Resistance to Tyranny

Eavesdropper: The Mobile Vulnerability Exposing Millions of Conversations

"Appthority has discovered a significant data exposure vulnerability we’ve named Eavesdropper that affects almost 700 apps in enterprise environments. The vulnerability is caused by including hard coded credentials in mobile applications that are using the Twilio Rest API or SDK. By hard coding their credentials, the developers have effectively given global access to all metadata stored in their Twilio accounts, including text/SMS messages, call metadata, and voice recordings."

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WikiLeaks: CIA wrote code ‘to impersonate’ Kaspersky Lab anti-virus

"The CIA multi-platform hacking suite ‘Hive’ was able to impersonate existing entities to conceal suspicious traffic from the user being spied on, the source code of the malicious program indicates, WikiLeaks said on Thursday. The extraction of information would therefore be misattributed to an impersonated company, and at least three examples in the code show that Hive is able to impersonate Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab, WikiLeaks stated."

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Prosecutors aren’t obligated to believe the evidence they present at trial

"I was surprised to learn that most state bars have no requirement that prosecutors believe that the evidence they present is truthful. Courts have ruled that even if prosecutors knowingly break the law — such as detaining defense witnesses in order to prevent them from testifying at trial — those who were harmed by the prosecutors’ behavior have no recourse."

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Jacob Hornberger: The JFK Autopsy Cover-Up

"It’s important to keep in mind that all of this was kept secret from the American people from 1963 to the 1990s. Military personnel who participated in the autopsy were required by superior officers to sign written secrecy oaths, in which they promised never to reveal what they had seen during the autopsy. If it hadn’t been for Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, everything surrounding the autopsy would have remained secret, most likely forever."

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Martin Luther King and Lee Harvey Oswald

"The records that the National Archives just released included a secret FBI analysis on civil-rights leader Martin Luther King. The thrust of the analysis is that King was a communist, and an immoral communist at that. Does the FBI analysis on King have any bearing on the Kennedy assassination? Actually, yes. That’s where critical thinking, circumstantial evidence, inferential thinking, and common sense come into play."

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More Broke States Trading In Vice Enforcement For Tax Revenue

"Pennsylvania is in the midst of a budget crisis. Seeing New Jersey success is raising revenue from Internet gambling, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives suggested that to avoid a tax increase, they would follow suit. This week, after years of haggling, Gov. Tom Wolf signed a measure to make Pennsylvania the fourth state to legalize online gaming – a move that is projected to bring in $426.3 million in tax revenue from 2017 to 2022. Michigan is also considering making a move, and guess who the chief opponent is?"

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Texas Police, Looking for More Military Hardware, Tout Its Use In Harvey Relief

"With military-grade equipment available for the cost of pick-up, police forces have been stocking up. While some of that equipment appears actually to have been used in post-hurricane relief work, most of it is better suited for SWAT raids, intimidating protesters, and killing people."

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Paradise Papers hang-out reveals income tax industry’s countermeasures

"The world’s biggest businesses, heads of state and global figures in politics, entertainment and sport who have sheltered their wealth in secretive tax havens are being revealed this week in a major new investigation into Britain’s offshore empires. The material, which has come from two offshore service providers and the company registries of 19 tax havens, was obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with partners including the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times."

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GOP sneaks in automatic annual tax increase by introducing chained CPI

"Republican tax-writers have decided to shift the tax code’s inflation index from the Consumer Price Index, or CPI, to something known as chained CPI, which is a slower-growing method of calculating cost-of-living increases. Using the lower rate of inflation to calculate future tax rates means taxpayers will more quickly fall into higher tax brackets, meaning they will pay more in taxes than if Republicans stuck with the traditional measuring stick. It works out to taxpayers paying $128 billion more to Uncle Sam than they would otherwise over the next decade, and $500 billion more in the subsequent decade."

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Duty, Honor, Atrocity: George W. Bush Receives West Point Character Award

"In George W. Bush’s home state of Texas, if you are an ordinary citizen found guilty of capital murder, the mandatory sentence is either life in prison or the death penalty. If, however, you are a former president of the United States responsible for initiating two illegal wars of aggression, which killed 7,000 U.S. servicemen and at least 210,000 civilians, displaced more than 10 million people from their homes, condoned torture, initiated a global drone assassination campaign, and imprisoned people for years without substantive evidence or trial in Guantanamo Bay, the punishment evidently is to be given the Thayer Award at West Point."

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