A document included in the trove of National Security Agency files released with Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide details how the agency’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit and other NSA employees intercept servers, routers, and other network gear being shipped to organizations targeted for surveillance and install covert implant firmware onto them before they’re delivered.

These Trojan horse systems were described by an NSA manager as being “some of the most productive operations in TAO because they pre-position access points into hard target networks around the world.”

The document, a June 2010 internal newsletter article by the chief of the NSA’s Access and Target Development department (S3261) includes photos (above) of NSA employees opening the shipping box for a Cisco router and installing beacon firmware with a “load station” designed specifically for the task.

The NSA manager described the process:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/

General counsel Michael Mooney observes that the ISPs are playing a game of chicken by demanding content providers pay them before they build out any further infrastructure. “These ISPs break the Internet by refusing to increase the size of their networks unless their tolls are paid,” Mooney said. Worse, they don’t even use the capacity they have, artificially starving their customers and slowing down the Internet. (Which explains why Game of Thrones is always buffering on your HBO Go, for example.) Level 3 Vice President Mark Taylor provided evidence that five U.S. ISPs (and one European ISP) are refusing to upgrade their infrastructure despite their connection ports being saturated. In other words, these ISPs are intentionally letting their service degrade because they’re cheap, like a city not fixing potholes in its roads.

If your Internet connection and streaming seem to have slowed down over the last year (as mine certainly has), Taylor has an answer: “permanent congestion” that has been in place for “well over a year,” because your ISP “refuses to augment capacity.” These ISPs, according to Taylor, “are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfill the requests their customers make for content.” He provided a graph showing one Dallas ISP in constant saturation, effectively an Internet brownout for its customers.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/05/network_neutrality_dinosaurs_like_time_warner_and_at_t_have_nothing_to_worry.html

Among the 54 billionaires resident in 2006 (the most up-to-date figures) a total of £14.7m was paid in tax. Mr Dyson alone paid £9m of that. In 2010, Dyson's company paid 88 per cent of its total tax bill in Britain, giving the Exchequer £50m.

Rowling has eloquently described why she feels compelled to pay her full taxes as a UK resident. "I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons," she said.

"The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain's; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating expats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.

"A second reason was that I am indebted to the welfare state... When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major, was there to break the fall."

The proposed price of an exclusive new prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, rose by $20 million in a year because designers added meeting rooms and a medical clinic for 15 former CIA captives, including accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a military spokesman saidMonday.

Last year, the military estimated it would cost $49 million to build a new Camp 7, Guantanamo's name for its clandestine high-value detainee lockup. Last week, the U.S. House Armed Services Committee earmarked $69 million in its proposed budget for 2015 Defense Department spending to build the new prison.

Construction is not assured because the full Congress has yet to take up the budget.

"The original estimated cost was made pre-site-selection," said Army Col. Greg Julian, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the detention center that holds 154 terrorism suspects and a 2,200-member staff.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/05/12/227251/price-for-new-prison-at-guantanamo.html?sp=/99/117/#storylink=cpy

Replacing fossil fuels with renewables as the world’s primary source of energy will not only save the planet from dangerous levels of warming – it will also save the global economy US$ 71trillion by 2050.

This is the finding of a report, Energy Technology Perspectives 2014, released today by the International Energy Agency, which looks at the direction of the energy sector over the next 40 years.

The changes needed to keep the world within 2C of warming— a widely agreed target in efforts to tackle climate change – will benefit the global economy, confirms the report, although a “coordinated policy approach” will be required to unlock these savings.

“The USD 44 trillion additional investment needed to decarbonise the energy system in line with the 2DS [2C scenario] by 2050 is more than offset by over USD 115 trillion in fuel savings – resulting in net savings of USD 71 trillion,” its says.

It's pretty hard to find non-depressing news out of Washington DC these days, but this genuinely qualifies:

The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday voted 32-0 to approve an amended version of the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would require the National Security Agency to get case-by-case approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before collecting the telephone or business records of a U.S. resident.

....The USA Freedom Act, introduced last October, would prohibit bulk collection under the business-records provision of the Patriot Act, the law cited by NSA and Department of Justice officials as giving them authority for the telephone records collection program exposed by leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The bill would also prohibit bulk collection targeting U.S. residents in parts of another statute, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which the NSA has used largely to target overseas communications. The bill would take the phone records database out of NSA control and leave the records with carriers.

Remarkably, support for this bill has stayed bipartisan despite the fact that President Obama supports it. And although it's true that several provisions have been watered down a bit recently, the heart of the bill has stayed intact: a ban on bulk collection of phone records by the NSA. This is a pretty big deal, and it's supported by Democrats, Republicans, and the president.

This represents the first time in decades that the national security establishment has been restrained in any significant way. And no matter what else you think of Edward Snowden, this never would have happened without him.

We’ve just made history. The first state has called for a convention of the states in order to propose an amendment restoring free and fair elections.

Vermont has passed our resolution through the state legislature, making it the historic first state to call for a convention to fix Citizens United. This is what winning feels like.

When I first started this organization, I was told that amending the Constitution was impossible and we would never win through our strategy. The victory in Vermont proves that the cowardly cynics were wrong all along. We will win this fight for free and fair elections. More than ever, I know that is true today.

The first domino has fallen and our momentum will only grow going forward, as more states follow suit and pass additional applications for a convention. Every mountain climbed begins with one simple step. We have now taken that step and need you to join us for this epic journey.

Every generation of Americans has amended the Constitution and now it’s our turn. Get in on this - come join us while we’re still writing the story of how we won the fight for free and fair elections - become a part of history in the making.

Future generations will call us patriots, and you’ll be proud of every hour you invested or every dollar you gave to participate in reclaiming our representative democracy. Thank you for your support.

See you at the convention,

Cenk Uygur, Wolf-PAC
http://www.wolf-pac.com/