The Nightly Quill

The NSA has the ability to eavesdrop on your communications, landlines, cell phones, e-mails, BlackBerry messages, Internet searches, and more with ease. What happens when the technology of espionage outstrips the laws ability to protect ordinary citizens from it?

On the first Saturday in April of 2002, the temperature in Washington, D.C., had taken a dive. Tourists were bundled up against the cold, and the cherry trees along the Tidal Basin were fast losing their blossoms to the biting winds. But a few miles to the south, in the Dowden Terrace neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia, the chilly weather was not deterring Royce C. Lamberth, a bald and burly Texan, from mowing his lawn. He stopped only when four cars filled with FBI agents suddenly pulled up in front of his house. The agents were there not to arrest him but to request an emergency court hearing to obtain seven top-secret warrants to eavesdrop on Americans.

As the presiding justice of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, Lamberth had become accustomed to holding the secret hearings in his living room. My wife, Janis has to go upstairs because she doesn’t have a top-secret clearance, he noted in a speech to a group of Texas lawyers. My beloved cocker spaniel, Taffy, however, remains at my side on the assumption that the surveillance targets cannot make her talk. The FBI knows Taffy well. They frequently play with her while I read some of those voluminous tomes at home. FBI agents will even knock on the judges door in the middle of the night. On the night of the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa, I started the first emergency hearings in my living room at 3:00 a.m., recalled Lamberth. From the outset, the FBI suspected bin Laden, and the surveillances I approved that night and in the ensuing days and weeks all ended up being critical evidence at the trial in New York.

The FISA court is probably the least-known court in Washington, added Lamberth, who stepped down from it in 2002, at the end of his seven-year term, but it has become one of the most important. Conceived in the aftermath of Watergate, the FISA court traces its origins to the mid-1970s, when the Senates Church Committee investigated the intelligence community and the Nixon White House. The panel, chaired by Idaho Democrat Frank Church, exposed a long pattern of abuse, and its work led to bipartisan legislation aimed at preventing a president from unilaterally directing the National Security Agency or the FBI to spy on American citizens. This legislation, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, established the FISA court made up of eleven judges handpicked by the chief justice of the United States as a secret part of the federal judiciary. The courts job is to decide whether to grant warrants requested by the NSA or the FBI to monitor communications of American citizens and legal residents. The law allows the government up to three days after it starts eavesdropping to ask for a warrant; every violation of FISA carries a penalty of up to five years in prison. Between May 18, 1979, when the court opened for business, until the end of 2004, it granted 18,742 NSA and FBI applications; it turned down only four outright. Read the rest of this entry »

A champion paraglider described today her terror at being flung to a height greater than Mount Everest by a tornado-like thunderstorm in Australia.

Ewa Wisnerska, 35, was sucked so high that she blacked out and became encased in ice.

“You can’t imagine the power. You feel like nothing, like a leaf from a tree going up,” she told Australian radio.

Wisnerska, from Germany, was preparing for the 10th World Paragliding Championships above the town of Manilla in New South Wales when the storm struck on Wednesday.

With terrifying speed she was whisked from 2,500 ft to an estimated 32,000 ft in about 15 minutes.

A 42-year-old Chinese paraglider, He Zhongpin, was also caught in the storm and died, apparently from a lack of oxygen and extreme cold.

His body was found nearly 50 miles from where he had taken off. Wisnerska said she encountered hailstones the size of oranges as the temperature dropped to minus 58 degrees fahrenheit.

“I was shaking all the time. The last thing I remember it was dark. I could hear lightning all around me,” she said.

Her ordeal was recorded by global positioning and a radio attached to her equipment.

When her desperate attempts to skirt the powerful thunderstorm failed, she concluded that her chances of survival were “almost zero.” “I said, ‘I can’t do anything. It’s raining and hailing and I’m still climbing — I’m lost.”’

The paragliding 2005 World Cup winner lost consciousness for more than 30 minutes while her aircraft flew on uncontrolled, sinking and lifting several times.

“There’s no oxygen. She could have suffered brain damage. But she came to again at a height of 6,900 metres with ice all over her body and slowly descended herself,” said Godfrey Wenness, the event organizer and one of Australia’s most experienced paraglider pilots.

After regaining consciousness, she felt like an astronaut returning from the Moon as the ground loomed beneath her. “I could see the Earth coming — wow, like Apollo 13 — I can see the Earth,” she said.

Wisnerska landed safely 40 miles from her original launch site with ice in her lightweight flying suit and frost bite to her face.

