Malaysian military withheld data on MH370: source

Authorities from several countries were searching fruitlessly for the missing MH370 flight in the South China Sea for days, even though the Malaysian military reportedly knew the plane was not there.

• PM to update Chinese president on search Two hours ago

• Final moments inside MH370 cockpit revealed 

• MH370 deliberately flown off course: Malaysian PM 

• Missing jet probe narrows to four scenarios

A military source claims that once alerted of the missing flight soon after its disappearance on March 8, military radar picked up an unidentified plane heading across peninsular Malaysia.

The air force now admits that the plane spotted on its radar, some 320km northwest of the west coast of Penang, could have been MH370.

"When we were alerted, we got our boys to check the military radar. We noticed that there was an unmarked plane flying back but [we] could not confirm [its identity]," said the military source.

While fighter jets may not have had enough fuel to follow MH370, they may have been able to spot the doomed aircraft flying across peninsular Malaysia and beyond.

While Malaysian officials are yet to expressly respond to this latest information, they have earlier justified their decision to withhold data saying that they did not want to risk confusion by sharing unverified data so early on in the each effort.

April 09, 2014: Australian search teams are confident they are close to finding missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. The Australian ship Ocean Shield has detected more signals believed to be from the aircraft's Black Boxes.

FULL COVERAGE: The search for MH370
 
Authorities searched the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand for more than a week, before satellite data led them to look in the Indian Ocean instead.

Malaysia's government has now begun investigating civil aviation and military authorities to determine why opportunities to track down MH370 were missed immediately after the jet disappeared off the radar.

"What happened at that time is being investigated and I can't say any more than that because it involves the military and the government," a senior government official told Reuters.

The source explained that, originally, air traffic controllers and military officials assumed the plane turned back to an airport in Malaysia due to a mechanical problem when it first disappeared off the radar.

The assumption, the source claims, took place despite no distresses call or communication coming through from the cockpit.

April 07, 2014: The search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is this morning concentrating on the southern end of the Indian Ocean as authorities pursue their strongest lead to date.

"The initial assumption was that the aircraft could have diverted due to mechanical issues or, in the worst case scenario, crashed," said a senior Malaysian civilian source.

"That is what we were working on."

Meanwhile, a senior military official also told Reuters that air traffic control informed the military that the plane was missing at 2am, despite the plane disappearing from radar from than 45 minutes earlier.

The standard operating procedure required when a civilian plane goes missing is to inform the military within 15 minutes of the plane's disappearance.

news.com.au 12 Apr 2014

A huge cover up and conspiracy by the authorities, where the military took no action on a 'rouge' plane.

As always there is much more than is revealed to the masses.

In a day and age where the masses are reminded that satellites can read newspaper headlines from above, a plane with a wingspan of 60.8 metres and an overall length of 63.7m goes off course with no reaction from so called 'authorities' and a media reporting circus on what the 'theories' are follows.

NSA knew about Heartbleed for two years and exploited it

The Heartbleed security flaw makes many popular sites vulnerable to hacking your information. Source: AP

 

THE National Security Agency knew for at least two years about the software flaw that has left countless individuals vulnerable to hackers, but the agency failed to alert the public and instead used the weakness to gather intelligence, Bloomberg News reported Friday. 

The flaw involves the so-called Heartbleed bug, a flaw in the OpenSSL encryption tool that is believed to be used on about two-thirds of all websites. Because of the glitch, security experts say, hackers had the chance to steal countless passwords used to access websites and other sensitive information.

While the Bloomberg report cited two unnamed sources, described as “people familiar with the matter,” the NSA denied the allegations late Friday in a post on the official Twitter account of the agency's public affairs office. The agency said: “Statement: NSA was not aware of the recently identified Heartbleed vulnerability until it was made public.” Bloomberg reported that the NSA exploited the Heartbleed bug to obtain vital data used by cyber-crooks. It said the clandestine agency discovered the flaw shortly after it was accidentally created in 2012 by an adjustment in the OpenSSL software, according to an unnamed source.

After that, Bloomberg said, the bug “became a basic part of the agency's tool kit for stealing account passwords” and other information, while most internet users and security experts remained unaware of the flaw.

news.com.au 12 Apr 2014

You can do a runner from police if not under arrest

Various blogs on the internet including some corporate media outlets have reported of how people (in Australia) have done the runner from police.

Most if not all have reported this fact pretty accurately and this information has been public since 2011.

• Quite simply put, if one is not under arrest or part of a criminal investigation, one can run from police.

Police are fully aware of the fact but not all police abide by the law, and in many instances, the law is actually broken by police, where police assault the person in question.

This matter was finalised in the Supreme Court of Victoria (VSC) in the case of:

DPP v Hamilton [2011] VSC 598 (25 November 2011)

 
The document in its entirety can be downloaded from the (pdf) link below:
 

or from the Austlii database at:

 

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/vic/VSC/2011/598.html

 

Internet giants to government: We can spy on customers’ data, you shouldn’t

Reuters / Pawel Kopczynski

Silicon Valley has been largely speaking out as of late against the United States government’s controversial surveillance programs, but some say the nation’s top cyber firms are scared that their own abilities to collect info could soon be eroded.

