Northrop Grumman awarded $44M contract for illegal immigrant detention

Qbit.cc has learned that in 2008 ICE and Homeland Security awarded Northrop Grumman a contract to provide “Bed Space, Transportation and Detainee Location Tracking” of illegal immigrants, from 2009-2013.  Northrop Grumman is one of the suppliers of weapons to the US Military.

You can download the contract PDF here. Itemized dollar amounts have been redacted but it does indicate the total amount of the award: $44,348,547.00

Also attached:

US Dept of Homeland Security
Office of Detention and Removal Operations DRO
Briefing Book

Feel Better™

There’s a new University of Michigan web site, purportedly to help students get help with mental health issues, called “Campus Mind Works.”

It contains a lot of info about therapy and seems rather benign and even potentially helpful, at first glance. But once you know who’s running the site- U-M Psychiatry, this deceptive little piece of marketing makes a lot more sense.

First Check out the scrolling slideshow

Frame 2 caption:

“The sooner you seek help, the sooner you will feel better.”
- Jenna, U-M student

Frame 6 caption:

“The sooner you seek help, the sooner you will feel better. Why wait?”
- Leena, U-M student

Oh well then, since both Leena and Jenna think I need some pills, let me just march right on over there ask my doctor.  I mean, I do want to Feel Better™, right?

Ladies- the fact that there are 13 women and 4 men in this thinly-veiled commercial should give you a clue that you are being targeted by the drug industry disproportionately.

Is it because you’re more trusting of authority than men?  Are you just more likely to use drugs because you’re more emotional?  Or are they targeting you as part of a larger agenda that is not purely market driven?

I don’t know the answers to these “why” questions, but one thing I do know is there are a lot of women out there hooked on antidepressants and anxiety drugs.  Based on some studies, women are about twice as likely to take antidepressants as men.

You probably won’t realize that the main purpose of this site is slinging happy drugs to students until you actually follow thru and speak with a doctor.  Thats when they sell you hard on the drugs.

There’s no free lunch.  Good luck with the brain zaps.

Many truckloads of explosives “go missing” over several months in India

I’m sure we’ll be hearing about these explosives again soon.

Bot-like scanning/indexing from Lockheed Martin

whois 192.31.106.34?

[Querying whois.arin.net]

NetRange:       192.31.106.0 – 192.31.106.255
CIDR:           192.31.106.0/24
OriginAS:
NetName:        LM-192-31-106
NetHandle:      NET-192-31-106-0-1
Parent:         NET-192-0-0-0-0
NetType:        Direct Allocation
NameServer:     NS2.LMCO.COM
NameServer:     NS3.LMCO.COM
NameServer:     NS1.LMCO.COM
RegDate:        1997-06-17
Updated:        2001-09-26
Ref:            http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-192-31-106-0-1

OrgName:        Lockheed Martin Corporation
OrgId:          LHMC
Address:        1401 Del Norte
City:           Denver
StateProv:      CO
PostalCode:     80221
Country:        US
RegDate:
Updated:        2010-01-21
Comment:        Unauthorized use of this system may be subject to disciplinary action, and
Comment:        if such use is violative of state and federal laws it may be subject to
Comment:        legal action as well. Reminder: Information transmitted to a foreign person
Comment:        on this network may be subject to US Export Control laws. Contact your
Comment:        Export Coordinator for assistance.
Ref:            http://whois.arin.net/rest/org/LHMC

OrgTechHandle: LMN-ORG-ARIN
OrgTechName:   Lockheed Martin Corporation
OrgTechPhone:  +1-303-430-2064
OrgTechEmail:  lm-nic@lmco.com
OrgTechRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/LMN-ORG-ARIN

Related: Federal Bureau of Investigation Awards Lockheed Martin Biometric Card Scanning Service Contract

“We’re proud to continue our decade-long partnership with the FBI on the Card Scanning Service program,” Read more …

Nuke that thing now, part 4

Holy sh*t.  This may be the biggest BP media deception yet. The gist of it is that the main well is still leaking and the “capped well” we’re looking at video of a 2nd nearby well from this drilling operation.

“Use skimmers to siphon off the oil” …. “Send a bomb down there”

And suddenly Matt Simmonds is dead.

See also:

Nuke that thing now
Nuke that thing now, Part 2
Nuke that thing now, Part 3

For years, Crestwood Illinois Public Water Supply secretly cut its “purified” Lake Michigan water with contaminated well water

Little did the Crestwood residents know, for years they were drinking significant amounts of chlorinated hydrocarbon dry cleaning chemicals because the Crestwood Public Water Supply mixed contaminated well water with the Lake Michigan water they claimed to be delivering into the municipal water system.