She spent just an hour in a hospital for observation and hopes to compete in biennial championships which begin on February 24.

Earlier this month a British paraglider survived an attack by two large eagles while flying in the same area.

YOU, or someone you love, may die because of a gene patent that should never have been granted in the first place. Sound far-fetched? Unfortunately, it’s only too real.

Gene patents are now used to halt research, prevent medical testing and keep vital information from you and your doctor. Gene patents slow the pace of medical advance on deadly diseases. And they raise costs exorbitantly: a test for breast cancer that could be done for $1,000 now costs $3,000.

Why? Because the holder of the gene patent can charge whatever he wants, and does. Couldn’t somebody make a cheaper test? Sure, but the patent holder blocks any competitor’s test. He owns the gene. Nobody else can test for it. In fact, you can’t even donate your own breast cancer gene to another scientist without permission. The gene may exist in your body, but it’s now private property.

This bizarre situation has come to pass because of a mistake by an underfinanced and understaffed government agency. The United States Patent Office misinterpreted previous Supreme Court rulings and some years ago began — to the surprise of everyone, including scientists decoding the genome — to issue patents on genes.

Humans share mostly the same genes. The same genes are found in other animals as well. Our genetic makeup represents the common heritage of all life on earth. You can’t patent snow, eagles or gravity, and you shouldn’t be able to patent genes, either. Yet by now one-fifth of the genes in your body are privately owned.

MORE >>> Read the rest of this entry »

Want to cancel your AOL account? Hopefully you are not easily intimidated. This phone conversation reveals the dire and desperate desire of one man’s need to keep his company’s customer.

Ask just about anyone in law enforcement, and they’ll tell you to be careful if you ever brew coffee in a hotel room.

“I know enough now that whenever I go to a hotel, regardless of how nice it is, I’ll never use a coffee pot,” said Marshall County District Attorney Steve Marshall.

Instead of brewing coffee, coffee pots are sometimes used to brew methamphetamine. And since meth labs in hotels aren’t anything new, Rick Phillips of the Marshall County Drug Enforcement Unit says there’s definitely a risk.

“The coffee makers that you find in every motel room is an ideal heat source. They mix it up in the coffee pot, put it on a heat source and let it sit there and cook,” said Phillips. It’s common knowledge to those who fight meth, but a shock to your average citizen. “That’s a little nerve rattling,” said Marshall County resident Toni Jones.

“I didn’t know that. Proud you told me,” said Marshall County resident Daryl Rice. If you were to drink coffee from a pot used to make meth, it could be hazardous to your health. The problem is residue from chemicals such as red phosphorus and iodine.
“Typical sickness and issues that would come with any chemical exposure, simple nausea, vomiting to maybe a hospital visit,” said Phillips. Phillips says it’s pretty easy to tell if a coffee pot has been used to cook meth. It will have a dark reddish-orange stain. You should also be skeptical if there’s a chemical odor when you walk in the room.
Link - www.waff.com

Sued Michael Jordan, because he looks like him:
Allen Heckard sued Michael Jordan and Phil Knight on July 2006. Heckard claims he has suffered emotional trauma because he looks like Michael Jordan. Heckard has filed his look-alike case at the Washington County Court in Oregon and with a $832 million dollar head. Allen Heckard believes his life has been rough since people continually think he is Michael Jordan. Heckard says when he plays basketball, people are constantly telling him he plays like Michael Jordan and this has been difficult for him. Heckard is only six feet tall, so obviously those who assume he is Michael Jordan have little regard for height. Heckard even wears Air Jordan shoes, he says that they’re the most comfortable.

Sued after getting stuck on the house he was robbing:
In October 1998, A Terrence Dickson of Bristol Pennsylvania was exiting a house he finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to get the garage door to go up, because the automatic door opener was malfunctioning. He couldn’t re- enter the house because the door connecting the house and garage locked when he pulled it shut. The family was on vacation, so Mr. Dickson found himself locked in the garage for eight days. He subsisted on a case of Pepsi he found, and a large bag of dry dog food. This upset Mr. Dickson, so he sued the homeowner’s insurance claiming the situation caused him undue mental anguish. The jury agreed to the tune of half a million dollars and change. Read the rest of this entry »

Capable of processing 1 trillion calculations a second, Intel’s latest test chip, when used commercially, will revolutionize computing.

Computing took a leap forward when chipmakers started putting more than one core—or central brain—on a single chip. It was a way to make machines work harder even as they consumed less power. Just wait until a single chip can sport 80 cores.

