Exposed: The Soviet Union spent $1 billion on mind-control program

 

Dr. Bill van Bise, electrical engineer, conducting a demonstration of Soviet scientific data and schematics for beaming a magnetic field into the brain to cause visual hallucinations. Source: CNN Source: Supplied

 

THE race to put man on the Moon wasn't enough of a battle for the global super powers during the Cold War. 

At the time, the Soviet Union and the United States were in an arms race of a bizarre, unconventional kind - that has been exposed in a new report.

The Soviets poured at least $1 billion into developing mind-controlling weaponry to compete with similar programs undertaken in the US.

While much still remains classified, we can now confirm the Soviets used methods to manipulate test subjects' brains.

The paper, by Serge Kernbach, at the Research Centre of Advanced Robotics and Environmental Science in Stuttgart, Germany, details the Soviet Union's extensive experiments, called "psychotronics". The paper is based on Russian technical journals and recently declassified documents outlining practices from 1917 to 2003.

Still from Secret Russia: Moscow The Zombies of the Red Czar, a German TV documentary, 1998. Source: Supplied

 

The paper outlines how the Soviets developed "cerpan", a device to generate and store high-frequency electromagnetic radiation and the use of this energy to affect other objects.

"If the generator is designed properly, it is able to accumulate bioenergy from all living things - animals, plants, humans - and then release it outside," the paper said.

The psychotronics program, known in the US as "parapsychology", involves unconventional research into mind control and remote influence - and was funded by the government.

With only limited knowledge of each other's mind-bending programs, the Soviets and Americans were both participating in similar secret operations, with areas of interest often mirroring the other country's study.

The original scheme of transmitting and receiving bio-circuitry of the human nervous system. 

Picture: B. B. Kazhinskiy Source: Supplied

 

The psychotronics project draws similarities to part of the controversial program MKUltra in the US. The CIA program ran for 20 years, has been highly documented since being investigated in the 1970s and was recently dramatised in the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats. 

The Men Who Stare at Goats. Picture: Smokehouse Pictures Source: Supplied

 

Scientists involved in the MKUltra program researched the possibility of manipulating people's minds by altering their brain functions using electromagnetic waves. This program led to the development of pyschotronic weapons, which were intended to be used to perform these mind-shifting functions.

The illegal research subjected humans to experiments with drugs, such as LSD, hypnosis and radiological and biological agents. Shockingly, some studies were conducted without the subject's knowledge.

A US Marine Corps truck carries an Active Denial System. It is a nonlethal weapon that uses directed energy and projects a beam of waves up to 1000 metres. When fired at a human, it delivers a heat sensation to the skin and generally makes humans stop what they are doing and run. Source: AAP

 

Kernbach's paper on the Soviet Union's psychotronics program fails to mention one thing - the results. He also doesn't detail whether there are ongoing programs in this area in the US or Russia, which became the successor state of the Russian SFSR following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, but there are suspicions.

Putin made mention of futuristic weaponry last year in a presidential campaign article.

"Space-based systems and IT tools, especially in cyberspace, will play a great, if not decisive role in armed conflicts. In a more remote future, weapon systems that use different physical principles will be created (beam, geophysical, wave, genetic, psychophysical and other types of weapons). All this will provide fundamentally new instruments for achieving political and strategic goals in addition to nuclear weapons," he wrote.

Example of a generator from the psychotronics program. Source: Supplied

 

The newly declassified information outlined in the report only touches on the Soviet psychotronics program and the bizarre experiments undertaken. With so much information still classified, will we ever know the whole truth?

news.com.au 30 Dec 2013

So now the real question is, how much is the United States spending?

Once again 'illegal' government activity goes unpunished.

The so called 'Cold War' was just a farce to keep the herd population in fear, driving a 'War Economy'.

The 'enemy' was financed by the Rothschild banking family, so how could they be at war with the 'west'?

NSA stands for ‘No Such Amendment’: Intelligence agency violates US Constitution

(A letter regarding the United States' constitution, written by the first president of the United States, George Washington (AFP Photo / Andrew Burton))

For the first time in history, all three branches of American government are complicit in violating the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution by facilitating illegal surveillance, Ray McGovern, a former CIA officer, told RT.

