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Canada Manual: US Prisoners Face Torture

Friday, January 18th, 2008

A training manual for Canadian diplomats lists the United States as a country where prisoners risk torture and abuse, citing interrogation techniques such as stripping prisoners, blindfolding and sleep deprivation.

The Foreign Affairs Department document, released Friday, singled out the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay. It also names Israel, Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Syria as places where inmates could face torture.

The listing drew a sharp response from the U.S., a key NATO ally and trading partner, which asked to removed from the manual.

“We find it to be offensive for us to be on the same list with countries like Iran and China. Quite frankly it’s absurd,” U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins told The Associated Press. “For us to be on a list like that is just ridiculous.”

He said the U.S. does not authorize or condone torture. “We think it should be removed and we’ve made that request. We have voiced our opinion very forcefully,” Wilkins said.

Michael Mendel, the Israeli Embassy spokesman, said Israel’s Supreme Court “is on record as expressly prohibiting any type of torture. If Israel is included in the list in question, the ambassador of Israel would expect its removal,” he said.

A Canadian citizen, Omar Khadr, is in custody at Guantanamo, but Canada has long publicly said it accepts U.S. assurances that Khadr is being treated humanely.

The government inadvertently released the manual to lawyers for Amnesty International who are working on a lawsuit involving alleged abuse of Afghan detainees by local Afghan authorities, after the detainees were handed over by Canadian troops.

Canada said the manual is for training, and does not amount to official government policy.

“It is not a policy document or any kind of a statement of policy. As such it does not convey the government’s views or positions,” said Neil Hrab, a spokesman for Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department.

“The training manual purposely raised public issues to stimulate discussion and debate in the classroom.”

Human rights groups have long called on Canada to pressure the United States to return Khadr from Guantanamo. They say not done enough for Khadr, who has been in custody since he was 15. Khadr is accused of tossing a grenade that killed one U.S. soldier and wounded another in Afghanistan in 2002.

He is the son of an alleged al-Qaida financier, and his family has received little sympathy in Canada, where they’ve been called the “First Family of Terrorism.”

Dennis Edney, one of Khadr’s lawyers, said the foreign affairs document shows that Canada says one thing publicly but believes something else privately.

“Canada was well aware that Omar Khadr’s allegations of being tortured had a ring of truth to it. Canada has not once raised the protection of Omar Khadr when there are such serious allegations,” Edney said. “What does that say to you about Canada’s commitment to the rule of law and human rights? It talks on both sides of its face.”

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US considering Pakistan incursion

Friday, January 18th, 2008

The US Defense Secretary says his country is trying to understand ground realities before taking any action inside northwestern Pakistan.

“We’re trying to make sure we understand the ground truth before we take any action so that it is not be misperceived,” The Daily Times quoted Robert Gates as saying.

“We’re assessing what value we could have, or any other ally could have, in contributing to their security,” he added.

“This has always been an area that has not been fully under the control of the Pakistani government or where there has been a significant military presence,” he added.

Washington is reportedly considering military operations inside Pakistan allegedly to hunt militants who use the country’s tribal regions as hideouts.

US-led forces have already launched several air strikes on North Waziristan and in the Bajaur tribal area, killing dozens of civilians.

JR/ RE

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CIA Corporate Spying

Friday, January 18th, 2008

They’re leaving “the Company” to snoop on your company. How C.I.A. agents are pushing corporate espionage to ominous new extremes.

Douglas Frantz

spies

Photograph by: Matt Hoyle

In early September 2006, a vice president of Wal-Mart sent a highly personal email to his boss through what he thought was a safe email account. “My Gmail is secure,” Sean Womack assured Julie Ann Roehm, the company’s senior vice president for marketing communications. “Write to me. Tell me something, anything…. I feel the need to be inside your head if I cannot be near you.”

Roehm had persuaded the company to hire Womack only three months before. “I hate not being able to call you or write you,” she replied. “I think about us together all of the time. Little moments like watching your face when you kiss me. I loved your voicemail last night and love the idea of memory and kept thinking/wishing that it would have been you and I there last night.” Then she signed off, saying she had to take her two children to the park.

Unfortunately for Roehm and Womack, who were both married to other people, their intimate email exchanges would become public in a legal dispute between Roehm and their employer. Wal-Mart learned about the relationship while investigating Roehm for accepting gifts from an ad agency that received a huge contract with the retailer. Ultimately, Wal-Mart fired both execs for violating company policy and later accused them of carrying out a love affair on company time.

Largely overlooked in the furor was the role that Wal-Mart’s internal security department had played in digging up the salacious details. This department, a global operation, was headed by a former senior security officer for the Central Intelligence Agency and staffed by former agents from the C.I.A., the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other government agencies. (See our Spy Slang guide) A person familiar with the episode said in an interview that an ex-C.I.A. computer specialist was involved in piecing together the email evidence—which included copies of Womack’s private Gmail messages, provided by his estranged wife—and that another former government agent had supervised the overall investigation.

Ex-government agents appear to be Wal-Mart’s investigators of choice. The retailer has emailed job listings to members of the Association for Intelligence Officers as well as posted ads on its site seeking to hire “global threat analysts” with backgrounds in intelligence. The job description for the analysts, who would have reported to a former Army intelligence officer, entailed collecting information from “professional contacts” to gauge threats from “suspect individuals and groups.” In practice, their responsibilities would have extended to gathering information about Wal-Mart employees, suppliers, and customers; Wal-Mart monitors shoppers for suspicious or potentially criminal activity. A Wal-Mart spokesman said the company does not comment on security matters.

Roehm sued the retailer for breach of contract over her firing but dropped her case in November. She has denied all wrongdoing, including the affair.

Sam Morgan, Roehm’s lawyer, declined to discuss the suit. But corporate espionage is becoming almost as sophisticated as government spying. Morgan said, “There is no right to privacy in the private-sector workplace.”

