Four major Internet, technology and privacy stories hit the Web this week.
Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
Four major Internet, technology and privacy stories hit the Web this week.
Coincident with the NSA privacy flap, Bloomberg News ran a story this week on how many U.S. state health organizations are selling supposedly “anonymous” patient information to pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and researchers that can, using other publicly available data and well-known analytical techniques, personally re-identify those patients. [...] Given all the personal information publicly available for sale—the medical information databases join readily-available commercial databases for driver license information and web surfing habits and location data, to name just two—the NSA flap looks almost tame in comparison.
I was really.... reluctant to post this story here. I'm adept enough to know that it will cause an uproar for many of you. Please don't take it personal if you disagree.
A Down's syndrome diagnosis may soon be determined by a simple blood test in pregnant women.
Currently, women who want to definitively see if their children may have genetic diseases are faced with invasive procedures like an amniocentesis that might put the baby at risk. The new blood test, however, may provide a non-invasive option for expecting mothers.
Alot of the basis of abortion rights is not putting the burden of motherhood on women who can't financially sustain childbearing or who had it placed on them (rape). It's not about the pregnancy itself but about the rights of the woman carrying the pregnancy.
If you were to apply something like what is above, the path to targeted abortion would be built for possibly the first time. If Down syndrome becomes a reason to keep a pregnancy from developing, why not bipolar disorder or ADHD or autism? I mean, why not? It's no longer about the situation of the parent(s) but suddenly filtering of the gene pool.
Isn't that genocide?
Many people, and they are people, with Down Syndrome have accomplished more than most of us. Sure they look a little different but didn't we fight civil rights to protect people who look different?
An Army Special Forces veteran who served in the Iraq War was accidentally shot and killed by his 4-year-old son in northern Arizona, police said.
Justin Stanfield Thomas took his son to visit a friend in Prescott Valley when the boy found a gun in the living room and accidentally shot his father in the chest, azfamily.com reported.
“Apparently when Justin and his little boy showed up, within minutes, the little boy found the gun and said, ‘Hey, daddy, what’s this?’ and it went off,” said Jeremy Hartt, a neighbor and friend. “He didn’t know what was going on; he was just a happy little boy.”
By Nahal Toosi, The Associated Press, June 8, 2013
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Just days after taking power, Pakistan's new government summoned a top U.S. envoy Saturday to lodge a protest over a U.S. drone strike, suggesting that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's team fully intends to make good on its promise to aggressively push for an end to such strikes.
Friday night's drone strike near the Afghan border, which was said to have killed seven militants, came two days after Sharif was sworn in as premier and the same day his Cabinet members took their oaths. Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N handily won general elections last month and is expected to govern with a relatively strong mandate because it doesn't need to rely on coalition partners.
Sharif, who wants to pursue peace talks with militants threatening his country, has insisted the U.S. stop the drone strikes, saying they violate Pakistan's sovereignty and are counterproductive because they often kill innocent civilians and stoke anti-U.S. sentiment [....]
By Glen Greenwald & Ewen MacAskill, guardian.co.uk, 7 June, 2013
Exclusive: Top-secret directive steps up offensive cyber capabilities to 'advance US objectives around the world'
• Read the secret presidential directive here
Barack Obama has ordered his senior national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for US cyber-attacks, a top secret presidential directive obtained by the Guardian reveals.
The 18-page Presidential Policy Directive 20, issued in October last year but never published, states that what it calls Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) "can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging" [....]
After writing intensely, even obsessively, for years about government surveillance and the prosecution of journalists, Glenn Greenwald has suddenly put himself directly at the intersection of those two issues, and perhaps in the cross hairs of federal prosecutors.
Another series of shootings at a school.
This time at Santa Monica College.
Cable news picking it up.
More news to follow on cable as well as the major sites.
By Michael Soloman, Time News Feed, June 6, 2013
Russian Teddy Bear. Powerful, manly, sensitive and suddenly single....
In the time it took you to read the last paragraph some 48-year old was laid off by The Village Voice, and they're smarter than you and have lived ten times what you've lived and can write so much better than you I actually almost feel bad for you, and now they're on the same job market trying to scramble for the same shitty 10-cents-a-word gig recapping a show about couponing for the AV Club in the hopes that they can bang out some soul-destroying tedious bullshit so that a pack of talentless losers in the comments can pick their words apart from the safety of their beige plastic cubicles as they try to distract themselves with pop culture for long enough to keep their all-devouring self-hatred at bay. You might get that gig over them but if so it's only because you're young and cheap and stupid and the scuzzy editor thinks he might be able to fuck you after the Christmas party.
Frederica Wilson (D-FL) from Miami has made a hat her trade mark. Take a look at the hats she likes to wear. She is one of the more colorful House Rep. that Florida has to offer. She is well liked.