The persecution-induced suicide of online activist Aaron Swartz, the sentencing of US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning and the Edward Snowden asylum saga have all made 2013 the year that saw a clampdown on whistleblowers. Yet the US government’s efforts to stifle this kind of activity will hardly stop the new tech-savvy generation from leaking sensitive data, McGovern believes, describing whistleblowing as “unstoppable.”

The former CIA officer says the NSA has been dubbed ‘No Such Amendment’ for its bulk surveillance, which is in violation of the US Constitution, particularly its Fourth Amendment prohibiting groundless and warrantless searches and seizures.

RT: Do you think in the future the work of whistleblowers will be discouraged from all that we’ve seen this year, the clampdown on whistleblowers throughout the globe?

Ray McGovern: Yes, their work will be discouraged but it will be inevitable. In other words the discouragement will appear more and more crass, more and more ineffectual because the cat is out of the bag. There’s this new generation, technical people, without whom people like NSA and General Hayden and General Alexander cannot exist. As Julian Assange said recently, he encourages this new generation to play the role that the industrial generation did in preparing the way for the 20th century. Seize the initiative, act courageously, realize what you have -- what Julian calls “extraordinary power” – they can’t make the systems work without you and when you talk about a system’s administrator, it is not just one system. It is the administrator that ties together a whole network of systems. The cat is out of the bag. Those who cannot bear, as Martin Luther King Jr. used to say, the natural medicines of air and light on what they are doing, are going to be very frantic, will try to stop this, but it is unstoppable and that’s good news for the world and not just the United States.

RT: Talking about Aaron Swartz, will there be a future for guys like him, computer whiz activists?

RM: Yes. You know General Hayden, who actually is the first one to let himself be suborned by Dick Cheney and George Bush into violating our Constitution. Now it may appear quaint to people on the outside of the US, but this Constitution of the US is a sacred document. It has a fourth amendment and that Fourth Amendment [spells out] the right of the people to be secure. OK, secure from “searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, except upon probable cause,” describing the things to be seized or the person to be seized, looked at. Now that constitution, that amendment has been violated to the point where wags friends of mine have called the NSA, “No Such Amendment”. It used to be “No Such Agency”, now it is “No Such Amendment” and Hayden himself before the national press club denied that probable cause is in the Fourth Amendment. It is right here, I can read it to you, if you wish.

RT: But ultimately, will Snowden’s revelations change anything? Is it going to change the NSA or the way the people approach trying to protect their privacy?

RM: That is a big question. For the first time in my professional life, we have a situation where not only the executive and the Congress, but huge parts of our judicial system, the three branches of our government, are all complicit in either winking at or endorsing or letting pass these gross violations of our Constitution. Now the cat is out of the bag. One judge has said this is almost Orwellian, and you know what Orwell stands for. It is almost Orwellian and it is crass violation of this Constitution. Well, another judge says, “Well, it may be not so bad.” So it is going to play out in the courts, but before that could happen, because it will take many years, it’s going to get done in Congress. And the person who is responsible for the Patriot Act, Jim Sensenbrenner from Wisconsin, he is in high dudgeon. He is as angry as can be. He said, I never intended the Patriot Act to be interpreted in such a way, by secret interpretation, to allow bulk collection of everything we type, everything we listen to, everything we communicate. It’s has gotten out of hand and now we’ll see if the President of the US has enough courage to enforce the Constitution that he, like I and like millions of others Americans swore a solemn oath to support and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

rt.com 1 Jan 2014

It can therefore be concluded that the NSA is a criminal organisation and should be treated as such by the legal system, bringing on a string of litigation, and foreclosure.

Will the authorities allow for this to occur?

One subject that the Australian authorities do not want the masses to understand or be aware of is the "Australian Constitution", supported by the fact that this is not taught in the Australian schooling system, and mocked by police when citizens refer to it, during 'unlawful' conduct of the police.

Keeping Australians dumbed down is the objective.

Too much heat on solar power

Heavy spending on new electricity infrastructure has pushed up power prices. Photo: Thinkstock.