Roehm and Womack were unwittingly drawn into a new world of intrigue in which rivalries between superpowers have been replaced by global competition among the titans of capitalism, where companies use the most advanced techniques available to scrutinize competitors and employees alike. From New York and London to Moscow and Beijing, today’s corporations are venturing into a netherworld populated by former agents who have been schooled in the arts of detection and deception by the C.I.A., the F.B.I., Britain’s secret services, and the former Soviet Union’s K.G.B. Instead of probing for state secrets or recruiting government ministers as double agents, these latter-day George Smileys are selling their old skills and contacts to multinationals, hedge funds, and oligarchs. They’re digging up dirt on competitors, ferreting out internal corruption, and uncovering secrets buried in the pasts of job applicants, boardroom rivals, and investment targets.

The best estimate is that several hundred former intelligence agents now work in corporate espionage, including some who left the C.I.A. during the agency turmoil that followed 9/11. They quickly joined private-investigation firms whose U.S. corporate clients were planning to expand into Russia, China, and other countries with opaque business practices and few public records, and who needed the skinny on international partners or rivals.

These ex-spies apply a higher level of expertise, honed by government service, to the cruder tactics already practiced by private investigators. One such ploy is pretexting—obtaining information by pretending to be somebody else. While private detectives have long posed as freelance reporters or job recruiters to get people to talk, former agents have elevated pretexting to an art.

At Diligence, a New York private-investigation firm founded by former C.I.A. and British agents, ex-intelligence officers have taught newcomers how to construct false identities by using fake business cards, creating phony websites, and directing incoming calls to cell phones reserved for each separate identity. “You are establishing a cover, like in the C.I.A.,” said a former Diligence employee, adding that there are people who know investigators only by their phony identities.

Similarly, ex-agents have helped popularize the use of G.P.S.-based monitoring devices and long-range cameras for following people around. One corporate-espionage technique comes straight from the C.I.A. playbook. In the constant search for the slightest edge, some hedge funds and investment companies have turned to a handful of private-investigation firms for a tactic that seems to fall between science and voodoo. Called tactical behavior assessment, it relies on dozens of verbal and nonverbal cues to determine whether someone is lying. Signs of potential deception include meandering off topic rather than sticking to the facts and excessive personal grooming, such as nervously picking lint off a jacket. This method was developed by former lie-detector experts from the C.I.A.’s Office of Security, which administers polygraph tests to keep agents honest and verify the stories of would-be defectors.

Don Carlson is the former chief executive of a Boston research-and-analysis firm, Business Intelligence Advisors, where ex-C.I.A. agents have turned the human-lie-detector technique into a business tool. Carlson said hedge fund managers have hired ex-C.I.A. polygraphers from B.I.A. to sit beside them as a company executive delivered a rosy business forecast. The former agents were supposed to signal the manager if they sensed that the executive was dissembling. Carlson said he is convinced that human lie detectors work, though others scoff at the notion.

B.I.A. did not return calls. But I was told that Cascade Investment, the vehicle set up by Microsoft founder Bill Gates to handle his wealth, was among the B.I.A. clients resorting to the human lie detector. Gates relied on B.I.A. investigators to analyze security risks in foreign countries that he and his wife, Melinda, plan to visit. Gates also employs a former C.I.A. agent as head of his personal security team.

Most of the ex-agents’ activities, from surveillance to lie detection, are perfectly legal. In the wake of the 2006 Hewlett-Packard scandal, detectives used pretexting to obtain the private telephone records of company directors, employees, and journalists. In an effort to track leaks to the media, federal law was tightened to prohibit using fraudulent means to obtain telephone records. Financial records were already off-limits. But federal law doesn’t forbid assuming a false identity to get other information—an area that ex-spies exploit.

Still, a few techniques favored by the spies-for-hire do appear to violate privacy statutes. One of these involves using “data haunts,” extreme methods of electronic monitoring such as tracking cell-phone calls and gathering emails by relying on secretly installed software to record computer keystrokes. An ex-C.I.A. agent described a group of his former colleagues who set up shop offshore so that they could tap into telephone calls—a practice prohibited by federal law—outside U.S. jurisdiction. “They call themselves the bad boys in the Bahamas,” he said.

Even some of the legal methods are controversial within the industry. Certain old-school firms won’t stoop to dumpster diving or stealing garbage—which is usually legal as long as the trash is on a curb or other public property—because they consider it unethical. They say that the prevalence of former intelligence agents in the field and the rise of unscrupulous tactics have tarnished a business that often struggles with its reputation. One longtime investigator complained that he recently lost business to some ex-C.I.A. officers who promised a potential client that they could obtain the phone and bank records of a target—something that is illegal in most cases.

The investigator told me that nearly every major security firm employs ex-agents, though most don’t break the law.
“But plenty of people are worried about the potential damage to all of us when someone gets caught,” the investigator says.

Penetrating the secret world of corporate espionage has never been easy, and spies are trained to leave no tracks. Still, when disputes like the Wal-Mart case become public, it’s increasingly likely that former intelligence officers are lurking in the background. For instance, in March 2007, Oracle, the software company, filed suit in San Francisco federal court against German rival SAP, accusing it of systematically and illegally downloading thousands of pieces of proprietary software. According to a source involved in the case, Oracle’s documentation featured an analysis by forensic computer experts who used to do top-secret work for the federal government. SAP’s chief executive, Henning Kagermann, acknowledged in July that “inappropriate downloads” had occurred, although he maintained that Oracle was not seriously harmed. The suit is pending.

Continue…

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Wal-Mart Spying: Good, Bad, Or Just The Future?

