Kid's Go To Jail For Doing It.............

Government-sponsored cyberattacks on the rise, McAfee says

Jon Brodkin, Network World

Governments and allied groups worldwide are using the Internet to spy and launch cyberattacks on their enemies, targeting critical systems including electricity, air traffic control, financial markets and government computer networks, according to McAfee's annual report examining global cybersecurity.

This year, China has been accused of launching attacks against the United States, India, Germany and Australia, but the Chinese are not alone: 120 countries including the United States are said to be launching Web espionage operations, according to McAfee's Virtual Criminology Report, issued today and developed with input from NATO, the FBI, the United Kingdom's Serious Organized Crime Agency, and various groups and universities.

"Cyber assaults have become more sophisticated in their nature, designed to specifically slip under the radar of government cyber defenses," McAfee states. "Attacks have progressed from initial curiosity probes to well-funded and well-organized operations for political, military, economic and technical espionage."

One attack against Estonia, allegedly carried out by Russia, disrupted government, news and bank servers for several weeks in April, McAfee notes. In the United States, a Pentagon computer network allegedly was hacked by China-based perpetrators in June, the McAfee report states.

The Internet is simply a great tool for gathering intelligence, both for world powers like the United States and China and small countries with limited resources, says David Marcus, security research and communications manager at McAfee Avert Labs.

He doesn't think cyberattacks will replace conventional warfare, but says they are becoming an important augmentation, with countries using technology to spread disinformation and disrupt communications. He also predicts it will be common for governments to license cybercriminals to attack enemies in a sort of privatized model. "We're already starting to see that with state-sponsored malware," he says. "I only think you're going to start seeing more than that because it's easier to attack government X's database than it is to nuke their troops."

McAfee said its research also found an increasing threat to banking and other online services, and "the emergence of a complex and sophisticated market for malware." Malware today is more complex than ever before, capable of acting as if it were genetically modified. "These 'super-strength' threats are more resilient, are modified over and over again like recombinant DNA," McAfee writes. "Nuwar ('Storm Worm') was the first example, and experts say there will be more examples in 2008."

VoIP is a new target of cybercriminals, and such social-networking applications as MySpace and Facebook are sure to be exploited more often, going forward, McAfee says. NATO insiders say many governments are unaware of the Web espionage threats and have left themselves open to cyberattack.

One aspect that might be overlooked is the economy that distributes the tools of cybercrime. Software flaws are sold for as much as US$75,000, and criminals can buy custom-written Trojans designed to steal credit card data. Additionally, McAfee says an "underground economy already includes specialized auction sites, product advertising and even support services, but now competition is so fierce that 'customer service' has become a specific selling point."


Copyright ©2007Computerworld, Inc.

Music......The Universal Language

After spending a week in French speaking Montreal, I realized how much of my mental activity is spent reading and listening to words in the environment. I experienced a spaciousness of mind when I only heard sound and saw images. I was much more aware of the truth at the source of the message. A truth rooted in feelings that are universal.

-SpringWind

80% Reduction 0f Global Warming Pollutants by 2050.......

We Can Stop Global Warming

By implementing new technologies, we can avert a potentially disastrous future.

By Sen. Bernie Sanders, TheNation.com
http://www.alternet.org/story/69178/

Scientists now tell us that the crisis of global warming is even worse than their earlier projections. Daily front-page headlines of environmental disasters give an inkling of what we can expect in the future, multiplied many times over: droughts, floods, severe weather disturbances, loss of drinking water and farmland and conflicts over declining natural resources.

Yet the situation is by no means hopeless. Major advances and technological breakthroughs are being made in the United States and throughout the world that are giving us the tools to cut carbon emissions dramatically, break our dependency on fossil fuels and move to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. In fact, the truth rarely uttered in Washington is that with strong governmental leadership the crisis of global warming is not only solvable; it can be done while improving the standard of living of the people of this country and others around the world. And it can be done with the knowledge and technology that we have today; future advances will only make the task easier.

What should we be doing now?

First, we need strong legislation that dramatically cuts back on carbon emissions. The Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act (S. 309), a bill that I introduced with Senator Barbara Boxer and that now has eighteen co-sponsors, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050.

Second, if the federal government begins the process of transforming our energy system by investing heavily in energy efficiency and sustainable energy, we can accomplish the 80 percent carbon reduction level and, at the same time, create millions of high-paying jobs.

Energy efficiency is the easiest, quickest and least expensive path toward the lowering of carbon emissions. My hometown of Burlington, Vermont, despite strong economic growth, consumes no more electricity today than it did sixteen years ago because of a successful effort to make our homes, offices, schools and other buildings more energy-efficient. In California, which has a growing economy, electric consumption per person has remained steady over the past twenty years because of that state's commitment to energy efficiency.