If I install solar panels and a car battery to run my air conditioner, should I pay higher electricity network fees? The electricity industry and Queensland’s Energy Minister would say yes. But is that equitable?

Scenarios like this expose inconsistencies between the way we pay for electricity poles and wires, and what they cost to run.

Most retail customers pay a small, fixed daily charge, and a larger variable charge based on the volume of electricity they use. So the (mainly fixed) cost of network services is “smeared” over the total volume of electricity delivered.

However, there is no clear link between the volume of electricity a customer uses and the cost of providing them with network services. Network costs are driven by how many appliances a customer has turned on when demand is at a peak on a local network. Critical peak demand is often in summer. An air conditioner can add an estimated $2,400 in grid costs that must be subsidised by all electricity users.

So there is a fundamental inequity between customers. Those with high demand at peak times drive up network costs. Others don’t but still pay the bill.

This wasn’t a big problem while electricity use was rising. But lately it has fallen by 4 per cent. That means the variable charge for network services is likely to rise to cover the difference. More than $42 billion of spending on network infrastructure has been the biggest factor in price rises since 2007.

A recent electricity industry report, Who Pays for Solar Energy?  painted rooftop solar as a power-bill villain. It claimed poorer people were subsidising those who could afford solar panels.  The report made three points. First, that rooftop solar reduces the total amount of electricity over which network costs are “smeared”, driving up variable charges. Second, that solar consumers use less electricity and so pay a smaller share of total network costs. Third, that the total cost of poles and wires would rise by millions of dollars due to rooftop solar energy.

However, there is little evidence of how much rooftop solar has reduced total electricity demand. Demand has been falling and rooftop solar is part of the reason but manufacturing and aluminium plant closures and energy efficiency might be more significant.

Maybe solar consumers use less grid-supplied electricity than other consumers but so do households that are energy-efficient. That doesn’t mean they are “ducking” their fair share of network costs.
Nor is there evidence that millions of dollars have been spent on upgrading networks to accommodate solar panels.

Perhaps the most interesting assumption is that it is more politically and technically feasible to charge solar consumers higher fixed network fees, than to charge wealthy, high-energy using households for turning on air-conditioning at peak times. This sits at odds with earlier industry research that shows critical peak pricing – which would hit those who consume a lot when local power demand is highest – is the most effective pricing method for reducing peak demand.

The electricity system faces a big challenge as it becomes more distributed. How do we get the right price signals to smooth peak demand, minimise future network costs, and keep rooftop solar connected to the grid? Consumers need to be encouraged to actively manage their energy use. This could include rewards for solar consumers who reduce their own use and export more electricity when networks are at peak capacity.

One thing is certain. Nothing will improve if governments sanction penalties for installing solar panels but ignore the real cost of my air conditioner.

Laura Eadie is a University of Technology, Sydney Business School Associate, and has qualifications in environmental management, finance and investment, and industrial chemistry. 

She is also the Centre for Policy Development’s Research Director for the Sustainable economy program. Her opinion here is adapted from a piece first published on 3 June, 2013, on The Conversation, an independent source of analysis, commentary and news from the university and research sector.

This story written and produced by the University of Technology, Sydney, for Brink, a publication distributed monthly in The Sydney Morning Herald

smh.com.au 21 Nov 2013

Once again the 'poor' sponsor the rich and the corporatocracy.

Facebook sued over alleged scanning of users' private messages

Facebook is being sued over allegations it monitors private messages to surreptitiously gather even more information on its users and share the data with advertisers.


When users compose messages that include links to another website, Facebook scans the content of the message, follows the link and searches for information to profile the message-sender's web activity "to improve its marketing algorithms and increase its ability to profit from data about Facebook users", according to the lawsuit.

The links to third-party websites are interpreted as a "like" of that website and contribute to a profile of the sender's activity on the web for the purpose of targeting advertising, the lawsuit alleges.

This practice violates the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act and California privacy and unfair competition laws, according to the lawsuit.

Facebook spokeswoman Jackie Rooney said the allegations are "without merit".

"We will defend ourselves vigorously," she said.

The two plaintiffs are looking to certify the case as a class action on behalf of all Facebook users who have sent or received a private message in the past two years that included web links.