Months into the ongoing and always heated debate about the US National Security Agency’s spy operations, President Barack Obama said last December that he had appointed a small panel of experts to assess the NSA programs in question that had been exposed after former contractor Edward Snowden started to disclose classified documents earlier that year. That review group has since presented a few dozen recommendations to the White House, and last month Pres. Obama asked Congress to codify into law changes concerning the way that the US government gets access to certain sensitive records — namely the telephony metadata created by telecommunication companies and currently gathered in bulk by the NSA, as exposed by Mr. Snowden.

In January, however, the president also said a separate group would reach out to privacy experts, technologists and business leaders to inspect the way that “big data” is created, collected and used by both the public and private sector, and “whether we can forge international norms on how to manage this data and how we can continue to promote the free flow of information in ways that are consistent with both privacy and security.”
 
Ultimately, Obama said at the time, “[W]hat’s at stake in this debate goes far beyond a few months of headlines or passing tensions in our foreign policy.”
 
Now this week in the National Journal, reporter Brendan Sasso writes that “Google is getting nervous” over what the president had to say.

“On the one hand, the Internet behemoth wants the public to know it’s outraged by US surveillance programs and is aggressively lobbying for new rules to keep its customers’ data safe from the government’s prying eyes,” Sasso wrote. “But as public attention turns to data privacy, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and other tech giants want to be sure that their own data-gathering practices don’t get lumped in with the federal spying programs that are the target of popular ire.”
 
Indeed, the giants of Silicon Valley — even some of the ones implicated in certain NSA spy programs, according to Snowden’s leaks — have spoken up about alleged counterterrorism intelligence-gathering practices perpetrated by the NSA that routinely sacrifice the privacy of the world’s wired population in exchange for supposed national security for some. At the same time, however, some — including Google — have earned reputations for not exactly valuing customer data as being something sacred or sensitive. In court documents filed by the search engine giant last year surrounding a class action lawsuit concerning the company’s automated scanning of messages sent through its Gmail service, Google said “Indeed, 'a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.’" And while the CEO of Facebook may have recently lashed out publically at Pres. Obama over the NSA’s activities, the social networking site has been scrutinized heavily over their own issues regarding privacy in the past, and just this year were sued for allegedly monitoring its user’s private messages.

When leaked NSA documents suggested last year that the US had been tapping into information sent between Google’s datacenters in an unencrypted state, however, the search company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, said it was “outrageous.” Then when disclosure made last month accused the NSA of masquerading as Facebook in order to trick targets and take over their computers, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was “confused and frustrated by . . . the behavior of the US government.” Another remark made by the social networking star in a statement published last month — that “The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat”—was all but echoed by other leading websites and tech experts who blamed the country’s behavior for undermining the very infrastructure of the ‘net.

But with “big data” being brought into the Obama administration’s crosshairs too now, Sasso says those same companies are saying “Leave us out of your spying fight.” And some, he added for an article published by the Journal on Tuesday this week, say there is “widespread frustration with the White House” because of both big data and the NSA’s operations being examined at once.

“Companies have very specific relationships with their users, and they tell them what they’re doing with their data,” one unnamed technology industry lobbyist said to Sasso.

On his part, Sasso succinctly summarized the difference between the public and private sector’s information gathering in just two sentences:

“Tech companies are lobbying against NSA spying because they worry it could undermine trust in their services,” he said. “But they depend on the ability to harvest data about users to target advertising and to provide other services,”
 
John Podesta — the Obama administration counselor tasked by the president in January to review big data technologies — said during an address at University of California-Berkley this month that “Big Data requires us to ask ourselves, how do we embrace new technologies and the progress they bring to our society, while at the same time protecting our fundamental freedoms and values, like privacy, fairness and self-determination?”
 
“[T]he legal and policy questions that these technologies raise are quite old,” Berkley’s newspaper quoted Podesta as saying.

“In the midst of what some are calling a Big Data revolution,” he said, “we’re taking this opportunity to consider the landscape, and to really interrogate whether our existing policies are prepared for what’s on the horizon technologically.”
 
Now according to Sasso, Silicon Valley is shaking because — despite being assured by his anonymous tech source that comparing the NSA with big data is on par with assessing “apples and oranges”— the cyber companies that collect personal information for reasons other than alleged national security could soon lose their ability to harvest data as well.

rt.com 10 Apr 2014

There is no pretend war between US tech giants and the US government over data privacy, as they BOTH collaborate together to collect 'big data'.

Facebook feud fires alarm over public service snoop plans

Federal government departments are using increasingly powerful cyber-snooping equipment to monitor the social media lives of millions of Australians.

A dramatic public confrontation between the Immigration Department and a Sydney-based political activist over her Facebook page has resulted in accusations that mass surveillance is being used to keep tabs on political dissent.

Other large government departments including Centrelink, Defence and Social Services have all conducted mass monitoring of social media activity.

Centrelink's parent agency, the Department of Human Services, even has its own software, which was developed by the CSIRO. A social media team of 10 public servants operates the software.

The Department of Immigration and Border Protection hires private sector contractors who can monitor more than half-a-billion ''pieces'' of social media each day on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and Flickr.

Immigration experimented several years ago with powerful software called Radian 6, which can provide surveillance across a range of social web platforms, but decided not to adopt it.

The department's key research contractor has told Fairfax that the monitoring currently undertaken for Immigration was about ''taking the temperature of society'' and that no reputable research company would help government departments compile ''hit lists'' of political opponents.

