Computer virus found in military computers
A computer virus has infected the computers used to control the drones used to bombs Afghanistan. Elaine Quijano reports.
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Appearing on RT, Roseanne Barr argued in favor of beheading any wealthy American making over 100 million dollars, and made a case for bringing back the guillotine in American society as a form of justice for big banks and Wall Street.“I first would allow the guilty bankers to pay… back anything over 100 million in personal wealth because I believe in a maximum wage of 100 million dollars and if they’re unable to live on that amount then they should go to the reeducation camps, and if that doesn’t help, then be beheaded.”
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Finnish researchers found a link between the Pandemrix swine flu vaccine and new cases of narcolepsy (AFP/File, Matej Divizna)
HELSINKI — The Finnish government and major insurance companies announced Wednesday they will pay for lifetime medical care for children diagnosed with narcolepsy after receiving the swine flu vaccine.
"The compensation will provide much-needed financial assistance for the families, although it cannot take away the emotional distress caused by this condition," Social Services and Health Minister Paula Risikko said in a statement.
Finnish and international researchers recently found a conclusive link between the Pandemrix swine flu vaccine and new cases of narcolepsy, a chronic nervous system disorder which causes people to often uncontrollably fall asleep.
The Finnish Pharmaceutical Insurance Pool (LVP), which represents insurance companies, said Wednesday it would honour all insurance claims in this category.
LVP said it would review each claim individually to calculate the scope of the payout.
The Finnish government meanwhile agreed to cover any medical costs exceeding the insurance claims.
In Finland, 79 children between the ages of four and 19 developed narcolepsy after receiving the Pandemrix vaccine in 2009 and 2010.
Of these cases, an unusually high number, 76, also suffered from bouts of cataplexy, suffering hallucinations or paralysing physical collapses, according to Finnish research.
Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet
A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.
The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”
Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.
Drones have become America’s tool of choice in both its conventional and shadow wars, allowing U.S. forces to attack targets and spy on its foes without risking American lives. Since President Obama assumed office, a fleet of approximately 30 CIA-directed drones have hit targets in Pakistan more than 230 times; all told, these drones have killed more than 2,000 suspected militants and civilians, according to the Washington Post. More than 150 additional Predator and Reaper drones, under U.S. Air Force control, watch over the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. American military drones struck 92 times in Libya between mid-April and late August. And late last month, an American drone killed top terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki — part of an escalating unmanned air assault in the Horn of Africa and southern Arabian peninsula.
But despite their widespread use, the drone systems are known to have security flaws. Many Reapers and Predators don’t encrypt the video they transmit to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, U.S. forces discovered “days and days and hours and hours” of the drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi insurgents. A $26 piece of software allowed the militants to capture the video.
The lion’s share of U.S. drone missions are flown by Air Force pilots stationed at Creech, a tiny outpost in the barren Nevada desert, 20 miles north of a state prison and adjacent to a one-story casino. In a nondescript building, down a largely unmarked hallway, is a series of rooms, each with a rack of servers and a “ground control station,” or GCS. There, a drone pilot and a sensor operator sit in their flight suits in front of a series of screens. In the pilot’s hand is the joystick, guiding the drone as it soars above Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other battlefield.
Some of the GCSs are classified secret, and used for conventional warzone surveillance duty. The GCSs handling more exotic operations are top secret. None of the remote cockpits are supposed to be connected to the public internet. Which means they are supposed to be largely immune to viruses and other network security threats.
But time and time again, the so-called “air gaps” between classified and public networks have been bridged, largely through the use of discs and removable drives. In late 2008, for example, the drives helped introduce the agent.btz worm to hundreds of thousands of Defense Department computers. The Pentagon is still disinfecting machines, three years later.
Use of the drives is now severely restricted throughout the military. But the base at Creech was one of the exceptions, until the virus hit. Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives. Drone units at other Air Force bases worldwide have now been ordered to stop their use.
