Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
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IT WAS A POWERFUL piece of technology created for an important customer. The Medusa system, named after the mythical Greek monster with snakes instead of hair, had one main purpose: to vacuum up vast quantities of internet data at an astonishing speed.
The technology was designed by Endace, a little-known New Zealand company. And the important customer was the British electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.
Dozens of internal documents and emails from Endace, obtained by The Intercept and reported in cooperation with Television New Zealand, reveal the firm's key role helping governments across the world harvest vast amounts of information on people's private emails, online chats, social media conversations, and internet browsing histories.
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There are two important policy takeaways every internet user should know about this attack. First: the government warns us about cyber attacks all the time, but has not required companies to use the kind of basic security measures that might have stopped Friday's outage. Second: having punted on legislation that would have required companies to keep good security practices, the government is now on the verge of obtaining the power to hack victims of attacks like that carried out Friday. Yes, you read that right: In place of mandating companies practice good security, the feds are plotting to get new authority to use weak security practices as a justification for mass government hacking.
In short: The government appears to be planning for an insecure internet full of spies. Intentionally.
To explain some of the backstory here, Fight for the Future, an internet freedom advocacy organization allied with the ACLU, tweeted this excellent thread over the weekend. I've storified it below, because it does a fantastic job explaining how the government, with a little cover from big business, retreated from legislation that would have forced companies to build more secure products and systems, and instead opted for a bill that would massively expand government surveillance powers
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Elsewhere in America, when emails that the author assumed would never see the light of day became public he suffers some form of consequences-you know, stuff like plummeting poll numbers, possible jail time or forced resignation. This goes for everybody from Hillary Clinton and the former head of Sony Pictures on down.
But if you're a Politico or New York Times scribe or CNBC anchor John Harwood and hacked emails emerge that reveal you outright colluding with Hillary Clinton campaign-by giving advice or providing the communications director "veto" power over what to include from your interview with the candidate or allowing campaign chair John Podesta veto power over your stories-that is another matter.
Your media friends will not censure you or even scold you-in fact, they don't bother to contact you directly. Instead, you can hide between a crafty spokesman who won't even answer specific questions but acts like he's the publicist for some elusive Hollywood star and that a journalist determined to ask standard pointed questions is actually pining to profile him for Vanity Fair.
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Globally averaged concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached the symbolic and significant milestone of 400 parts per million for the first time in 2015 and surged again to new records in 2016 on the back of the very powerful El Niño event, according to the World Meteorological Organization's annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.
CO2 levels had previously reached the 400 ppm barrier for certain months of the year and in certain locations but never before on a global average basis for the entire year. The longest-established greenhouse gas monitoring station at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, predicts that CO2 concentrations will stay above 400 ppm for the whole of 2016 and not dip below that level for many generations.
The growth spurt in CO2 was fuelled by the El Niño event, which started in 2015 and had a strong impact well into 2016. This triggered droughts in tropical regions and reduced the capacity of "sinks" like forests, vegetation and the oceans to absorb CO2. These sinks currently absorb about half of CO2 emissions but there is a risk that they may become saturated, which would increase the fraction of emitted carbon dioxide which stays in the atmosphere, according to the Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.
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WikiLeaks reveals Clinton considered a Texas Republican for the Supreme Court
Hours after conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia passed away, the Clinton campaign floated a Texan as a possible replacement.
Wallace Jefferson, a former chief justice on the Texas Supreme Court, was the subject of an email titled "Scalia replacement" written by the president of a George Soros-backed grant-making organization.
"Remember our discussion of Wallace Jefferson, Chief Justice in Texas?" said Open Society Foundations president Chris Stone in the email.
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