Igeldard

Recent comments from prolific National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden have caused alarm in the intelligence community that he may defect to China, reports ABC.

Snowden recently said China was under a tidal wave of U.S. cyber war, suffering "hundreds" of successful hacking attempts on everything from universities to public officials.

Snowden also disclosed that the U.S. has conducted at least 61,000 cyber operations globally.

"We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one," he told the South China Post.

The response from officials was immediate.

"I think if a foreign government learned everything that was in Edward Snowden's brain, they would have a good window into the way we collect signals intelligence… He had access to highly classified information," Jeremy Bash, former CIA and Pentagon Chief of Staff, told ABC.

"He could do tremendous damage."

It goes without saying that Snowden's intimate knowledge of the NSA would be very useful to the Chinese.

Another senior intelligence official told ABC that Snowden defecting was a "very legitimate" concern. 

Although, Snowden's not quite saying something new. Chinese officials have been complaining for quite some time that the U.S. was attacking them in cyberspace.

There's also section of the NSA with the explicit mission of hacking into Chinese networks. Apparently they've been pretty successful too.

According to a Foreign Policy report, the U.S. government pretty much knows everything it needs to know about the makeup of China's Communist Party and it's growing military.

Join the conversation about this story »

They’re right, it does. Via Washington Times: Afghanistan’s parliament has rejected a measure that would have barred men from marrying girls younger than 16, saying the proposal ran counter to Islamic ideology. The measure also would have banned “baad, [the] traditional practice of buying or selling women to settle disputes,” and outlawed criminal charges being [...]

With no ‘good’ side to support, Michael Walzer says the US should increase humanitarian aid rather than intervene militarily

Excerpted from WASHINGTON TIMES

Afghanistan’s parliament has rejected a measure that would have barred men from marrying girls younger than 16, saying the proposal ran counter to Islamic ideology.

The measure also would have banned “baad, [the] traditional practice of buying or selling women to settle disputes,” and outlawed criminal charges being imposed on rape victims, Breitbart reported. Rape victims in Afghanistan often are charged with fornication or adultery.

President Hamid Karzai reportedly supported the measures, but opponents said they “violate[d] Islamic principles,” Breitbart reported.

The failure of parliament to act in accordance with Mr. Karzai highlights a deep rift among the nation’s politicians. And it comes at a time when elections are set for April 2014 for a new president.

There is “a rift between conservative and more secular members of the community,” Sky News reported.

The feds indicted and prosecuted Martha Stewart for lying to federal investigators about a stock trade. They also indicted baseball star Roger Clemens for supposedly lying to Congress about drug abuse.

So, the obvious question arises: Why no perjury indictment against Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr.

Consider the following testimony that Clapper gave to Congress last March:

Senator Ron Wyden: Does the N.S.A. collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

Clapper: No, sir. Not wittingly.

In light of the revelations regarding the super-secret NSA surveillance scheme on the American people, which is no longer super-secret, what other conclusion can be drawn than that Clapper knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally lied to Congress?

In fact, he’s even pretty much confessed that he lied. According to the New York Times, “In an interview on Sunday with NBC News, Mr. Clapper acknowledged that his answer had been problematic, calling it ‘the least untruthful answer he could give.’”

So, why no perjury indictment? Why no indictment for lying to Congress in an official hearing? Why no indictment for obstruction of justice? Why not the same treatment for Clapper that the feds meted out to private American citizens Martha Stewart and Roger Clemens?

After all, let’s not forget the words of David Kelley, the U.S. Attorney who prosecuted Martha Stewart for lying to federal investigators about a stock trade: “The word is — beware — and don’t engage in this type of conduct because it won’t be tolerated.”

Really? Why then is such conduct being tolerated in the case of Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr.?

Or recall the words of federal prosecutor Courtney Saleski in the Roger Clemens trial: “He did that at the expense of our Congress. He threw sand in their eyes. He stole the truth from them.”

