"Ron Paul joins Larry to blast US government secrecy and talk about his new Web channel. Plus, have his supporters finally found peace with the GOP? Also, whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg says the government is always watching... even while you sleep." Continue reading →
"China and the US, which are embroiled in a bitter dispute over hacking, have agreed to set up a cybersecurity working group, US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday. 'All of us, every nation, has an interest in protecting its people, protecting its rights, protecting its infrastructure,' he told reporters on a visit to Beijing. 'Cybersecurity affects everybody,' he said. 'It affects airplanes in the sky, trains on their tracks, it affects the flow of water through dams, it affects transportation networks, power plants, it affects the financial sector, banks, financial transactions. So we are going to work immediately on an accelerated basis on cyber.'" Continue reading →
"After decades of adding more cars to their household fleet while moving further and further out into the suburbs, Americans are waiting longer to get licensed, driving less and increasingly turning to alternatives such as mass transit or car-sharing programs, according to a new study by the U.S. Public Research Interest Group, or PIRG. It's not just millennials. Overall, the percentages of Americans of driving age who actually were licensed fell to just 86 percent in 2011, a 30-year low. As recently as 1992, the figure stood at 90 percent. Meanwhile, the number of vehicles Americans owned has also begun to tumble." Continue reading →
"'The digital battlefield has to be as easy to navigate as an iPhone,' writes Wired magazine’s Noah Shachtman. 'The attacks have to be as easy to launch as an Angry Bird.' Mr. Shachtman points out that U.S. cyberoffensives have taken months of planning and have required small specialized units. Instead, the Pentagon wants 'munitions made of 1s and 0s to be as simple to launch as ones made of metal and explosives.' The Pentagon has brought in 'designers behind some of Apple’s most famous computers — with assistance from the illustrators who helped bring Transformers to the silver screen.' The DoD will shell out $16.1 billion in contract money to conduct their cyber makeover." Continue reading →
"The New York Times said its website went down Tuesday after what appeared to be a 'malicious external attack.' A security researcher said there were indications that the Syrian Electronic Army, which has attacked several media organizations, was the culprit. Matt Johansen of WhiteHat Security said in a tweet that the technical aspects of the website during the outage were 'pointing to Syrian Electronic Army.' The Washington Post website was hacked this month in an attack blamed on the Syrian Electronic Army, a group that backs embattled strongman Bashar al-Assad." Continue reading →
"RAT operators have nearly complete control over the computers they infect; they can (and do) browse people's private pictures in search of erotic images to share with each other online. They even have strategies for watching where women store the photos most likely to be compromising. Women who have this done to them, especially when the spying escalates into blackmail, report feeling paranoia. One woman targeted by the California "sextortionist" Luis Mijangos wouldn't leave her dorm room for a week after Mijangos turned her laptop into a sophisticated bugging device. Mijangos began taunting her with information gleaned from offline conversations." Continue reading →
"Rome didn't fall so much as erode away, its many strengths squandered on in-fighting, mismanagement and personal aggrandizement/corruption. More telling for the present is Goldsworthy's identification of expansive, sclerotic bureaucracies that lost sight of their purpose. The top leadership abandoned the pursuit of the common good for personal gain, wealth and power. This rot at the top soon spread down the chain of command to infect and corrupt the entire institutional culture. As the empire shrank and lost tax revenues, the Imperial bureaucracies continued growing, much as parasites attach themselves to a weakened host." Continue reading →
"President Obama signed a law that gutted the reporting requirements originally included in the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act. Before these changes were made the STOCK Act required congressional staffers to disclose their finances to the public to help ensure they were not engaging in corrupt practices. But on second thought, President Obama and Congress decided that congressional staffers should be able to escape transparency. Unanimous consent, no one wanted to put their name down as openly supporting corruption while supporting corruption. And now President Obama has signed the bill guaranteeing a more corrupt Washington." Continue reading →
"Last week Thursday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew visited the west coast and had a closed door meeting with key players from Silicon Valley. The meeting was held in Mountain View, California at the headquarters of Facebook. EconomicPolicyJournal.com has obtained the list of attendees. How would you like to be able to make your investment and business decisions after attending a meeting like this?" Continue reading →
"Has government waste become so bad that we need an encyclopedia to keep track? One watchdog group seems to think so and has started a publicly edited, crowdsourced website that compiles cases of fiscal abuse, modeled after the popular site Wikipedia. Spendopedia, launched this month, is an attempt to organize examples of fiscal waste into a central, easily searchable database. The site documents programs that have been labeled as wasteful by news organizations, members of Congress or federal investigators. The website catalogs more than 100 examples of waste, including a lavish conference of the GSA and excessive severance packages at the Energy Department." Continue reading →