by Declan McCullagh
CNET.com
June 15, 2013 4:39 PM PDT

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler's disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.

The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii "wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president."

There are serious "constitutional problems" with this approach, said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated warrantless wiretapping cases. "It epitomizes the problem of secret laws."

The NSA yesterday declined to comment to CNET. A representative said Nadler was not immediately available. (This is unrelated to last week's disclosure that the NSA is currently collecting records of the metadata of all domestic Verizon calls, but not the actual contents of the conversations.)...

June 12th, 2013
06:32 PM ET

CNN Political Unit

by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY)
June 12, 2013
FoxNews.com

In the United States, we are supposed to have a government that is limited with its parameters established by our Constitution. This notion that the federal government can monitor everyone’s phone data is a major departure from how Americans have traditionally viewed the role of government.

If this is acceptable practice, as the White House and many in both parties now say it is, then there are literally no constitutional protections that can be guaranteed anymore to citizens.
In the name of security, say our leaders, the Constitution has become negotiable.

This is what the White House is saying when it defends the National Security Agency’s gathering of Verizon’s client data en masse, or what President Obama calls a “modest encroachment” on our rights, as he assures us that “Nobody is listening to your phone calls.”

Perhaps he can also assure us that nobody at the Internal Revenue Service is targeting political dissidents.

Perhaps he can assure us that nobody at the Justice Department is seizing reporters’ phone records.

Sorry, Mr. President, but “trust me” is not good enough.

President Obama says, “You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.” But we couldn’t have 100 percent security even if we turned America into a total police state—something too many seem eager for—because there’s no such thing as a risk free society.

When balancing liberty against security, the American tradition has always been to err on the side of liberty. Targeting potential terror suspects by obtaining a warrant is an “inconvenience” the Founders’ intentionally put upon the government in order to protect the privacy of citizens.
Now this president turns this core constitutional principle on its head.

There are also Republicans who seem to want more power for government and less for citizens. One senator, a particularly zealous defender of the surveillance state, has said that he would be fine with “censoring the mail” if “necessary” to keep us safe.

This senator would open citizens’ mail, detain them indefinitely if he decided they were dangerous, claw his way through their trash, peek in their bedrooms if he decided they were an enemy, and then if they dared to ask for a lawyer, he would bark: "Shut up! You don’t get a lawyer!"

Such arrogance and tone deafness! 

A government as omnipotent as this may be powerful enough to spy on all of its citizens all of the time, but doesn’t seem to be able to even stop terrorists like the Boston Marathon bombers and the “underwear bomber” – both of whom set off warnings before they were noticed.

Instead of monitoring billions of phone calls and spying on law-abiding Americans, perhaps we should have been done more targeted monitoring of the Boston bombing suspects, one of whom traveling to Chechnya, largely undetected.

Clutching desperately for relevance, some Republican Senators point wildly at the Boston Marathon bombing and grit out, "See, I told you so!  America is too part of the battlefield.”

Duh! No one is arguing that our enemies won’t attack us here and that we shouldn't defend ourselves. Constitutionalists simply argue that we can defend the homeland and the Bill of Rights simultaneously, and to relinquish concrete liberties for an illusive security is a fool's errand.

I can remember not so long ago, when the war caucus—and we don’t need to name any names—were all saying “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.”

Now, they are saying we have to give up our liberties to fight them here? Who is winning this battle?

Regardless, anytime we give up our liberty—we lose.

National security is the federal government’s top priority. We have always balanced liberty with common sense security precautions. There are unquestionably exceptions to every rule.

But those who continue to defend the National Security Agency’s actions are essentially saying that something that would be controversial even as an exception—blanket phone trolling by the government—is now the new rule. They are saying it’s OK to spy on citizens’ phone data without a warrant, not just one time or a few times, but all the time.

They are saying that suspending the Bill of Rights is now the new normal. 

In my world, the Constitution still applies.

Republican Rand Paul represents Kentucky in the United States Senate.

By Shaun Waterman
The Washington Times
Friday, June 7, 2013

The National Security Agency’s collection of phone data from all of Verizon’s U.S. customers is just the “tip of the iceberg,” says a former NSA official who estimates the agency has data on as many as 20 trillion phone calls and emails by U.S. citizens.

William Binney, an award-winning mathematician and noted NSA whistleblower, says the collection dates back to when the super-secret agency began domestic surveillance after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I believe they’ve been collecting data about all domestic calls since October 2001,” said Mr. Binney, who worked at NSA for more than 30 years. “That’s more than a billion calls a day.”

