Visit the Wrong Website, and the FBI Could End Up in Your Computer

Photo Credit: Getty

Photo Credit: Getty

Security experts call it a “drive-by download”: a hacker infiltrates a high-traffic website and then subverts it to deliver malware to every single visitor. It’s one of the most powerful tools in the black hat arsenal, capable of delivering thousands of fresh victims into a hackers’ clutches within minutes.

Now the technique is being adopted by a different kind of a hacker—the kind with a badge. For the last two years, the FBI has been quietly experimenting with drive-by hacks as a solution to one of law enforcement’s knottiest Internet problems: how to identify and prosecute users of criminal websites hiding behind the powerful Tor anonymity system.

The approach has borne fruit—over a dozen alleged users of Tor-based child porn sites are now headed for trial as a result. But it’s also engendering controversy, with charges that the Justice Department has glossed over the bulk-hacking technique when describing it to judges, while concealing its use from defendants. Critics also worry about mission creep, the weakening of a technology relied on by human rights workers and activists, and the potential for innocent parties to wind up infected with government malware because they visited the wrong website. “This is such a big leap, there should have been congressional hearings about this,” says ACLU technologist Chris Soghoian, an expert on law enforcement’s use of hacking tools. “If Congress decides this is a technique that’s perfectly appropriate, maybe that’s OK. But let’s have an informed debate about it.”

The FBI’s use of malware is not new. The bureau calls the method an NIT, for “network investigative technique,” and the FBI has been using it since at least 2002 in cases ranging from computer hacking to bomb threats, child porn to extortion. Depending on the deployment, an NIT can be a bulky full-featured backdoor program that gives the government access to your files, location, web history and webcam for a month at a time, or a slim, fleeting wisp of code that sends the FBI your computer’s name and address, and then evaporates.

What’s changed is the way the FBI uses its malware capability, deploying it as a driftnet instead of a fishing line. And the shift is a direct response to Tor, the powerful anonymity system endorsed by Edward Snowden and the State Department alike.

Read more from this story HERE.

See Why This Reluctant Republican Says He Might Be Forced To Impeach Obama After This…

Photo Credit: Western Journalism

Photo Credit: Western Journalism

Responding to the recent House vote allowing a lawsuit against Barack Obama to move forward, Iowa Rep. Steve King addressed accusations that Republicans are only trying to score political points against the current administration. In a Fox News interview, the congressman asserted that something must be done to address Obama’s misuse of executive power, particularly in the implementation of ObamaCare.

“It’s not about mad, it’s not about hate, it is about the Constitution,” he told ‘Fox News Sunday’ host Chris Wallace. “And the president has just simply decided that he can amend the law has … his signature on it, the law says that the employer mandate shall commence and each month after December of 2013.”

Obama unilaterally updated that requirement, King noted, despite the fact that it had been proposed and passed by his own party and signed into law by his own hand.

“The Constitution is very clear,” he added. “Take care that laws are faithfully executed.”

Read more from this story HERE.

New Video of Hamas Gives Case-Closed Evidence That They Use Civilians For Human Shields

A new video of Hamas is giving case-closed evidence that they use civilians as human shields.

On Monday, Hamas was caught on tape by Sreenivasan Jain of NDTV (an Indian news network) assembling what appears to be a site to launch a rocket from a densely populated civilian area. The “alleged” launch site is surrounded by hotels and apartment buildings.

Read more from this story HERE.

This Simple Chart Shows Where The Fed’l Gov’t Spent Your Money Last Year. All $3.45 Trillion Of It.

That’s right. The federal government spent $3.45 trillion dollars in fiscal year 2013. That’s a 3…followed by 12 digits: $3,454,253,000,000.

This nearly-unfathomable amount can be broken down into three basic categories:

1. Non-Means-Tested Government Programs
2. Means-Tested Government Programs
3. “Other”

…

This chart details the various expenditures in these two categories:

GovernmentProgramsAug4-2-e1407257423984

Read more from this story HERE.

Tea Party Incumbent Justin Amash Smashes GOP Establishment-Backed Challenger

Photo Credit: TPNN

Photo Credit: TPNN

Congressman Justin Amash soundly defeated U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Republican Party establishment-backed businessman Brian Ellis in the GOP Michigan primary on Tuesday.

The youthful Amash, 34, a favorite in the pro-freedom, pro-Constitution Tea Party movement, and perhaps the most transparent legislator in U.S. history (he has explained every vote on his Facebook page since taking office), Amash led Ellis by 14%, 57% to 43%, with 94% of precincts reporting Tuesday evening in Michigan.

