Johanna Faust, a mixed race Jew, prefers to publish pseudonymously. She is committed: first, to preventing war, ecological disaster, and nuclear apocalypse; last to not only fighting for personal privacy & the freedom of information, but, by representing herself as a soldier in that fight, to exhorting others to do the same. She is a poet, always. All these efforts find representation here: "ah, Mephistophelis" is so named after the last line of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, whose heretical success flouted the censor for a time.

Traitorware: Fruit of Apple's Poisoned Tree


Don't take this one sitting down, all you who love your iphones. Otherwise, I will never get one.


Thanks to EFF via Blacklisted News

It looks like Apple, Inc., is exploring a new business opportunity: spyware and what we're calling "traitorware." While users were celebrating the new jailbreaking and unlocking exemptions, Apple was quietly preparing to apply for a patent on technology that, among other things, would allow Apple to identify and punish users who take advantage of those exemptions or otherwise tinker with their devices. This patent application does nothing short of providing a roadmap for how Apple can — and presumably will — spy on its customers and control the way its customers use Apple products. As Sony-BMG learned, spying on your customers is bad for business. And the kind of spying enabled here is especially creepy — it's not just spyware, it's "traitorware," since it is designed to allow Apple to retaliate against you if you do something Apple doesn't like.

Essentially, Apple's patent provides for a device to investigate a user's identity, ostensibly to determine if and when that user is "unauthorized," or, in other words, stolen. More specifically, the technology would allow Apple to record the voice of the device's user, take a photo of the device's user's current location or even detect and record the heartbeat of the device's user. Once an unauthorized user is identified, Apple could wipe the device and remotely store the user's "sensitive data." Apple's patent application suggests it may use the technology not just to limit "unauthorized" uses of its phones but also shut down the phone if and when it has been stolen.

However, Apple's new technology would do much more. This patented device enables Apple to secretly collect, store and potentially use sensitive biometric information about you. This is dangerous in two ways: First, it is far more than what is needed just to protect you against a lost or stolen phone. It's extremely privacy-invasive and it puts you at great risk if Apple's data on you are compromised. But it's not only the biometric data that are a concern. Second, Apple's technology includes various types of usage monitoring — also very privacy-invasive. This patented process could be used to retaliate against you if you jailbreak or tinker with your device in ways that Apple views as "unauthorized" even if it is perfectly legal under copyright law.

Here's a sample of the kinds of information Apple plans to collect:

  • The system can take a picture of the user's face, "without a flash, any noise, or any indication that a picture is being taken to prevent the current user from knowing he is being photographed";
  • The system can record the user's voice, whether or not a phone call is even being made;
  • The system can determine the user's unique individual heartbeat "signature";
  • To determine if the device has been hacked, the device can watch for "a sudden increase in memory usage of the electronic device";
  • The user's "Internet activity can be monitored or any communication packets that are served to the electronic device can be recorded"; and
  • The device can take a photograph of the surrounding location to determine where it is being used.

In other words, Apple will know who you are, where you are, and what you are doing and saying and even how fast your heart is beating. In some embodiments of Apple's "invention," this information "can be gathered every time the electronic device is turned on, unlocked, or used." When an "unauthorized use" is detected, Apple can contact a "responsible party." A "responsible party" may be the device's owner, it may also be "proper authorities or the police."

Apple does not explain what it will do with all of this collected information on its users, how long it will maintain this information, how it will use this information, or if it will share this information with other third parties. We know based on long experience that if Apple collects this information, law enforcement will come for it, and may even order Apple to turn it on for reasons other than simply returning a lost phone to its owner.

This patent is downright creepy and invasive — certainly far more than would be needed to respond to the possible loss of a phone. Spyware, and its new cousin traitorware, will hurt customers and companies alike — Apple should shelve this idea before it backfires on both it and its customers.



Sure wish I had that Nokia 770...

Be seeing y'all.

Perhaps there will be evacuations after all...


...or, I told y'all to move. Now there is another voice adding to the chorus -- tis time one with inside information. Perhaps something is being planned.

Government insiders: Get ready for the Gulf “dead zone”

Wayne Madsen Report – June 23, 2010

Bad news concerning the Gulf oil disaster continues to come from WMR’s federal government sources in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the US Army Corps of Engineers. Emergency planners are dealing with a prospective “dead zone” within a 200 mile radius from the Deepwater Horizon disaster datum in the Gulf.