He called his figures “back of the envelope” estimates, adding that they include emails as well as telephone calls.

Mr. Binney, who left the agency in October 2001, said the data were collected under a highly classified NSA program code-named “Stellar Wind,” which was part of the warrantless domestic wiretapping effort — the Terrorist Surveillance Program — launched on orders from President George W. Bush.

The Terrorist Surveillance Program was revealed by The New York Times in 2005, but officials said it only monitored calls between Americans and suspected terrorists abroad. The Bush administration said it based the program’s legal authority on the president’s powers as commander-in-chief.

Congress subsequently amended the law governing wiretapping by spy agencies — the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — to provide legislative authority for the program and require supervision by the special secret court the 1978 act established.

Britain’s Guardian newspaper posted online late Wednesday a copy of the “Top Secret” FISA court order directing telecommunications giant Verizon to hand over “metadata” about every call made or received by all of its customers in the United States. Such metadata include the calling and receiving phone numbers, the time of day and length of the call, and the whereabouts of the two parties.

Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian (UK)
Friday 7 June 2013

A slide depicting the top-secret PRISM program

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers.

Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

In a statement, Google said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

Several senior tech executives insisted that they had no knowledge of PRISM or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a program. "If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge," one said.

An Apple spokesman said it had "never heard" of PRISM.

The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012.

The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US...

by James Hall
May 29, 2013

The lingering questions about the nature of the Google – NSA relationship, jeopardize business confidence in the use of their services and ad programs. The persistent claims that Google data integration is coordinated with the NSA and that the Utah Data Center has linkage with the Google server network, gains traction when the government refuses public disclosure of the full historical relationship.

Once online, the data lives eternally. Act accordingly.

By Barnini Chakraborty
Published May 22, 2013
FoxNews.com

WASHINGTON –  Lois Lerner, the director of the IRS division that singled out conservative groups, is expected to invoke the Fifth Amendment Wednesday when she appears before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Fox News has learned.

That means Lerner, head of the exempt organizations division, probably won’t answer any questions on what she knew about IRS agents going after Tea Party-related groups. That also means she probably won’t say why she sat on the information for so long before it became public.

Lerner’s attorney, William Taylor III, asked committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., in a letter if she could skip Wednesday’s hearing since she would be pleading the Fifth.

Taylor argued in the letter that forcing Lerner to appear “would have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her.” 

Late Tuesday, the House oversight committee released a statement saying Lerner was still under subpoena and would be required to appear in the morning. 

“Chairman Issa remains hopeful that she will ultimately decide to testify tomorrow about her knowledge of outrageous IRS targeting of Americans for their political beliefs,” committee spokesman Ali Ahmad said in a statement. 

Other former or outgoing IRS officials have already testified, and will continue to give their testimony on Wednesday. But Lerner, who is the official who first acknowledged the IRS program, has faced significant scrutiny. 

Since the Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation into the IRS scandal and the House committee indicated it would question Lerner about why she provided incomplete information to the committee at least four times last year, Taylor wrote that his client would be invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. 

Sunday, May 19, 2013
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) In the face of the outrageous IRS intimidation scandal now sweeping across America, gun control advocates are changing their tune. All of a sudden, the idea that the federal government could engage in tyranny against the People of America is no longer a "conspiracy theory." It's historical fact right in your face thanks to all the recent scandals now bursting onto the scene: IRS intimidation, secret targeting of non-profit groups for possible "thought crimes," the Department of Justice seizing AP phone records and so on.

Just which liberals are changing their minds on all this? Piers Morgan, for starters. The man who once called Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America a "very stupid man" on live national television is suddenly reversing course. Here's what Morgan now says in the wake of the IRS intimidation scandal:

"I've had some of the pro-gun lobbyists on here saying to me, well the reason we need to be armed is because of tyranny from our own government, and I've always laughed at them. I've always said don't be so ridiculous. Your government won't turn itself on you. But actually when you look at this [IRS scandal]... actually this is vaguely tyrannical behavior by the American government. I think what the IRS did is bordering on tyrannical behavior, I think what the Department of Justice has done to the Associated Press is bordering on tyrannical behavior."...

