Seth Rich

Exploration of Conspiracy Theories from Perspective of Esoteric Traditions

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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sat Aug 25, 2018 5:42 am

Florida candidate for Congress: Alien abduction doesn't define me

Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera has a long list of accomplishments to bolster her campaign in Florida. But she is perhaps best known for claiming that she was abducted by space aliens as a child. (Story by Curt Anderson / Associated Press)
Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera has a long list of accomplishments to bolster her campaign in Florida. But she is perhaps best known for claiming that she was abducted by space aliens as a child. (Story by Curt Anderson / Associated Press)

MIAMI — U.S. House candidate Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera has a long list of accomplishments to bolster her campaign in Florida. But she is perhaps best known for claiming that she was abducted by space aliens as a child.

Rodriguez Aguilera is a longshot in the race for the Miami-area seat being vacated by retiring Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Yet last weekend, the Miami Herald endorsed her for the GOP nomination in the Tuesday primary out of a field of nine candidates.
In an interview, she said she is grateful for the endorsement and that her tale of kidnapping by aliens does not define her.
“It has nothing to do with what I have done. It happened when I was 7 years old,” she said. “I am so proud of the Herald and what they did.”
Rodriguez Aguilera says she was taken aboard a spaceship as a young girl by blond extraterrestrials who resembled the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro. She says they told her that the “center of the world's energy is Africa” and that thousands of non-human skulls were once discovered in a cave on the Mediterranean island of Malta.
She has said she witnessed paranormal activity since then and saw a UFO at 17. She also said she has been in touch with the aliens telepathically long after the abduction.
Even if it’s hard to believe there’s a starman waiting in the sky, Rodriguez Aguilera won’t back down.

“I stick to my guns when I believe in something,” she said.
In its Aug. 19 editorial, the Herald reported that two of the leading Republican candidates — former Miami-Dade commissioner Bruno Barreiro and Spanish-language television journalist Maria Elvira Salazar — did not take part in the paper’s endorsement process. And beyond Rodriguez Aguilera, the editorial found the remaining candidates unprepared or unqualified.
“We realize that Rodriguez Aguilera is an unusual candidate,” the editorial noted, adding that the paper was impressed with her “boots-on-the-ground ideas and experience.”
Rodriguez Aguilera is a former City Council member in the suburb of Doral who is the daughter of a Cuban political prisoner. She previously was a social worker, ombudsman at the Miami-Dade county manager’s office and now runs a business training women in other countries how to run for political office.
“The theme of my campaign is people above politics. I train people around the world about democracy,” she said. “I have the most experience. I can go in there and start working just as I have all my life.”
Whoever emerges from the GOP field Tuesday will face one of five Democratic candidates and the seat is considered one of the party’s best chances for a switch from the GOP.
Polls show the leader on the Democratic side is former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, who was also president of the University of Miami and University of Wisconsin. The Herald, however, endorsed state Rep. David Richardson over Shalala.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/politi ... story.html
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Mon Aug 27, 2018 11:34 am

Study: More ‘Ecosexual’ Professors Are Having Sex with Trees

A recently published academic article examines “exosexuals’ encounters with the natural environment.”
In a new academic piece published in the journal Feminist Theory, Professor Lauran Whitworth of St. Mary’s College of Maryland defines the increasingly popular term “ecosexual.”
“1. A person that finds nature sensual, sexy. 2. A new sexual identity. 3: Person who takes the Earth as their lover,” she wrote. In another paragraph, Whitworth explains that while some environmentalists encourage the use of environmentally-friendly sex products such as fair trade condoms and chemical-free lubricants, “ecosexuals” take it a step further by encouraging sex with “nature itself.”

Whitworth includes a description of one “ecosexual” individual’s first sexual encounter with a redwood tree at Yosemite National Park.
In the spirit of carnival, ecosexuality embraces degradation and decomposition. Sprinkle describes her first encounter with redwood trees at Yosemite National Park: ‘I loved the scent of the trunk, like vanilla mixed with soil. I have a strong memory of coming across a redwood that had fallen over from a storm. I walked around off the trail and peeked at its freshly exposed roots. So soft, so sensuous, so sexy! I had to touch them.’
In a particularly bizarre portion of the piece, Whitworth writes about how defecating outside is a form of “ecosexuality.” According to her, “ecosexuality celebrates the carnal and grotesque, particularly in some of its campiest moments.”
Breitbart News has reported on “ecosexuals” throughout their rise in popularity in feminist circles. In November 2016, Breitbart News reported that “ecosexuals” were masturbating under waterfalls and trees to save the planet. In September 2017, Breitbart News reported that a UC Santa Cruz professor was encouraging her students to have sex with the earth in order to preserve it. In April 2018, Breitbart News reported on a University of Michigan professor that wrote about the importance of “talking erotically to plants.”

More
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/08/ ... ith-trees/
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Wed Aug 29, 2018 6:38 pm

Awan gets a Q drop..

"Aug 29 2018 00:36:08
Q
!!mG7VJxZNCI
2779165
>>2779059
Why is POTUS pushing the FBI & DOJ on this issue?
What if access to the server(s) was deliberate?
What if this is 'known' within the intelligence community?
What if this is 'known' within the FBI & DOJ?
If known - why no action?
How might this discredit the FBI's investigation into HRC's emails?
How might this OPEN THE DOOR to [WEINER] / [Huma] / [HRC]?
Logical thinking.
WHY WAS THE INFORMATION ON WEINER'S LAPTOP IN THE FIRST PLACE?
D5.
Q
Aug 29 2018 01:02:38
Q
!!mG7VJxZNCI
2779677
>>2779165
What if a paper-trail exists…
PDB via No Such Agency?
HUSSEIN made aware w/ no action?
Why did POTUS refuse 'select' PDBs during transition?
Who knew?
Threat assessment.
Adm Rogers?
FLYNN?
Why did HUSSEIN + HRC + ADMIN + Staff + … use private emails to communicate?
Was HRC the only one to use unsecured server(s)?
If access was granted re: HRC private server(s) can you assume access was granted re: House server(s) re: AWAN?
AWAN>Pakistani Intelligence?
AWAN FREE?
Huma>Muslim Brotherhood?
Matters of NAT SEC.
Q"

#1971
https://qanonposts.com/
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sat Sep 01, 2018 6:33 pm

From FP

Observation Deck
Washington’s Ministry of Preemption
To stop security breaches before they happen, U.S. intelligence agencies are surveilling everything.
By James Bamford | May 31, 2017, 8:00 AM