Isn’t that what Clapper did to Congress when he knowingly lied to them about whether the NSA was collecting data on millions of American citizens?

One might say, “But Jacob, he was lying to protect ‘national security.’”

My answer: So what? Since when is that a defense to a perjury charge? Sure, it might work to reduce his sentence after he’s convicted but nowhere does the law recognize the protection of “national security” to be a defense to a charge of perjury for, for that matter, murder, robbery, burglary, or any other crime.

I’ll tell you why they’re not indicting James R. Clapper, Jr. It’s because he is a high official in what has effectively become the national-security branch of the U.S. government, a branch that consists of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. For all practical purposes, officials in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches aren’t about to enforce their perjury laws against what they know has grown into the most powerful of the four branches of the federal government.

 

 

 

The post Why No Perjury Indictment for Clapper? appeared first on The Future of Freedom Foundation.

The NSA takes such great quantities of data legally that it has built a system to manage it.

A week on from the revelations in the Guardian and Washington Post about the PRISM revelations, and the dust is settling. The tech companies have issued their denials; Edward Snowden has revealed himself as the source of the leak; and the Guardian has published five of the slides from the presentation in which the NSA lay out the scheme. At the same time, the recontextualisation of what we previously knew has brought more information forward.

Putting it all together, we can start getting our first really good guess at what PRISM actually is:

A system for requesting and managing data from major online companies using the FISA provisions which allow for secret collection of information.

That guess comes from examining the constraints which are laid out by the various pieces of information made public:

• PRISM only cost $20m: That's an astonishingly low price, and suggests that the vast majority of the work was done by the companies themselves. It rules out anything involving breaking encryption, or significant amounts of hardware being installed externally.

• The firms involved have all denied it: "Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?" Nonetheless, many of the denials are worded incredibly strongly. Take Google's chief architect:

  Even if I couldn't talk about it, in all likelihood I would no longer be working at Google: the fact that we do stand up for individual users' privacy and protection, for their right to have a personal life which is not ever shared with other people without their consent, even when governments come knocking at our door with guns, is one of the two most important reasons that I am at this company.

  That suggests that the majority of what the NSA considers to be the PRISM program is in their hands, not the companies'.

• The denials all make the point that they hand over data when forced to by the law: Take Yahoo, confirming that "the only disclosures that occur are in response to specific demands" or Facebook saying that the "provide information only to the extent required by law." That suggests that the data that PRISM collects comes from legal mandates, not through voluntary co-operation.

• FISA requests are not public: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a thirty-year-old law which was most recently amended in 2008, allows US government agencies to make demands for data through a secret court. Requests to the court for warrants are rarely turned down, and companies are not allowed to publicise how many requests they make.

• The NSA describes collection of data "directly from the servers" of participating companies: This is the claim which has got everyone into such trouble. The Washington Post appears to have based its claim that PRISM consisted of "direct access" to their servers on this phrasing; it has since retracted that claim. The Guardian has not retracted, but has now provided an alternative description of what it means:

  The Guardian understands that the NSA approached those companies and asked them to enable a "dropbox" system whereby legally requested data could be copied from their own server out to an NSA-owned system.

  That would involve collecting data "directly from servers" while not quite involving the NSA having "direct access" to the companies data. (By way of analogy, when you visit Google.com, you are downloading data from Google's servers, but it would probably be misleading to say you had "direct access" to their servers.) That matches information Google has disclosed about how it transfers data to the NSA: through good, old-fashioned FTP.

So it seems like PRISM is the name for the scheme by which FISA demands for data are transferred to the NSA. If that's the case, the technology of PRISM isn't the scary thing. Neither is the possibility of illegal activity on the part of the NSA.

Instead, it's that FISA requests are served in such great quantities that the NSA has spent $20m building special infrastructure to speed up receiving the data. Microsoft, Twitter, Google and Facebook are now lobbying the NSA to allow them to reveal how many FISA requests they've been served with: if it's astronomical, we'll have confirmation that that's the real scandal.