By Drew Prindle
May 16, 2013
DigitalTrends.com

You don’t have to be a secret agent or a notorious hacktivist to care about anonymity. Even regular Joes like you and I have plenty of good reasons to care about the privacy and security of our online activity. Pretty soon, just about everything we do on the Web will be logged, analyzed, and used for things outside of our control. In a lot of ways, it’s already happening – but that’s not to say there’s nothing you can do about it.

This guide will help you learn ways to anonymize the majority of your Internet-based communications and activities. But before we get started, it should go without saying that if you’re trying to stay anonymous online, you shouldn’t use your real name when creating any account and shouldn’t sign in with any profile that has your personal information connected to it (ie, Google, Facebook, Twitter). We’ve left out the obvious stuff here and instead focused on offering a quick summary of ways that you can keep your identity and location hidden while browsing, communicating, and downloading and transferring files.

The best thing you can do to stay anonymous online is to hide your IP address. This is the easiest way to trace your online activity back to you. If someone knows your IP address, they can easily determine the geographic location of the server that hosts that address and get a rough idea of where you’re located. Broadly speaking, there are three ways to obscure your IP address and hide your location:

1. Use a proxy server. If you want all of your online activity to be anonymized, the best way to do it is to pretend to be someone else. This is basically what a proxy server does: it routes your connection through a different server so your IP address isn’t so easy to track down. There are hundreds of free proxies out there, and finding a good one is just a matter of searching. Most major browsers offer proxy server extensions that can be activated in just one click
2. Use a Virtual Private Network (VPN). For most intents and purposes, a VPN obscures your IP address just as well as a proxy does – and in some cases even better. They work differently, but achieve the same result. Essentially, a VPN is a private network that uses a public network (usually the Internet) to connect remote sites or users together. So, if I were to log into Digital Trends’ VPN, anyone looking at my IP address would think I’m in New York when I’m actually on the West Coast. Here’s a list of good VPN services to get you started.
3. Use TOR. Short for The Onion Router, TOR is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Browsing with TOR is a lot like simultaneously using hundreds of different proxies that are randomized periodically. But it’s a lot more than just a secure browser. We won’t get into the details here, but you should definitely check out its site if you’re concerned about anonymity.  

Using proxies, VPNs, and TOR will obscure your IP address from prying eyes, but sending emails presents a different anonymity challenge. Let’s say you want to send somebody an email, but you don’t want them to know your email address. Generally speaking, there are two ways to go about this:

1. Use an alias. An alias is essentially a forwarding address. When you send mail through an alias, the recipient will only see your forwarding address, and not your real email. Since all mail is forwarded to your regular inbox, this method will keep your real email address secret, but it will not, however, keep you from being spammed like crazy.
2. Use a disposable email account. This can be done in two ways: either you can just create a new email account with a fake name and use it for the duration of your needs, or you can use a disposable email service. These services work by creating a temporary forwarding address that is deleted after a certain amount of time, so they’re great for signing up for stuff on sites you don’t trust and keeping your inbox from being flooded with spam.

Also, using a VPN and communicating through an anonymized email address will keep your identity hidden, but it still leaves open the possibility of your emails being intercepted through a man-in-the-middle scheme. To avoid this, you can encrypt your emails before you send them. Here’s how:

• Use HTTPS in your Web-based email client. This will add SSL/TLS encryption to all of your Web-based communications. It’s not bulletproof, but it definitely helps. Just make sure the URL of your webmail has an S (for Secure) after the HTTP. Gmail users, for example could use https://mail.google.com. We also recommend using the HTTPS Everywhere extension. 
• Use PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) software. We won’t go into great detail on how to install/use PGP, but you might want to consider looking into it. While using HTTPS will encrypt your data on a network level , PGP software will encrypt the actual files themselves. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it. 

In addition to email, you might want to encrypt any instant messaging you do for the same reasons. We recommend the following two chat clients:

• TOR chat: a lightweight and easy-to-use chat client that uses TOR’s location hiding services. It uses SSL/TLS encryption.
• Cryptocat: a Web-based chat client that uses the AES-256 encryption standard, which is extremely hard to break. It also supports group chats, so its perfect for all those top-secret world domination meetings you have with your buddies.

Getting files from the Internet is easy, but the sender has access to your IP address when you download files. In the case of BitTorrent, there are thousands of different peers that can see your IP address at any given moment, which means downloading is one of the least anonymous things you can do on the Web. However, if done correctly, it is possible to download and share files while keeping your IP address and identity concealed.