Friday, January 18th, 2008

Mel Duvall

Wal-Mart is used to finding its name on the front page of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, but in March of 2007 it found itself making news under very different circumstances.
Wal-Mart officially apologized to the Times and retail reporter Michael Barbaro after a member of its internal security organization was found to have secretly taped conversations between Wal-Mart employees and the Times reporter. Not only did Wal-Mart apologize to the reporter, chief executive H. Lee Scott phoned the chief executive of The New York Times to personally offer an explanation and convey the information that the technician involved, who had 19-years with the company, as well as a supervisor, had been fired.
But the matter did not end there. Weeks later, the fired technician, Bruce Gabbard, went public, telling The Wall Street Journal he was part of a larger, sophisticated surveillance operation at Wal-Mart. Gabbard said the retailer employs a variety of means, including software that can monitor every key stroke on the retailer’s network, to keep tabs not only on employees but also on its board of directors, stockholders, critics of the company, and in at least one instance, on a consultant, McKinsey & Co.
Wal-Mart later denied some of Gabbard’s allegations, in particular statements made that Wal-Mart had spied on its own directors as well as shareholders, but the incident cast a spotlight on the retailer’s normally secretive security organization. McKinsey & Co. was contacted by CIOZone to confirm Gabbard’s statement that Wal-Mart spied on its consultants, but spokesman Mark Garrett said because of the confidential nature of McKinsey’s work with clients, the firm declined to comment.
Kenneth Senser, a former top official at the C.I.A., heads the company’s global security operations. His lieutenants include a number of former government and defense department security specialists. David Harrison, a former member of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, heads the company’s analytic research center, which has a mandate to identify threats from suspect individuals and groups. Joseph Lewis, a 27-year FBI veteran, heads corporate investigations. And Steve Dozier, former director of the Arkansas State Police, is a VP in charge of corporate investigative services.
It is not unusual for Fortune 500 companies to hire law enforcement or intelligence experts for their security departments, but Wal-Mart actively recruits those with military or intelligence backgrounds. Last March it posted ads on its Web site and on sites for security professionals for “global threat analysts” with backgrounds in government or military intelligence.
“Like most major corporations, it is our corporate responsibility to have systems in place, including software systems, to monitor threats to our network, intellectual property and our people,” Wal-Mart spokeswoman Sarah Clark said in a statement in April. Following the Gabbard firing, Wal-Mart said it conducted a review of its monitoring activities. “There have been changes in leadership, and we have strengthened our practices and protocols in this area,” Clark said.
When contacted by CIOZone, Wal-Mart spokesman John Simley restated the company monitors threats using a variety of techniques, as would any company its size. “Every company has an obligation to its shareholders and to its employees to ensure that its information isn’t compromised,” Simley said. Simley would not, however, provide details on the security department reorganization.
To be fair, Wal-Mart is not the only company involved in a spying controversy. Other high-profile corporate spying incidents have drawn public attention to the fact that companies are using an increasing array of methods to snoop on, or monitor as is the preferred term, the everyday activities of employees, suppliers and customers on their networks.
In December a researcher in the anti-spyware unit of Computer Associates, revealed that Sears Holdings Corp. had installed spyware software in a program offered to customers via its “My SHC Community” shopping network that allowed Sears to track its members online browsing behavior.
Sears says it does disclose the tracking software in a privacy statement, but Harvard Business School assistant professor Ben Edelman has criticized the retailer, saying the disclosure is difficult to find and consumers rarely read such statements.
Boeing was the subject of a Seattle Post Intelligencer investigative story in November, which questioned its monitoring activities, including the reading of emails and videotaping of employees. Boeing spokesman Tim Neale said when employees log on to the corporate network they are fully informed that their activities are being monitored. He said only authorized personnel have the capability to monitor corporate systems and they do so only when they have reason to suspect abuse or misuse. “For example, it is against company policy for an employee to use company systems to run his or her own business,” Neal said. “Of course, it is also against company policy to share proprietary information with parties outside the company, unless authorized by management to do so.”
And, in probably the most publicized example, Hewlett-Packard found itself in hot water with California regulators in 2006 after it initiated an investigation of its own board of directors to discover the source of leaks to the media. The investigation included monitoring of emails and instant messages, as well as using illegal means to obtain telephone records of employees and journalists. The company was ordered to pay $14.5 million in fines and bring its internal investigations into compliance with California laws.
Most employees have now come to expect that their activities on corporate computers are being monitored to a certain degree.
But in 2008 CIOs will be increasingly drawn into discussions about who should be in charge of monitoring employees, what software tools should be deployed to protect corporate resources, and which electronic activities corporations should or shouldn’t watch. “There used to be an argument over whether we should be doing this at all,” says Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, an industry-sponsored research group and computer security training body. “It rarely comes up as an issue any more.”
David Zweig, an associate professor of organizational behavior with the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto who has written books on the issue of workplace monitoring, says that it is now believed close to 75% of employers have some form of electronic monitoring in the workplace.
Zweig is not against monitoring. He believes in today’s environment, where companies face a wide range of internal and external threats, some levels of monitoring are necessary. However, he believes the monitoring should be in relation to the risk, and that companies need to do more to inform employees exactly how they are being monitored and why. “If you give people a rational explanation for monitoring, they will at least see why the company is doing it,” he says. “But you should be open and inform them exactly how it’s being done and what controls are in place.
“It’s easy to monitor—it’s much more difficult to develop proper controls and processes,” he says.
Ira Winkler, president of Internet Security Advisors Group of Baltimore, Md., and author of books such as “Spies Among Us” and “Zen and the Art of Information Security,” doesn’t believe in coddling employees with lengthy disclosures and explanations for why monitoring is taking place. “Get over it. Companies need to protect themselves,” says Winkler. “The fact is nobody should have any expectations of privacy when they’re using the company’s computers.”
In fact, Winkler advocates companies apply a blanket approach to security and use of the Internet in particular. Simply tell employees or suppliers accessing a corporation’s network, they are being monitored and non-approved activities will not be tolerated. End of story.
Is that fair? “I think it’s totally fair,” he says. “If I want to go shop on eBay or download porn on a company computer, that’s my stupidity, not the company’s,” he says.
For many organizations the line will probably be drawn somewhere between Zweig’s and Winkler’s viewpoints. But what is clear is a mounting body of evidence points to the need for network monitoring against a wider definition of internal and external threats.

As the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart does often find itself a target for a wide range of protests and potential security threats. Its stores have been targeted by groups who feel its low wages contribute to the working poor and it has been the subject of frequent union protests over its healthcare policies. In December alone, Wal-Mart stores were evacuated for periods of time after bomb threats were reported at stores in Somerworth, N.H., Noblesville, Ind., Viera, Fla., Fruitland, Md., Fayetteville, Ark., Garden City, Kan., and Halifax, Nova Scotia.

At a gathering of security specialists in New York City in January of 2006, David Harrison, the former Army military intelligence officer who was hired by Senser to head Wal-Mart’s analytical security research center, provided a rare glimpse into the company’s monitoring operations. Harrison told the gathering Wal-Mart faces a wide range of threats: “A bombing in China, an armed robbery in Brazil, an armed robbery in Las Vegas, another bomb threat, and that was just yesterday,” Harrison said.

