Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.
GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images ofYahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.
In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.
Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".
GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans' images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.
The documents also chronicle GCHQ's sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this material in the first place.Here's the thing. They spied on anyone, random people, to supposedly test the system. Or because they do spy on everyone. Hey there squeaky clean, that means you, too. From Time:
According to the documents, the British spy agency GCHQ snooped on “unselected” Yahoo users—that is, people who were spied on at random regardless of whether or not they were suspected of any wrongdoing—during webcam chats and took millions of still shots at five-minute intervals.From CNN:
The GCHQ estimated that up to 11% of the digital images it collected from the webcam chats were explicit, the Guardian reported, citing the leaked documents.Eleven per cent????!!!!
The outbreak of the mumps at Fordham University has spread from one campus to another.
There are now 13 reported cases, 12 at the Rose Hill campus in the Bronx and one at the Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan.
The symptoms are similar to the flu, but the virus can also cause painful swelling.
All of the infected patients had the mumps vaccine, but doctors say it's not 100 percent effective...From TechTimes:
Most kids in the United States receive mumps-containing vaccine but vaccination does not give guarantee that the disease will be avoided. "Studies suggest that the mumps vaccine is 80% to 90% effective," the NYC Health Department said. "That means that for every 100 people vaccinated, 80 to 90 of them will be fully protected, but 10 to 20 are at risk for the disease."
Health experts also said that vaccination does not give 100 percent protection. Dana Saltzman, a disease specialist, said that virus-induced immunity against a disease can wane. "The immunity that's induced by the virus starts to wane. They believe that it holds until at least late teenage years, but then it starts to wane," Saltzman said. "There's no way to predict who's going to lose their immunity or not."
Whenever government representatives from around the world meet, they’re often able to make progress in many areas of common interest: combating climate change, poverty, the drug trade, Islamic extremism, human trafficking and modern-day slavery, even cybercrime — the list is long. What these officials often fail to dwell upon is corruption. All of their nations suffer from it; they agree it’s a cancer of our age and should be stamped out. But they do precious little about it.
This is bizarre, when you consider the scale of the problem. What is corruption? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power.” And “by those in power” I would include those working for corporations and institutions that are part of the ruling elite.
According to the Tax Justice Network, an independent group promoting efforts to curb tax avoidance, crooked business people, working with corrupt officials, have embezzled $30 trillion over the last 15 years — or half of the world’s annual gross domestic product.
From China, nearly $4 trillion is thought to have disappeared between 2000 and 2011, much of it the profits of corruption, channeled into secret offshore financial havens. From Russia, the figure is close to $1 trillion. In the European Union, the total is put at $1.2 trillion.
In the West, the best-known figures linked to high-level fraud include Bernie Madoff, Allen Stanford, Jérôme Kerviel of Société Générale, Kweku Adoboli of UBS. And everyone knows of the subprime debt scandal and the criminal rigging of the Libor rate. In my country, Russia, there have been similar scams: the theft of $5 billion from Bank of Moscow; $4 billion from BTA Bank and AMT Bank; $4 billion from Rosukrenergo; $3 billion from Globex and Sviaz Bank; $2 billion from Russian Agricultural Bank; $1 billion from Rosagroleasing; and $1 billion from VEFK Bank.
Many of the perpetrators of these scams have been able to move abroad, where they draw upon the expertise of what I term the “financial services oligarchy” of international banks, law firms and accountants to ensure they can continue to live off the proceeds of their crimes. Some, like Andrei Borodin, former chief executive of Bank of Moscow, have been granted political asylum (Mr. Borodin, in Britain)....
If governments want to have any chance of recovering what has been lost, they must join together to create an international anticorruption force, along the lines of Interpol, to defeat these financial oligarchs...
Without such a body, it is difficult to see how the battle against corruption can be won. Ranged against national police forces and investigators is an entire corps of professional advisory firms well-versed in assisting those who want to put their wealth beyond the authorities’ reach. Aiding and abetting those who have committed fraud are offshore tax havens that structure their laws to help those seeking total secrecy and security. This oligarchy can be broken only if governments fight like with like — by creating a well-equipped sleuthing agency that is not afraid of anybody or aligned with any particular nation...