• If you’re downloading directly form a file hosting site like MediaFire or Mega, you can just use a proxy or VPN to obscure your IP. 
• If you’re using BitTorrent to download stuff, using a proxy or VPN will keep your identity hidden, but rather than just using any old service, we recommend using BT Guard. At its core, BT Guard is exactly the same as any other VPN or proxy service with the one difference being that the site is designed specifically for heavy BitTorrent users. Don’t worry about DMCA violation notices you might elicit – BT Guard just ignores them for you.

This tutorial touches on a lot but is by no means comprehensive. If you have any good tips or tricks for staying anonymous online, we encourage you to share them in the comments.

By Geoff Duncan
May 14, 2013
DigitalTrends.com

Major password breaches are so common they’re becoming like storms and traffic jams: One day you hear about tens of thousands of Twitter users compromised or several million at LinkedIn, the next it might be upwards of 50 million at Evernote or LivingSocial.

But despite their fallibility, passwords won’t be replaced any time soon. Two-factor authentication technologies using our mobile devices and even biometrics can help keep us secure, but so far none are foolproof, and precious few are even convenient.

How can we make our passwords more hack-resistant and manage all the passwords we need?

Most attackers don’t break passwords by going to Gmail or Facebook and making guesses; that’s slow, and most services block access after a few failed attempts. However, if attackers steal account data through a security hole, they can make thousands, millions, or even billions of guesses per second offline using their own computers. If that sounds outlandish, consider that Stricture Consulting Group last year showed off a small computer cluster made from off-the-shelf components that could test as many as 350 billion passwords per second. Some password-cracking operations harness hundreds (or thousands) of computers via botnets or legitimate cloud-computing platforms, while others just use everyday PCs. They’re fast too.

The quality of a password doesn’t matter if a service stores your password as plain text and an attacker steals it. (Don’t laugh: it happens.) If passwords are encrypted, however, size and randomness are two factors that determine a password’s strength or entropy — basically, a measure of the possible combinations a password can have.

“The higher the entropy, the longer it will take, on average, for a brute-force attack to succeed,” noted Joe Kissel, author of the ebook Take Control of Your Passwords. So, all things being equal, you want a high-entropy password.”

The benefit of a password’s size is obvious: More characters means more possible combinations. The benefit of randomness is less subtle. A password like YesThisIsMyGreatNewRandomPassphrase wins points for size — 36 characters! — but loses points for randomness, since it’s just upper- and lower-case letters. (It’s also less random because it’s in English: Attackers try to take advantage of common letter patterns.)

Something like *5FRRcr62{d~OkP!{AKaxzevQZb6L{~S1F~b would be more secure — it’s both big and highly random. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible for most people to remember…but it’s easy for a computer to remember.

There’s no magic formula for making passwords both very strong and easy to remember. However, here are some ideas:...

And it asked what books people were reading.

A POLITICO review of documents from 11 tea party and conservative groups that the IRS scrutinized in 2012 shows the agency wanted to know everything — in some cases, it even seemed curious what members were thinking. The review included interviews with groups or their representatives from Hawaii, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere.

The long-awaited Treasury Department inspector general report released Tuesday says the agency itself decided some of its questions to conservative groups were way over the line — especially the one about donors.

The report shows that top IRS officials put a stop to some of the questions in early 2012, including the ones that asked tea party groups who their donors were, what issues were important to them and whether their top officers ever planned to run for office. And they told the investigators they planned to destroy the donor lists that had already been sent in.

But interviews with members of the groups paint a more dramatic picture than the bland language of the report, which just says the IRS “requested irrelevant (unnecessary) information because of a lack of managerial review, at all levels, of questions before they were sent to organizations seeking tax-exempt status.”

“They were asking for a U-Haul truck’s worth of information,” said Toby Marie Walker, the president of the Waco Tea Party.

Published May 13, 2013
FoxNews.com

An IRS campaign to apply additional scrutiny to conservative groups went beyond targeting "Tea Party" and "patriot" groups to include those focused on government spending, the Constitution and several other broad areas. 

The additional guidelines created by the agency were part of a timeline, obtained by Fox News, from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which is looking into the controversial IRS practice. IRS officials apologized Friday for the scrutiny, but new information suggests senior leaders were apprised of the effort as early as 2011 despite public denials from the top. 

Republican lawmakers have vowed to investigate and hold hearings, calling the revelations deeply troubling. 

