DarkGovernment

Flood Victim Attacked by FEMA Inspector

When called to slow down by the victim, the FEMA employee said “I don’t have to slow down, I’m with FEMA!”

Police say a contracted FEMA housing inspector nearly hit a Penford Products employee with his car and then got out of the car slamming the man with a golf club.

Inspector Vincent Koley, 74, was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon after the 11:30 a.m. incident, the Cedar Rapids Police Department reported.

Koley stopped the car and jumped out, police said. Tom Kramer told him to slow down and that he was in the cross walk. Koley replied that “he didn’t have to slow down, he was with FEMA,” police said. The two argued for a minute, and when Kramer turned to walk away, Koley took a golf club out of his car and struck Kramer across the arm, breaking the golf club.

Koley got back into his car, but numerous Penford employees observed the incident and surrounded the car so Koley couldn’t leave, police said. Koley then began to nudge his car forward, forcing Kramer, who was in front of the car, onto the car’s hood.

Koley was booked into the Jones County Jail. He is an employee of Alltech, Inc., a Herndon, Va., housing inspection company contracted with FEMA. Alltech has provided housing inspection services in emergency or disaster areas to FEMA since 1995, according to the firm’s Web site.

Tags: fema, flood, flood victim, inspector

North Pole May Completely Melt This Summer

scientists reveal new evidence of dramatic climate change

It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.

The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic and serious examples of global warming on the planet. Scientists say the ice at 90 degrees north could be gone by summer.

“From the viewpoint of science, the North Pole is just another point on the globe, but symbolically it is hugely important. There is supposed to be ice at the North Pole, not open water,” said Mark Serreze of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado.

If it happens, it raises the prospect of the Arctic nations being able to exploit the valuable oil and mineral deposits below these a bed which have until now been impossible to extract because of the thick sea ice above.

Seasoned polar scientists believe the chances of a totally ice-free North Pole this summer are greater than 50:50 because the normally thick ice formed over many years at the Pole has been blown away and replaced by huge swathes of thinner ice formed over a single year.

This one-year ice is highly vulnerable to melting during the summer months and satellite data coming in over recent weeks shows that the rate of melting is faster than last year, when there was an all-time record loss of summer sea ice at the Arctic.

“The issue is that, for the first time that I am aware of, the North Pole is covered with extensive first-year ice – ice that formed last autumn and winter. I’d say it’s even-odds whether the North Pole melts out,” said Dr Serreze.

Each summer the sea ice melts before reforming again during the long Arctic winter but the loss of sea ice last year was so extensive that much of the Arctic Ocean became open water, with the water-ice boundary coming just 700 miles away from the North Pole.

The diminishing polar ice

Courtesy of NOAA / NESDIS Center for Satellite Applications and Research

This meant that about 70 per cent of the sea ice present this spring was single-year ice formed over last winter. Scientists predict that at least 70 per cent of this single-year ice – and perhaps all of it – will melt completely this summer, Dr Serreze said.

“Indeed, for the Arctic as a whole, the melt season started with even more thin ice than in 2007, hence concerns that we may even beat last year’s sea-ice minimum. We’ll see what happens, a great deal depends on the weather patterns in July and August,” he said.

Ron Lindsay, a polar scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, agreed that much now depends on what happens to the Arctic weather in terms of wind patterns and hours of sunshine. “There’s a good chance that it will all melt away at the North Pole, it’s certainly feasible, but it’s not guaranteed,” Dr Lindsay said.

The polar regions are experiencing the most dramatic increase in average temperatures due to global warming and scientists fear that as more sea ice is lost, the darker, open ocean will absorb more heat and raise local temperatures even further. Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, who was one of the first civilian scientists to sail underneath the Arctic sea ice in a Royal Navy submarine, said that the conditions are ripe for an unprecedented melting of the ice at the North Pole.

“Last year we saw huge areas of the ocean open up, which has never been experienced before. People are expecting this to continue this year and it is likely to extend over the North Pole. It is quite likely that the North Pole will be exposed this summer – it’s not happened before,” Professor Wadhams said.

There are other indications that the Arctic sea ice is showing signs of breaking up. Scientists at the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre said that the North Water ‘polynya’ – an expanse of open water surrounded on all sides by ice – that normally forms near Alaska and Banks Island off the Canadian coast, is much larger than normal. Polynyas absorb heat from the sun and eat away at the edge of the sea ice.