The wait won’t be long. Chipmaking giant Intel (INTC) on Feb. 11 said it has successfully produced just such a chip, the size of a fingernail, capable of processing a mind-boggling 1 trillion calculations a second. The chip, which Intel claims is the fastest ever made, could start being used commercially in “in five years, if not sooner,” Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner says.

Rattner has reason to crow. The massive processing power each chip would provide will dramatically change the way consumers and businesses work and play. Financial analysis that takes days to perform in back offices could be done in seconds at a trader’s terminal on Wall Street. Real-time physics calculations could let consumers create on-the-fly games that make even the cutting-edge motion-control techniques in Nintendo’s Wii game console seem like child’s play. Read the rest of this entry »

The Nightly Quill believes this action to be another example of monumental government waste!

Two recent efforts to promote wide usage of a dollar coin proved unsuccessful. But maybe Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea should not take public rejection personally. It’s not easy overcoming people’s indifference to dollar coins, even those honoring such historic figures.

A poll found that three-fourths of people surveyed oppose replacing the dollar bill, featuring George Washington, with a dollar coin. People are split evenly on the idea of having both a dollar bill and a dollar coin.

A new version of the coin, paying tribute to American presidents, goes into general circulation Thursday. Even though doing away with the bill could save hundreds of millions of dollars each year in printing costs, there is no plan to scrap the bill in favor of the more durable coin.

“I really don’t see any use for it,” Larry Ashbaugh, a retiree from Bristolville, Ohio, said of the dollar coin. “We tried it before. It didn’t fly.”

A quarter-century ago, the dollar coin showed feminist Susan B. Anthony on the front; then one in 2000 featuring Sacagawea, the Shoshone Indian who helped guide the Lewis and Clark expedition.

The latest dollar coin will bear Washington’s image, followed later this year by those of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. A different president will appear on the golden dollar coins every three months.

People have strong feelings about their money, even the penny, which occasionally is threatened with elimination.

When people were asked whether the penny should be eliminated, 71 percent said no, according to the poll of 1,000 adults conducted Nov. 28-30 that had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Some fear that getting rid of the penny will cause product prices to be rounded up, perhaps increasing inflation. (”fear it would cause“, NO it will cause!!)

ROME (Reuters) - Call it the eternal embrace.

Archaeologists in Italy have discovered a couple buried 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, hugging each other.

“It’s an extraordinary case,” said Elena Menotti, who led the team on their dig near the northern city of Mantova. “There has not been a double burial found in the Neolithic period, much less two people hugging — and they really are hugging.” Menotti said she believed the two, almost certainly a man and a woman although that needs to be confirmed, died young because their teeth were mostly intact and not worn down. “I must say that when we discovered it, we all became very excited. I’ve been doing this job for 25 years. I’ve done digs at Pompeii, all the famous sites,” she told Reuters. “But I’ve never been so moved because this is the discovery of something special.”

A laboratory will now try to determine the couple’s age at the time of death and how long they had been buried.
Link - news.yahoo.com

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) — A 16-year-old boy being sued for online music piracy accused the recording industry on Tuesday of violating antitrust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats.

In papers responding to a lawsuit filed by five record companies, Robert Santangelo, who was as young as 11 when the alleged piracy occurred, denied ever disseminating music and said it’s impossible to prove that he did.

Santangelo is the son of Patti Santangelo, the 42-year-old suburban mother of five who was sued by the record companies in 2005. She refused to settle, took her case public and became a heroine to supporters of Internet freedom.

The industry dropped its case against her in December but sued Robert and his sister Michelle, now 20, in federal court in White Plains. Michelle has been ordered to pay $30,750 in a default judgment because she did not respond to the lawsuit.

Robert Santangelo and his lawyer, Jordan Glass, responded at length on Tuesday, raising 32 defenses, demanding a jury trial and filing a counterclaim against the companies for allegedly damaging the boy’s reputation, distracting him from school and costing him legal fees.

His defenses to the industry’s lawsuit include that he never sent copyrighted music to others; that the recording companies promoted file sharing before turning against it; that average computer users were never warned that it was illegal; that the statute of limitations has passed; and that all the music claimed to have been downloaded was actually owned by his sister on store-bought CDs.

Santangelo also claims that the record companies, which have filed more than 18,000 piracy lawsuits in federal courts, “have engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud the courts of the United States.”

The papers allege that the companies, “ostensibly competitors in the recording industry, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and public policy” by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency “to make extortionate threats … to force defendants to pay.”

