FBI And NSA Demands Passwords From Internet Service Providers — Big Brother Is Truly Out-of-Control — Time To Totally Repeal Patriot Act — Photos and Videos
Posted on July 25, 2013. Filed under: American History, Blogroll, Communications, Constitution, Economics, Education, Employment, Federal Government, Federal Government Budget, Fiscal Policy, Foreign Policy, government spending, history, Illegal, Immigration, Law, liberty, Life, Links, Macroeconomics, media, People, Philosophy, Politics, Press, Radio, Rants, Raves, Security, Tax Policy, Taxes, Video, War, Wisdom | Tags: 1984, Big Brother, Bill Binney, Bluffdale, Collection, data centers, Enemy of the State, FBI, Glenn Beck, Internet Service Providers, James Bamford, Justing Amash, Mark Levin, National Security Agency, Nova, NSA, Passwords, Patriot Act, Photos, PRISM, S$, Secret Security Surveillance State, Utah, Utah Data Center |
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Feds tell Web firms to turn over user account passwords
Secret demands mark escalation in Internet surveillance by the federal government through gaining access to user passwords, which are typically stored in encrypted form.
The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users' stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed.
If the government is able to determine a person's password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user. Obtaining it also would aid in deciphering encrypted devices in situations where passwords are reused.
"I've certainly seen them ask for passwords," said one Internet industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We push back."
A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies "really heavily scrutinize" these requests, the person said. "There's a lot of 'over my dead body.'"
Some of the government orders demand not only a user's password but also the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person familiar with the requests. A salt is a random string of letters or numbers used to make it more difficult to reverse the encryption process and determine the original password. Other orders demand the secret question codes often associated with user accounts.
"This is one of those unanswered legal questions: Is there any circumstance under which they could get password information?" –Jennifer Granick, Stanford University
A Microsoft spokesperson would not say whether the company has received such requests from the government. But when asked whether Microsoft would divulge passwords, salts, or algorithms, the spokesperson replied: "No, we don't, and we can't see a circumstance in which we would provide it."
Google also declined to disclose whether it had received requests for those types of data. But a spokesperson said the company has "never" turned over a user's encrypted password, and that it has a legal team that frequently pushes back against requests that are fishing expeditions or are otherwise problematic. "We take the privacy and security of our users very seriously," the spokesperson said.
Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast did not respond to queries about whether they have received requests for users' passwords and how they would respond to them.
Richard Lovejoy, a director of the Opera Software subsidiary that operates FastMail, said he doesn't recall receiving any such requests but that the company still has a relatively small number of users compared with its larger rivals. Because of that, he said, "we don't get a high volume" of U.S. government demands.
The FBI declined to comment.
Some details remain unclear, including when the requests began and whether the government demands are always targeted at individuals or seek entire password database dumps. The Patriot Act has been used to demand entire database dumps of phone call logs, and critics have suggested its use is broader. "The authority of the government is essentially limitless" under that law, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the Senate Intelligence committee, said at a Washington event this week.
Large Internet companies have resisted the government's requests by arguing that "you don't have the right to operate the account as a person," according to a person familiar with the issue. "I don't know what happens when the government goes to smaller providers and demands user passwords," the person said.
An attorney who represents Internet companies said he has not fielded government password requests, but "we've certainly had reset requests — if you have the device in your possession, than a password reset is the easier way."
Cracking the codes Even if the National Security Agency or the FBI successfully obtains an encrypted password, salt, and details about the algorithm used, unearthing a user's original password is hardly guaranteed. The odds of success depend in large part on two factors: the type of algorithm and the complexity of the password.
Algorithms, known as hash functions, that are viewed as suitable for scrambling stored passwords are designed to be difficult to reverse. One popular hash function called MD5, for instance, transforms the phrase "National Security Agency" into this string of seemingly random characters: 84bd1c27b26f7be85b2742817bb8d43b. Computer scientists believe that, if a hash function is well-designed, the original phrase cannot be derived from the output.
But modern computers, especially ones equipped with high-performance video cards, can test passwords scrambled with MD5 and other well-known hash algorithms at the rate of billions a second. One system using 25 Radeon-powered GPUs that was demonstrated at a conference last December tested 348 billion hashes per second, meaning it would crack a 14-character Windows XP password in six minutes.
The best practice among Silicon Valley companies is to adopt far slower hash algorithms — designed to take a large fraction of a second to scramble a password — that have been intentionally crafted to make it more difficult and expensive for the NSA and other attackers to test every possible combination.
One popular algorithm, used by Twitter and LinkedIn, is called bcrypt. A 2009 paper (PDF) by computer scientist Colin Percival estimated that it would cost a mere $4 to crack, in an average of one year, an 8-character bcrypt password composed only of letters. To do it in an average of one day, the hardware cost would jump to approximately $1,500.
But if a password of the same length included numbers, asterisks, punctuation marks, and other special characters, the cost-per-year leaps to $130,000. Increasing the length to any 10 characters, Percival estimated in 2009, brings the estimated cracking cost to a staggering $1.2 billion.
