White House Memo Outlines Military Action on US Citizens and Gun Control Online Speech Being Outlawed on Forums and Websites Against Public

""A 2010 Pentagon directive on military support to civilian authorities details what critics say is a troubling policy that envisions the Obama administration’s potential use of military force against Americans.

The directive contains noncontroversial provisions on support to civilian fire and emergency services, special events and the domestic use of the Army Corps of Engineers.

The troubling aspect of the directive outlines presidential authority for the use of military arms and forces, including unarmed drones, in operations against domestic unrest.

“This appears to be the latest step in the administration’s decision to use force within the United States against its citizens,” said a defense official opposed to the directive.

Directive No. 3025.18, “Defense Support of Civil Authorities,” was issued Dec. 29, 2010, and states that U.S. commanders “are provided emergency authority under this directive.”

“Federal military forces shall not be used to quell civil disturbances unless specifically authorized by the president in accordance with applicable law or permitted under emergency authority,” the directive states.

“In these circumstances, those federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the president is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances” under two conditions.

The conditions include military support needed “to prevent significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property and are necessary to restore governmental function and public order.” A second use is when federal, state and local authorities “are unable or decline to provide adequate protection for federal property or federal governmental functions.”

“Federal action, including the use of federal military forces, is authorized when necessary to protect the federal property or functions,” the directive states.

Military assistance can include loans of arms, ammunition, vessels and aircraft. The directive states clearly that it is for engaging civilians during times of unrest.

A U.S. official said the Obama administration considered but rejected deploying military force under the directive during the recent standoff with Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his armed supporters.

Mr. Bundy is engaged in a legal battle with the federal Bureau of Land Management over unpaid grazing fees. Along with a group of protesters, Mr. Bundy in April confronted federal and local authorities in a standoff that ended when the authorities backed down.

The Pentagon directive authorizes the secretary of defense to approve the use of unarmed drones in domestic unrest. But it bans the use of missile-firing unmanned aircraft.

“Use of armed [unmanned aircraft systems] is not authorized,” the directive says.

Defense analysts say there has been a buildup of military units within non-security-related federal agencies, notably the creation of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams. The buildup has raised questions about whether the Obama administration is undermining civil liberties under the guise of counterterrorism and counternarcotics efforts.

Other agencies with SWAT teams reportedly include the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Education Department.

The militarization of federal agencies, under little-known statues that permit deputization of security officials, comes as the White House has launched verbal attacks on private citizens’ ownership of firearms despite the fact that most gun owners are law-abiding citizens.

A White House National Security Council spokeswoman declined to comment.

President Obama stated at the National Defense University a year ago: “I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen — with a drone or with a shotgun — without due process, nor should any president deploy armed drones over U.S. soil.”

A Pentagon official who defended the directive said it was signed in December 2010 after four years of thorough consultations within the Pentagon and with other federal agencies The 2010 directive replaced several previously published directives in 1980, 1991, and 1993. The last time military forces were used to quell civil unrest was 1906 following the San Francisco earthquake to protect the federal mint and restore order in the city.

The official said: “I suppose that in a very extreme case, one can imagine a combination of natural and man-made disasters that result in the cascading failure of communication infrastructure, or some electro-magnetic pulse that shuts down all electronic communication.”

“In the event that it should happen in today’s day and age, we would want our senior military leaders in the field to do all they can to assist their fellow Americans to prevent significant loss of life or malicious destruction of property and to protect federal property or federal governmental functions,” the official said.

HOUSE HITS ONA DOWNGRADE

The House defense authorization bill passed last week calls for adding $10 million to the Pentagon’s future warfare think tank and for codifying the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) as a semi-independent unit.

The provision is being called the Andrew Marshall amendment after the ONA’s longtime director and reflects congressional support for the 92-year-old manager and his staying power through numerous administrations, Republican and Democratic.

Mr. Marshall’s opponents within the Pentagon and the Obama administration persuaded Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel this year to downgrade the ONA by cutting its budget and placing it under the control of the undersecretary of defense for policy. The ONA currently is a separate entity within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Members of the House Committee on Armed Services objected and added the $10 million to the administration’s $8.9 million request, along with a legal provision that would codify ONA’s current status as separate from the policy undersecretary shop.

