Society's ChildS


Cut

CNN Poll: Opposition to Obamacare hits record Highs, support crashes to new lows

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© CNN
The results of CNN's latest poll on Obamacare were delivered just two days before Christmas - and it's unlikely they are making President Barack Obama very happy.
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© Zero Hedge
The telephone poll, taken between December 13-19, asked 1035 adults - 950 of whom were registered voters - the following question: "As you may know, a bill that makes major changes to the country's health care system became law in 2010. Based on what you have read or heard about that legislation, do you generally favor or generally oppose it?"

Camcorder

Burglar calls police after inadvertently stealing child sex abuse videos

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© shutterstock
If you doubt there's an unwritten code of honor among criminals -- governing certain behavior that's just not permitted -- consider this:

Police say a burglar in southern Spain who stole an old Super 8 camera and tapes from a home discovered to his horror the graphic video content of a man sexually abusing boys.

The burglar put three tapes in a brown envelope, hid them under a parked car, and then called police from a public phone, directing them to go find it.

Inside the envelope, police found a note with the home address of the suspected pedophile and a message from the burglar:

"I've had the misfortune that these tapes have fallen into my hands and I feel obligated to turn them in so that you can do your job and put that (expletive) in prison for life."

Spanish national police confirmed Thursday they arrested a 64-year-old suspected child molester this week at his home -- the one that had been burglarized -- in the southern provincial capital of Jaen.

The suspect is a local football (soccer) coach who lived alone. He lured some of his young players into watching pornographic videos together, and then sexually abused them, police said.

Card - VISA

Target denies insider claims that encrypted PINs were stolen along with 40 million card numbers

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  • Target hackers allegedly stole encrypted PINS in 'sophisticated' operation
  • The retailer says it has learned of some scam emails related to breach but doesn't have specific information as to how it happened
  • Details of 40 million credit and debit card accounts stolen between November 27 and December 15
  • Target claimed Wednesday that encrypted personal ID numbers were not accessed by hackers
  • Target faces at least 15 lawsuits seeking class action status
Target Corp is crying foul on insiders who recently told the media that encrypted PINs were stolen along with more than 40 million credit and debit card numbers in the retail behemoth's catastrophic data breach.

The hackers who attacked Target Corp and compromised more than 40 million credit cards and debit cards also managed to steal encrypted personal identification numbers, according to a senior payments executive familiar with the situation told Reuters.

However, Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder insisted that 'no unencrypted PIN data was accessed' and there was no evidence that PIN data has been 'compromised'.

She confirmed that some 'encrypted data' was stolen, but declined to say if that included encrypted PINs.

Whistle

The Real Snowden

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© ForbesThe Electronic Frontier Foundation hoodie Edward Snowden often wore to work in his NSA Hawaii office.
Perhaps Edward Snowden's hoodie should have raised suspicions.

The black sweatshirt sold by the civil libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation featured a parody of the National Security Agency's logo, with the traditional key in an eagle's claws replaced by a collection of AT&T cables, and eavesdropping headphones covering the menacing bird's ears. Snowden wore it regularly to stay warm in the air-conditioned underground NSA Hawaii Kunia facility known as "the tunnel."

His coworkers assumed it was meant ironically. And a geek as gifted as Snowden could get away with a few irregularities.

Months after Snowden leaked tens of thousands of the NSA's most highly classified documents to the media, the former intelligence contractor has stayed out of the limelight, rarely granting interviews or sharing personal details. A 60 Minutes episode Sunday night, meanwhile, aired NSA's officials descriptions of Snowden as a malicious hacker who cheated on an NSA entrance exam and whose work computers had to be destroyed after his departure for fear he had infected them with malware.

But an NSA staffer who contacted me last month and asked not to be identified - and whose claims we checked with Snowden himself via his ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner - offered me a very different, firsthand portrait of how Snowden was seen by his colleagues in the agency's Hawaii office: A principled and ultra-competent, if somewhat eccentric employee, and one who earned the access used to pull off his leak by impressing superiors with sheer talent.