As computers have become more powerful, the cost of cracking bcrypt passwords has decreased. "I'd say as a rough ballpark, the current cost would be around 1/20th of the numbers I have in my paper," said Percival, who founded a company called Tarsnap Backup, which offers "online backups for the truly paranoid." Percival added that a government agency would likely use ASICs — application-specific integrated circuits — for password cracking because it's "the most cost-efficient — at large scale — approach."
While developing Tarsnap, Percival devised an algorithm called scrypt, which he estimates can make the "cost of a hardware brute-force attack" against a hashed password as much as 4,000 times greater than bcrypt.
Bcrypt was introduced (PDF) at a 1999 Usenix conference by Niels Provos, currently a distinguished engineer in Google's infrastructure group, and David Mazières, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University.
With the computers available today, "bcrypt won't pipeline very well in hardware," Mazières said, so it would "still be very expensive to do widespread cracking."
Even if "the NSA is asking for access to hashed bcrypt passwords," Mazières said, "that doesn't necessarily mean they are cracking them." Easier approaches, he said, include an order to extract them from the server or network when the user logs in — which has been done before — or installing a keylogger at the client.
Questions of law Whether the National Security Agency or FBI has the legal authority to demand that an Internet company divulge a hashed password, salt, and algorithm remains murky.
"This is one of those unanswered legal questions: Is there any circumstance under which they could get password information?" said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society. "I don't know."
Granick said she's not aware of any precedent for an Internet company "to provide passwords, encrypted or otherwise, or password algorithms to the government — for the government to crack passwords and use them unsupervised." If the password will be used to log in to the account, she said, that's "prospective surveillance," which would require a wiretap order or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order.
If the government can subsequently determine the password, "there's a concern that the provider is enabling unauthorized access to the user's account if they do that," Granick said. That could, she said, raise legal issues under the Stored Communications Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The Justice Department has argued in court proceedings before that it has broad legal authority to obtain passwords. In 2011, for instance, federal prosecutors sent a grand jury subpoena demanding the password that would unlock files encrypted with the TrueCrypt utility.
The Florida man who received the subpoena claimed the Fifth Amendment, which protects his right to avoid self-incrimination, allowed him to refuse the prosecutors' demand. In February 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit agreed, saying that because prosecutors could bring a criminal prosecution against him based on the contents of the decrypted files, the man "could not be compelled to decrypt the drives."
In January 2012, a federal district judge in Colorado reached the opposite conclusion, ruling that a criminal defendant could be compelled under the All Writs Act to type in the password that would unlock a Toshiba Satellite laptop.
Both of those cases, however, deal with criminal proceedings when the password holder is the target of an investigation — and don't address when a hashed password is stored on the servers of a company that's an innocent third party.
"If you can figure out someone's password, you have the ability to reuse the account," which raises significant privacy concerns, said Seth Schoen, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57595529-38/feds-tell-web-firms-to-turn-over-user-account-passwords/
Six Ways Congress May Reform NSA Snooping
A measure to end one NSA program was just defeated in the House by a surprisingly narrow margin. Here are other proposals on the table.
by Kara Brandeisky
Although the House defeated a measure that would have defunded the bulk phone metadata collection program [1], the narrow 205-217 vote [2] showed that there is significant support in Congress to reform NSA surveillance programs. Here are six other legislative proposals on the table.
1) Raise the standard for what records are considered "relevant"
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has reportedly adopted a broad interpretation of the Patriot Act [3], ruling that all the records in a company's database could be considered "relevant to an authorized investigation." The leaked court order compelling a Verizon subsidiary to turn over all its phone records is just one example of how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has interpreted the statute.
Both Rep. John Conyers [4], D-Mich., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. [5], have introduced bills requiring the government to show "specific and articulable facts" demonstrating how records are relevant. Similarly, legislation introduced by Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., would require any applications to include an explanation [6] of how any records sought are relevant to an authorized investigation.
2) Require NSA analysts to obtain court approval before searching metadata
Once the NSA has phone records in its possession, Sen. Dianne Feinstein has explained that NSA analysts may query the data without individualized court approvals [7], as long as they have a "reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts [8]" that the data is related to a foreign terrorist organization.
A bill from Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., would require the government to petition the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court every time an analyst wants to search telephone metadata [9]. From there, a surveillance court judge would need to find "reasonable, articulable suspicion" that the search is "specifically relevant to an authorized investigation" before approving the application. The legislation would also require the FBI to report monthly to congressional intelligence committees all the searches the analysts made.
3) Declassify Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions
Right now, court opinions authorizing the NSA surveillance programs remain secret. Advocacy groups have brought several Freedom of Information Act suits [10] seeking the release of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court documents, but the Justice Department continues to fight them.
Several bills would compel the secret court to release some opinions. The Ending Secret Law Act — both the House [11] and Senate [12] versions — would require the court to declassify all its opinions that include "significant construction or interpretation" of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under current law, the court already submits these "significant" opinions to congressional intelligence committees, so the bill would just require the court to share those documents with the public.
The bills do include an exception if the attorney general decides that declassifying an opinion would threaten national security. In that case, the court would release an unclassified summary of the opinion, or — if even offering a summary of the opinion would pose a national security threat — at least give a report on the declassification process with an "estimate" of how many opinions must remain classified.
Keep in mind, before Edward Snowden's disclosures, the Justice Department argued that all "significant legal interpretations" needed to remain classified [13] for national security reasons. Since the leaks, the government has said it's now reviewing what, if any, documents can be declassified, but they said they need more time [14].
