April 8, 2015

U.S. Deports Salvadoran General Accused in ’80s Killings

Source: The New York Times

After a 16-year legal battle, a former defense minister of El Salvador once embraced by Washington as a close ally during the civil war there in the 1980s, was deported on Wednesday after immigration courts found that he had participated in torture and killings by troops under his command.

The officer, Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, is the highest-ranking foreign official to be deported under laws enacted in 2004 to prevent human rights violators from seeking haven in this country. The expulsion culminates persistent efforts by rights advocates to hold General Vides accountable for his role in the 1980 murders of four American churchwomen, one of the most notorious crimes by the Salvadoran armed forces in that era.

General Vides landed at the international airport in Comalapa, El Salvador just after 12:30 p.m., one of dozens of Salvadoran deportees aboard an Immigration and Customs Enforcement charter flight, according to Mauricio Silva, a spokesman for the Salvadoran immigration agency. The general had been detained by immigration authorities in the United States since March 25.

The deportation “sends an enormously important message to El Salvador and the rest of the world that we are not going to harbor people who committed these violations even when at the time they appeared to be supporting U.S. policy,” said R. Scott Greathead, a lawyer who represented William Ford, the brother of Sister Ita Ford, one of the murdered churchwomen. Mr. Ford died in 2008.


Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/us/us-deports-salvadoran-general-accused-in-80s-killings.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

April 8, 2015

Pittsburgh DUers...I don't want to be 'that guy', but I have to ask:

What the hell with the Pens?? They've been in freefall and are about to miss the playoffs?

Haven't you been doing your job and cheering them on? I can't do all the cheering here in Virginia...

April 8, 2015

Glenn Greenwald still running damage control to prop up his myth

https://twitter.com/Wilson__Valdez/status/585577609750282242

Shorter Greenwald: Evidently the only reason some of us don't think Edward Snowden is Christ on the cross is because there's a Dem in the White House...It's one of his whinier, wussier talking points so I know he doesn't have anything left...

April 7, 2015

Russia may offer gas price discount, loans to Greece

Source: Reuters

MOSCOW, April 7 (Reuters) - Russia may offer Greece a discount on gas deliveries and new loans when Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras visits Moscow this week, the Kommersant business daily reported on Tuesday, citing one source in the Russian government.

A Kremlin spokesman said last week that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Tsipras planned to discuss economic ties and EU sanctions on Moscow when they meet for talks, which Kommersant said would take place on Thursday.

"We are ready to consider the issue of a gas price discount for Greece," the newspaper said quoting an unnamed Russian government source.

Russia's state-controlled producer Gazprom declined to comment. The Energy Ministry also declined to comment.

The source said that in exchange for the discount and some unspecified loans, Russia would want access to Greek assets. The source did not name any specific assets.


Read more: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/russia-may-offer-gas-price-060104152.html

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And now the *other* shoe drops...

April 7, 2015

Silk Road Boss' First Murder-For-Hire Was His Mentor's Idea

The allegation that the Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts attempted to pay for six murders has loomed over the story of that massive online drug market. How could the pseudonymous figure preaching non-violent, libertarian ideals stoop to commissioning the paid killings of half a dozen people?

Now a newly revealed chat log from the case sheds light on how the first of those paid murder attempts appears to have arisen. The logs show it was not the creator of the Silk Road who first suggested enlisting the services of a hit man, but rather his top advisor and mentor.

Earlier this week, a trove of new records from the Silk Road pre-trial hearings was unsealed, including logs of January 2013 instant-message conversations that prosecutors say were pulled from the laptop of Ross Ulbricht at the time of his arrest. In February, Ulbricht was convicted of being the Dread Pirate Roberts, Silk Road’s creator and owner. But the recorded conversations, along with the other sealed documents, had been kept secret throughout Ulbricht’s trial earlier this year to avoid compromising an investigation that led to the arrest Monday of two federal agents on corruption charges.

In the 21-page IM chat log, which occurred over the anonymous IM service Torchat, the Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts carries out conversations with his staffer Inigo, a supposed drug-dealing associate named Nob (who we now know was actually undercover DEA agent Carl Force), and a figure named Cimon, also known as Variety Jones, whom Ulbricht had described in his journal as his “mentor” and advisor. The conversations revolve around $350,000 worth of bitcoin that had been stolen from the Silk Road, which Dread Pirate Roberts and Inigo believed had been taken by Silk Road staffer Curtis Clark Green. (In fact, it seems the bitcoins had been allegedly stolen by rogue Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges, using Green’s account—one of the criminal charges for which Bridges was arrested Monday.)

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-boss-first-murder-attempt-mentors-idea/

April 7, 2015

On John Oliver, Edward Snowden Says Keep Taking Dick Pics

John Oliver is worried that you don’t care about government surveillance because you have no idea what it is. After doing an informal poll of passersby in Times Square, who for the most part had no idea who whistle-blower Edward Snowden was, Oliver said Sunday, “It seems like we’ve kind of forgotten to have a debate over what Snowden leaked.”

The best person to explain why surveillance should upset the American people, John Oliver reasoned, is “the most famous hero and/or traitor in recent American history” Edward Snowden himself. So Oliver and crew traveled to Russia to sit down with him.