Originally limited to advertisers upon launching in 2011, Twitter Analytics has finally opened its stat-tracking doors to all users. Although without a formal announcement, there's always the possibility that it's all a glitch—in which case, get it while it's hot/broken.

Read more...

Former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi plotted to have Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi assassinated by the secret services, Italy's Il Fatto Quotidiano daily said on Thursday, sparking a heated denial from the magnate's spokesman.

Before there was Edward Snowden there was Mark Klein, a telecommunications technician who alleged that AT&T was allowing US spies to siphon vast amounts of customer data without warrants.

Britain is in denial. If population trends continue, by the year 2050, Britain will be a majority Muslim nation

Today's battle in Syria is clearly split along religious lines and could have serious consequences for the West

What’s really going on behind these clouds of nicotine-infused vapour?

Addiction is an emotive subject, to put it mildly. As such, when reading reactions to the news that electronic cigarettes may be regulated as a medicinal product from 2016, it’s easy to lose all sense amidst the roaring.

For some, this is all down to lobbying from Big Tobacco, aimed at pricing e-cig makers out of the market with red tape before they can further erode the monopoly on addiction. For others, it’s Big Pharma trying to quash competition for its sprays, gums and patches by restricting surrogate fags to the pharmacy counter. Another set think this is the government, scared witless of losing revenue from tobacco taxes.

For others still it’s grey-faced, life-hating Eurocrats, engaged in their endless struggle to quash life’s pleasures and make everyone into a cycle-riding vegan.  Then there are the people who’ve forgotten what’s actually happening and are just using comments sections to bark about how much they love or hate smoking. But what’s really going on behind these obfuscating clouds of nicotine-infused vapour?

Naively assuming that no conspiracy theories are in play, the situation seems to revolve around the fact that an unregulated market of 1.3 million people, which it is estimated will be worth £250m in 2014, has sprung up virtually overnight, and has huge cultural links to smoking. The broad aim of the EU Tobacco Products Directive – which is to drive the regulation in question – is to reduce uptake of tobacco smoking in young people, and its logic seems to be that if e-cigs can be sold anywhere and everywhere, it may actually bring impressionable teens into the smoker’s fold.

Whether the risk of this happening outweighs the benefit that e-cig availability has in taking career smokers away from flammables is genuinely up for debate. That said, I am inclined to agree with Rob Lyons of Sp!ked, who argues that “to block people from accessing this escape route is rather like padlocking fire doors on the off-chance that someone tries to break in.”

The second (non-tinfoil-hatted) argument for the regulation of e-cigs is the fact that there are currently no enforceable standards for product safety. But while it is possible that moustache-twirling manufacturers could cut their propylene glycol with rat poison, there’s currently no evidence to suggest that electronic cigarettes are harmful, and nicotine in itself is the least of a smoker’s health worries.

Nevertheless, even if one does come to the conclusion that regulating replacement cigarettes will be a boon to public health, it’s impossible to think about the issue for long without being consumed by the screaming irony of the whole debate.

As Diane Abbott pointed out, for the government to build up regulation for e-cigs just a month after caving in on the issue of standardised, non-enticing packaging for real, poisonous cigarettes, is frankly bizarre, and really does cause one to wonder what conversations are going on behind the scenes.

Perhaps, in this case, some of the conspiracy theorists have got it spot on. 

Here's a quick list of some of my older writings that are related to the current NSA spying documents: "The Internet Is a Surveillance State ," 2013. The importance of government transparency and accountability, 2013. The dangers of a government/corporate eavesdropping partnership, 2013. "Why Data Mining Won't Stop Terror," 2006. "The Eternal Value of Privacy," 2006. The dangers of our...

by Paul McLeary
[DefenseNews.com]

WASHINGTON — In September, America’s top special operator plans to sit down with US geographic combatant commanders to finally lay out plans for what he has been calling the “global SOF network.”