In the meantime, technicians at Creech are trying to get the virus off the GCS machines. It has not been easy. At first, they followed removal instructions posted on the website of the Kaspersky security firm. “But the virus kept coming back,” a source familiar with the infection says. Eventually, the technicians had to use a software tool called BCWipe to completely erase the GCS’ internal hard drives. “That meant rebuilding them from scratch” — a time-consuming effort.
The Air Force declined to comment directly on the virus. “We generally do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, or responses to our computer networks, since that helps people looking to exploit or attack our systems to refine their approach,” says Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for Air Combat Command, which oversees the drones and all other Air Force tactical aircraft. “We invest a lot in protecting and monitoring our systems to counter threats and ensure security, which includes a comprehensive response to viruses, worms, and other malware we discover.”
However, insiders say that senior officers at Creech are being briefed daily on the virus.
“It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says. “But no one’s panicking. Yet.”
Photo courtesy of Bryan William Jones
FBI to launch nationwide facial recognition service
The FBI by mid-January will activate a nationwide facial recognition service in select states that will allow local police to identify unknown subjects in photos, bureau officials told Nextgov.
The federal government is embarking on a multiyear, $1 billion dollar overhaul of the FBI's existing fingerprint database to more quickly and accurately identify suspects, partly through applying other biometric markers, such as iris scans and voice recordings.
Often law enforcement authorities will "have a photo of a person and for whatever reason they just don't know who it is [but they know] this is clearly the missing link to our case," said Nick Megna, a unit chief at the FBI's criminal justice information services division. The new facial recognition service can help provide that missing link by retrieving a list of mug shots ranked in order of similarity to the features of the subject in the photo.
Today, an agent would have to already know the name of an individual to pull up the suspect's mug shot from among the 10 million shots stored in the bureau's existing Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Using the new Next-Generation Identification system that is under development, law enforcement analysts will be able to upload a photo of an unknown person; choose a desired number of results from two to 50 mug shots; and, within 15 minutes, receive identified mugs to inspect for potential matches. Users typically will request 20 candidates, Megna said. The service does not provide a direct match.
Michigan, Washington, Florida and North Carolina will participate in a test of the new search tool this winter before it is offered to criminal justice professionals across the country in 2014 as part of NGI. The project, which was awarded to Lockheed Martin Corp. in 2008, already has upgraded the FBI's fingerprint matching service.
Local authorities have the choice to file mug shots with the FBI as part of the booking process. The bureau expects its collection of shots to rival its repository of 70 million fingerprints once more officers are aware of the facial search's capabilities.
Thomas E. Bush III, who helped develop NGI's system requirements when he served as assistant director of the CJIS division between 2005 and 2009, said, "The idea was to be able to plug and play with these identifiers and biometrics." Law enforcement personnel saw value in facial recognition and the technology was maturing, said the 33-year FBI veteran who now serves as a private consultant.
NGI's incremental construction seems to align with the White House's push to deploy new information technology in phases so features can be scrapped if they don't meet expectations or run over budget.
But immigrant rights groups have raised concerns that the Homeland Security Department, which exchanges digital prints with the FBI, will abuse the new facial recognition component. Currently, a controversial DHS immigrant fingerprinting program called Secure Communities runs FBI prints from booked offenders against the department's IDENT biometric database to check whether they are in the country illegally. Homeland Security officials say they extradite only the most dangerous aliens, including convicted murderers and rapists. But critics say the FBI-DHS print swapping ensnares as many foreigners as possible, including those whose charges are minor or are ultimately dismissed.
Megna said Homeland Security is not part of the facial recognition pilot. But, Bush said in the future NGI's data, including the photos, will be accessible by Homeland Security's IDENT.
The planned addition of facial searches worries Sunita Patel, a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, who said, "Any database of personal identity information is bound to have mistakes. And with the most personal immutable traits like our facial features and fingerprints, the public can't afford a mistake."