Incidence of kidney and lung cancer is significantly higher in Crestwood, and the EPA has reported that the contaminants detected in the Crestwood water are likely due to a spill of a dry cleaning chemical, perchloroethylene (perc).  From the EPA’s perc ‘chemfact’ page: “Laboratory studies show that PERC causes kidney and liver damage and cancer in animals exposed repeatedly by inhalation and by mouth.”

The EPA estimated that residents of Crestwood were consuming water containing the various chemical byproducts of the perc spill in the low PPB (parts per  billion) range, which may not seem like much, but over years of chronic exposure can lead to significant increases in the incidence of disease.

Those who are predisposed to certain diseases may find their tissues can not withstand the chronic exposure to organic chemicals.

From Natural News

A report by the Chicago Tribune has revealed that officials in the village of Crestwood, just outside Chicago, have been secretly introducing tainted well water into the town water supply for years.

“I feel deceived,” village resident Tom Parkis said.

For years before the story broke, town residents had wondered if there might not be something wrong with their water. For example, Frank Caldario was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2009, at the age of 30.

“I can’t help but wonder if what happened to me had something to do with the water,” said Caldario, a non-smoker.

“It’s just unreal for someone my age to get that.”…In response to the article, the Illinois Department of Public Health conducted a survey of disease rates in Crestwood between 1994 and 2006. The researchers found that rates of kidney and gastrointestinal cancer were significantly higher in Crestwood men than in the population at large, and rates of lung cancer were significantly higher in both men and women. The researchers could not prove that the higher cancer rates were caused by the polluted water, but did find it to be a possible cause.

From the Illinois EPA’S site regarding the contamination (check out the FAQ)

From 1986 to 2007, the Illinois EPA believes Crestwood was using water from its contaminated groundwater well to supplement the Lake Michigan source water without informing the Illinois EPA or its water customers. Since the Crestwood Public Water Supply (PWS) well was reportedly not in use during this time period, no routine samples of that well were taken; federal Safe Drinking Water Act regulations do not require sampling of PWS wells that are not in use. Consequently, no regularly-collected analytical data are available to determine the levels of contamination over those years. However, in a letter to the Illinois EPA from April 1998, a consultant investigating a nearby drycleaner solvent release reported results from two samples collected from the Crestwood well. This letter also documents conversations with Crestwood officials who told the consultants that the well water was being mixed with the purchased Lake Michigan water at a ratio of 10:90. If this report is accurate, this set of results indicates that the chemical contamination discovered in 1986 had not yet degraded into the more dangerous chemical, vinyl chloride, which was first found in a 2007 well sample

….

Where are the VOCs vinyl chloride, 1,1-dichloroethylene (1,1-DCE) and the cis- and trans- forms of 1,2-DCE coming from?

Vinyl chloride is often found in the environment as a breakdown product of other solvents and is most likely coming from a release of the drycleaner solvent known as tetrachloroethylene

…

Illinois EPA is actively researching potential sources of the Crestwood well contamination.

A fundamental problem with biometric authentication

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just sit down at your computer and have it recognize you?  Remembering usernames and passwords to authenticate you to various computer resources can be quite a pain.

IT help desks across the world see a constant stream of password reset requests due to forgotten passwords, but this is precisely the appeal that password authentication has over biometric authentication.  You can change your password and hold a multitude of different user accounts without necessarily revealing your identity.

Biometrics, meaning measurements (metrics) of the biology (you)– fingerprint, iris, retina, face recognition, voice recognition, brain wave, DNA, or any number of features that are unique to individuals, can be used for identification.  Biometric authentication has one fatal security flaw however that prevents using it in high security systems: Individuals can’t change their biometrics.  Once an attacker gets your fingerprint, iris, retina scan, voice print or other hash in a standardized format, they can use it to impersonate you.

Here are some ways biometric authentication can be defeated, unless used in conjunction with a password.  This is obviously for informational purposes only, as a security assessment of these technologies. I don’t recommend you do any of these things.

Fingerprint readers [Difficulty: moderate]
Pull someone’s fingerprint off a used beverage glass or can.  CNC machine or create a photoresist mold of said fingerprint from a scan of the print, or from a fingerprint hash obtained from an existing authentication database.  Cast it in silicone.  Attacker wears the cast over her fingertip, spoofing the victim’s print.