Governments around the world are struggling to raise funds to counter the global downturn, but they can’t simply keep increasing taxes on the middle- and higher-income brackets. Rather, they must pursue cash anywhere they can — and one source has to be the proceeds of corruption. (After all, in many cases, it’s government money that was spirited away in the first place.)
I propose a relatively cheap, effective solution to one of the world’s most pressing issues: an international body to police corruption. And we must have it now, not at some date far into the future. It’s our money — and we want it back.
Among 14,628 P&I deaths reported through the 122 Cities Mortality Reporting System from September 29, 2013 to February 8, 2014, a total of 571 (3.9%) were influenza-associated (i.e., they had influenza listed on the death certificate as an underlying or contributing cause of death), of which 352 (62%) were in persons aged 25-64 years, 194 (34%) in persons aged ≥65 years, and 25 (4%) in persons aged 0-24 years.The first thing to notice is that CDC likes to lump pneumonia and influenza numbers together. But when you only look at deaths, only 3.9% of deaths associated with pneumonia and/or influenza (in an area of 27 million Americans used by CDC for medical surveillance purposes) actually had influenza listed as a cause or contributor to death. That means over 96% were due to pneumonia in the absence of flu.
FIGURE 3. Rates of hospitalization for laboratory-confirmed influenza, by age group and surveillance week - FluSurv-NET,* 2013-14†
Between 2002 and 2011, KBR was the largest U.S. contractor operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, winning nearly $40 billion worth of federal work, according to the U.S. Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. KBR has been the subject of numerous lawsuits and allegations of fraud relating to contracts with the U.S. government, according to the war commission and the Justice Department.So the companies required employees to sign confidentiality statements that prohibited employees from speaking to government officials or anyone else, under penalty of termination and legal action. From the Washington Post:
One of the nation’s largest government contractors requires employees seeking to report fraud to sign internal confidentiality statements barring them from speaking to anyone about their allegations, including government investigators and prosecutors, according to a complaint filed Wednesday and corporate documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Attorneys for a whistleblower suing Halliburton Co. and its former subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, said the statements violate the federal False Claims Act and other laws designed to shield whistleblowers...
The phone hacking trial has heard details of an email sent by Rebekah Brooks in which she claims to have received advice from former Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Mrs Brooks spoke to Mr Blair on the telephone and passed on what he said to James Murdoch, who was then News International executive chairman, the Old Bailey trial heard.
The email read:
"Only got ten minutes before I see Charlie for confiscation!
But I had an hour on the phone to Tony Blair.
He said:
1. Form an independent unit that has a outside junior council, ken macdonald, a great and good type, a serious forensic criminal barrister, internal counsel, proper fact checkers etc in it. Get them to investigate me and others and publish a hutton style report.
2. Publish part one of the report at same time as the police closes its inquiry and clear you and accept short comings and new solutions and process and part two when any trials are over.
3. Keep strong and definitely sleeping pills. Need to have clear heads and remember no rash short term solutions as they only give you long term headaches.
4. It will pass. Tough up.
5. He is available for you, KRM and me as an unofficial adviser but needs to be between us.
He is sending more notes later."
Ken Macdonald, whom Mrs Brooks referred to in the email, is a former director of public prosecutions.
Mrs Brooks also said Tony Blair had urged her to set up a "Hutton style" inquiry. This was a reference to the inquiry into the death of government weapons adviser Dr David Kelly. Its report exonerated Mr Blair and other officials over flawed evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, including the so-called "dodgy dossier".
Fake-food scandal revealed as tests show third of products mislabelled
Consumers are being sold drinks with banned flame-retardant additives, pork in beef, and fake cheese, laboratory tests show
Consumers are being sold food including mozzarella that is less than half real cheese, ham on pizzas that is either poultry or "meat emulsion", and frozen prawns that are 50% water, according to tests by a public laboratory.
The checks on hundreds of food samples, which were taken in West Yorkshire, revealed that more than a third were not what they claimed to be, or were mislabelled in some way.
Their results have been shared with the Guardian.Testers also discovered beef mince adulterated with pork or poultry, and even a herbal slimming tea that was neither herb nor tea but glucose powder laced with a withdrawn prescription drug for obesity at 13 times the normal dose.