To safeguard its employees and operations Wal-Mart has tapped its massive data warehouse of information, now believed to be larger than 4 petabytes (4,000 terabytes), to look for potential threats. It tracks customers who buy propane tanks, for example, or anyone who has fraudulently cashed a check, or anyone making bulk purchases of pre-paid cell phones, which could be tied to criminal activities. “If you try to buy more than three cell phones at one time, it will be tracked,” he reportedly told the audience.

When CIOZone contacted Wal-Mart for comment on this story, the company said it would not provide further information or make its security officials available for interviews. It did not dispute Harrison’s reported statements.

But, according to one report, Kenneth Senser, the senior vice president of global security, aviation and travel, is in charge of an apparatus that spans the company’s global operations. Senser oversees a department with about 400 employees, according to an interview he gave last March to The New York Times. Heads of the company’s crisis management, investigative services, the analytical research center headed by Harrison, as well as individual departments assigned to address corporate fraud, security of the company’s headquarters in Fayetteville, Ark., and protection of the company’s top executives, all report directly or indirectly to Senser.

In its advertisements for “global threat analysts” last spring, the job description included collecting information from professional contacts and public data to assess threats coming from “world events, regional/national security climates, and suspect individuals and groups.”

Gabbard, the Wal-Mart employee fired for recording reporters’ phone calls, said in his interview with The Wall Street Journal that Wal-Mart uses software from Raytheon Oakley Networks to monitor activity on its network. The Oakley product was originally developed for the U.S. Department of Defense.

The Oakley software is so sophisticated it can allow administrators to visually see what types of information are moving across the network, from Excel spreadsheets to job searches on Monster.com, or photos with flesh tones that might indicate a user is viewing pornography.

Tom Bennett, senior vice president of Raytheon Oakley Networks, would not reveal the company’s customers other than the U.S. Department of Defense. However, the company does note its customers include 10 of the Fortune 100, including top U.S. retailers and manufacturers.

SOMETHING TO FEAR

There are good reasons why companies are turning to increasingly sophisticated monitoring tools. Some studies, such as one conducted in 2006 by the F.B.I., suggest as much as 70 percent of attacks originate from within an organization.

Not only that, but the definition of what constitutes and insider has changed. Companies now open up their corporate networks to a wide range of suppliers, consultants and customers, and that in turn opens up new avenues for security breaches and data leakage.

Consider some of the higher profile network security breaches of the past year:

Oracle sued rival SAP in March, alleging that employees of an SAP operating unit called TomorrowNow, based in Bryan Texas, stole proprietary information from Oracle’s network. In its suit Oracle claims that TomorrowNow employees used “the log-in credentials of Oracle customers with expired or soon-to-expire support rights,” and then “accessed and copied thousands of individual software and support materials.” Oracle alleges SAP then used the materials to offer “cut-rate” support deals to Oracle clients. In a statement, SAP responded to the suit by saying TomorrowNow was authorized to download materials from Oracle’s Web site on behalf of TomorrowNow customers. It says it will defend the lawsuits in hearings expected to resume in U.S. District Court in San Francisco early this year.
Formula One racing team McLaren Group was fined $100 million last September and excluded from the 2007 Constructors’ Championship, after it was revealed a former Ferrari employee took designs for special gases with him when he defected to McLaren. Ferrari was able to finger the culprit because it had deployed software from Verdasys of Waltham, Mass. which allows it to track individuals that access certain files.
WestJet Airlines, a Canadian discount airline, was forced to issue an apology in May 2006 to rival Air Canada and pay a $15.5 million penalty, after it admitted members of its management team accessed a password protected Air Canada employee Web site and downloaded competitive data. The WestJet employees used the Air Canada Web site to obtain detailed information on Air Canada flight loads.

Keith Rice, a vice president with the Threat Detection Engineering Group at Bank of America, notes that an insider may, in fact, be a partner working on critical application development overseas. “One thing we’re running into now is we’ve outsourced a lot of development to India and other locations,” says Rice. “We have very strict contractual rules in place, that state what they can do, what they cannot do, and what they must have installed on their networks. But that creates whole new issues for us.”

“It’s a constant battle,” adds Bruce Valentine, senior vice president in treasury management at Comerica Bank. Valentine is responsible for ensuring the security of the bank’s e-commerce and other customer facing applications. “We have what everyone wants - money. And data is the key to that money,” says Valentine. In today’s competitive banking environment, you have to open up your networks to customers, says Valentine, but that means you have to put systems in place to manage the risk.

Keith Carter, executive director of materials management systems with Estée Lauder, agrees that companies have to accept a certain amount of risk or trust when dealing with partners and suppliers. But, he says, that doesn’t mean blind trust. He shared a recent example of data leakage at a security conference in Palo Alto in November. Estée Lauder had designed a counter poster display it wanted to use in stores with its Bobbi Brown cosmetic line. “One of our competitors came out with it a month earlier, because the photographer, in this case, showed it to the competitor as a sample [of their work]. We couldn’t use it any longer, because we didn’t want to look like we were the ones who copied the idea,” says Carter.

In this case, the company ended its relationship with the photographer, but Carter says the incident demonstrates how easily competitive data can leak out of an organization without proper controls in place. It also demonstrates the kind of analysis companies need to perform to determine what types of data or files need to be protected.

CONTROLS REQUIRED

The consensus seems to be that in today’s environment, where corporate networks are increasingly exposed to insider and outside threats, companies must protect their data by putting controls, policies, and systems in place to monitor activity.

But if you accept it as a necessary evil, how do you go about putting systems and policies in place, and making sure employees, partners and suppliers abide by those policies?

“When we hear people tell horror stories, so often the breakdown is in the area of communication,” says Robin Ruefle, a member of the technical staff at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT).

“The right people didn’t get told in the right time frame, the information didn’t get to the right people who could effect change, people didn’t know what the right policies or procedures were . . . there’s a breakdown in process.” Ruefle’s team is involved in developing security best practices for organizations, including creating Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) to respond to security incidents as they happen.

“A lot of people think it’s just about technology, but really, developing and having the right processes in place is critical,” says Ruefle. “It’s about being prepared. What’s your plan? Who’s involved? Do they know what to do when something’s happened? Do they know what the policies and procedures are? Do they know how to escalate?

