"XKeyscore is a massive programme that sweeps up email, social media activity and all browsing history.
The data, according to NSA slides detailing the programme, is analysed, sifted and stored on servers around the world - more than 700 servers at approximately 150 sites, as the "top secret" slide states.
A small-scale world map locates the sites with the use of red dots (see slide). There are three dots, which may also cover Myanmar, Vietnam or Cambodia. But at least one of the dots sits atop the image of Thailand.
While locating NSA spy technology in Thailand is unsurprising, few details are known. The servers would have to be large computer arrays by definition, but they could be anywhere, from the US Embassy to almost any office building in Bangkok or up-country. The NSA has a long history of using Thailand in its long-range interception programmes. In the Vietnam war era, the NSA was the agency behind the huge electronic Ramasun spy station south of Udorn Thani. The secret surveillance system known as XKeyscore, revealed by Mr Snowden and The Guardian on Thursday, allows US intelligence to monitor "nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet," according to the leaked documents. Citing classified documents provided by the fugitive, the British daily said the programme was the most wide-reaching operated by the NSA."
"warrenellis: Captured: the precise moment at which Wil Wheaton hears someone at the back of the auditorium intone “YOU HAVE A WOMAN’S BEARD"
WilWheaton: hi warren i’m trying so hard to make my beard grow like yours but it keeps its secrets so hidden i can’t figure it out. can it help me be more beardy with some secret formula or something. thanks okay."
"Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." - Elie Wiesel
"A lot of people have a hard time trusting lawyers as it is, but what about one who claims he was part of a secret government time travel program when he was a kid? Since 2004, Seattle attorney Andrew Basiago has been publicly claiming that from the time he was 7 to when he was 12, he participated in "Project Pegasus," a secret U.S. government program that he says worked on teleportation and time travel under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency...
"They trained children along with adults so they could test the mental and physical effects of time travel on kids," Basiago told The Huffington Post. "Also, children had an advantage over adults in terms of adapting to the strains of moving between past, present and future.""
"I hate laziness. I hate excuse-making. I hate rationalization and self-bullshitting. I hate willful ignorance. I hate watching people piss away their potential. I hate it when people blame everyone but themselves. I hate mental weakness." - Chris Shugart
"Today, I found out via Instagram that my boyfriend didn't actually go to the Bahamas with his dad as he claimed. Not unless his dad lost weight, grew tits and long hair, and likes to make out with his son. They have no cellphone service, so I can't even call to break up with him. FML"
"At least one cop has been disciplined for ordering the NYPD's highest-ranking uniformed black officer out of his auto while the three-star chief was off-duty and parked in Queens, the Daily News has learned. "How you can not know or recognize a chief in a department SUV with ID around his neck, I don't know," a police source said. Chief Douglas Zeigler, 60, head of the Community Affairs Bureau, was in his NYPD-issued vehicle near a fire hydrant when two plainclothes cops approached on May 2, sources said. One officer walked up on each side of the SUV at 57th Ave. and Xenia St. in Corona about 7 p.m. and told the driver to roll down the heavily tinted windows, sources said. What happened next is in dispute. In his briefing to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Zeigler said the two cops, who are white, had no legitimate reason to approach his SUV, ranking sources said. After they ordered him to get out, one officer did not believe the NYPD identification Zeigler gave him."
"For that matter, the demograpic profile of the people who are usually hassled by the cops, while it certainly should bother anyone who claims to be concerned about racial profiling or the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection, is not the most decisive argument against stop and frisk, which is the Fourth Amendment. As Mike Riggs noted yesterday, Kelly seems to think everyone detained by the cops must be guilty of something. "The notion anyone stopped has done absolutely nothing wrong is not really the case," he said on MSNBC's Morning Joe, because police "need reasonable suspicion to stop someone and question them." Kelly not only confuses reasonable suspicion with guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; he assumes his cops really do have a sound legal basis for every stop they make and every pat-down they perform. That assumption is hard to credit, given that stops result in an arrest or summons only 12 percent of the time and pat-downs almost never discover guns."