"The conclusion that the IRS came to is that they did have agents who were engaged in intimidation of political groups," Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers told "Fox News Sunday." "I don't care if you're a conservative, a liberal, a Democrat or a Republican, this should send a chill up your spine. It needs to have a full investigation." 

The internal IG timeline shows a unit in the agency was looking at Tea Party and "patriot" groups dating back to early 2010. But it shows that list of criteria drastically expanding by the time a June 2011 briefing was held. It then included groups focused on government spending, government debt, taxes, and education on ways to "make America a better place to live." It even flagged groups whose file included criticism of "how the country is being run." 

By early 2012, the criteria were updated to include organizations involved in "limiting/expanding government," education on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and social economic reform. 

Taken together, the findings of the IG and the initial admissions by the IRS Friday are fueling complaints from Republicans on Capitol Hill. 

Evidence that the IRS was flagging such groups in 2011 was included in a draft inspector general's report obtained Saturday by Fox News and other news organizations and expected to be released in full later this week...

By Juliet Eilperin, Published: May 12, 2013 at 2:30 pm
Washington Post

At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials targeted nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency’s inspector general.

The documents, obtained by The Washington Post  from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that on June 29, 2011, IRS staffers held a briefing with senior agency official Lois G. Lerner in which they described giving special attention to instances where “statements in the case file criticize how the country is being run.” Lerner, who  oversees tax-exempt groups for the agency, raised objections and the agency revised its criteria a week later.

But six months later, the IRS applied a new political test to groups that applied for tax-exempt status as “social welfare” groups, the document says. On Jan. 15, 2012 the agency decided to target “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement.,” according to the appendix in the IG report, which was requested by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and has yet to be released.

The new revelations are likely to intensify criticism of the IRS, which has been under fire since agency officials acknowledged they had deliberately targeted groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their name for heightened scrutiny.

During an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) described the practice as “absolutely chilling” and called on President Obama to condemn the effort.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday he’s not satisfied with the Obama administration’s handling of the controversy. The IG report was “leaked by the IRS. to try to spin the output,” Issa said, and lawmakers now need to go through the full report so they can “see what the instituted changes need to be to make this not happen again...

by Gary North
April 18, 2013

Kim Dotcom really is his name these days. He had it legally changed.

The federal government shut down his enormously profitable file-sharing business in 2011. It won’t shut down his latest version of file-sharing.

His new company, Mega, offers 100% encryption. His company can’t crack it. The U.S. government can’t crack it — not at a price it can afford, anyway.

So people can post movies, songs, or anything else on his site. You get 50 megabytes of free storage to start out.

His lawyers can now say this: “Our company will cooperate with the governments of the world. But, sorry, we have no idea what people are putting into their accounts.”

The federal government opened a gigantic can of worms when it did Hollywood’s bidding and shut him down. It made him mad. He decided to get revenge.

The federal government can track some kinds of digits. It cannot track all of them.

As people seek privacy, hackers like Dotcom will sell it to a few major players, and give it away for free to everyone else.

The days of easy tracking of data are coming to an end. People who don’t really care to defend their privacy will remain vulnerable to government intrusion. Those who decide they will no longer remain sitting ducks will not have to.

There is a new generation of haves and have-nots coming into existence: those who have privacy and those who do not.

James Hall – April 17, 2013

Money is supposed to be a store of value. After the recent collapse in the dollar convertible price of Bitcoins, the inevitable scrutiny in the viability of the monetary system is warranted.

The official description of Bitcoin states: Bitcoin is an experimental, decentralized digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority managing transactions and issuing money carried out collectively by the network. Purported myths and ground rules on how the alternative currency operates, provides calculated reading. Whether this accounting system can or would be accepted as a credible medium of exchange on any large scale is certainly an open question. 

The need for an alternative currency to fiat debt created tender is apparent. However, establishing faith and acceptance in a competing and digital method of payment for transactions is almost inconceivable to the average consumer.

The Business Insider in Bitcoin Is Changing The World provides an analysis and a risk warning report.

"Bitcoin’s inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, is a mysterious hacker (or a group of hackers) who created it in 2009 and disappeared from the internet some time in 2010.

Reddit, a social-media site, and WordPress, which provides web hosting and software for bloggers. The appeal for merchants is strong. Firms such as BitPay offer spot-price conversion into dollars. Fees are typically far less than those charged by credit-card companies or banks, particularly for orders from abroad. And Bitcoin transactions cannot be reversed, so frauds cannot leave retailers out of pocket.