A third of fruit juices sampled were not what they claimed or had labelling errors. Two contained additives that are not permitted in the EU, including brominated vegetable oil, which is designed for use in flame retardants and linked to behavioural problems in rats at high doses.
Experts said they fear the alarming findings from 38% of 900 sample tests by West Yorkshire councils were representative of the picture nationally, with the public at increasing risk as budgets to detect fake or mislabelled foods plummet...
Ms. Malmstrom said the commission’s estimate that corruption costs Europe €120 billion, or roughly $162 billion, annually was almost certainly too conservative. The figure is equivalent to about 1 percent of the €11.7 trillion gross domestic product of the 28-nation European Union. Ms. Malmstrom did not provide a breakdown of how officials had arrived at the €120 billion figure...
Transparency International, a nonprofit organization that monitors corporate and government corruption, said in a statement that the report was “an important step in the E.U.’s collective effort to scale up its anti-corruption efforts.” But it noted the commission had failed “to issue detailed recommendations in the area of whistle-blowing, access to information and lobbying.”
...A survey of companies by the European Commission showed that 75 percent of businesses said corruption was widespread in their countries. The worst was the construction industry, where four out of five companies said so, including nearly 100 percent of construction companies in Greece, Spain and Italy.What the reader should not assume is that the problem is "over there". Here in the US, the stakes are bigger, the wars are larger, government contracting is over the top-- (for example, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to build the not-that-complicated healthcare.gov website that still had bugs when I checked it out this morning) and the fines and penalties issued (those rare times when they get issued) for corrupt activities have been insufficient to serve as a deterrent. I suspect that the drag on the economy caused by corruption, in all sectors, is the underlying reason why we cannot get over the recession. The gray money just doesn't get added to the economy--instead it winds up in offshore accounts. Or sweet deals. Or buys something really expensive, maybe under the wrong name.
... the GOP establishment is changing along with its elected officials; the RNC voted in a winter meeting to literally renounce NSA domestic surveillance. "It was passed by a voice vote as part of a package of RNC proposals," Benjy Sarlin reports. "Not a single member rose to object or call for further debate, as occurred for other resolutions." That's incredible, because it's almost impossible to exaggerate how unequivocally the resolution condemns the NSA...Here is the full text of the resolution that passed unanimously:
WHEREAS, the secret surveillance program called PRISM targets, among other things, the surveillance of U.S. citizens on a vast scale and monitors searching habits of virtually every American on the internet;
WHEREAS, this dragnet program is, as far as we know, the largest surveillance effort ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens, consisting of the mass acquisition of Americans’ call details encompassing all wireless and landline subscribers of the country’s three largest phone companies;
WHEREAS, every time an American citizen makes a phone call, the NSA gets a record of the location, the number called, the time of the call and the length of the conversation, all of which are an invasion into the personal lives of American citizens that violates the right of free speech and association afforded by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution;
WHEREAS, the mass collection and retention of personal data is in itself contrary to the right of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which guarantees the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, that warrants shall issue only upon probable cause, and generally prevents the American government from issuing modern-day writs of assistance;
WHEREAS, unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society and this program represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy and goes far beyond even the permissive limits set by the Patriot Act; and
WHEREAS, Republican House Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, an author of the Patriot Act and Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee at the time of Section 215′s passage, called the Section 215 surveillance program “an abuse of that law,” writing that, “based on the scope of the released order, both the administration and the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court are relying on an unbounded interpretation of the act that Congress never intended,” therefore be it
RESOLVED, the Republican National Committee encourages Republican lawmakers to enact legislation to amend Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make it clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity, phone records and correspondence — electronic, physical, and otherwise — of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court;
RESOLVED, the Republican National Committee encourages Republican lawmakers to call for a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying and the committee should create specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform ot end unconstitutional surveillance as well as hold accountable those public officials who are found to be responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance; and
RESOLVED, the Republican National Committee encourages Republican lawmakers to immediately take action to halt current unconstitutional surveillance programs and provide a full public accounting of the NSA’s data collection programs.
A government advisory panel said Thursday that the bulk data collection program run by the National Security Agency is illegal and should be halted.
