New citizen-shot video was released yesterday of a portion of a Fresno police shooting and killing of an unarmed 19-year-old, Dylan Noble.
On June 25, Fresno police were investigating a call from a woman who insisted a man with a rifle and camo gear was at a certain corner. While in that area looking, a pickup driven by Noble drove up, tires squealing. The police gave chase to that pickup, and pulled it over.
Noble apparently got out of the truck and walked toward the officers “rapidly,” according to Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer in interviews with The Fresno Bee, and allegedly refused to obey when told to show both his hands. Dyer says that Noble placed his right hand behind his back then pulled it out “very quickly.”
Noble also, according to Dyer, shouted something about hating his life.
The officers began shooting at Noble, three from one officer’s handgun and one from an officer’s shotgun.
At least the last two shots were fired after Noble was already shot and prone on the ground.
Noble had no weapon on his person or his vehicle. No such rifle-wielding suspect was ever found.
Dyer insisted that the prone and shot Noble, in the reporter’s words, “uses his left hand to lift up his shirt. He then puts his right hand into his waistband. When he suddenly pulls out his right hand, the officer believed he was pulling out a gun.”
Dyer will not name the officers, who he says have been threatened, and they are “either on administrative leave or personal leave time,” he told The Bee.
Dyer so far is not willing to release officer body camera video, which does exist; he says he’s awaiting the completion of a district attorney investigation. He says the FBI will also be involved in the investigation of the incident.
While he may not be the infamous Kevin Henry, so well-known to Zero Hedge regulars, here is another Kevin, who is not a “trader/analyst” at the NY Fed but merely a lowly intern, and who today took over the Twitter feed of the NY Fed to show what a “day in the life of a NY Fed intern” looks like.
We would be far more impressed if the NY Fed were to do a “day in the life” series of any or all of the following NY Fed Trader/Analysts, perhaps starting with an explanation of why the NY Fed needs “traders” in the first place, and what precisely is it that these individuals are actually trading?
We do know, however, that among the extensive list of skills exhibited by the above individuals are, but not limited to, painting the tape, the “market open” ramp, the “3:30pm pre-ramp” ramp, the “3:30pm ramp”, BTFD and BTFATH.
Have you noticed that the world seems to be going a little bit more crazy with each passing month? Here we are halfway through 2016, and the rot and decay that are eating at the foundations of civilized society seem to be rapidly gaining momentum. Every single day, all of us take certain things for granted as we go through our normal routines. For example, as you walk down the street you probably take it for granted that someone is not going to pull out a gun and try to shoot you. As members of a civilized society, we have come to expect that our fellow citizens will behave in a certain way. Unfortunately, the thin veneer of civilization that we have all come to rely upon is steadily evaporating all over the globe, and chaos, crime and violence are all on the rise.
Even the United States is becoming a lawless place. We saw this very clearly when the FBI magically cleared Hillary Clinton. We’ll talk more about the deterioration of America later on in this article, but I would like to begin today by looking at what is going on in Brazil. The Olympics are about a month away, and things are so bad in Rio de Janeiro that police have put up a billboard for all of the tourists that are coming in that says “Welcome to Hell”…
The Olympic Games are 31 days away — and Rio de Janeiro is in crisis.
Violence is on the rise, and police officers are at loggerheads with the Rio state government after claiming they’ve not been paid for months.
The message from police to tourists is clear: We won’t be able to protect you.
The state’s police officers vented their anger Monday with a sign saying, “Welcome to Hell,” outside Rio’s main airport.
It may be hard to believe, but approximately 42,000 people are shot and killed in Brazil each year, and it has one of the highest homicide rates on the entire planet.
But it isn’t just the violence that those traveling to the Olympics need to be concerned about. According to Weather.com, a “super bacteria” has been found in the city’s waterways…
“I don’t take my children to these beaches,” Picao said. “We still need more studies to tell what would be the risk to human health of this exposure through the water.”
