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.

MUST READ SURVEILLANCE STATE INFO |
"Your Private Life Will Suddenly Explode: Narus's 'Hone'"



I thought I would repost a few things, for those few of my Gentle Readership actually surprised by the recent developments that have so ...shocked... mainstream America. 

Otherwise known as, from the not-feeling-the-need-to-actually-say-it I-told-you-so department.  


New Scary Narus Data Mining Tool "Hone"

Narus is developing a new technology that sleuths through billions of pieces of data on social networks and Internet services and connects the dots.

The new program, code-named Hone, is designed to give intelligence and law enforcement agencies a leg up on criminals who are now operating anonymously on the Internet.

In many ways, the cyber world is ideal for subversive and terrorist activities, said Antonio Nucci, chief technology officer with Narus. “For bad people, it’s an easy place to hide,” Nucci said. “They can get lost and very easily hide behind a massive ocean of legal digital transactions.”

It’s trivial to set up a Gmail or Facebook account under a fake name. The question for law enforcement then becomes, how does it connect different pieces of information to the same person? “It’s very hard to connect these two pieces of information,” Nucci said. “We’re really asking [law enforcement] to become almost like magicians.”

Narus is best known as the creator of NarusInsight, an network monitoring device that can analyze traffic on IP networks. AT&T allegedly used a Narus system to wiretap customer data on behalf of the U.S. National Security Agency as part of a U.S. domestic terrorist surveillance program.

Hone works in tandem with NarusInsight. By Nucci’s own admission, however, it can do some pretty “scary” things.

The software’s user creates a target profile, and Hone then proceeds to link what Nucci calls “islands of information.” Hone can analyze VOIP conversations, biometrically identify someone’s voice or photograph and then associate it with different phone numbers.

“I can have a sample of your voice in English, and you can start speaking Mandarin tomorrow. It doesn’t matter; I’m going to catch you.”

It uses artificial intelligence to analyze e-mails and can link mails to different accounts, doing what Nucci calls topical analysis. “It’s going to go through a set of documents and automatically it’s going to organize them in topics — I’m not talking about keywords as is done today, I’m talking about topics,” he said.

That can’t be done with today’s technology, he said. “If you search for fertilizers on Google… it’s going to come back with 6.5 million pages. Enjoy,” he said. “If you want to search for non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer… it’s not even searchable.”

Hone will sift through millions of profiles searching for people with similar attributes — blogger profiles that share the same e-mail address, for example. It can look for statistically likely matches, by studying things like the gender, nationality, age, location, home and work addresses of people.

Another component can trace the location of someone using a mobile device such as a laptop or phone.

Bit by bit, it pieces together the subject’s different identities on the Internet.

Narus is still testing the waters with Hone. Working with a consortium of universities, the company has used Hone to sift through massive amounts of public information. “We started to collect data three years ago and we’ve gone through several programs,” Nucci said. “We have something like 75 million users in our system.” With the permission of users, Nucci’s team also analyzed data on about 50,000 private profiles.

Nucci will discuss Hone at the RSA Conference in San Francisco Friday.

The company is now talking to potential customers such as defense contractors and government agencies to see if there’s enough interest to turn Hone into a product. “If the market is as big as we guess it’s going to be, then we will start rolling this into products,” Nucci said.

That day could be just a year away, he added.

Originally posted 3/8/2010.

Be seeing you.

Georgia Tech To Rest Of Academic World: "It's On."


A degree from Georgia Tech for .....  Seven thousand dollars?



Compete with that, you money grubbing ossified shibboleths!

Read more here.

Be seeing you.

Westlake Superfund Site was IN THE PATH of that Tornado in Earth City, MO?



UPDATE:


So Faux News was overhasty in declaring casualties as a result of the Missouri tornado contingent: 


FOX NEWS INACCURATELY REPORTS MULTIPLE CASUALTIES AT EARTH CITY, MISSOURI, HOLIDAY INN AFTER TORNADO TEARS THROUGH ST. LOUIS AREA

By Brian KlonoskiRYOT News

UPDATE: Fox News just said on air that earlier reports of casualties at the Holiday Inn in Earth City, MO, were incorrect. Local officials have not received any such reports. The KMOV reporter at the scene is reporting no mass casualties (as reported earlier by Fox News)...

Fox News has just reported that there are multiple causalities at a Holiday Inn in Earth City, MO, after a tornado tore through the area.
Multiple sources on Twitter are confirming Fox News’ report.