In explaining why he had sought re-election, Rep. Amash said:

“When I entered Congress, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution, and I have followed through on that promise. The political elites of both parties don’t like what I’m doing. They have a vision of government that is very different from the vision laid out in the Constituion.”

Read more from this story HERE.

VA Lied To Congress About Veteran Deaths and Wait Times

Photo Credit: REUTERS / Kevin Lamarque

Photo Credit: REUTERS / Kevin Lamarque

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) misled Congress on the number of veteran deaths in its health care system, adding to a growing list of untruths that VA has told congressmen trying to investigate the scandal-plagued department.

The House Committee on Veterans Affairs, chaired by Republican Rep. Jeff Miller, is the latest victim of VA’s dishonesty.

VA provided the committee an April 7, 2014 fact sheet purporting to show all of the cases of delays and preventable veteran deaths it oversaw in its gastrointestinal care in the last fifteen years.

“As a result of the consult delay issue VA discovered at two of our medical centers, VHA continues to conduct a national review of consults across the system, which includes a review of all consults since 1999,” according to the fact sheet.

“During this review, VA looked at all open since 1999 to ensure that proper care has been administered to patients. Within this time frame over a quarter billion consults were requested in VA,” the fact sheet stated.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Army's 3D-Printed Food Will Give Soldiers Personalized Meals

Photo Credit: Marines / Creative Commons

Photo Credit: Marines / Creative Commons

Three-dimensional printing is changing the way the Army treats injuries and builds bombs, and now the technology is poised to revolutionize how soldiers are fed. 3D printing will allow the Army to print food on demand, from pasta to pizza, and tailor its nutritional content to an individual soldier’s needs.

Feeding thousands of soldiers in the wilderness of a far-flung battlefield has never been an easy task. The food served to Army personnel needs to be unspoiled, nutritious, and reasonably tasty. For decades, soldiers have dined on Army-supplied Meals, Ready to Eat, but MREs are usually pretty unappetizing and limited to 24 options like “beef taco filling” served in a tinfoil bag. You couldn’t even get a pizza until last year when Army researchers developed a groundbreaking pizza that stays fresh for three years.

But 3D printing could change that. While most current methods for 3D printing food pile layers of nutritional goo on top of each other, the Army is looking to use ultrasonic agglomeration, which binds particles together by shooting ultrasonic waves at them. This approach, explained Army Magazine in its July issue, affords them great flexibility when it comes to printing varied meals—adding some additional options to the menu.

“You would like a sandwich, where I would like ravioli. You would print what you want and eliminate wasted food,” Mary Scerra, an Army food technologist at the Natick Soldier Research, Development, and Engineering Center (NSRDEC) in Massachusetts, told Defense One.

Read more from this story HERE.

Huge Rise in US Terror Watch List in Recent Years

Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

The number of people on the government’s database of known or suspected terrorists has doubled in recent years, according to new information released by the National Counterterrorism Center. From March 2010 to the end of 2013, the number has gone from 550,000 to roughly 1.1 million people.

The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, is a huge, classified database of people known to be terrorists, those who are suspected of having ties to terrorism, and in some cases those who are related to or are associates of known or suspected terrorists. It feeds to smaller lists that restrict peoples’ abilities to travel on commercial airlines to or within the U.S.

Read more from this story HERE.

Russian Gang Stole 1.2 Billion Net Passwords

Photo Credit: Brian A. Jackson, Getty / iStockphoto

Photo Credit: Brian A. Jackson, Getty / iStockphoto

Security researchers say a Russian crime ring has pulled off the largest known theft of confidential Internet information, including 1.2 billion username and password combinations and more than 500 million email addresses.

The cyber gang injected malicious code to steal databases from at least 420,000 websites, says Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer for Hold Security in Milwaukee, Wisc.

“It is absolutely the largest breach we’ve ever encountered,” Holden said late Tuesday.

Most unsettling, he said, was finding his own credentials among the compromised data.

Hold Security cyber sleuths have been monitoring the cyber gang for about seven months, but only recently realized the magnitude of the gang’s operation, Holden said.

Read more from this story HERE.

New York Patient Tested for Ebola Virus

Photo Credit: Susan Sermoneta / Creative Commons

Photo Credit: Susan Sermoneta / Creative Commons

By Tim Fleischer.

