Posts tagged government

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos (L) and his wife Maria Clemencia with President Obama at the height of the Secret Service Sex Scandal.

The US Secret Service, embroiled in a deepening sex scandal, said Saturday it had suspended 11 agents assigned to President Barack Obama’s trip to Colombia amid reports they had used prostitutes.

Five US military personnel are also being investigated for misconduct said to have taken place at the same hotel where the Secret Service staff were staying in the Caribbean resort city of Cartagena, and have been confined to barracks.

US Secret Service Assistant Director Paul Morrissey said the allegations were made on Thursday against

the Secret Service personnel, who included both special agents and Uniformed Division Officers, though none of them was assigned to Obama’s personal security detail.

“The nature of the allegations, coupled with a zero tolerance policy on personal misconduct, resulted in the Secret Service taking the decisive action to relieve these individuals of their assignment, return them to their place of duty and replace them with additional Secret Service personnel,” he said in a statement.

But Morrissey stressed that “these actions have had no impact on the Secret Service’s ability to execute a comprehensive security plan for the president’s visit to Cartagena.”

The personnel involved were taken to the service’s Washington headquarters for interviews on Saturday as the agency’s internal affairs division investigates the matter.

“As a result, all 11 employees have been placed on administrative leave. This is standard procedure and allows us the opportunity to conduct a full, thorough and fair investigation into the allegations,” Morrissey said.

He said the incident, which threatened to overshadow the Summit of the Americas, “is not reflective of the behavior of our personnel as they travel every day throughout the country and the world performing their duties in a dedicated, professional manner.”

“We regret any distraction from the Summit of the Americas this situation has caused,” he added.

(Source: news.ninemsn.com.au)

• Fake profiles used by Department of Homeland Security, says privacy group
• List of keywords flags ‘danger’ signal
• DHS may attempt to identify users from their accounts
• Keywords include ‘virus’, ‘drill’ and ‘illegal immigrant’

The Department of Homeland Security makes fake Twitter and Facebook profiles for the specific purpose of scanning the networks for ‘sensitive’ words - and tracking people who use them.

Simply using a word or phrase from the DHS’s ‘watch’ list could mean that spies from the government read your posts, investigate your account, and attempt to identify you from it, acccording to an online privacy group.

The words which attract attention range from ones seemingly related to diseases or bioweapons such as ‘human to animal’ and ‘outbreak’ to other, more obscure words such as ‘drill’ and ‘strain’.

The DHS also watches for words such as ‘illegal immigrant’.

The DHS outlined plans to scans blogs, Twitter and Facebook for words such as ‘illegal immigrant’, ‘outbreak’, ‘drill’, ‘strain’, ‘virus’, ‘recovery’, ‘deaths’, ‘collapse’, ‘human to animal’ and ‘trojan’, according to an ‘impact asssessment’ document filed by the agency.

When its search tools net an account using the phrases, they record personal information.

It’s still not clear how this information is used - and who the DHS shares it with.

An online privacy group, the Electronic Privacy Information Centre has requested information on the DHS’s scans, which it says the agency announced in February.

The privacy group has requested information on the DHS, and contractors it claims are working with the agency to scan social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The group says that the government has used scans of social media before to analyse specific events - such as the 2010 BP oil spill - but this general ‘watching’ of social media using fake profiles is new.

‘The initiatives were designed to gather information from ‘online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards,’ to store and analyze the information gathered, and then to ‘disseminate relevant and appropriate de-identified information to federal, state, local, and foreign governments and private sector partners,’ the group said in a court filing.

The group claims that a request under the Freedom of Information Act to access the documentation has gone unanswered.

(Source: Daily Mail)

Websites which revealed violations in Russia’s legislative polls were targeted in a mass hacking attack their operators said was aimed at preventing the exposure of mass fraud in the country’s parliamentary elections.

Popular Russian radio station Moscow Echo and election monitoring group Golos said their websites were the victims of massive cyber attacks on Sunday, while several opposition news sites were inaccessible.

