Bill Binney – the high-level NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, senior technical director within the agency who managed thousands of NSA employees, interviewed by CBS, ABC, CNN, New York Times, USA Today, Fox News, PBS and many others – told Washington’s Blog:
[NSA chief Keith] Alexander wants you and everybody (including this clueless judge) to believe that caller ID does not work. First of all, all the calls that are made in the world are routed by machines. And, with machines, you have to tell them exactly what to do. Which means, the routing instructions calling nr and called nr have to be passed through the machines to route the call to get from point A to point B in the world.
So, he is feeding everyone a line of crap. If you buy into this, I have a bridge I would like to sell.
Also, all calls going from one region of the world to another are preceded by 01 or 011 in region “1″ (US/Canada/some islands) or by “00″ in the rest of the world. And that goes both ways on any call.
The Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) numbering plan is how we could eliminate all US to US calls right up front and never take them in.
In other words, while Binney headed NSA’s global digital communications gathering efforts prior to 9/11, his team knew in real-time which countries calls were made from and received in. The NSA is lying if it claims otherwise.
One of the major trends facing the U.S. is that it is on track to become a country with no racial majority, and to develop a culture where just being born white will no longer confer automatic privilege. For a significant minority of white people, particularly in the Southern states, this is causing massive angst and anger. I have been writing about this for over a decade, now others, as this report describes are beginning to see this trend as well.
Phi Beta Iota: Think of dignity now toward minorities as a means of paying forward. Reap as you sow.
It is always very important to distinguish between spirituality and religion. Religion is entirely man made. Humans decide who is a prophet and who is a dingbat, and it is humans that write the dogma and create the rituals. Spirituality is an experience of nonlocal consciousness that has to be experienced to be properly understood, and many religious adherents have never had a spiritual experience. Many spiritual experiences have nothing whatever to do with religion, although they often start religions. But what is particularly interesting, and a modern contribution to understanding spirituality is the neuroscience, of which this report is an example.
Source: http://bit.ly/1jYo6ro JAMA Psychiatry, online December 25, 2013.
The rise of the aggrieved whites has taken on the attributes of a tribe. And, like all tribes there are things the tribe believes to be true, and things the tribe does not believe. One thing the angry white tribe has apparently decided not to believe is evolution. This is an account of spreading willful ignorance, Creationism has become one of the tribal oaths. This is one of the reasons I consider ! the Theocratic Right, which is a 99 per cent aggrieved white person tribe, to be a toxic malevolent force in American society.
One of the things I have noticed about the Theocratic Right is that although they loudly profess their belief in Christianity and Jesus they actually hold the modern day equivalent of the positions held by the Sadducees and the Pharisees who persecuted Jesus. They also have a remarkable, considering that they talk about it! all the time, illiteracy about the Bible. It is a very bizarre trend.
Syria: President Bashar Asad Monday called for a battle against Wahhabism, the political and religious theology embraced by the Saudi Arabian government that backs the Sunni uprising against his regime.
“President Assad said that extremists and Wahhabi thought distort the real Islam, which is tolerant,” state news agency SANA reported. He underlined the role of men of religion in fighting against Wahhabi thought, which is foreign to our societies, according to Asad.
Wahhabism is an ultra-conservative Muslim tradition, which is predominant in Saudi Arabia and whose intolerant precepts govern Saudi religious, civilian and political life. It is a sect of Sunni Islam, whose leaders profess has no sects.
Kudos to Owl — one of over 25 contributing editors — for the top post. We are well over 1,200,000,000 total visitors, and with over 11,000 subscribers receiving every post via email digest, appear to be comfortably established as a reliable source of public interest information.
Of particular note is the sites value as a permanent reference source. Roughly three quarters of our daily visitors are connecting to past posts, some dated 20 years back. As this site contains contributions from over 800 authorities on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), public intelligence (decision-support), and all-source intelligence reform, it is less of a Blog and more of a constantly updated archive.
We have stopped doing RECAPs. Instead we have shifted to @ Phi Beta Iota. WordPress search works well with simple terms.
We salute our kindred spirit, Federation of American Scientists, for whom we gladly provide a constantly updated catalog of Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports.
Juárez Correa didn’t know it yet, but he had happened on an emerging educational philosophy, one that applies the logic of the digital age to the classroom. That logic is inexorable: Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think. Decentralized systems have proven to be more productive and agile than rigid, top-down ones. Innovation, creativity, and independent thinking are increasingly crucial to the global economy.
Click on Image to Enlarge
And yet the dominant model of public education is still fundamentally rooted in the industrial revolution that spawned it, when workplaces valued punctuality, regularity, attention, and silence above all else. (In 1899, William T. Harris, the US commissioner of education, celebrated the fact that US schools had developed the “appearance of a machine,” one that teaches the student “to behave in an orderly manner, to stay in his own place, and not get in the way of others.”) We don’t openly profess those values nowadays, but our educational system—which routinely tests kids on their ability to recall information and demonstrate mastery of a narrow set of skills—doubles down on the view that students are material to be processed, programmed, and quality-tested. School administrators prepare curriculum standards and “pacing guides” that tell teachers what to teach each day. Legions of managers supervise everything that happens in the classroom; in 2010 only 50 percent of public school staff members in the US were teachers.
The results speak for themselves: Hundreds of thousands of kids drop out of public high school every year. Of those who do graduate from high school, almost a third are “not prepared academically for first-year college courses,” according to a 2013 report from the testing service ACT. The World Economic Forum ranks the US just 49th out of 148 developed and developing nations in quality of math and science instruction. “The fundamental basis of the system is fatally flawed,” says Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford and founding director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. “In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are developing these skills.”
That’s why a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.
Truth Finding on the Deep Web: Is the Problem Solved?
Xian Li, Xin Luna Dong, Kenneth Lyons, Weiyi Meng, and Divesh Srivastava.
In VLDB, 2013. [PDF][Report]
Big data integration & linkages. Xin Luna Dong and Divesh Srivastava. Tutorial in Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), 6(11): 1188-1189, 2013. [ publisher site | talk slides(PPTX) ]
6. Create “idea resumes.” An idea resume is one-page document listing the following attributes: how customers will learn about it or access it; what resources or processes are needed to make it a reality; and how the solution will achieve economic sustainability. The benefit of idea resumes is that (when they're finished) they allow all involved parties to scan and share ideas, in a way that invites “apples-to-apples” comparisons and “ensures that ideas are evaluated on their merits rather than on how well they are pitched.”
Even Before 9/11, NSA Knew In Real-Time Which Countries Both Parties to Phone Calls Were In