But pro-asylum seeker campaigner Vanessa Powell said she was intimidated when the department tweeted her about an ''offensive remark'' it said should be removed from her Facebook thread immediately or the government would ''consider our options further''.

''I felt quite intimidated and threatened as well because I didn't know what action they were referring to when they said, 'We will consider our options further','' Ms Powell told Fairfax.

When she identified the post in question - a comment using ''foul language'' a friend had made about a photograph of a protest at a Sydney detention centre - she removed it.

''I was shocked that they were actively monitoring my account because it's just my personal page,'' the activist said.

''They have no right to be spying on members of the public.''

The secretive department refused to say how it became aware of the material on Ms Powell's Facebook account.

The department said it had no problem with ''discourse'' on politics or policies; it confronted Ms Powell over an ''offensive'' remark about one of its public servants.

Immigration said it would be ''inappropriate'' to disclose publicly how it became aware of Ms Powell's post but pointed out that the material was open to public viewing.

Written questions from Fairfax to Immigration about its social media monitoring were referred to the office of Immigration Minister Scott Morrison, which did not respond.

smh.com.au 11 Apr 2014

The real truth is that the government monitors ALL communications on the internet by Australians, whether it be url lists from ISPs to forum posts, and not just 'social media'.

This is all part of the 'slave' agenda which all Australians are.

 

Another fact regarding telecommunication is that the Israeli company Amdocs in collaboration with Telstra collects customer data, which is stored not in Australia.

 

FORMER Labor minister Joe Tripodi has been accused of turning off his telephone when he drove to Wellington in central NSW last year to see his former cabinet ­colleague Tony Kelly to avoid being tracked by investigators from the Independent Commission Against Corruption. 
 
Counsel assisting the commission, Geoffrey Watson SC, said Mr Tripodi had turned off his phone at 8:04am on March 10 last year and turned it on at 6:25pm when he was on the Sydney side of the Blue Mountains.

He had driven 5½ hours so the pair could get their stories straight over a doctored cabinet minute, Mr Watson said — a minute that could have ended up with Australian Water Holdings winning a billion-dollar deal with the NSW government.

Mr Kelly put the minute forward, after Mr Tripodi had drafted it, using material from AWH.

Mr Tripodi yesterday denied he had deliberately turned his phone off to avoid being tracked, saying he found it on the back seat of the car when he stopped at service station on the way back.

After getting Mr Kelly’s ­address from NSW ALP head office, he had gone to Wellington to see Mr Kelly and to research a possible lucerne export deal for an associate, William Ning.

At this point, Mr Watson announced he had earlier handed a note to his junior counsel that read: “I bet you $2 that Tripodi says he went down to see Kelly for a hay deal involving some unnamed Chinese investors.”

He asked Mr Tripodi: “Pretty close, isn’t it? Where do you think we got that information from. I couldn’t have invented it, I’m not that clever. Where do you think we got that information from? It’s not true, is it?”

Asked if he was devastated to have driven 5½ hours there and 5½ hours back on a fruitless ­errand, he replied: “I went out to inform myself about it.”

Mr Tripodi agreed he quickly found out that it was not possible to profitably export hay as it was worth only $12 a bale. He agreed it wasn’t even economically feasible to move it from Wellington to Orange.

Why hadn’t he just rung Mr Kelly? “I can’t remember. I might have tried, I can’t remember … if he wasn’t home, I had other things to do.”

Mr Kelly told the commission Mr Tripodi turned up un­announced on his doorstep with a coffee and a hamburger. They had talked for about 20-30 minutes, mostly about how former parliamentary colleagues were going after politics. The subject of the cabinet minute had been only briefly raised, he said.

He said this was before the commission had approached him. It is illegal for witnesses before the commission to speak to anyone about their evidence.

Mr Tripodi was also asked about being picked up from a park in Fairfield West by a former staff member of Mr Tripodi, Rocco Leonello.

He denied he had arranged to meet in the park because he feared his phone was being tapped and he wanted to defeat ICAC investigators.

Earlier, Mr Kelly relied on his staff when he signed a highly misleading cabinet minute that could have led to Australian Water Holdings getting a billion-dollar contract to provide water and sewerage.

He said he read the cabinet minute, which reversed the recommendations of the Department of Premier and Cabinet to refuse a public-private partnership with AWH, with his chief of staff Laurie Brown standing beside him.

He said he questioned Mr Brown as he read it. When it came to a series of figures, he had asked him: “How do I know these are correct?”

Mr Brown had replied they were correct, but in any case when the minute went up to the budget sub-committee of cabinet they would be verified.

theaustralian.com.au 11 Apr 2014

Another action where politicians are committing criminal offences.

Allegedly when one turns one's phone off it is to avoid ICAC tracking.

Excellent information for amateur criminals.

The truth is out: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it

 

'The central bank can print as much money as it wishes.' Photograph: Alamy

 

Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn't know how banking really works, because if they did, "there'd be a revolution before tomorrow morning".

Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called "Money Creation in the Modern Economy", co-authored by three economists from the Bank's Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox positions more ordinarily associated with groups such as Occupy Wall Street are correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.