A looming environmental and population displacement disaster is brewing in the Gulf. The oil dispersant used by BP, Corexit 9500, is seen by FEMA sources as mixing with evaporated water from the Gulf and absorbed by rain clouds producing toxic precipitation that threatens to kill all marine and land animals, plant life, and humans within a 200-mile radius of the Deepwater Horizon disaster site in the Gulf. Adding to the worries of FEMA and the Corps of Engineers is the large amounts of methane that are escaping from the cavernous grotto of oil underneath the Macondo drilling area of Gulf of Mexico.

On a recent visit to the Gulf coast, President Obama vowed that the Gulf coast will “return to normal.” However, federal officials dealing with the short- and long-term impact of the oil disaster report that the “dead zone” created by a combination of methane gas and Corexit toxic rain will force the evacuation and long-term abandonment of cities and towns within the 200-mile radius of the oil volcano.

Plans are being put in place for the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Mandeville, Hammond, Houma, Belle Chase, Chalmette, Slidell, Biloxi, Gulfport, Pensacola, Hattiesburg, Mobile, Bay Minette, Fort Walton Beach, Panama City, Crestview, and Pascagoula.

The toxic rain from the Gulf is expected to poison fresh water reservoirs and lakes, streams, and rivers, which will also have a disastrous impact on agriculture and livestock, as well as drinking water, in the affected region.

FEMA officials also claim that the $20 billion compensation fund set aside by BP is not nearly enough to offset the costs of the disaster. The FEMA sources say the disaster will cost well in excess of $1 trillion, and likely closer to $2-3 trillion.

End of Wayne Madsen Report

+ + +

Here’s a map of the Gulf showing what 50-200 miles from the Gulf coast (not a 200-miles radius from the roiling oil volcano) looks like, drawn by darkelf of AboveTopSecret.com. The red is 50 miles inland, yellow is 100 miles inland and green is 200 miles inland. Click map to enlarge. [snip]

Drawn by darkelf of AboveTopSecret.com


If anyone wants to help someone from the gulf relocate -- or if anyone from the gulf wants to get a head start -- write gulfcoast2westcoast@gmail.com. We are trying to match the former up with the latter, point people in the right direction.


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Wayne Madsen Special Report: Obama & the CIA



If you haven't already: enjoy.



The Story of Obama:

All In The Company

Part I


Special Report

by Wayne Madsen



(Repost)

WMR via rm: Monday, 16-Aug-2010 17:46:57

(originally for subscribers only; recently released.)

=====


WMR has discovered CIA files that document the agency’s connections to institutions and individuals figuring prominently in the lives of Barack Obama and his mother, father, grandmother, and stepfather.

President Obama’s own work in 1983 for Business International Corporation, a CIA front that conducted seminars with the world’s most powerful leaders and used journalists as agents abroad, dovetails with CIA espionage activities conducted by his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham in 1960s post-coup Indonesia on behalf of a number of CIA front operations, including the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Ford Foundation. Dunham met and married Lolo Soetoro, Obama’s stepfather, at the East-West Center in 1965. Soetoro was recalled to Indonesia in 1965 to serve as a senior army officer and assist General Suharto and the CIA in the bloody overthrow of President Sukarno.

Barack Obama, Sr., who met Dunham in 1959 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii, had been part of what was described as an airlift of 280 East African students to the United States to attend various colleges — merely “aided” by a grant from the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation, according to a September 12, 1960, Reuters report from London. The airlift was a CIA operation to train and indoctrinate future agents of influence in Africa, which was becoming a battleground between the United States and the Soviet Union and China for influence among newly-independent and soon-to-be independent countries on the continent.

The airlift was condemned by the deputy leader of the opposition Kenyan African Democratic Union (KADU) as favoring certain tribes — the majority Kikuyus and minority Luos — over other tribes to favor the Kenyan African National Union (KANU), whose leader was Tom Mboya, the Kenyan nationalist and labor leader who selected Obama, Sr. for a scholarship at the University of Hawaii. Obama, Sr., who was already married with an infant son and pregnant wife in Kenya, married Dunham on Maui on February 2, 1961 and was also the university’s first African student. Dunham was three month’s pregnant with Barack Obama, Jr. at the time of her marriage to Obama, Sr.