There's the political class and then there's you. And they don't give a fuck about you.
"...the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which handles benefits issues for Hill staffers, has decided to allow congressional staffers to put the same employer contribution they get toward their current plans toward the purchase of health plans bought on the exchanges, according to Politico. Coverage of the issue up until now has tended to focus on the question of whether congressional staffers would be “exempt” from Obamacare. I never thought that was quite the right way to understand it: Staffers weren’t looking to be exempt from the whole law, but from one provision that specifically affected, and complicated, their own lives.
The health law’s defenders, in turn, argued that it wasn’t fair to create a special class of individuals who have to give up their employer coverage, and the tax-protected contribution toward that coverage’s cost, in order to buy from the exchanges. But OPM’s decision creates a different sort of special class: A tiny group of federal employees allowed to put their employer’s existing coverage contribution toward plans bought through Obamacare’s exchanges. In other words, Hill staffers were irritated by a provision of the health law that would have cost them money. And they got a bureaucratic fix to make the problem go away. Most Americans frustrated by some specific provision in Obamacare, on the other hand, won’t be so lucky."
8/2 - pushups, pullups/chins -- abs/kneeups & crunches -- 25 chins/50 pushups for time 2:11 - [and then again for 2:19] -- grease the groove/neutral grip chins
#AdaptationIsSpecific -- The only thing long, slow cardio is good for is getting good at doing long, slow cardio. For guys and girls, to be lean, strong, fit [and to look good] then lift weights/do strength training/resistance work, do intervals & sprints and clean up your diet. -- T NATION | The Final Nail in the Cardio Coffin:
"It is time to bury the myth of using long, slow steady-state cardio to burn up fat, for good. No more spending hours and hours on a treadmill, elliptical, or bike...
Feeling soft around the midsection? Can't see your abs anymore? Feel the need to get lean in a hurry? Slacking off on your diet and workouts can do that to you. In my case, training for an Ironman triathlon can do that, too. What? Yeah, you heard me right... My body was soft, with no definition, and had definitely changed due to spending the majority of my training in the steady-state aerobic zone – the same "fat burning zone" many books and magazine still talk about...
Body built by Cosgrove, strength training, and intervals.
I was able to increase my mileage until I could go for a 16-mile run or a 112-mile bike ride like it was "just another workout." It was amazing to see how the body adapts to demands and how far you can push yourself. Unfortunately, this was also exactly why I didn't lose much fat – my body was adapting to what I was doing. My goal was to get my body super-efficient at running 20 miles and riding a bike for 100 miles, so when it came time for my race, I'd be able to do it. However, the more your body adapts the fewer calories you burn. So, I was doing more and more exercise without burning as many calories, and therefore I wasn't losing any fat... In seven months of training, I calculated that I worked out for 374 hours – that's an average of over thirteen hours a week! If I burned just ten calories a minute, it adds up to 224,400 calories. Doing the math (at 3,500 calories per pound), 224,400 calories should equal sixty four pounds lost! Needless to say, I did not lose 64 pounds. Over those seven months, training an average thirteen to fourteen hours a week, I lost all of five pounds. That... was... it. Now, we've heard many of the fitness experts tell us that, "steady-state aerobics is not effective for fat loss, and we've heard the scientific research that interval training is more effective. But, still, I thought it would've been more effective than this! A lousy five pounds after doing 374 hours of training, while keeping tabs on what I'm eating! It's enough to make a girl give up the gym... Fortunately, I now have first-hand experience that steady-state aerobics is absolutely, completely, utterly ineffective for fat loss. After working my way up to twenty training hours a week, I can tell you that long, steady-state endurance is not the answer for a defined, lean physique and it's a waste of time if your goal is fat loss. It's only the answer if your goal is to complete an endurance event.