“Having those processes in place, along with the right education, is key.”

Zweig, the associate professor of organizational behavior with the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, says while monitoring may be a necessary evil, companies should resist the temptation of putting in systems that go beyond what is necessary.

He says there is a line that can be drawn between benign monitoring and intrusive, and Wal-Mart has crossed that line. “If you have to use a stick, make sure the stick is in relation to the behavior you’re trying to stop,” says Zweig. “People are going to rebel against the constant monitoring, and you know, Wal-Mart is going to reap what they sow.”

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‘Bush message one of confrontation’

Friday, January 18th, 2008

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blasts US President George W. Bush’s recent remarks on Iran in a live interview with Qatar’s Al-Jazeera TV.

“President Bush’s message is the message of division and confrontation and will not affect the Iranian people and neighboring countries,” said Ahmadinejad in a live interview televised by Al-Jazeera.

“Mr. Bush did not gain much in his visit. If Bush wished to polish his image domestically he should have taken better steps.”

“We considered the visit a failure from the very beginning and did not pay any attention to it,” he continued.

When asked about his recent visit to Doha to attend the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council summit, President Ahmadinejad said, “we have been living together for thousands of years”.

“We share the same religion, the same scripture, the same God, we are all brothers as you may have noticed the leaders and the peoples of the region are rapidly heading towards conversion and harmony,” he explained.

The Iranian president also answered questions about the situation in Iraq and Iran-US talks on the war-torn country’s security, saying, “regional stability depends on the stability of Iraq”.

“On the invitation of the Iraqi officials we staged a few rounds of talks aimed at defending Iraqi interests and at supporting the Iraqi government, which is elected by its people,” the Iranian president affirmed.

He noted that the fourth round of the Iran-US talks on Iraq’s security is still in the pipeline.

Turning to Israel the Iranian chief executive predicted Israel will not dare to attack Iran, despite its recent successful test of a ballistic missile.

“The Zionist regime lacks the courage to launch a strike against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Ahmadinejad observed.

He noted that the Israeli regime is aware that any strike on Iran will be confronted by a strong Iranian response.

Israel tested a long-range ballistic missile on Thursday capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

Israel is widely considered to be the Middle East’s sole nuclear power with an estimated but undeclared arsenal of upwards of 200 warheads.

MGH/AA/MMN/HSH/HAR

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Guiliani’s Daughter Supports Obama

Friday, January 18th, 2008

Well, that’s embarassing. We knew that Rudy Guiliani’s two kids are estranged from him since he dumped their mother for his mistress (and now third wife), but this is just humiliating for the candidate. According to her Facebook page, Rudy’s daughter Caroline supports Barack Obama for president, not her own father. She lists her political affiliation as liberal and — up until reporters started hounding her this morning — was a member of the Barack Obama support group “Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack).” After Slate broke the story and reporters started calling and emailing her, Caroline removed the mention of the Obama support group, but still lists herself as a liberal.

Rudy has not attended any of Caroline’s high school events, although he did show up at her graduation. But he didn’t even speak to his daughter nor did he participate in the graduation festivities with his ex-family. Guiliani’s son, Andrew, who is a junior at Duke, has not been shy in telling reporters how unhappy he is with his father’s behavior towards his mother and his family. Andrew has also discussed how he objects to his father’s marriage to Judith Nathan.

You remember Judith, right? The week before 9/11, the cover of People magazine screamed “The Mayor, His Wife and His Mistress.” The story went on to detail how Rudy moved his mistress into Gracie Mansion, humiliating his wife and children. Rudy can yell “9/11 Changed Everything!” all he wants on TV, but Rudy’s kids don’t seem impressed. By contrast, Chelsea Clinton is always by her mother’s side and is a passionate, poised and polished speaker on her mother’s behalf.

It does not look good to voters when your own family doesn’t think you’re qualified to be president. You just know John McCain thinks the whole thing is hilarious.

http://www.mediacynic.com/cgi-bin/mediacynic.pl?cynic=806071

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Truth About Antidepressants Kept From Public

Friday, January 18th, 2008

Sweeping Overview Suggests Suppression of Negative Data Has Distorted View of Drugs

By DAVID ARMSTRONG and KEITH J. WINSTEIN

The effectiveness of a dozen popular antidepressants has been exaggerated by selective publication of favorable results, according to a review of unpublished data submitted to the Food and Drug Administration.

As a result, doctors and patients are getting a distorted view of how well blockbuster antidepressants like Wyeth’s Effexor and Pfizer Inc.’s Zoloft really work, researchers asserted in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine.

Since the overwhelming amount of published data on the drugs show they are effective, doctors unaware of the unpublished data are making inappropriate prescribing decisions that aren’t in the best interest of their patients, according to researchers led by Erick Turner, a psychiatrist at Oregon Health & Science University. Sales of antidepressants total about $21 billion a year, according to IMS Health.

Wyeth and Pfizer declined to comment on the study results. Both companies said they had committed to disclose all study results, although not necessarily in medical journals. GlaxoSmithKline PLC, maker of Wellbutrin and Paxil, said it has posted the results of more than 3,000 trials involving 82 medications on its Web site, and also has filed information on 1,060 continuing trials at a federal government Web site.

Schering-Plough Corp., whose Organon Corp. unit markets Remeron, and Eli Lilly & Co., which makes Prozac, said their study results were indeed published — not individually, but as part of larger medical articles that combined data from more than one study at a time. The New England Journal study counted a clinical trial as published only if it was the sole subject of an article. “Lilly has a policy that we disclose and publish all the results from our clinical trials, regardless of the outcomes from them,” a Lilly spokeswoman said.

Pharmaceutical companies are under no obligation to publish the studies they sponsor and submit to the FDA, nor are the researchers they hire to do the work. The researchers publishing in the New England Journal were able to identify unpublished studies by obtaining and comparing documents filed by the companies with the FDA against databases of medical publications.

“There is no effort on the part of the FDA to withhold or to not post drug review documents,” an FDA representative said. For newer drugs, information is posted online “as soon as possible.” Older documents aren’t always available online and efforts to add those files to the Web are slowed by “a lack of resources,” the agency said, acknowledging that there is a backlog in complying with records requests.