According to the Associated Press, the Olympic sites on Guanabara Bay are tested daily for bacteria, and four of the five will not pose any problems, but also said the bay has shown astronomically high levels of viruses for which the state is not testing.
Rio’s waters were found to contain viruses up to 1.7 million more times hazardous than a beach in the U.S, CBS reports.
The water is so bad in Rio that the U.S. rowing team will actually use sewage-proof suits at the Olympics.
Yuck!
Meanwhile, things are even worse in Brazil’s neighbor Venezuela. 47 percent of the population can no longer provide three meals a day for their families, people are hunting cats and dogs for food, and armed guards are being stationed on food trucks to keep the rioters and looters at bay. It is a full-blown economic collapse, and what is happening in Venezuela right now is eventually coming to America.
Over in Europe, they are dealing with a major sexual assault epidemic. Millions of refugees from the Middle East have poured into western Europe over the past couple of years, and the results have been nothing short of catastrophic. The latest incident to make global headlines comes from Sweden…
Over 20 girls between 12 and 18 years old told police they were sexually assaulted by a group of men during a music festival in Karlstad, Sweden.
Police are investigating “a score of cases in which young girls have been molested,” Swedish Aftonbladet daily reported.
It said that the alleged attacks occurred during the “Putte i Parken” rock festival in Karlstad in Varmland County, despite enhanced police presence.
Do you want to guess who the attackers were? One of the young girls that was sexually assaulted said that the perpetrators “were not from a Swedish background”…
She said that the boys around them were about 17 or 18-years-old but ‘those standing behind me were not from a Swedish background.’
‘They were probably immigrants. I hate to say it. But it is the truth,’ she said.
‘I have reported this to the police, but it feels like a drop in the ocean. I saw girls that came crying from the audience, including an old childhood friend who is two years younger. She cried so much that it broke my heart.’
But don’t worry, the police in Sweden have launched a new campaign against these kinds of assaults. They plan to hand out bracelets that say “don’t molest” at music festivals and they have even started a special hashtag on Twitter.
That should do quite a bit to stem the tide.
Over in Germany, a leaked report is making waves because it specifically identifies refugees as the primary reason for the horrible wave of sexual assaults at swimming pools and other bathing establishments…
The internal report was issued for officers of the Criminal Commisariat 12 – responsible for sex crimes and missing persons – and states: ‘The K12 can confirm a surge in sex crimes at these establishments.
‘In particular rape and the sexual abuse of children in bathing establishments have given us grave cause for concern.
‘The perpetrators are, for the most part, immigrants.’
Look, I am all in favor of helping families that are fleeing the war in Syria, but these nations in Europe need to start using some common sense.
In the Middle East, the barbarism just continues to get even worse. Just today, I saw a report about how ISIS is boiling people alive, and over the past couple of weeks there has been a shocking string of Islamic terror attacks all over the world. According to Wikipedia, there have been more than 100 terror attacks worldwide per month so far in 2016, and during the month of June there were more than 200.
When are people going to start realizing that Islamic terror is a major threat and it is not going away?
In the United States, the thin veneer of civilization is breaking down as well, and this is especially true in many of our major cities.
Over the July 4th weekend, at least 64 people were shot in Chicago. The homicide rate in the city is up nearly 50 percent so far in 2016, and the police are having a very difficult time trying to deal with rapidly escalating gang violence in the region.
But it isn’t just the rise in violent crime that shows how our society is decaying. I want to share with you an incident that I came across earlier today that I think really gives us some insight into what is happening to this country. Our young people have so little respect for one another or for anything else, and the way that they treat one another is not what you would expect from citizens of a “civilized” society. Just check out this example of what I am talking about…
A pair of young American men were left covered in Coke after they pranked a young female McDonald’s worker.
They approached a drive-thru in their SUV with the camera rolling.
Just as the girl prepares to take their money and hand them the drink they honk the horn, making her jump in fright.
But the worker had the last laugh when she said: ‘You’re not going to get your drink, go!’ before lobbing the large Coke back at them.
The driver tried to chuck the drink back but she shut the drive-thru window in time.