4) Change the way Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges are appointed
Current law does not give Congress any power to confirm Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges. Instead, the chief justice of the United States appoints the judges, who all already serve on the federal bench. The judges serve seven-year terms. Chief Justice John Roberts appointed all 11 judges [15] currently serving on the court – ten of whom were nominated [16] to federal courts by Republican presidents.
A bill introduced by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., would give the president the power to appoint surveillance court judges [17] and give the Senate power to confirm. The president would also choose the presiding judge of the surveillance court, with Senate approval.
Alternatively, Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., has offered a bill [18] that would let the chief justice appoint three judges and let the House Speaker, the House minority leader, the Senate majority leader, and the Senate minority leader each appoint two judges.
5) Appoint a public advocate to argue before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
Currently, the government officials petitioning the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court do not face an adversarial process. Surveillance targets do not have representation before the court, and they are not notified if a court order is issued for their data.
In 33 years, the surveillance court only rejected 11 of an estimated 33,900 government requests [19], though it the government has also modified 40 of the 1,856 applications in 2012.
Two former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges – Judge James Robertson [20] and Judge James Carr [21] – have argued that Congress should appoint a public advocate to counter the government's arguments. Carr wrote in the New York Times, "During my six years on the court, there were several occasions when I and other judges faced issues none of us had encountered before. […]Having lawyers challenge novel legal assertions in these secret proceedings would result in better judicial outcomes."
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has promised to introduce a bill [22] that would provide a "special advocate" to argue on behalf of privacy rights and give "civil society organizations" a chance to respond before the surveillance court issues significant rulings.
The surveillance court can actually invite advocates to argue before the court, as the Supreme Court did when the Obama administration refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act.
"There's nothing in law that would prevent the FISA court from hiring an advocate as an additional advisor to the court, except the need to obtain security clearances for that advocate, which would have to be granted by the executive branch," explained Steven Bradbury, who served as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice from 2005 to 2009.
Bradbury has argued that the surveillance court may not need a permanent public advocate because its legal advisers [23] already fulfill that role.
6) End phone metadata collection on constitutional grounds
The Justice Department has maintained that mass phone metadata collection is "fully consistent with the Fourth Amendment [24]." That reasoning is based on the 1979 Supreme Court decision Smith v. Maryland [25], where the Court found that the government does not need a warrant based on probable cause to collect phone records. The Court reasoned that whenever you dial a phone number, you voluntarily share that phone number with a telecom, and you can't reasonably expect a right to privacy for information shared with third parties. As a result, the Court ruled that the collection of phone records is not a "search" and does not merit protection under the Fourth Amendment.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has introduced a bill [26] declaring that the Fourth Amendment "shall not be construed to allow any agency of the United States Government to search the phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause" — effectively shutting down the NSA's phone metadata collection program.
http://www.propublica.org/article/six-ways-congress-may-reform-nsa-snooping
The NSA's New Spy Facilities are 7 Times Bigger Than the Pentagon
He works at one of the three-letter intelligence agencies and oversees construction of a $1.2 billion surveillance data center in Utah that is 15 times the size of MetLife Stadium, home to the New York Giants and Jets. Long Island native Harvey Davis, a top National Security Agency official, needs that commanding presence. His role is to supervise infrastructure construction worldwide for NSA, which is part of the Defense Department. That involves tending to logistics, military installations, as well as power, space and cooling for all NSA data centers.
In May, crews broke ground on a $792 million computing center at the agency's headquarters near Baltimore that will complement the Utah site. Together the Utah center and Maryland's 28-acre computer farm span 228 acres—more than seven times the size of the Pentagon.
During an interview with Government Executive in June, amid the uproar over leaked details of NSA's domestic espionage activities, Davis describes the 200-acre Utah facility as very transparent: "Only brick and mortar." A data center just provides energy and chills machines, he says.
About 6,500 contractors, along with more than 150 Army Corps of Engineers and NSA workers, including some with special needs, are assigned to the project. Davis perks up when he talks about the hundreds of individuals with disabilities he has steered into NSA.
But ask him why the facility is so big and what's inside, and he is less forthcoming. "I think we're crossing into content. It's big because it's required to be big," says Davis, a 30-year veteran of the spy agency.
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At NSA, secrecy is not exclusive to intelligence analysts. Every civil servant in the Installations and Logistics Directorate Davis leads has a security clearance. He earned his in the early 1980s, entering the agency with a master's degree in business administration, experience managing inventory for a women's apparel chain, and a yearning for a higher calling than retail.
For security reasons, some of the contractors erecting the data center don't even know its purpose, other than the equipment needed—nothing about snooping. The 2010 public work solicitation called for a 65-megawatt center with a chiller plant, fire suppression systems, electrical generators and an uninterruptible power supply backup capacity.
Davis lets out that inside there will be supercomputers, or what NSA labels "high performance computers." These need "different cooling and different power distributions as opposed to something you bought from Best Buy," he says. The machines, along with whatever other technology is tucked in the facility, are slated to power on by Oct. 1.