Numerous studies tell us that retrofitting older buildings and establishing strong efficiency standards for new construction can cut fuel and energy consumption by at least 40 percent. Those savings would increase with the adoption of new technologies such as LED light bulbs, which consume as little as 10 percent of the electricity that incandescent bulbs do and last twenty years.

Transportation must also be addressed in a serious manner. It is insane that we are driving cars today that get the same twenty-five miles per gallon that US cars did twenty years ago. If Europe and Japan can engineer their vehicles to average more than forty-four miles per gallon, we can do at least as well. Simply raising fuel-efficiency standards to forty miles per gallon would save roughly the same amount of oil as we import from Saudi Arabia and would dramatically lower carbon emissions. We should also rebuild and expand our decaying rail and subway systems and provide energy-efficient buses in rural America so that travelers have an alternative to the automobile.

Sustainable energies such as wind, solar and geothermal have tremendous potential and often cost no more than fossil fuels (and, in some cases, even less). Increased production and research should cause sustainable energy prices to decline steeply in the future.

Wind power is the fastest growing source of new energy in the world and in the United States, but we have barely begun to tap its potential. Denmark, for example, generates 20 percent of its electricity from wind. We should be supporting wind energy not only through the creation of large wind farms in the appropriate areas but through the use of small, inexpensive wind turbines available today that can be used in homes and farms throughout rural America. These small turbines can produce, depending on location, more than half the electricity that an average home consumes while saving consumers money on their electric bills.

Solar energy is another rapidly expanding technology. In Germany, a quarter of a million homes are now producing electricity through rooftop photovoltaic units, and the cost of that technology is expected to decline steeply. California is providing strong incentives so that 1 million homes will have solar units in the next ten years. The potential of solar energy, however, goes far beyond rooftop photovoltaic units. Right now, in Nevada, a solar plant is generating fifty-six megawatts of electricity. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the US Energy Department, "Solar energy represents a huge domestic energy resource for the United States, particularly in the Southwest where the deserts have some of the best solar resource levels in the world. For example, an area approximately 12 percent the size of Nevada has the potential to supply all of the electric needs of the United States."

As a strong indication of what the future holds, Pacific Gas and Electric, the largest electric utility in the country, has recently signed a contract to build a 535-megawatt solar thermal plant in the Mojave Desert. This plant, which should be operating in about four years, will have an output equivalent to a small nuclear power plant and will produce electricity for about 400,000 homes. Most important, the price of the electricity generated by this plant, about 10 cents per kilowatt hour, is competitive with other fuels today and will be much cheaper than other fuels by the end of the twenty-five-year contract. Experts in the industry say that dozens of these plants can be built within the next twenty years.

Geothermal energy, the heat from deep inside the earth, is another overlooked resource with real potential. It is free, renewable and can be used for electricity generation and direct heating. A recent report for the US Energy Department by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that geothermal could supply 100,000 megawatts of new carbon-free electricity at less than 10 cents per kilowatt hour, the going rate today. It is estimated that electricity from geothermal sources could provide 10 percent of the US baseload energy needs in 2050.

As the nation at last confronts global warming, it is no time for denial, greed, cynicism or pessimism. It is a time for vision and international leadership. It is a time for transforming our energy system from the polluting and carbon-emitting technologies of the nineteenth century into the unlimited and extraordinary energy possibilities of the twenty-first. When we do that we will not only solve the global warming crisis; we will open up unimaginable opportunities for improving life all over the planet.

Bernie Sanders is a U.S. Senator from Vermont.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/69178/

The Uncounted Casualties of War..............

120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week
By Penny Coleman, AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story/68713/


Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone -- and remember, this is just in 45 states -- there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.

As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, and as the author of a book for which I interviewed dozens of other women who had also lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for undertaking this long overdue investigation. I am also heartbroken that the numbers are so astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that there are hard numbers to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it will finally be taken seriously. I say tentatively because this is an administration that melts hard numbers on their tongues like communion wafers.

Since these new wars began, and in spite of a continuous flood of alarming reports, the Department of Defense has managed to keep what has clearly become an epidemic of death beneath the radar of public awareness by systematically concealing statistics about soldier suicides. They have done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call "accidental noncombat deaths" to outright lying to the parents of dead soldiers. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped their disinformation, continuing to insist that their studies indicate that soldiers are killing themselves, not because of their combat experiences, but because they have "personal problems."

Active-duty soldiers, however, are only part of the story. One of the well-known characteristics of post-traumatic stress injuries is that the onset of symptoms is often delayed, sometimes for decades. Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam are still taking their own lives because new PTSD symptoms have been triggered, or old ones retriggered, by stories and images from these new wars. Their deaths, like the deaths of more recent veterans, are written up in hometown newspapers; they are locally mourned, but officially ignored. The VA doesn't track or count them. It never has. Both the VA and the Pentagon deny that the problem exists and sanctimoniously point to a lack of evidence they have refused to gather.

