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Possible National Quarantine? How Deadly Is This Virus?

Reports and rumors have been surfacing that President Trump is currently mulling over a plan for a national shutdown. Such a shutdown would be unprecedented in U.S. history.

The plan would allow President Trump to mobilize the National Guard to help enforce a two-week quarantine of the public and require everyone to “stay at home..” This would also urge all businesses, other than grocery stores and pharmacies to close for the time being. According to the source named in the Washington Examiner article, this plan would not be announced until early next week.

This comes on the heels of more and more states and cities taking drastic measures on Friday to combat the ongoing spread of the coronavirus, which so far has infected roughly 14,000 Americans.

03/23/2020 · Comments Off Continue Reading →

COVID-19: Life After the Pandemic

E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. A fitting motto for the melting pot that is the United States and a fitting view of the world, whose frailty, humanity and interdependence has been laid bare by an invisible virus. While ground zero for coronavirus seems to have shifted from Asia to Europe and is now making its way to the U.S., whose level of national awareness has only recently kicked into gear with a presidential emergency declaration, it is not too soon to begin asking ourselves what life should look like after this moment of global and national solidarity.

Coping with the pandemic will be agonizingly hard for the global economy and for many millions of people who do not enjoy the inherent security and resilience of adequate healthcare coverage, savings, paid medical leave and other benefits. The societal trade off we now face is stark. As financially vulnerable people grapple with the false choice of complying with calls for social distancing to protect the medically at risk and themselves, while doing so at the peril of their own economic survival. In this environment, facing a 100-year pandemic threat that has grounded the global economy to a halt in 90 days (with governments throwing trillions of dollars at the invisible many-headed hydra that has once vibrant free moving societies on lockdown), basic benefits and social compliance are our best defense.

03/16/2020 · Comments Off Continue Reading →

Big Cable Owns Internet Access. Here’s How to Change That.

Surveying the landscape of internet access, one could be forgiven for a single dank conclusion: Winter is coming.

We know that Big Cable’s plan for high-speed internet access is to squeeze with “usage-based billing” and data caps, so as to milk ever-growing profits from their existing networks rather than invest in future-proof fiber optics. We’re also seeing that Big Cable has won the war for high-capacity, 25Mbps-download-or-better wired internet access, leaving AT&T and Verizon to concentrate primarily on mobile wireless. Indeed, Big Cable’s share of new and existing wired-access subscribers has never been greater — cable got both all new net subscribers in the third quarter of 2015 and captured millions of subscribers fleeing DSL — and its control over this market is growing faster than ever.

Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett predicts that, in the end, unless things change, cable will have 90 percent of subscribers in areas where it faces competition from only traditional DSL and will have the lion’s share of subscribers in areas where cable faces competition from souped-up copper-line DSL and fiber-to-the-node (aka “fiber to the neighborhood”).

We’re already seeing the deadening effects of this. Pew reports that home adoption of high-speed internet access has plateaued, while the percentage of smartphone-only users in the United States is growing. Just 8 percent of Americans were smartphone only in 2013. That number is now 13 percent—mostly lower-income households, minorities, and rural Americans. What’s the reason for nonadoption? Mostly cost: The monthly fee for high-speed internet is the main reason most of these people don’t have access at home. Smartphone-only users just don’t have same the quality of access as home high-speed internet subscribers. We are amplifying and entrenching existing inequality by not taking on this country’s internet access problem.

01/09/2016 · Comments Off Continue Reading →

Islamic State fighters number far more than first thought, says CIA

US officials are shocked at the “Islamic State’s rapid growth.” Now, the CIA estimates that the Islamic State has somewhere between 20,000 to 31,500 fighters within its ranks. That number may include “some 15,000 foreign fighters in Syria alone, including 2,000 Westerners,” Al Jazeera reported, which noted the estimate is “far more than first thought.”

Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria number around 20,000 to 31,500 — a figure far higher than previously estimated, the Central Intelligence Agency has said.The new calculation includes some 15,000 foreign fighters in Syria alone, including 2,000 Westerners, a U.S. intelligence official told the AFP news agency on Thursday.

“The number is much higher than a previous estimate of 10,000,” Al Jazeera continues.

