• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

Thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets of Turkey demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan amid a widening corruption scandal rattling his government. There are reports of tear gas and clashes with police in Istanbul.

Over 5,000 people gathered in Istanbul's Kadikoy district and some 1,000 in the Besiktas district on Wednesday, Xinhua news agency reports. Protesters have also gathered in the capital of Ankara, as well as in Izmir and other cities. Ruptly news agency says hundreds took to the streets of Istanbul.

Police in Istanbul have fired tear gas to disperse the demonstrators. At least four people have been arrested, according to Firat news agency.

Late on Wednesday, Erdogan announced a major cabinet reshuffle, replacing 10 key ministers. This came soon after the resignation of interior, economy, and environment ministers over a high profile corruption investigation. Resigned Environment Minister Erdogan Bayraktar turned against the Turkish leader, urging him to step down.

The scandal and ensuing feud between Erdogan and the judiciary have reignited anti-government protests against Erdogan's 11-year rule within the past week.

According to official science, Homo is the genus of human-like great apes, with only one surviving species today - 'Modern Human', or Homo Sapiens. Strange as it may seem, the great majority of the 7 billion or so members of this species that presently inhabit planet Earth believe themselves to be active creators of, and participants in, what they call a 'highly advanced civilization'.

Yet there remain a few members of this species who, unlike the majority of their fellow sapiens who have cast off their bothersome critical thinking capacities in favor of a sonambulistic approach to life, can see quite clearly that this particular 'highly advanced civilization' is in fact a society where, to paraphrase hypnotist Michel Ellner, "Everything is backwards, everything is upside down; doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, psychiatrists destroy minds, scientists destroy truth, major media destroys information, religions destroy spirituality and governments destroy freedom."

The illusion of the 'great advancement in civilization' aside, if we really take a look at what's going on in the world around us these days, it becomes difficult to make any sense of inter-human relationships, to say nothing about our relationships with the other species with which we share this planet. Official science routinely stretches credulity in the obtuse and often deceitful way that it dismisses the many bizarre and 'out of place' anthropological and archeological artifacts and remains that have been discovered all over the planet in recent decades. If mainstream science refuses to take all the available evidence into account in its attempt to come up with a theory of humanity's origins, how can we expect to ever understand the true position of our species within the larger animal kingdom on Earth?