R.I.P. Aerobics
Get off the treadmill, stop spinning your wheels, and push yourself in the gym if you want to lose some serious fat. Take it from me, I finally learned first hand. It's time to put the last nail in the coffin of using aerobics for fat loss, bury it for good, and do some high intensity, interval dancing on its overdue grave."
So much fail to go around - The Diplomatic Doldrums - By Nicholas Kralev | Foreign Policy: "How is the State Department ever going to get a bigger budget if Congress isn’t clear about what it actually does? Many in Congress simply do not see diplomacy as a vital component of U.S. national security. They view it as something that is useful under certain circumstances, but not necessarily crucial to protecting American interests. To a startling degree, this disconnect appears to be the product of ignorance. Members and their staffers don't know exactly what U.S. diplomats do every day at all 275 overseas posts to advance U.S. interests -- whether it is helping foreign countries build infrastructure, reform judicial systems, enhance counterterrorism programs, or improve their economies. Members of Congress have a vague idea of what U.S. diplomats are up to, but clearly not enough to justify continuing the current year's funding level... In fact, a bigger part of the responsibility for educating and informing Congress about U.S. diplomatic activities lies with the State Department, which hasn't done a good enough job on this front, all of the respondents in my study agreed. "State should find creative ways to show how the work of the Foreign Service affects the lives of ordinary Americans," a House Democratic aide said. A senior Senate Democratic aide concurred: "You have to make the connection for the members and for the public that this is something that relates to their daily lives. You have to do a much more sophisticated job of selling the relevance of the institution." Another senior House Republican aide added: "They should be the ones getting the message out on what it is they do and what value they add to our government." But the distrust flows both ways. Skepticism of Congress and insufficient understanding of its role in U.S. foreign policy were also cited by most respondents as a reason for the rift between Foggy Bottom and Capitol Hill. "State does not trust us," explained one House Democratic aide. "They don't think we deserve all the information. State's perception is that we do all the leaking, which is not true. Right now, because of the trust deficit, it becomes more adversarial." Likewise, a Senate Republican staffer said that Foreign Service officers "view Congress as an annoyance and an impediment. It stops them from what they want to do. That's one of the reasons they are disliked up here. They are famous for having an attitude of superiority, like they are the cream of the crop and don't necessarily need to be wasting their time on our issues." At the same time, the aide conceded that "people are more competent in the Foreign Service relative to other agencies; I think they are higher quality.""
"My kids and I figured out that there’s a third kind of person, and I don’t know what you call them, but it’s somebody who sees that the glass is always full because it’s half full with water and half full with nothing, so that’s the third kind of person. I don’t know what it is." — Louis CK
"CNN is now reporting that “dozens” of CIA employees were on the ground in Benghazi at the time of the attack...
CNN's exclusive, of course, is not the first mention of CIA involvement in Benghazi. The second part of the Benghazi attack was on the CIA annex in the Libyan city. The CIA apparently was not sure how the attackers knew about the facility in the first place. Paula Broadwell, the intelligence officer-cum-palace journalist whose affair with David Petraeus ended the general’s career as CIA director, believed the CIA annex in Benghazi was a secret prison and that the attack was a jihadi jailbreak (something we’ve seen from Iraq to Pakistan in recent months)...
President Obama and administration officials, of course, chose to blame a video, something that was known to be patently false very early on in the aftermath, both to US officials on the ground and anyone who was paying attention and had half a clue. The latest revelations about the extent of the CIA presence in Benghazi on September 11, and the extent to which the administration is trying to prevent it, at least provide some minor insight as to why the Obama Administration was so committed to the lie of the video.
I argued a few months ago that the answer to Hillary Clinton’s question of “what difference does it make?” what the facts on Benghazi are is that it betrays a complete disregard for truthfulness from this administration to the public. That continues."