The committee was concerned Mr. Hagel’s downgrade would “limit the ability and flexibility of ONA to conduct long-range comparative assessments,” the report on the authorization bill states.

“The office has a long history of providing alternative analyses and strategies that challenge the ‘group think’ that can often pervade the Department of Defense,” the report says, noting an increasing demand for unconventional thinking about space warfare capabilities by China and Russia.""

Continued here:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/28/inside-the-ring-directive-outlines-obamas-policy-t/?page=3

""Commonly used and unregulated internet discussions and videos about guns and ammo could be closed down under rules proposed by the State Department, amounting to a "gag order on firearm-related speech," the National Rifle Association is warning.

In updating regulations governing international arms sales, State is demanding that anyone who puts technical details about arms and ammo on the web first get the OK from the federal government — or face a fine of up to $1 million and 20 years in jail.

RELATED: ATF waves white flag, kills AR-15 bullet ban in big win for NRA

According to the NRA, that would include blogs and web forums discussing technical details of common guns and ammunition, the type of info gun owners and ammo reloaders trade all the time.

"Gunsmiths, manufacturers, reloaders, and do-it-yourselfers could all find themselves muzzled under the rule and unable to distribute or obtain the information they rely on to conduct these activities," said the NRA in a blog posting.

RELATED: Should guns be allowed on college campuses?

"This latest regulatory assault, published in the June 3 issue of the Federal Register, is as much an affront to the First Amendment as it is to the Second," warned the NRA's lobbying shop. "Your action is urgently needed to ensure that online blogs, videos, and web forums devoted to the technical aspects of firearms and ammunition do not become subject to prior review by State Department bureaucrats before they can be published," it added.

At issue is the internet. State is updating International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which implement the federal Arms Export Control Act (AECA). The rules govern everything from guns to strategic bombers.

The NRA said that the rules predate the internet, and now the federal government wants to regulate technical arms discussions on on the internationally available web.

RELATED: Bam: Arms maker to sell 6,134 guns a day to benefit NRA

State's proposal is highly technical. It took 14 pages in the Federal Register to explain. But the NRA boiled it down for gun owners with this warning:

"In their current form, the ITAR do not (as a rule) regulate technical data that are in what the regulations call the 'public domain.' Essentially, this means data 'which is published and which is generally accessible or available to the public' through a variety of specified means. These include 'at libraries open to the public or from which the public can obtain documents.' Many have read this provision to include material that is posted on publicly available websites, since most public libraries these days make Internet access available to their patrons.

"The ITAR, however, were originally promulgated in the days before the Internet. Some State Department officials now insist that anything published online in a generally-accessible location has essentially been 'exported,' as it would be accessible to foreign nationals both in the U.S. and overseas.

"With the new proposal published on June 3, the State Department claims to be 'clarifying' the rules concerning 'technical data' posted online or otherwise 'released' into the 'public domain.' To the contrary, however, the proposal would institute a massive new prior restraint on free speech. This is because all such releases would require the 'authorization' of the government before they occurred. The cumbersome and time-consuming process of obtaining such authorizations, moreover, would make online communication about certain technical aspects of firearms and ammunition essentially impossible.""

Below are the State changes drawing the NRA fire:

Continued Here:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/nra-gun-blogs-videos-web-forums-threatened-by-new-obama-regulation/article/2565762

FBI Selling the Old/New Brand of Malware to the Public for the Sake of 'Security' as Policy Change

""The FBI’s bespoke surveillance malware—called Computer and IP Address Verifier (CIPAV)—is designed to track criminal suspects by logging their IP address, MAC address, computer programs running, operating system details, browser details, and other identifying computer information.

As far as spyware goes, it’s unusually circumscribed—unlike consumer keylogging and social media snooping surveillance tools, CIPAV isn’t able to spy on the entire computer at will, just a narrow list of identifiers. That means it’s a weirdly weak invader, but that’s a deliberate, built-in privacy protection, a way to keep the FBI’s spyware ostensibly legal.