To get a sense of how radical the Bank's new position is, consider the conventional view, which continues to be the basis of all respectable debate on public policy. People put their money in banks. Banks then lend that money out at interest – either to consumers, or to entrepreneurs willing to invest it in some profitable enterprise. True, the fractional reserve system does allow banks to lend out considerably more than they hold in reserve, and true, if savings don't suffice, private banks can seek to borrow more from the central bank.

The central bank can print as much money as it wishes. But it is also careful not to print too much. In fact, we are often told this is why independent central banks exist in the first place. If governments could print money themselves, they would surely put out too much of it, and the resulting inflation would throw the economy into chaos. Institutions such as the Bank of England or US Federal Reserve were created to carefully regulate the money supply to prevent inflation. This is why they are forbidden to directly fund the government, say, by buying treasury bonds, but instead fund private economic activity that the government merely taxes.

It's this understanding that allows us to continue to talk about money as if it were a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say "there's just not enough money" to fund social programmes, to speak of the immorality of government debt or of public spending "crowding out" the private sector. What the Bank of England admitted this week is that none of this is really true. To quote from its own initial summary: "Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits" … "In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money 'multiplied up' into more loans and deposits."

In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it's backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There's really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again. So for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What's more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity. Since the beginning of the recession, the US and British central banks have reduced that cost to almost nothing. In fact, with "quantitative easing" they've been effectively pumping as much money as they can into the banks, without producing any inflationary effects.

What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this (and the paper does admit, if you read it carefully, that the central bank does fund the government after all). So there's no question of public spending "crowding out" private investment. It's exactly the opposite.

Why did the Bank of England suddenly admit all this? Well, one reason is because it's obviously true. The Bank's job is to actually run the system, and of late, the system has not been running especially well. It's possible that it decided that maintaining the fantasy-land version of economics that has proved so convenient to the rich is simply a luxury it can no longer afford.

But politically, this is taking an enormous risk. Just consider what might happen if mortgage holders realised the money the bank lent them is not, really, the life savings of some thrifty pensioner, but something the bank just whisked into existence through its possession of a magic wand which we, the public, handed over to it.
Historically, the Bank of England has tended to be a bellwether, staking out seeming radical positions that ultimately become new orthodoxies. If that's what's happening here, we might soon be in a position to learn if Henry Ford was right.

theguardian.com 18 Mar 2014

Anger as number of criminals recruited to NSW Police increases

One in 40 NSW police officers were discovered to have a criminal conviction. Photo: Daniel Shaw

NSW Police recruited criminals who had notched up 414 convictions before they entered the force, including 40 cases of stealing, 20 cases of break, enter and steal, more than 100  drink-driving offences, plus fraud and dishonesty.

Figures obtained under freedom of information laws reveal that 595 offences were committed by 437 police officers, or about one in 40 police still on active duty. Of those offences, 70 per cent were committed before they were employed as police officers. 

There are well over 100 high range PCAs, there are more high range PCA than low level PCA. 

The figures put pressure on Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione, who has said that most convictions by serving officers were for low-range drink-driving and similar offences.

Former police officer Richard McDonald, who obtained the figures, said it was ‘‘just unfathomable you can let police in who have convictions for serious offences, including fraud, break and enter, drug offences and firearms’’.

He said the number of police with convictions had risen almost 250 per cent since 2008, although police numbers had only increased 6 per cent.

Of the 260 drink-driving offences recorded by police, including those by senior officers on the force and those committed pre-employment, 202 were medium or high range.

‘‘NSW Police has been recruiting criminals found guilty of serious offences,’’ Mr McDonald said. ‘‘That’s why the number of offences has gone up. This flies in the face of [Mr Scipione’s] claim that most are low-range drink-driving offences.’’

Mr Scipione has stood by his statement on Saturday that the majority of convictions ‘‘were for a low-range PCA [prescribed concentration of alcohol] or similar offence’’.  

‘‘While I’m not happy about that [convictions by police officers], I don’t believe these warrant the end of a police career,’’ he said.

However, of the 260 drink-driving offences, only 58 were low range. Of those, 52 were committed before employment as police officers.

Of the 174 drink-driving offences recorded by officers before they were employed by the police, 118 were for medium or high range.

Of the 35 drink-driving offences by senior constables, 32 were in the medium or high range.  Six serving sergeants committed high or medium drink-driving offences.

Other offences recorded by senior police include five cases of assault occasioning bodily harm, one case of common assault and several convictions for providing false information. Mr Scipione said the recruitment process, which had been strengthened in 2009, involved a range of checks.

On its website, the NSW Police Recruitment branch says it conducts a review of any criminal history information of any potential recruits.

smh.com.au 29 Mar 2014

 

The Police are a criminal organisation in Australia, a fact that the masses are not being made aware of.

 

The police are NOT there for YOUR protection, but rather are subservient to corporate rule, and are contract / policy enforcers, who put people into prison for not following 'Commercial Laws'.

DARPA project seeks hive mind for drones

Reuters / Chad Slattery

The Pentagon’s research arm is launching a program to unite existing and future drones into hives, where individual autonomous aircraft will share data and operate together against targets on a battlefield – all while being controlled by one human.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently announced that, on April 11, it will hold a “proposer’s day” for its Collaborative Operations in Denied Environments (CODE) program. CODE’s objective is to expand capacity of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, to include “autonomy and inter-platform collaboration.”
 