Recommendations by the bipartisan Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which was created by Congress last decade with a mandate to conduct oversight and recommendations to preserve individual liberty, are sure to inflame the ongoing debate over the National Security Agency and its surveillance practices.
Full text of the report (.pdf)
Among the findings of the panel:
- Section 215 the Patriot Act “does not provide an adequate legal basis” to support the NSA’s collection of records of telephone calls, branding the practice illegal in the panel’s view.
- The NSA program violates a federal law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act which prohibits telephone companies from giving customer records to the government except in response to a specific search warrant.
- The data collection done under the Section 215 program “has shown minimal value in safeguarding the nation from terrorism.” The board members said that based on the classified briefings and documents they received, “we have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.”
"... In addition, late recognition of pregnancy, a moderate risk factor for many birth defects, including ASD, might explain the number of women vaccinated during their first trimester. After review of these data and discussions with the authors of this study, ACIP concluded that AVA is safe to administer during pregnancy but recommended that pregnant women defer vaccination unless exposure to anthrax poses an immediate risk for disease."This is a "blame the victim" strategy. If you got vaccinated while you were pregnant, the assumption is that you did not know you were pregnant, and therefore you were in a group with a higher than normal risk of adverse birth outcomes. And that was the problem, not anthrax vaccine! What a convenient, non-data-driven assumption.
RT: ... who is administering the surveillance?
Tice: That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer to that. It looked like, the plugging in of these phone numbers was being done in the evenings at NSA. So almost it was like being done on the sly even so that most NSA employees did not know what was going on. Now, a high-level person at NSA told me this was being directed from the vice president’s office. That would be Vice-President Dick Cheney. I don’t know that for sure but that’s what I was told from a very senior person at NSA.
Tice: ... I noticed that the intelligence community is not being hit with the sequester, the intelligence budget. Well, how is that possible? Is there some kind of leverage that is being placed on our three branches of government, to make sure that the intelligence community gets what they want? In other words, is the intelligence community running this country, not our government?
... Tice: What’s different about this is at the Orwellian scale. This is the everything scale. This is not just Richard Nixon going after a few, you know, enemies’ list. This is everybody and everything. And now NSA is literally tapping every communication, every digital communication in this country, content, not just the metadata, the content. And when they’re saying, “well, it’s not that far,”once again, they’re lying. They continue to lie about the full capability.
... Tice: Well, I sort of consider this sort of a, the light police state. Because they’re hiding the fact that it is a police state. I mean the fact that they can literally go into all of our communications, all of the digital communications, the fact that … It’s been disclosed recently that the post office is now doing a cover on every tangible letter that goes to the post office. They’re taking the picture of everything. They’re looking at the return address and they’re looking at the main address at who is mailing something. And that is also being digitally stored. So every means of communication in this country, everything is being watched by the federal government. And that is Orwellian and that is a trademark of a police state.
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks.
While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet, according to N.S.A. documents, computer experts and American officials.
The technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target...
Among the most frequent targets of the N.S.A. and its Pentagon partner, United States Cyber Command, have been units of the Chinese Army, which the United States has accused of launching regular digital probes and attacks on American industrial and military targets, usually to steal secrets or intellectual property. But the program, code-named Quantum, has also been successful in inserting software into Russian military networks and systems used by the Mexican police and drug cartels, trade institutions inside the European Union…
Over the past two months, parts of the program have been disclosed in documents from the trove leaked by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor. A Dutch newspaper published the map of areas where theUnited States has inserted spy software, sometimes in cooperation with local authorities, often covertly. Der Spiegel, a German newsmagazine, published the N.S.A.’s catalog of hardware products that can secretly transmit and receive digital signals from computers, a program called ANT...
Computers are not the only targets. Dropoutjeep attacks iPhones. Other hardware and software are designed to infect large network servers, including those made by the Chinese.
Most of those code names and products are now at least five years old, and they have been updated, some experts say, to make the United States less dependent on physically getting hardware into adversaries’ computer systems…
... In December 2008, the [Israeli Medical Association] investigative committee published a report, which found grave fault with the way in which soldiers were recruited for the experiment, and the unscrupulous methods for achieving the soldiers’ consent – which included failure to inform them of the risks associated with the experiment.