On April 7, an odd-looking jet landed at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan. Codenamed Constant Phoenix, it was a U.S. Air Force version of a Boeing 707 but with round pods on the fuselage designed to “sniff” the atmosphere for radioactivity. Eight days later, across the East China Sea, North Korea would be celebrating the “Day of the Sun,” marking the 105th birthday of its founder, Kim Il Sung. And because many in the Donald Trump administration were concerned that the festivities would include a very big surprise — the country’s sixth nuclear test — Constant Phoenix was on alert. But when the celebrations ended, the surprise was on the Koreans, whose missile launch failed.
The unexpected has always been the enemy of intelligence. That’s why a small group of Ph.D.s and research scientists are employed by a secretive organization in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., to take the surprises out of intelligence: the spy world’s premier research center, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), which reports directly to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

For decades, from the first World Trade Center bombing to 9/11 to the recent Syrian poison gas attack, U.S. intelligence agencies have consistently been caught off guard, despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent on spies, eavesdroppers, and satellites. IARPA’s answer is “anticipatory intelligence,” predicting the crime or event before it happens.
Like a scene from Minority Report, the 2002 film where criminals are caught and punished by a “precrime” police force before they can commit their deeds, IARPA hopes to find terrorists, hackers, and even protesters before they act. The group is devising robotic machines that can find virtually everything about everyone and issue automatic “precrime” alerts.
That’s the idea behind the agency’s Open Source Indicators (OSI) program: Build powerful automated computers, armed with artificial intelligence, specialized algorithms, and machine learning, capable of cataloging the lives of everyone everywhere, 24/7. Tapping real-time into tens of thousands of different data streams — every Facebook post, tweet, and YouTube video; every tollbooth tag number; every GPS download, web search, and news feed; every street camera video; every restaurant reservation on Open Table — largely eliminates surprise from the intelligence equation. To IARPA, the bigger the data, the fewer and smaller the surprises.
If all this sounds familiar, it is. In 2002, the U.S. Defense Department created Total Information Awareness (TIA). Similar to IARPA’s OSI, TIA’s goal was to create a “virtual, centralized grand database” made up of unclassified, publicly available information. But following press reports and a public outcry, Congress killed it. However, the Pentagon secretly shifted some resources to the National Security Agency’s own research center, the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA). Then, in 2007, ARDA quietly morphed into IARPA.
Even more troubling is IARPA’s secretive program Mercury, which focuses on data mining private communications collected by the NSA. Last year, for example, the agency collected more than 151 million phone call records involving Americans, according to a U.S. intelligence community report released May 2. Worldwide, the number is likely in the billions.
Like OSI, Mercury is outsourced to private contractors who develop computerized robots to scan the ocean of NSA intercepts for clues to potential terrorists, hackers, social unrest, and war. According to IARPA, “The Mercury program seeks to develop methods for continuous, automated analysis of SIGINT in order to anticipate and/or detect political crises, disease outbreaks, terrorist activity, and military actions.” The program manager for the Mercury project, Kristen Jordan, had previously worked at the NSA as the deputy national intelligence officer for signals intelligence connected to weapons of mass destruction.
To process such mammoth amounts of information, both open and secret, IARPA is racing to develop the world’s fastest computer, one capable of “beyond exascale” speeds — 1 quintillion (a million trillion) operations per second — program manager Marc Manheimer told the Next Platform, a news site that covers high-end computing. Under IARPA’s Cryogenic Computing Complexity program, the agency is focused on moving from traditional semiconductors to an energy-efficient superconducting supercomputer able to crunch data and break encryption at unimaginable speeds.
But collecting the data is useless without analysis, and that’s where the dangers of anticipatory intelligence and “precrime” policing are myriad and growing, with the shape of a subject’s face now the latest determinant of his or her likelihood to be or become a terrorist.
But collecting the data is useless without analysis, and that’s where the dangers of anticipatory intelligence and “precrime” policing are myriad and growing, with the shape of a subject’s face now the latest determinant of his or her likelihood to be or become a terrorist.
That capability is, at least, the assertion of Faception, an Israeli company that says its software uses “advanced machine learning techniques” and “an array of classifiers” to “match an individual with various personality traits and types with a high level of accuracy.” Thus, according to the company’s website, its program can simply pick out the likely terrorists, pedophiles, and white-collar criminals from “video streams (recorded and live), cameras, or online/offline databases.”
To its credit, IARPA claims that the open-source data it collects is anonymized to protect privacy — but the group makes no mention of the NSA intercepts. Nevertheless, the hardware, software, and algorithms are already in place, and that administrative decision can be changed at any time by the Trump administration, which has shown little regard for privacy issues.
During his confirmation hearing last February, Dan Coats, the new director of national intelligence and the head of the office to which IARPA reports, expressed his support for the NSA’s warrantless overseas internet spying, which has also scooped up some domestic communications. The authority, contained in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is due to expire in December, but Coats vowed to make reauthorizing it his “top legislative priority.” And, as a senator, Coats voted against the USA Freedom Act, the bill that prohibited the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records.
In Minority Report, the precrime program was shut down after the system was proved to be subject to manipulation. That plot provides a lesson for IARPA. In December 2016, Sean Kinion, a scientist working on a program for IARPA, was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to faking data.
Illustration by Matthew Hollister
This article originally appeared in the May/June 2017 issue of FP magazine.

@© 2018, The Slate Group
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/31/wa ... elligence/
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sat Sep 01, 2018 6:54 pm

James Bamford
Born
V. James Bamford
September 15, 1946 (age 71)
Natick, Massachusetts, United States

V. James Bamford (born September 15, 1946) is an American bestselling author and journalist noted for his writing about United States intelligence agencies, especially the National Security Agency (NSA).[1] Bamford has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, as a distinguished visiting professor and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper's, and other publications. In 2006, he won the National Magazine Award for Reporting for his article, "The Man Who Sold The War," published in Rolling Stone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bamford#Books

Note: I've read all but "A Pretext for War". His books are well researched and written.
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sat Sep 01, 2018 7:35 pm

Re: "The Slate Group" owner of Slate and Foreign Policy..

The Slate Group owned, or was owned, by WaPo . WaPo owned Newsweek. Post Bezos buying WaPo, I don't know the status.