Inuit natives living near Baffin Bay between Canada and Greenland are also reporting that the sea ice there is starting to break up much earlier than normal and that they have seen wide cracks appearing in the ice where it normally remains stable. Satellite measurements collected over nearly 30 years show a significant decline in the extent of the Arctic sea ice, which has become more rapid in recent years.

Tags: global warming, ice, north pole

Incredible Recent Botnet Growth

An announcement from F-Secure warned that malware is growing faster than ever before, while Marshal’s TRACE team claims that the volume of malicious spam in circulation has more than tripled in one week.

Marshal fingered the Srizbi botnet as the chief culprit, currently responsible for 46 percent of all spam sent, helping malicious spam figures jump from 3 to almost 10 percent of all spam traffic so far in June.

TRACE team lead threat analyst, Phil Hay, said that Srizbi’s criminal controllers are currently on a major expansion drive.

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Srizbi is duping recipients by including the first part of their e-mail address in the subject line with the suggestion that they look “stupid” in a video, luring them to a Web site to view the video where they are exposed to malware.

Marshal said Srizbi is also targeting social networking sites like Classmate.com, luring victims to dodgy sites with the promise of messages from long lost school friends. A Flash video player link is presented to the victim, which downloads an executable file that infects their computer.

“This kind of social engineering tactic is nothing new,” said Hay.

“What is significant is the rapid increase in the volume. It once again demonstrates the incredible power and dominance that the major spamming botnets have over e-mail traffic. Very few legitimate businesses could triple their e-mail capacity at the push of a button. But this is the advantage that the illegal control of thousands of computers gives the spammers. “We see Srizbi as one of the biggest threats to Internet users today. Users should be wary of e-mails that make personal offers such as online friend connections or include inflammatory personalized subjects such as ‘you look stupid in this video’, particularly if they don’t recognize the sender,” he said.

According to F-Secure’s security summary for the first half of 2008, the unprecedented growth in malware is due to the packing, encryption, and obfuscation of existing families of trojans, backdoors, exploits and other threats now being done with “industrial efficiency”.

The number of malware detections has grown by almost half a million since the end of the year, jumping from 500,000 total detections to 900,000.

“I have a nasty feeling that the situation is getting worse, not better”, says Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for the security vendor.

F-Secure cited targeted malware attacks such as the classmates.com con that Marshal reported as key growth areas for dodgy software peddlers over the past six months.

Targeted malware attacks typically involve the attacker profiling their victim and sending an e-mail using the recipients name, title, job function and a subject field related to the victim’s position in order to trick them into opening something they would normally expect to receive via e-mail.

Targeted malware attacks against political or military organizations also increased, such as an e-mail attack against human rights and pro freedom of Tibet groups that aimed to install malware on their PCs that would allow their political opposition to spy on their actions.

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F-Secure’s half-yearly security summary also looked at emerging mobile phone threats such as Jailbreaking, growth in SQL injection attacks, and the risks emerging around third party applications like Adobe Flash.

Tags: botnet, computers, malware, Security, spam, srizbi

RFID Fears and Myths

In an effort to dispel some of the privacy concerns surrounding radio frequency identification technology (RFID), the Information Technology Association of America has issued a white paper covering what the technology is and is not capable of.

The report “RFID Myths and Urban Legends,” available from the ITAA Web site, cites some of the benefits of the technology, including identity management, supply-chain efficiency, pharmaceutical tracking, food safety/recall, security, and stock control. RFID has the potential to have profound impact on industry.

As you know, RFID is an automated data-capture technology. The technology consists of RFID tags, RFID readers, and a data collection and management system. Because RFID can be used for personal identification, there are privacy and security concerns regarding the technology. The ITAA white paper is a useful resource to counter some of these concerns in your company by correcting misinformation:

* Companies and governments plan to track you using RFID.

Not true because an RFID tag has no awareness of geographical data. An RFID tag must be within 10 to 30 feet of a reader – outside of that range, tags don’t emit a signal. “Big Brother” type surveillance would require billions of readers and antennas within that range.

* RFID creates a database in the sky.

When it’s so difficult for companies to integrate their disparate sources of data, is it really realistic to believe there will be a single database that tracks all your purchases? RFID doesn’t change the way information is used or stored.