“Collaborative autonomy has the potential to significantly increase the capabilities of [existing drones] as well as to reduce the cost of future systems by composing heterogeneous teams of [drones] that can leverage the capabilities of each asset without having to duplicate or integrate capabilities into a single platform,” DARPA’s announcement explains.

“Using collaboration algorithms, [drones] can provide services to each other, such as geolocating targets with long-distance sensors and guiding less-capable systems within their sensor range, providing multimodal sensors and diverse observation angles to improve target identification, transmitting critical information through the network...[and] protecting each other by overwhelming defenses and other stratagems.”
 
With CODE, DARPA hopes to develop four “critical technology areas” for its future drones: single-drone mission and flight autonomy; a human-systems interface that enables a “mission commander” to manage a drone fleet and handle “critical inputs” such as telling drones to fire weapons; drone-team autonomy that gives a fleet one common intelligence while exploiting the best capabilities and attributes of each “member”; and an “open architecture” that would guide aspects of a squadron, allowing them to pass information between each other and humans.

The CODE project, according to DARPA, is an effort to ready today’s relatively primitive drones for “dynamic” future conflicts, which the agency believes will be marked by “a higher level of threats, contested electromagnetic spectrum, and re-locatable targets.”
 
Furthermore, as Ars Technica points out, DARPA sees the skies of Afghanistan and Iraq, where US drones have operated with almost no danger of counteraction, as child’s play compared to a future where drone technology will surely be more widespread and enemies more “hardened” than insurgents drones have hunted thus far.

It was recently reported that DARPA is doubling funding for its fleet of underwater drones, dubbed the Hydra program. Some of DARPA’s other ongoing projects include inaudible military vehicles, the ATLAS robot, unprecedented facial recognition software, brain-reading technology, the ultimate internet search engine, and, of course, lasers to shoot down multiple enemy drones.

rt.com 29 Marc 2014

While currently this technology is officially being used in 'hostile' countries, it can also be used against the people of the nation.

The largest threat to ANY government is NOT the external 'invading' forces, but rather it's own people, who have allegedly democratically elected it.

In order to keep the masses subservient, various 'distractions' are created.

This illusion must not stop functioning in order for successful control of the herd population.

Row continues over boat incursion secrecy

THE opposition and Greens are demanding a full and frank government account of the circumstances surrounding Australian border protection vessels' six breaches of Indonesian territory, following the release of a heavily redacted report. 
 
Customs and Defence conducted a joint internal review into the incursions - which took place between December 2013 and January 2014 under Operation Sovereign Borders - but only the executive summary with five recommendations was publicly released in February.

AAP obtained a copy of the 55-page report, under Freedom of Information laws, but Customs cited damage to international relations among the reasons for 18 blacked-out pages and other redacted sections.
Both Labor and the Greens have been vocal in their calls for the report's full release.

The opposition's immigration spokesman Richard Marles said the Abbott government's culture of secrecy, surrounding the military-led asylum seeker boat crackdown, was deeply concerning.

"The Australian public has a right to know the exact circumstances into how and why our navy illegally entered Indonesian waters," he told AAP.

He's concerned about safety at sea as well as the impact on Australian and Indonesian relations.

The document does not disclose whether Australian border protection vessels were turning asylum seeker boats back at the time of the breaches.

Sections identifying which border protection vessels were involved and the circumstances are also blanked out.

The document shows the joint review actually made seven recommendations but two have not been made public.

Discussion about the Abbott government's policy parameters on boat turn backs - only when safe and outside 12 nautical miles from Indonesia's archipelagic baseline - was also heavily redacted.

Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said the redacted report is just another example of the Abbott government's obsession with secrecy.

So far explanations about the breaches had been "woefully inadequate", Senator Hanson-Young said.

"It is time for Tony Abbott to... provide the Australian people with a full and frank explanation as to how Australian vessels came to breach another country's waters," she told AAP.

Last month, a Senate inquiry into the breaches found that the government's directions, to turn boats back when safe and outside of Indonesian territory, may be unachievable.

"Our defence personnel are being forced to carry out dangerous operations on the high seas and are being held as the government's scapegoat," Senator Hanson-Young said.

The review blamed the breaches on incorrect calculations of boundaries of Indonesian waters rather than deliberate actions or navigational error.

The discovery of the "inadvertent" breaches prompted the Abbott government to issue a swift apology to Indonesia.

Relations between the two countries were already under strain following revelations Australian spies tapped the mobile phones of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his wife in 2009.

Customs and Defence are still assessing whether lapses in judgment contributed to the breaches.

Training regimes are under review and revised force preparation training will be introduced by next month.
Officers will also be given special training on the United Nations convention of the law of the sea from the end of June.

theaustralian.com.au 6 Apr 2014

The actions of the Australian 'government' are criminal to say the least.

The illegitimacy of Australia's government will be exposed, irrespective of how many documents are heavily redacted.

Why companies including GE, Apple, Coca-Cola and more are incorporated in Delaware

Welcome to Delaware — the home of tax-dodging American corporate giants. Source: ThinkStock

 

THERE’S an office building in Wilmington, Delaware that is entirely unremarkable in physical appearance. Two storeys, beige brickwork, metal window frames and a red awning. 