The Slate Group
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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The Slate Group is a US online publishing entity established in June 2008 by Graham Holdings Company. Among the publications overseen by The Slate Group are Slate and ForeignPolicy.com.[1]
The creation of The Slate Group was announced by Donald Graham, Chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Company, in a press release on June 4, 2008.[2] Its mission was stated as developing and managing a family of web-only magazines.[1] The release also announced that Slate Group was expected to work closely with Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive in the areas of advertising sales, technology and marketing services.[1]
In 2014, The Slate Group had around 121 employees and reported more than 25 million unique visitors and more than 120 million page views per month on average.[3]
Via a share in French company E2J2 SAS and other support, The Slate Group is involved in the French-language websites Slate.fr and Slate Afrique.[3] The Root, an online magazine focusing on African American culture, used to be held by The Slate Group until Graham Holdings sold it to Univision Communications in 2015.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slate_Group

I found the following Slate tweet interesting. I'm no fan of TrumpZilla, or any political animal, but the attempted smear or poor humor is beyond me. It's .. Who are you going to believe, us, or your lying eyes?

TrumpZilla is on AF1 or similar. I think laptops are still considered computers?

https://twitter.com/Slate/status/1035140587425542144

The account belongs to Slate as per the tweet link https://slate.com/hotseats. I guess someone may have spoofed their account? Or, blatant fake news and stupidity ?

Got me.
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Mon Sep 03, 2018 5:29 pm

Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance

By Jeff NesbitDecember 8, 2017
Former director of legislative and public affairs, National
qz.com
10 mins read

Two decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. And Google is at the heart of that origin story. Some of the research that led to Google’s ambitious creation was funded and coordinated by a research group established by the intelligence community to find ways to track individuals and groups online.
The intelligence community hoped that the nation’s leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital information network. That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today.

The story of the deliberate creation of the modern mass-surveillance state includes elements of Google’s surprising, and largely unknown, origin. It is a somewhat different creation story than the one the public has heard, and explains what Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page set out to build, and why.
But this isn’t just the origin story of Google: It’s the origin story of the mass-surveillance state, and the government money that funded it.
Backstory: The intelligence community and Silicon Valley
In the mid 1990s, the intelligence community in America began to realize that they had an opportunity. The supercomputing community was just beginning to migrate from university settings into the private sector, led by investments from a place that would come to be known as Silicon Valley.
The intelligence community wanted to shape Silicon Valley’s efforts at their inception so they would be useful for homeland security purposes.
A digital revolution was underway: one that would transform the world of data gathering and how we make sense of massive amounts of information. The intelligence community wanted to shape Silicon Valley’s supercomputing efforts at their inception so they would be useful for both military and homeland security purposes. Could this supercomputing network, which would become capable of storing terabytes of information, make intelligent sense of the digital trail that human beings leave behind?

Answering this question was of great interest to the intelligence community.
Intelligence-gathering may have been their world, but the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) had come to realize that their future was likely to be profoundly shaped outside the government. It was at a time when military and intelligence budgets within the Clinton administration were in jeopardy, and the private sector had vast resources at their disposal. If the intelligence community wanted to conduct mass surveillance for national security purposes, it would require cooperation between the government and the emerging supercomputing companies.
To do this, they began reaching out to the scientists at American universities who were creating this supercomputing revolution. These scientists were developing ways to do what no single group of human beings sitting at work stations in the NSA and the CIA could ever hope to do: gather huge amounts of data and make intelligent sense of it.
A rich history of the government’s science funding
There was already a long history of collaboration between America’s best scientists and the intelligence community, from the creation of the atomic bomb and satellite technology to efforts to put a man on the moon.
The internet itself was created because of an intelligence effort.
In fact, the internet itself was created because of an intelligence effort: In the 1970s, the agency responsible for developing emerging technologies for military, intelligence, and national security purposes—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—linked four supercomputers to handle massive data transfers. It handed the operations off to the National Science Foundation (NSF) a decade or so later, which proliferated the network across thousands of universities and, eventually, the public, thus creating the architecture and scaffolding of the World Wide Web.

Silicon Valley was no different. By the mid 1990s, the intelligence community was seeding funding to the most promising supercomputing efforts across academia, guiding the creation of efforts to make massive amounts of information useful for both the private sector as well as the intelligence community.
They funded these computer scientists through an unclassified, highly compartmentalized program that was managed for the CIA and the NSA by large military and intelligence contractors. It was called the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project.
The Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project
MDDS was introduced to several dozen leading computer scientists at Stanford, CalTech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and others in a white paper that described what the CIA, NSA, DARPA, and other agencies hoped to achieve. The research would largely be funded and managed by unclassified science agencies like NSF, which would allow the architecture to be scaled up in the private sector if it managed to achieve what the intelligence community hoped for.

“Not only are activities becoming more complex, but changing demands require that the IC [Intelligence Community] process different types as well as larger volumes of data,” the intelligence community said in its 1993 MDDS white paper. “Consequently, the IC is taking a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that IC requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products. Because the challenges are not unique to any one agency, the Community Management Staff (CMS) has commissioned a Massive Digital Data Systems [MDDS] Working Group to address the needs and to identify and evaluate possible solutions.”
Over the next few years, the program’s stated aim was to provide more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each to advance this research concept. The grants were to be directed largely through the NSF so that the most promising, successful efforts could be captured as intellectual property and form the basis of companies attracting investments from Silicon Valley. This type of public-to-private innovation system helped launch powerful science and technology companies like Qualcomm, Symantec, Netscape, and others, and funded the pivotal research in areas like Doppler radar and fiber optics, which are central to large companies like AccuWeather, Verizon, and AT&T today. Today, the NSF provides nearly 90% of all federal funding for university-based computer-science research.
The CIA and NSA’s end goal
The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called “birds of a feather:” Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online. The intelligence community named their first unclassified briefing for scientists the “birds of a feather” briefing, and the “Birds of a Feather Session on the Intelligence Community Initiative in Massive Digital Data Systems” took place at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose in the spring of 1995.
The intelligence community named their first unclassified briefing for scientists the “birds of a feather” briefing.
Their research aim was to track digital fingerprints inside the rapidly expanding global information network, which was then known as the World Wide Web. Could an entire world of digital information be organized so that the requests humans made inside such a network be tracked and sorted? Could their queries be linked and ranked in order of importance? Could “birds of a feather” be identified inside this sea of information so that communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way?