In 2010, 92 soldiers filed a lawsuit against the government, through attorney Boaz Ben Zur. The lawsuit’s complaint included a statement that the ordeal involved an “experiment on human beings” who did not agree to participate.
Many participants have developed medical problems in the years subsequent to the experiment. The settlement agreement calls on the government to admit that side effects from the experimental inoculation have been found in some of the participants. These side effects were labeled by the government as “few and far between,” and included – among others – Crohn’s disease, thyroid inflammation, [both of which were strongly correlated with the vaccination in US troops--Nass] allergic dermatitis reactions and temporary kidney failure.
Although the settlement agreement did not force the government to take responsibility for the side effects, it was written that “in some cases, and in light of the specific circumstances of every case, it was determined, based on medical knowledge, that correlation between the aforementioned side effects and receiving the inoculation cannot be denied.”
... A letter for participants and their families from the Victims of Anthrax Experimentation committee read, “After seven years of long, difficult struggle, we won. We set out to combat the IDF’s moral image as a Jewish army; we were not seeking reparations. What we fought for is an IDF that does not experiment on human beings, its soldiers, as if they are lower than lab animals, and then evades responsibility for the consequences. We’ve returned honor to the IDF command, but it’s a shame we had to do so through the courts...”
The Defense Ministry will pay out tens of thousands shekels in compensation to every one of the 716 soldiers and officers who agreed to take part in a once secret anthrax vaccine trial, following a compromise deal to settle lawsuits filed by dozens of volunteers who suffered negative side effects after being injected.
The vaccine trial, named Omer 2, took place between 1998 and 2006, and sought volunteers from elite IDF units. Following the trial, a number of participants complained of side effects such as breathing problems and skin conditions.
Link: MoD failed to supervise anthrax vaccine tests
Ninety one soldiers who sued the Defense Ministry will receive NIS 36,000 each, while the remainder of the trial’s participants will receive NIS 27,000 each, amounting to a compensation package of more than NIS 20 million.
In a joint statement released by the Defense and Justice ministries, the state denied wrongdoing, saying, “More than a decade ago, the defense establishment concluded that Israeli civilians and soldiers faced a tangible threat from anthrax attacks, possibly via missile attacks, and that defense measures were essential against this unconventional threat. In line with this assessment, the Defense Ministry began developing a vaccine in Israel which was based on an American vaccine, in order to provide a solution to members of the security forces and civilians.”
The statement added that military medical researchers who developed the vaccine “did not expect any dangerous side effects,” and that “the vaccine used in the research contains materials that exist in many vaccines given to babies on a regular basis, such as for tetanus and hepatitis.”
The research “was carried out in the safest way” on volunteers, the statement continued.
Defense figures said they took into account the fact that those who sued were volunteers, and as a result, the Defense Ministry decided to settle the issue through compensation, it said.
The Medical Research Administration, which operates under the IDF’s Chief Medical Officer, will provide care for volunteers, while a financial fund will be created to handle compensation payments.
During the trial period, a quarter of participants were given an American version of the vaccine, while 75 percent were injected with the Israeli vaccine, which had not been previously tested. Members of both groups went on to suffer side effects.
The trial program had in the past been severely criticized by the Israel Medical Association.
In 2009, the Defense Ministry, responding to lawsuits and criticism, said, “Thanks to Omer 2, Israel has a medical reply for the general public against a most severe threat.
We thank the volunteers and appreciate their willingness to take part in this important trial, and their contribution to the general security of residents of Israel.” It went on to say that the Israeli vaccine is as safe as the anthrax vaccine developed by the US.
Those who sued raised questions over the way the vaccine trial was conducted, and challenged the adequacy of the monitoring of volunteers and the subsequent care provided to them.
Those who question vaccination programs are kooks or quacks, the press repeatedly tells us. The Globe and Mail, CBS News, Mother Jones and even scientific journals like Nature label skeptics as "vaccination deniers," much as global warming skeptics are called "deniers."
Slate magazine, citing the medical journal Vaccine, deplores "the global anti-vaccination movement [as] a loose coalition of rogue scientists, journalists, parents, and celebrities, who think that vaccines cause disorders like autism - a claim that has been thoroughly discredited by modern science." Commentary, a serious publication that covers politics, refers to skeptics as "vaccination truthers."