It’s completely average in every way except for one extraordinary fact. It is the official legal address to almost 300,000 businesses including giants of the corporate world such as Coca-Cola, Ford, Google, News Corp (owner of news.com.au), Apple and General Electric, as revealed by The New York Times.
 
This building (1209 North Orange Street) and several others in Delaware is how more than half of America’s publicly-listed companies, and two-thirds of Fortune 500 businesses, legally minimise their tax bill.

1209 North Orange Street, Wilmington, Delaware. Image: Google Maps. Source: Supplied

 

Delaware’s laws and regulations are so business friendly, it actually led officials in the Cayman Islands to complain about how lax the state is in comparison to the more infamous tropics.

You’d be forgiven if you can’t place Delaware on a map. It’s a tiny east coast state whose less than a million denizens account for only 0.29 per cent of the total US population.

Its main city, Wilmington, is approximately halfway between New York City and Washington DC, and it’s America’s second smallest state by land mass. In the US presidential elections, Delaware gets only three electoral votes, compared to the country’s biggest state, California, which gets 55.

But a perusal of America’s biggest and most well-known corporations and you’ll find they are incorporated in Delaware, far from their actual headquarters in California, Georgia, Nebraska, Michigan, Illinois or New York. Think Walmart, General Motors, Berkshire Hathaway, Disney, Facebook, Amazon, JP Morgan, Kraft, Netflix, McDonald’s and American Airlines.

See that tiny red speck? That's Delaware. Image: Wikimedia Commons. Source: Supplied

 

So what is it about Delaware that is attracting business like no other states?

There are a couple of factors at work, one of which is tax benefits. Surprise.

According to the New York Times , Delaware allows companies which are incorporated (the process of separating a company from an individual ie. Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are separate entities under business law) there to reduce their tax obligations by shifting certain revenues to holding companies in Delaware.

Specifically, Delaware doesn’t apply tax on what’s termed ‘intangible assets’ such as trademarks, royalties, leases and copyrights. For example, if company X held the copyright to song Y, every time song Y is licenced for use, company X collects royalty fees. Those fees are liable for tax collection in the state company X actually operates in. But if company X shifts that revenue to Delaware, then that cash stream isn’t taxed, saving it tons of money every year.

Coca-Cola’s actual home office may be in Atlanta, Georgia, but its legal address is in Delaware. Source: AP

 

The Net estimated in the 10 years to 2012, the Delaware loophole allowed American companies to get away with reducing their tax bills to other states by $9.5 billion. This, unsurprisingly, has ruffled feathers in other statehouses, who are missing out on those tax dollars.

But it’s not the only reason Delaware is such an attractive proposition to its more than a million companies — there are more companies incorporated in Delaware than there are people. Because Delaware generates a quarter of its state budget from fees and taxes from these companies, it’s in the state’s best interest to keep them happy. Very happy.

And one of the ways it does that is with business-friendly laws and regulations free of red tape. Delaware is one of the easiest places in the world to set up a business with its Department of State office open until 10:30pm on Mondays to Thursdays and midnight on Fridays. It can take less than an hour to incorporate a company.

Delaware’s most famous resident: US vice president Joe Biden, who represented Delaware as a senator for 36 years. His son, Beau Biden, is the state’s attorney-general. Source: AP

 

It also requires very little paperwork from businesses setting up. Critics argue that lack of demand for credentials or transparency allows criminals to take advantage of the system. Many law-skirters have been caught laundering money through shell companies incorporated in Delaware. The Economist reported investigators have joked Delaware is an acronym for ‘Dollars and euros Laundered And Washed At Reasonable Expense’.

However, the other reason why businesses are so enamoured with Delaware is because of its court system. The state set up the respected Court of Chancery in 1792, which only hears business disputes. The court is timely and presided over by judges incredibly well-versed in the state’s business laws. There is also more than 200 years of case law and precedent which means there are very few surprises in the verdicts.

McDonald’s is another company incorporated in Delaware. Its headquarters are actually in Chicago, Illinois. Source: AFP

 

Corporate lawyers all over the country are well versed in two sets of business law — those of their home state and those of Delaware, which is taught in academic institutions across the US.

Plus, it’s self-perpetuating. The next generation of US companies are also incorporating their businesses in Delaware with start-ups following the example of their bigger siblings if they want to attract investors.

The founder of a Virginia-based technology start-up, who declined to be named, told news.com.au: “Delaware has the most straightforward rules for corporations and companies and venture capitalists prefer to go with what they know.

“They know exactly what to expect in Delaware rules, rather than having to know the rules of 50 different states. Over time, Delaware has just become the go-to and easy place, and you’re expected to incorporate there if you’re serious about growth.”

General Electric’s real headquarters are in Connecticut. Source: Supplied

 

So what does this all have to do with that nondescript building in Wilmington? 1209 North Orange St is like a dropbox for all those companies. The address belongs to a company called CT Corporation, which acts as a ‘mail-forwarder’ for its clients. And it’s what allows those companies to be incorporated in the tax-haven that is Delaware, with its cushy business perks, rather than their actual home states.

news.com.au 8 Apr 2014

This is how governments allow global giants to defraud the people (taxpayers) of their earnings.

ALL U.S. CITIZENS ARE LEGALLY OWNED CORPORATE SLAVES.