By working with emerging commercial-data companies, their intent was to track like-minded groups of people across the internet and identify them from the digital fingerprints they left behind, much like forensic scientists use fingerprint smudges to identify criminals. Just as “birds of a feather flock together,” they predicted that potential terrorists would communicate with each other in this new global, connected world—and they could find them by identifying patterns in this massive amount of new information. Once these groups were identified, they could then follow their digital trails everywhere.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, computer-science boy wonders
In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?
This process is perfectly suited for the purposes of counter-terrorism and homeland security efforts: Human beings and like-minded groups who might pose a threat to national security can be uniquely identified online before they do harm. This explains why the intelligence community found Brin’s and Page’s research efforts so appealing; prior to this time, the CIA largely used human intelligence efforts in the field to identify people and groups that might pose threats. The ability to track them virtually (in conjunction with efforts in the field) would change everything.
It was the beginning of what in just a few years’ time would become Google. The two intelligence-community managers charged with leading the program met regularly with Brin as his research progressed, and he was an author on several other research papers that resulted from this MDDS grant before he and Page left to form Google.
The grants allowed Brin and Page to do their work and contributed to their breakthroughs in web-page ranking and tracking user queries. Brin didn’t work for the intelligence community—or for anyone else. Google had not yet been incorporated. He was just a Stanford researcher taking advantage of the grant provided by the NSA and CIA through the unclassified MDDS program.
Left out of Google’s story
The MDDS research effort has never been part of Google’s origin story, even though the principal investigator for the MDDS grant specifically named Google as directly resulting from their research: “Its core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant,” he wrote. In a published research paper that includes some of Brin’s pivotal work, the authors also reference the NSF grant that was created by the MDDS program.
Instead, every Google creation story only mentions just one federal grant: the NSF/DARPA “digital libraries” grant, which was designed to allow Stanford researchers to search the entire World Wide Web stored on the university’s servers at the time. “The development of the Google algorithms was carried on a variety of computers, mainly provided by the NSF-DARPA-NASA-funded Digital Library project at Stanford,” Stanford’s Infolab says of its origin, for example. NSF likewise only references the digital libraries grant, not the MDDS grant as well, in its own history of Google’s origin. In the famous research paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” which describes the creation of Google, Brin and Page thanked the NSF and DARPA for its digital library grant to Stanford. But the grant from the intelligence community’s MDDS program—specifically designed for the breakthrough that Google was built upon—has faded into obscurity.
Google has said in the past that it was not funded or created by the CIA. For instance, when stories circulated in 2006 that Google had received funding from the intelligence community for years to assist in counter-terrorism efforts, the company told Wired magazine founder John Battelle, “The statements related to Google are completely untrue.”
Did the CIA directly fund the work of Brin and Page, and therefore create Google? No. But were Brin and Page researching precisely what the NSA, the CIA, and the intelligence community hoped for, assisted by their grants? Absolutely.
The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur something that looks almost exactly like Google.
To understand this significance, you have to consider what the intelligence community was trying to achieve as it seeded grants to the best computer-science minds in academia: The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur the development of something that looks almost exactly like Google. Brin’s breakthrough research on page ranking by tracking user queries and linking them to the many searches conducted—essentially identifying “birds of a feather”—was largely the aim of the intelligence community’s MDDS program. And Google succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
The intelligence community’s enduring legacy within Silicon Valley
Digital privacy concerns over the intersection between the intelligence community and commercial technology giants have grown in recent years. But most people still don’t understand the degree to which the intelligence community relies on the world’s biggest science and tech companies for its counter-terrorism and national-security work.
Civil-liberty advocacy groups have aired their privacy concerns for years, especially as they now relate to the Patriot Act. “Hastily passed 45 days after 9/11 in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet,” says the ACLU. “While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.”
When asked, the biggest technology and communications companies—from Verizon and AT&T to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft—say that they never deliberately and proactively offer up their vast databases on their customers to federal security and law enforcement agencies: They say that they only respond to subpoenas or requests that are filed properly under the terms of the Patriot Act.
But even a cursory glance through recent public records shows that there is a treadmill of constant requests that could undermine the intent behind this privacy promise. According to the data-request records that the companies make available to the public, in the most recent reporting period between 2016 and 2017, local, state and federal government authorities seeking information related to national security, counter-terrorism or criminal concerns issued more than 260,000 subpoenas, court orders, warrants, and other legal requests to Verizon, more than 250,000 such requests to AT&T, and nearly 24,000 subpoenas, search warrants, or court orders to Google. Direct national security or counter-terrorism requests are a small fraction of this overall group of requests, but the Patriot Act legal process has now become so routinized that the companies each have a group of employees who simply take care of the stream of requests.
In this way, the collaboration between the intelligence community and big, commercial science and tech companies has been wildly successful. When national security agencies need to identify and track people and groups, they know where to turn – and do so frequently. That was the goal in the beginning. It has succeeded perhaps more than anyone could have imagined at the time.
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-ori ... veillance/
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sat Sep 08, 2018 12:52 am

Note: NPS = National Park Service not Nikon Professional Service.

Trump Had Inauguration Crowd Photos Edited, Report Claims
Sep 07, 2018 Michael Zhang
PetaPixel

President Donald Trump personally intervened to have a government photographer edit official photos of his inauguration to make the crowd look bigger. That’s according to a new report published by The Guardian.

The newspaper submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and received a set of documents from the inspector general of the US interior department.
Those records reportedly reveal that Trump was angered by viral photos showing that his inauguration audience was smaller than President Barack Obama’s in 2009, despite the White House’s claims that Trump’s audience was the biggest ever.

Trump and then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer made phone calls to acting NPS director Michael Reynolds and NPS officials on January 21st, 2017, The Guardian reports, leading to a “scramble” within the National park Service for more flattering photos of the event.
In the report, an unnamed NPS communications official said “she got the impression that President Trump wanted to see pictures that appeared to depict more spectators in the crowd” and that the photos published up to that point showed “a lot of empty areas.”
An unnamed NPS photographer then went back into his photos from the inauguration and edited some of them by cropping out parts of the frame (he’s not accused of cloning or manipulating the photos in any other way).
“He said he edited the inauguration photographs to make them look more symmetrical by cropping out the sky and cropping out the bottom where the crowd ended,” the report states. “He said he did so to show that there had been more of a crowd.” But the photographer admitted NPS officials “had not specifically asked him to crop the photographs to show more of a crowd.”
The result of the new edit was that the photographer “selected a number of photos, based on his professional judgment, that concentrated on the area of the national mall where most of the crowd was standing.”

More, along with lots of photos..

https://petapixel.com/2018/09/07/trump- ... rt-claims/
kinderdigi
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sun Sep 09, 2018 9:40 pm

Old, but just found it.

