My daughter’s phone has stopped working.
The display and touch screen are dead, but the rest of the phone, an LG Mach LS 860, still works.
I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get the already MyPhoneExplorer synching software to run with no access to the screen.
Why do I do this sh%$?
Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ryan Devereaux take another dive in lake Snowden, and discover that the NSA intercepts every single mobile phone call made in the Bahamas:
The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas.
According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month.
SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.
………
In addition, the program is a serious – and perhaps illegal – abuse of the access to international phone networks that other countries willingly grant the United States for legitimate law-enforcement surveillance. If the NSA is using the Drug Enforcement Administration’s relationship to the Bahamas as a cover for secretly recording the entire country’s mobile phone calls, it could imperil the longstanding tradition of international law enforcement cooperation that the United States enjoys with its allies.
“It’s surprising, the short-sightedness of the government,” says Michael German, a fellow at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice who spent 16 years as an FBI agent conducting undercover investigations. “That they couldn’t see how exploiting a lawful mechanism to such a degree that you might lose that justifiable access – that’s where the intelligence community is acting in a way that harms its long-term interests, and clearly the long-term national security interests of the United States.”
Once again, we see why intelligence agencies, particularly those in SIGINT, can never do decide woh to target, because they will take it all, damn the consequences.
When you let them run their own agendas, they are a clear and present danger to our national security interests.
One critique though, they buried the f%$#ing lede:
But the NSA documents don’t reflect a concerted focus on the money launderers and powerful financial institutions – including numerous Western banks – that underpin the black market for narcotics in the Bahamas. Instead, an internal NSA presentation from 2013 recounts with pride how analysts used SOMALGET to locate an individual who “arranged Mexico-to-United States marijuana shipments” through the U.S. Postal Service.
They captured every cell phone call in a jurisdiction known for money laundering by tax evaders, organized criminals, arms dealers, and other illegal activity, and they are only going after people who are mailing pot to people who are mailing baggies of pot back home.
Think about it for a moment.
Spend billions on these capabilities, and then choose not to go after transnational criminals and tax dodgers .
Your tax dollars at work.
After FCC Chairman, and former telco lobbyist, unleashed a bit of a sh%$ storm when he basically proposed ending net neutrality and relying on the kindness of the FCC in the future.
So the FCC punted today:
Federal regulators appear to share one view about so-called net neutrality: It is a good thing.
But defining net neutrality? That is where things get messy.
On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to open for public debate new rules meant to guarantee an open Internet. Before the plan becomes final, though, the chairman of the commission, Tom Wheeler, will need to convince his colleagues and an array of powerful lobbying groups that the plan follows the principle of net neutrality, the idea that all content running through the Internet’s pipes is treated equally.
While the rules are meant to prevent Internet providers from knowingly slowing data, they would allow content providers to pay for a guaranteed fast lane of service. Some opponents of the plan, those considered net neutrality purists, argue that allowing some content to be sent along a fast lane would essentially discriminate against other content.
………
The proposal also requests public comments on whether and by how much the commission should tighten regulation of Internet service providers. For example, the commission asks whether it should reclassify high-speed Internet service as a utilitylike application, subject to stricter regulatory controls than now apply, and if it should ban certain practices that might impede consumers from getting equal access to all legal online content through their chosen Internet service provider.
So basically, they proposed a tiered internet with protections that depend on whether or not you get a Bush appointed judge, in which case, you are f%$#ed, and also proposed returning ISPs to the status of telecommunications services, (Title II) which would regulate them as utilities.
I think that the intention here is to hope that the controversy will die down over the next few months months, and then they can go with the telcos and cable companies with less public push-back.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation takes a rather similar view of these developments:
There’s good news: the nationwide outcry against the Federal Communications Commission’s troublesome proposal for new Open Internet rules is clearly having an impact. At a public meeting this morning, commissioners were factoring in questions that—according to previous accounts—weren’t on the table only days ago. The bad news: the FCC still is considering a set of rules that will allow Internet providers to discriminate how we access websites with only vague and uncertain limits, endangering network neutrality and threatening the vibrant growth of the Internet.