Navy creates ship fuel from seawater

Researchers working for the United States Navy say they are around a decade away from mastering a procedure that will make high-powered fuel for the military’s fleet of ships out of run-of-the-mill seawater.

The US Naval Research Laboratory’s Materials Science and Technology Division have already demonstrated that a new, state-of-the-art conversion method can turn ordinary seawater into a liquid hydrocarbon fuel potent enough to power a small model aircraft. Soon, though, they say the same process will provide the Navy with a way of refueling any of its hundreds of ships at sea without relying on the comparably meager fleet of 15 military oil tankers currently tasked with delivering nearly 600 million gallons of fuel to those vessels on an annual basis.

Scientists say it will be another 10 years before ships will likely be able to successfully convert seawater into super-powerful fuel, but the technology is already being hailed as a game changer and is expected to substantially cut costs for the Pentagon.

The process at hand involves extracting carbon dioxide molecules from the ocean water outside of a ship’s hull and using it to produce hydrogen gas, “catalytically converting the CO2 and H2 into jet fuel by a gas-to-liquids process,” according to an article published this week on the Naval Research Laboratory’s website.

“The potential payoff is the ability to produce JP-5 fuel stock at sea reducing the logistics tail on fuel delivery with no environmental burden and increasing the Navy's energy security and independence,” Dr. Heather Willauer, a research chemist who has worked on the procedure for years, explained to the NRL back in 2012. “With such a process, the Navy could avoid the uncertainties inherent in procuring fuel from foreign sources and/or maintaining long supply lines,” she said.

Two years later, Willauer’s research team says they are making substantial progress with regards to their goal of using that process to put a powerful new tool into the hands of the Navy. According to a study in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, the new conversion method is fuel is "game changing."

"For us in the military, in the Navy, we have some pretty unusual and different kinds of challenges," AFP quoted Vice Admiral Philip Cullom for an article published on Monday this week. “We don't necessarily go to a gas station to get our fuel. Our gas station comes to us in terms of an oiler, a replenishment ship. Developing a game-changing technology like this, seawater to fuel, really is something that reinvents a lot of the way we can do business when you think about logistics, readiness."

“It’s a huge milestone for us,” said Cullom.

When the Navy Times first wrote about the procedure in 2012 earlier on in the development process, staff writer Joshua Stewart reported that not only would the program cut costs by generating the fuel on site instead of importing it from the Pentagon’s reserves or an foreign supplier, but not bothering to stock up on gallons upon gallons of fuel — or being at the mercy of one of the military’s few oil tankers — would all together eliminate a number of the costly factors normally involved in keeping the Navy’s fleet afloat.

An analysis conducted by Willauer’s team, Stewart reported then, estimated that fuel made through the conversion process would cost between $3 and $6 per gallon, including start-up costs.

“The report cited the Navy's 2011 average cost for JP-5 at $3.51; media reports have put that number closer to $4. These prices don't include shipping and storage costs, which would be cut drastically or eliminated by making JP-5 at sea,” he wrote.

"Historical data suggest that in nine years, the price of fuel for the Navy could be well over the price of producing a synthetic jet fuel at sea," agreed the authors of the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy study.

Screenshot from YouTube user USNRL

According to AFP, Vice Admiral Cullom said that the Navy is in the midst of “very challenging times” that are prompting decision makers to think outside of the box when it comes to finding new ways to fuel the fleet.

“We need to challenge the results of the assumptions that are the result of the last six decades of constant access to cheap, unlimited amounts of fuel,” he said.“Basically, we’ve treated energy like air, something that’s always there and that we don’t worry about too much. But the reality is that we do have to worry about it.”

On her part, Dr. Willauer called the NRL’s latest advancement “a big breakthrough” that came after nearly a decade of personally working close to the project.

“We've demonstrated the feasibility, we want to improve the process efficiency," she said.


The International Business Times reported this week that most of the Navy’s 289 vessels rely on oil-based fuel, with the exception of some some aircraft carriers and nuclear-powered submarines.

rt.com 9 Apr 2014

Another technology held by the U.S. (military) government.

As a patented / military technology it can be kept away from civilian use.

More relocatable units for Vic prisons

MORE shipping container-style "relocatable units" are being rolled out to boost the capacity of Victoria's prison system. 
 

The Victorian government has announced another 27 units will be installed by August at two correctional facilities near Geelong, a gain of 81 medium-security beds.

"Relocatable units are already providing an important, immediate boost to capacity in Victoria's corrections system, and today's announcement will build on this," Corrections Minister Edward O'Donohue said on Wednesday.

"The security and design of the units will be consistent with the standard security accommodation already at Fulham and Marngoneet prisons."

The government has previously likened the units - which each house three inmates - to mining camp accommodation and has also pointed to their use in prisons in Western Australia, South Australia and New Zealand.

Expansion plans for Victoria's Loddon Prison, announced in March, include 15 of the units.

The government says it has added 1000 prison beds since 2011 with another 2500 in the pipeline, including the 1000-bed prison under construction at Ravenhall in Melbourne's west.

However, Community and Public Sector organiser Andrew Capp said the use of relocatable units, known as "dongaS", was inadequate because the doors could be prised open.

"The government is increasing the escape risks at the prisons that use these dodgy Dongas putting officers the community and other prisoners at risk," he said.