Kim Dotcom Says Seth Rich Was WikiLeaks Source & ‘I Was Involved’

heavy.com

Kim Dotcom (Getty)
Kim Dotcom released a surprise series of tweets after private investigator Rod Wheeler backpedaled on his claims that he had evidence that Seth Rich was the WikiLeaks source. Dotcom is now saying that he knows Seth Rich was the WikiLeaks source, because he was involved in the whole thing. So far he hasn’t provided evidence for these statements, but Dotcom said on Twitter that he will give an official statement with more details on Tuesday after he consults with his attorneys.

Seth Rich was shot and killed on July 10 at 4:15 a.m. His murder remains unsolved and there were no suspects or eyewitnesses. Police have said it may have been an attempted robbery, but his wallet and credit cards weren’t taken. Rich worked for the DNC as a data analyst and was the DNC’s Voter Expansion Data Director at the time of his death.
Here’s what you need to know.

In a Series of Tweets, Kim Dotcom Said Seth Rich Was the WikiLeaks Source and He Helped
Dotcom released a series of tweets revealing that he believes Seth Rich was WikiLeaks’ source for the DNC emails. It started out with a tweet on May 19, in which he shared that if Congress decided to include Seth Rich in their Russian probe case, he’ll give written testimony and evidence that Seth Rich was the WikiLeaks source.


Immediately people wanted to know how he knows this. Dotcom pointed to a statement he made back in May 2015 that Julian Assange was going to be Clinton’s “worst nightmare” in 2016. At the time, he was responding to a question about a tweet he made in December 2014 when he said that he was going to be Clinton’s worst nightmare. “I have to say it’s probably more Julian,” he said, explaining his tweet. “But I’m aware of some things that are going to be roadblocks for her,” he told Bloomberg.
Now, Dotcom is hinting on Twitter that he had this knowledge because of his work with Rich:

Sean Hannity later tweeted to Dotcom, asking if he had evidence. And Doctom responded: “I’m the evidence!”


He clarified, emphasizing that he knew Seth Rich was the source, and that Dotcom was involved, somehow, in the leaks himself:

Dotcom then said that he will be releasing a statement about this on Tuesday. He said that he needs to consult his legal team before he reveals any additional information. So, up to this point, he hasn’t provided evidence to back up his claims.

Dotcom lives in New Zealand and is fighting charges from the United States of copyright infringement. Hillary Clinton signed the extradition request, and Dotcom is very open about his distaste for the Clintons and the Democrats.

In February, The Guardian reported that a New Zealand high court had ruled that Dotcom’s extradition to the U.S. could go ahead. A professor from Harvard Law School had previously shared why he believed that extradition shouldn’t go forward (which you can read here.)
Dotcom is a German-Finnish Internet entrepreneur who originally founded Megaupload, which ran from 2005 to 2012. It was a file hosting and sharing online service. The U.S. Justice Department accused him of copyright infringement, among other things, after Megaupload closed. In 2013, Dotcom launched Mega, a cloud storage service that uses encryption to prevent third-party spies from invading privacy. Dotcom promotes a whitepaper about the case, written by Robert Amsterdam and Ira Rothken, here. The United States’ case against Dotcom is unresolved at this point.

Dotcom’s Announcement Came After Rod Wheeler Retracted His Claims about Rich & WikiLeaks
Dotcom’s announcement came on the heels of Rod Wheeler, a private investigator and Fox analyst, backpedaling on all his statements claiming that Rich was the WikiLeaks source. Fox 5 published a story with quotes from Wheeler saying that Rich had emailed WikiLeaks before his death, that evidence was on Rich’s computer, and a confidential source from within the DC police had told him that the investigation was being slowed down. (The DC police did not respond to a request from Heavy for more information about these claims.)
Seth Rich’s family immediately blasted Wheeler for the statements, saying that he was hired by a third party and had signed a contract that he would not disclose anything without permission from the family. They said they doubted Wheeler’s claims and had seen no evidence themselves of anything. They also threatened to possibly sue Wheeler for his statements.

Wheeler later backtracked completely, telling CNN that he had no evidence about Rich and WikiLeaks, and was merely repeating things that Fox had said. It was strange, considering that when a Fox reporter had asked him if FBI sources had said there was information linking Rich to WikiLeaks, Wheeler responded: “Absolutely. That’s confirmed.” According to Fox he also said: “My investigation up to this point shows there was some degree of email exchange between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks.”
But later, he recanted everything. He told BuzzFeed he had no personal knowledge about an email between Rich and WikiLeaks. “That story on Fox 5 last night was inaccurate. I don’t even know where the computers are.” He said he only knew about the emails because of a Fox story by Malia Zimmerman, which stated an anonymous federal investigator was claiming Rich had sent emails to WikiLeaks. He later went on TV and told Sean Hannity that he had no evidence about emails to WikiLeaks, but then added:


Some Doubt Dotcom’s Claim about Rich Because of Past Disappointments
You can find all sorts of theories about Rich’s death online, ranging from Russia killing him to the DNC being involved to a random robbery on a dangerous street where other robberies also recently occurred. The people who are promoting the DNC theory have expressed some doubt about Dotcom’s statements because they’ve felt disappointed in the past, thinking he was going to release important information and then he did not. You can see some of the skepticism on Reddit here.
Some of the skepticism dates back to the campaign. When Trump supporters and Bernie Sanders supporters were eager for information about the DNC, they were frequently disappointed, feeling that Julian Assange and Kim Dotcom, among others, were promising information and not delivering. A tweet by Dotcom in July prompted some of these feelings:

Some interpreted this as a promise from Dotcom that he knew something about her server being hacked and was going to release emails. However, others have posited that it might have been more of a hopeful statement based on his dislike of the Clintons rather than a statement that he actually had the emails.
Dotcom also tweeted multiple times about the NSA having Clinton’s emails, such as here:

It didn’t appear, however, that he was claiming he had them or that he knew they were going to be released. Merely that if a federal investigator wanted them, they might be able to ask the NSA.
Whether Dotcom has evidence about Seth Rich like he said or not, we don’t know. Time will tell and we will likely know more come Tuesday after he speaks with his attorneys and releases an official statement.

Assange and WikiLeaks Have a Policy of Not Revealing Sources, Even After Death
We will likely never hear from WikiLeaks definitively if Seth Rich was or was not their DNC source. WikiLeaks has a very strict policy of never revealing sources, even if the sources die. However, Assange has made some statements and taken actions that led some people to believe he may have been hinting Rich was the source. Others think it’s misdirection or an attempt to gain attention based on something in the news. The motive behind his statements will always be open to interpretation, since WikiLeaks does not confirm or deny sources.

