Sunday News Roundup

Good Morning Conflucians!!

We’ve had an amazing week of news from corruption investigations, back room watergate-esq oil/finance dealings that likely lead to Obama himself, the continuing bad economy, Obama pimping himself out on the View, and a continuing parade of don’t look at the man behind the curtain distractions helped by the MSM at every turn. But on one perfect day in upstate NY, a wedding celebration was a nice respite. We wish the Clinton/Mezvinsky families all the best.

First the wedding itself. Here is some coverage by the LATimes and USAToday and People Magazine. CBSNews has a nice photo album.

Now back to the newsy bits. As reported earlier, in addition to Charlie Rangle, Maxine Waters is also up on ethics investigations. LATimes has an interesting angle about the racial tensions involved with these two investigations:

The prospect of two long-serving African American lawmakers in the House enduring unprecedented public ethics trials seems likely to add to the growing tension between black members of Congress and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill and in the Obama administration.

Congressional sources confirmed late Friday that later this year Rep. Maxine Waters (D- Los Angeles) will face an ethics proceeding likely related to allegations that she sought to help a bank with ties to her husband receive federal bailout funds.

The House trial could come on the heels of the high-profile trial of Rep. Charles B. Rangel, the venerable Democrat from New York who is accused of 13 violations of House ethics rules. Like Rangel, Waters chose not to seek a settlement with House ethics investigators that would have involved some admission of wrongdoing.

These charges of each member is very disappointing. They’ve had a great history as liberals in congress. They were both supporters of Hillary in the last primary. If true, they should certainly be held to task for their activities. But I can’t help but wonder given all of the corruptions going on, and all the likely similar shortcomings of many in congress, why these two and why now? Perhaps they just were blatant and their activities couldn’t be ignored. Perhaps it’s wrapped up in the race baiting meme/distraction coming from the WH. We all know that’s their favorite card to play, and they play it often. Perhaps it’s just a lively distraction for other purposes. Perhaps it’s punishment or an example to any who supported Hillary and especially to any who might make trouble and ask too many questions. It’s hard to know. But it’s interesting nonetheless.

For more on the Maxine Waters ethics charges themselves, see another LATimes article:

A House panel is preparing to accuse Rep. Maxine Waters of at least one ethics violation in her efforts to help a bank with ties to her husband, and the longtime Los Angeles Democrat plans to fight the charges in a House trial, according to a source familiar with the case.

The Coast Guard approved every request from BP to use the dispersants in the gulf:

Despite the order — and concerns about the environmental effects of the dispersants — the Coast Guard granted requests to use them 74 times over 54 days, and to use them on the surface and deep underwater at the well site. The Coast Guard approved every request submitted by BP or local Coast Guard commanders in Houma, La., although in some cases it reduced the amount of the chemicals they could use, according to an analysis of the documents prepared by the office of Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.).

The documents indicate that “these exemptions are in no way a ‘rare’ occurrence, and have allowed surface application of the dispersant to occur virtually every day since the directive was issued,” Markey wrote in a letter dated Aug. 1 to retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad W. Allen, the government’s point man on the spill. Markey chairs the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

Some of them dealt with separate dispersant applications on the same day. Markey said it appeared that the order “has become more of a meaningless paperwork exercise” than a real attempt to curb use of the dispersants.

Markey seems to be on the case. Let’s hope he doesn’t run into any ethics investigations.

Google and the CIA are working together to monitor the web:

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.

Take a look at the article for a bit more including a video and interesting links/references. And while we’re at it, take a look at WSJ’s guide to improving your digital privacy.

And speaking of such things, a couple of interesting sessions worth noting at this years Defcon conference in Las Vegas included easy means of intercepting cell phone calls and surprisingly easy ways of getting secrets out of corporations. The cell phone hack involves:

A security researcher created a cell phone base station that tricks cell phones into routing their outbound calls through his device, allowing someone to intercept even encrypted calls in the clear.

The device tricks the phones into disabling encryption and records call details and content before they’re routed on their proper way through voice-over-IP.

The low-cost, home-brewed device, developed by researcher Chris Paget, mimics more expensive devices already used by intelligence and law enforcement agencies – called IMSI catchers – that can capture phone ID data and content. The devices essentially spoof a legitimate GSM tower and entice cell phones to send them data by emitting a signal that’s stronger than legitimate towers in the area.

“If you have the ability to deliver reasonably a strong signal, then those around are owned,” Paget said.

Paget’s system costs only about $1,500, as opposed to several hundreds of thousands for professional products. Most of the price is for the laptop he used to operate the system.

And the work to get secrets out of corporations was a contest involving not technology itself, but instead social engineering:

Social engineering hackers — people who trick employees into doing and saying things that they shouldn’t — took their best shot at the Fortune 500 during a contest at Defcon Friday and showed how easy it is to get people to talk, if only you tell the right lie.

The Defcon and Black Hat security conferences are taking place in Las Vegas this week.

Contestants got IT staffers at major corporations, including Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Apple, and Shell, to give up all sorts of information that could be used in a computer attack, including what browser and version number they were using (the first two companies called Friday were using IE6), what software they use to open pdf documents, their operating system and service pack number, their mail client, the antivirus software they use, and even the name of their local wireless network.

Read more for the details of what they did and how surprisingly easy it was.