In addition, Patel said she is concerned about the involvement of local police in information sharing for federal immigration enforcement purposes. "The federal government is using local cops to create a massive surveillance system," she said.
Bush said, "We do have the capability to search against each other's systems," but added, "if you don't come to the attention of law enforcement you don't have anything to fear from these systems."
Other civil liberties advocates questioned whether the facial recognition application would retrieve mug shots of those who have simply been arrested. "It might be appropriate to have nonconvicted people out of that system," said Jim Harper, director of information policy at the libertarian Cato Institute. FBI officials declined to comment on the recommendation.
Harper also noted large-scale searches may generate a lot of false positives, or incorrect matches. Facial recognition "is more accurate with a Google or a Facebook, because they will have anywhere from a half-dozen to a dozen pictures of an individual, whereas I imagine the FBI has one or two mug shots," he said.
FBI officials would not disclose the name of the search product or the vendor, but said they gained insights on the technique's accuracy by studying research from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
In responding to concerns about the creation of a Big Brother database for tracking innocent Americans, Megna said the system will not alter the FBI's authorities or the way it conducts business. "This doesn't change or create any new exchanges of data," he said. "It only provides [law enforcement] with a new service to determine what photos are of interest to them."
In 2008, the FBI released a privacy impact assessment summarizing its appraisal of controls in place to ensure compliance with federal privacy regulations. Megna said that, during meetings with the CJIS Advisory Policy Board and the National Crime Prevention and Privacy Compact Council, "we haven't gotten a whole lot of pushback on the photo capability."
The FBI has an elaborate system of checks and balances to guard fingerprints, palm prints, mug shots and all manner of criminal history data, he said.
"This is not something where we want to collect a bunch of surveillance film" and enter it in the system, Megna said. "That would be useless to us. It would be useless to our users."
Double Impact: Did 2 Giant Collisions Turn Uranus on Its Side?
A pair of giant impacts early in solar system history could reconcile the dramatic tilt of Uranus with the equatorial orbit of its satellites
By John Matson
But what if the tilting was a more gradual process, caused not by one mammoth impact but by two somewhat smaller nudges? Simulations show that the two-strike mechanism appears to solve the problem, knocking Uranus sideways and allowing it to develop equatorially orbiting moons, Morbidelli said.
The key is that the impacts must have come very early, before Uranus's moons had coalesced from a disk of gas and dust surrounding the planet. That disk, supplemented by debris stirred up by the collisions, would have migrated around the planet to form a thin equatorial disk that gave rise to Uranus's five large moons.
In the simulations, the same sort of equatorial migration also worked for the single-impact tilt scenario, but that scenario came with one important and disqualifying caveat: the moons orbited in the wrong direction, counter to Uranus's rotation. "If you tilt Uranus all in one shot, you produce regular satellites on the equator, but they will all be retrograde, and the satellites are actually prograde," Morbidelli said.
The only way for Uranus to have kept its moons in the right place, moving in the right direction, was to have suffered multiple giant impacts. "If we are right, Uranus was hit at least twice by big objects, about the mass of the Earth," Morbidelli said. He noted that Neptune's tilt, although only about one third that of Uranus, is also best explained by a giant impact.
"He solved the problem with the giant-impact hypothesis," said Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "I've always been worried about this problem." But, Levison noted, "that doesn't mean that the giant-impact hypothesis is right." There are several other ways to change a planet's tilt, or obliquity, including tidal forces and resonances between a planet's spin and its orbit.
But if Uranus did suffer two large collisions, and Neptune absorbed one as well, that would indicate that massive impacts played a significant role in shaping the giant planets. That would be a surprise, given the traditional view that the gas giants grew by sweeping up smaller planetesimals. "This is quite an unconventional scenario for the formation of the giant planets, but I think that the obliquities of Uranus and Neptune point in this direction," Morbidelli said.