These are some of the things WikiLeaks has done that some people interpreted as hints about Rich, but are open to interpretation based on what you believe are WikiLeaks’ motives.
1. Assange’s Interview with Hannity in January
In an interview with Sean Hannity in January, Assange reiterated that despite rumors to the contrary, WikiLeaks did not get any of its information on the DNC or Podesta from Russia. Assange pointed out that even the joint analysis report that came out from several intelligence agencies on December 29, 2016 never mentioned WikiLeaks by name. Assange said this was because they didn’t have any evidence that WikiLeaks was working with Russia, because they were not. He later went on to say that as far as WikiLeaks’ source, “there is one person in the world — and I think it’s actually only one — who knows exactly what is going on with our publications… And that’s me.” (He said that around the 7:00 mark in the interview below.)
Some read a lot into Assange’s statement. They said that the source of the WikiLeaks DNC leak would know that Russia wasn’t involved. But since Assange said that he is the only person in the world to know, then the source of the leaks must be dead. However, others thought that was taking things way too far. They thought Assange was talking about how WikiLeaks works in general and who they coordinate with, and he’s the only person in the world who knows all the underpinnings of WikiLeaks’ operations.
Here’s the full interview:

Other statements that viewers pointed out as possible “clues” in the interview include Assange speaking around 16:16 in the video, stating that he does not want to clarify who the source is, whether it is within the U.S., within the DNC, a service provider of the DNC, or outside of the U.S. Some thought this to pointed to Rich, who provided services to the DNC. But others said that Assange was simply listing all possibilities.
The bottom line is that there was no concrete evidence provided in Assange’s interview with Hannity that Rich was the source. In fact, Assange was very careful to repeatedly say that he was not going to reveal the source and he only wanted to make clear that the information was not from the Russian government or a state actor.
2. Assange Retweeted Fox 5’s Story about Seth Rich
Shortly after Fox 5 DC released their story about Seth Rich (which Wheeler later recanted), Assange retweeted the story.

It’s hard to know how to interpret Assange’s retweet. It’s possible that he was only sharing the story because it was about WikiLeaks, not as a way to confirm or deny Rich as the source. Others, however, believed that it is definitely a sign. This includes Daniel Clark, who is running for Congress in 2018 with the Green Party. Here’s the Facebook post below, or you can read it here.

Clark believes WikiLeaks’ releases, because he was in one of them, when the DNC was keeping track of Bernie Sanders’ delegates, including him:

What we know for certain is that Assange has said over and over that Russia was not the source. In a mid-December radio interview with Sean Hannity, Assange asserted again that their DNC emails and Podesta emails didn’t originate from Russian hackers. Hannity asked him, “Russia did not give you the Podesta documents are anything from the DNC?” And Assange responded, “That’s correct.”
3. After an Associate of Assange Said a DNC Insider was the Source, WikiLeaks said He Was Not Authorized to Speak for Them
On December 14, just a day before Assange’s interview, Craig Murray, a close associate of Assange, said that he had received one of WikiLeaks’ sources, The Washington Times reported. He said that he was given a package near American University, in a wooded area, that was the source of some of the Clinton emails. He said the source was a Democratic insider who had legal access to the information. Murray said he was prompted to make the revelation after seeing claims that WikiLeaks’ source came from Russia.
The sources, he said, were disgusted with corruption in Clinton’s campaign and the sabotage of Bernie Sanders, Inquistr reported. Murray is a former British ambassador who was removed because of allegations of misconduct, after he was highly critical of human rights abuses in Uzbekistan.
Whether Murray’s statement is true is not known. But WikiLeaks did not respond encouragingly. The next day, WikiLeaks’ Twitter account stated that only Assange, Sarah Harrison, and sometimes their lawyers are authorized to speak for WikiLeaks. That list does not include Murray.

4. WikiLeaks Offered a $20,000 Reward for Information Leading to a Conviction in Rich’s Murder

WikiLeaks also offered a $20,000 reward for any information that leads to a conviction. Some have guessed that this concern is a hint about WikiLeaks’ involvement, but others say it’s only because of the theories surrounding Rich’s death.
5. Assange Talked About Rich in an Interview About the Risks Sources Take
In what may be one of the strongest hints from WikiLeaks, Assange spoke about Rich’s death in an interview with Dutch TV station NOS. You can watch the video here. He said:
Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material, often very significant risks. There’s a 27-year-old that works for the DNC who was shot in the back, murdered, just two weeks ago, for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington… I am suggesting that our sources, ah, take risks and they, they become concerned to see things occurring like that…”
He continued:
We have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States. Our sources, ah, our sources face serious risks, that’s why they come to us so we can protect, ah, their anonymity. … We investigated to understand what happened in that situation, with Seth Rich. I think it is a concerning situation. There is not a conclusion yet. We wouldn’t be willing to say a conclusion yet, but we are concerned about it. More importantly, a variety of WikiLeaks sources are concerned when that kind of thing happens.”
Shortly after this interview, WikiLeaks reiterated that it never confirms or denies sources.

Seth Rich’s Family Has a Crowdfunder to Help with the Unsolved Case
Many theories have been raised about Rich’s death. They include the theory from police that he died because of a robbery gone wrong. His family believes he fought back and that’s why nothing of his was taken. Then there’s the theory that he was killed because of leaking information to the DNC, of which there’s no solid evidence. There was also a theory that he was killed by the Russians because he realized that the leak came from them, according to Republican lobbyist Jake Burkman — there’s also no evidence for this one. So far there has been no concrete evidence for any of the theories.
In the end, Rich’s murder remains unsolved, which is a tragedy for his family who needs peace and closure. Rich’s family has asked people who are concerned to donate to their crowdfunder, because they no longer trust Private Investigators to do what is right without political motivations. They’ve been burned by both sides.
Tuesday may bring more information about Rich, depending on what Kim Dotcom has to share and what evidence he has to provide. We’ll learn more when he releases his statement. Check back to this story then, when we share the latest updates.
Do you believe Kim Dotcom? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

https://heavy.com/news/2017/05/kim-dotc ... eaks-hack/
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Fri Sep 14, 2018 4:15 am

Old Coast Guard Tower In The Atlantic Is The Unlikely Star Of Hurricane Florence Coverage
The retired light tower turned adventure bed and breakfast has gained new fame by providing spectacular footage of Florence as it approaches.
By Tyler RogowaySeptember 13, 2018

The Coast Guard shut the tower down in 1992. As for its current role, the website for the remote outpost reads:
Over the last few years along with a bunch of volunteers, we have been restoring the Frying Pan Tower so that it will last another 50 years. With a hot shower, full electricity restored, a complete stainless steel kitchen and recreation room that were designed to keep restless 20 something Coast Guard crewmen happy after a long day's activities maintaining the facility. The tower was built before GPS and when ships were likely to run aground on the Frying Pan Shoals that are between us and the deeper ocean waters! Volunteer with us and we are sure you'll find a work activity that you will also enjoy! And after a full day, you’ll be able to share your pictures with your friends and family back on land with our wireless Internet access! Then, it’s up to the 80’ x 80’ helipad or further up to the 130’ corner light tower with its 360 degree ocean and sky views where the Milky Way jumps out at you and the moon smiles down on your good fortune to have an experience of a lifetime!