Four years ago, the stated purpose of the megaplex near Salt Lake City was to amass foreign intelligence and warnings about hackers. Officials described it as an extension of President George W. Bush's 2008 Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, a largely classified, cross-agency program to protect U.S. computer networks against adversaries. Today, it is evident the data plantation will not be linked to any one program. Instead, the systems inside will warehouse counterterrorism information collected in aggregate, including millions of Americans' phone logs for five years and certain foreigners' online messages, NSA officials confirm. Spies at other locations will decipher what's accumulated to thwart terrorist attacks, cyber assaults, and weapons of mass destruction.
The Utah effort is the largest ongoing Defense construction project in the United States. Still, it is only three-quarters the size of the department's largest in the world—the Medical Center Replacement Project at Rhine Ordnance Barracks, Germany.
Harvey Davis, Director of Logistics, NSA, at the agency's Fort Meade construction site. Photo by Melissa Golden
His Posse
Davis is reluctant to discuss the ratio of contractors to civil service employees in Utah—a week after The Guardian and The Washington Post have reported an NSA contractor leaked Top Secret documents. Prosecutors are pursuing former Booz Allen Hamilton employee Edward Snowden for exposing files about PRISM, the agency's foreign Internet surveillance program, and domestic call data-monitoring while he was administering NSA data systems in Hawaii.
Compared with the 6,500 contract employees, "there is a smaller number of people on my core project management team," Davis says. An agency official in the room adds: "We can talk in total numbers here . . . We can't get into how many are ours, how many are theirs."
A few days after the interview, when asked why NSA's reliance on contractors is hush-hush, agency officials released some figures. Ten people are on Davis' core team. About 150 employees from the Army Corps of Engineers, along with an undisclosed number of employees from the 1,000-member Installations and Logistics Directorate, are involved with the Utah project. NSA considers the total sum of agency personnel staffed to certain construction projects operational details and would not provide that statistic. A small workforce of up to 200 government and contract employees—building engineers, systems administrators and maintenance workers—will stay permanently to keep the facility running.
Davis is more eager to discuss the quality than quantity of his employees. Roughly 10 years ago, while working as an NSA human resources director, he encountered an untapped talent pool that he now draws from regularly. "The disabled population is just so thankful to have a job. They would just come in here and you'd have to actually force them to go home," Davis says. "I have engineers that are hard of hearing, and our workforce all took sign language so they could actually communicate with one another."
Nobody waters down security clearance exercises to facilitate special needs applicants, he adds. "Somebody who was deaf, we would do polygraph in sign language," Davis says. "What we look for is qualifications first. We have someone developing software—working on the computers—that is blind. There is really no limitation that we have found as long we can find the skill match." At least a dozen engineers who have disabilities work in his directorate. Grounds maintenance and snow removal contractors in Utah will be hired through SourceAmerica (formerly NISH), a nonprofit organization that fits agency needs with the skills of job seekers with disabilities.
"He has integrated this into the fabric of the company," says Joyce A. Bender, past chair of the board of the American Association of People with Disabilities, who met Davis when he decided NSA needed more diversity. "What makes this work at any company is a passionate leader, someone in leadership, whether it's in the private sector or a federal agency," says Bender, a Pittsburgh-based consultant who recruits people with disabilities for work in government and industry.
Her firm refers to NSA about 200 individuals annually for positions in finance, linguistics, math and other specialties. Since 2010, about 550 candidates have been hired. "If he says, 'I'm going to do something,' you can count on it that he is going to do it," Bender says of Davis. "He doesn't sugarcoat anything. He's very direct and to the point."
A Leak During Construction
No matter their background or how they came to NSA, civil servants and contract employees alike all serve in silence. "That's really the culture of this agency, and we're really not looking for big accolades," Davis says. "What really makes the people satisfied here is that they did the job and they did it right and they're doing things within the appropriate manner." The mentality is that NSA operates in the dark for the safety of Americans. Some citizens, however, argue it should operate in the sunshine a little more for the safety of democracy.
The secrecy dispute is "a distraction and a weakness that has been presented by this guy," Snowden, who should not have seen such sensitive information in the first place, says one former NSA official. "They've got to do some internal homework about how to keep that data separate," the ex-official says, adding that technical controls are not very difficult to configure. "How the heck did this guy in Hawaii gain access to all that?"
Some human rights advocates are grateful for the exposure of the agency's surveillance methods. "Communications about millions of innocent Americans are being stored for five years in a government database—whether or not there is any reason to search our call records, and I don't think our Constitution allows that," says Alex Abdo, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project.
Even some former Pentagon officials say citizens should know NSA's intentions for the Utah data center. "When you have this much centralization of capabilities, which in government terms can translate into real power—that and resources—it's important that the public be able to look at these things and figure out what they are doing," says a cyber official who recently left Defense and now works as a private contractor. The official is not involved in the project and was not authorized to speak on behalf of the department.
A 2012 article in Wired reported that NSA needs the megaplex partially because the Pentagon wants to expand the military global communications network to manage yottabytes of data. "A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude," the article said. "Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text." NSA officials told Government Executive, however, they do not discuss such operational details.
An Open House
The contents of the NSA computer fortress might be a mystery to the public, but Davis says his project has been open to congressional and industry scrutiny.