Radical's plan involves strategy to collapse stock market
Meet the Obama link to Wall Street terror
Radical's plan involves strategy to collapse stock market
Stephen Lerner, a controversial anti-capitalist SEIU organizer, is one of the forces behind the protests on Wall Street and nationwide, according to quotes obtained by a socialist activist who doubles as a Washington Post columnist.
WND was first to report Lerner was the brain behind some of the economic protest templates being used by the Occupy Wall Street campaign.
Lerner recently laid out a mass economic protest plan intended to bring down the stock market, and boasted his plan could be used to cause a new financial crisis. His ideology prompted some conservative critics to go so far as to label him an economic terrorist.
Writing in the Washington Post on Tuesday, columnist Harold Meyerson, the vice-chair of Democratic Socialists of America, quoted Lerner describing how a coalition is fomenting the current economic protests.
Lerner described himself as part of that coalition, referring to the organizations behind the demonstrations as "we."
Lerner told Meyerson: "It's a confluence of planned and unplanned demonstrations … . We build on each other. We go ping-ponging back and forth."
The Occupy Wall Street unrest first started Sept. 17 with a protest called the "Day of Rage."
Planners used their own website – USDayofRage.org – which told protesters to "bring your own tent." That website is now a sister site for the Occupy Wall Street initiative.
The website is not specific about the purpose of the protests other than calling for "integrity" to be "restored to our elections."
The site accuses corporations of using "money to act as the voices of millions, while individual citizens, the legitimate voters, are silenced and demoralized by the farce."
In March, ACORN founder Wade Rathke announced what he called "days of rage in 10 cities around JP Morgan Chase." Rathke was president of an SEIU local in New Orleans.
The planned Sept. 17 protest seems to have been the culmination of Rathke's efforts.
WND reported how those efforts were organized by Lerner, an SEIU board member who reportedly visited the Obama White House at least four times.
Lerner is considered one of the most capable organizers of the radical left. He recently organized the SEIU's so-called Justice for Janitors campaign.
As part of his planned protests, Lerner called for "a week of civil disobedience, direct action all over the city."
His stated aim was to "destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement."
In an interview about the Wall Street protests, Lerner outlined his goals: "How do we bring down the stock market? How do we bring down their bonuses? How do we interfere with their ability to, to be rich?"
'Economic terrorist'
Lerner came under fire in the conservative blogosphere and digital news in March after he laid out an economic plan some claimed amounts to economic terrorism.
In an oped titled "This can be our moment," published in the radical In These Times magazine, Lerner calls on followers to "go on offense" and "make Wall Street pay for the trillions it stole from us."
Lerner outlined his campaign to "stoke simmering discontent into concrete, concerted direct action to challenge corporate extremism."
Lerner's campaign was intended to sow "the seeds of a movement that turns the tables on them [Wall Street]."
The Blaze.com first posted a video of Lerner addressing a conference in which he stated the aim of such an economic campaign would be, among other things, to "bring down the stock market."
Lerner continued, "There are actually extraordinary things we could do right now to start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement."
During the presentation, Lerner called for a mass strike by mortgage payers that, he said, could cause a new financial crisis.
Stated Lerner: "And so the question would be, what would happen if we organized homeowners en masse to do a mortgage strike. Just say if we get, and, and, if we get half a million people to agree, we'll all not, we'll agree we won't pay our mortgages, it would literally cause a new financial crisis."
Lerner's plan had him dubbed an "economic terrorist" in headlines by writers for American Thinker and a multitude of blogs. TheBlaze.com owner Glenn Beck used the "economic terrorist" label for Lerner, as well.
Forecast for American cities: Confrontation, intimidation?
There are other indications a coalition of radicals and unions is planning chaos using the current economic crisis.
WND reported that a slew of extremist organizations, some tied to Obama, are preparing protests to coincide with major NATO and G-8 summits in Chicago next May.