Try our world class fishing in the aquarium like waters around the perimeter of the tower and test your skills hauling in anything from black sea bass, to cobia, to wahoo, to mahi mahi, to giant African pompano! And with the rock ledges all around us, an average 6 pound spiny lobster is just waiting for you to grab! With our super-fast water to top hoist, you can be spearfishing or diving in less than a minute on our diver’s lift and if your dates are set but the ocean is wild and rugged then a helicopter is standing by to make sure your trip is both beautiful and safe to and from the tower!

Act soon while we are still relatively unknown because although the world is finding out about us, we're still hiding in relative anonymity and weekends are still open! So come join us while we work and play in the most unique location off the East Coast!

The Frying Pan Tower is located out of sight of land in 50' of clear blue Atlantic waters! With the Gulf Stream close by, we often are pleasantly warm when it's still cold onshore and mild when it's too hot to walk on the sand at the beach so don’t let a great weekend go to waste, BOOK your Adventure today!


Frying Pan Tower Facebook page
Frying Pan Tower back in its operational heyday.

Frying Pan Tower Facebook page
The tower, which is really a modified drilling platform, sits on a shoal fifty feet below the waterline. During its active career, it would host continuous rotations of Coasties. Life on a lonely lighthouse platform out in the Atlantic—one that had to stay lit even during major storms—was not for the faint of heart. So creature comforts were factored into the tower's construction, offering as comfortable of a lifestyle as possible for the era and for such a remote location.
5,000 square feet of living space that make up the lower part of the platform includes seven bedrooms, a recreation area, a kitchen, an office, storage areas and so on. The top of the platform acts as a landing pad but it can also be accessed by boat, although there is no easy way of doing so as the lower portion of a circular staircase was ripped off in a storm. With the stairs gone, the winch and scaling a ladder are the only alternatives.

The accommodations aboard the platform are 'rustic' to say the least. But if you are in it for a period-specific experience, why muck it up with modern accoutrements?

The recreation area on Frying Pan Tower. A pool table also sits to the left.

Frying Pan Tower Facebook page
After over half a century of being bathed in saltwater, the structure needs some TLC but it has been deemed in overall sound condition by a recent survey. Originally the Coast Guard was going to tear it down, but they ended up auctioning it off in 2009 for half a million dollars to a company named Shipwrecks Inc. that wanted to use the spot for a sport fishing and diving outpost. Supposedly the sea life around the tower is incredible. That plan fell through when Shipwrecks Inc. defaulted on making a down-payment and in 2010 the facility was snapped up for a cool $85,000 by North Carolina native Richard Neal. Neal still owns it today and works with a team of passionate volunteers to restore the tower and execute his adventure hotel vision.

Photos at the link.

http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23 ... e-coverage
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Fri Sep 14, 2018 4:58 am

Senior Google Scientist Resigns Over “Forfeiture of Our Values” in China

theintercept.com
4 mins read
A senior Google research scientist has quit the company in protest over its plan to launch a censored version of its search engine in China.
Jack Poulson worked for Google’s research and machine intelligence department, where he was focused on improving the accuracy of the company’s search systems.
In early August, Poulson raised concerns with his managers at Google after The Intercept revealed that the internet giant was secretly developing a Chinese search app for Android devices. The search system, code-named Dragonfly, was designed to remove content that China’s authoritarian government views as sensitive, such as information about political dissidents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest.
After entering into discussions with his bosses, Poulson decided in mid-August that he could no longer work for Google. He tendered his resignation and his last day at the company was August 31.
He told The Intercept in an interview that he believes he is one of about five of the company’s employees to resign over Dragonfly. He felt it was his “ethical responsibility to resign in protest of the forfeiture of our public human rights commitments,” he said.
Poulson, who was previously an assistant professor at Stanford University’s department of mathematics, said he believed that the China plan had violated Google’s artificial intelligence principles, which state that the company will not design or deploy technologies “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”
He said that he was concerned not just about the censorship itself, but also the ramifications of hosting customer data on the Chinese mainland, where it would be accessible to Chinese security agencies that are well-known for targeting political activists and journalists.
In his resignation letter, Poulson told his bosses: “Due to my conviction that dissent is fundamental to functioning democracies, I am forced to resign in order to avoid contributing to, or profiting from, the erosion of protection for dissidents.”
“I view our intent to capitulate to censorship and surveillance demands in exchange for access to the Chinese market as a forfeiture of our values and governmental negotiating position across the globe,” he wrote, adding: “There is an all-too-real possibility that other nations will attempt to leverage our actions in China in order to demand our compliance with their security demands.”

“I am forced to resign in order to avoid contributing to, or profiting from, the erosion of protection for dissidents.”

