern. Under Putin's rule, independent publishers have been mostly taken over by Kremlin-friendly businessmen. Domestic media are under heavy pressure not to criticise the government, making journalists suspicious of any new official initiative.
Raf Shakirov, who was dismissed as editor of the Izvestiya daily after critical coverage of the 2004 Beslan school siege, said Putin's decree could extend Soviet-style controls to Russia's online media, which have been relatively free to date.
Media control
"This is an attempt to put everything under control, not only electronic media, but also personal data about people such as bloggers," he said.
Tired of stifling official control over mainstream television and newspapers, Russians have increasingly turned to the internet to find independent sources of information. Russians are the second largest group represented on the big US-based blog www.livejournal.com. Their blogs often feature political debates and advertise protests by opposition leaders. But authorities have already fired a warning shot across the bows of one leading news website, www.gazeta.ru, which got an official warning last year for "extremism" after writing about cartoons satirising the Prophet Mohammad.
Super agency might put the squeeze on media
Roman Bodanin, gazeta.ru's political editor, said the new super-regulator could make it easier for the government to track and pressurise independent media because the same agency would control the granting of licences and the supervision of content. Andrei Vasilyev, editor of Russian daily Kommersant, saw the move as part of a Kremlin drive to consolidate power before parliamentary and presidential elections in the next 12 months. - - - -
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7) UK: Children of 11 to be finger printed
THE SUNDAY TIMES of LONDON - By David Leppard - March 4, 2007
CHILDREN aged 11 to 16 are to have their fingerprints taken and stored on a secret database, internal Whitehall documents reveal.
The leaked Home Office plans show that the mass fingerprinting will start in 2010, with a batch of 295,000 youngsters who apply for passports.
The Home Office expects 545,000 children aged 11 and over to have their prints taken in 2011, with the figure settling at an annual 495,000 from 2014. Their fingerprints will be held on a database also used by the Immigration and Nationality Directorate to store the fingerprints of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers.
The plans are outlined in a series of “restricted” documents circulating among officials in the Identity and Passport Service. They form part of the programme for the introduction of new biometric passports and ID cards.
Opposition politicians and privacy campaigners warn that the plans show ministers are turning Britain into a “surveillance society”.
David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: “This borders on the sinister and it shows the government is trying to end the presumption of innocence. With the fingerprinting of all our children, this government is clearly determined to enforce major changes in the relationship between the citizen and the state in a way never seen before.”
Under the new passport and ID scheme, everyone over 16 who applies for a passport will have their details — including fingerprints and eye or facial scans — added to the National Identity Register from next year.
From October 2009, ID cards will be issued alongside new passports. Initially these will not be mandatory, but Tony Blair has said that if Labour is reelected it will make them compulsory, a process that the documents predict will take just over a decade.
Children under 16 will not be part of the ID card scheme. But the documents show that from 2010 they will still have to be fingerprinted for a new passport. - - - -
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8) UK: Don't want national ID? Surrender your passport
WORLDNETDAILY - March 10, 2007
British citizens who refuse to provide personal details for the planned "voluntary" national identification card have been told they will be denied passports and be unable to leave the UK.
James Hall, CEO of the Identity and Passport Service, the agency charged with running the National Identity Scheme to provide ID cards to all residents of the UK, confirmed many privacy advocates' fears this week when he revealed those who opt out of the program will be unable to obtain or renew travel documents.
Hall made the revelation during a national "webchat" where questions were submitted by the public.
In response to a questioner asking what would happen to those who refused to join the nearly $11 billion program, Hall answered, "There is no need to register and have fingerprints taken - but you will forgo the ability to have a passport."
According to a government website:
The National Identity Scheme is an easy-to-use and extremely secure system of personal identification for adults living in the UK. Its cornerstone is the introduction of national ID cards for all UK residents over the age of 16.
Each ID card will be unique and will combine the cardholder's biometric data with their checked and confirmed identity details, called a "biographical footprint". These identity details and the biometrics will be stored on the National Identity Register. Basic identity information will also be held in a chip on the ID card itself.
Additionally, applicants for the ID cards, which will first be issued in 2009 to anyone seeking a passport, will be required to supply personal details, including second homes and driver's license and insurance numbers.