They are also asking to bar Facebook from continuing to intercept messages and seek as much as $US10,000 in damages for each user.

Hacker News brought to light the practice of recording links in private messages as "likes" in 2012. At the time some questioned whether users understood that links in their messages were being scanned.

Google is one of the Silicon Valley companies targeted by similar lawsuits. A US federal judge ruled in September that Google must face a lawsuit that accuses the tech giant of illegally opening and reading the contents of email sent through its Gmail service in violation of US wiretapping laws.

smh.com.au 3 Jan 2014

Facebook are one of the few that just have been caught out, that's all.

Once again all part of the agenda to monitor 'everyone'.

Very rare for a company to 'fess up' as it is all about litigation and may open up the flood gates for everyone to sue.

Facebook, another company that reports to the NSA.

Japan to tap smart meters, fuel cells to tackle climate change

Japan plans smart meters in every residence and factory by the early 2020s and 5.3 million fuel cells in homes by 2030 to tackle climate change, according to a report to be submitted to the United Nations.

The country will also promote renewable energy as much as possible over the next three years, the Japanese government said in the biennial report, which developed countries are asked to submit by January 1. Nuclear reactors will be restarted after safety is confirmed and thermal power generation efficiency will be enhanced, the government said.

The submission follows Japan’s setting of a new target for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in November. The goal was criticized by environmental groups as being weaker than the previous plan.

The country is debating its energy policies following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry submitted a draft of a new set of policies earlier this month and is seeking comments from the public.

Panasonic Corp. and Chofu Seisakusho Co. are among companies making residential fuel cells.

The devices use the chemical energy of hydrogen to cleanly and efficiently produce electricity with water and heat as byproducts, the U.S. Department of Energy said on its website. Fuel cells release no greenhouse gases and air pollutants at the point of operation.

smh.com.au 28 Dec 2013

Smart meters DO NOT reduce greenhouse gasses.

A hidden (global) agenda part of the policy to monitor every single person on the planet.

 

Since the Sun is slowly approaching 'Super Nova' state, if its mass and therefore solar radiation (which is increasing) solely responsible for heating up the Solar System, how will 'smart' meters reduce the Sun's radiation of the planet?

Just another way of 'dumbing' down the masses through a political agenda as an excuse for Financial Terrorism enforced on the masses, for 'polutants' created by the multinationals.

Apple buys Melbourne man John Papandriopoulos' app, SnappyCam

 

John Papandriopoulos, the founder of SnappyCam. Source: Supplied

 

JOHN Papandriopoulos's dad forked out a relative mint for an IBM clone computer for his family decades ago. Now, it seems the investment has paid off. 

The Melbourne-born techno entrepreneur has gone to ground in San Francisco after reports Apple has bought his company which developed the No. 1 selling phone camera app, SnappyCam.

It is not known how much Apple paid for the deal but insiders suggest it would be well into a seven-figure sum.

The app has been removed from Apple's iTunes site, sparking speculation it will be incorporated into future iPhones for free.

In a classic "local-boy-does-good" story, Dr Papandriopoulos revealed in an interview last year that his father - an electronics engineer who moved from Greece shortly after the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 - was responsible for sparking his interest in technology.

And his move into the big time would come as no surprise to the 35-year-old's computer science and electrical engineering former peers at RMIT and the University of Melbourne.

When he graduated from RMIT nearly 12 years ago, he won the J.N. McNicol Prize, given to the top student across all faculties for academic excellence and leadership potential.

His "thirst for discovery" prompted him to do his PhD at the University of Melbourne.

"Education was always a big focus in the family. Yet I nearly didn't make the cut into Melbourne High School because we didn't realise at the time that entrance-exam tuition was available and commonplace," Dr Papandriopoulos wrote in a Melbourne University publication.

He graduated in year 12 at No. 30 of the 250 boys in his year.

SnappyCam

 

"The four years at MHS was a pivotal time and set me up for life," he said.

When he finished his education, he moved to the US to join a start-up company and later won the "Greencard lottery", giving him US permanent residency and enabling to start his own business.