You can watch the young McDonald’s worker throwing the Coke at the two guys right here. My point is not to place blame on the worker or on the two “pranksters”. Rather, my point is to show how pathetic our interactions with one another have become.
We like to think that we are so “advanced”, but the truth is that we have become the kind of crude, disgusting slobs that the movie “Idiocracy” once mocked.
Could you imagine the people of Downton Abbey acting in this manner?
I certainly couldn’t.
And you know why they wouldn’t have acted this way?
It is because they were far more “civilized” than we are.
Our standards have fallen so low that very few people care if we even have standards anymore. Just like most of the rest of the world, our society is crumbling, and as a result the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is starting to disappear.
Summing up everything in this farcical stock 'market' perfectly, MarketWatch unleashes the following headline…
As they explain…
There is a feeling of “how I stopped worrying and learned to love central banks” in the latest take from Zor Capital’s Joe Fahmy.
Fahmy — who three months ago called for the Dow to hit 20,000 this year — reiterates that he thinks that level is “a real possibility.”
Many smart investors have made bearish market calls, but they are too early because the Fed is on the market’s side and not raising rates anytime soon, Fahmy says.
“As they say, ‘don’t fight the Fed,’ so good luck fighting all the globally coordinated Feds,” he writes. That refers to the world’s big central banks all working together.
The market could be showing resilience in anticipation of a more business-friendly president, and watch for a “chase trade” if the S&P breaks out to a record high, Fahmy says.
“This is when under-invested and bearish fund managers are forced to put money to work so they don’t risk losing their jobs,” he writes.
Please note that at no time was there any discussion of record low bond yields, plunging earnings, collapsing European financials, or election uncertainties… because none of that matters – until it does…
We're gonna need a lot more QE to get to Dow 20,000
Chasing yield only works for so long… but where is the central bank to save this?
While it is no longer a secret that Elon Musk has been handing out NDA to those Tesla buyers who have encountered “quality control” issues to prevent any negative publicity from leaking out about his overhyped vehicle, he will have a difficult time limiting the damage control from a deadly crash two months ago that claimed the life of its driver who was allegedly watching a DVD while the car was on autopilot.
Exibit A: a photo of the Tesla Model S involved in the fatal crash on May 7, 2016 shows with the top third of the car sheared off by the impact of the collision of the Tesla with a tractor-trailer truck on nearby highway and coming to rest in the yard of Robert and Chrissy VanKavelaar.
Additionally, as Reuters reported today, investigators found a laptop computer in the Tesla Model S sedan involved in a fatal crash in May while running on autopilot, Florida investigators said on Thursday, leaving it unclear whether the driver was distracted at the time. Neither the laptop nor a DVD player also found in the vehicle was running after the crash, said Sergeant Kim Montes of the Florida Highway Patrol. Montes said investigators could not determine whether the driver was operating either at the time of the accident.
Which is odd because as reported previously, the driver of the truck in which the Tesla slammed, said the Tesla driver was “playing Harry Potter on the TV screen” at the time of the crash and driving so quickly that “he went so fast through my trailer I didn’t see him.” The car was equipped with a computer stand, but the laptop was not mounted on the stand when investigators recovered the laptop, Montes said.
Witnesses who came upon the wreckage gave differing accounts last week about whether the DVD player was showing a movie.
It could be weeks if not months before officials make a final determination of the cause of the crash, the first known fatality of a Model S driver while using Autopilot. The accident has opened debate about whether drivers were being lulled into a false sense of security by such technology.
What is worse for Musk, however, is not the immediate fallout from the crash, but the viability of the underlying business and investor confidence with a model which is burning billions of dollars in cash every month.
