A polygraph instructor has been sentenced to eight months in prison for teaching federal job applicants how to deceive a lie detector test. The case has raised concerns over the First Amendment and the legitimacy of polygraph results. Chad Dixon of Marion, Indiana pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud and obstructing a government proceeding with his business, Polygraph Consultants of America. Prosecutors initially sought a two-year sentence for Dixon, whom they said should be sent a “strong message” for knowingly teaching polygraph counter-measures to federal job applicants and criminal suspects.
Author: mediahitman
Sweden’s leaders came forward to express deep concern after a report alleged that the country’s spy agency has close ties with the NSA and GCHQ, and is the third major partner in surveillance cooperation. “It’s a very serious matter if Sweden is indeed involved in American surveillance programs,” Green Party IT policy spokeswoman Maria Ferm told Sweden’s The Local. “I’m very concerned about the information that came up in the hearing,” she said.
Following in the footsteps of other tech giants, Yahoo has published its first ever transparency report revealing how often governments request data about its users. According to the information, the majority of requests came from the US. The report presents information on global government data requests that Yahoo received between January 1 and June 30 of this year. The move comes in the wake of the NSA leak scandal
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has added the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), an active group of hackers sympathetic to the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, to its list of wanted criminals. Though working largely on the periphery for the last few years, the SEA has recently raised its profile considerably after temporarily disabling major media outlets.
A 107-year-old man was killed during a shootout with members of an Arkansas SWAT team Saturday evening. In a statement to CBS affiliate KTHV-TV in Little Rock, the Pine Bluff Police Department say the incident occurred after officers responded to a disturbance. Upon arrival, police found an “Aggravated Assault” against two people had occurred. The pair were evacuated from the home for their own safety
A very much alive New York man said his Medicaid benefits were cut off, and credit cards and bank accounts were canceled after a hospital declared him dead. The Bronx-Lebanon Hospital in March 2009 put Juan Antonio Arias’ full name, social security number and date of birth on a death certificate, but the 57-year-old father of two said he is most certainly not dead.
The US Director of National Intelligence has issued a statement in response to a report revealing that the National Security Agency, with help from international allies, secretly inserted backdoors into various encryption and internet security services. Intelligence agencies in the US and United Kingdom have spent millions to bribe technicians – perhaps even planting agents inside telecommunication companies – in a bid to penetrate the encryption used by hundreds of millions of people to protect their privacy online.
Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital was a hospital in Marlboro Township, New Jersey which was operated by the State of New Jersey. Construction of the hospital began in 1929. It first opened in early 1931. According to the site plan, the hospital’s campus was on 468 acres (1.89 km2). There is a perimeter fence which completely enclosed the property. The land was mostly a rural environment. When it closed, the hospital was on 594 acres (2.40 km2), having enlarged the grounds over the years. It opened with a capacity to accommodate 500-800 patients.
by Mike Masnick Yet another point on the latest NSA/GCHQ revelations concerning backdoors into all sorts of commercial encryption tools, buried within the stories is the pretty clear admission that the NSA and GCHQ views the public as the enemy. First, as Marcy Wheeler points out, all of the programs are named after civil war battles in which the same country’s own citizens were seen as the enemy:
From Mexico to Qatar, obesity rates are soaring to unprecedented levels. The alarming trend is damaging economic performance, as well as the health of millions of consumers worldwide. Take our increasingly sedentary lifestyles, mix in a generous portion of American fast-food and dubious agricultural practices, add a dash of corporate duplicity and you have a recipe for high obesity rates across the planet.
The latest top-secret documents leaked to the media by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden reveal that United States and British spy agencies have invested billions of dollars towards efforts to make online privacy obsolete. The New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica all reported on Thursday that newly released Snowden documents expose the great lengths that the National Security Agency and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, have gone to in order to eavesdrop on encrypted Internet communications.
US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wants a real-time feed on outbreaks of infectious diseases worldwide. Small businesses are encouraged to bid for a government contract. The DHS Office of Health Affairs has announced its intention to stay updated on the outbreaks of infectious diseases affecting both humans and animals by having news about them from all parts of the world coming to a single feed 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.
by Mike Adams The “TED talks” organization, once founded on the idea of spreading good ideas, has become the new priesthood of status quo dogma. The TED organization doesn’t want you to hear the really important, breakthrough advancements in scientific thinking, and to enforce that intellectual ignorance, it has resorted to censoring and suppressing two of the most important scientists our world has ever produced. This is being accomplished by a cowardly board of “anonymous scientific advisors” who have seized control of TED’s talks while hiding behind a curtain of anonymity. These “scientific advisors” no doubt represent the interests of…
China joined Russia in its opposition against military strikes on Syria ahead of the G20 summit on Thursday. Beijing said the use of force would cause a swing in oil prices, thereby hurting the global economy. “Military action would have a negative impact on the global economy, especially on the oil price – it will cause a hike in the oil price,” China’s vice finance minister, Zhu Guangyao, said at a pre-G20 briefing in St. Petersburg.
Media companies have asked UK broadband providers to collate info on illegal downloaders, which could violate data protection laws. Those caught committing piracy could be subject to internet throttling and even prosecution. In an attempt to clamp down on the illegal downloading of music and films, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and the British Video Association have requested BT, Virgin Media, BSkyB and TalkTalk to record information on piracy.
A Missouri man possibly exposed hundreds of sexual partners to the HIV virus because he feared that he would be rejected if he told them he was infected, police said. David Lee Mangum from Dexter, a small town in southeastern Missouri, was arrested last week on suspicion of reckless exposure to HIV after authorities received a tip from a man who claimed he was a sexual partner of Magnum’s and had recently tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS.
The potential of strategic US strikes in Syria has sparked fears Damascus’ chemical weapons could fall into the wrong hands if the government is toppled. A recent congressional report says 75,000 troops would be needed to safeguard the WMD caches. The Congressional Research Center (CRS) report, issued just one day before the alleged August 21 chemical weapons attack in a Damascus suburb, was compiled with the aim of “responding to possible scenarios involving the use, change of hands, or loss of control of Syrian chemical weapons.”
The growing surveillance industry complex is providing governments with increasingly sophisticated spying software to track and control their citizens, the latest documents obtained by the pro-transparency group, WikiLeaks reveal. A trove of documents, outlining the activities of dozens of companies operating in the ever-expanding electronic snooping industry, were made available by the pro-transparency group on Wednesday.