From the Trenches World Report

CNN

Washington (CNN) – Chinese hackers tapped into the Federal Election Commission’s website during the federal government shutdown in October, a report released Tuesday by an investigative news organization says.

The report from the Center for Public Integrity, one of the country’s oldest and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organizations, indicates that hackers crashed the FEC’s computer systems, which compiles federal election campaign finance information like contributions to parties and candidates, and how those billions of dollars are spent in each election by candidates, political parties, and independent groups such as political action committees.   Continue reading “Report: Chinese hackers attacked crucial government election website”

NPR – by KRISHNADEV CALAMUR

At issue is the arrest last week of Devyani Khobragade, India’s deputy consul general in New York.

She is accused of using false documents to get a work visa for her Manhattan housekeeper.Indian media reports say she was arrested and handcuffed last Thursday as she dropped off her daughter at school. The reports say she was kept in a cell with “drug addicts” before posting $250,000 bail. The U.S. Marshals Office confirms a report that Khobragade, 39, was strip-searched, according to Reuters.   Continue reading “India-U.S. Row Over Diplomat’s Arrest In New York Escalates”

Little Green Footballs – by Charles Johnson

The NSA is a topic of discussion on social media tonight because of 60 Minutes, but here’s something I bet you didn’t know about the incredibly intrusive techniques Facebook uses to monitor everything you do on their site (and beyond): Facebook Self-Censorship: What Happens to the Posts You Don’t Publish?

We spend a lot of time thinking about what to post on Facebook. Should you argue that political point your high school friend made? Do your friends really want to see yet another photo of your cat (or baby)? Most of us have, at one time or another, started writing something and then, probably wisely, changed our minds.   Continue reading “Facebook Is Keeping Track of the Things You DON’T Post”

Fox News – by Judson Berger

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers paid $5.4 million for shoddy trash incinerators that were delivered years behind schedule and never used, leaving soldiers at an Afghanistan base with no other option than to keep burning waste in open-air pits, according to an internal probe.

The report from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John F. Sopko was released Monday. It found the failure to complete the trash incinerators left soldiers exposed to potential health hazards from the burn pits, and taxpayers, once again, with nothing to show for a multimillion-dollar investment.   Continue reading “‘Complete waste’: Army Corps flushed $5.4M on ‘unusable’ trash incinerators, probe finds”

Washington’s Blog

32-year NSA Veteran Who Created Mass Surveillance System Says Government Use of Data Gathered Through Spying “Is a Totalitarian Process”

Bill Binney is the high-level NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information.  A 32-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency, Binney was the senior technical director within the agency and managed thousands of NSA employees.   Continue reading “Former Top NSA Official: “We Are Now In A Police State””

MassPrivateI

The spate of campuswide lockdowns has drawn attention to the practice, which security officials say they increasingly rely on.

“I don’t think there’s any greater level of danger, but our response to it is much different than it used to be,” Northeastern University criminology professor James Alan Fox said.   Continue reading “Bomb hoaxes on campuses expose America’s police state and the exploitation of terrorism”

Patrick Henry Unbound – by Hatrick ‘Hattie’ Penry

Part 1

Plume-Gate: the world’s largest, provable cover-up and conspiracy

“For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.”   Continue reading “Something Wicked This Way Comes: The story of Plume-Gate, the world’s largest, provable cover-up”

Dallas Observer -by Eric Nicholson

Police in Parker County had been watching Michael Fred Wehrenberg’s home for a month when, late in the summer of 2010, they received a tip from a confidential informant that Wehrenberg and several others were “fixing to” cook meth. Hours later, after midnight, officers walked through the front door, rounded up the people inside, and kept them in handcuffs in the front yard for an hour and a half.

The only potential problem, at least from a constitutional standpoint, was that the cops didn’t have a search warrant. They got one later, before they seized the boxes of pseudoephedrine, stripped lithium batteries, and other meth-making materials, while the alleged meth cooks waited around in handcuffs, but by then they’d already waltzed through the home uninvited. They neglected to mention this on their warrant application, identifying a confidential informant as their only source of information.   Continue reading “In Texas, Search Warrants Can Now Be Based on a “Prediction of a Future Crime””

New York Times – by NEIL GOUGH

HONG KONG — China’s biggest Bitcoin exchange was forced to stop accepting deposits in the Chinese currency on Wednesday, sending the price of the virtual money tumbling in one of its biggest markets globally.

The exchange, BTC China, made the announcement in a post on its verified account on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like messaging service.   Continue reading “Bitcoin Value Sinks After Chinese Exchange Move”

WND – by Bob Unruh

A proposal by a state senator in Ohio, Cafri Cafaro, a Democrat, would require every homeschooling parent in Ohio to be investigated – and approved of – by various social services agencies before they would be allowed to teach their own children.

And officials with the Home School Legal Defense Association say it is the “worst-ever homeschool law proposed.”   Continue reading “Democrat: Investigate Every Homeschool Parent”

TruthDig

The Hill – by Rebecca Shabad

The State Department announced Tuesday it is suspending normal operations at the U.S. Embassy in South Sudan, and it issued a new travel warning for Americans in that region in the face of “ongoing political and social unrest.”

Americans in South Sudan are advised to “depart immediately,” the U.S. Embassy tweeted from the capital, Juba, where gunfire and mortar use have been reported.   Continue reading “US to evacuate South Sudan embassy, issues travel warning”

The New American – by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.

Negotiators in Washington, D.C. are working on a trade pact this week, and it isn’t the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Representatives from the United States and the European Union are hammering out the details of a purported trade pact called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Despite its name, this bundle of commercial compromises has little to do with trade and a lot to do with the slow transfer of sovereignty to bodies of globalists outside the United States.   Continue reading “U.S.-EU Trade Pact Accelerates Economic and Political Integration”

Yahoo Sports – by Stephen Collinson

Washington (AFP) – President Barack Obama Tuesday named two openly gay sports stars to his delegation to the Winter Olympics, sending a pointed message of diversity to Russia amid a furor over its law targeting homosexuals.

Obama chose tennis legend Billie Jean King and women’s ice hockey silver medalist Caitlin Cahow for the US delegation to the Sochi Olympics which begin on February 7.   Continue reading “Obama sends signal to Russia with gay stars in Olympic delegation”