Despite limitations, the FBI’s spyware capabilities are hugely powerful. As the Washington Post pointed out:

The most powerful FBI surveillance software can covertly download files, photographs and stored e-mails, or even gather real-time images by activating cameras connected to computers, say court documents and people familiar with this technology.
Yet there’s been zilch in the news about this government malware since 2013.

The FBI’s basement baby

The FBI keeps its malware deployment on the down low low. The few official documents available that provide spyware details use take care to reveal as little as possible.

“The exact nature of these commands, processes, capabilities, and their configuration is classified as a law enforcement sensitive investigative technique, the disclosure of which would likely jeopardize other ongoing investigations and/or future use of the technique,” an FBI agent’s affidavit reads.

So the FBI says it can’t explain exactly how CIPAV works because then the bad guys will figure it out and get away. If this argument sounds stale, it’s because it’s the same wobbly rationale the FBI uses to keep its heavy-handed cell phone tracking practices secret.

What we do know about CIPAV largely stems from court documents from one 2007 case. The FBI installed its malware on a teenaged bomb-threat suspect’s computer by tricking him into clicking on a phishing message on MySpace by impersonating Associated Press journalists. The FBI created a fake news article that contained malware about the bomb threats and sent it to the suspect in hopes that he’d click on it.

And the first and only semi-confirmed CIPAV attack discovered “in the wild,” before it was documented in a court case, happened in 2013, when researchers fingered the FBI as the source of a malware attack on Freedom Hosting, the anonymous hidden service notorious for hosting child porn. (The FBI later confirmed this.)

Another FBI spyware was used in 2013 to inject surveillance malware into a Colorado bomb threat suspect’s Yahoo email account. We know that the spyware allowed the FBI to see the webpages the suspect was visiting, which means it had a wider range of capabilities than CIPAV.

You may be wondering, who cares about the privacy of bomb threat suspects and pedophiles? It’s not exactly a sympathetic clan. The issue here isn’t that known pedophiles shouldn’t be tracked or that there’s a general problem with the FBI using warrants to narrowly track suspects of terrible crimes—that’s what it’s supposed to do! The issue is that the FBI’s current setup leaves too much room for to violate the privacy of people who aren’t suspects, and too many unanswered questions about its powerful spy tools.

Take the Freedom Hosting case for instance. All of the sites that used the anonymous server, including many that had absolutely nothing to do with child porn, were hit with the FBI’s spyware. In the case of the Colorado bomb threat, the FBI screwed up and originally received a warrant to spy on the wrong email address thanks to a typo, meaning some random person whose only crime was accidentally choosing an email address similar to a wanted criminal had their computer vulnerable to intensive FBI spying. The FBI saw no reason to fess up to spying on innocent people in those cases.

And since the FBI can use spyware to go after “zombified” computers infected with botnets, it could end up putting spyware on peoples’ computers just because someone else had already infected them with malware. This is like the FBI searching your house without telling you because a criminal had already broken in earlier.

We want to know more

What little we know about the FBI’s history with spyware raises questions. For instance, there was internal confusion about how to deploy spyware that suggests that the FBI hasn’t been sure how much it intruded on privacy. While the agency now requires a warrant and a Pen/Trap order to use CIPAV, documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation show several FBI agents discussed deploying the spyware without warrants before finally asking for clarification in 2007.

Since we know the FBI has been using spyware since 2001, that’s six years before the FBI cemented its policy. How many other lingering privacy questions are still being debated about legal spyware use internally? And shouldn’t Congress and the general public be able to participate in these privacy debates? Shouldn’t people have the right to know if their computer has been accidentally snooped on, or if they’ve acquired government-issued spyware as collateral damage?""

http://gizmodo.com/the-fbi-has-its-own-secret-brand-of-malware-1694821520

United States of America is it's Own Worst Enemy Troll: Edward Snowden Chimes in on International Government Surveillance Cyber Warfare Against the Public Globally

""After a year punctuated by hacks and data breaches, most notably a cyberattack against Sony, President Barack Obama used part of his State of the Union address on Tuesday to mention the growing threat to cybersecurity. “No foreign nation, no hacker, should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets or invade the privacy of American families, especially our kids,” he said.

