Only hours after a criminal complaint unearthed on Wednesday accused a California man of operating an online black market, an indictment unsealed in Maryland alleged that the same webmaster ordered the assassination of a former employee. The unsealing of the indictment late Wednesday lent even more weirdness to an already bizarre account of events unraveled earlier that day through a federal complaint. It accused 29-year-old Ross William Ulbricht of San Francisco, CA of operating the Silk Road website
Author: mediahitman
The US government default caused by the ongoing budget standoff in the Congress could have a “catastrophic” effect on the country’s economy, which would be felt for decades, the Treasury Department said in report. The US government went on partial shutdown this Monday after the Democratic-led Senate turned down repeated efforts by the Republicans to pass a budget, constraining the implementation of ‘Obamacare’ – a healthcare law, which the president considers a centerpiece of his political legacy.
AlJazeera America’s Jared B. Keller just Tweeted a possibly astonishing finding: the Anchorage, Alaska office of the National Weather Service, where salaries are hanging in the balance as a result of the government shutdown, may have embedded a secret message into a weather bulletin. The update definitely read: PLEASE PAY US. Here’s a screen grab of the forecast, which was posted at 5:00 a.m. Alaskan daylight time.
By Daniel Tencer Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Trade Minister Ed Fast are headed to Malaysia and Indonesia this week, and one of the main issues on their agenda is a trade deal that would cover one-third of the world’s international commerce. But what the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will contain is so far a matter of rumour, conjecture and guesswork — nowhere more so than in Canada, where the government has kept a tight lid on news coming out of the talks.
By Alex Pappas In a stunning development, some military priests are facing arrest if they celebrate mass or practice their faith on military bases during the federal government shutdown. “With the government shutdown, many [government service] and contract priests who minister to Catholics on military bases worldwide are not permitted to work – not even to volunteer,”
BY: Elizabeth Harrington The Kentucky Obamacare marketplace has no “expectation of privacy,” warning its prospective customers that their information can be monitored and shared with government bureaucrats. When clicking “let’s get started” on the state-run health insurance marketplace “kynect,” the user is quickly prompted to a “WARNING NOTICE.” “This is a government computer system and is the property of the Commonwealth of Kentucky,” it states. “It is for authorized use only regardless of time of day, location or method of access. “
A Texas father is refusing to apologize for forcing his child to hold a pink “I am a bully” sign because he says that “we don’t need another Columbine.” When Jose Lagares found out that his son got in trouble for bullying in his fourth grade class, he sent the boy out to the intersection of Ft. Hood Street and W. Veterans Memorial Boulevard in Ft. Hood on Tuesday.
Check this video out, there seems to be two people the car that was involved in the shootout in Washington DC:
As clocks at the Pentagon approached midnight late Monday evening and inched America towards a government shutdown, the United States Department of Defense spent $5.5 billion dollars on an arsenal of items ordered at the last minute by Uncle Sam. Foreign Policy reported on Tuesday that the Defense Department awarded 94 contracts totaling over $5.5 billion a day earlier, ensuring the mightiest military on Earth would stay significantly well-stocked throughout an indefinite shutdown that has sent hundreds of thousands of federal workers home without pay and polarized lawmakers in Washington.
The director of the National Security Agency admitted this week that the NSA tested a program that collected cellphone location data from American citizens starting in 2010, but suspended it shortly after. Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of both the NSA and the United States Cyber Command, told lawmakers in Washington early Wednesday that the secretive pilot program was taken offline in 2011, but that the intelligence community may someday in the future make plans to routinely collect location data about US citizens.
Authorities have arrested a man in San Francisco, California accused of operating an underground website that allowed users to purchase guns and drugs from around the world using encrypted, digital currency. Ross William Ulbricht, a 29-year-old graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Materials Science and Engineering known by the online alias “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Tuesday for his alleged involvement in the Silk Road online marketplace, according to court papers published this week.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation secretly obtained a court order compelling Lavabit, the email service used by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, to hand over its private SSL key, thereby allowing the FBI to monitor Lavabit’s users. The FBI order was handed down on July 16, according to Wired, shortly after Lavabit refused to bypass the company’s internal security systems to facilitate a government request asking the email provider to trace the internet IP address of an individual user.
Beyond the glitches. An employee of Minnesota’s Obamacare exchange, MNsure, sent an unencrypted file to the wrong person and left 2,400 people’s private information at the mercy of a nearby insurance agent. One exchange staffer’s simple mistake gave insurance broker Jim Koester access to an Excel document of Social Security numbers, names, addresses and other personal data for whole a list of insurance agents. Luckily for the 2,400, Koester was cooperative — and unnerved.
The tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut last winter will be getting a deep dive in the coming book Newtown: An American Tragedy from journalist Matthew Lysiak. Pegged to the first anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary that left 26 dead, including 20 children, the book will reportedly feature exclusive interviews and emails from shooter Adam Lanza’s mother as well as the broader story of the tragedy.
A large dinosaur fossil has been found by a pipeline crew near Spirit River, Alta. The 10-metre-long fossilized skeleton was found Tuesday when a backhoe operator working on the Tourmaline Oil Corp. pipeline installation moved some earth, inadvertently breaking off a piece of the fossil.
A federal grand jury has returned an indictment against 13 alleged members of the hacktivist movement Anonymous and has charged them with participating in an anti-copyright campaign that targeted government and corporation websites in 2010 and 2011. The 28-page indictment, unsealed on Thursday, accuses the defendants of engaging in Operation Payback, an Anonymous-led initiative that went after the US Copyright Office, major credit card companies and international law firms and trade groups starting in late 2010.
The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case on whether a conviction for domestic violence precludes Americans from obtaining a firearms license. The Obama administration has argued that ending the prohibition would invalidate bans in much of the US. The Justices announced Tuesday they would hear eight cases of the more than 2,000 appeals that accumulated over the summer. Among them is an argument from James Alvin Castleman, who maintains that his misdemeanor domestic assault conviction in Tennessee does not prevent him from legally owning a gun.
(Emphasis Added): New spill at No. 1 laid to typhoon miscalculation Authorities are still groping for a solution to the water crisis at the crippled nuclear plant, which is rapidly running out of storage space and facing a growing risk of flooding from typhoons. The water contained strontium and tritium and was emitting beta-ray radiation of 580,000 becquerels per liter, according to Tepco, which was apparently trying to drain rainwater from the flood containment area into the tanks during the typhoon.