"The vast majority of law enforcement professionals are just that — professional — but those who behave like the officers in this column create a toxic relationship between the public they serve and the entire police department. These officers should be fired immediately." --Police Threatened to Arrest Me for Taking Their Photo Last Night | Slog: "...one of the officers eyed me and yelled something like, "He's got a camera!" King County Sheriff's Office Sergeant Patrick "K.C." Saulet rushed over and told me to leave or be arrested. He claimed I was standing on transit station property; the plaza belongs to King County Metro's International District Station and I could not stand there, he said. I backed up about two feet over the line that he pointed out (two parts of the same walkway) until I was unambiguously on the City of Seattle's sidewalk, near a utility pole by the curb. But Officer Saulet then insisted that I would be arrested unless I left the entire block. Now, let me pause for a second to say this: When the US Department of Justice alleged that the Seattle Police Department was routinely using excessive force, federal prosecutors stressed in their report that officers were escalating ordinary interactions into volatile, sometimes violent, situations. Now a federal court controls the SPD under a reform plan, and the King County Sheriff's Department has faced extensive scrutiny for officer misconduct, so the two agencies should be showing more civility on the beat. Or so you'd think.
Back to Saulet: "You need to leave or you're coming with me," he said while repeating his arrest threat yet again. Commuters, shoppers, and vagrants were milling about the sidewalk and plaza—some people were passing closer to the center of the police activity than I was—but I was the only one on that busy block told to leave (the guy watching the police and taking their picture). I hadn't tried speaking to the officers or bothering them in any way, I hadn't even identified myself as a reporter, and I was standing on public property. The officers did not accuse me of any offense other than standing there. At this point, the man police were questioning had left. So I asked for the officer's name—I wanted to know who was threatening to arrest me—and he pointed to his embroidered shirt breast; as I took a photo of it, he lifted his hand, apparently in an attempt to block the shot. (What I didn't know at the time is that Sergeant Saulet has a long history of abusive policing. In 2006, the Seattle PI reported the he has 12 sustained misconduct complaints against him and "one of the worst misconduct histories in the King County Sheriff's Office." Two years later, The Stranger reported that Saulet had been reprimanded five times for excessive use of force and four times for improper personal conduct. Nonetheless, Saulet has kept his job and his estimable rank as sergeant.)
After snapping Saulet's picture, I rode my bike across the street because I didn't want to get arrested, even though standing on the sidewalk and taking photos of police from a reasonable distance seemed legal. I was jotting down a few notes so I'd remember what happened when I saw three officers leaving the scene. I asked them who at the scene was the commanding officer. They explained that they were Seattle cops and they didn't know which county officer was in charge. Then Seattle police officer John Marion asked why I was asking. I explained to him that I'd just been threatened with arrest for standing on the sidewalk (even though he'd just watched the whole thing), so I wanted to know who was in charge and if he thought it was illegal to stand on the sidewalk. Instead of answering, Officer Marion asked why I was asking him questions. I explained that I'm a reporter and I didn't think I'd broken any laws. He asked what news outlet I worked for. The Stranger, I told him. Then Officer Marion said this: "I'm going to come into The Stranger and bother you while you're at work." He asked for my business card so he could get the address to come to my office, and, twice more, he threatened to come harass me at work. His point, he said, was that I was "harassing" him. In other words, I stopped and asked matter-of-fact questions in a normal tone, and this SPD officer—with two colleagues at his side—escalated the situation without prompt or segue by threatening to "bother" me at my job. Last night and today I followed up with the county and city police departments. Both confirm that taking photos of officers and standing on public property—staying out of their way, like I was—is legal. Although she was not able to comment on this specific incident, King County Sheriff's Department spokeswoman Sergeant Cindi West explains, "It's a free country, and as long as you have a legal right to be there, you can take a picture." She elaborated in an e-mail that "in general a person cannot be ordered to stop photographing or to leave property if they have a legal right to be there. Additionally, if a group of people are in an area legally we could not order just one person to leave." Speaking on behalf of the Seattle Police Department, Sergeant Sean Whitcomb said, "It is our job—it is our job—to politely answer reasonable questions from members of the public when it is safe to do so." He then confirmed that questions regarding the on-scene commanding officer and legality of sidewalk standing are reasonable. "The public does not expect us to threaten them with a workplace visit for the sole purpose of bothering them," Sergeant Whitcomb added. Let me be the first say it: This is not a big case. Seattle police have punched, kicked, and killed people in recent years. What happened to me was minor. But I'm writing about it because it's minor. Officers went out of their way to threaten a civilian with arrest and workplace harassment for essentially no reason. Because they could. Because they didn't like being watched." Cool Runnings, still Awesome - Fun Fact: ‘Little Giants’ and ‘Cool Runnings’ Were Written Under the Influence of Heroin - BroBible.com: "Tommy Swerdlow is the name of the guy who wrote the scripts for childhood-defining kids films like Little Giants, Cool Runnings, and Sherk. Tommy Swerdlow was also a massive heroin addict at the time those films were made, as revealed in a Reddit AMA. How's that for a childhood-shaking dose of reality?"