Furthermore as RBC noted in a note today, “Tesla Confidence Tipping Point May Near With Each Target Miss.” As a result, RBC’s Joseph Spak – who lowered his price target from $220 to $210 – cut his Tesla 2016 delivery estimates to 75k from prior 79k after Tesla 2Q delivery figures this week implied production of ~50k vehicles in 2H 2016, putting total year deliveries at low end of 80k-90k forecast, RBC analyst Joseph Spak He also cut the 2Q per-share loss est. to 86c vs his previous loss est. 36c. He adds that while the market “may not care” on some short-term issues, still sees “mid-to-long term opportunity” but there could be a “tipping point” where continued missed targets lower confidence in Model 3 ramp up, adding that “most investors we talk to” don’t think TSLA can make target of 500k vehicles in 2018 and 1m in 2020.
With any news of more Tesla crashes, those targets will certainly become increasingly more elusive.
The primary goal of government is its own credibility.
…
Governments do many things, including building roads, providing social services, defending the homeland, and more. But no matter what the government is trying to accomplish, its macro-responsibility is to maintain its own credibility. Governments without credibility devolve into chaos. Credibility has to be job one.
…
This gets me to FBI Director James Comey’s decision to drop the case against Hillary Clinton for her e-mail security lapses. To the great puzzlement of everyone in America, and around the world, Comey announced two things:
1. Hillary Clinton is 100% guilty of crimes of negligence.
2. The FBI recommends dropping the case.
From a legal standpoint, that’s absurd.
…
But what was the alternative?
The alternative was the head of the FBI deciding for the the people of the United States who would be their next president. A criminal indictment against Clinton probably would have cost her the election.
How credible would a future President Trump be if he won the election by the FBI’s actions instead of the vote of the public? That would be the worst case scenario even if you are a Trump supporter. The public would never accept the result as credible.
…
Thanks to Comey, the American voting public will get to decide how much they care about Clinton’s e-mail situation. And that means whoever gets elected president will have enough credibility to govern effectively.
Comey might have saved the country. He sacrificed his reputation and his career to keep the nation’s government credible.
Once again America is outraged, this time not over one but two police shootings in as many days, the second of which was particularly chilling because as we reported earlier today, the victim’s girlfriend posted live video on the internet as it was happening. Philando Castile, 32, who was shot by a police officer after a traffic stop on
Wednesday. Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, videotaped the minutes immediately following his shooting and posted it on Facebook Live. Castile, who was driving, was shot with Reynolds and her 4-year-old daughter in the car. The graphic video showed blood oozing through Castile’s shirt as he appeared to lose consciousness.
In the video Reynolds posted to Facebook the shooting, she said her boyfriend had just been pulled over and explained he had a gun he was licensed to carry. “He was trying to get out his ID and his wallet out of his pocket,” Reynolds said. “He let the officer know that he had a firearm and that he was reaching for his wallet, and the officer just shot him in his arm.” Police said a handgun was recovered at the scene.
“Fuck,” a distraught man is heard screaming in the video. “I told him not to reach for it.”
The shooting was the second-high profile killing of a black man by police in Minnesota in seven months. Two Minneapolis police officers in November shot and killed 24-year-old Jamar Clark in a struggle that broke out when they were called to assist an ambulance crew that was helping Clark’s girlfriend.
Diamond Reynolds, girlfriend of Philando Castile, spoke at a conference on Thursday morning when she expressed her anger at the conduct of the police, and called on Governor Mark Dayton to get more involved with police officers, “who have mental problems.”
“When they’re coming out here to serve and protect, they’re not here to serve and protect, because they’re damaged from all the past and previous people that they killed,” she said.
Reynolds gave details of the on Wednesday night encounter with police that led to Castile’s death. After pulling the couple over for “allegedly what was supposed to be a broken taillight”, the police officer asked the couple to put their hands in the air.
“My boyfriend carries all his information in a thick wallet in his right side back pocket,” Reynolds explained. “As he’s reaching for his back pocket wallet he lets the officer know, ‘Officer, I have a firearm on me.’ I begin to yell, ‘But he’s licensed to carry.’ ” After that, the officer began to shoot, saying “Don’t move”, Reynolds detailed. “It’s either you want my hands in the air, or you want my information.”
