Puppet MastersS


Pistol

Afghan special forces commander defects with guns to insurgents

Mohammad Anwar
Reuters
Sun, 20 Oct 2013 17:20 UTC
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An Afghan army special forces commander has defected to an insurgent group allied with the Taliban in a Humvee truck packed with his team's guns and high-tech equipment, officials in the eastern Kunar province said on Sunday.

Monsif Khan, who raided the supplies of his 20-man team in Kunar's capital Asadabad over the Eid al-Adha religious holiday, is the first special forces commander to switch sides, joining the Hezb-e-Islami organisation.

"He sent some of his comrades on leave and paid others to go out sightseeing, and then escaped with up to 30 guns, night-vision goggles, binoculars and a Humvee," said Shuja ul-Mulkh Jalala, the governor of Kunar.

Zubair Sediqi, a spokesman for Hezb-e-Islami, confirmed that Khan had joined the group, saying he had brought 15 guns and high-tech equipment.
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Eye 1

NSA leaks: Years of spying on Mexico govt gave US investment benefits


RT
Sun, 20 Oct 2013 17:15 UTC
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© (NSA) (AFP Photo)The Threat Operations Center inside the National Security Agency
US electronic surveillance in Mexico reportedly targeted top officials, including both current and previous presidents. Intelligence produced by the NSA helped Americans get an upper hand in diplomatic talks and find good investment opportunities.

The US National Security Agency was apparently very happy with its successes in America's southern neighbor, according to classified documents leaked by Edwards Snowden and analyzed by the German magazine, Der Spiegel. It reports on new details of the spying on the Mexican government, which dates back at least several years.

The fact that Mexican President Peña Nieto is of interest to the NSA was revealed earlier by Brazilian TV Globo, which also had access to the documents provided by Snowden. Spiegel says his predecessor Felipe Calderon was a target too, and the Americans hacked into his public email back in May 2010.

The access to Calderon electronic exchanges gave the US spies "diplomatic, economic and leadership communications which continue to provide insight into Mexico's political system and internal stability," the magazine cites an NSA top secret internal report as saying. The operation to hack into presidential email account was dubbed "Flatliquid" by the American e-spooks.
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Bad Guys

Sebelius on the Run


Wall Street Journal
Fri, 18 Oct 2013 16:27 UTC
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© APHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Capitol Hill in Washington in April.
The HHS Secretary refuses to testify about ObamaCare's rollout.

The Affordable Care Act's botched rollout has stunned its media cheering section, and it even seems to have surprised the law's architects. The problems run much deeper than even critics expected, and whatever federal officials, White House aides and outside contractors are doing to fix them isn't working. But who knows? Omerta is the word of the day as the Obama Administration withholds information from the public.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is even refusing to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a hearing this coming Thursday. HHS claims she has scheduling conflicts, but we hope she isn't in the White House catacomb under interrogation by Valerie Jarrett about her department's incompetence.

The department is also refusing to make available lower-level officials who might detail the source or sources of this debacle. Ducking an investigation with spin is one thing. Responding with a wall of silence to the invitation of a duly elected congressional body probing the use of more than half a billion taxpayer dollars is another. This Obama crowd is something else.

What bunker is Henry Chao hiding in, for instance? He's the HHS official in charge of technology for the Affordable Care Act, and in March he said at an insurance lobby conference that his team had given up trying to create "a world-class user experience." With the clock running, Mr. Chao added that his main goal was merely to "just make sure it's not a third-world experience."
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Dollar

François Hollande admits French taxes are 'too much'

Hugh Carnegy
CNBC
Sat, 19 Oct 2013 16:02 UTC
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© Getty ImagesFrench President Francois Hollande
When François Hollande came to power last year, his most famous election promise was to impose a 75 per cent tax rate on those earning more than 1 million euros ($1.3 million) a year. Now France's socialist president has acknowledged that the country is hitting the tax buffers.

In a television interview this week, he noted that both his and the previous center-right government had raised taxes in total by 60 billion euros since 2011, equivalent to about 3 per cent of national income. "That's a lot - that's to say, too much," he said.

Mr Hollande has promised a "tax pause", backing up his finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, who last month triggered a political tremor when he said he was "very conscious that the French are fed up with taxes".

French business leaders have been clamoring for relief from a relentless increase in the tax burden, which government projections show will rise to 46.5 per cent of gross domestic product next year, one of the highest levels among developed economies. Recent polls have indicated the French public increasingly feels much the same.
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War Whore

Yes, America. There is a Texan who is worse than Ted Cruz: Blake Farenthold

TBogg
The Raw Story
Sun, 20 Oct 2013 14:31 UTC
Blake Farenthold
It is a well established fact that America only tolerates Texas because it has oil and Austin and probably something else of value that I can't think of off the top of my head. Let's see .... nope ... I got nothin'. But there are times when Texas gets on our last nerve (to be fair, that is usually reserved for Florida) and we just shake our heads and start to wonder if maybe Mexico would be willing to take Texas back if we can find the receipt in a drawer somewhere , and even if we have to pay a 15% restocking fee.

I know I'd chip in.
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Vader

As booty and plunder wind down in Af-Pak and Middle East, U.S. Army looks to scavenge in Africa

Eric Schmitt
New York Times
Fri, 18 Oct 2013 15:48 UTC
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Here on the Kansas plains, thousands of soldiers once bound for Iraq or Afghanistan are now gearing up for missions in Africa as part of a new Pentagon strategy to train and advise indigenous forces to tackle emerging terrorist threats and other security risks so that American forces do not have to.