We’re still waiting for the full proposal. But according to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s statements at the open meeting, the FCC didn’t take pay-to-play “fast lanes” off the table. Paid “fast lane” access fees threaten the engine of innovation that has allowed hackers, startup companies, and kids in their college dorm rooms to make the Internet that we know and love today. We want the Internet to continue to thrive as a platform for innovation and expression; vague rules that bless “pay to play,” with ill-defined limits, are not compatible with our vision of an open Internet.
The good folks at the EFF also provide a tool, Dear FCC, to help people make their feelings known during the public comment period.
It turns out that there is one unambiguously good thing in the proposal, the FCC has proposed assigning 3 television channels to unlicensed public use:
While FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s fast-lane/slow-lane net neutrality proposal was taking a beating on all sides (even Wheeler took a few whacks at it), Internet companies sneaked through a huge victory when the agency agreed to set aside up to three channels of TV airwaves for unlicensed use.
That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s something that Google, Microsoft and other tech companies have spent years advocating. In the past, Republican lawmakers have mostly shut down those efforts, saying that billion-dollar tech companies don’t need a freebie.
This time it mostly slid under the radar as Republicans were distracted by net neutrality and upset about proposed bidding restrictions on AT&T and Verizon in the upcoming TV airwaves auction.
Most airwaves can only be used by companies or parties that hold exclusive licenses; unlicensed airwaves can be used by anyone. Wi-Fi networks run on unlicensed airwaves, and tech companies have been trying for years to get more set aside for more powerful Wi-Fi networks.
Internet companies recently got a huge chunk of airwaves set aside for unlicensed use. But they also coveted a channel or two of TV airwaves, which are among the most valuable since signals on those frequencies can go through buildings and travel relatively long distances.
With its move Thursday, the FCC basically created a half-mile public beach in the middle of multimillion-dollar mansions. ………
This is akin to the various white space proposals that have been fought tooth and nail by the wireless firms.
If this survives, it will be an unalloyed good, but unless the pressure is kept up on the FCC about reinstating Title II, we are going to continue to have a overpriced and under-performing broadband services in the United States.
It is becoming WAY too difficult to distinguish between the mentally ill homeless guys talking to themselves and someone having a conversation on their Bluetooth ear piece.
Posted via mobile.
OK, THIS time it’s the Feds that they overcharged:
The President Barack Obama administration accused Sprint today of overcharging the government more than $21 million in wiretapping expenses.
Sprint, like all the nation’s carriers, must comply with the Communications Assistance in Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which requires telcos to be capable of providing government-ordered wiretapping services. The act also allows carriers to recoup “reasonable expenses” associated with those services.
Sprint, of Overland Park, Kansas, inflated charges approximately 58 percent between 2007 and 2010, according to a lawsuit (.pdf) the administration brought against the carrier today.
“As alleged, Sprint over billed law enforcement agencies for carrying out court-ordered intercepts, causing a significant loss to the government’s limited resources,” said San Francisco U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag.
The authorities said the suit, filed in San Francisco federal court, was a result of an investigation by the Justice Department’s Inspector General.
It’s kind of like having your Mother-In-Law drive your brand new Mercedes over a cliff.
They put a holocaust revisionist who calls for genocide of the gays, and they neglect to mention these facts to their listeners:
National Public Radio’s Michel Martin did a segment on Uganda’s growing crackdown on its gay population, and decided to interview Holocaust-revisionist hate-group leader Scott Lively, who is truly one of the most horrific religious right extremists in America.
How did NPR’s Michel Martin describe Lively to her audience? Simply as “Evangelical leader Scott Lively.”
That’s it.
No mention of the fact that Lively was labeled a Holocaust revisionist by HateWatch for his “thoroughly-discredited” 1995 tome, “The Pink Swastika,” which tried to argue that gays were the really force behind the Holocaust.
No mention of Lively’s organization, Abiding Truth Ministries, that was officially-designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
He was extensively involved in Uganda’s proposed “Kill the Gays” bill, and the now just passed “Jail the Gays” bill.
You don’t just call him “Evangelical leader Scott Lively.” At the very least you call him a controversial anti-gay activist, unless you are so cowed by the Talibaptists that you should quit journalism and take up knitting.
They throw some highbrow opera and such, and then they pursue the political agenda of right wing industrialists:
Last month, Pando’s “Wolf of Sesame Street” investigation broke the news that one of PBS’s flagship outlets had inked a secret deal with anti-pension billionaire John Arnold. That deal, which was not explicitly disclosed to viewers, was designed to broadcast anti-pension programming on public television stations throughout the country.