Reynolds’ four year-old daughter was in the backseat at the time. “He killed him in front of us for no reason.” she cried. “Without this little angel by my side, I would never have been able to make it through this.” The mother described her late boyfriend and “best friend” as quiet, laidback and loving. “Nothing within his body said intimidation, nothing within his body language said, shoot me.” “He did not do nothing but what the police officer asked of us,” she said.
* * *
The shooting prompted Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton to call on the U.S. Department of Justice to begin an investigation. “This kind of behavior is unacceptable,” Dayton said, adding that a state investigation was already under way.
Castile’s was killed within a day of the shooting of 37-year-old Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Sterling was killed during an altercation with two white police officers. As Reuters reports, graphic video of that incident triggered protests and an outcry on social media.
In a Facebook post on Thursday, President Barack Obama said he and wife Michelle shared the “anger, frustration and grief” many Americans feel. “All Americans should be deeply troubled by the fatal shootings…. We’ve seen such tragedies far too many times, and our hearts go out to the families and communities who’ve suffered such a painful loss.”
As we noted earlier, the use of force by police against African-Americans in cities from Ferguson, Missouri, to Baltimore and New York has sparked periodic and sometimes violent protests in the past two years, and has spawned the Black Lives Matter movement. Anger has intensified when the officers involved in such incidents have been acquitted or not charged at all.
In Reynolds’ video shown above, a police officer outside the car is seen pointing a gun. Reynolds described what was going on, sometimes speaking calmly to the police officer, sometimes with her voice rising as she feared Castile was dying. Reynolds said Castile, 32, was shot after police pulled their car over, citing a broken tail light. “Nothing within his body language said ‘Kill me, I want to be dead,'” she said on Thursday.
Dozens of protesters gathered at the governor’s mansion in St. Paul, about 10 miles (15 km) southeast of the scene of the incident, where the governor spoke at a news conference with Reynolds and civil rights activists. As Reynolds spoke, people shouted “murder,” and called for the arrest of the police officer involved.
As Reuters reports, the St. Anthony Police Department said only that an unidentified black man was wounded during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, on Wednesday evening. He was taken to a hospital, where he later died. The ethnicity of the police officers involved was not clear. Attempts to reach the police department for further comment were unsuccessful.
Reynolds and her daughter were treated like criminals after the incident, Levy-Pounds said. “What this signifies to us is that black lives don’t really matter in the state of Minnesota.” She said later that local and federal authorities had a pattern of failing to hold officers accountable. “I don’t have faith in the system because of all of the injustices and the systemic pattern of failing to hold officers accountable when they kill civilians,” Levy-Pounds told Reuters.
“Loss of faith” in the system appears to be a popular refrain in recent months.
The Justice Department said it was assessing the Minneapolis area incident but did not say if it would start a formal investigation. The department has opened an investigation into the Baton Rouge shooting.
Castile’s mother, Valerie Castile, described her son as a “laid back” but industrious man who worked as a school cafeteria supervisor and enjoyed playing video games. He had a permit to carry a concealed weapon, she told CNN. St. Paul Public Schools said in a statement Castile had worked for the district since 2002, and colleagues were mourning a cheerful “team player who maintained great relationships with staff and students.”
Reynolds said police had not even tried to check if her boyfriend was alive after they shot him, and it had taken at least 15 minutes for paramedics to arrive. “Not one shot, not two, shots, not three shots, but five shots,” she said at the news conference. “They did not check for a pulse at the scene of the crime.”
That however contradicts a video posted later showing paramedics giving CPR after the shooting. By then, naturally, it was too late.
* * *
Meanwhile, as we predicted, the demonstrations over the deaths of Castile, Sterling and other black men killed by police are now planned for St. Paul, New York, Chicago and several smaller cities on Thursday evening, according to organizers posting on social media.
Other rallies, including one in Atlanta, were planned for Friday. Protests as far away as London were being discussed on Twitter for the weekend.
FBI director Comey said
today that Hillary Clinton running emails containing government
information on an unsecured, private server was not as bad as former CIA
director Petraeus sharing classified documents with his lover.