“We’re going to lay that out in a very visual fashion”, for the commanders, said Adm. William McRaven, head of US Special Operations Command. He made his remarks during a luncheon wrapping up a two-day “Positioning Special Operations Forces [SOF] for Global Challenges” conference convened by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis here.

The goal of the network is to more directly link deployed special operations forces (SOF) — which conduct operations under the command of the geographic commanders, not SOCOM — to one another to share information and intelligence.

But the plan is not without its detractors, including powerful voices on Capitol Hill.

Right now, SOCOM merely recruits, trains and equips special operations forces, and McRaven has no operational control over his units once they deploy.

The admiral’s plan will not give him any ability to control SOF in the field — that power stays with the combatant commanders — but it will allow him to help SOF commanders push intelligence to one another, while facilitating their interactions with other US government agencies and with international SOF partners.

The September meetings will allow McRaven to fully lay out his plan to commanders, which he said is critical in setting up his more ambitious vision to create the global SOF network.

“I need to get the military buy-in first, and then very quickly we move to the interagency, and then very quickly we move to our partners and our allies to make sure that everybody understands, at least from a global SOF network perspective, what the intent is,” he said.

As his team starts patching together the disparate SOF units spread around the world, McRaven said he plans to cut back on the amount of travel he does in order to stay at his Tampa headquarters and act as “master of ceremonies” and bring any interagency or foreign ally into the fold who wants to be a part of the network.

“The reason I want to do that is to be able to pump energy into the network to kind of force the network to talk to each other,” he said.

McRaven estimated that he spends about 70 percent of his time on the road, but come October wants to flip that to 30 percent.

This network also has a hardware component to it; it’s not just about personal relationships, McRaven said.

“It is also about command and control and communications. There is an infrastructure that makes this network hum,” he said. “Right now, some of that works very well, but across the globe, it works episodically, and it works episodically because we haven’t engaged it to the level we need to engage it.”

While the idea is moving full speed ahead on the SOCOM side, congressional appropriators are a little more wary of the idea.

The House Armed Services Committee’s markup of the fiscal 2014 defense authorization bill gutted the $10 million SOCOM request to establish a Washington office, in addition to slashing the $15 million requested to create regional SOF coordination centers (RSCCs) to make the network operational.

Two RSCCs are envisioned for SOF in US Pacific and Southern Commands. The Pacific center would be “a hub for multilateral engagement” for education and training activities that would “link a multinational network of over 1,000 partners ready to cooperate” with the US, budget documents state.

The other office would be in Colombia, with the Colombian government leading the effort in setting up “a multinational education venue with an operation/inter-agency focus designed to strengthen relations, build trust and foster cooperation among regional allies in the Western Hemisphere to better counter threats to regional security and stability.”

Speaking at the luncheon, House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., explained the cut by saying that “we have limited resources, and some people don’t understand what he’s trying to do where he can build up commands … so all the money we’re trying to put into readiness. We have a big concern about readiness".

“We’re just at the start of the process,” McKeon said, adding that “there’ll be time to make changes as we move forward.”

China has offered Sri Lanka new loans for infrastructure projects, worth US$ 2.2 billion dollars. In a reply to a question, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Mr. Hong Lei told the news media that in addition to infrastructure loans, both countries agreed to further deepen defence cooperation and maintain exchanges between two defence ministries, whilst they continue to carry out in cooperating defence technology, personal training and other fields. Yet, the spokesperson did not reveal further details regarding the nature of the new strategic cooperation.

You absolutely cannot underestimate the importance of the Panama Canal to the modern global economy. The existence of the canal has done more to promote free trade and globalization than all of the international summits in history. It has massively reduced costs and transit times and allowed for much tighter economic integration between the countries of the Americas and between the Americas and the Old World. Maybe China is betting that world trade will be high enough to justify two Central American canals by the year 2025, but I believe its motivation is less economic and more geopolitical.