Dr Papandriopoulos's SnappyCam invention enables the iPhone 5 to capture at full resolution 20 photographs a second, the fastest smartphone camera app.

"SnappyCam hit the No. 1 paid rank in the Apple App Store in 15 countries and within the top No. 10 rank in 60 countries," he said in September.

"As a start-up founder and independent developer, that's what dreams are made of."

WHAT IS SNAPPYCAM?

SnappyCam turns the iPhone camera into a high-powered photographer's dream.

It lets people take at least 20 full-resolution photos every second, snapping at a speed not possible with the phone's in-built software.

heraldsun.com.au 6 Jan 2014

Congratulations are in order to Yianni, another (Greek) Australian success.

What indeed needs to be examined is something that may have the conspiracy 'theorists'  or 'factologists' (colloquial term for a person dealing with 'facts') talking for a little while, is that an external source has developed this 'technology', where in the heart of Apple, hardware and software engineers that are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars annually have not used this 'feature'.

Apple is notorious for thwarting the technology used in their products and/or locking or disabling technology used by Original Equipment Manufacturers, e.g. Bluetooth, much to the disadvantage to the consumer.

Each generation of Apple products is surpassed by features offered by Apple's rivals, e.g. Samsung, a fact that is reciprocated in sales figures.
 

Lack of accountability clouding the climate change debate

The world's so-called authority on climate change engages in exaggerated science and has become a political tool.

Illustration: John Spooner.

We've recently seen comments about climate matters from Maurice Newman, the chairman of the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council, and David Karoly, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Melbourne and a member of the Climate Change Authority.

Newman wasn't completely correct about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Karoly failed to mention some critical issues about the IPCC's operation and function. The IPCC certainly has faults and its publicity material doesn't always accord with the facts, but the bigger issues are its narrow charter and how various bodies encourage us to believe that the IPCC is an authority on all climate matters.

Journalists are supposed to be sceptical about all claims on all matters but that scepticism is usually absent when dealing with climate issues. 

The IPCC's charter from the outset has been ''to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation''.

The IPCC's focus is therefore very specific - any human influence on climate. It has no mandate to examine other causes of climate change. IPCC assessment reports claim that the human influence is significant but look closely and we find the claims are based on the output of climate models that the IPCC admits are seriously flawed, that the IPCC often asserts a level of certainty that the data cannot sustain and that as ''Climategate'' showed us, a clique of scientists has in the past sought to control the material cited by these reports.

What starts out being a scientific report becomes a political instrument because after a hard-core group of IPCC supporters draft the Summary for Policymakers, government representatives discuss, negotiate and eventually agree on the wording of each sentence. The scientific component of the report is then modified to better align it with the thinking of government representatives.

If the IPCC reports were accepted for exactly what they are - exaggerated science with a large dollop of politics - this would be the end of the matter. Unfortunately, various bodies actively encourage us to believe the reports are entirely scientific, accurate and completely authoritative on all climate matters, this despite the IPCC's charter and the political interference.

Foremost among those who imply that the IPCC has a wider remit than it does is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). At its inaugural meeting in 1992 the UNFCCC declared that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 were causing significant and dangerous climate change. This statement had no factual basis. It was the IPCC's role to determine if this was correct. It certainly hadn't done so by 1992 and despite its assertions it still hasn't produced credible evidence to support that claim.

The UNFCCC's deceit continues via its annual conferences that try to pressure countries into reducing carbon dioxide emissions despite the absence of any clear evidence that warrants such action. Each conference is wrapped in a publicity blitz before, during and after the event, each time exaggerating the IPCC's findings and certainty, staying mum about the influence of politics on IPCC reports and falsely implying that the IPCC's investigative scope extends far beyond its mandate. The executive secretary of the UNFCCC is appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations and reports to him, which implies UNFCCC deceit is endorsed at the upper levels of the UN.

There is no higher authority to which one can complain.

Not far behind the UNFCCC we have government bodies, such as the Department of Climate Change and now-privatised Climate Commission, that ardently promote the IPCC view. In some cases these bodies were created specifically for that purpose and in most cases their action is to support government policy. As with the UNFCCC, these bodies falsely imply the IPCC's remit covers all aspects of climate science.