A total of 74 studies involving a dozen antidepressants and 12,564 patients were registered with the FDA from 1987 through 2004. The FDA considered 38 of the studies to be positive. All but one of those studies was published, the researchers said.

The other 36 were found to have negative or questionable results by the FDA. Most of those studies — 22 out of 36 — weren’t published, the researchers found. Of the 14 that were published, the researchers said at least 11 of those studies mischaracterized the results and presented a negative study as positive.

Five Trials

For example, Pfizer submitted five trials on its drug Zoloft to the FDA, the study says. The drug seemed to work better than the placebo in two of them. In three other trials, the placebo did just as well at reducing indications of depression. Only the two favorable trials were published, researchers found, and Pfizer discusses only the positive results in Zoloft’s literature for doctors.

One way of turning the study results upside down is to ignore a negative finding for the “primary outcome” — the main question the study was designed to answer — and highlight a positive secondary outcome. In nine of the negative studies that were published, the authors simply omitted any mention of the primary outcome, the researchers said.

The resulting publication bias threatens to skew the medical professional’s understanding of how effective a drug is for a particular condition, the researchers say. This is particularly significant as the growing movement toward “evidence-based medicine” depends on analysis of published studies to make treatment decisions.

Colleagues’ Questions

Dr. Turner, who once worked at the FDA reviewing data on psychotropic drugs, said the idea for the study was triggered in part by colleagues who questioned the need for further clinical drug trials looking at the effectiveness of antidepressants.

“There is a view that these drugs are effective all the time,” he said. “I would say they only work 40% to 50% of the time,” based on his reviews of the research at the FDA, “and they would say, ‘What are you talking about? I have never seen a negative study.’” Dr. Turner, said he knew from his time with the agency that there were negative studies that hadn’t been published.

The suppression of negative studies isn’t a new concern. The tobacco industry was accused of sitting on research that showed nicotine was addictive, for instance. The issue has come up before notably with antidepressants: In 2004, the New York state attorney general sued GlaxoSmithKline for alleged fraud, saying it suppressed studies showing that the antidepressant Paxil was no better than a placebo in treating depression in children. Glaxo denied the charge and eventually settled with the attorney general. The company later posted on its Web site the full reports of all of the studies of Paxil in children.

[nejm]

But publication of negative studies is an issue that cuts across all medical specialties. And it has engendered some strong reactions in the medical-research world: To make it harder to conceal negative study findings, an association of medical journal editors began requiring in 2005 that clinical trials be publicly disclosed at the outset to be considered for publication later. The system isn’t foolproof, since manufacturers often run exploratory studies without registering them and can selectively disclose favorable results. The rule only applies to studies intended for publication in a medical journal.

Some studies that don’t eventually get published are registered with online trial registries, including the federal government’s www.clinicaltrials.gov. Nonetheless, many studies still aren’t being registered or reported, says Kay Dickersin, the director of the Center for Clinical Trials at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We need something more meaningful,” she said. “The average person has no idea that www.clinicaltrials.gov is not comprehensive.”

The New England Journal study also points to the need for the FDA to disclose more information about the studies it receives, says Robert Hedaya, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Georgetown University Hospital. He said it was “disturbing” that the information on the negative studies wasn’t made widely available by the FDA.

The FDA does post information, including unpublished studies, for some drugs on its Web site, says Dr. Turner. But information that hasn’t yet made it online is hard to come by. Dr. Turner said he made public records requests for information not on the Web site more than a year ago, but the requests have gone largely unfulfilled. He said he was able to get some of the FDA’s information on unpublished studies from other researchers who acquired it from the agency through their own record requests.

The ‘Effect Size’

In this week’s study, the researchers found that failing to publish negative findings inflated the reported effectiveness of all 12 of the antidepressants studied, which were approved between 1987 and 2004. The researchers used a measurement called effect size. The larger the effect size, the greater the impact of a treatment.

The average effect size of the antidepressant Zoloft rose 64% by the failure to publish negative or questionable data on the drug, the researchers found.

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VIDEO: The Truth About Google’s Privacy

Friday, January 18th, 2008

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Iraq War: 1,760 Days and Counting

Friday, January 18th, 2008

Sen. John McCain may have stunned some Americans with his projection that the U.S. occupation of Iraq could last 100 years or more. But the political pressures in Washington sometimes make ending a war more difficult than starting one.

In this guest essay, the Independent Institute’s Robert Higgs discusses what it might take to bring the troops home:

By Robert Higgs

On Oct. 19, 2001, in speaking about the new government controls and heightened surveillance already being clamped on the American people in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney said that the new war “may never end. At least not in our lifetime. . . . The way I think of it is, it’s a new normalcy.”

We should have taken his grim forecast more seriously.

The U.S. attack on and occupation of Iraq, represented by the Bush administration as a critical element in the larger Global War on Terror, began nearly five years ago, and it shows no signs of ending soon.

Indeed, if John McCain is elected president and (with help from his successors) carries out the not-so-veiled threat to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for a hundred years, then we can confidently expect that the war will not end in our lifetime. Such a prospect is so seemingly preposterous, however, that one’s mind does not readily assimilate it.

It is difficult enough to absorb the reality that the United States has now been at war against the Iraqis for almost five years. An engagement sold to the public as a “cakewalk” and represented just six weeks after it began as a “mission accomplished” has now (as I write) continued for 1,760 days.

Compare this duration with the time the United States was formally engaged in World War I (589 days) or World War II (1,365 days). In the 1940s, the U.S. forces (with important allies, to be sure) defeated two major economic and military powers in a globe-circling war in less time than the U.S. forces have been engaged in Iraq.

And after all this time, where does the U.S. venture stand? Evidently it is no closer to the “victory” the president has repeatedly said he seeks than it was immediately after the occupation began.

The 901 U.S. troops who lost their lives in Iraq during 2007 were the largest number in any calendar year since the war began.

As 2008 begins, we read reports of a U.S. air strike on the outskirts of Baghdad in which B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters dropped 40,000 pounds of explosives, an attack described by Major Alayne Conway as “one of the largest airstrikes since the onset of the war.”

The attack came only a day after six U.S. soldiers participating in a major ground offensive were reported killed in the “biggest one-day loss in Iraq since May.” These events do not epitomize minor “mopping up” activities. The war obviously has no end in sight.