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Green News – DC wrote:
GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES

http://www.gp.org

For Immediate Release: Thursday, June 13, 2013
This release is online at http://www.gp.org/press/pr-national.php?ID=623

Contacts:
Scott McLarty, Media Coordinator, 202-904-7614, mclarty@greens.org
Starlene Rankin, Media Coordinator, 916-995-3805, starlene@gp.org

Green Party urges mass protest against “adversarial government” and an end to the National Surveillance State initiated under Bush and expanded under Obama

• Green Party’s 2013 Annual National Meeting in Iowa City, July 25-28: http://www.gp.org/meetings/Iowa2013 / Media Credentialing for the meeting: http://www.gp.org/committees/media/press.php

• Green Shadow Cabinet: http://greenshadowcabinet.us

WASHINGTON, DC — The Green Party today called for a mass movement to demand the dismantling of the National Surveillance State created by the National Security Agency, CIA, and Justice Department with President Obama’s approval.

Greens also called for a halt to the prosecution of whistleblowers, including Pfc. Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, who complied with international laws to which the U.S. is signatory when they exposed war crimes, as well as government and corporate criminality in the U.S. and abroad, and for no action against whistleblower Edward Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald.

“President Obama and Congress members who are defending this kind of mass surveillance don’t understand that adversarial government that turns millions of Americans into potential enemies is the opposite of democracy, freedom, and the rule of law,” said Carl Romanelli, 2006 U.S. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania and member of Green Party’s International Committee.

“The Obama Administration has maintained and expanded the Bush Administration’s patent violations of our First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights. The key phrase in the 4th Amendment’s guarantee of freedom from search and seizure is ‘upon probable cause’ — which doesn’t permit a dragnet that intercepts and analyses the private phone communications and Internet activity of millions of Americans,” Mr. Romanelli added.

Greens said that the current massive violation of privacy and freedom was inevitable after the passage and renewal of the USA Patriot Act and Congress’s 2007 grant of immunity (with a yea vote from Sen. Obama) to telecomms that complied with warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens. The Green Party opposed both pieces of legislation.

“One of the most despicable aspects of the targeting of low-level whistleblowers — with the Obama White House invoking the 1917 Espionage Act more than all previous administrations combined — is that President Obama has refused to go after top-level Wall Street fraudsters who caused the 2008 economic crises, drug-money-laundering banks like HSBC, and Bush-Cheney officials who authorized torture and other war crimes,” said Mayor David Doonan (Green) of Greenwich, New York.

Greens said it was urgent that Americans take back the right to know what their government is up to, the right of a free and unrestricted press to investigate government actions, and the right to communicate on the phone and use the Internet without fear that their privacy will be breached.

“President Obama said that ‘congressional oversight was the American peoples’ best guarantee that they were not being spied on.’ Who is he kidding? Senators have complained of the NSA’s failure to provide them with accurate information on surveillance. Nor should we forget that in 2002 and 2003 bipartisan members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees went along with the manipulated intelligence that President Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, and other members of Congress are playing a similar role now in their defense of the NSA’s mass surveillance. The only real oversight is public oversight, as the nation’s founders understood when they passed the First Amendment,” said Steve Welzer, Green candidate on the ballot for Governor of New Jersey (http://greenstevefornj.wordpress.com).

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied during a congressional hearing on March 12 when he answered no to Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-Ore.) question “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” (Penalties for lying to Congress: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389×492578) Greens said that Mr. Clapper should resign or be fired by President Obama.

Green Party leaders said that the recent precipitation of revelations and new policies and legislation signals a threat to the U.S. as a republic founded on principles of freedom and law. These include:

• Revelations, by Edward Snowden and first appearing in The Guardian, that millions of Americans are under surveillance through a cooperative effort by the National Security Agency and telecomms under a top secret court order issued in April. The NSA has engaged in warrantless domestic data-mining since 2006 (http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/06/nsa-has-been-hoovering-your-phone-records-over-decade).

• Aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers who have exposed war crimes, malfeasance by public officials, and corporate criminality.

• The Justice Department’s surveillance of members of the press, including AP reporters and Fox reporter James Rosen, on the allegation that journalists reporting important news were violating the 1917 Espionage Act (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/05/news-corp-vs-fox-news.html).