Yet for Bitcoins to go mainstream much has to happen, says Fred Ehrsam, the co-developer of Coinbase, a Californian Bitcoin exchange and "wallet service", where users can store their digital fortune. Several Bitcoin exchanges have suffered thefts and crashes over the past two years.

But the real threat is competition. Bitcoin-boosters like to point out that, unlike fiat money, new Bitcoins cannot be created at whim. That is true, but a new digital currency can be. Alternatives are already in development. Litecoin, a Bitcoin clone, is one.

A less nerdy alternative is Ripple."

Wow . . . the innovative advantage for merchant acceptance might make one think that Amazon will be jumping into the cauldron and become the big daddy digital vender. Nonetheless, the spike and fall that has the appearance of a Bitcoin bubble will certainly give pause to any large retailer that is flirting with accepting payment through an exchange.

The implication in the article, Why Bitcoin crashed, and how Ripple might avoid the same fate, sets out the risks involved.

"That single point of failure is the most popular Bitcoin currency exchange, Mt Gox. There are other exchanges, but the bulk of Bitcoin trading happens there. Mt Gox claims to have been hit over the last couple weeks’ mania by the twin ills of denial-of-service attacks and sudden, excessive popularity, both of which amount to the same thing: Mt Gox’s systems falling over. The operation (which is based in Japan) has also shut down its own service at least once in an attempt to "cool down" the market.

And every time that has happened, a panic sell-off has been the result. That’s not surprising: Mt Gox’s status as the best-known exchange has led it to become the main data source for most of the Bitcoin rate visualizations out there, so when Mt.Gox goes down it affects visibility for a lot of people. And when people can’t see what’s going on, they panic, find another exchange and sell, sell, sell. Same goes for the biggest exchange unilaterally deciding to cool down the market – hardly a sign of viability."

If the Bitcoin crash was simply a function of clearing house settlement failure, the claim that Bitcoins retain the properties of money evaporates. Blaming the breakdown on an exchange, illustrates that Bitcoins have more in common with the properties of a stock or commodity, than a hard currency.

The video, Bitcoin Mania! DDoS Attacks & Phishing Scams, reports on the speculative nature of a virtual currency that operates in the etherzone of the cyber world.

The Fierce Markets site announces Jeff Berwick’s effort, Here come the Bitcoin ATMs.

"Somewhat like a traditional ATM, says Berwick. Instead of connecting to your bank account, the software he and his team have developed is installed on an ATM and converts cash to Bitcoins stored in a Bitcoin wallet or extracts cash based on what's stored in your personal Bitcoin account."

Bitcoin convertibility back into a legal tender paper currency might go a long way to establish a workable alternative to using the bankster banking system. However, this digital currency is only as solid as the confidence level of users to store wealth in a medium that promises the return of capital or its equivalent value.

For now, Bitcoins has all the trappings of a speculative scheme to harvest profits, explained in the article, Bitcoin Miners Are Racking Up $150,000 A Day In Power Consumption Alone.

"Bitcoins are "mined" by unlocking blocks of data that "produce a particular pattern when the Bitcoin ‘hash’ algorithm is applied to the data."

Blockchain.info, which tracks Bitcoin-related data, estimates that miners are generating $470,000 in Bitcoin-related revenue per day. In fact, due to the recent interest in the virtual currency and its popularity, operating margins for Bitcoin miners are close to record highs."

Such practices do not conform to the properties required to qualify as money. It would seem to describe Bitcoins as an alternative accounting organism to the central banking system. In that regard and goal, the merits of instituting a functioning and reliable digital currency, should be encouraged. Nevertheless, the lack of market stability in Bitcoin value convertibility dooms this experiment in the absence of manipulative swings in currency quotations.

The destructive consequences of floating currency rates have plagued consumers and savers alike for decades. The desired objective is a decentralized monetary system, digital or coinage that has a fixed convertibility and stable purchasing value.

Published April 11, 2013
FoxNews.com

The Internal Revenue Service believes it doesn’t need permission to root through emails, texts or other forms of electronic correspondence, according to recently released internal agency documents.

The documents, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union, reveal that tax department agents have been operating under the assumption that they can bypass warrants. The ACLU claims this would in turn violate the Fourth Amendment. 

According to a 2009 IRS employee handbook, though, the tax agency said the Fourth Amendment does not protect emails because Internet users don’t “have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.”