The first-of-its-kind program is drawing on troops from a 3,500-member brigade in the Army's storied First Infantry Division, known as the Big Red One, to conduct more than 100 missions in Africa over the next year. The missions range from a two-man sniper team in Burundi to 350 soldiers conducting airborne and humanitarian exercises in South Africa.

The brigade has also sent a 150-member rapid-response force to Djibouti in the Horn of Africa to protect embassies in emergencies, a direct reply to the attack on the United States Mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year, which killed four Americans.

"Our goal is to help Africans solve African problems, without having a big American presence," said Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee Magee, a West Point graduate and third-generation Army officer whose battalion has sent troops to Burundi, Niger and South Africa in the past several months, and whose unit will deploy to Djibouti in December.

Comment:
Africom: The New American Empire in Africa



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Bizarro Earth

UK's top prosecutor defends journalists who break law in public interest

Zoe Williams and Nick Hopkins
Guardian
Fri, 18 Oct 2013 15:47 UTC
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© Felix ClayKeir Starmer, the outgoing DPP, said laws governing UK intelligence agencies needed reviewing in light of Edward Snowden's revelations.
Keir Starmer says his guidelines are drafted to let journalists pursue difficult stories without fear of prosecution

Britain's most senior prosecutor has launched a robust defence of journalists who break the law pursuing investigations that have a genuine public interest. Legal guidelines had been drafted, he said, to protect reporters.

Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions (DPP), insisted it "would be very unhealthy if you had a situation where a journalist felt that they needed to go to their lawyer before they pursued any lead or asked any question".

In an interview with the Guardian, Starmer said: "We've got to recognise that in the course of journalism, journalists will rub up against the criminal law and that is why, in our guidelines, we took the approach that we would assess where there was evidence of a criminal offence, whether the public interest in what the journalist was trying to achieve outweighed the overall criminality."

Starmer spoke at the end of another week in which the furore over the leaks from the whistleblower Edward Snowden has reverberated around Westminster. One backbench Tory MP has called for the Metropolitan police to investigate the Guardian for publishing stories about GCHQ's mass surveillance programmes.
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Snakes in Suits

Obamacare woes widen as insurers get wrong data

Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky
Wall Street Journal
Thu, 17 Oct 2013 15:42 UTC
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© Shutterstock
New Errors Indicate Technological Problems Extend Issues Already Identified

Insurers say the federal health-care marketplace is generating flawed data that is straining their ability to handle even the trickle of enrollees who have gotten through so far, in a sign that technological problems extend further than the website traffic and software issues already identified.

Emerging errors include duplicate enrollments, spouses reported as children, missing data fields and suspect eligibility determinations, say executives at more than a dozen health plans. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Nebraska said it had to hire temporary workers to contact new customers directly to resolve inaccuracies in submissions. Medical Mutual of Ohio said one customer had successfully signed up for three of its plans.

The flaws could do lasting damage to the law if customers are deterred from signing up or mistakenly believe they have obtained coverage.

"The longer this takes to resolve...the harder it will be to get people to [come back and] sign up," said Aetna Inc. Chief Executive Mark Bertolini. "It's not off to a great start," he said, though he believes the marketplaces are "here to stay."
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Eye 1

Several top websites use device fingerprinting to secretly track users


KU Leuven-iMinds
Thu, 10 Oct 2013 08:54 UTC
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A new study by KU Leuven-iMinds researchers has uncovered that 145 of the Internet's 10,000 top websites track users without their knowledge or consent. The websites use hidden scripts to extract a device fingerprint from users' browsers. Device fingerprinting circumvents legal restrictions imposed on the use of cookies and ignores the Do Not Track HTTP header. The findings suggest that secret tracking is more widespread than previously thought.

Device fingerprinting, also known as browser fingerprinting, is the practice of collecting properties of PCs, smartphones and tablets to identify and track users. These properties include the screen size, the versions of installed software and plugins, and the list of installed fonts. A 2010 study by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) showed that, for the vast majority of browsers, the combination of these properties is unique, and thus functions as a 'fingerprint' that can be used to track users without relying on cookies. Device fingerprinting targets either Flash, the ubiquitous browser plugin for playing animations, videos and sound files, or JavaScript, a common programming language for web applications.

This is the first comprehensive effort to measure the prevalence of device fingerprinting on the Internet. The team of KU Leuven-iMinds researchers analysed the Internet's top 10,000 websites and discovered that 145 of them (almost 1.5%) use Flash-based fingerprinting. Some Flash objects included questionable techniques such as revealing a user's original IP address when visiting a website through a third party (a so-called proxy).
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Eye 1

Snowden says he took no secret files to Russia

James Risen
The New York Times
Mon, 21 Oct 2013 08:26 UTC
Edward J. Snowden
© Wikileaks via Associated PressEdward J. Snowden said there was a "zero percent chance" that the Russians or Chinese had received any of the secret documents he obtained.
Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, said in an extensive interview this month that he did not take any secret N.S.A. documents with him to Russia when he fled there in June, assuring that Russian intelligence officials could not get access to them.

Mr. Snowden said he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong, before flying to Moscow, and did not keep any copies for himself. He did not take the files to Russia "because it wouldn't serve the public interest," he said.

"What would be the unique value of personally carrying another copy of the materials onward?" he added.

He also asserted that he was able to protect the documents from China's spies because he was familiar with that nation's intelligence abilities, saying that as an N.S.A. contractor he had targeted Chinese operations and had taught a course on Chinese cybercounterintelligence.
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