But the highest-level NSA whistleblower in history, William Binney – the NSA executive who created
the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, the
36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency, who
served as the senior technical director within the agency, and managed
six thousand NSA employees – explains why Comey’s statement is nonsense.
By way of background, recall that – when the American press reported
that U.S. intelligence services tracked Bin Laden through his satellite
phone – he stopping using that type of phone … so we could no longer
easily track him.
This is exactly what government
officials mean whenever they say that someone – say Edward Snowden,
Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, or Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning – is
threatening national security by “revealing confidential
information-gathering methods or sources.”
Also by way of background, Binney pointed us to an article from March written by former NSA analyst, counterintelligence officer and War College professor John Schindler:
Just-released State Department documents obtained by Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act [here] detail a bureaucratic showdown between Ms. Clinton and NSA at the outset of her tenure at Foggy Bottom.
***
One
senior NSA official, now retired, recalled the kerfuffle with Team
Clinton in early 2009 about Blackberrys. “It was the usual Clinton prima
donna stuff,” he explained, “the whole ‘rules are for other people’ act
that I remembered from the ’90s.” Why Ms. Clinton would not simply
check her personal email on an office computer, like every other
government employee less senior than the president, seems a germane
question, given what a major scandal email-gate turned out to be. “What
did she not want put on a government system, where security people might
see it?” the former NSA official asked, adding, “I wonder now, and I
sure wish I’d asked about it back in 2009.”
He’s not the only NSA
affiliate with pointed questions about what Hillary Clinton and her
staff at Foggy Bottom were really up to—and why they went to such
trouble to circumvent federal laws about the use of IT systems and the
handling of classified information.
***
As I explained in this column
in January, one of the most controversial of Ms. Clinton’s emails
released by the State Department under judicial order was one sent on
June 8, 2011, to the Secretary of State by Sidney Blumenthal, Ms.
Clinton’s unsavory
friend and confidant who was running a private intelligence service for
Ms. Clinton. This email contains an amazingly detailed assessment of
events in Sudan, specifically a coup being plotted by top generals in
that war-torn country. Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from a
top-ranking source with direct access to Sudan’s top military and
intelligence officials, and recounted a high-level meeting that had
taken place only 24 hours before.
To anybody familiar with
intelligence reporting, this unmistakably signals intelligence, termed
SIGINT in the trade. In other words, Mr. Blumenthal, a private citizen
who had enjoyed no access to U.S. intelligence for over a decade when he
sent that email, somehow got hold of SIGINT about the Sudanese
leadership and managed to send it, via open, unclassified email, to his
friend Ms. Clinton only one day later.
NSA officials were appalled by the State Department’s release of this email, since it bore all the hallmarks of Agency reporting. Back in early January when I reported this, I was confident that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from highly classified NSA sources,
based on my years of reading and writing such reports myself, and one
veteran agency official told me it was NSA information with “at least 90
percent confidence.”
Now, over two months later, I can confirm
that the contents of Sid Blumenthal’s June 8, 2011, email to Hillary
Clinton, sent to her personal, unclassified account, were indeed based on highly sensitive NSA information.
The agency investigated this compromise and determined that Mr.
Blumenthal’s highly detailed account of Sudanese goings-on, including
the retelling of high-level conversations in that country, was indeed
derived from NSA intelligence.
Specifically, this
information was illegally lifted from four different NSA reports, all of
them classified “Top Secret / Special Intelligence.” Worse, at least
one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an
NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information
(for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership,
as this was). GAMMA is properly viewed as a SIGINT Special Access
Program, or SAP, several of which from the CIA Ms. Clinton compromised
in another series of her “unclassified” emails.
Currently
serving NSA officials have told me they have no doubt that Mr.
Blumenthal’s information came from their reports. “It’s word-for-word,
verbatim copying,” one of them explained. “In one case, an entire
paragraph was lifted from an NSA report” that was classified Top Secret /
Special Intelligence.