Arrow Down

Multimillionaire philanthropist leaps from his NYC high-rise after suffering stroke

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Robert W. Wilson, a hedge fund manager and decades-long patron of the ACLU, committed suicide Monday by throwing himself from his luxury Central Park West high-rise apartment in New York into the courtyard.

Wilson, 87, had earned an estimated $800 million as a noted short seller by 2000, the New York Post reported. Estimates of his gifts to groups including the World Monuments Fund, the Nature Conservancy, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Wildlife Conservation Society range between $400 million and $500 million. He spent millions fighting Proposition 8 in California - the state's gay marriage ban - and backed a measure which would expand state funding and oversight for treatment and rehab programs for nonviolent drug offenders and parolees while reducing criminal penalties and limiting courts' authority to lock up offenders who violate probation or parole.

He also devoted time and money to the cause of criminal justice reform. He established a matching donation in 2010 for anyone leaving money to the ACLU in their will of up to $10,000 each.

Arrow Down

No charges after family member's gun fatally shoots 2-month-old on Christmas Eve

An autopsy was being conducted on Thursday after a 2-month-old girl was shot to death in Pennsylvania on Christmas Eve.

The Lancaster Intelligencer Journal reported that the infant had been killed by a single gunshot wound in East Lampeter Township on Tuesday just after 2 p.m.

Investigators said that the only person at home with the child at the time of the shooting was an adult male. According to The Patriot-News, police said that the gun was owned by a family member.

First responders were unable to revive the girl and she was later pronounced dead at Lancaster General Hospital.

Megaphone

Internet privacy as important as human rights, says UN's Navi Pillay

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© Martial Trezzini/APSir Tim Berners-Lee and Navi Pillay, during a press conference in Geneva earlier this month.
The UN human rights chief, Navi Pillay, has compared the uproar in the international community caused by revelations of mass surveillance with the collective response that helped bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Pillay, the first non-white woman to serve as a high-court judge in South Africa, made the comments in an interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee on a special edition of BBC Radio 4's Today programme, which the inventor of the world wide web was guest editing.

Pillay has been asked by the UN to prepare a report on protection of the right to privacy, in the wake of the former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden leaking classified documents about UK and US spying and the collection of personal data.

The former international criminal court judge said her encounters with serious human rights abuses, which included serving on the Rwanda tribunal, did not make her take online privacy less seriously. "I don't grade human rights," she said. "I feel I have to look after and promote the rights of all persons. I'm not put off by the lifetime experience of violations I have seen."

Book

U.S. bans 49 more books from schools in 2013

More books have been banned in US schools than ever before. Book burning next?


Airplane

Flu hits Alaska Airlines crews, cancelling 24 flights

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© AP
Alaska Airlines cancelled 24 flights on Sunday and Monday after flu-stricken pilots and flight attendants called in sick.

Alaska spokeswoman Bobbie Egan says about 270 passengers were affected by cancelled flights. Another 14 flights were cancelled Sunday due to bad weather.

Egan says a "very unusual" cold and flu season hit the airline's Pacific Northwest hub, and the entire region was affected.

Egan says pilots and flight attendants who were off-duty have volunteered to work while their colleagues are out sick.

The airline forecasts a less-busy Tuesday, and says it probably won't have to cancel any more flights because of illness.

Cell Phone

WATCH-READ: Edward Snowden's Alternative Christmas Message

As we reported on Tuesday, NSA leaker Edward Snowden will deliver Channel 4 UK's "Alternative Christmas Message," the network's annual response to the Queen's address. They aired on Christmas Day at 4:15 p.m. local time in England.

Snowden's remarks were filmed by Glenn Greenwald's film collaborator Laura Poitras, from an undisclosed location in Russia.


Full remarks transcribed below.
Hi and Merry Christmas. I'm honored to have a chance to speak with you and your family this year. Recently we learned that our governments, working in concert, have created a system of worldwide system of mass surveillance watching everything we do. Great Britain's George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information.

The types of collection in the book - - microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us - - are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person.

A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters; privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.

The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it. Together we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance, and remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying.

For everyone out there listening, thank you and Merry Christmas.