US special forces have been committing suicide at record levels for the last two years, the head of the US Special Operations Command (SOCom) admitted in a speech on Thursday. He blamed the high numbers on the length and difficulty of combat. “There is a lot of angst. There’s a lot of pressure out there. My soldiers have been fighting now for 12, 13 years in hard combat. Hard combat,” Adm. William McRaven, the head of SOCom, said at a conference in Florida. “And anybody that has spent any time in this war has been changed by it. It’s that…
Author: mediahitman
By Bennett Stein The government is using shaky legal arguments to silence major Internet companies without giving them – or the public – the opportunity to respond. In three separate recent cases, the government has sent a grand jury subpoena to Yahoo or Twitter and requested a gag order from a magistrate judge, attempting to bar these tech companies from informing the customers in question. To make matters worse, the government won’t disclose its reasoning for requesting the gag, effectively shutting the public out of the courthouse without any explanation.
The Pentagon’s research arm, DARPA, is developing robot pods that can sit at the bottom of the ocean for long stretches of time, waiting to release airborne and water-based drones to the surface upon an attack command. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently called for bids to complete the final two phases of its Upward Falling Payloads (UFP) program. The UFP operation is an effort to position unmanned systems around far-flung regions of the sea floor.
Apparently the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police, infamous for having shot dead unarmed Oakland resident Oscar Grant on a subway platform in 2009, are today conducting armed, joint exercises on trains with Transportation Security Administration (TSA) VIPR teams. From the BART website: From 8:30am to 12:30pm on Friday, April 18, BART Police, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and Bay Area law enforcement will be working with other local transit agencies to conduct joint security training exercises at the SFO, Embarcadero, West Oakland, and Coliseum BART stations.
The FBI is on trial, caught in the middle of allegations that it stepped out of bounds by sending what was essentially a virus to unsuspecting computer users. Operation Torpedo originated out of computers in Bellevue. One of the targeted websites had 10,000 images of child pornography. It had 5,600 members and 24,000 postings on the message boards with categories that include babies and teenage girls.
Few will likely find themselves reading the fine print added to the new terms of service issued by Google this week, but the updated version clarifies to customers once and for all that the contents of messages going in and out of Gmail are being scanned. On Monday, the search engine site-turned-Silicon Valley giant updated the terms of service that its hundreds of millions of Gmail users must agree to in order to use the immensely popular free email service.
A federal appeals panel on Wednesday dismissed what attorneys for the Lavabit email service said was “immense public concern” surrounding the government’s request for the site’s encryption keys, and instead upheld a lower court’s earlier ruling. Wednesday’s decision out of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirms a judge’s ruling from last summer in which Lavabit owner Ladar Levison was found to be in civil contempt for failing to immediately adhere to the government’s demands for info on a single user amongst his email service’s 400,000 or so customers.
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg may be out of office, but he’s just starting to make some noise if his latest investment is any indication: a new organization intended to take on the National Rifle Association. In a report by the New York Times, Bloomberg announced plans to spend $50 million this year in order to establish a grass-roots network of gun-control advocates across the United States.
By John Aziz In a setback for the renewable energy movement, the state House in Oklahoma this week passed a bill that would levy a new fee on those who generate their own energy through solar equipment or wind turbines on their property. The measure, which sailed to passage on a near unanimous vote after no debate, is likely to be signed into law by Republican Gov. Mary Fallin.
The “kill switch,” a system for remotely disabling smartphones and wiping their data, will become standard in 2015, according to a pledge backed by most of the mobile world’s major players. Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft, along with the five biggest cellular carriers in the United States, are among those that have signed on to a voluntary program announced Tuesday by the industry’s largest trade group.
The Boston Police Department investigated two unattended backpacks near the finish line area of the city’s marathon. A man thought to have left one of the bags was taken into custody, though it appears to have been a hoax.
The United States government is preparing to send non-lethal aid to Ukraine, the Associated Press reported on Wednesday, just one day after the interim government there launched an operation against armed pro-Russian protesters. White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters during a scheduled briefing in Washington, DC midday Wednesday that the Obama administration is “obviously evaluating requests and looking at ways that we can support the Ukrainian government.”
No city or county in Oklahoma will be allowed to set their own mandatory minimum wage or employee benefits, according to a law signed by Republican Governor Mary Fallin on Monday. The new law, formerly known as Senate Bill 1023, comes amid a nationwide movement pushing lawmakers to raise the minimum wage across the US.
The woman who threw a shoe at former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a speech in Las Vegas last Thursday is now facing federal charges. Clinton dodged the object and an usher escorted the woman, Alison Michelle Ernst, from the audience. Clinton had only been on stage at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries convention at Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino for moments when the object flew toward her from the crowd.
Jeff Templin is a amateur photographer. He says he’s seen it all until now. While taking pictures of wildlife back in February, something caught his eye. He said it looked like an unusual contrail. “Right over the city, clear as a bell,” said Templin. “Anyone that was looking up would have seen it. You don’t usually see military or even civilian aircraft’s jets that leave contrails (or chemtrails) making those kind of severe departures off of the given route.”
Tech giant Google has patented a smart contact lens to buttress its Google Glass product. The lenses will contain micro cameras and come with sensors embedded on the surface, all controlled by blinking. The smart lenses are a melding of both Google Glass and the company’s tear-monitoring contacts, which are aimed at helping diabetics survey their blood glucose levels.
The critical “Heartbleed” bug reported earlier this week to have affected the security of most of the internet was discovered by researchers at the United States National Security Agency two years earlier, according to a new report.
Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been quietly embedded with US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan since September 11 according to a new report that bolsters claims that the FBI has morphed primarily into a counter-terrorism organization. The report, published Thursday by the Washington Post’s Julie Tate and Adam Goldman, reveals that members of the FBI’s renowned Hostage Rescue Team have conducted hundreds of raids in the Middle East alongside the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).