Next are environmental organisations, such as Greenpeace and WWF, others such as the sustainable energy industry that have vested interests and push the IPCC view, implying it's the ultimate authority on climate matters.

We should also not forget the scientists who publicly endorse the IPCC view. Ascribing a specific motive to a large number of people is futile, but among them are likely to be people holding various levels of belief and of course people whose income and reputation rest on the IPCC's position.

The public would hardly be aware of the statements made by all of the above if it wasn't for the mainstream media. Journalists are supposed to be sceptical about all claims on all matters but that scepticism is usually absent when dealing with climate issues. Whatever the cause, journalists appear unwilling to question claims, unwilling to ask for the data so they might verify the findings and unwilling to follow-up predictions to see if they were correct. The silence on all these matters tacitly and falsely implies that the IPCC's view is correct and it's an authority on all climate issues.

The reality is that the IPCC is in effect little more than a UN-sponsored lobby group, created specifically to investigate and push the ''man-made warming'' line. With no similar organisations to examine other potential causes of climate change, it's only the IPCC voice that is heard. But the IPCC's voice isn't heard in context and with all the necessary caveats; it's distorted via the UNFCCC and others who imply that the IPCC is the sole scientific authority on climate matters.

Of course those with vested interest support it, which include governments, politicians, government bodies, ''green'' groups and many scientists. Ultimately it's the unquestioning media, or perhaps a media unwilling to admit that the UN and its agencies might be dishonest or wrong, that misleads the public into believing the IPCC is something it's not.

John McLean is the author of three peer-reviewed papers on climate and an expert reviewer for the latest IPCC report. He is also a climate data analyst and a member of the International Climate Science Coalition.

theage.com.au 3 Jan 2014

The policy in Australia called the 'Carbon (dioxide) Tax' punishes the masses for industry created so called greenhouse gasses.

 

Another fraud by government to line the pockets of politicians and their industrial 'brethren'.

 

NSA can turn the iPhone into a pocket-sized spy, hacker reveals

LONDON — A well-known privacy advocate has given the public an unusually explicit peek into the intelligence world’s tool box, pulling back the curtain on the National Security Agency’s arsenal of high-tech spy gear.

Independent journalist and security expert Jacob Appelbaum this week told a hacker conference in Germany that the NSA could turn iPhones into eavesdropping tools and use radar wave devices to harvest electronic information from computers, even if they weren’t online.

Even worse than your worst nightmares

Appelbaum told hundreds of computer experts gathered at Hamburg’s Chaos Communications Conference that his revelations about the NSA’s capabilities “are even worse than your worst nightmares.”

“What I am going to show you today is wrist-slittingly depressing,” he said.

Related

• Edward Snowden says government surveillance now far worse than George Orwell’s 1984 envisioned
• ‘I’ve already won’: Edward Snowden says his ‘mission’s already accomplished’ after leaking NSA secrets

Apple responded on Tuesday to the claims, saying it never worked with the U.S. spy agency and was unaware of efforts to target its iPhones.

“Apple has never worked with the NSA to create a backdoor in any of our products, including iPhone. Additionally, we have been unaware of this alleged NSA program targeting our products,” the company said in a statement.

“We will continue to use our resources to stay ahead of malicious hackers and defend our customers from security attacks, regardless of who’s behind them.”

Even though in the past six months there have been an unprecedented level of public scrutiny of the NSA and its methods, Appelbaum’s claims — supported by what appeared to be internal NSA slideshows — still caused a stir.

One of the slides described how the NSA can plant malicious software onto Apple Inc.’s iPhone, giving American intelligence agents the ability to turn the popular smartphone into a pocket-sized spy.
Another slide showcased a futuristic-sounding device described as a “portable continuous wave generator,” a remote-controlled device which — when paired with tiny electronic implants — can bounce invisible waves of energy off keyboards and monitors to see what is being typed, even if the target device isn’t connected to the Internet.

A third slide showcased a piece of equipment called NIGHTSTAND, which can tamper with wireless Internet connections from up to 8 miles (13 kilometres) away.

