Freeman said he was approached by a forensic specialist working for the Maine State Police. The specialist, he said, was working with police to inventory camp equipment confiscated by police in April after Earth First! attempted a protest campout on Sears Island.

Freeman said police initially told him his DNA was wanted as part of an ongoing investigation into a broken padlock on Sears Island. Freeman said after more questions, police told him the investigation was actually related to the vandalism incidents at Plum Creek.

Police asking for DNA to investige an act of politically motivated vandalism? This kind of thing ought to be reserved for serious crimes, I think.

Activist: Police ask for DNA as scare tactic

In JPod, the little brothers and sisters of Generation X slave away at a thinly-disguised EA Games in Vancouver, where marketdroids reward their slavish labor by heaping menial tasks on them, and perverting the games they make so that they're not even cool. None of these people will be a software millionaire. They are people who work sweatshop hours for lousy wages, burn out young, and go nowhere. They use Google and eBay to scour the globe for anything to make their lives meaningful. They don't find it.

Boing Boing: Coupland's JPod: the Anti-Microserfs

In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia found that cable modem providers and other companies are subject to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, the 1997 law that requires phone companies to put law enforcement backdoors in their switching networks.

This is total bullshit. The deal that was cut in '94 was very clearly that the Internet was not covered by CALEA. The purpose of the deal was to require a political reconsideration of this at a later date.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

27B Stroke 6 - CALEA extended to the Internet

In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.

In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.

An interesting data point on Al'Z. My understanding was that he wasn't formally part of Al'Q until well into the Iraq war. I guess it doesn't matter. I agree that if they had a chance to take him out, they should have. However, if we knew that this guy was running terrorist operations out of Iraq that targetted Europe, and Saddam was not cooperating with us in shutting these operations down, then that puts Iraq very much on same footing that the Government of Afghanistan was on, in terms of harboring Bin Laden. However, whether or not Iraq really was aware of Al'Z's presense seems to be a matter of some debate. For some reason this is a datapoint that escaped me until the aftermath of his death.

What would the geopolitical implications have been of a U.S. strike against a terrorist training camp in Iraq without the benefit of a formal process involving the Security Counsel, which would have given Iraq a clear attempt to respond (and which in the case of afghanistan resulted in the terrorists going underground)?

Avoiding attacking suspected terrorist mastermind - Nightly News with Brian Williams - MSNBC.com

I do NOT plan to get in the habit of regularly reposting Stratfor's emails, but this one is extremely relevant to conversations we've been having on this site for a long time. (BTW, I'm not really sure if thats the first time that idea appeared here or if I'm really responsible for originating it. Its just the earliest link that I have. I think I was thinking that a long time before I said it. I said it when it became so obvious it seemed like review.)

Once again, let me start with one of the last sentances: Finally, the ability of grassroots cells to network across international boundaries, and even across oceans, presents the possibility that al Qaeda 4.0 cells could, now or in the future, pose a significant threat even without a central leadership structure -- meaning, a structure that can be identified, monitored and attacked

Stratfor: Terrorism Intelligence Report - June 7, 2006

Al Qaeda: The Next Phase of Evolution?

By Fred Burton

Canadian authorities recently arrested 17 men, accusing them of
planning terrorist attacks, after some members of the group bought
what they believed to be some 3 tons of ammonium nitrate
fertilizer, which can be used to make explosives. The men allegedly
were planning attacks against symbolic targets in Toronto and
Ottawa in a plot that reportedly included bombings, armed assaults
and beheadings.

One of the things that make this case interesting is that the group
-- now dubbed by the media as the "Canada 17" -- reportedly had
connections to alleged jihadists in other countries, whose earlier
arrests were widely reported. Those connections included two men
from the United States -- Ehsanul Islam Sadequee and Syed Haris
Ahmed -- who reportedly traveled from Georgia in March 2005 to meet
with Islamist extremists in Toronto. Authorities have said they
conspired to attend a militant training camp in Pakistan and
discussed potential terrorist targets in the United States. There
also is said to be a connection to a prominent computer hacker in
Britain, who was arrested in October and charged with conspiring to
commit murder and cause an explosion.

The June 2 arrests certainly underscore the possibility that
Canada , which has a long history of liberal immigration and asylum
policies, has been used by jihadists as a sanctuary for raising
funds and planning attacks. But the most intriguing aspect of the
Canada case is that it seems to encapsulate a trend that has been
slowly evolving for some time. If the allegations in the Canada 17
case are at least mostly true, it might represent the emergence of
a new operational model for jihadists -- an "al Qaeda 4.0," if you
will.