In the six weeks since the revelations about Dragonfly, Google has still not publicly addressed concerns about the project, despite facing a major backlash internally and externally. Earlier this month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai refused to appear at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, where he would have been asked questions about the China censorship. The company has ignored dozens of questions from journalists about the plan and it has stonewalled leading human rights groups, who say that the censored search engine could result in the company “directly contributing to, or [becoming] complicit in, human rights violations.” (Google also did not respond to an inquiry for this story.)
Poulson, 32, who began working for Google in May 2016, told The Intercept that the company’s public silence fueled his sense of frustration. “There are serious worldwide repercussions to this,” he said. “What are Google’s ethical red lines? We already wrote some down, but now we seem to be crossing those. I would really like to see statements about what Google’s commitments are.”
Google launched a censored search engine in China in 2006, but stopped operating the service in the country in 2010, citing Chinese government efforts to limit free speech, block websites, and hack people’s Gmail accounts. At that time, Google co-founder Sergey Brin made clear that he was strongly opposed to the censorship. Brin had spent part of his childhood in the Soviet Union, and said that he was “particularly sensitive to the stifling of individual liberties” due to his family’s experiences there. In 2010, after the company pulled its search engine out of China, Brin told the Wall Street Journal that “with respect to censorship, with respect to surveillance of dissidents” he saw “earmarks of totalitarianism [in China], and I find that personally quite troubling.”
Poulson said that he “very much agree[s] with the case Sergey made in 2010. That’s the company I joined, the one that was making that statement.” If the anti-censorship stance is shifting, he said, then he could no longer “be complicit as a shareholder and citizen of the company.”
Only a few hundred of Google’s 88,000 employees knew about Dragonfly before it was publicly exposed. Poulson was one of the majority who were kept in the dark. But because he was focused on improving the company’s search systems — specifically in an area called “international query analysis” — it is possible his work could have been integrated into the censored Chinese search engine without his knowledge or consent.
Once news of Dragonfly spread through Google, there were protests inside the company. More than 1,400 of the internet giant’s employees signed a letter demanding an ombudsman be appointed to assess the “urgent moral and ethical issues” they said were raised by the censorship plan. The letter condemned the secrecy surrounding Dragonfly and stated: “We urgently need more transparency, a seat at the table, and a commitment to clear and open processes: Google employees need to know what we’re building.”


Google bosses have tried to contain the anger by shutting down employee access to documents about the China search engine. Following leaks from an all-hands staff meeting last month, sources said, the company has tightened rules so that employees working remotely can no longer view a livestream of the meetings on their own computers — they can only watch them inside a designated room at a Google office overseen by managers.
Poulson said he considered staying on as an employee of Google and trying to raise his protests from within. Some of his colleagues argued that the decision to launch the Chinese search engine may still be reversed, and encouraged him to wait before making his call on resigning. “But then I have no chance of changing that decision,” he said, “whereas if I resign beforehand, then there’s some chance of impact.”
Between May 2016 and July 2017, Poulson worked out of Google’s Mountain View headquarters, before he relocated to company offices in Toronto. He said he views his former Google colleagues as some of the smartest and most hardworking people he has ever met. But he is surprised more of the company’s employees have not quit over Dragonfly.
“It’s incredible how little solidarity there is on this,” he said. “It is my understanding that when you have a serious ethical disagreement with an issue, your proper course of action is to resign.”
Top photo: Jack Poulson.

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/goo ... e-resigns/
kinderdigi
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sat Sep 15, 2018 12:16 am

Fake weather news..
Look at the actions of the reporter in the "deadly wind" and, check the two guys casually walking in the background. There is software that could have easily removed those two guys, but the WX CH didn't think it was necessary.

I couldn't get a link that would start from the beginning. So, restart, "Weather Channel Hurricane Florence Report" once it loads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCDzfZt ... tu.be&t=47

https://youtu.be/lCDzfZtVR2U?t=47

Found this.. Not the full clip but, you'll get the message.
https://twitter.com/gourdnibler/status/ ... 2262916096
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sun Sep 16, 2018 4:46 pm

kinderdigi wrote:Fake weather news..
Look at the actions of the reporter in the "deadly wind" and, check the two guys casually walking in the background. There is software that could have easily removed those two guys, but the WX CH didn't think it was necessary.

I couldn't get a link that would start from the beginning. So, restart, "Weather Channel Hurricane Florence Report" once it loads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCDzfZt ... tu.be&t=47

https://youtu.be/lCDzfZtVR2U?t=47

Found this.. Not the full clip but, you'll get the message.
https://twitter.com/gourdnibler/status/ ... 2262916096


https://www.instagram.com/p/Bnto4qbBq9B ... alanharvey
kinderdigi
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sun Sep 16, 2018 6:44 pm

kinderdigi
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sat Sep 22, 2018 6:00 pm

"optionally manned"

We Have The Best Images And Video Yet Of The H03 Firebird Spy Plane And Boy Does It Sound Odd
The optionally manned, medium-altitude, long-endurance surveillance plane is meant to be quiet, which explains its strange acoustic signature.
By Tyler RogowaySeptember 21, 2018

Scaled Composites' optionally manned H03 Firebird surveillance plane has captured our imaginations since we first posted detailed single aspect images of its intriguing tail configuration last April. Since then, we reported that it had taken to the skies and had images to prove it. You can read everything we know about this highly unique aircraft and its interesting lineage in both of those past posts linked here and here. Now we have the clearest images yet of this supposed production-ready Firebird and its sensor suite, taken at Mojave Air And Space Port by our good friend and regular contributor Matt Hartman of Shorealonefilms.com.

Snip
This is all mixed hypertext:
Northrop Grumman's 'H03' Firebird Spy Plane Is Now Flying At Mojave Air and Space PortBy Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
Mysterious Northrop Grumman Spy Plane Emerges At The Mojave Air and Space PortBy Joseph Trevithick and Tyler Rogoway Posted in The War Zone
Exclusive Images Unmask Name Of Scaled Composites' Mysterious Model 401 'Son Of Ares' JetBy Tyler Rogoway Posted in The War Zone
The U.S. Coast Guard May Be Flying a Unique Stealthy Spy PlaneBy Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
Unusual High-Altitude Spy Plane Appears at Special Operations ExerciseBy Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
Here are those shots and some captions about what we can see in them:
(photos at link)

Snip
Firebird is meant to be quiet due to its spy/surveillance mission set. Trying to get the drop on some bad guys while droning overhead like a buzz saw sort of defeats the point. Its five-bladed prop helps with its audible signature but clearly, other measures have been taken to make it as silent as possible.
As the H03's testing commences hopefully Scaled Composites will tell us a little bit more about the aircraft and even possibly who is slated to take ownership of it. Its unique and highly flexible feature set seems as if it would be really attractive, especially to export customers who can't afford all different types of manned and unmanned aerial surveillance assets. Just being able to easily forward-deploy the H03 to new locales with a pilot at the controls is a huge advantage over strictly unmanned medium altitude long endurance platforms. Other high-altitude, prop-driven surveillance aircraft do exist and remain in demand, but none are built to be optionally manned.
We also know that the EO/IR sensor ball is just the start of the aircraft's payload capabilities and it's designed to carry many types of systems, including radars, electronic intelligence suites, air sampling gear, and possibly even weapons. Seeing that Scaled Composites is owned by Northrop Grumman, its parent company may now have a product to offer that nobody can really compete directly with.
We will keep you in the loop as to any new developments with this truly intriguing aircraft.

Lots of photos at the link.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23 ... -sound-odd

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... XA4Zci39Mc
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