"And finally, this is his favorite quote from Cool Runnings. Who could disagree?"
"Periodic Boing Boing contributor Michelle Catalano was internet-profiled and then raided at home by terrorism task force investigators who apparently found her internet browsing history suspicious, not that anyone's looking at the internet habits of innocent Americans, no, that's definitely not happening."
"In Dead Pig Collector, the process of disposing of a body is fairly well detailed. How much research did you do for that?
Four or five hours. Believe it or not, a lot of people seem to spend time talking on the internet about getting rid of bodies. And now they’re all on PRISM-generated watchlists. And so am I... I think one of the bigger lessons the internet has taught us is that “niche” or “subculture” are a lot bigger than anyone ever thought. And, frankly, if it’s on the internet, the biggest and widest communication and information system in the world, then it’s not really a subculture any more. If it’s accessible by hundreds of millions of people, then it’s as mainstream as it gets. More people visit body modification websites than watch some tv shows, and yet we think of television as the most mainstream, monocultural thing in the world. How can you not be interested in them? They are the shape of the world to come."
"...You see, Skype wasn't changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, because the government was already able to eavesdrop on users.
At a Senate hearing in March, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assured the committee that his agency didn't collect data on hundreds of millions of Americans. He was lying, too. He later defended his lie by inventing a new definition of the word "collect," an excuse that didn't even pass the laugh test.
As Edward Snowden's documents reveal more about the NSA's activities, it's becoming clear that we can't trust anything anyone official says about these programs. Google and Facebook insist that the NSA has no "direct access" to their servers. Of course not; the smart way for the NSA to get all the data is through sniffers. Apple says it's never heard of PRISM. Of course not; that's the internal name of the NSA database...
Both government agencies and corporations have cloaked themselves in so much secrecy that it's impossible to verify anything they say; revelation after revelation demonstrates that they've been lying to us regularly and tell the truth only when there's no alternative...
This sort of thing can destroy our country. Trust is essential in our society. And if we can't trust either our government or the corporations that have intimate access into so much of our lives, society suffers. Study after study demonstrates the value of living in a high-trust society and the costs of living in a low-trust one. Rebuilding trust is not easy, as anyone who has betrayed or been betrayed by a friend or lover knows, but the path involves transparency, oversight and accountability. Transparency first involves coming clean. Not a little bit at a time, not only when you have to, but complete disclosure about everything. Then it involves continuing disclosure. No more secret rulings by secret courts about secret laws. No more secret programs whose costs and benefits remain hidden.
...democracy can't work unless voters know what the government is doing in their name. That's why we have open-government laws. Secret courts making secret rulings on secret laws, and companies flagrantly lying to consumers about the insecurity of their products and services, undermine the very foundations of our society."