The story spotlighted how ideological billionaires and powerful corporations are increasingly – and stealthily – attempting to launder their political agendas through the trusted public-television brand, potentially in violation of PBS’s own rules.
Now, as part of our continuing investigation into who funds public television, Pando has learned that a new campaign is being launched against another major PBS station, once again over the issue of billionaire influence.
The campaign, sponsored by the environmental group Forecast the Facts, aims to remove one of the most influential and politically active fossil fuel magnates from the board of the PBS station that provides science-related programming to outlets across the US.
The campaign’s target is David Koch, who serves on the board and the Science Visiting Council of Boston’s WGBH. These are particularly powerful posts for the conservative financier — one of the infamous Koch brothers — because, like the Arnold-infiltrated WNET in New York, the Boston station produces many of the national PBS network’s programming. In fact, according to its own website, WGBH is “PBS’s single largest producer of Web and TV content.” That includes PBS’s iconic science show, NOVA.
And if you read further, you see that WGBH violated PBS guidelines repeatedly to appease the right wing billionaire.
It really sucks.
I’m taking the bus and Metro to work today.
I’m doing out to see how it goes.
If this works for me, our will save some money, along with some wear and tear in my psyche.
There its a guy in the Metro car with me, and I cannot tell if he is having a conversation via a bluetooth equipped cell phone, our if he is mentally ill.
The joys of modem technology, neh?
[on edit]
No loss of signal underground, and the conversation continues, so, to paraphrase Cheap Trick, it’s those men inside his brain.
Posted via mobile.
Telco Maven, and fellow medieval recreation afficianado, Harold Feld, gives us the best comment ever on the merger:
OH MY GOD!! YOU COMCAST PEOPLE HAVE NO LIMITS! YOU’RE LIKE SOME GIANT, COAX-TENTACLED CTHULHU-BEAST THAT KEEPS PROMISING TO DEVOUR US ALL BETWEEN 8 A.M. AND NOON BUT DOESN’T ACTUALLY GET AROUND TO DEVOURING US UNTIL AFTER 3 P.M. BECAUSE YOU GOT ‘STUCK IN TRAFFIC’ AND A PREVIOUS DEVOURING RAN LONGER THAN EXPECTED . . . .
Not only that, he raises one of the famous (infamous?) Taiwanese CGI news animations.
Mr. Feld, you are a f%$#ing genius.
If you read of my recent travel problems, I should note that they were all weather related, and everyone at United was polite, and efficient, energetic, and quite competent.
I really mean that.
But, because of the inevitable consequences of the snowtastrophe, it meant that I spent hours on hold.
And United has licensed George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue as its theme, and so it is their on hold music.
So I heard it for hours ……… and hours ……… and hours ……… AND HOURS ………
It’s a musical masterpiece, and I can no longer listen to it.
UAL, drop Rhapsody in Blue as your hold music, please.
I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!The big news in diplomacy recently is the leaking of a conversation between Victoria Nuland,the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and Geoff Pyatt, the Ambassador to the Ukraine, regarding the recent political upheavals in that former Soviet republic.
Diplomatic heads have been exploding over Neuland telling Pyatt, “F%$# the EU.
America’s new top diplomat for Europe seems to have been caught being decidedly undiplomatic about her EU allies in a phone call apparently intercepted and leaked by Russia.
“F%$# the EU,” Victoria Nuland apparently says in a recent phone call with the US ambassador to Kiev, Geoff Pyatt, as they discuss the next moves to try to resolve the crisis in Ukraine amid weeks of pro-democracy protests which have rocked the country. The call appears to have been intercepted and released on YouTube, accompanied by Russian captions of the private and candid conversation.
Although the US state department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, White House spokesman Jay Carney alleged that because it had been “tweeted out by the Russian government, it says something about Russia’s role”.
………
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Nuland “has been in contact with her EU counterparts and of course has apologized for these reported comments”.
She said that if the Russians were responsible for listening to, recording and posting a private diplomatic telephone conversation, it would be “a new low in Russian tradecraft.”
Well, first, I would argue that if a diplomat decides conduct a conversation over unsecured cell phones, they pretty much had it coming, and second, given the very recent history of the NSA targeting the sex lives of domestic political opponents of the Bush administration.