"The military construction process by design is a very, very transparent process. We work through the Corps of Engineers," he says. "It's a public discourse. When we give out our request for proposal, that's through FedBizOpps.gov." But on the website, many of the work descriptions for that project are locked behind a firewall. NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines says the documents are restricted because "they must be accounted for and are only for cleared defense contractors."
Davis acknowledges the controversy over his project has taken an emotional toll. "We've been pressured to disclose what's been going in the Utah Data Center for quite a while independent of the current events," he says. "My workforce and the workforce that I work with here [in Utah] take our jobs and our responsibility very, very seriously, and for somebody to say that we're doing something untoward is a pretty big hit on the morale here."
No matter the outcome of the debate, the Utah computers are expected to go online within two months. This is where the MBA comes in. From choosing a site, to convincing Congress to agree with blueprints to surmounting a late-in-the-game budget chop, balancing the books is key. "Utah is a wonderful place with abundant and inexpensive power," Davis says. "Plenty of sources of water for cooling." NSA applied a mathematical model to select the location. The surrounding environment simplified construction. "Utah, because of the facility and the utilities, just came out far and ahead of everywhere else," he says. "Lots of good roads. We could get the steel in. We could get the concrete in. We have lots of sand pits nearby," he says. "We built our own cement slabs in that area. It's pretty well offset from the road for the security that we need for the data center."
The price tag for the project is in line with industry standards, according to NSA. "It's actually relatively cheap and I came in under cost," Davis says, referring to $100 million in savings gained partly by refusing to let contractors adjust the plan. Penny-pinching became mandatory when governmentwide spending cuts, known as sequestration, kicked in this year.
"One of the biggest cost drivers on a project this size is something called an engineering change proposal. They really number in the tens to hundreds in a project of this size," but one could "count on a couple of hands the numbers of change orders that we allowed to happen," he says. "We spent a lot of time honing the requirements tightly up front, making sure we knew what we were building, building it, and not going back and changing it later." That's the New York strong arm talking.
http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2013/07/nsas-big-dig/67406/
James Bamford — The National Security Agency (NSA) — Videos
Enemy Of The State: Life Imitating Art –National Security Agency Targets American People — Videos
Big Brother Barack Targets All The American People As Enemies of The State and Democratic Party — National Security Agency's PRISM Is The Secret Security Surveillance State (S4) Means of Invading Privacy and Limiting Liberty — Outrageous Overreach–Videos
No Such Agency — NSA — National Security Agency — Threat To The Liberty and Privacy of The American People — None Of Their Damn Business — Still Trust The Federal Government? — Videos
National Security Agency (NSA) and Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI) Secret Security Surveillance State (S4) Uses Stellar Wind and PRISM To Create Secret Dossiers On All American Citizen Targets Similar To East Germany Stasi Files–Videos
NSA's PRISM Political Payoff: 40 Million Plus Foreigners Are In USA As Illegal Aliens! — 75% Plus Lean Towards Democratic Party — Pathway To One Party Rule By 2025 If Senate Bill Becomes Law Giving Illegal Aliens Legal Status — 25 Million American Citizens Looking For Full Time Jobs! — Videos
NSA–Now Spying on Americans: Big Brother Government Spying On Americans–Progressives Minding Your Business Without Warrants–Remotely Piloted Aircraft a.k.a.Drones–Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)–Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISA)–Videos
Posted on June 8, 2012. Filed under: American History, Blogroll, College, Communications, Economics, Education, Employment, Foreign Policy, government, government spending, history, Investments, Language, Law, liberty, Life, Links, media, People, Philosophy, Regulations, Resources, Taxes, Unemployment, Unions, War, Wealth, Wisdom | Tags: 1984, Big Brother, Big Government, CIA, CISPA, Cyber Intelligence Sharing Protection Act, data centers, Department of Homeland Security, Drones, FISA, Fourth Amerndment, freedom, Homeland Security, Invasion of Privacy, James Bamford, John Birch Society, Judge Napolitano, Libertarians, liberty, National Security Agency, NSA, Phantom Eye, Progressives, Remotely Piloted Aircraft, Robert Welch, SOPA, Spying On Americans, Total surveillance, Ubiquitous Computing, War and Peace |
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SOPA changes name to CISPA
CISPA going international?
US House passes CISPA
Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act
CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, is picking up sponsors and it looks like the legislation will make it to the House floor for a vote next week. CISPA emerged from the House Intelligence Committee with an overwhelming vote of 17-1.
The bill, authored by Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican, is supported by Google, the technology company in bed with the CIA and responsible for building the Great Firewall of China. Google is not alone in supporting CISPA. Corporate sponsors include Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Verizon, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others, according to the House's Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, long a champion of rights online, has signed on to two coalition letters urging legislators to drop their support for HR 3523. The coalition behind the privacy letter includes dozens of groups, including the ACLU, the American Library Association, the American Policy Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and many others, according to the EFF website.
The letter warns: CISPA creates an exception to all privacy laws to permit companies to share our information with each other and with the government in the name of cybersecurity…. CISPA's 'information sharing' regime allows the transfer of vast amounts of data, including sensitive information like internet use history or the content of emails, to any agency in the government including military and intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency or the Department of Defense Cyber Command. Once in government hands, this information can be used for any non-regulatory purpose so long as one significant purpose is for cybersecurity or to protect national security
Cyber Intelligence Sharing Protection Act – CISPA – More Insights, pls see video responses
CISPA: Another Fascist Takeover of the Internet. EMERGENCY ALERT!