KADU deputy leader Masinda Muliro, according to Reuters, said KADU would send a delegation to the United States to investigate Kenyan students who received “gifts” from the Americans and “ensure that further gifts to Kenyan students are administered by people genuinely interested in Kenya’s development.’”

Mboya received a $100,000 grant for the airlift from the Kennedy Foundation after he turned down the same offer from the U.S. State Department, obviously concerned that direct U.S. assistance would look suspicious to pro-Communist Kenyan politicians who suspected Mboya of having CIA ties. The Airlift Africa project was underwritten by the Kennedy Foundation and the African-American Students Foundation. Obama, Sr. was not on the first airlift but a subsequent one. The airlift, organized by Mboya in 1959, included students from Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland

Reuters also reported that Muliro charged that Africans were “disturbed and embittered” by the airlift of the selected students. Muliro “stated that “preferences were shown to two major tribes [Kikuyu and Luo] and many U.S.-bound students had failed preliminary and common entrance examinations, while some of those left behind held first-class certificates.”

Obama, Sr. was a friend of Mboya and a fellow Luo. After Mboya was assassinated in 1969, Obama, Sr. testified at the trial of his alleged assassin. Obama, Sr. claimed he was the target of a hit-and-run assassination attempt after his testimony.

Obama, Sr., who left Hawaii for Harvard in 1962, divorced Dunham in 1964. Obama, Sr. married a fellow Harvard student, Ruth Niedesand, a Jewish-American woman, who moved with him to Kenya and had two sons. They were later divorced. Obama, Sr. worked for the Kenyan Finance and Transport ministries as well as an oil firm. Obama, Sr. died in a 1982 car crash and his funeral was attended by leading Kenyan politicians, including future Foreign Minister Robert Ouko, who was murdered in 1990.

CIA files indicate that Mboya was an important agent-of-influence for the CIA, not only in Kenya but in all of Africa. A formerly Secret CIA “Current Intelligence Weekly Summary,” dated November 19, 1959, states that Mboya served as a check on extremists at the second All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) in Tunis. The report states that “serious friction developed between Ghana’s Prime Minister Kwame NNkrumah and Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya who cooperated effectively [emphasis added] last December to check extremists at the AAPC’s first meeting in Accra.” The term “cooperated effectively” appears to indicate that Mboya was cooperating with the CIA, which filed the report from field operatives in Accra and Tunis. While “cooperating” with the CIA in Accra and Tunis, Mboya selected the father of the president of the United States to receive a scholarship and be airlifted to the University of Hawaii where he met and married President Obama’s mother.

An earlier CIA Current Intelligence Weekly Summary, Secret, and dated April 3, 1958, states that Mboya “still appears to be the most promising of the African leaders.” Another CIA weekly summary, Secret and dated December 18, 1958, calls Mboya the Kenyan nationalist an “able and dynamic young chairman” of the People’s Convention party who was viewed as an opponent of “extremists” like Nkrumah, supported by “Sino-Soviet representatives.”

In a formerly Secret CIA report on the All-Africa Peoples Conference in 1961, dated November 1, 1961, Mboya’s conservatism, along with that of Taleb Slim of Tunisia, are contrasted to the leftist policies of Nkrumah and others. Pro-communists who were elected to the AAPC’s steering committee at the March 1961 Cairo conference, attended by Mboya, are identified in the report as Abdoulaye Diallo, AAPC Secretary General, of Senegal; Ahmed Bourmendjel of Algeria; Mario de Andrade of Angola; Ntau Mokhele of Basutoland; Kingue Abel of Cameroun; Antoine Kiwewa of Congo (Leopoldville); Kojo Botsio of Ghana; Ismail Toure of Guinea; T. O. Dosomu Johnson of Liberia; Modibo Diallo of Mali; Mahjoub Ben Seddik of Morocco; Djibo Bakari of Niger; Tunji Otegbeya of Nigeria; Kanyama Chiume of Nyasaland; Ali Abdullahi of Somalia; Tennyson Makiwane of South Africa, and Mohamed Fouad Galal of the United Arab Republic.

The only attendees in Cairo who were given a clean bill of health by the CIA were Mboya, who appears to have been a snitch for the agency, and Joshua Nkomo of Southern Rhodesia, B. Munanka of Tanganyika, Abdel Magid Shaker of Tunisia, and John Kakonge of Uganda.