How Mr. Blumenthal got his hands on this
information is the key question, and there’s no firm answer yet. The
fact that he was able to take four separate highly classified NSA
reports—none of which he was supposed to have any access to—and pass the
details of them to Hillary Clinton via email only hours after NSA
released them in Top Secret / Special Intelligence channels indicates
something highly unusual, as well as illegal, was going on.
Binney explained to Washington’s Blog the serious nature of Clinton’s breach of GAMMA classified information:
The
compromise of this kind of cryptology success has a number of impacts
on the ability of NSA to produce accurate intelligence on foreign
targets of highest interest.
(1) This lets the leaders of a
foreign country know that their communications have been compromised and
thatwe read what they are saying, planning and intending to do.
(2)
It compromises the fact that a particular type of encryption is
readable. Not just the leadership; but, also all the others in that
country and around the world that are using that encryption.
(3) It lets our potential adversaries know our technology capabilities in attacking encryption.
(4)
If other countries (like Russia or China or any others) know the
encryption system involved, then they too will look at it for any
weakness or flaws that would allow reading the system.
(5) It
alerts adversaries to look into that system for structural errors in
encryption design also look for human error in using the system or a
combination of both that would make the system vulnerable.
(6)
This presents the country using that system the opportunity to feed
false information into the intelligence produced by NSA which means the
free world.
(7) For NSA, this means that they have to find other
ways to validate any intelligence they get from this encryption to
insure the validity of the information they get.
The target
country may stop using that encryption for leadership (as was the case
with GAMMA GUPY) but may continue to use it at other levels of
communication; but, over time, they have been alerted to this weakness
and will move as fast as they can to replace it with other encryption.
GAMMA GUPY was the U.S. spy program
which installed an antenna on the roof of the United States Embassy in
Moscow to eavesdrop on top officials of the Soviet Union in Moscow as
they chatted with each other on their car telephones. When
nationally-syndicated journalist Jack Anderson reported on GAMMA GUPY in
1971, it alerted the Soviet leadership … so they immediately stopped talking in a way that could be overheard.
Binney continued:
This
[Clinton’s email hijinks] is real serious, on the order of what Jack
Anderson compromises in 1971 dealing with the “Gamma Gupy” source.
This
is the most sensitive intelligence, and [Clinton] and her staff took it
out of classified reports and put excerpts in open source on her
server.
***
All in all, this is a rather devastating compromise of technical capability and a commensurate loss of high value intelligence.
I
know this kind of technical explanation is rather difficult for the
public to understand and comprehend, but it is rather devastating to
people responsible for intelligence production.
In my view, this is much worse than what Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning or any of the other whistleblowers have done.
Some
are in prison for as many as 35 years. Others have just been ruined and
kept from getting anything but menial jobs. But, those in high
positions get a pass for much worse offenses.
As we have covered ad nauseam, companies who rushed to perform the most altruistic of favors to workers by raising wages are now facing the realization that profitability simply can't be maintained, and thus are taking measures to cut costs (ie: firing people or reducing hours).
Our current title holder for most actions taken as a result of trying to appease the living wage crowd is WalMart of course, who has already closed stores and fired massive amounts of people as a result of increasing wages. More efforts are also on the way, recall that WalMart is also testing the use of drones in distribution facilities in order to facilitate even more layoffs.
Now, just as the case was with Starbucks, WalMart is tinkering with employee work hours in order to try and figure out a way to reduce costs but make it appear as though that isn't the case. This time, however, the company is testing it out in China, which unlike the US is unionized and will be much more disruptive to operations as the unions begin to protest the change in hours.
Employees said WalMart wants them to work 11 hour shifts on the weekends and as little as four hours on the weekdays under a system the company began to roll out in June. Some employees believe the change will result in lower pay and interfere with their ability to work second jobs. The proposed changes have led to protests already, something China is very sensitive to as it tries to ensure as little civil unrest as possible takes place in the country at a time when the economy is weakening. Last week, staff members protested on Friday and Saturday outside WalMart stores in the cities of Nanchang and Shenzhen in Southern China, Chengdu in the west and Harbin in the northeast AP reports.