If intercepting an unencrypted call between two people discussing how to intervene in political instability on a nation state bordering your own is “a new low in Russian tradecraft,” then there are simply no words to describe what the NSA has been doing against domestic critics of our government.
Neither the EU’s outrage over the comments about the EU, which is a participant in the conflict, and therefore cannot be a good faith interlocutor on this issue, nor the US’s crocodile tears over being spied upon are justified.
They are simply exercises in self serving hypocrisy.
There must be something about their heritage as “Ma Bell” that leads them overplay their hand.
The FCC gave a space for wireless providers, and AT&T jumped full in with a pay for play Internet:
Today, AT&T announced a “Sponsored Data” plan that would put it in a position to pick winners and losers online. This plan would require that Internet services pay to make sure customers are able to view their content by exempting it from data caps. Service providers that can’t meet the price tag that AT&T sets could be left behind.
The following can be attributed to Michael Weinberg, Acting Co-President:
“The FCC needs to protect consumers and creators from internet service providers (ISPs) who want to pick winners and losers online. This is but the latest example of how data caps are increasingly becoming used to threaten the open internet. As AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson announced in May, data caps are all about forcing content creators to pay and are no longer about any sort of network congestion. In December, Stephenson admitted to investors that they had addressed the network capacity issues that were used to justify data caps in the first place. It is time for the FCC to heed Public Knowledge’s over two year old call to investigate data caps and gather basic information about their use. It is impossible for the FCC to examine the impact of today’s announcement on net neutrality until it develops an understanding of data caps.
“When it was reported in May that ESPN was in negotiations with a major carrier to pay to be exempt from data caps, Public Knowledge highlighted that this was an obvious violation of net neutrality. The company that connects you to the internet should not be in a position to control what you do on the internet. AT&T’s announcement positions itself to do just that.
“In addition to being a ripoff for both consumers and content creators, AT&T’s plan erects a massive barrier in front of anyone hoping to be the next big thing online.”
In addition to the more general philosophical concerns addressed above by Public Knowledge, the Daily Beast observes AT&T’s new business model is primarily an attempt to stop investing in improving its network and start shaking down content providers:
AT&T has proudly moved past the days when the iPhone crashed its network for millions of excited subscribers. In May of last year CEO Randall Stephenson told investors that AT&T anticipated reducing expenditures on its network and that data caps were really about charging content providers He repeated his confidence in AT&T’s network in December.
The sponsored data plan itself further highlights AT&T’s confidence in its network: if the network truly was fragile AT&T probably would not be inviting creators to dump a lot more content onto it. Any problems in the network that exist going forward should be traced back to the fact that AT&T is investing in its special paid access lanes instead of the parts of the network available to everyone else.
Furthermore, even if AT&T is painting an overly rosy picture to investors and deluding itself about its network capacity, monthly data caps are an incredibly inefficient way to deal with momentary network congestion.
But they are a great way to gouge content creators.
And let us not forget that it’s not just AT&T that is trying to junk copper, and replace it with overpriced and limited wireless. Remember how Verizon tried to foist Voice Link™ fixed wireless on the residents of Fire Island, NY?
What about people who don’t live in places like Owings Mills, MD? People who not only cannot choose between Comcast Xfinity or FIOS?
What about poor neighborhoods, or rural neighborhoods, where the Telcos are systematically starving land line infrastructure?
The consumer is going to get F%$#ed over this.
It’s been a busy week for developments in spying by the US state security apparatus.
First, we have the report from the President’s hand picked panel, “Liberty and Security in a Changing World.” (PDF)
From people who know the issues, the reviews have been this weak tea.
The EFF’s conclusion was that, “The reportleft open the door for future mass surveillance and failed to address the constitutionality of the NSA’s mass spying, recently questioned by the D.C. federal court and raised by EFF in its multiple lawsuits.”
Marcy Wheeler, who is has perhaps the most knowledgeable on these sorts of issues, observes that the panel refused to address whether the NSA spying program was illegal. There is simply nothing in the report about this.
When she looks what is in the report, she sees signs that the NSA is probably functioning as a domestic security agency:
Which is why I’m curious what’s behind the following language, offered in support of the recommendation to clearly designate NSA as a foreign intelligence organization and presented with two other things we know NSA does.
It should not be a domestic security service, a military command, or an information assurance organization.