• Surveillance, infiltration, disruption, and police actions against Americans engaged in peaceful political dissent, including members of the Occupy Movement (http://www.progressive.org/spying-on-ccupy-activists).

• President Obama’s claim that the White House has the authority, later sanctioned by Congress’s passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), to order the extra-judicial assassination of U.S. citizens.

Green Party leaders expect more revelations of assaults on the U.S. Constitution, civil liberties, and privacy.

Greens said that Democratic and Republican policies and actions have been setting the stage for the current outrages during the past two decades: President Clinton’s authorization of training for civilian police forces in military tactics as part of the War on Drugs; passage of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act; criminalization of demographic groups, especially Muslims and undocumented aliens; Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp, with many detainees still locked up and denied habeas corpus despite knowledge of their innocence; and the rise of a prison-industrial complex in the U.S. that now houses the highest proportion of citizens in the world, with private prisons and contractors drawing their profits by filling up cells — a financial incentive for incarcerating more and more Americans.

“U.S. agencies helped create terror threats like Al Qaeda in the 70s and 80s, installed repressive dictators in foreign countries, and established alliances with dangerous movements, most recently Libya and Syria. Then Americans are expected to surrender their rights for protection against blowback caused by these reckless policies,” said Carl Romanelli.

See also:

“Confirmation of America’s fears that the government is spying on us”
Shahid Buttar, Director of Civil Rights Enforcement, Justice Branch of the Green Shadow Cabinet, June 7, 2013

http://greenshadowcabinet.us/statements/justice-confirmation-americas-fears-government-spying-us

“No action should be taken against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden”
Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, Director of Government Transparency and Accountability, and King Downing, Commission on Correctional Reform in the Green Shadow Cabinet, June 10, 2013

http://greenshadowcabinet.us/statements/no-action-should-be-taken-against-nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden

“Edward Snowden: saving us from the United Stasi of America: Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us a chance to roll back what is tantamount to an ‘executive coup’ against the US constitution”
By Daniel Ellsberg, The Guardian, June 10, 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/10/edward-snowden-united-stasi-america

“Freedom Rider: The Snowden Litmus Test”
By Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report, June 12, 2013

http://blackagendareport.com/content/freedom-rider-snowden-litmus-test

“Put the NSA on trial: With potential perjury by top officials, and new questions about spying, let’s stop assuming everything is legal”
By David Sirota, Salon.com, June 11, 2013

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/11/put_the_nsa_on_trial/

“The Judicial Lynching of Bradley Manning”
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig, June 9, 2013

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_judicial_lynching_of_bradley_manning_20130609

MORE INFORMATION

Green Party of the United States http://www.gp.org
202-319-7191
• Green candidate database and campaign information: http://www.gp.org/elections.shtml
• News Center http://www.gp.org/newscenter.shtml
• Speakers Bureau http://www.gp.org/speakers
• Ballot Access Page http://www.gp.org/2012/ballot-access.html
• Video Page http://www.gp.org/video/index.php
• Green Papers http://www.greenpapers.net/
• Discussion Forum https://secure.gpus.org/secure/GreenPartyForum
• Google+ http://www.gp.org/google
• Twitter http://twitter.com/gpus
• Livestream Channel http://www.livestream.com/greenpartyus
• GP-TV Twitter page http://www.gp.org/twitter
• Facebook page http://www.gp.org/facebook

Green Pages: The official publication of record of the Green Party of the United States

http://gp.org/greenpages-blog

The recent revelations that the NSA has been collecting the detailed phone records of Americans since 2001 has a lot of citizens saying that claims of the NSA operating a vast domestic dragnet have been vindicated.

Others think the news has led the "tin foil hat" types to come out in spades.

Saying someone is "wearing a tin foil hat" or "is a tin foil hat" means that they have paranoia or a belief in conspiracy theories, especially involving government surveillance or paranormal beings.