I suffered from the Epstein Barr virus in my 30s, which crippled me dramatically for many years. During this time, I was involved in three auto accidents and nearly died from a ruptured appendix that was misdiagnosed in 2010. During my recovery from that dreadful sequence of life changing events, I broke my elbow, which took more than 18 months to heal properly."
"I wouldn't be any kind of "ist." I don't believe these T-shirt slogans adequately explain the complexities of human existence...
[on Man of Steel] It's a credible Superman for now. But I'm not sure about the killing thing. I don't want to sound like some fuddy-duddy Silver Age apologist but I've noticed a lot recently of people saying Batman should kill the Joker and, yeah, Superman should kill, he should make the tough moral decisions we all have to make every day. I don't know about you, but the last moral decision I made didn't have anything to do with killing people. And I don't think many of us ever have to make the decision whether or not to kill. In fact, the more you think about it, unless you're in one of the Armed Forces, killing is illegal and immoral. Why would we want our superheroes to do that? There is a certain demand for it, but I just keep wondering why people insist that this is the sort of thing we'd all do if we were in Superman's place and had to make the tough decision and we'd kill Zod. Would we? Very few of us have ever killed anything. What is this weird bloodlust in watching our superheroes kill the villains?"
I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If you fucking like something, like it. That’s what’s wrong with our generation: that residual punk rock guilt, like, “You’re not supposed to like that. That’s not fucking cool.” Don’t fucking think it’s not cool to like Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” It is cool to like Britney Spears’ “Toxic”! Why the fuck not? Fuck you! That’s who I am, goddamn it! That whole guilty pleasure thing is full of fucking shit. — Dave Grohl
"Today a state appeals court panel unanimously ruled that the New York Board of Health exceeded its regulatory authority when it enacted Mayor Michael Bloomberg's big beverage ban."
"I can remember a time when bullying referred to a stronger party abusing its power to harass, coerce, or physically attack a weaker party without reasonable justification. Nowadays, “bullying” refers to anything that calls out a person’s bad behavior, disgusting lifestyle, or inane world view."
"Taking drugs in defiance of arbitrary rules and constantly shifting enforcement regimes doesn’t make Braun a role model for anybody outside Celebrity Rehab, but it also doesn’t make him a hall-of-fame-level dirtbag, either. He is what he is: a typical top-tier athlete willing to do just about anything to excel at his chosen sport. That’s why he gets paid the big bucks, and that’s what fans want to see..
You don’t have to look hard to find real villains in baseball, including literal Hall of Famers such as Cap Anson (widely credited with segregating the national pastime in the 19th century) and Ty Cobb (who once beat up a crippled heckler in the stands). Braun isn’t accused to throwing games or even half-assing it on the field; no, his crime is that he wanted to be better than everyone around him. Where’s the harm in that, exactly?
...It would be much better for all involved if we could get past the preadolescent anti-’roid rage that’s spewed over the sports pages like a rancid Dodger dog. As the sportswriting legend Robert Lipsyte noted in an interview earlier this year, PEDs are not magical potions that transform no-talent shlubs into the next Babe Ruth. They are complicated technologies whose effects can’t be openly investigated and measured with any reliability."
"Seriously, I don't want to hear any lectures about how Manning deserves this time because he "broke the law." If he had illegally tortured Guantanamo detainees for the CIA, or even orchestrated such torture programs – illegal per U.S. and international law – he could very well have been promoted, if not left alone. The Manning verdict's central message, aside from this obvious hypocrisy and the injustices underlying it, is this: if you are a whistleblower in this country, do what Edward Snowden did (and what Daniel Ellsberg suggests): flee America, and fast. However, if you commit crimes in the name of the state? Bulk up your profile. There's a microphone waiting."
"Rush Holt (D-NJ) has introduced a bill called the "Surveillance State Repeal Act" that repeals the PATRIOT Act and much of FISA (though it leaves some pretty terrible parts of FISA intact). It's only 8 pages long, but it has the potential to do a lot of good."
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