They have managed this smoke and mirrors trick for decades in large part because suicide makes people so uncomfortable. It has often been called "that most secret death" because no one wants to talk about it. Over time, in different parts of the world, attitudes have fluctuated between the belief that the act is a sin, a right, a crime, a romantic gesture, an act of consummate bravery or a symptom of mental illness. It has never, however, been an emotionally neutral issue. In the United States, the rationalism of our legal system has acknowledged for 300 years that the act is almost always symptomatic of a mental illness. For those same 300 years, organized religions have stubbornly maintained that it's a sin. In fact, the very worst sin. The one that is never forgiven because it's too late to say you're sorry.

The contradiction between religious doctrine and secular law has left suicide in some kind of nether space in which the fundamentals of our systems of justice and belief are disrupted. A terrible crime has been committed, a murder, and yet there can be no restitution, no punishment. As sin or as mental illness, the origins of suicide live in the mind, illusive, invisible, associated with the mysterious, the secretive and the undisciplined, a kind of omnipresent Orange Alert. Beware the abnormal. Beware the Other.

For years now, this administration has been blasting us with high-decibel, righteous posturing about suicide bombers, those subhuman dastards who do the unthinkable, using their own bodies as lethal weapons. "Those people, they aren't like us; they don't value life the way we do," runs the familiar xenophobic subtext: And sometimes the text isn't even sub-: "Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania," proclaimed W, glibly conflating Sept. 11, the invasion of Iraq, Islam, fanatic fundamentalism and human bombs.

Bush has also expressed the opinion that suicide bombers are motivated by despair, neglect and poverty. The demographic statistics on suicide bombers suggest that this isn't the necessarily the case. Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists came from comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class families and were well-educated. Ironically, despair, neglect and poverty may be far more significant factors in the deaths of American soldiers and veterans who are taking their own lives.

Consider the 25 percent of enlistees and the 50 percent of reservists who have come back from the war with serious mental health issues. Despair seems an entirely appropriate response to the realization that the nightmares and flashbacks may never go away, that your ability to function in society and to manage relationships, work schedules or crowds will never be reliable. How not to despair if your prognosis is: Suck it up, soldier. This may never stop!

Neglect? The VA's current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the appalling conditions in many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, almost 6 million veterans and their families were without any healthcare at all. Most of them are working people -- too poor to afford private coverage, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans need help now, the help isn't there, and the conversations about what needs to be done are only just now beginning.

Poverty? The symptoms of post-traumatic stress injuries or traumatic brain injuries often make getting and keeping a job an insurmountable challenge. The New York Times reported last week that though veterans make up only 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless. If that doesn't translate into despair, neglect and poverty, well, I'm not sure the distinction is one worth quibbling about.

There is a particularly terrible irony in the relationship between suicide bombers and the suicides of American soldiers and veterans. With the possible exception of some few sadists and psychopaths, Americans don't enlist in the military because they want to kill civilians. And they don't sign up with the expectation of killing themselves. How incredibly sad that so many end up dying of remorse for having performed acts that so disturb their sense of moral selfhood that they sentence themselves to death.

There is something so smugly superior in the way we talk about suicide bombers and the cultures that produce them. But here is an unsettling thought. In 2005, 6,256 American veterans took their own lives. That same year, there were about 130 documented deaths of suicide bombers in Iraq.* Do the math. That's a ratio of 50-to-1. So who is it that is most effectively creating a culture of suicide and martyrdom? If George Bush is right, that it is despair, neglect and poverty that drive people to such acts, then isn't it worth pointing out that we are doing a far better job?

*I say "about" because in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, it is often very difficult for observers to determine how many individual bodies have been blown to pieces.

Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/68713/

Share the Love

Friday I took a pilgrimage to spend time with and be hugged by Amma. Her message is as presented on her website http://www.amma.org/ :

Amma has time and again emphasized that the duty of every human being is to realize his true Self, or in other words,' know who we really are.' She does not favor any particular religion. When asked to which religion she belongs, she says, “My religion is love and service.”

“ Love is the foundation of a happy life. Knowingly or unknowingly we are forgetting this truth” she says. Amma on several occasions has said that it is important not only to feel love but also to express it. “ After all, love is our true nature. When we do not express love in our words and actions it is like honey hidden in a rock. “ she says, “ It is of no use to anyone. This mutual sharing and expressing of love should begin at home between married couples and between parents and children. Only then will there be peace and harmony at home and in the society.”

Once when someone asked Amma as to whom she would term as a true disciple, Amma said that, “One whose legs rush to offer help, whose lips utter comforting words of love and whose eyes shed tears of compassion on hearing the cry of the distressed, such a person I would call a true disciple."