A lawyer for the agency reiterated the policy in 2010. And the current online version of the IRS manual says that no warrant is required for emails that are stored by an Internet storage provider for more than 180 days.

"This is an affront not only to our system of checks and balances, but also to our fundamental right to privacy," Colorado Democratic Sen. Mark Udall said in a statement Thursday, adding that he wants Congress to overhaul the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News
April 6, 2013

Psilocybin is a hallucinogenic chemical in magic mushrooms

'Absurd' laws dealing with magic mushrooms, ecstasy and cannabis are hindering medical research, according to a former government drugs adviser.

Prof David Nutt says he has funding to research the use of the chemical psilocybin - found in fungi known as "magic mushrooms" to treat depression.

But he says "insane" regulations mean he cannot get hold of the drug.

The Home Office said there was "no evidence" that regulations were a barrier to research.

It is not the first time Prof Nutt has been at odds with government policy.

He was sacked as an adviser over views that ecstasy and LSD were less harmful than alcohol.

Psilocybin is illegal in the UK and is a Class A drug.

Earlier research at Imperial College London showed that injections of psilocybin could calm a region of the brain which is overactive in depression.

The group is now trying to conduct a clinical trial to test psilocybin as a treatment.

Stumbling block

The UK's Medical Research Council has given the lab a £550,000 grant to test the idea - in 30 patients who have not responded to at least two other therapies. They have also been given ethical approval.

However, there are more stringent regulations for testing the drug as a treatment than in earlier experiments. As a potential medicine it must meet Good Manufacturing Practice requirements set out by the EU.

"It hasn't started yet because the big problem is getting hold of the drug," said Prof Nutt. He said finding a company to provide a clinical-grade psilocybin had "yet proved impossible" as none was prepared to "go through the regulatory hoops"...

By Madison Gray March 28, 2013 - Time.com

If you’ve ever worried about whether the U.S. Constitution protects you from a dog’s nose, there’s no need to fret: even a canine cop needs a warrant to sniff your front porch.

The Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision on Tuesday that a police drug-sniffing dog picking up a scent outside of your home still constitutes a search for which law enforcement would have to obtain a warrant.  The ruling may limit how police use animals‘ sensitive noses to detect illicit substances on private property.

The justices made their decision after hearing arguments in Florida v. Jardines, in which Franky, a Miami-Dade police dog, searched for marijuana in the home of Joelis Jardines. Jardines’ front door was closed and no search warrant had been issued. But when the chocolate labrador got a good enough whiff, he sat down at the front door, indicating that he smelled pot. Police felt that was good enough to obtain a warrant, and they arrested Jardines with more than $700,000 worth of marijuana.

In his trial, Jardines’s attorney argued that Franky’s sniff was an unreasonable search without probable cause under the Fourth Amendment, which made the search warrant invalid. Jardines’ motion was successful, but a Florida appellate court disagreed, saying that the sniff wasn’t an unconstitutional search.

But Jardines lawyers would not relent, arguing that because Franky smelled the plants outside the house, it was a violation of the Fourth Amendment protection. The case bounced between courts for years before landing in Florida’s Supreme Court, which eventually took Jardine’s side and ruled that the sniff was an “unreasonable government intrusion into the sanctity of the home.”

By Ryan Gallagher
Slate.com
Tuesday, March 26, 2013, at 4:58 PM

Despite the pervasiveness of law enforcement surveillance of digital communication, the FBI still has a difficult time monitoring Gmail, Google Voice, and Dropbox in real time. But that may change soon, because the bureau says it has made gaining more powers to wiretap all forms of Internet conversation and cloud storage a “top priority” this year.

Last week, during a talk for the American Bar Association in Washington, D.C., FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann discussed some of the pressing surveillance and national security issues facing the bureau. He gave a few updates on the FBI’s efforts to address what it calls the “going dark” problem—how the rise in popularity of email and social networks has stifled its ability to monitor communications as they are being transmitted. It’s no secret that under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the feds can easily obtain archive copies of emails. When it comes to spying on emails or Gchat in real time, however, it’s a different story.

By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 03:17 GMT, 17 March 2013 | UPDATED: 04:30 GMT, 17 March 2013

Let the opposition begin.