In other words, the world might be witnessing the emergence of a
grassroots jihadist network that both exists in and h... [ Read More (2.4k in body) ]

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Coalition forces killed al-Qaida terrorist leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and one of his key lieutenants, spiritual advisor Sheik Abd-Al-Rahman, yesterday, June 7, at 6:15 p.m. in an air strike against an identified, isolated safe house.

“Tips and intelligence from Iraqi senior leaders from his network led forces to al-Zarqawi and some of his associates who were conducting a meeting approximately eight kilometers north of Baqubah when the air strike was launched.

This is good news.

Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, Killed Dead

What if, seconds before your laptop began stalling, you could feel the hard drive spin up under the load? Or you could tell if an electrical cord was live before you touched it? For the few people who have rare earth magnets implanted in their fingers, these are among the reported effects -- a finger that feels electromagnetic fields along with the normal sense of touch.

Quinn got a cybernetic implant! Wish this had come up at Schmoocon.

Wired News: A Sixth Sense for a Wired World

finethen wrote:

Social Security numbers and other personal information for as many as 2.2 million U.S. military personnel were among the data stolen from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs analyst last month, federal officials said yesterday, raising concerns about national security as well as identity theft.

Hotel.com had info stolen too in the last few days. Is there some fancy new trick to stealing info or are these just flukes?

Neither. These kinds of databases have been around a long time, but 20 years ago they'd require serious computing centers that couldn't be easily lost or stolen. They did get hacked into from time to time, but you can't take an IBM Mainframe with you in your carry on luggage. Today three things have occured:

1. Technology has advanced. The entire Veteran's Affairs database can run off of someone's laptop. That makes it easier for it to leave the building.

2. Technology has become more widespread. In the 80's these things were the exclusive domain of large businesses and government agencies. Now there are hundreds of thousands of dot com companies with customer databases that are directly connected to the internet, any one of which could get hacked into.

3. A larger criminal market has arrived. In the 80's very little actual theft occured as the result of computer crime. Today organized criminal groups have cropped up, largely situated in the anarchocapitalism that exists in Russia and the Eastern Block as they struggle to build real, sustainable economies. These groups target the wide array of potentially insecure information sources, collect identity data, and convert it into cash. Distributed international networks of operatives coordinated through the internet monetize the results of these thefts and funnel money back to central coordinators.

There are three things that need to be done:
1. Organizations that deal in personal information need to continue to take computer security seriously. In particular, the credit card companies, and other organizations that deal with money, need to build better systems for determining whether or not you are you before they'll authorize a financial transaction with your money.

2. Organizations that deal in personal information need to have strict internal policies for access to information. People shouldn't have the database floating around on CD.

3. Some amount of regulation may be needed. However, IMHO the feds are 0 for 2 with SOX and HIPPA, so I'm not sure they've proved that they can regulate in an effective way.

Real Computer Security is hard, because you have to prevent bad stuff without being noticed as the good guys go about their jobs. When you get noticed, you've done something wrong, either because there has been a breach or because someone can't do their job because your security system stopped them. There is a certain art to finding the balance and it depends greatly on the specific requirements of the people you are working for and your wisdom in being judicious about what you control. Things like SOX and HIPPA micromanage the problem with one size fits all policies that inevitably fail in the real world.

Congress should operate on the level of incentivization and not on the level of specific requirements. For example, one of the reasons credit card fraud is so easy is that credit card companies don't bare the costs associated with fraud (the merchants do) and so they don't have any economic incentive to deploy technologies that are harder to subvert. In fact, credit card companies are making money on fraud by selling useless identity theft protection and credit report monitoring services. This is a problem lawyers can fix. They should focus on who is liable and leave computer security to the computer security professionals.

RE: Data Theft Affected Most in Military

Scientists at two universities — Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco — will try to develop embryonic stem cells from the adult cells of patients suffering from certain diseases.

2 New Efforts to Develop Stem Cell Line for Study - New York Times

An increasingly powerful Islamic militia rolled through its newly captured territory and installed a religious court in one town Wednesday as the remnants of a U.S.-backed alliance of warlords desperately tried to regroup.

The Islamic Courts Union, which has alleged links to al-Qaida, controls the Somali capital and surrounding areas after defeating the secular warlord alliance in weeks of battles that killed at least 330 people - many of them civilians caught in the crossfire.

Somali Militia Poised for Counterattack - Forbes.com