An NSA spokeswoman, Vanee Vines, said that she wasn’t aware of Appelbaum’s presentation, but that in general should would not comment on “alleged foreign intelligence activities.”

“As we’ve said before, NSA’s focus is on targeting the communications of valid foreign intelligence targets — not on collecting and exploiting a class of communications or services that would sweep up communications that are not of bona fide foreign intelligence interest to the U.S. government.”

The documents included in Appelbaum’s presentation were first published by German magazine Der Spiegel on Sunday and Monday.

Appelbaum and Der Spiegel have both played an important role in the disclosures of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, but neither has clarified whether the most recent set of slides came from Snowden.

financialpost.com 31 Dec 2013

Despite what the 'official' reports are from the world's largest I.T. companies (which include but are not limited to Apple, Dell, Google, HP, Microsoft all of which are situated on US soil)  and consequently the corporate media, they (the corporations) must be subserviant to the (corporate) policies and requests of the U.S. government, period, no questions asked.

Governments accused Chinese communictations manufacturer Huawei of concealed backdoors in their communications equipment, something that was already in place in US maunfactured Operating Systems / hardware, which has already been proven.

Special personnel within the companies are employed to covertly monitor systems and provide the information back to the government, despite what the official reports are.

Corpau is aware of the identities of several 'hardware specialists' in Australia that (secretly) report back to the authorities.

There is a deliberate push (by promoting the apparent so called 'advantages' to the consumer) for 'smart' technologies, from 'smart' meter to the portable and almost surgically attached mobile 'smart' phone, so that the masses can be monitored and later controlled at various stages of the technology.

NSA researching quantum computer that could crack most types of encryption

 

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Photo: Washington Post

• NSA hacking methods revealed
• NSA can turn iPhone into a spy
• Snowden: mission accomplished

In room-size metal boxes, secure against electromagnetic leaks, the US National Security Agency (NSA) is racing to build a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.

According to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the effort to build "a cryptologically useful quantum computer" – a machine exponentially faster than classical computers – is part of a $US79.7 million ($89.5 million) research program called "Penetrating Hard Targets". Much of the work is hosted under classified contracts at a laboratory in College Park, Maryland, in the United States.

The US National Security Agency campus in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photo: AP
 
The development of a quantum computer has long been a goal of many in the scientific community, with revolutionary implications for fields such as medicine as well as for the NSA's code-breaking mission. With such technology, all forms of public key encryption would be broken, including those used on many secure websites as well as the type used to protect state secrets.

Physicists and computer scientists have long speculated whether the NSA's efforts are more advanced than those of the best civilian labs. Although the full extent of the agency's research remains unknown, the documents provided by Snowden suggest the NSA is no closer to success than others in the scientific community.

"It seems improbable that the NSA could be that far ahead of the open world without anybody knowing it," said Scott Aaronson, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The NSA appears to regard itself as running neck and neck with quantum computing labs sponsored by the European Union and the Swiss government, with steady progress but little prospect of an immediate breakthrough.

"The geographic scope has narrowed from a global effort to a discrete focus on the European Union (EU) and Switzerland," one NSA document states.

Seth Lloyd, professor of quantum mechanical engineering at MIT, said the NSA's focus is not misplaced. "The EU and Switzerland have made significant advances over the last decade and have caught up to the US in quantum computing technology," he said.

The NSA declined to comment for this story.

The documents, however, indicate that the agency carries out some of its research in large, shielded rooms known as Faraday cages, which are designed to prevent electromagnetic energy from coming in or out. Those, according to one brief description, are required "to keep delicate quantum computing experiments running".

The basic principle underlying quantum computing is known as "quantum superposition", the idea that an object simultaneously exists in all states. A classical computer uses binary bits, which are either zeroes or ones. A quantum computer uses quantum bits, or qubits, which are simultaneously zero and one.

This seeming impossibility is part of the mystery that lies at the heart of quantum theory, which even theoretical physicists say no one completely understands.

