Kidz Rage !

Saw this and only can laugh…looks like the race between Obama and Clinton is getting some t shirt publicity aswell…lol!

Respect 12th Pleazy 4 the link

Thank you for your interest in Zeitgeist.

Zeitgeist was created as a not for profit expression to inspire people to start looking at the world from a more critical perspective and to understand that very often things are not what the population at large think they are.

The information in Zeitgeist was established over a year long period of research and the current Source page on this site lists the sources used / referenced.

http://zeitgeistmovie.com/

Please be aware that I posted this here for Information purposes only!

via (ZeitGeist)

For 18 tense months, a computer-savvy grifter named David Thomas runs a thriving online crime hub for bank heists, identity theft and counterfeiting, with the FBI paying the bills.

Check out the full story here.
via (wired.com)

Yes, you read it right…..her Royal Highness, i mean Majesty will be recording her annual Christmas message to the Commonwealth via podcast this year!

Check out the podcast here

Consumers have no idea how reliable their cell phone service will be when they buy a phone and sign a long-term contract. The Federal Communications Commission could offer some guidance, but it won’t. The agency refuses to make public a detailed database of cell phone provider outages that it has maintained since 2004.

A federal Freedom of Information Act request for the data, filed in August by MSNBC.com, has been rejected by the agency. The stated reasons: Release of the information could help terrorists plan attacks against the United States, and it would harm the companies involved.

Complaints about cell phone service are near the top of every list of consumer gripes. The Illinois attorney general’s office, for example, last year ranked cell phone complaints as the fourth-most-common complaint, trailing only gas prices, credit card firms and home improvement scams.

To find out if a cell phone carrier service will be reliable, consumers are forced to buy a phone, then use it at home and on their normal commuting routes. Callers generally get 30 days at most to return a phone if the service doesn’t work well enough.

But that test won’t reveal anything about carriers’ periodic outages.

The Federal Communications Commission does know something about outages, however. It has collected outage reports from telecommunications firms since the early 1990s. Any time a carrier has an outage that affects 900,000 caller minutes – say a 30-minute outage impacting 30,000 customers – it must report it to the Network Outage Reporting System.

In the beginning, the reports all were from “wire line” telephone providers and were available to the public. But in 2004, the commission ordered wireless firms to supply outage reports as well. But at the same time, it removed all outage reports from public view and exempted them from the Freedom of Information Act.

The FCC took the action at the urging of the Department of Homeland Security, which argued that publication of the reports would “jeopardize our security efforts.”

“The same outage data that can be so useful … to identify and remedy critical vulnerabilities and make the network infrastructure stronger can, in hostile hands, be used to exploit those vulnerabilities to undermine or attack networks,” DHS said.

‘Corporate competition protection’

What use would wireless outage reports have to would-be terrorists? Not much, said NBC terrorism analyst Roger Cressey, the former chief of staff of the President’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board.

“There is nothing mysterious behind it, it is corporate competition protection,” said Cressey, now a partner in Good Harbor Consulting. “The only reason for the government to not let these records get out is then one telco provider could run a full-page ad saying ‘the government says we’re more reliable.’”

Cressey added that he couldn’t imagine a scenario where the reports would be valuable to terrorists.

In October, MSNBC.com filed an administrative appeal of the FCC’s rejection of its FOIA request. The FCC has not yet responded to the appeal.

In its initial answer to MSNBC.com’s FOIA request, FCC officials cited only one reason for the denial: “competitive harm” to companies involved.

“NORS records are not available to the public,” the rejection letter said. “Given the competitive nature of many segments of the communications industry and the importance that outage information may have on the selection of a service provider or manufacturer, we conclude that there is a presumptive likelihood of substantial competitive harm from disclosure of information in outage reports.”

That’s likely true. A report that revealed which mobile phone company suffered the most outages in a given area would likely impact consumers’ choice of provider. Such information would be in the public interest, MSNBC.com believes.

“We believe that this is basic consumer information and we will continue to fight for your right to know it,” said MSNBC.com editor-in-chief Jennifer Sizemore.

Explanation doesn’t measure up, expert says

The explanation also does not meet the bar set by the Freedom of Information Act for an agency to decline a request, according to an analysis by The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

The competitive harm exemption “requires fairly detailed explanations by the company involved as to how the release of information will put it at a substantial competitive disadvantage,” said analyst Nathan Winegar.

In a subsequent response to a reporter’s query, an FCC spokesman pointed toward the second reason for the public record request denial: The 2004 administrative order declaring the outage records off limits to the public. That order cited both competitive harm and national security.

Al Tompkins, a Freedom of Information Act expert at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think-tank, said release of the cell phone outage reports would be “a tremendous consumer tool,” and compared them to the Federal Aviation Administration’s publication of airline on-time records.

“It seems to me that while one could understand it might put one company at a competitive disadvantage, it would put another at a competitive advantage,” he said. “The airwaves are owned by the public. … The public has a need to know what’s reliable and what’s not.”

Not every mobile phone firm thought the database needed to be hidden from public view when the FCC decided to make it secret in 2004. Sprint argued that the commission could “scrub” the reports of sensitive material before they were made public and thus serve the “seemingly divergent needs for public access and protection of confidential information.”

The FCC chose the blunt instrument.

Another ‘national security issue’

Tompkins said the blanket removal of the entire outage report system from public view was symptomatic of a larger trend in the Bush administration.

“Every time we turn around something else is a national security issue,” he said.