Originally, the term referred to the practice of wearing headgear consisting of metal foil to block mind-reading.

Julian Huxley, brother of "Brave New World" author Aldous Huxley, coined the concept in his 1927 work "The Tissue-Culture King":

Well, we had discovered that metal was relatively impervious to the telepathic effect, and had prepared for ourselves a sort of tin pulpit, behind which we could stand while conducting experiments. This, combined with caps of metal foil, enormously reduced the effects on ourselves.

Unfortunately for contemporary tin foil hat wearers, a 2005 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that the metal hats actually amplify certain radio frequencies instead of blocking them.

From the study (emphasis ours):

It has long been suspected that the government has been using satellites to read and control the minds of certain citizens. The use of aluminum helmets has been a common guerrilla tactic against the government's invasive tactics.

Surprisingly, these helmets can in fact help the government spy on citizens by amplifying certain key frequency ranges reserved for government use.

The findings led the authors to "speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason."

Now that's a tin foil hat conspiracy theory!

Editor's note: We recommend the recent New York Times article "Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories"

SEE ALSO: Only One Big Telecom CEO Refused To Cave To The NSA ... And He's Been In Jail For 4 Years

Join the conversation about this story »

Some researchers are suggesting that Neanderthals were driven to extinction by a massive volcanic eruption near Naples. The suggestion is one of the topics under debate this week at a conference at London's British Museum examining what forces led to the destruction of the Neanderthals and what led to the triumph of the homo sapiens. One new theory holds that a gigantic eruption of the volcano in the Campi Flegrei area near Naples 39,000 years ago was catastrophic for the Neanderthals. That was the biggest volcanic eruption in Europe for more than 200,000 years and scientists say that its enormous plumes of ash would have blotted out the sun for months, or possibly years. And that, in turn, would have caused temperatures to plummet and filled the atmosphere with toxic matter that may have contributed to the end of the Neanderthals. But not all scientists agree. Some argue the Neanderthals were already extinct before the eruption. This is just one of the major issues at the conference called: "When Europe was covered by ice and ash". At the meeting scientists will also try to understand why homo sapiens are the only species left today and why other version of humanity died out.

 

Look for these 10 clues when deciding if your government is repressive.

Stars and Stripes
June 12, 2013

US participating in international Eager Lion exercise in Jordan
By Hendrick Simoes

====

Eager Lion includes field training, multiple live-fire exercises, reconnaissance training, and Harrier, Cobra and Osprey aircraft…

Last week, Jordanian officials said the U.S. was likely to leave Patriot missile batteries and F-16s in Jordan after the exercise.

====

AMMAN, Jordan: Eager Lion, a 12-day annual military exercise involving 8,000 personnel from 19 countries, is underway as the civil war rages next door in Syria.

About 5,000 Americans from all services are participating in the Jordanian-led exercise, which will focus on “issues such as integrated air and missile defense and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to address current and future conflicts’ security issues,” said Maj. Gen. Awni al Adwan of the Jordanian army and chairman of the joint task force.

…

“This exercise provides us with the opportunity to develop relationships and capabilities,” said U.S. Maj. Gen. Robert Catalanotti, the U.S. Central Command director of exercises and training.

A major participant in the exercise, which runs through June 20, is Expeditionary Strike Group 5, bringing the Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group that includes the USS Kearsarge; USS San Antonio; and USS Carter Hall.

The land component includes a mixture of special operations forces and Marines from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which played a role in Operation Odyssey Dawn to enforce the no-fly zone over Libya in March 2011.

“The exercise has started smoothly…the JAF [Jordanian Armed Forces] are integrating nicely with U.S. forces,” said Lt. Dawn Stankus, the Expeditionary Strike Group 5 spokeswoman.

Eager Lion includes field training, multiple live-fire exercises, reconnaissance training, and Harrier, Cobra and Osprey aircraft…

Last week, Jordanian officials said the U.S. was likely to leave Patriot missile batteries and F-16s in Jordan after the exercise.