Anonymous – CISPA Worse than SOPA
Ubiquitous Computing: Big Brother's All-Seeing Eye – Part 1
Words to Avoid Online Unless You Want Government Snooping
Revealed: Hundreds of words to avoid using online if you don't want the government spying on you (and they include 'pork', 'cloud' and 'Mexico')
Department of Homeland Security forced to release list following freedom of information request
Agency insists it only looks for evidence of genuine threats to the U.S. and not for signs of general dissent
By Daniel Miller
"…The Department of Homeland Security has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2150281/REVEALED-Hundreds-words-avoid-using-online-dont-want-government-spying-you.html#ixzz1xDZrBiPm
NAPOLITANO: Big Brother's all-seeing eye
Use of military surveillance drones overhead would be un-American
"…For the past few weeks, I have been writing in this column about the government's use of drones and challenging their constitutionality on Fox News Channel, where I work. I once asked on air what Thomas Jefferson would have done if – had they existed at the time – King George III had sent drones to peer inside the bedroom windows of Monticello. I suspect Jefferson and his household would have trained their muskets on the drones and taken them down. I offer this historical anachronism as a hypothetical only, not as someone who is urging the use of violence against the government.
Nevertheless, what Jeffersonians are among us today? When drones take pictures of us on our private property and in our homes and the government uses the photos as it wishes, what will we do about it? Jefferson understood that when the government assaults our privacy and dignity, it is the moral equivalent of violence against us. Folks who hear about this, who either laugh or groan, cannot find it humorous or boring that their every move will be monitored and photographed by the government.
Don't believe me that this is coming? The photos that the drones will take may be retained and used or even distributed to others in the government so long as the "recipient is reasonably perceived to have a specific, lawful governmental function" in requiring them. And for the first time since the Civil War, the federal government will deploy military personnel insidetheUnitedStates and publicly acknowledge that it is deploying them "to collect information about U.S. persons." …"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1UhF0apVhg
George Carlin – The Owners of This Country
Lying Politicians And Words
Is the NSA reading your e-mail?
Spying on the Home Front
Judge Napolitano 'If Cops Don't Have A Warrant Don't Open The Door'
Obama's secret drone war explained by Reuters' David Rohde – Fast
Judge Napolitano – Obama Makes Free Speech A Felony!!! BILL H.R. 347
Windows Nuclear: Green Operating Electricity System:
Posted on January 7, 2009. Filed under: Blogroll, Computers, Economics, Energy, Links, Programming, Quotations, Regulations, Resources, Science, Security, Technology, Video | Tags: data centers, electric car, GM volt, micro-nuclear reactors, Microsoft, nuclear power, Nuclear Power Plants, operating systems, servers, Windows Nuclear |
Nuclear Renaissance – World
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Lkh_y47XaA
Computers need electricity for power and cooling both on the desktop and in server rooms and data centers.
Larger LCD screens and monitors also need significantly more electricity as will "electric" cars if they become affordable over the next decade.
Nuclear power plants currently supply about 20% of the electrical needs of the United States and 16% world wide.
Nuclear power plants are experiencing a revival both in the United States and abroad especially in China, India, France, and Japan.
One key component of such a plant is its computer operating system or the Instrumentation and Control (I&C) Systems.
Given the challenges of such an operating system, one can only speculate as to whether or not the largest software company in the world, Microsoft, will take an active part in developing–Windows Nuclear–the operating system for nuclear power plants from the micro to large nuclear power plants.
Will Microsoft partner with General Electric to build the next generation of nuclear power plants in the USA as well as abroad?
Will there be a Windows Nuclear?
Go Nuclear!
Nuclear power plants, world-wide
"…As of end 2007 the total electricity production since 1951 amounts to 59,450 billion kWh. The cumulative operating experience amounted to 12,750 years by the end of 2007.
Electr. net output
Lithuinia
http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm
Mini Nuclear Power Plant
Nuclear Power Station
Nuclear Power – How it Works
Let's Do It Like France Does It: Nuclear Power
Russia and India strike nuclear deal
EuroNews – Futuris – new generation of nuclear power plant
epr areva
Nuclear Energy will Save the Planet – Join In!
The Future of Nuclear Power in the US
P&T Bullshit Nukes, Hybrids and Lesbians Part 1
Microsoft Data Centers – getting bigger and better
Michael Manos, Microsoft's data center guru talks about Scry
Electricity use and efficiency of servers and data centers: A review of recen…
"…The Internet economy depends on a reliable computing infrastructure. While earlier reports of information technology using vast amounts all electricity were grossly exaggerated, these facilities still use electricity, and this use is growing rapidly. Recent analysis indicates that data center electricity use in both the US and the world roughly doubled from 2000 to 2005, and this growth is expected to slow only modestly over the following five years. Growth of this magnitude represents a substantial business opportunity for technology companies. This talk will describe results of recent work analyzing trends in total data center power use and how this growth varies by major world region. It will also explore the misplaced incentives and institutional failures that impede data center efficiency investments on a large scale. Finally, it will describe business, government, and research efforts to improve efficiency in these mission critical facilities, including recent work by the Energy Star program to promote server and data center efficiency.
