http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/171262/man-says-he-was-paid-to-spy-on-muslim-groups

Man Says He Was Paid To Spy On Muslim Groups
By: Dean Meminger

Muslim groups have long complained that the NYPD has targeted them for surveillance and now a self-described informant has come forward to say he was doing more than spying. NY1's Dean Meminger filed the following report.
Outraged members of the Muslim Student Association at John Jay College say Shamiur Rahman told them he was a paid informant of the police after pretending to be a part of their group.

"It felt like someone stabbed you in the back right there, someone you trust too much, someone you reach out to, someone you try to help out," said Syedtalha Shahbaz, a student at John Jay College.

The Muslim students at John Jay said that Rahman said he was sorry for spying on them in a Facebook message this month. Shahbaz, the president of the association, said they went on Muslim retreats together and he even invited Rahman into his home.

Shahbaz said that Rahman told the group that they were not doing any illegal activities.

"Definitely not," Shahbaz said. "We actually asked him that, and he admitted that he wasted his time over here because obviously we are not doing any illegal activities over here."

The Associated Press reports Rahman was paid up to $1,000 a month to infiltrate groups and mosques and take pictures.

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/22/will_the_next_911_happen_online/

MONDAY, OCT 22, 2012 09:45 AM EDT
Will the next 9/11 happen online?
The secretary of defense claims cyber war is imminent. Its real threat may be to our constitutional liberties
BY KAREN GREENBERG, TOMDISPATCH.COM

(Credit: AP/Paul J. RIchards)
This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.
First the financial system collapses and it’s impossible to access one’s money. Then the power and water systems stop functioning. Within days, society has begun to break down. In the cities, mothers and fathers roam the streets, foraging for food. The country finds itself fractured and fragmented — hardly recognizable.

It may sound like a scene from a zombie apocalypse movie or the first episode of NBC’s popular new show “Revolution,” but it could be your life — a nationwide cyber-version of Ground Zero.

Think of it as 9/11/2015. It’s Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s vision of the future — and if he’s right (or maybe even if he isn’t), you better wonder what the future holds for erstwhile American civil liberties, privacy, and constitutional protections.

Last week, Panetta addressed the Business Executives for National Security, an organization devoted to creating a robust public-private partnership in matters of national security. Standing inside the Intrepid, New York’s retired aircraft-carrier-cum-military-museum, he offered a hair-raising warning about an imminent and devastating cyber strike at the sinews of American life and wellbeing.

Yes, he did use that old alarm bell of a “cyber Pearl Harbor,” but for anyone interested in American civil liberties and rights, his truly chilling image was far more immediate. “A cyber attack perpetrated by nation states or violent extremist groups,” he predicted, “could be as destructive as the terrorist attack of 9/11.”

Panetta is not the first Obama official to warn that the nation could be facing a cyber catastrophe, but he is the highest-ranking to resort to 9/11 imagery in doing so. Going out on a limb that previous cyber doomsayers had avoided, he mentioned September 11th four times in his speech, referring to our current vulnerabilities in cyber space as “a pre-9/11 moment.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/10/20/romney-family-investment-ties-to-voting-machine-company-that-could-decide...

Rick Ungar, Contributor
Writing from the left on politics and policy.
OP/ED | 10/20/2012 @ 8:32PM |278,326 views
Romney Family Investment Ties To Voting Machine Company That Could Decide The Election Causing Concern

(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

It’s 3:00 a.m. on November 7, 2012.

With the painfully close presidential election now down to who wins the battleground state of Ohio, no network dares to call the race and risk repeating the mistakes of 2000 when a few networks jumped the gun on picking a winner.

As the magic boards used by the networks go ‘up close and personal’ on every county in the Buckeye State, word begins to circulate that there might be a snafu with some electronic voting machines in a number of Cincinnati based precincts. There have already been complaints that broken machines were not being quickly replaced in precincts that tend to lean Democratic and now, word is coming in that there may be some software issues.

The network political departments get busy and, in short order, discover that the machines used in Hamilton County, Ohio—the county home of Cincinnati— are supplied by Hart Intercivic, a national provider of voting systems in use in a wide variety of counties scattered throughout the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Hawaii, Colorado and Ohio.

A quick Internet search reveals that there may be reason for concern.

A test conducted in 2007 by the Ohio Secretary of State revealed that five of the electronic voting systems the state was looking to use in the upcoming 2008 presidential election had failed badly, each easily susceptible to chicanery that could alter the results of an election.

As reported in the New York Times, “At polling stations, teams working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software into servers.”

We learn that one of the companies whose machines had failed was none other than Hart Intercivic.

With television time to fill and no ability to declare a winner so that the long night’s broadcast can be brought to a close, the staffs keep digging for relevant information to keep the attention of their viewers—and that is when it gets very real.

It turns out that Hart Intercivic is owned, in large part, by H.I.G. Capital—a large investment fund with billions of dollars under management—that was founded by a fellow named Tony Tamer. While is is unclear just how much H.I.G. owns of Hart Intercivic, we do learn that H.I.G. employees hold at least two of the five Hart Intercivic board seats.

Professor Graeme MacQueen and I are pleased to announce two new, peer reviewed articles that have been published at the Journal of 9/11 Studies.

The first is from German journalist Paul Schreyer and is titled Anomalies of the air defense on 9/11.

This paper identifies six major, simultaneous anomalies that occurred on September 11, 2001 with regard to the national air defenses. Here is an excerpt:

“The official explanation for the detour is that air traffic controllers at Langley had sort of a standard flight plan, sending all jets generally to the east and that this standardized eastern heading somehow replaced the original NORAD scramble order. But this seems to be a dubious claim. Because how could that have happened? The pilots knew the original scramble order. They knew which direction NEADS wanted them to fly. And then they somehow forgot? But, same as with the Otis scramble, there seems only little chance to dig deeper because ‘Giant Killer’, the responsible control facility, deleted all its tapes from the communication on 9/11."

The second article is from licensed structural engineer Ronald H. Brookman and is titled A Discussion of “Analysis of Structural Response of WTC 7 to Fire and Sequential Failures Leading to Collapse.”

This paper discusses a recent article published in the Journal of Structural Engineering, authored by a team including several of the primary NIST WTC report authors. Brookman’s discussion reviews how the NIST authors continue to ignore facts related to the construction of WTC 7 in their computer models, and how the basic information needed to verify those computer models remains unavailable to independent researchers. Here is an excerpt:

“The destruction of WTC 7 on September 11, 2001 and the final NCSTAR reports issued in 2008 raise many questions in addition to those outlined here, but one thing is certain: Thousands of hours of computer simulation are no substitute for a forensic investigation based on published national standards and well-established principles of scientific inquiry. “