Phil Booth, of the privacy-advocacy group NO2ID, told the London Daily Mail, "The idea that ID cards scheme is voluntary, and people can opt out, is a joke.
"There are all sorts of reasons why people need to travel, not just for holidays. There is work, visiting relatives. What are these people supposed to do? It stretches the definition of voluntary beyond breaking point. They will go to any length to get personal information for this huge database. Who knows what will happen to it then?" - - - -
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9) U.S. Report to Fault F.B.I. on Subpoenas
NEW YORK TIMES - By David Johnston And Eric Lipton - March 9, 2007
WASHINGTON, March 8 — The Justice Department’s inspector general has prepared a scathing report criticizing how the F.B.I. uses a form of administrative subpoena to obtain thousands of telephone, business and financial records without prior judicial approval.
The report, expected to be issued on Friday, says that the bureau lacks sufficient controls to make sure the subpoenas, which do not require a judge’s prior approval, are properly issued and that it does not follow even some of the rules it does have.
Under the USA Patriot Act, the bureau each year has issued more than 20,000 of the national security letters, as the demands for information are known. The report is said to conclude that the program lacks effective management, monitoring and reporting procedures, officials who have been briefed on its contents said.
Details of the report emerged on Thursday as Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and other officials struggled to tamp down a Congressional uproar over another issue, the ousters of eight United States attorneys. - - -
The use of national security letters since the September 2001 attacks has been a hotly debated domestic intelligence issue. They were once used only in espionage and terrorism cases, and then only against people suspected as agents of a foreign power.
With the passage of the Patriot Act, their use was greatly expanded and was allowed against Americans who were subjects of any investigation. The law also allowed other agencies like the Homeland Security Department to issue the letters.
The letters have proved contentious in part because unlike search warrants, they are issued without prior judicial approval and require only the approval of the agent in charge of a local F.B.I. office. A Supreme Court ruling in 2004 forced revisions of the Patriot Act to permit greater judicial review, without requiring advance authorization. - - - -
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11) Surveillance Cameras Get Smarter
THE WASHINGTON POST - By Stephen Manning - February 25, 2007
COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- The next time you walk by a shop window, take a glance at your reflection. How much do you swing your arms? Is the weight of your bag causing you to hunch over? Do you still have a bit of that 1970s disco strut left?
Look around _ You might not be the only one watching. The never-blinking surveillance cameras, rapidly becoming a part of daily life in public and even private places, may be sizing you up as well. And they may soon get a lot smarter.
Researchers and security companies are developing cameras that not only watch the world but also interpret what they see. Soon, some cameras may be able to find unattended bags at airports, guess your height or analyze the way you walk to see if you are hiding something.
Most of the cameras widely used today are used as forensic tools to identify crooks after-the-fact. (Think grainy video on local TV news of convenience store robberies gone wrong.) But the latest breed, known as "intelligent video," could transform cameras from passive observers to eyes with brains, able to detect suspicious behavior and potentially prevent crime before it occurs. ---
The innovations could mean fewer people would be needed to watch what they record, and make it easier to install more in public places and private homes. ---
At the University of Maryland, engineering professor Rama Chellappa and a team of graduate students have worked on systems that can identify a person's unique gait or analyze the way someone walks to determine if they are a threat.
A camera trained to look for people on a watch list, for example, could combine their unique walk with facial- recognition tools to make an identification. A person carrying a heavy load under a jacket would walk differently than someone unencumbered _ which could help identify a person hiding a weapon. The system could even estimate someone's height. ----
Some of the current and future uses this article claims for the all seeing video eyes:
Monitoring street corners
Watching sensitive government buildings
Catching speeders
Detect gunshots
Catch graffiti sprayers or illegal dumpers
Catch cheating gamblers
Airports and Ports
Securing private homes
Public Buses
Train Stations
Building Lobbies
Schools and Stores
Watching over vast borders to catch people crossing illegally
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12) It’s Not Only About Price at Wal-Mart
NEW YORK TIMES - By Michael Barbaro – March 2, 2007
For 44 years, Wal-Mart’s message was “Low prices, always.”
