Third In-Custody Death For The Kern County Sheriff’s Dept. In Four Months

"The Kern County Sheriff's Department has no problem taking people into custody. It just seems to have trouble keeping them from dying. Here's the issue: the department goes overboard, deploys excessive force and somehow, the coroner finds that everyone the department restrains to death has heart problems. Coroner's reports latch onto pre-existing conditions as the cause of death, and seem to give no weight to the fact that being beaten (even by-the-book) and restrained by multiple deputies may have something to do with the resulting deaths." Continue reading

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Former California cop arrested for raping prostitutes while in uniform

"A former police officer in Southern California was arrested Thursday for allegedly raping two prostitutes while he was in uniform or carrying his service gun, according to the Los Angeles Times. 'The charges in this case describe disgraceful abuses of police authority that simply cannot be tolerated in our society,' United States Attorney André Birotte Jr. said in a statement. Forty-six-year-old Jose Jesus Perez of Menifee, California was arrested without incident in Denton, Texas. A federal grand jury indicted Perez on four civil rights offenses, claiming the officer forced two women to have sex with him 'while acting under the color of law.'" Continue reading

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U.S. Court: Journalist Barrett Brown Can’t Talk To The Press Any More

"We just wrote about the ridiculousness of Barrett Brown's case, in which he's been in jail and facing a very long sentence mainly for copying a URL from one place to another, but also because the feds have been seeking a media gag. Tragically, the court has now granted that gag order. Neither Brown nor his legal team is allowed to speak to the media. It's perfectly reasonable to expect Brown and his legal team to try to draw attention to the ridiculousness of the case, and the only purpose of this sort of gag order is to silence the press and keep the story from getting the kind of attention it deserves, as yet another example of prosecutorial overreach by the DOJ." Continue reading

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Toshiba’s quantum cryptography network that even the NSA can’t hack

"A quantum network uses specially polarized photons to encode an encryption key—a very long series of numbers and letters that can unlock a digital file. The photons are then sent down a fiber optic cable until they reach their destination, a photon detector, which counts them, and delivers the key to the intended recipient. If the photons are interfered with, the individual packets of information are forever altered and the recipient can see the telltale signs of tampering. The next step toward mainstreaming quantum crypto is increasing the distance that photons can travel before they degrade—currently the record is 200 km (124 miles) using a dedicated fiber optic cable." Continue reading

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What Exactly Are the NSA’s ‘Groundbreaking Cryptanalytic Capabilities’?

"Whatever the NSA has up its top-secret sleeves, the mathematics of cryptography will still be the most secure part of any encryption system. I worry a lot more about poorly designed cryptographic products, software bugs, bad passwords, companies that collaborate with the NSA to leak all or part of the keys, and insecure computers and networks. Those are where the real vulnerabilities are, and where the NSA spends the bulk of its efforts. While the NSA certainly has symmetric cryptanalysis capabilities that we in the academic world do not, converting that into practical attacks on the sorts of data it is likely to encounter seems so impossible as to be fanciful." Continue reading

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Putin: Syria chemical attack is ‘rebels’ provocation in hope of intervention’

"The alleged chemical weapons use in Syria is a provocation carried out by the rebels to attract a foreign-led strike, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the G20 summit. There was no 50/50 split of opinion on the notion of a military strike against the Syrian President Bashar Assad, Putin stressed refuting earlier assumptions. Only Turkey, Canada, Saudi Arabia and France joined the US push for intervention, he said, adding that the UK Prime Minister’s position was not supported by his citizens. Russia, China, India, Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and Italy were among the major world’s economies clearly opposed to military intervention." Continue reading

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Max Keiser’s Marshmallow Gun of Truth: Think Tank

"Abby Martin talks to Max Keiser, host of RT's 'Keiser Report' about everything from why a supposedly broke country always has money for war, and the often illogical outcomes of important events, citing Halliburton stocks rising following revelations of the company's criminality." Continue reading

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