Foreshadowing possible violent confrontations, some of the same radical trainers behind the infamous 1999 Seattle riots against the World Trade Organization have been mobilizing new protest efforts geared toward world summits as well as the current economic crisis.
The NATO and G-8 summits are not the only focus of radical groups.
WND reported Heather Booth, director of a Saul Alinsky-style community organizing group, the Midwest Academy, was among the main speakers at the "2011 State Battles Summit" in June at the Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Booth's husband, Paul, also was a speaker at the union summit. Paul Booth co-founded Midwest Academy in the 1970s.
The four-day summit was organized by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, with participation from the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest union.
An official schedule for the event, obtained by WND, declared: "Our union is under unprecedented attack in every state. Extremist politicians want to weaken us as we head into 2012. Their tactics include budget cuts, layoffs, privatization and the denial of our very collective bargaining rights."
Continued the flyer: "New challenges require new energy and new thinking. We encourage union activists to attend this conference and bring their creative ideas on how to overcome the challenges ahead."
Heather Booth participated in a panel entitled, "Our Message, Alliances and Best Practices."
Paul Booth delivered the opening remarks for the union conference.
Another speaker at the union event was John Podesta, who co-chaired President Obama's transition team.
Podesta is president of the Center for American Progress, which is heavily influential in advising the White House. The center is funded by philanthropist George Soros.
Mideast revolutions coming to U.S.?
Citizen Action of Wisconsin, an arm of Booth's Midwest Academy, is part of the Moving Wisconsin Forward movement, one of the main organizers of the major Wisconsin protests in February, as WND first reported.
The protests were in opposition to Gov. Scott Walker's proposal for most state workers to pay 12 percent of their health care premiums and 5.8 percent of their salary toward their own pensions.
WND reported at the time speakers at the rallies likened the Wisconsin protests to the ongoing revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa while calling for similar uprisings in the U.S.
'Redistribution of wealth and power'
Obama himself once funded Midwest Academy. He has been closely tied to Heather Booth.
Booth has stated building a ''progressive majority'' would help for ''a fair distribution of wealth and power and opportunity."
Her husband Paul is a founder and the former national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society, the radical 1960s anti-war movement from which unrepentant radical Bill Ayers' Weather Underground splintered.
In 1999, the Booths' Midwest Academy received $75,000 from the Woods Fund with Obama on its board alongside Ayers, In 2002, with Obama still serving on the Woods Fund, Midwest received another $23,500 for its Young Organizers Development Program.
Midwest describes itself as "one of the nation's oldest and best-known schools for community organizations, citizen organizations and individuals committed to progressive social change."
It later morphed into a national organizing institute for an emerging network of organizations known as Citizen Action.
Discover the Networks describes Midwest as "teach[ing] tactics of direct action, confrontation and intimidation."
WND first reported the executive director of an activist organization that taught Alinsky's tactics of direct action, confrontation and intimidation was part of the team that developed volunteers for President Obama's 2008 campaign.
Jackie Kendall, executive director of the Midwest Academy, was on the team that developed and delivered the first Camp Obama training for volunteers aiding Obama's campaign through the 2008 Iowa Caucuses.
Camp Obama was a two-to-four day intensive course run in conjunction with Obama's campaign aimed at training volunteers to become activists to help Obama win the presidential election.
Also, in 1998, Obama participated on a panel discussion praising Alinsky alongside Heather Booth, herself a dedicated disciple of Alinsky.
The panel discussion following the opening performance in Chicago of the play "The Love Song of Saul Alinsky," a work described by the Chicago Sun-Times as "bringing to life one of America's greatest community organizers."
Obama participated in the discussion alongside other Alinskyites, including political analyst Aaron Freeman, Don Turner of the Chicago Federation of Labor and Northwestern University history professor Charles Paine.
"Alinsky had so much fire burning within," stated local actor Gary Houston, who portrayed Alinsky in the play. "There was a lot of complexity to him. Yet he was a really cool character."
With research by Brenda J. Elliott