[…] Like other agencies, there are situations in which NSA does and should provide support to the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and other law enforcement entities. But it should not assume the lead for programs that are primarily domestic in nature.That seems to suggest that, in addition to supporting DHS, DOJ, and other law enforcement entities (cough, DEA, as well as probably Secret Service in its cyber-role), NSA takes the lead on certain issues that are primarily domestic.I do hope we’ll learn what this refers to. Because if NSA is operating domestically (maybe to police IP?), it will be scandalous news.
Pro Publica notes that one of the more direct recommendations of the panel is that the NSA needs to stop undermining publicly available encryption algorithms:
The National Security Agency should not undermine encryption standards that are designed to protect the privacy of communications, the panel of experts appointed by President Obama to review NSA surveillance recommended in a report released today.
The recommendation, among the strongest of the many suggested changes laid out by the panel, comes several months after ProPublica, the Guardian, and the New York Times reported that the NSA has successfully worked to undercut encryption. The story was based on a set of documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Outside of the intelligence review board, we have learned that the NSA paid RSA Security LLC to incorporate insecure encryption in its products:
As a key part of a campaign to embed encryption software that it could crack into widely used computer products, the U.S. National Security Agency arranged a secret $10 million contract with RSA, one of the most influential firms in the computer security industry, Reuters has learned.
Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a “back door” in encryption products, the New York Times reported in September. Reuters later reported that RSA became the most important distributor of that formula by rolling it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used to enhance security in personal computers and many other products.
Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the BSafe software, according to two sources familiar with the contract. Although that sum might seem paltry, it represented more than a third of the revenue that the relevant division at RSA had taken in during the entire previous year, securities filings show.
In total, this explains the flight from services like Google to non-US algernatives.
In a perfect world, all of this might lead the White House, and the intelligence agencies to back off regarding their expansion of power, but you would be wrong.
They are at this time attempting to quash a court ruling on the constitutionality ofits domestic spying program by invoking the state-secrets privilege.
And for your amusement, we have Mark Fiore’s comments on the difference between the data collection by the government and commercial interest.
The US offers free “lifeline” cell phone service for the poor.
In Georgia, the powers that be decided to levy a fee on the free cell phones, because ……… They just want to hate on the poor, I guess.
A Federal Court just told them to go Cheney themselves:
A federal judge has blocked Georgia’s plan to charge low-income residents $5 per month for cell phone service that currently is provided free of charge.
The fee was set to take effect on Jan. 31 and would have made Georgia the only the U.S. state to charge for the federally subsidized phone service.
“The public interest tilts in favor of providing telephone services to low-income households that otherwise would be unable to afford mobile phones,” U.S. District Court Judge Richard Story wrote on Tuesday in a temporary injunction that stops the new fee while a court challenge is pending.
Nationally, about 14 million households participate in the Lifeline phone program, according to the Universal Service Administrative Co, the nonprofit organization that administers the program.
The level of hate and evil here is only exceeded by the pettiness shown.
Un-dirtyword believable.
Comcast, the evil empire of cable companies (scary thought), decided to dump a huge chunk of change on the Seattle Mayoral election to sabotage Mayor Mike McGinn’s gigabit fiber initiative:
One of Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn’s big policy initiatives has been expanding the quality and quantity of high-speed Internet access throughout the city. A public-private partnership plans to offer higher speeds at lower prices than most broadband providers currently offer. And incumbent providers, particularly Comcast, have invested heavily in defeating McGinn in Tuesday’s mayoral election. While Comcast denies there is any connection between McGinn’s broadband policies and their donations, the company has given thousands of dollars to PACs that have, in turn, given heavily to anti-McGinn groups.
McGinn’s major opponent, state Sen. Ed Murray (D-Seattle), has committed to honoring the city’s existing contracts for a 14-neighborhood pilot project, but has shown limited enthusiasm about McGinn’s plans to expand the network in the future. So the election could determine whether Seattle residents have new options for high-speed broadband service, or will have to make do with the slower services already offered by incumbents like Comcast.
McGinn’s broadband initiative
According to Robert Cruickshank, a senior communications adviser for McGinn, one of McGinn’s core promises in the 2009 campaign was to “develop a city-wide broadband system.” The mayor considered creating a citywide broadband system as a public utility, like water or electricity. But aides say that would have been too expensive, so the mayor settled on public-private partnerships using city-owned dark fiber. This dark fiber was laid down starting in 1995, and the mayor’s office now says there are some 535 miles of it, only a fraction of which is being used.