Iris scanners [Difficulty: moderate]
Shoot a high res photo of someone’s iris or obtain the raw biometric hash from an existing system.  Create a contact lens with this image printed on it.

Retina scanners [Difficulty: hard]
Because the retina is on the back of the eye, it’s not something that could be easily “skimmed” in public.  In the sci-fi novel Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson), there were laser iris scanners that could scan an iris from a distance.  Even though that technology doesn’t exist yet, one could use an existing hash of the retina scan to create a combination contact lens with a hologram of the retina and the victim’s iris print built into one.  This holographic technology already exists and is only getting cheaper.

Voice print [Difficulty: moderate]
Voice print authentications systems use various algorithms to match a user’s voice to a known “voice print” hash or pre-recorded phrase.  A shotgun microphone can remotely record the sound of a person logging in, or phrases can be pieced together using phonemes (short sounds) taken from pre-recorded samples of the victim’s voice.  The voice can be played back over a speaker to the authentication system.  There are two-factor voice print systems that ask the user to read a dynamically generated word, but again using sample based techniques, it’s possible to synthesize a person’s voice dynamically.

DNA reader [Difficulty: hard]
The only way one could defeat current DNA sequencing technology would be by stealing some tissue (or pre-cloning it) from the victim, which would be used to spoof their identity. DNA sequencing is too slow and expensive to be used for authentication currently, however recent microfluidic lab-on-chip technologies have provided dramatic speed increases.

In any of these systems, if it’s physically accessible, one can bypass the scanner input subsystem and pass the raw, forged sensor data to the host software. If one already has the hash data from an existing database, no snooping or device fabrication is required.

Let’s just keep one thing in mind about biometrics.  We’re talking about identification, not authentication. If, as a society, we ever decide to rely solely on biometrics for authentication, we will have an epidemic of identity theft.  You can easily come up with a new password, completely independent of your identity. There’s no practical way to change your biometric data.

Say we live in a society that relies on biometrics for authentication to sensitive resources, and a criminal does actually steal your biometric data, they could wreak absolute havoc in your life.  Since you can’t change it, more and more criminals could use your identity as your biometric hash spreads thru the underground networks, the way social security numbers do today.

Let me tell you, identity theft is real.  I once got a phone bill for over $1000 due to identity theft.  Took me 6 months to clear that mess up.  Passwords are a pain but a strong password is the only thing standing between you and having your phone disconnected over fraudulent charges.

Also if you don’t have one, you should get a paper shredder.

Unnatural Selection: Genetically Modified Canola growing wild in North Dakota

Bayer (IG Farben) and Monsanto (/Searle), two of the most evil companies in history, join forces to pollute our gene pool with their profit-motivated genetic tinkering.

Our society desperately needs to move to a techno-agrarian model using local food production and clean energy (solar and wind), domestic manufacturing, responsible mining, and renewable materials, with severely limited imports.  This is getting ridiculous.  It’s death to our environment by a thousand cuts.

For billions of years on this planet, there has not been the means to program genes manually and deliberately.   All mutations to genes have been due to random forces such as radiation or chemical damage.  Now we bring into the equation the psychology of profit combined with the ability to construct new organisms with specific purposes.  This is a quantum leap forward in terms of evolution.  In a sense it bypasses evolution since natural selection is not imposed on these new organisms.

It’s artifical,  unnatural selection, imposed by some sick, sick people.  We’re talking about the same companies that created Agent Orange defoliant (Monsanto) that caused horriffic birth defects, and Zyklon B Gas (IG Farben) used to kill concentration camp inmates in Germany during WW2.  Do we really trust them to be engaging in this sort of reckless activity that will surely have unforeseen consequences?  The biggest class action law suit you can imagine wouldn’t begin to recoup the cost of permanently removing GM plants and animals that have escaped into the wild.   There is no amount of money that can fix these problems.

From GM crop escapes into the American wild (Nature)

“The extent of the escape is unprecedented,” says Cynthia Sagers, an ecologist at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, who led the research team that found the canola (Brassica napus, also known as rapeseed).

Sagers and her team found two varieties of transgenic canola in the wild — one modified to be resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide (glyphosate), and one resistant to Bayer Crop Science’s Liberty herbicide (gluphosinate). They also found some plants that were resistant to both herbicides, showing that the different GM plants had bred to produce a plant with a new trait that did not exist anywhere else.