“The attack on the website on election day is clearly an attempt to inhibit publication of information about violations,” Moscow Echo editor-in-chief Alexei Venediktov wrote on Twitter.

Golos said it was the victim of a similar “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attack, while several other opposition news sites were down.

The Moscow Echo is popular among the liberal opposition although it is owned by state gas giant Gazprom.

After the close of polls on Sunday, the Moscow Echo website was working again but the Golos website was still inaccessible.

Prime minister Vladimir Putin, whose United Russia party is expected to win Sunday’s polls but with a reduced majority, has denounced non-governmental organisations like Golos, comparing them to the disciple Judas who betrayed Jesus.

Russia has seen an upsurge in internet use since the last elections in 2007, and analysts have said the explosion of critical material on the web poses one of the biggest challenges to United Russia’s grip on power.

Golos said on Twitter that its main website as well as the “Map of Violations” site, detailing claims of fraud across Russia, were under “massive DDoS attacks”.

Golos head Liliya Shibanova said the authorities seemed especially angry at their Map of Violations project, where people could upload any information or evidence of election violations.

“It’s a very expensive operation,” Ms Shibanova said of the attacks. “It’s a big organisation with plenty of means that must have done it.”

Ms Shibanova, who was held for nearly 12 hours on Saturday by customs officials who also confiscated her computer, said the attack consisted of 50,000 hits per second by computers attempting to access the Golos website.

The website of opposition weekly New Times, known to publish investigative reports about government officials and feature columns by jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was inaccessable for several hours on Sunday.

Business daily Kommersant was not working for the fourth consecutive day after it was hacked on Thursday and had its IP address changed.

Moscow Echo filed a complaint to the Central Election Committee demanding to open a criminal case into the attacks, and editor Mr Venediktov said he complained directly to the spokespeople of Putin and president Dmitry Medvedev.

Like the Moscow Echo, the radio station is popular with the liberal opposition although it is owned by the media arm of state-controlled Russian gas giant Gazprom.

“Any hacker attack on any resource leads to financial losses, which is essentially the same as stealing,” said the chairman of Moscow Echo’s board of directors Nikolai Senkevich, adding that Gazprom’s media holding “fully supports” the station’s concern.

Pro-Kremlin youth activists also complained on Twitter that the opposition ordered an attack on their website chronicling violations by the opposition parties, although the website was fully accessible.

Russian bloggers also complained of their inability to access their accounts on popular blogging platform LiveJournal.com. The website has been a victim of repeated DDoS attacks throughout the week and worked intermittently.

“The goal of the attackers is clear,” Anton Nossik, the media director of LiveJournal owner SUP, wrote on his blog, alleging the perpetrators are a “group of criminals” who are “probably fattened by the federal budget.”

AFP

(Source: abc.net.au)

Anti-government protesters fill the Parliament square in Kuwait City

Kuwait’s prime minister and his government resigned on Monday in response to escalating demands by protesters and opposition deputies that he step down over corruption allegations.

The oil-producing state has tolerated criticism of its government to a degree rare among its Gulf neighbours, helping to insulate it from the protest-driven political tumult that has helped topple four Arab leaders this year.

But tensions rose sharply this month when opposition lawmakers and protesters stormed parliament to demand the resignation of prime minister Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammad al-Sabah.

“We decided to submit our resignation to comply with the national interest and due to the danger the situation had reached,” the state television channel cited Sheikh Nasser as saying.

The storming of parliament followed a request filed by a group of MPs to question Sheikh Nasser, which was blocked by the cabinet in a move decried as unconstitutional by the opposition.

Opposition MPs warned that if Sheikh Nasser did not step up to the questioning stand on November 29, they would escalate their campaign against him.

Kuwait has been locked in a long-running political battle between the government dominated by the ruling Al Sabah family and the 50-member elected parliament.

The emir, who appoints all but one member of Kuwait’s government including the prime minister, accepted the government’s resignation, state news agency KUNA reported.