A cashier who has worked at the Nanchang store for more than five years said her monthly pay of about $215 to $245 has fallen about $11 under the new system – the legal minimum wage in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province, is $235 according to AP. The employees are unlikely to get a raise in the next few years either said the cashier, adding "what worries us more is that they are preparing for the future. Will we be cut off in the future and get no compensation, like the part-time workers?"
Managers have presented the new scheduling system, and employees were creatively being forced into signing new contracts that allowed the changes to be implemented, as the option to continue to work under the "old" contract was left on the table, but the paycheck would miraculously get smaller as meal subsidies and other payments were eliminated.
As AP explains
Managers presented the new scheduling system in May and encouraged employees to sign new contracts to authorize the change, according to employees. Under Chinese law, full-time employees work under two-year contracts.
"The workload is very heavy because we have to stand for 11 hours," said another employee of the Nanchang store, who asked not to be identified by name for fear of trouble with the company or Chinese authorities. "All the employees felt it was too difficult and were very unhappy."
Employees were told they could keep working under previous contracts if they wanted, but those who did so found their paychecks were smaller because meal subsidies and other payments were eliminated, according to the employee in Nanchang.
An activist group, China Labor Watch, said employees were pressured to sign the contracts by being told they could not leave meetings where the new system was announced until they did. Wal-Mart did not respond to a question about whether that happened.
Employees expressed concern the system could be abused to induce unwanted workers to quit by giving them awkward shifts, eliminating the need to pay severance.
Traditional retailers have been battered as Chinese shoppers shift to shopping online. Total retail sales rose 10 percent in May compared with a year earlier but that was down from 13 percent in 2014. Meanwhile, online commerce grew by more than 30 percent.
Wal-Mart, headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, has expanded to 433 stores in China, but that is less than one-tenth as many as its 4,655 outlets in the United States.
Some frustrated employees have taken to social media to communicate, and authorities are investigating whether groups are taking money from foreign organizations that may be spurring the unrest – or, on the other hand, perhaps the fact that WalMart is cutting hours is actually spurring the unrest, one of the two.
Phone calls Wednesday to ACFTU branches in Nanchang, Chengdu and Shenzhen weren't answered.
Frustration among Wal-Mart employees with the ACFTU prompted some to start an informal group called the Wal-Mart Chinese Employee Fellowship in 2014, according to Zhang Jun, who said he was a spokesman for the group. He worked as an electrician at a Wal-Mart in the eastern city of Yantai from 2011 until last December.
The group's 20,000 members – about 20 percent of Wal-Mart's China workforce – use social media to communicate, according to Zhang.
They divide themselves into small groups in line with regulations aimed at suppressing dissent by limiting the number of accounts that can be linked together.
Authorities have investigated whether the group received money from foreign organizations, according to China Labour Bulletin, a research group in Hong Kong.
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While China will do what it can to crack down on protests in an effort to hide any and all civil unrest, WalMart's subtle cost savings measure isn't sitting well with Chinese employees and may be a catalyst for future protests. It is not lost on us that WalMart is attempting this in China, trying to sweep the cost savings effort under the rug knowing it may get less coverage than such a move within the US. Perhaps next time, employees will not ask for such "help" as increased wages if all of this is the ultimate result.
The API set the expectations bar high for today`s EIA Report, and the Gasoline numbers came in well below the API numbers from last night. Gasoline is what shorts have been concentrating on in the year over year comps, up around 20 Million versus last year. The actual demand numbers are fine, it is just going to take some time to work off these gasoline inventories as the market goes through the rebalancing process.
Basically, a lot of Oil was pushed through the system in terms of refined product just to get it out of oil storage inventories, refining for the sake of refining, regardless of need. We have seen this play out in Asia and Europe as well, but the good news is that consumers are buying more gasoline, driving more, and economics is playing out as it should in the oil market. Thus the oil market will eventually rebalance, and at some point move into deficit supply/demand dynamics.