Furthermore, if some larger pattern of cell phone outages could be gleaned from the reports, he said, companies might “fix it, not bury it.”

“I can’t think of one problem that has gone away because it’s kept a secret,” he said.

The Freedom of Information Act, signed into law in 1966, provides specific procedures for U.S. citizens to gain access to government documents, through a procedure known as a FOIA request. The law was amended in the mid-1970s in reaction to the Watergate scandal, with time and fee limits imposed on government agencies to comply with requests. The law was amended again in 1986, but journalists continued to complain that federal agencies were still stonewalling. In response to those complaints, in October 1993 then-President Bill Clinton issued an administrative memo calling for federal agencies to “renew their commitment” to the spirit of the Freedom of information Act.

The law was originally intended to make government paper records available to the public, but gradually has been extended to apply to electronic records as well.

Anyone can file a FOIA request, but the procedure is most frequently used by journalists, lawyers and jail inmates seeking more information about their cases. Many agencies, including the FCC, now allow FOIA requests to be filed right from their Web sites.

via [keeping you in the dark]

How easy is it to digitally clone an electronic passport?

Very. Using an RFID reader purchased on eBay, white-hat hackers from DN-Systems consulting recently demonstrated to the BBC how they can download British e-passport data to their computer and then write it to a new, blank RFID chip to create a perfect digital clone. Sure, the hack requires access to the software used by border police, but apparently, this is already out in the wilds. Astounding, huh? Yeah, but it’s not new. This is the same hack we’ve seen repeatedly demonstrated in Germany, the US, The Netherlands, Ireland, etc.

What’s notable here is the lack of incredulity imparted by the spokesman for the UK Home Office who said, “It is hard to see why anyone would want to access the information on the chip.” Identify theft, maybe? True, British e-passports unlike those issued by other countries, do not (currently) store fingerprint scans in the chip and the encryption is just one aspect of the passport’s overall security. However, with these mechanisms also circumvented, shouldn’t our government officials be just a tad concerned?

I read on the UCLA Asia Institute page that the RECORD NUMBER of 34 Million bloggers was hit this last August in Beijing, China !  I find this quite amazing and astonishing!

Second to the USA, they command the internet with 123 million users(which of 77 million are broadband users) and there are roughly 788,000 websites in the country according to the stats.

For more info or to see the page visit their site:

http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=53893

A sprawling array of cases challenging the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of American’s domestic and international communications may be moved to an obscure secret court in Washington, if a pending bill to alter the nation’s surveillance law is voted on before the upcoming recess.

Pennsylvania Republican Senator Arlen Specter’s National Security Surveillance Act would allow the Attorney General to move surveillance cases involving state secrets to the little-known Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which has only heard one case in its 28-year history.

National security experts and civil liberties advocates assail the idea, saying it would diminish the chance that the government’s controversial snooping would face open judicial scrutiny.

But Specter, who has long criticized the wiretapping that evades the law requiring warrants for such surveillance, argues that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, also known as the FISA Court, is accustomed to dealing with national secrets.

Specter also believes that transferring cases to a central court will lead to a more cohesive decision that can then be appealed directly to the Supreme Court, but he does not believe that already moving cases, such as Detroit one where a judge declared one spying program unconstitutional and the government has appealed, should be transferred, according to an aide speaking on background.

It’s unclear whether the provision would allow the attorney general to transfer the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against AT&T for its alleged complicity in the warrantless surveillance program, but EFF lawyers declined to comment on the legislation, which may indicate they think it could affect their case.

Fifteen other cases filed against telecoms were recently moved to the San Francisco district court, and another 21 may be moved there soon.

Louis Fisher, an expert on national security law who just published a book on the state secrets privilege called In the Name of National Security, says that court is just too secret.

“We always do this in the public, and the courts have to come up with a decision that shows reasoning, facts and understanding, and to give that to a secret court where, I imagine, there will be secret briefs and secret oral arguments and a secret decision, maybe a declassified decision?,” Fisher said. “I can’t see there’s credibility or trust in that kind of process. I frankly would prefer it to be decentralized and have a lot of district judges take a crack at it.”

The review court is also politically stacked, according to Shayana Kadidal, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights. CCR is suing the government directly over warrantless wiretapping of overseas communications, arguing that the program infringes on their ability to defend their Guantanamo Bay detainee clients.

“The transfer provision would move us in front of the three FISA Court of Review judges, who are all Republicans.” Kadidal said.

Another provision of the bill that allows the government to have the FISA Court approve a whole surveillance program, rather than a particularized warrant, will be used by the administration to legalize the program and prevent lawsuits from stopping the program, though they might be able to get damages for prior surveillance, if it’s found to be illegal, Kadidal said.

It remains unclear whether the bill will make it to the Senate floor for a vote, given that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist promised to adjourn the Senate by the end of September and that much of the Senate’s energy may stay focused on a controversial military commission bill and immigration proposals.

Still, Wednesday’s markup of a companion spy bill in two House committees involved much arm-twisting of Republican members with concerns over expanding surveillance power into voting for the bill, according to ACLU legislative counsel Lisa Graves.

“That arm-twisting signals a real determination to have votes on the House side on this legislation next week,” Graves said. “It seems a part of Rove strategy to have that vote before the election and try to make terrorism a divisive partisan issue. Everyone agrees that the government should be monitoring suspected terrorists; the question is does the president get to unilaterally, secretly and indefinitely wiretap or bug your home without any judicial oversight ever.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.