The scope of the operation, including the territory covered, indicates that tens of thousands of ISIS fighters participated in the recent fighting. The group is estimated to have anywhere around 50,000 members, thousands of foreign fighters and is more of an army rather than a smaller extremist group.

09/13/2014 · No Comments Continue Reading →

Can Hackers Decrypt Target’s PIN Data?

Slightly longer answer: it depends on whether they have access to the encryption key, or to a machine that contains the encryption key.

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about: there was recently a massive credit card breach at Target. If you’re like many people you probably heard about this three times. First in the news, then again in your email when Target notified you that you were a victim, and finally a third time when you checked your credit card bill. Not a proud day for our nation’s retailers.

The news got a bit messier today when Target announced the thieves had also managed to get their hands on the PIN numbers of unfortunate debit card customers. But this time there’s a silver lining: according to Target, the PIN data was encrypted under a key the hackers don’t have.

12/28/2013 · No Comments Continue Reading →

What to Expect From Surveillance Politics in 2014 (Hint: It’s Not Reform)

One would think that a federal judge calling an NSA program “almost Orwellian” would be a good sign for surveillance and privacy in 2014. Especially when coupled with his observation that the founding fathers would be “aghast” at the NSA’s bulk warrantless collection of telephone metadata, and his view that it’s therefore likely unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment…

And even though the findings released by President Obama’s surveillance review panel this week were more “a set of guidelines than a set of restrictions”, the more than 40 recommendations will no doubt compel major changes to the nation’s surveillance apparatus, right?

Well, hold on. None of these things necessarily signals a turning point in the debate about surveillance. If you’re holding out hope for an act of political courage to end bulk surveillance and improve transparency, such as passage of the Leahy-Sensenbrenner USA Freedom Act to curb the NSA: Abandon hope, all ye whose data is indiscriminately collected here. Instead, here are some things to expect from the government, tech companies, and investors regarding surveillance and privacy this coming year.

12/21/2013 · No Comments Continue Reading →

UN Team to Begin Syria CW Site Inspections ‘Within Next Week’

The Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is reviewing additional information received from Syria about its chemical weapons stockpiles, a United Nations spokesperson has said, ahead of onsite inspections and initial disabling of equipment which could start as early as next week. The OPCW Technical Secretariat, which together with the UN forms the team tasked with overseeing the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons production facilities, received information that was “additional to the disclosure on its chemical weapons program which Syria submitted on September 21,” UN spokesperson Martin Nesirky told reporters at UN Headquarters in New York on Friday.

10/05/2013 · No Comments Continue Reading →

Not Even NSA Can Crack State Department’s Totally Anonymous Network

A far-flung group of geeks, supported by the U.S. State Department, has built a tool for anonymous communication that’s so secure that even the world’s most sophisticated electronic spies haven’t figured out how to crack it.

That’s the takeaway from the latest revelations from National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. The NSA has used aggressive computer attack techniques to monitor people using the Tor network, a service that’s funded by the U.S. government and allows users to remain anonymous when they’re connected to the Internet. But the agency has not been able to undermine the core of the Tor system, which was developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in 2002. It remains a viable means for people to connect to the Internet anonymously. Although Tor’s complete reliability has been called into question in light of the NSA’s efforts — which may have begun as early as 2006, according to the Washington Post — for now it’s State Department 1, NSA 0, in the anonymity wars.

10/04/2013 · No Comments Continue Reading →

India Flooding World with Tainted Drugs, and Getting Away with It

Each time we take medicine, we assume that the manufacturer did its best to produce a quality product. Evidence is mounting, however, that some pharmaceutical manufacturers in countries like India cut corners and send low-quality products to major, developed markets. Worse still, they may have separate production lines for drugs they sell in developing markets like Africa, where poor quality is more likely to go unnoticed.

In mid-2013, India’s largest drugmaker, Ranbaxy, pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to several criminal offenses relating to the fraudulent manufacture and sale of adulterated drugs. (The United States is the biggest importer of generic Indian drugs.) Among other revelations, Ranbaxy’s executives acknowledged that “more than 200 products in more than 40 countries” are affected by “elements of data that were fabricated to support [Ranbaxy’s] business needs.” In other words, Ranbaxy made up facts and figures to demonstrate product safety for myriad drugs, including critical HIV medicines paid for by U.S. tax dollars and destined for the poor in Africa. As a consequence, the company was fined $500 million.