Notwithstanding these inauspicious developments and Sen. McCain’s bizarre pronouncement, we might well think in a more focused way about what will ultimately bring the war to an end, because it almost certainly will end someday.

Given its nature, it cannot be ended as each of the world wars was ended, by the formal capitulation of an enemy state. Loosely organized insurgents and guerrillas do not stop fighting in that fashion.

In view of the particulars on the ground in Iraq, it would seem that no complete cessation of armed hostilities can occur there until the United States withdraws its military forces. So the question becomes: What will induce a future U.S. president or a future U.S. Congress to act decisively to bring the troops home?

In the abstract, the answer is easy: U.S. authorities will extract their occupation force when they perceive that doing so is in their interest. Note well that I said, “in their interest.”

Whether a U.S. withdrawal serves my interest, or yours, or that of 95 percent of the American people is not necessarily important, because government leaders do not act to serve other people’s interests.

Anyone who has advanced beyond infancy in his understanding of political affairs knows that despite all the dutiful claptrap that political leaders and their functionaries spout in public, they invariably pursue their own interests. Those interests may be material, political, institutional, or ideological, but in any event they are their own interests, not yours or mine.

It follows directly that up to this point the continued prosecution of the war has served the leaders’ interests. They may say they are trying to end the war. They may have secured their election or reelection, as many of the Democrats now serving in Congress have, by promising to do whatever they can to end the war. Yet the truth is that they’ve sold the public a bill of goods.

When the leaders have considered all the personal consequences they expect to follow from acting to end the war, they have concluded that, all things being considered, doing so does not serve their interest, and therefore they have refrained from doing so.

After all, it’s not as though the U.S. war effort has a mind of its own. Whenever the president wants to remove the troops, he can do so; he has the power. Whenever the members of the majority in Congress want to remove the troops, by stopping the funding to support them there, they can do so; they have the power.

The posture of powerlessness that our leaders often affect―my goodness, what can I do? my hands are tied―is a disingenuous pose. They can stop the U.S. engagement in the war whenever they want to do so. Thus far, they simply have not wanted to do so.

What might cause them to reach a new conclusion about what serves their personal interest? Several developments might turn the trick. Nearly all of them work by heightening the public’s anger with their leaders’ decisions.

Historically, the decisive development in similar instances has been the cumulation of public costs, especially the costs in life and limb. In both the Korean War and the Vietnam War, the public’s disfavor of the engagement closely tracked the cumulation of casualties.

As political scientist John Mueller showed in his book War, Presidents, and Public Opinion, “every time American casualties increased by a factor of 10, support for the war dropped by about 15 percentage points” in the polls.

One reason the public has continued to tolerate their leaders’ continued prosecution of the war in Iraq is that the casualties have not been nearly so great, by an order of magnitude, as they were in Korea and Vietnam.

So far, not quite 4,000 U.S. military personnel have been killed in Iraq. That’s only one death for every 75,000 persons living in the United States, and therefore the loss of life has not cut deeply into the public psyche―most Americans have not been personally acquainted with anyone killed in the war.

(The vastly greater loss of Iraqi lives seems to have made even less impression.)

Sad to say, the public may not turn decisively against their leaders’ continued prosecution of the war until many more American soldiers have died.

Economic costs have also mounted, and they have loomed relatively much larger in this war than in the earlier wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Who says the military leaders never learn? They’ve certainly learned how to increase hugely the financial costs of fighting a war.

Estimates of the costs to date vary widely, depending on how one accounts for various joint, indirect, and implied costs, but a total cost to date in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars is not implausible, and later costs, including those associated with decades of care for the war’s legions of physically and mentally disabled, will add enormously to the total.

In earlier wars, even though the costs were relatively greater in blood than in dollars, the public eventually wearied of the economic sacrifices entailed by the financial expenses of continued fighting.

Economist Hugh Mosley concluded that the Johnson administration “was reluctant to resort to increased taxes to finance the war for fear of losing public support for its policy of military escalation.”

Historian Stephen Ambrose wrote that President Richard Nixon “realized that for economic reasons (the war was simply costing too much) and for the sake of domestic peace and tranquility he had to cut back on the American commitment to Vietnam”; the retrenchment was “forced on [him] by public opinion.”

As the recession that has just begun deepens, the public may well object more strenuously to the government’s squandering of such vast amounts of tax money on a senseless continuation of the war in Iraq.

When their purses are not so full, people may resent every additional dollar spent on the war more than they did previously. Ultimately, they may become so angry that they will take actions to punish severely the political leaders who continue to support the war.

Serious political challengers may attract a mass following by embracing the example of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who promised in the 1952 campaign to end the enormously unpopular war in Korea and, after he took office, kept his promise expeditiously.

When substantial negative feedback begins to jeopardize the personal job security, not to speak of the respect and fawning, the electorate affords incumbents, they will begin to take notice, and to discount more heavily the contributions from defense contractors, big financial establishments, petrochemical companies, and other high rollers who have encouraged them to stay the hopeless course―though not hopeless for these special interests, of course; for them it has been a bonanza.

George W. Bush parlayed a campaign of fear-mongering into his reelection in 2004, but unless another major terrorist attack occurs in the United States, the public will grow increasingly resistant to such appeals and more eager to throw the rascals out as the war’s costs continue to mount.

It is extremely unfortunate that escalating costs in blood and money are the only proven means of bringing the general public to resist strongly their political leaders who are committed to a continuation of unnecessary, unwise, and immoral war.

Some of us wish that rational argument, cogent evidence, and humane sentiment would persuade a preponderance of the public to demand an end to the war. History suggests, however, that only personal grief and economic pain will induce the American public to act against their perfidious leaders.

Needless to say, if the public remains as passive and as easily bamboozled as it has been during the past seven years, the war will continue, maybe even for the hundred years in which Senator McCain declares that a U.S. occupation of Iraq would be “fine with me.”

Robert Higgs is a Senior Fellow in Political Economy for The Independent Institute. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, and the University of Economics, Prague. He is the author of many books, including Depression, War, and Cold War.