* RFID will spur drive-by reads.

RFID requires direct line of sight within the 10- to 30-foot range. It does not work through walls, so it’s highly unlikely someone could park at the curb to find out what’s in your medicine cabinet unless your lawn was dotted with readers.

* RFID can lead to identity theft.

The tags do not usually contain personally identifiable information. Rather, they transmit unique identifiers that function like license plates. You’d need access to a database that should be secured with encryption and all the other usual standard forms of protection.

Tags: big brother, privacy, rfid, rfid tag, spy spying

Expensive Military Practices

Over the Bering Sea in 2006, a B-2A stealth bomber from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri takes on fuel from an Air Force KC-10A tanker from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey

Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) dominated our military posture toward our Soviet enemy. I bring this up because the midair refueling tanker that the MAD warrior LeMay commissioned suddenly has become a controversy in the presidential campaign.

MAD was based on a triad of air, land and sea forces that would punish a Soviet first strike, ending all semblance of life on the one-sixth of the planet that composed the old Soviet Union. Toward that end, we needed not only thousands of land-based weapons but thousands of other weapons on ships and on airplanes. It was LeMay’s insistence that nuclear-armed bombers be in the air 24/7 that gave rise to the midair refueling tankers that were in the news this past week. Controversy arose when the Government Accountability Office questioned an Air Force decision to award the contract for a new generation of those “gas stations in the sky” to one defense contractor instead of its rival.

The news was presented in a Wall Street Journal front-page story focusing on the profit potential rather than the military significance of the tanker. So, too, the account that led the New York Times business section, which detailed the good news in Boeing’s revived chances to secure the refueling tanker contract. This deal would initially cost $35 billion, but, as the Times pointed out, “The tanker contract, which could eventually grow to $100 billion to build a fleet of 179 refueling planes, is one of the most lucrative ever awarded by the Pentagon.”

Neither newspaper indicated why we needed $100 billion in tankers, other than in a revealing photo in the Times showing one of the airplanes refueling a B-2 bomber, which brings us back to Gen. LeMay and his MAD doctrine. The B-2 was designed to be the modern bomber in the triad confronting the Soviets. Its very expensive stealth cover would be able to penetrate a sophisticated Soviet radar system—which was never built. That also assumes that the B-2’s stealthy cover would stop deteriorating in the rain, as it was wont to do, but the test for this technology never occurred because of the untimely fall of the Soviet menace.

Despite having lost its purpose, production of the B-2 continued for a while as a jobs and profit program supported by key legislators from both parties, as has been the case with the tanker designed to fuel the planes. Woe to the legislator who dares take on any weapons program, and that is why John McCain has become the subject of criticism from the Democrats.

In one of his better performances as a senator, McCain distinguished himself by challenging a swindle that would have rewarded the Boeing company with a contract worth $100 billion for leasing Boeing aircraft that were converted to refueling tankers from a model that was not selling in a depressed market. Thanks to McCain’s insistence on a criminal investigation, the chief financial officer of Boeing and the top procurement officer in the Air Force wing of the Pentagon were sent to serve time in federal prison. The contract was canceled, and a new contract was awarded to Northrop Grumman and a European partner.

The Democratic National Committee now has criticized McCain for having opposed the Boeing deal, charging that McCain had “sent American jobs abroad.” The DNC’s attack on McCain speaks volumes to the bipartisan gut-checking in favor of military waste that has led us to squander trillions of taxpayer dollars since 9/11.

McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers responded to the scurrilous attack from the DNC, saying:

“Let’s get this straight: John McCain led the charge to uncover the biggest boondoggle in Pentagon history, saved the taxpayers over $6 billion, helped send corrupt execs and government officials to jail, and the Democrats say he’s the bad guy? It’s absurd. Apparently to Barack Obama and the Democrats, corruption is OK, so long as it helps them politically. That’s not change we can believe in.”

Now, of course, McCain has done his bit to waste egregious amounts of taxpayer money by cheerleading for an Iraq war that has already burdened us with trillions in future debt, but that hardly exonerated the Democrats in once again attempting to one-up the Republicans in throwing money at defense contractors.

Tags: air force, b2, fuel tankers, midair refueling, military budget, military spending, refueling, waste