In a partnership with the University of Washington, the city put out a request for proposals in late 2012. “The RFP process is not intended to pick one provider,” says Cruickshank, but one company — Ohio-based Gigabit Squared — is currently farthest along. The company is still wrapping up its funding and finalizing plans with the city. They expect to begin offering gigabit-speed service to households with a combined population of 50,000 in early 2014, according to Mark Ansboury, co-founder of Gigabit Squared.
In June, Gigabit Squared announced pricing for its Seattle service: $45 dollars a month for 100 Mbps service or $80 a month for 1 Gbps service plus a one-time installation cost of $350 that will be waived for customers signing a one-year contract. For comparison, Comcast, one of the primary Internet providers in the area, offers 105 Mbps service in the area for $114.99 a month according to their website. (It’s unclear if there is an installation charge.)
So the solution to the problem is to toss the mayor out at reelection time, so that you can continue to maintain you extortionate rates.
The bummer is that it worked:
Mike McGinn, who was elected mayor in 2009, was denied a second term on Tuesday as voters turned instead to Ed Murray, a longtime state senator and leader of last year’s successful drive for same-sex marriage in the state. It was the third time in just over a decade that an incumbent mayor had lost his job.
With two days of ballots counted in the all mail-in election, Mr. Murray led with more than 55 percent of the vote, enough to give him a victory over Mr. McGinn, according to The Associated Press. Mr. McGinn, 53, who had a reputation for bluster, faced widespread voter disapproval over public safety and transportation even as Seattle’s economy gained strength and created thousands of jobs as it emerged from the recession.
Mr. Murray, 58, who will take office as the city’s first openly gay mayor, pledged to start his administration with a new police commissioner and a more collaborative tone at City Hall.
“Collaboration is not a code word, for, you know, a fluffy approach to administering,” Mr. Murray said in a news conference. In the state Legislature, he said, he was able to build coalitions around gay rights and other issues by including opponents in the discussion. “You make them part of the process, and almost every time I’ve used that method I’ve been pretty successful in moving controversial issues,” he said.
Mr. McGinn seemed in some ways like a mayor from central casting when he took office in 2010: a bike-commuting, slightly scruffy, bearded social liberal and former leader of a Sierra Club chapter.
But he finished second in the primary election in August behind Mr. Murray, which advanced both men to the general election. Mr. Murray then pulled ahead in fund-raising. His prominent role in the battle to win same-sex marriage rights for Washingtonians last year — hugely popular in Seattle — helped him in many city neighborhoods.
And all that Comcast money did not hurt either.
You know, if Osama bin Laden had targeted the cable companies, instead of the World Trade Center, he’d be president of the United States today.
It appears that the power outages in our neighborhood caused a lot of Verizon’s FIOS’ equipment. It took out the Battery Backup Units (BBUs).
It appears that the generation of our now-replaced BBU was susceptible to power spikes.
This is too funny for words:
Just like I did a few months ago.
It’s Senator Bernie Sanders and Represantative of Pete Defazio:
The Postal Service Modernization Bills brought by Peter DeFazio and Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, would allow the post office to recapitalize itself by diversifying its range of services to meet unmet public needs.
Needs that the post office might diversify into include (1) funding the rebuilding of our crumbling national infrastructure; (2) servicing the massive market of the “unbanked” and “underbanked” who lack access to basic banking services; and (3) providing a safe place to save our money, in the face of Wall Street’s new “bail in” policies for confiscating depositor funds. All these needs could be met at a stroke by some simple legislation authorizing the post office to revive the banking services it efficiently performed in the past.
I don’t think that it’s going to happen.
Wall Street owns Congress, and Wall Street does not want an alternative.
The FISA court has said that since none of the telcos have ever challenged the collections orders, and that they are the only ones with standing to challenge these orders.
I guess that it might have something to do with the fact that the only time that a phone company resisted their demands, the government retaliated against them and threw their CEO in jail.
So, no harm, no foul, I guess:
No telecommunications company has ever challenged the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court’s orders for bulk phone records under the Patriot Act, the court revealed on Tuesday.