Last week the emir had said he would not allow his PM to resign or dissolve the elected parliament, denouncing as a “black day” the storming of the assembly.

At least 45 people were arrested over the incident. Earlier on Monday, parliamentary sources said if the resignation were accepted, it could take up to three months to form a new government. During that time parliament sessions would be suspended.

Since Sheikh Nasser became prime minister in 2006, seven cabinets have been re-jigged, and three times the emir has been pushed to dissolve parliament and call early elections.

The previous cabinet resigned in March to avoid parliamentary questioning of three ministers, the main weapon the elected body has against the government.

A small population and a generous social welfare system have shielded Kuwait, which sits on one-tenth of global crude reserves, from the mass protests that have buffeted the Arab world this year and helped to oust the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt.

Reuters

(Source: abc.net.au)

Child porn found on former MP’s computer

A Supreme Court jury has been told told former Tasmanian Upper House MP Terry Martin should have realised or suspected that a prostitute he solicited in 2009 was under the age of 17.

The court has heard Terry Martin called the phone number in a newspaper ad which read “Angela 18-years-old and new in town”.

It is alleged the former Member for Elwick made an appointment for the 12-year-old girl to come to his Claremont home in September 2009.

The court heard the 54-year-old and the girl performed oral sex on each other and Martin photographed the act.

He has pleaded not guilty to three charges; indecent assault, unlawful sexual intercourse with a young person under 17 and producing child exploitation material.

The court heard the former politician admitted to the acts in a police interview but is denying the charges because he thought she was 18.

But the Crown prosecutor Darryl Coates told the jury that was hollow statement because police found hundreds of images of child pornography in a locked drawer and on a hard drive belonging to the 54-year-old.

Some of the photos had been put into slide shows and set to music.

A jury of nine women and three men was empanelled for the trial which is expected to run for three to four days.

None of the witnesses in the trial can be named for legal reasons.

The trial continues on Thursday.

(Source: abc.net.au)

Australia - Labor MPs have stopped Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) governor Glenn Stevens from appearing before a parliamentary committee to answer allegations senior officials covered up corruption.

Officials at Securency International, a banknote printing firm half-owned by the RBA, have allegedly paid secret kickbacks to foreign officials to secure contracts.

Fairfax Media reports that Labor MPs on the House of Representatives economics committee stopped an opposition motion to have Mr Stevens and his deputy Ric Battellino answer questions in November.

Coalition MPs reportedly wanted to ask Mr Stevens about revelations that some of the RBA’s most senior officials suppressed damaging information in 2007 and 2008 about the payment of secret commissions to middlemen hired by Securency and Note Printing Australia.

In September, both major parties voted against a motion by Greens lower house MP Adam Bandt calling on the federal government to establish an independent inquiry, with the powers of a royal commission, into the matter.

(Source: Yahoo!)

ATLANTA (Reuters) - An official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was in jail on Tuesday on charges of molesting a 6-year-old boy and a separate charge of bestiality, police said.

Kimberly Lindsey, 44, and her boyfriend, 42-year-old Thomas Westerman, turned themselves into police Sunday night, DeKalb County police said in a statement. Both were charged with two counts of child molestation. Lindsey was also charged with one count of bestiality, police said.

Lindsey is deputy director for the Laboratory Science Policy and Practice Program Office at the CDC. Westerman is a resource management specialist in the CDC’s Office of Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Laboratory Services.

A medical professional told police in late August about allegations that Lindsey and Westerman had molested a 6-year-old boy, police said.

Police spokeswoman Pamela Kunz said the bestiality charge does not involve the child, but declined to disclose further details about the allegations.

Westerman was released on Monday on a $15,000 bond, but Lindsey remained in jail on Tuesday on a $20,000 bond, police said. They will have a court hearing on December 1.

CDC spokesman Tom Skinner declined to comment on the case other than to confirm that Lindsey and Westerman work at the CDC.

(Source: Yahoo!)