Read more

But wait:

Not only was that Holiday Inn only a mile away from the Westlake Superfund site, according to Pissin' On The Roses, the site -- and all of its illegally dumped radioactive waste -- was in the direct path of the tornado (h/t ChasAha of EnergyNews): 


FRIDAY, MAY 31, 2013
ALERT! Tornado Strikes At Radioactive Underground Landfill Fire In Saint Louis

UPDATE: Report of collapsed floor at Holiday Inn, POTENTIAL of mass casualties.
Strike reported within a few hundred feet of radioactive landfill, more info to follow tomorrow.
-------------------------------------------------------------

UPDATE: Current reports indicate NO casualties at the location in question. More info to follow tomorrow.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tornado related Mass causality event reported at Holiday Inn at Earthcity, Mo.  within a few thousand feet of the WestLake superfund site. The landfill was in the direct path of the tornado, immediate radioactive risk assumed low, but bears watching

Read more

Still have to map the tornado.  Here is a map of the Holiday Inn vis-a-vis Westlake:

screenshot: click for Google Map


As for Westlake -- LiveLeak is reporting there is already a fire there -- the site was already on my radar earlier this year, via Energy News.  The radioactve waste, illegally dumped, is not even covered.


Title: Cancer cluster map of St. Louis
Source: KSDK
Author:  Leisa Zigman
Date: Feb 1, 2013
h/t Anonymous tip
Transcript Excerpts
Anchor: There are radioactive secrets beneath the banks and waters of a north St. Louis County creek that may be linked to a staggering number of cancers, illnesses and birth defects. In four square miles, there are three reported cases of conjoined twins and cancer rates that one data expert says is statistically impossible. [...]

Source: KSDK (See .pdf: Illnesses Linked to Manhattan Project Waste CHART)
Janell Wright, class of ’88 McCluer North High School, Accountant and former auditor: “There’s something very wrong.” [...]
Leisa Zigman, Reporter: At first she found 30 cases. Within two months, she had data on 200 cases. Now, her maps have more than 700 cases in four square miles [...]
Wright: “The children usually came down with brain cancer in the first 15 years of life, in addition, leukemia. In my peer group’s children, there were several children who had to have their thyroid removed before they were 10-years-old.”
Zigman: In the 1940s, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in downtown St. Louis purified thousands of tons of uranium to make the first atomic bombs. [...] 21 acres of airport land became a dumping site where a toxic mixture of uranium, thorium, and radium sat uncovered or in barrels. In the 60s, government documents noted contents from the rusting barrels were seeping into nearby Coldwater Creek. And by the 90s, the government confirmed unsafe levels of radioactive materials in the water. [...]

The transcript is excerpted from this video, "Cancer Cluster Map of St. Louis":



By the way, according to Wikipeda, Mallinckrodt was purchased by Tyco; the health-care wing was spun off to Covidien. Tyco is the source, among other things, for (emphasis mine):

(From Wikipedia on Covidien)
[snip]
• Active pharmaceutical ingredients, including medicinal narcotics and acetaminophen, peptides, stearates and phosphates. (Mallinckrodt is the sole legal source for all the major illegal drugs in the US and at least one of the prominent chemicals, para-aminophenol a.k.a. acetaminophen, used as "cut" -- ed)
• Specialty Chemicals, including Mallinckrodt and J.T. Baker chemicals used in laboratories and the pharmaceutical industry.
• Contrast products including contrast delivery systems and contrast agents.
• Radiopharmaceuticals including radioactive isotopes and associated pharmaceutical products used for the diagnosis and treatment of disease.

Read more

Wonder where they get it.  Just kidding, of course.  If  I wasn't, after this tornado, a Bob Dylan song might be fit answer, now.

God let's hope not.





Be seeing you.



US-Banned GMO Wheat in OREGON in LAST YEAR'S CROP


I once came across a dot-gov database listng all the acreage planted with experimental crops, where t was, what was planted and by whom.  Wish I could remember that URL.



Then just now, I read a Businessweek article that says that genetically modified wheat is not supposed to exist in the US but it did in Oregon. A wheat farmer noticed some wheat plants that survived glyphosate when he sprayed the field for preparation for new planting. These wheat plants were those that sprout voluntarily from seeds knocked loose during harvest.

(Wait a minute... That means the last year's crop from this field WAS genetically modified wheat...)

The Businessweek article doesn't give any answer to this enigma. But since the wheat in question is resistant to glyphosate, which Monsanto has been marketing as "Roundup" since 1973, it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that it was from Monsanto. Washington Post seems to think so, too.

Read more


Hat tip to EX-SKF.  

And thanks to StingRay, for recommending the following video on the topic, from NaturalNews:


Be seeng you.