Then in early 2006, it invited customers to “Look beyond the basics,” and try costlier products like 500- thread count sheets.
Now, after a tumultuous year of experimentation, abrupt reversals and admissions of missteps, Wal- Mart Stores is finding its raison d’être in the middle of these two extremes: “Saving people money so they can live better lives.”
The new, and so far internal, definition of what Wal- Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, stands for will soon become a very public strategy, evident on the shelves of 4,000 stores and in advertisements seen across the country.
In their first interviews since a management shuffle last month, John Fleming, the new chief merchandising officer, and Stephen Quinn, the new chief marketing officer, said that after a year of intense research, the discount giant is seeing its 200 million customers as belonging to three groups.
There are “brand aspirationals” (people with low incomes who are obsessed with names like KitchenAid), “price-sensitive affluents” (wealthier shoppers who love deals), and “value-price shoppers” (who like low prices and cannot afford much more).
The new categories are significant because for the first time, Wal-Mart thinks it finally understands not just how people shop at its stores, but why they shop the way they do. - - - -
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13) American Express Addresses RFID People Tracking Plans
Promises Full Patent Review, Tracking Notice, and Chip-Free Option
CASPIAN - Press Release - March 9, 2007
The top brass at American Express, chagrined at the discovery of its people tracking plans, met with CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) last week to discuss the issue. One outcome of the meeting was a promise by American Express to review its entire patent portfolio and ensure that any people-tracking plans be accompanied by language requiring consumer notice and consent.
The meeting was organized after CASPIAN called attention to one of the company's more troublesome patent applications. That patent application, titled "Method and System for Facilitating a Shopping Experience," describes a Minority Report style blueprint for monitoring consumers through RFID- enabled objects, like the American Express Blue Card.
According to the patent, RFID readers called "consumer trackers" would be placed in store shelving to pick up "consumer identification signals" emitted by RFID-embedded objects carried by shoppers. These would be used to identify people, track their movements, and observe their behavior.
The patent also suggested such people-tracking systems could "be located in a common area of a school, shopping center, bus station or other place of public accommodation." - - - -
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15) Bugging Out on Homeland Security
Wings, antennae and scales may be our best weapons yet against toxins and explosives
POPULAR SCIENCE - By Abby Seiff - March 2007
Annoying as they are, you may want to think twice before you crush a cockroach or swat a fly—you could be killing a future foot soldier in the war on terror. Increasingly, scientists are turning to insects and other creatures for better ways to identify biohazards. “Cockroaches can detect all kinds of things, from anthrax spores to DNA,” says Karen Kester, an entomologist at Virginia Commonwealth University. With $1 million in funding from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), Kester is studying ways to use roaches and houseflies as toxin sentinels inside contaminated buildings or subways. This, of course, spares humans the job, and it may prove more effective than mechanical sensors, which often lack the range and sensitivity of their living counterparts.
Bees and fish are also in demand. A small British biotechnology firm called Inscentinel is employing the finely tuned olfactory system of bees to sniff for explosives. And New York, California and Maryland are exploiting the highly sensitive nervous system of bluegill fish to test for toxins in municipal water supplies. Bill Lawler, co-founder of Intelligent Automation Corporation, the California company that sells the bluegill-monitoring system, says living sensors are “the wave of the future.” So go easy on the Raid.
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16) Israel unveils portable hunter-killer robot
REUTERS - March 8, 2007
JERUSALEM - An Israeli defense firm on Thursday unveiled a portable robot billed as being capable of entering most combat zones alone and engaging enemies with an onboard armory that includes a machine-pistol and grenades.
The VIPeR, roughly the size of a small television, was invented as part of Israel's efforts to develop weaponry that could reduce the risks to its forces from hand-to- hand fighting against Palestinian or Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas.
The manufacturer, Elbit Systems Ltd., said that the VIPeR's small size and dual treads enable it to move "undeterred by stairs, rubble, dark alleys, caves or narrow tunnels".
As well as bomb-sniffing and bomb disposal equipment, the VIPeR can carry an Uzi machine-pistol or plant a grenade. The weapons would be aimed using an onboard video camera. - - - -
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