Mr Capp said Corrections Victoria had re-classified medium-security prisoners in walled prisons to those in lower security levels so they could be shifted to the units without fences at Dhurringile, Beechworth and Langi Kal Kal, and issued with monitoring bracelets that were not reliable.

news.com.au 9 Apr 2014

The people of Victoria are under the rule of a 'Police State', and this is reinforced by a new style of 'prison' being built, most likely for the new breed of criminals, the protesters.

The masses may be under the impression that they have elected a Victorian 'government' but the reality is far from the truth.

The Victorian courts function on 'Commercial Law', where one is 'judged' and sentenced with relation to contracts and NOT 'law'.

This is the largest farce in the legal history of Victoria, also Australia.

Bob Carr's texts to Gillard reveal 'extraordinary' influence pro-Israel lobby had on former

Former foreign minister Bob Carr has published private text messages between himself and Julia Gillard to reveal the "extraordinary" level of influence the pro-Israel lobby had on the former prime minister's office.

In a remarkable disclosure of private conversations, Mr Carr said he chose to publish the text messages in his book – Diary of a Foreign Minister – without getting Ms Gillard's permission, because to do so was in the national interest.

He also describes Israel's former ambassador as "cunning" and reveals his fights with the self-described pro-Israel "falafel faction" in Labor's caucus that includes Jewish MPs Mark Dreyfus and Michael Danby.

Happier times ... Prime Minister Julia Gillard with Foreign Minister Bob Carr at a press conference in Beijing China on 9 April, 2013. Photo: Andrew Meares

"The book would not have been truthful with this disagreement between a prime minister and her foreign minister edited out," Mr Carr told Fairfax Media, explaining his decision to publish Ms Gillard's private text messages without consent, despite asking other officials for permission to publish correspondence.

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"The public should know how foreign policy gets made, especially when it appears the prime minister is being heavily lobbied by one interest group with a stake in Middle East policy."

Mr Danby has hit back at Mr Carr, accusing him of bigotry over his claims of the influence of a pro-Israel lobby.

"No lobby in Australia, I understand, has that kind of influence. It's laughable," he told ABC radio on Thursday.

"But I suppose, in the current climate, as [Attorney-General] George Brandis says, it's OK to be a bigot."
The Jewish MP, who is chairman of the Friends of Israel, also accused Mr Carr, a former premier of NSW, of showing ingratitude to the Labor Party.

"In retrospect, given all the division he caused ... it was a mistake," Mr Danby told ABC Radio on Thursday.

"Here's a bloke plucked from obscurity ... a former provincial premier who dumps on Gillard and the former Labor government ... the Labor Party supported him all his political life. How about a bit of decency?"
Mr Danby also likened Mr Carr to Jack Nicholson's character in the film As Good as it Gets.

"A lot of people are laughing at the book; they're not laughing with you Bob, they're laughing at you," Mr Danby said.

On Thursday, Mr Carr said Mr Danby's comments were "extraordinary".

"For years I was president of Labor Friends of Israel. I wrote a book, My Reading Life, in which I recommend the book of an Auschwitz survivor as the most important book of the last 100 years," he told ABC radio.

"My only point about Israel was that settlement activity ought to stop and that the Palestinian status, the increased status in the General Assembly, ought to be not blocked by Australia. So that's a position that the foreign minister of every European country would endorse and indeed doesn't fall too much short of the foreign policy position of [US Secretary of State] John Kerry."

During his 18 months as foreign minister, Mr Carr orchestrated a significant shift in the Australian government's Middle East policy, swinging support behind Palestine at the United Nations. Standing up to Ms Gillard, who was staunchly pro-Israel, Mr Carr succeeded in forcing her to abandon her determination to oppose Palestine's attempts to gain observer status at the UN. Ms Gillard's leadership wobbled in the process.

Mr Carr's pro-Palestinian advocacy alienated many in Australia's Jewish community, and some within his own party; and the publishing of his personal diaries is likely to inflame both the Australian Israel lobby and senior Israeli officials.

Mr Carr's criticisms of Israel touch the highest levels of the Israeli government. Mr Carr describes Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman as "gloomy, taciturn", and the former Israeli ambassador Yuval Rotem as "the cunning Yuval".

In diary entries Mr Carr reveals just how deep his division with Ms Gillard went. He complains that Ms Gillard would not even let him criticise Israeli West Bank settlements due to her fear it would anger Australia's pro-Israel lobby – a reference to the Melbourne-based Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council – which Mr Carr says had a direct line into the prime minister's office.

"So, we can't even 'express concern' without complaint," Mr Carr writes. "This lobby must fight every inch."
Reproducing private text messages, Mr Carr suggests Ms Gillard's support of Israel was so immovable that she would not even allow him to change Australia's vote on what he considered to be a minor UN motion.
"Julia – motion on Lebanon oil spill raises no Palestinian or Israel security issues. In that context I gave my commitment to Lebanon," Mr Carr writes in a text message.

"No reason has been given to me to change," Ms Gillard reportedly replies.

"Julia – not so simple," Mr Carr responds. "I as Foreign Minister gave my word. I was entitled to because it had nothing to do with Palestinian status or security of Israel."

Ms Gillard shuts him down in a final terse message: "Bob … my jurisdiction on UN resolutions isn't confined to ones on Palestine and Israel."

smh.com.au 10 Apr 2014