Nkrumah would eventually be overthrown in a 1966 CIA-backed coup while he was on a state visit to China and North Vietnam. The CIA overthrow of Nkrumah followed by one year the agency’s overthrow of Sukarno, another coup that was connected to President Obama’s family on his mother’s side. There are suspicions that Mboya was assassinated in 1969 by Chinese agents working with anti-Mboya factions in the government of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta in order to eliminate a pro-U.S. leading political leader in Africa. Upon Mboya’s death, every embassy in Nairobi flew its flag at half-mast except for one, the embassy of the People’s Republic of China.

Mboya’s influence in the Kenyatta government would continue long after his death and while Obama, Sr. was still alive. In 1975, after the assassination of KANU politician Josiah Kariuki, a socialist who helped start KANU, along with Mboya and Obama, Sr., Kenyatta dismissed three rebellious cabinet ministers who “all had personal ties to either Kariuki or Tom Mboya.” This information is contained in CIA Staff Notes on the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, formerly Top Secret Umbra, Handle via COMINT Channels, dated June 24, 1975. The intelligence in the report, based on its classification, indicate the information was derived from National Security Agency intercepts in Kenya. No one was ever charged in the assassination of Kariuki.

The intecepts of Mboya’s and Kariuki’s associates are an indication that the NSA and CIA also maintain intercepts on Barack Obama, Sr., who, as a non-U.S. person, would have been lawfully subject at the time to intercepts carried out by NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

----

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. He has written for several renowned papers and blogs.

Madsen is a regular contributor on Russia Today. He has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. Madsen has taken on Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity on their television shows. He has been invited to testifty as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel of the French government.

As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He subsequently worked for the National Security Agency, the Naval Data Automation Command, Department of State, RCA Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation.

Madsen is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), Association for Intelligence Officers (AFIO), and the National Press Club. He is a regular contributor to Opinion Maker.

In Part II, the history of Stanley Ann Dunham and Madelyn Dunham in CIA activities in Southeast Asia will be revealed.

=====





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No Wonder They Are Losing The Drug War!







Seriously, people. You have got to have better things to do. Like meditate, or spin in a circle, or get in a hot tub, or get a massage -- all of which may alter your attitude (here's a secret: that's what it means to get 'high') and/or change your perspective. Which, if you were buying this load of scaremongering propaganda, you probably need, seeing as you are at best an ossified and useless irrelevance, and at worst an abusive asshole. How about going hiking -- maybe with your kids? When was the last time you hung out with your kids? If you harangue them, it doesn't count. If you guilt-trip them, it doesn't count. If you threaten them, it doesn't count. If you put them down, it doesn't count. How about you try listening?


NEWSFLASH:

YOUR CHILDREN DO NOT BELONG TO YOU.
THEY BELONG TO THEMSELVES.
THEIR MINDS ARE THEIR OWN.


Try being their friends.

Friendship, like love, is between equals.







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URGENT: NEW POLICY MAY SUDDENLY TERMINATE SOC SEC BENEFITS OF MANY


LEAKED: SOCIAL SECURITY POLICY

EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY:

'DROP AS MANY AS POSSIBLE'


PLEASE REPOST WIDELY.


Someone close to me, who gets social security benefits for mental disability, told me a few days ago that her psychiatrist told her about a recent semi-secret policy decision to quietly drop as many people as possible from the rolls.


She was told it would work like this: the beneficiary (or possibly payee) would receive a letter at his/her last official address of record. This letter would not be able to be forwarded. If the letter was not returned, the person's benefits would be summarily cut, and nearly impossible to reinstate.


Now, I have no way of verifying this, and I have no idea how the system is set up, or how it works. However, I, personally, trust my source on this. She told me that her psychiatrist said he wasn't supposed to warn her; that this was happening immanently, and that he expected that a very many people would lose their benefits suddenly in the near future.


EXPECT THIS LETTER ANY DAY NOW. IF YOU GET A LETTER THAT REQUIRES A RESPONSE OF SOME KIND, DO NOT DELAY. MAKE SURE YOU CHECK OLD ADDRESSES IF YOU HAVE RECENTLY MOVED OR IF THERE IS ANY WAY FOR THEM TO CLAIM THAT ANOTHER ADDRESS IS YOUR OFFICIAL ADDRESS.


My guess is, watch your mail like a hawk for the next month at least. Remember: if this is true, their goal is to drop as many people as possible. Don't let it be you.


Good luck with that.


PLEASE REPOST WIDELY.





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