"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics," said the late Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, who is widely regarded as a pioneer in quantum computing.
Here's how it works, in theory: while a classical computer, however fast, must do one calculation at a time, a quantum computer can sometimes avoid having to make calculations that are unnecessary to solving a problem. That allows it to home in on the correct answer much more quickly and efficiently.
Quantum computing is so difficult to attain because of the fragile nature of such computers. In theory, the building blocks of such a computer might include individual atoms, photons or electrons. To maintain the quantum nature of the computer, these particles would need to be carefully isolated from their external environments.

"Quantum computers are extremely delicate, so if you don't protect them from their environment, then the computation will be useless," said Daniel Lidar, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of the Centre for Quantum Information Science and Technology at the University of Southern California.

A working quantum computer would open the door to easily breaking the strongest encryption tools in use today, including a standard known as RSA, named for the initials of its creators. RSA scrambles communications, making them unreadable to anyone but the intended recipient, without requiring the use of a shared password. It is commonly used in web browsers to secure financial transactions and in encrypted emails. RSA is used because of the difficulty of factoring the product of two large prime numbers. Breaking the encryption involves finding those two numbers. This cannot be done in a reasonable amount of time on a classical computer.

In 2009, computer scientists using classical methods were able to discover the primes within a 768-bit number, but it took almost two years and hundreds of computers to factor it. The scientists estimated it would take 1000 times longer to break a 1024-bit encryption key, which is commonly used for online transactions.

A large-scale quantum computer, however, could theoretically break a 1024-bit encryption much faster. Some leading internet companies are moving to 2048-bit keys, but even those are thought to be vulnerable to rapid decryption with a quantum computer.

Quantum computers have many applications for today's scientific community, including the creation of artificial intelligence. But the NSA fears the implications for national security.

"The application of quantum technologies to encryption algorithms threatens to dramatically impact the US government's ability to both protect its communications and eavesdrop on the communications of foreign governments," according to an internal document provided by Snowden.

Experts are not sure how feasible a quantum computer is in the near future. A decade ago, some experts said developing a large quantum computer was likely 10 to 100 years in the future. Five years ago, Lloyd said the goal was at least 10 years away.

Last year, Jeff Forshaw, a professor at the University of Manchester, told Britain's Guardian newspaper, "It is probably too soon to speculate on when the first full-scale quantum computer will be built but recent progress indicates that there is every reason to be optimistic."

"I don't think we're likely to have the type of quantum computer the NSA wants within at least five years, in the absence of a significant breakthrough maybe much longer," Lloyd said in a recent interview.

However, some companies claim to already be producing small quantum computers. A Canadian company, D-Wave Systems, says it has been making quantum computers since 2009. In 2012, it sold a $US10 million version to Google, NASA and the Universities Space Research Association, according to reports.

That quantum computer, however, would never be useful for breaking public key encryption such as RSA.

"Even if everything they're claiming is correct, that computer, by its design, cannot run Shor's algorithm," said Matthew Green, a research professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, referring to the algorithm that could be used to break encryption such as RSA.

Experts believe one of the largest hurdles to breaking encryption with a quantum computer is building a computer with enough qubits, which is difficult given the very fragile state of quantum computers. By the end of September, the NSA expected to be able to have some basic building blocks, which it described in a document as "dynamical decoupling and complete quantum control on two semiconductor qubits".

"That's a great step, but it's a pretty small step on the road to building a large-scale quantum computer," Lloyd said.

A quantum computer capable of breaking cryptography would need hundreds or thousands more qubits than that.

The budget for the National Intelligence Program, commonly referred to as the "black budget", details the "Penetrating Hard Targets" project and noted that this step "will enable initial scaling towards large systems in related and follow-on efforts".

Another project, called the "Owning the Net", is using quantum research to support the creation of new quantum-based attacks on encryptions such as RSA, documents show.

"The irony of quantum computing," Lidar said, "is that if you can imagine someone building a quantum computer that can break encryption a few decades into the future, then you need to be worried right now."

smh.com.au 3 Jan 2014

If this technology and its use was used by another company or country, then it would be declared as a 'terrorist' act, and the USA would invade and kill all civilians in the process, labeling them as terrorists.

How ironic, from a country that is the world's largest warmonger and 'paranoid' that every single human has to be spied upon as they could (read are) a potential threat, where the real threats to humanity come from within the government of the US.