Speaker: Jonathan Koomey
Dr. Koomey held the MAP/Ming visiting professorship in energy and environment at Stanford University for the 2003-2004 school year, and is now a Consulting Professor at Stanford. …"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOJoB38OxK0&feature=related
Chevy Volt extended range electric vehicle
GM unveils Volt electric car
Bob Lutz On The Volt I
Cloud Computing Part 3: Peak Energy
"…Cloud computing seductively offers the chance for fast efficient centralised computing for the masses reputedly with an eco-friendly footprint. Rather than being environmentally sound, these huge data centre behemoths ─ housing server farms with literally tens of thousands of high performance servers ─ consume vast amounts of energy. An unforeseen consequence of centralising cloud computing is it's continuously growing electrical load which cannot easily be shed and could even become a tipping point with a peak load that takes the electrical grid past the point of catastrophic failure. …"
Massive Electrical Load
"…It is no coincidence that data centres are located near large power sources. The power they consume is staggering. In a recently announced data centre based in California, some 40,000 servers are housed; each draws perhaps 1 amp so that total power used is at least 10 megawatts. Arguably these servers that bring cloud computing to life could be considered more efficient working far harder than those under utilised servers and personal computers based at home or offices. However large the server's power consumption is, it still represents just a fraction of the total utility bill since the data centre must operate a thermal control system to dump the waste heat generated by the servers as a physical by-product of creating and delivering a virtual world to our desktops. …"
http://sandersresearch.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1380&Itemid=98
"…Nuclear power is any nuclear technology designed to extract usable energy from atomic nuclei via controlled nuclear reactions. The most common method today is through nuclear fission, though other methods include nuclear fusion and radioactive decay. All utility-scale reactors[1] heat water to produce steam, which is then converted into mechanical work for the purpose of generating electricity or propulsion. In 2007, 14% of the world's electricity came from nuclear power. More than 150 nuclear-powered naval vessels have been built, and a few radioisotope rockets have been produced. …"
"…As of 2005, nuclear power provided 6.3% of the world's energy and 15% of the world's electricity, with the U.S., France, and Japan together accounting for 56.5% of nuclear generated electricity.[2] As of 2007, the IAEA reported there are 439 nuclear power reactors in operation in the world,[3] operating in 31 countries.[4]
In 2007, nuclear´s share of global electricity generation dropped to 14%. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the main reason for this was an earthquake in western Japan on 16 July 2007, which shut down all seven reactors at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant. There were also several other reductions and "unusual outages" experienced in Korea and Germany. Also, increases in the load factor for the current fleet of reactors appear to have plateaued.[5]
The United States produces the most nuclear energy, with nuclear power providing 19%[6] of the electricity it consumes, while France produces the highest percentage of its electrical energy from nuclear reactors—78% as of 2006.[7] In the European Union as a whole, nuclear energy provides 30% of the electricity.[8] Nuclear energy policy differs between European Union countries, and some, such as Austria and Ireland, have no active nuclear power stations. In comparison, France has a large number of these plants, with 16 multi-unit stations in current use. …"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power
Instrumentation and Control (I&C) Systems in Nuclear Power
Plants: A Time of Transition
"…I&C systems are the nervous system of a nuclear power plant. They monitor all aspects of the plant's health and help respond with the care and adjustments needed.
Progress in electronics and information technology (IT) has created incentives to replace traditional analog instrumentation and control (I&C) systems in nuclear power plants with digital I&C systems, i.e. systems based on computers and microprocessors. Digital systems offer higher reliability, better plant performance and additional diagnostic capabilities. Analog systems will gradually become obsolete in the general IT shift to digital technology. About 40% of the world's operating reactors have been modernized to include at least some digital I&C systems. Most newer plants also include digital I&C systems.
Digital I&C systems have posed new challenges for the industry and regulators, who have had to build up the methods, data and experience to assure themselves that the new systems meet all reliability and performance requirements. In general, countries with more new construction of nuclear reactors have had greater incentives and opportunities to develop the needed capabilities. Other countries are still in the process of doing so. …"
http://www.iaea.org/About/Policy/GC/GC52/GC52InfDocuments/English/gc52inf-3-att5_en.pdf
Nuclear plant powers up on real-time OS
"…The real-time operating system is used where software failure can lead to catastrophic consequences, even death – from high-speed trains to air traffic control towers to highway toll systems. It's also used in more than 100 different types of cars on the road.
For Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., which operates nuclear power plants in Canada, China and Slovenia, downtime just isn't an option. About 15 to 20 years ago, the Mississauga, Ont.-based company turned to QNX's real-time operating system to keep its plants running. Since then, it's upgraded to version 4.0 and is now rolling out 6.0 – and that's it. …"
"We chose QNX initially because of its micro-kernel architecture, its performance and its real-time capabilities," said Ross Judd, manager of information and control systems development with Atomic Energy. "Our applications are real-time applications – they involve data acquisition through machine interfaces and control rooms."
"…"Remember the old style of Christmas lights where you had a big long string and if one bulb burned out the whole thing burned out and you had to go through each one and find out which single bulb failed? That's Microsoft."