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Elite’s Blueprint for Global Enslavement Exposed

Friday, January 18th, 2008

Paul Joseph Watson

The waiting is over, the anticipation can now finally be realized-Alex Jones’ Endgame is here and its arrival heralds a new salvo in the infowar, a fresh new insight into understanding what the long term plans of the elite really are and why the future destiny of humanity could be won or lost within our lifetimes.

Endgame is the culmination of years of research into the documented historical record of why the rulers of the world are maniacally obsessed with controlling, dominating and enslaving humanity, wielding ferocious power for power’s sake, centralizing authority into a ruthless world government system, and ultimately enacting their “final solution” of global population reduction.

The movie lays the framework for how this tyranny will unfold by highlighting the message of the mysterious Georgia Guidestones, purportedly built by representatives of a secret society called the Rosicrucian Order, which call for a global religion, world courts, and for population levels to be maintained at around 500 million, over a 5.5 billion reduction from current levels. The stones infer that humans are a cancer upon the earth and should be culled in order to maintain balance with nature.

The new elite that seek to capitalize on this blueprint for global enslavement are merely the latest generation in a long line of tyrants and their empires that have sought world domination throughout human history. The fact that powerful people have always attempted to expand their authority and rule over others is a manifestly provable historical truth, but one that is often forgotten in today’s world of mindlessness, self-obsession, entertainment and distraction.

Endgame explores how elite banking families like the Rothschilds were able to stay one step ahead of world events and shape the future by financing both sides in wars and use their advance knowledge to seize control of economies and governments and lay the foundations for the architecture of world government.

The documentary then explains how the two camps of world government were formed-Fabian socialism in Britain and fascism in Italy and Germany, and how General Smedley Butler discovered a plan on behalf of the fascists to take over America in a violent coup d’etat.

The birth of the United Nations and the secretive Bilderberg Group segway into a tour de force feature about how the Bilderberg Group have been forced to relinquish their much cherished anonymity thanks to the efforts of the alternative media and veteran journalists like Jim Tucker and Daniel Estulin, who are interviewed at length about Bilderberg’s agenda, during Alex Jones’ confrontation of Bilderberg at the 2006 meeting in Ottawa, Canada.

The fascinating veil of secrecy that Bilderberg still tries to impose over their gatherings despite the increased media attention is documented as Tucker and Estulin explain how moles within Bilderberg always leak their participant list and agenda because they are furious about the level of illegal scheming clearly taking place along with the Bilderberger’s rude disdain for everyday people who are not members of the elite.

Estulin explains that the Bilderberg Group control the world by means of a process called systemic methodology, where they carve up the globe into numerous different pieces and then place their designated frontmen in charge of the major institutions that govern each part of the world.

By this method, Bilderberg were able to merge the nations of Europe into the EU under the guise of trade deals, and the same process is now unfolding with Canada, the U.S. and Mexico being conglomerated to form the North American Union-but not without committed resistance on behalf of the American people.

That resistance is being countered by the beefing of a brutal police state nationwide and the increasing use of U.S. troops in domestic law enforcement. Endgame exposes how the elite are trying to overcome opposition to their agenda by instituting the framework of martial law with executive orders that are designed to combat “domestic insurrection,” as President George Bush officially announces a fiat dictatorship.

Endgame documents how tyranny is the norm and why governments are the biggest killers and always have been throughout the ages-from Hitler, to Stalin, to Mao, through to genocide in Uganda, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda and Turkey-and how Communist China, with its crushing of dissent, intolerance of religion and horrific organ harvesting of political prisoners, remains the model for the global tyranny that the elite plan to entrench.

The scientific rationale for tyranny gives the elite an excuse for treating their fellow man like lab rats and this mindset gave rise to the emergence of eugenics in the 19th century. Endgame catalogues how the Malthusian drive to eliminate the poor developed into social Darwinism which then transgressed into the fields of racial hygiene programs and genetic screening as American citizens were forcibly sterilized by the state throughout the 19th century.

Endgame charts how the Rockefeller family exported eugenics to Germany by bankrolling the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute which later would form a central pillar in the Third Reich’s ideology of the Nazi super race. After the fall of the Nazis, top eugenicists were protected by the allies as the victorious parties fought over who would enjoy their “expertise” in the post-war world.

The comments of elitists alive today who openly advocate “culling” the human population by means of mass genocide, plagues and viruses are then considered alongside Aldous Huxley’s warning that ruling oligarchies would use advanced techniques of medicine and pharmacology to ensure the human population “enjoy their servitude.”

Endgame documents the innumerable examples where governments have tested deadly pathogens, viruses, radiological and biological weapons on human populations without their knowledge in order to advance the progress of eugenics, including the infamous Ringworm Children, who were used as guinea pigs and subjected to lethal doses of radiation by Israeli health officials, killing 6,000 and leaving the rest with lifelong debilitating illnesses.

The hollow words of Bertrand Russell, who advocated the use of vaccines to induce partial chemical lobotomies and create a servile zombie population, are then considered alongside the soaring rates of autism in the U.S. and the increasing amount of vaccines being mandated for babies and young children.

Endgame highlights National Security Study Memorandum 200, a geopolitical strategy document prepared by Henry Kissinger, which targeted thirteen countries for massive population reduction by means of creating food scarcity, sterilization and war. George H.W. Bush’s role in advising China on its one-child policy and the forcible sterilization of native American women is also presented as evidence of the elite’s ruthless pursuit of eugenics.

Endgame exposes how the myth of man-made global warming is being hyped by the establishment in order to create new feudalist control methods and convince people that their every action should be regulated by the state in the interests of supposedly saving the planet, while the real environmental crises go ignored.

Endgame concludes by looking to the future and analyzing the field of transhumanism, founded by eugenicists as another trojan horse on which to piggy-back global population reduction by formulating a technologically bio-enhanced master race, leaving the rest of humanity in the dust and subject to elimination.

Finally, we return to the Georgia Guidestones and the elite’s sacred mission, to thin the population leaving only an enslaved underclass who are forced to live on the poverty line in control grid cities while the overlords enjoy the bountiful paradise of the earth and evolve into super-beings with the aid of advanced life-extension technologies.

Endgame rips the lid off the elite’s long term dream and explains why it will be a nightmare for the rest of humanity unless we rise up now and fight back against the systems of control that are being locked down to transform the earth into a prison planet.

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