This wholesale demeaning of vaccine skeptics defies explanation. Granted, kooks and quacks exist in the vaccination field, just as they exist elsewhere. But why taint the skeptics as a whole, and fail to respectfully report dissenting views? No journalist would have had any difficulty finding dozens of distinguished skeptical scientists for the very few "rogue" scientists that the press has vilified.
How hard, for example, should it have been for the press to notice the views of Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former head of the National Institute of Health, the former head of the American Red Cross, and the former Chair of the White House Cabinet Group on Biotechnology, one of several White House positions she held in service to three U.S. presidents.
Dr. Healy criticized the public health establishment for being "too quick to dismiss [vaccine concerns] as irrational...The more you delve into it, if you look at the basic science, if you look at the research that's been done in animals, if you also look at some of these individual cases, and if you look at the evidence... what you come away with is that the question [of vaccine safety] has not been answered."
Dr. Healy's views would have been particularly easy to find because they were actually aired by one of America's leading journalists, Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News, in one of the rare instances in which the mainstream press fairly presented a skeptic's perspective on the vaccine issue.
Journalists should also have had no trouble finding Dr. Diane Harper, a lead developer of the controversial Gardasil vaccine and another interviewee of Attkisson's. Dr. Harper believes this vaccine, which is being recommended for teens and pre-teens to combat cervical cancer, is less effective than the common Pap smear, and that it may harm more children than it helps. "Parents and women must know that deaths occurred," she stated in arguing that parents need to know that they could be subjecting their children to needless risks.
Journalists might have sought the views of skeptics among academics. At the University of British Columbia, for example, researchers Chris Shaw and Lucija Tomljenovic in the Faculty of Medicine state that the cervical cancer vaccine may lead to death among susceptible members of the population.
Their views have been quite public, as were those of Professor Walter Spitzer of McGill University, considered Canada's "dean" of epidemiology. In 2002 testimony to a U.S. Congressional committee hearing into the safety of various childhood vaccines, he matter-of-factly stated that, based on the evidence to date involving one of the vaccine combinations under scrutiny, "I cannot recommend it ... for my own grandchildren."
Finally, journalists who place special stock in the credibility of government scientists might have noticed the views of none other than Peter Fletcher, former Chief Scientific Officer at the UK's Department of Health.
Dr. Fletcher was also the Medical Assessor to the Committee on Safety of Medicines, and thus the very person who determined for the UK government whether vaccines were safe. Dr. Fletcher has several times gone public with his concerns over vaccines, and with his frustration that "no one in authority will even admit [a vaccine-related problem could be] happening, let alone try to investigate the causes."
Those who are labelled as anti-vaccination rogue scientists are hardly rogues -- they are found at the pinnacle of the medical establishment. And they are hardly anti-vaccination. All of the scientists that I mention in this article value vaccines for the great good that they can do. Their opposition is to mass vaccination of the population, which discounts the risk that people with certain predispositions can react badly to various vaccines, just as people with certain predispositions can react badly to various prescription drugs.
Identify the vulnerable populations, the skeptics say, so that all can be confident when vaccines are administered. For this, they deserve our appreciation, not our ridicule.
LOS ANGELES — A sweeping bill intended to rein in the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is making its way through the halls of Sacramento.
The California State Senate has voted overwhelmingly to approve Senate Resolution 16, which calls on lawmakers in Washington to take action against the NSA.
Passed in a bipartisan 31-1 vote on Monday, Senate Resolution 16 (PDF) bans state agencies, officials, and corporations from giving any material support, participation or assistance to any federal agency to collect electronic or metadata — including emails and text messages — of any person unless a warrant is issued that specifically describes the person, place and thing to be searched or seized.
Sen. Ted Lieu, who co-authored SR 16 with Assemblyman Joel Anderson (R-San Diego), said the legislation comes in response to recent revelations of the NSA’s “massive phone and internetrecords collection program on Americans.”
“The NSA is violating our Constitutional rights on a daily basis by doing a blanket search-and-seizure of all our phone records of every American for the last several years, and I want to put a stop to that,” Lieu said...