Written by Gary North on March 8, 2013

Read more: http://teapartyeconomist.com/2013/03/08/dumb-and-dumber-mccain-and-graham-attack-rand-pauls-filibuster/#ixzz2N79Qf8qU

New York Magazine ^ | 3/7/2013 | Jonathan Chait

John McCain, understandably distraught to see most of his party suddenly embracing the libertarian view of drone warfare, took to the Senate floor to pour contempt on Rand Paul. What particularly raised McCain’s ire was Paul’s use of an extreme hypothetical case: the government murdering Jane Fonda during her visit to North Vietnam. Sneered McCain:

To allege that the United States of America, our government, would drop a drone hellfire missile on Jane Fonda — that brings the conversation from a serious discussion of policy to the realm of the ridiculous.

Of course it’s ridiculous. This is one way of understanding the point of civil liberties. They're designed to prevent the government from doing ridiculous things. If your view is that we’d never do terrible things like that because we’re the United States of America, then you don’t need civil liberties. But the whole construction of the Constitution is premised on the possibility that elected officials might abuse their power.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today, which McCain quoted in his speech, attempting to allay Paul’s fear but serving only to spread confusion:

Calm down, Senator. Mr. Holder is right, even if he doesn't explain the law very well. The U.S. government cannot randomly target American citizens on U.S. soil or anywhere else. What it can do under the laws of war is target an "enemy combatant" anywhere at anytime, including on U.S. soil. This includes a U.S. citizen who is also an enemy combatant. The President can designate such a combatant if he belongs to an entity—a government, say, or a terrorist network like al Qaeda—that has taken up arms against the United States as part of an internationally recognized armed conflict. That does not include Hanoi Jane.

Right. The government can’t just go assassinating American citizens. There’s an intermediate step of designating them an enemy combatant. The concern is that a president might be tempted to misuse the power of declaring somebody an enemy combatant.

I’m willing to be persuaded that a process like this could be designed. But the Journal seems to assume that the declaration of enemy-combatant status is tantamount to the real thing.

In 1972, Jane Fonda traveled to North Vietnam for a propaganda mission, and even posed on an anti-aircraft battery. You could at least argue that she “belonged to an entity” that was at war with the United States. Now, Richard Nixon never tried to assassinate Jane Fonda, in part because she was a powerful propaganda weapon for his policies. He did order the firebombing of the Brookings Institution, though his henchmen didn’t carry it out, probably in part because they knew it was illegal. Imagining a president who orders a bombing of the Brookings Institution is even more absurd than imagining a president who orders the murder of Jane Fonda. The absurdity of the case is precisely its value...

Editor's note: Andrew Keen is a British-American entrepreneur, professional skeptic and the author of "The Cult of the Amateur" and "Digital Vertigo." Follow Andrew Keen on Twitter.

(CNN) -- It's hard to engineer this kind of creepy serendipity. Earlier this week, European Union data watchdogs, fighting to protect our privacy in an age of big data, put pressure on Google over the privacy of user information.

Just 48 hours later, Google potentially struck a new blow against privacy when it posted a video preview of its new "Glass" technology -- high-tech spectacles featuring a revolutionary digital interface that enable its wearers to not only view the world through Google's eyes but also automatically photograph all that they see.

"How strange is that!" CNN's Erin Burnett exclaimed after a contemplating a "world seen through Google Glasses".

Strange indeed. But these glasses, a kind of digital surrogate for our eyes, are strange in a creepy, Hitchcockian, "Rear Window" sort of way. Or the same way that Big Brother's ubiquitous cameras were strange in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty Four." And in the same way that a future in which "promethean" data companies like Google rule the world now appears strange.

The coincidental timing of last week's EU and Google announcements may have been unintentional, but it sure is ominous.

Read related: How it will feel to wear Google Glass

The EU is concerned about the way in which Google has, since last March, been pooling the data of its individual users across its popular services like search, Gmail, Google+ and YouTube in order to bundle them up for advertisers.

Its anxiety over this aggregation of our personal information is twofold. Firstly, Google has done little, if anything, to inform users of this unilateral change. Secondly, Google hasn't offered users a way of opting out.

Google insists its privacy policies respect European laws and simply help enhance user experiences. But in the eyes of the EU, those of us using products like YouTube, Gmail or Google+ are being, to borrow a Microsoft coined neologism, "Scroogled" by Google's new privacy policy.

Last October, EU watchdogs gave Google four months to revise this policy. But last week, after nothing appeared to have changed, Brussels raised its warning a bureaucratic notch, promising to take action against Google by the summer...