Only a few components that are critical to maintaining the operation of a function are in what's called the protected kernel. All other elements are in modules that plug into the kernel. That means if one function fails, it won't bring down the other functions; they're protected from corrupting each other.
"When you've got Microsoft on your desktop and you have a problem with Explorer or Excel, it can hang up your computer where your only option is to shut the entire thing down," said Shewchuk. "It might be something as silly as a printer driver, but it affects the whole operating system because all the code is in this monolithic structure."
In a micro-kernel operating system, upgrading software consists of slotting in one module, rather than bringing down the entire system. "If you want to go from having one switch to multiple switches, you can link those together seamlessly without bringing the entire system down and having to reboot an entirely new system up," he said.
The old-fashioned way of thinking was that when you hard-wired all these applications together, your systems could run faster. That was true 20 years ago when systems were much less complex, said Shewchuk, but nowadays even simple devices connect to the Internet and have a graphical capability, and many of them are networked.
"The amount of code and complexity of coding becomes more and more difficult and the amount of discipline it takes to maintain the operating system in those environments is incredibly complex," he said. "It's a more clean, defined process for coding in a micro-kernel." …"
http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/CDN/News.asp?id=40793
Truck-delivered Micro-Nuclear Reactor for Clean Energy Within Five Years
Edwin Black
"…Micro-nuclear reactors about the size of a hot tub, prefabricated and delivered by trucks, will begin revolutionizing electric energy supply within five years, according to information gleaned from government scientists and corporate energy sources. If successful, the breakthrough will change the face of global energy supplies.
New nuclear battery technology pioneered by government scientists at Los Alamos—the facility that developed the first atomic bomb—has been licensed to private companies for mass production and distribution. In its initial format, each micro-reactor will produce just 25 megawatts, but enough to provide electricity for 20,000 average American-sized homes or a major industrial project. Daisy-chained, these micro-reactors, each one about twice the size of an average man, can supply enough electricity to power an entire small city or suburb. Initially, the reactors will be placed in isolated industrial and residential areas, such as oilsand enterprises and underdeveloped African nations in need of power.
The miniature nuclear marvels will be factory-sealed in concrete, and delivered by truck, train or ship for burial under close international nuclear regulatory supervision. The reactors will produce heat which will boil an adjacent water source to create the steam that typically turns turbines that generate electricity. …"
http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=906&pageid=37
Hyperion Power Generation
"…Hyperion Power Generation, Inc. (HPG) was formed to bring to market the unique Hyperion (formerly Comstar) small, modular, non-weapons grade nuclear power reactor invented by Dr. Otis "Pete" Peterson at the United States' famed Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico. Through the commercialization program at LANL's Technology Transfer Division, HPG was awarded the exclusive license to utilize the intellectual property and develop a product that will benefit the U.S. economy and global society as a whole.
The next multi-million dollar phase of work on the development of Hyperion, underwritten by private investors, continues, Hyperion will play a key role as a solution for climate change and the energy crisis. …"
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/about.html
Backgrounder on New Nuclear Plant Designs
"…The NRC has long sought standardization of nuclear power plant designs, and the enhanced safety and licensing reform that standardization could make possible. The Commission expects advanced reactors to be safer and use simplified, passive or other innovative means to accomplish their safety functions. The NRC's regulation (Part 52 to Title 10 of the Code of Federal Regulations) provides a predictable licensing process including certification of new nuclear plant designs. This process reflects decades of experience and research involving reactor design and operation. The design certification process provides for early public participation and resolution of safety issues prior to an application to construct a nuclear power plant. …"
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/new-nuc-plant-des-bg.html
Nuclear Power May Be in Early Stages of a Revival
"…When the industry first said several years ago that it would resume building plants, deep skepticism greeted the claim. Not since 1973 had anybody in the United States ordered a nuclear plant that was actually built, and the obstacles to a new generation of plants seemed daunting.
But now, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 21 companies say they will seek permission to build 34 power plants, from New York to Texas. Factories are springing up in Indiana and Louisiana to build reactor parts. Workers are clearing a site in Georgia to put in reactors. Starting in January, millions of electric customers in Florida will be billed several dollars a month to finance four new reactors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/24nuke.html Plants in the World
Nuclear Power Plants in the World
IJCT Nuclear Training Center
http://www.icjt.org/an/tech/jesvet/jesvet.htm
Big TVs = Big electric bills
"…According to a recent study by the Natural Resources Defense Council it's because of that ginormous TV set you just bought. We always figured that LCDs and plasmas used less power than CRTs, but apparently digital HDTVs actually suck up more power than analog TVs (see the chart below), and to make matters worse, we're buying bigger and bigger television sets than we used to. They're predicting that in four years our TVs will be consuming 50% more power per year than they do today, what worries them is that hardly anyone thinks about how much power their TV is going to use when they're buying it (we certainly don't), so they're trying to get manufacturers to make their displays more energy efficient and are asking the EPA to establish a single annual energy-consumption number for TVs that's sort of like the one they already have for air conditioners. …"
http://www.engadget.com/2005/06/16/big-tvs-big-electric-bills/
Solar Energy with Photovoltaics Articles and Videos
Going Deep–Cool–Deep Ocean Water (DOW)–Ocean Power!
Al Gore 2.0 and The Coming Renewable Energy Ice Age–The Big Chill
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