Mount Sinai Hospital is performing tests on a patient who had recently traveled to a West African country where Ebola has been reported, the hospital says.

A male patient with high fever and gastrointestinal symptoms came to the hospital’s emergency room on Monday morning, officials said.

The hospital says the patient has been placed in strict isolation and is undergoing medical screenings to determine the cause of his symptoms.

“All necessary steps are being taken to ensure the safety of all patients, visitors and staff. We will continue to work closely with federal, state and city health officials to address and monitor this case, keep the community informed and provide the best quality care to all of our patients,” the hospital wrote in a statement.

Mt. Sinai is following what the Center for Disease Control recommended last week when they sent a Health Alert to doctors and hospitals.

Read more from this story HERE.

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ebola-guineaOverwhelmed by scale of outbreak: Deadly Ebola virus now ‘out of control,’ claim medics

By The Extinction Protocol.

“Lots of people in my family are dead. I left my home and I don’t know what to do,” said a Guinean Ebola refugee last week. Claiming over 730 lives and infecting over 1,300 people, the world’s biggest outbreak of Ebola is creeping across West Africa. Despite a recent lull, the pandemic is now worse than ever. Sheik Umar Khan, a leading Ebola expert died of the disease, two American medics were infected in Liberia and man collapsed and later died after a flight to Lagos, Nigeria where 69 people are now being held under observation to ensure the virus doesn’t get amongst the city’s 21 million population. Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia have been struggling to fight the deadly virus since March this year. According to Medecins Sans Frontieres, who deployed 552 staff in hotspots across the region, the epidemic is now officially ‘out of control.’ “The medical humanitarian organization is building a quarantine unit in Kenema, Sierra Leone, to where Irish doctor Gabriel Fitzgerald has just travelled. He says his team is overwhelmed with new Ebola patients. “The sooner a person receives treatment, the better their chances of recovery. People are dying in their villages without access to medical care,” he said. Unease and panic were unleashed across the globe as people feared the disease, thought to be passed on by fruit bats, could take to the skies and end up anywhere in the world, even Ireland.” The chances of that happening are slim. It’s not airborne. You can only catch the disease from close personal contact with someone through blood or bodily fluids. It’s not like TB, which you can catch if you are sitting seven rows in front of an infected person on a plane,” says Dr Graham Fry, founder of the Tropical Medical Bureau. “Though in most cases it takes less than 21 days for symptoms including fever, headache and vomiting to take hold,” he says.

When a friend of mine’s 23- year-old sister brought Lassa fever, an almost identical hemorrhagic fever which is spread by rodents, to mainland Europe on a flight from Accra in Ghana via Lisbon, and onto Frankfurt some years back, none of her fellow passengers or people who came in direct contact with her got the disease. She went to visit her father upon arrival in Germany and fell ill at his deathbed. He died on the top floor, while she was put into an isolation ward below. It was a huge media story and people on the flight and family members were sent to a special unit to receive close examination. She died after massive internal bleeding and was never buried, she was cremated so that the disease wouldn’t spread…

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

Should We Bring Ebola Patients Back to the States? Dr. Ben Carson Responds

By Kara Jones.

As Ebola cases continue to pop up across western Africa, many are beginning to wonder just how big of a threat this deadly virus is to the rest of the world. So far, two infected Americans have been flown to Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital for treatment. But was it a smart decision to bring these patients back to the U.S.?

Via AP:

The Ebola virus has killed more than 700 people in Africa and could have catastrophic consequences if allowed to spread, world health officials say. So why would anyone allow infected Americans to come to Atlanta?

The answer, experts say, is because Emory University Hospital is one of the safest places in the world to treat someone with Ebola. There’s virtually no chance the virus can spread from the hospital’s super-secure isolation unit.

And another thing, they say: medical workers risking their lives overseas deserve the best treatment they can get.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Breitbart

Photo Credit: Breitbart

Liberia orders cremation of ebola victims

By Associated Press.

The deadly scourge of Ebola means people here no longer shake hands when greeting each other. In taxi cabs where people used to cram onto the laps of others, drivers now can carry only four people or risk fines.

Plastic buckets are selling at a record pace to people who fill them with chlorine to disinfect their hands.

And Monday Liberian health authorities ordered that all Ebola victims must be cremated as the virus blamed for killing at least 729 people across West Africa shows no sign of slowing down. At least 17 bodies have been abandoned on Monrovia’s streets in recent days, health officials say.

Read more from this story HERE.