The secretive Fisa court’s disclosure came inside a declassification of its legal reasoning justifying the National Security Agency’s ongoing bulk collection of Americans’ phone records.
Citing the “unprecedented disclosures” and the “ongoing public interest in this program”, Judge Claire V Eagan on 29 August not only approved the Obama administration’s request for the bulk collection of data from an unidentified telecommunications firm, but ordered it declassified. Eagan wrote that despite the “lower threshold” for government bulk surveillance under Section 215 of the Patriot Act compared to other laws, the telephone companies who have received Fisa court orders for mass customer data have not challenged the law.
“To date, no holder of records who has received an Order to produce bulk telephony metadata has challenged the legality of such an Order,” Eagan wrote. “Indeed, no recipient of any Section 215 Order has challenged the legality of such an order, despite the mechanism for doing so.”
That complicity has not been total. Before the Bush administration moved the bulk phone records collection under the authority of the Fisa court, around 2006, Qwest Communications refused to participate in the effort.
If you know what happened to Qwest, and you might understand why the telcos have never challenged the order.
Qwest lost numerous government contracts after refusing to collaborate in the Bush administration’s illegal data collection, and missed its numbers, which caused the stock to tank, and then they went after the CEO, Joe Nacchio. who was then prosecuted for insider trading on the basis of his rosy projections for the company.
See Nacchio’s allegations here: (from 2007)
Nacchio was convicted for selling shares of Qwest stock in early 2001, just before financial problems caused the company’s share price to tumble. He has claimed in court papers that he had been optimistic that Qwest would overcome weak sales because of the expected top-secret contract with the government. Nacchio said he was forbidden to mention the specifics during the trial because of secrecy restrictions, but the judge ruled that the issue was irrelevant to the charges against him.
Nacchio’s account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.
They sent him to jail for 6 years. (He actually is coming out after a bit less than 5)
Is there any wonder that none of the telcos have challenged such an order?
Even if they don’t send you to jail, supplying secure connectivity to government agencies is a particularly lucrative part of the business, and if they took the NSA to court, it would all end, and they would lose their, “Phoney Baloney Jobs,” to quote Mel Brooks.
Harrumph, indeed.
If you follow telecommunications developments, you are no doubt aware, that, following Superstorm Sandy, Verizon decided not to fix the conventional wire lines and instead used something called fixed wireless (Voice Link™).
Basically, it means unreliable 911, credit card machines don’t work properly, DSL is not available, and it’s reliability is suspect.
Verizon applied for permission from the FCC to shaft its customers by making its removal of copper a permanent things.
Well, today, the FCC voted to move Verizon’s application off the fast track:
For those following the summer sitcom That Darned Voice Link, it looks like the FCC has now decided to order new episodes for the fall season.
Short version: the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Wireline Competition Bureau issued a public notice taking Verizon’s Section 214(a) request to discontinue copper-based TDM service on Fire Island, NY and Mantaloking, NJ off the “fast track” streamlined process on the grounds that it needed more information before it could properly consider the request. Had the FCC not acted before August 27, the request would have been automatically granted.
The Bureau made it clear that this was not in any way a determination on the merits of the request. But in light of several substantive filings raising questions about whether substituting Voice Link for copper would (in the words of the statute) “reduce, or impair service to a community” (including requests from both the NY Public Service Corporation (PSC) and the NJ Board of Public Utilities (BPU) to hold off until they complete their state level inquiries), the Bureau wanted more information to properly consider the request.Consistent with this, the Bureau also sent Verizon a request for additional data that covers the areas you would hope the FCC would want to know about before deciding whether substituting Voice Link for copper lines “impairs” service to the local community.
The Bureau made it clear that this was not in any way a determination on the merits of the request. But in light of several substantive filings raising questions about whether substituting Voice Link for copper would (in the words of the statute) “reduce, or impair service to a community” (including requests from both the NY Public Service Corporation (PSC) and the NJ Board of Public Utilities (BPU) to hold off until they complete their state level inquiries), the Bureau wanted more information to properly consider the request.Consistent with this, the Bureau also sent Verizon a request for additional data that covers the areas you would hope the FCC would want to know about before deciding whether substituting Voice Link for copper lines “impairs” service to the local community.
So, it’s not a formal decision, but the fact that they rejected a fast track does not bode well for Verizon.