The Recording Industry Association of America, which has coordinated most of the lawsuits, issued a statement saying, “The record industry has suffered enormously due to piracy. That includes thousands of layoffs. We must protect our rights. Nothing in a filing full of recycled charges that have gone nowhere in the past changes that fact.”
Link - www.1010wins.com

If you’re planning on popping the big question this Valentine’s Day and money’s no object, the Tropicana is offering a decadent package that will include limousine service, a hotel suite covered in rose petals, dinner for two at Red Square, dessert at Brulee and — for a total cost of $15,000 — the Trop will throw in a grand celebration dinner at Wellington’s for when it’s time to brandish the ring. Brandeis Jewelers will offer a ring of up to $10,000 in value. Brulee at The Quarter will offer a brownie of $1,000 in value. According to a spokesperson, “It is a decadent, dark chocolate brownie topped with 24 carat gold leaf … served with a St. Louis crystal atomizer containing 1996 Quinta do Noval Nacional — a very fine, very rare port wine.” For more info — or to find out if you can get 10 brownies instead of an engagement ring — call Tropicana Media Services at 340-4029.

They say don’t ask and don’t tell. But you have to see this.
“For anybody who is not familiar with a jet engine, a jet fan blade should be perfectly smooth. You might want to think twice the next time you fly on a Chinese Airline.

A pilot for a Chinese carrier requested permission and landed at FRA, (Germany) for an unscheduled refueling stop. The reason became soon apparent to the ground crew: The Number 3 engine had been shutdown previously because of excessive vibration, and because it didn’t look too good. It had apparently been no problem for the tough guys back in China: as they took some sturdy straps and wrapped them around two of the fan blades and the structures behind, thus stopping any unwanted windmilling (engine spinning by itself due to airflow passing through the blades during flight) and associated uncomfortable vibration caused by the suboptimal fan.

Note that the straps are seat belts….how resourceful! After making the “repairs”, off they went into the wild blue yonder with another revenue-making flight on only three engines! With the increased fuel consumption, they got a bit low on fuel, and just set it down at the closest airport (FRA) for a quick refill.

That’s when the problems started: The Germans, who are kind of picky about this stuff, inspected the malfunctioning engine and immediately grounded the aircraft. Besides the seat belts, notice the appalling condition of the fan blades. The airline operator had to send a chunk of money to get the first engine replaced (took about 10 days).

The repair contractor decided to do some impromptu inspection work on the other engines, none of which looked all that great either. The result: a total of 3 engines were eventually changed on this plane before it was permitted to fly again.”

A maggot couldn’t ask for a better friend than Rebecca O’Flaherty. She helps kids appreciate the larval stage of flies, teaching children how to dip maggots into nontoxic paint and set them on paper to writhe away, creating “maggot art.”

She teaches law enforcement officers how to recognize, collect and preserve maggots and other insect evidence that can help establish time of death.

And she’s devoted years of her life to studying maggot habits, working toward a doctorate in entomology at UC Davis.

O’Flaherty wants people to better understand the insects that tidy up the world’s oozing messes.

“We’d be knee-deep in garbage … if we didn’t have them to clean it up,” she said.

Maggot art is the hook, and it’s a grabber. A piece of O’Flaherty’s art has been part of the scenery on “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” hanging on the office wall of fictional TV investigator Gil Grissom. In Sacramento, O’Flaherty and two friends just opened a maggot art exhibit at the Capital Athletic Club, where their work’s squiggling, swooping lines decorate a hallway gallery that leads to the swimming pool.

Beyond the art are more serious goals: Help forensic entomology shed its academic image of too much flash, too little substance. Help answer some of the questions that are vitally important to detective work, such as how temperature affects maggot growth.

Read the rest of this entry »

MOODY AIR FORCE BASE, Georgia (AP) — The military’s new weapon is a ray gun that shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they will catch fire.

The technology is supposed to be harmless — a non-lethal way to get enemies to drop their weapons.

Military officials say it could save the lives of civilians and service members in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

The weapon is not expected to go into production until at least 2010, but all branches of the military have expressed interest in it, officials said. (Watch a demo of the ray gun Video)

During the first media demonstration of the weapon Wednesday, airmen fired beams from a large dish antenna mounted atop a Humvee at people pretending to be rioters and acting out other scenarios U.S. troops might encounter.

The crew fired beams from more than 500 yards (455 meters) away, nearly 17 times the range of existing non-lethal weapons, such as rubber bullets.

While the sudden, 130-degree Fahrenheit (54.44 Celsius) heat was not painful, it was intense enough to make participants think their clothes were about to ignite. Read the rest of this entry »