LATimes as an article on Elisabeth Warren and her enemies and prospects to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau she helped create:

For a soft-spoken, unfailingly polite university professor, Elizabeth Warren has a surprising knack for making people squirm — particularly on Wall Street.

She’s done it to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and other administration officials. As head of the watchdog panel monitoring the $700-billion federal bank bailout fund and a former high school debating champion, Warren often has put them on the defensive with pointed questions, such as: “Do you know where the money went?”

She’s done it to lobbyists and lawmakers who unsuccessfully fought the creation of a new federal agency to protect consumers in the financial marketplace. As a bestselling author who can make complex issues understandable, Warren frustrated opponents by keeping the focus on the industry’s failures.

“I want to turn to these guys sometimes and I want to say, ‘What part of “We bailed you out” do you not get?’” she said on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” in January.

Now Warren has Wall Street executives, bankers and business groups extremely nervous. As the person to propose such an agency and one of its most outspoken advocates, the Harvard law professor is a leading candidate to be nominated by President Obama as director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

That would make Warren, 61, one of the most powerful regulators of the financial industry.

“There are people who try to portray her as an activist or some sort of ideologue. What they are really troubled by is she communicates very well with the American public,” said Jay L. Westbrook, a University of Texas law professor who has worked with Warren since the early 1980s.

“Her crime here, in the minds of many, is she’s a very effective proponent of consumer protection,” he said.

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) said he would not vote for Warren. He called her a “guru” of behavioral economics, which studies how people make financial decisions.

Get out the popcorn, this will be interesting. If the weasels don’t let her run the new bureau, then they will show themselves to be the low life rotted scum we assume they are. If they let her run the show, then she will show them to be the low life rotted scum we assume they are.

NYTimes has an in depth article on some geological details of deepwater drilling and how what was once considered a used up, dried up area for oil is not the beginning of a new frontier of oil drilling. May the oil gods save us:

…Moore, while at Anadarko Petroleum Corp., was one of the earliest geologists to probe beneath the Gulf’s salt, helping discover the Mahogany oil reservoir, the region’s first producing subsalt field, after burrowing through 3,825 feet of salt in the early 1990s. The productivity of these salt-based fields could prompt a re-evaluation of peak oil’s arrival, he said.

“If the volumes are there, this will be a significant addition to the world’s resources,” he said.

Of course, there are complications. Deeper wells sit at higher pressures, increasing the risk of blowout. The deepest exploration well, drilled by the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon, is 35,000 feet down, several times the depth of BP’s Macondo well. And further oil production will only add to the greenhouse gases humans pour into the atmosphere each year, slowly increasing global temperatures.

Yet despite these caveats, it is hard not to admire the intricate salt formations revealed by, and enabling, the plunge for hydrocarbons. Tongues of salt extend from the Gulf’s “mother” sheet, 9 miles below the ocean floor, in intricate plumes and plateaus, hourglass-shaped columns leading to secondary lateral spreads. The plumes have inspired their own exotic terminology — turtle domes, diapirs, canopies — and their own geological field, salt tectonics.

Sure there are some scientific and engineering marvels with what they’re doing. And perhaps if they spent the money and put the time into safety, it would be worth the effort. But they didn’t. And they won’t.

WoPo has another interesting article on cloak and dagger activities leading up to the wikileaks documents release:

The investigators from the Army and the State Department seemed to be “looking for classified documents that they thought to be in the Boston area,” said the acquaintance, who would discuss the sensitive matter only on the condition of anonymity. “I got the impression that we’re still in the process of containing a leak.”

The man, a computer expert who met Pfc. Bradley E. Manning in January, said he told the investigators in mid-June that he knew of no such documents.

The interview was among at least two investigators conducted in the Boston area after Manning was accused of giving WikiLeaks State Department cables and a video of a helicopter attack in which unarmed civilians were killed in Baghdad. Officials have said they are investigating whether Manning leaked the Afghanistan documents made public last week, a disclosure that prompted condemnation from the Obama administration.

The computer expert also said the Army offered him cash to, in his word, “infiltrate” WikiLeaks. “I turned them down,” he said. “I don’t want anything to do with this cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

The Obama administration has stalled some Sept. 11 trials:

As the U.S. military prepares for the first war crimes trial under President Barack Obama, its most high-profile case against the planners of the Sept. 11 attacks is stuck in political and legal limbo.

Canadian prisoner Omar Khadr, accused of killing an American soldier during a raid on an al-Qaida compound, is scheduled to go to trial Aug. 9 at the U.S. base in Cuba.

But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the attacks, and four alleged accomplices are still sequestered at Guantanamo without charges. The Obama administration, after months of review, hasn’t made a decision on whether to seek a military or civilian trial.

It’s a delay that has angered relatives of Sept. 11 victims. It also has created an unusual situation: Previous war-crimes proceedings, in which Mohammed boasted of his role in the attacks and said he wanted to plead guilty, have essentially been erased. No U.S. officials will say what the plans are for the five men who were transferred in 2006 to Guantanamo from secret CIA custody.

“There’s no case, there’s no judge, there’s nothing,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Richard Federico, a military lawyer appointed to defend alleged plotter Ramzi bin al Shibh. “They are back into the black hole.”

That’s a bit of what’s happening now and what happened last week. Chime in with what you’re finding.