Before the interview, Oliver used his introduction to prime viewers with random analogies (he likened Julian Assange—the creator of Wikileaks—to a “sandwich bag full of biscuit dough wearing a Stevie Nicks wig) and his plain-spoken approach to explain why government surveillance matters. And matters now. The Patriot Act is up for reauthorization on June 1, and John Oliver doesn’t want you to forget it.

Specifically, one part of the Patriot Act that is expiring is called Section 215. It is what gives the government the authority ask companies to hand over “any tangible things” that pertain to terrorism.


http://www.wired.com/2015/04/john-oliver-edward-snowden-dick-pics/

April 7, 2015

John Oliver Finds the Real Edward Snowden

The media team and intelligence handlers around Edward Snowden finally committed a major blunder. After fawning tributes, softball interviews, and an Oscar coronation for his celluloid enablers, they made a decision they should have known would go wrong. They let Ed talk to John Oliver.

This is nothing short of amazing, and suggests either that the Russian spooks now in control of Snowden’s life don’t watch Oliver’s show, or that they were led to believe Oliver is just another liberal journalist who would allow Snowden to run his usual All-American Kid act. Either way, they had to be disappointed. Oliver, for all of his attempts to be serious, couldn’t help but shove Snowden around, and the interview showed just how uncomfortable someone like Snowden is—and likely has been his whole life—around Cool Kids like John Oliver.

So, Snowden’s socially awkward, and Oliver is hilarious. This we knew already. But what else did we learn from this interview, and what does it tell us about the Snowden affair in general?

One observation right off the bat is that both the Russians and Snowden’s other advisers are losing their touch. The people around Snowden have played an expert game for the past two years, especially given the limited material (that is, Snowden himself) they’ve had to work with. They’ve done some good staging, exploited the cooperation of credulous journalists, and avoided hard questions. It is a testimony both to the fecklessness of the media and the competence of the Snowden team that Oliver was the first time Ed’s done anything even close to a real interview.

http://thefederalist.com/2015/04/07/john-oliver-finds-the-real-edward-snowden/

April 7, 2015

Snowden Lays an Egg, a Statue Grows in Brooklyn and Manning Wins a Round

When a military court handed Manning a 35-year sentence on August 21 of the same year, Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda were in their third day of wailing and chest-beating over Miranda’s 11-hour “psychological torture” at the hands of British officials on the previous Sunday. That same week, the Guardian disclosed that, on government orders it had destroyed computers containing Snowden documents, a story it had sat on for months. The Guardian also announced a sharing agreement with The New York Times.

The following February, the Oxford Union gave Manning the Sam Adams Award for Integrity and Intelligence. Since Manning was sequestered in Leavenworth, Snowden acted in her place, via a video in which he scrupulously avoided any details of what she had leaked, to talk about “over-classification” of government documents. This segued into Snowden’s familiar lecture on the necessity to democracy of informed consent and a free press. At the end, he offered Manning the Oxford Union’s, and his, “moral sanction.”

Exactly two months after the Oxford Union award, an Army general upheld Manning’s 35-year sentence, the longest ever given by a U.S. court for leaking secrets to the media. The same day, The Washington Post and The Guardian won a Pulitzer Prize for their Snowden stories.

As I have laboriously documented, throughout all of this scene-stealing, Snowden and his colleagues relentlessly recapitulated mainstream media smears against Manning while insisting on Snowden’s vastly superior methods with sometimes laughable hyperbole. A central feature of this mythology is the notion that he read and analyzed every document in his trove before he handed it over to his most beloved journalists. Almost none of this fit the ever-changing facts at all — Snowden and co were as mendacious about Snowden as they were about Manning — and no one cared, not even Snowden’s ostensible detractors.

https://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/snowden-lays-an-egg-a-statue-grows-in-brooklyn-and-manning-wins-a-round/

April 7, 2015

The Rand Paul campaign is selling an "NSA Spy Cam Blocker" for your laptop

Most laptops today have a built-in camera above the display. And most of those have a small light next to them that is supposed to turn on to alert the user when the camera is active. But a couple of years ago, researchers discovered that this doesn't always work; hackers can activate the camera on certain MacBook models (and probably some other laptops) without enabling the light and tipping off the user.

Ever since writing that story, I've had a precautionary Post-it Note over my laptop's camera. Newly minted presidential candidate Rand Paul is using concerns over laptop camera privacy to promote his campaign:

Paul's campaign has dubbed this the "NSA Spy Cam Blocker," urging supporters to "stop hackers and the NSA with this simple camera blocker."

I don't think there's been any proof that the NSA spies on people using webcams, but this isn't a crazy concern. We've known since 2013 that the FBI had technology to remotely activate targets' webcams and stream images back to the authorities.

http://www.vox.com/2015/4/7/8361429/rand-paul-nsa-laptop

April 6, 2015

But dat ass, tho...

Mets Magic Number is now 161...They WILL shock the world this season, and the line for you johnny-come-lately bandwagoners is over there =======================>

http://m.mlb.com/nym/video/topic/42930092/v62892983/?c_id=nym


Now I'm off to find a stimulating and adventurous woman willing to dress up as Mrs. Met for a little roleplay...