By Oray Egin, Vocativ, June 4, 2013
[....] Turkish officials and pro-government news outlets have been spreading rumors in an attempt to discredit the movement, which is being spearheaded by the children of Turkey’s privileged elite, a group that until now has largely abstained from politics. Here are the top five bogus rumors being spread by the government and its supporters: [....]
By Phil Hoad, Film Blog @ guardian.co.uk, June 5, 2013
Film-makers in Indonesia are harnessing Hollywood's dark arts to ask questions about their own society
By Douglas Farah, Op-ed @ ForeignPolicy.com, June 4,2013
Argentina's President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has hit on a novel way to try to alleviate her self-inflicted economic free fall and acute shortage of hard currency -- invite money launderers from around the world to put their dollars in Argentine banks with no questions asked.
That's not, of course, the official plan. But this month's move is the latest in a series of steps that seem more rooted in magical thinking than in economic reality that have pushed Argentina ever closer to financial ruin and international pariah status. The government-sponsored amnesty to allow any amount of dollars from anywhere in the world to find a home in Argentina, with no questions asked, was passed into law last Wednesday. The justification is the need for hard currency because the current economic policies have drive up the value of the "blue-" or black-market dollar to 10 pesos while the official exchange remains pegged at 5 pesos [.....]
By Manny Fernandez., New York Times, June 4,2013
KILLEEN, Tex. — Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people, told a judge on Tuesday that he believed he was defending the lives of the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan from American military personnel when he went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood here in November 2009.
Major Hasan’s remarks were the first public explanation about the motive for one of the deadliest mass shootings at an American military base. His comments came a day after the judge granted his request to release his court-appointed military lawyers so that he could represent himself.
On Monday, one of Major Hasan’s first legal maneuvers had been to ask the judge, Col. Tara A. Osborn, for a three-month delay [....]
My question: Does this not mean he is a self-admitted enemy combatant?
Sixteen Americans – including transportation secretary's son Sam LaHood – among 43 staff guilty of receiving foreign funding
By Louisa Loveluck in Cairo and agencies, guardian.co.uk, 4 June 2013
A Cairo criminal court has convicted 43 NGO workers, including at least 16 Americans, of operating without a licence and receiving foreign funding. The case had sparked international outrage, souring relations between Egypt and the US, and inflaming domestic fears over the potential for foreign funding to influence internal political affairs.
Twenty-seven of the defendants, all of whom were tried in absentia, received prison sentences of five years. Eleven of those who attended the trial received one-year suspended sentences, and five others received two years. Judge Makram Awad also ruled that the NGOs that the defendants worked for should be closed in Egypt.
Most of the Americans – including Sam LaHood, son of the US transportation secretary Ray LaHood – had already left the country. LaHood received a five-year jail term [....]
By Andy Eckhardt & John Newland, NBC News, June 3, 2013
Floodwaters from heavy rains swamped five countries in Europe and threatened others, leaving at least six people dead and eight missing.
Germany, Austria, Poland, Switzerland and the Czech Republic have been affected, with officials in the Czech capital, Prague, closing the subway system, evacuating thousands of homes and warning other people not to come into the city. Slovakia and Hungary were preparing flood defenses on the Danube River.
In Germany, rain levels that reached record highs in May contributed to widespread flooding across southern and eastern parts of the country. In the southern state of Bavaria, more than 20,000 firefighters and other rescue workers were battling rising water levels [.....]
Photo credit: Roman Vondrous / CTK via AP
Caption: A couple in a Prague suburb carry three kittens in a plastic bag through floodwaters on Sunday.
By Ed Pilkington at Fort Meade, guardian.co.uk, June 3, 2013
Court hears new allegations about soldier's relationship with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange in trial's intense opening statements....
Exclusive: Official Washington still glorifies George W. Bush’s “successful surge” in Iraq while ignoring the wanton slaughter inflicted on Iraqis. So, there remains a high-level desire to harshly punish Pvt. Bradley Manning for exposing the horrific truth about that and other war crimes, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
It starts:
Greetings from the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania. I arrived here on February 28, 2013 to serve a 30 month sentence for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. At least that's what the government wants people to believe. In truth, this is my punishment for blowing the whistle on the CIA's illegal torture program and for telling the public that torture was official US government policy. But that's a different story. The purpose of this letter is to tell you about prison life.
There were no prison sentences or even trials for the actual CIA torturers. No investigation of the Bush administration for starting the war of aggression in Iraq. No criminal inquiry or trials for for fat cat bankers who brought down the world economy, and/or laundered millions or billions in $$ from drug lords (see HSBC), there was not one person held criminally accountable for the Massey coal mine disaster that killed 29 or the BP Deepwater Horizon oil blowout that killed eleven workers.
There was the conviction of John Kiriakou, a multi-lingual former CIA employee who blew the whistle on use of torture. Petition to pardon John Kiriakou. A pardon would truly be 'change we can believe in'.