The president’s speech came a week after the White House outlined a cybersecurity policy proposal that calls for more information sharing between the private sector and government, an increase in penalties for hacking and an update in the standards for when companies have to report that their customers’ data has been compromised.

Yet in a recent interview on PBS’s Nova, Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who leaked a large number of classified documents about government surveillance, argued that one of the biggest threats to American cybersecurity may actually be ourselves.

“When the lights go out at a power plant sometime in the future,” Snowden said, “we’re going to know that that’s a consequence of deprioritizing defense for the sake of an advantage in terms of offense.”

In the interview, Snowden argued that Stuxnet, a digital virus that the U.S. and Israel allegedly used to attack Iran’s nuclear program in 2007, was a tipping point in the history of cyberconflict and led to a proliferation of attacks. “I think the public still isn’t aware of the frequency with which these cyberattacks, as they’re being called in the press, are being used by governments around the world,” he said. “We really started this trend in many ways.”

It’s impossible to know how many cyberattacks have been carried out by or against the U.S. But the numbers appear to be rising. In 2013, U.S. military and federal government computers were invaded 46,605 times, up from 26,942 in 2009, according to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

Underscoring Snowden’s point: Der Spiegel released a trove of documents earlier this week, which revealed that the NSA broke into North Korea’s computer network in 2010, out of fear of the country’s growing cybercapabilities. That’s why the FBI was quick to accuse North Korea of carrying out the Sony hack, which eventually led to the leak of sensitive internal documents and partially canceled the release of The Interview.

When “we start engaging in these kind of behaviors,” Snowden said, “we’re setting a standard. We’re creating a new international norm of behavior that says this is what nations do.”""

Continue Story:

http://www.newsweek.com/snowden-cyber-war-america-its-own-worst-enemy-301175

Massive Millions Collection of Stars and Galaxies Released from Astronomy Database Data Now Available to the Public

"This set of observations is one of the largest astronomical databases ever assembled," remarked Donald Schneider, Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State. Images are online at http://science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2015-news/SDSS1-2015


"The more than 70 terabytes we collected during the third epoch of this survey, SDSS-III, contain information on nearly half-a-billion stars and galaxies, including three-dimensional cosmic structures that formed billions of years before the sun began to shine," Schneider said. "This data release will undoubtedly form the basis for many future scientific investigations." Schneider is the SDSS-III survey coordinator and the project's scientific publication coordinator.

"The most astonishing feature of the SDSS is the breadth of groundbreaking research it enables," said SDSS-III Director Daniel Eisenstein of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "We've searched nearby stars for planets, probed the history of our Milky Way and measured 9 billion years of our universe's accelerated expansion. Our data also provide the first direct probe of the expansion rate of the universe 10 billion years ago."

Niel Brandt, Penn State's Verne M. Willaman Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, is the SDSS-III leader of a number of projects investigating the properties of quasars, which are supermassive black holes that are devouring enormous amounts of matter, releasing amazing amounts energy in the process. "SDSS-III consists of four independent surveys," he said. "The fields range from searches for planets around nearby stars, to the chemical and dynamical evolution of our galaxy, to the large-scale structure of our universe."

After a decade of design and construction, the SDSS team began mapping the cosmos in 1998, using the dedicated 2.5-meter Sloan Foundation Telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. Each phase of the project has used this telescope, which is equipped with a succession of powerful instruments, for a distinct set of astronomical surveys. SDSS-III started observations in July 2008 and completed its six-year, $45 million program in June 2014. The SDSS-III Collaboration includes 51 member institutions and 1,000 scientists from around the world.

University Released Article:

http://news.psu.edu/story/339942/2015/01/08/research/massive-new-astronomy-database-now-available-public

Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet Cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper

 ""A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.""

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/virus-hits-drone-fleet/