Sunday 26 June 2011

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Nick Cave & Neko Case - She's Not There

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 More LULZ!!!

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LulzSec Arizona Leak: We Called Public Safety Officers' Cell Phones, and They're Not Laughing

lulzsec.jpg
LulzSec, the anonymous hacker group best known for attacking NPR Sony and wiping the CIA website, took the hacker mission beyond lulz this week with a political statement against Arizona law SB 1070: "Chinga la Migra." (Glossary break. Lulz is like, out-loud laughs, usually personal jokish, usually at someone else's expense. Chinga la migra means fuck the po-lice. Moving on.) Whether these vindictive nerds actually care about the plight of the undocumented immigrant or whether they're just piggypacking popular anti-Arizona sentiment as an excuse to breeze through some dinosauric local-government spyware...
... has yet to be determined. But the LulzSec hack into the Arizona Department of Public Safety servers yesterday was the groups's most significant yet -- both in terms of volume and personal impact at the other end.
We began by calling Lieutenant Larry Parks, from the DPS' Highway Patrol division, on his cell phone. "You're the first one who's called," he says.
And he's surprised. Although Parks says he has no clue "what they put on there," he didn't think his cell phone had been leaked. (Parks' number was not included in the LulzSec press release, like a few of the other officers; instead, interested parties had to download the 470 MB file to find it. Call us devoted.) The officer says he feels terrible for a few of his colleagues, who had their personal info -- wives' names, home addresses, cell phones -- posted on the "Chinga la Migra" home page.
"I find that a little disconcerting," he says. "It makes it a little personal -- makes you worry every time the phone rings."
We called the rest, too. Steven Loya's cell had been disconnected. Horacio Lomeli and Daniel Scott's phones went straight to message. And Charles Springstun Jr., turns out, had gone so far to get a stuffy lawyer-sounding lady to record the following public service announcement for all callers:
"You the public have been victimized by Internet hackers attempting to incite harm, riots and disobedience by stealing the Springstun identity and the employee identities from the Department of Public Safety. DPS employs police officers, secretaries, records clerks, photographers, mechanics, forensic experts and many other occupations of all races and ages. ... Mr. Springstun was a retiree, but due to the economy, had to seek employment and was hired by DPS earlier this year. ... The Springstuns have not made any statements or opinions on the Internet. the Springstuns have not sent or made made any emails, statements or opinions on SB 1070."
Parks says DPS has "launched an investigation" into how such a security breach was made possible. (Good luck with that. Judging by the DPS web correspondance released by LulzSec, officials are still on page 2 of their 'puter manuals.) FBI spokesman Manuel Johnson says, ever cryptically, that it "wouldn't be uncommon for the FBI to assist" in such an investigation -- but the FBI isn't exactly one step ahead of the Lulzers, either.
However, Parks does confirm that the DPS email server can now only be accessed from within department buildings -- making much of the leaked login/password info pretty useless to the general public.
We asked him what he thinks LulzSec wants to get from all this.
"I'm familiar with what an anarchist group is," he says, "but we don't really run into these kind of individuals in my part of the state."
Parks says he patrols the "rural northeast" -- where towns aren't likely to come much larger than 6,000 people. He tries to think of an equivalent near Los Angeles, but can't. "I'm kind of in the sticks," he says.
Because of the smalltime, intimate nature of the e-mails in LulzSec's mass download (and with no time for redactions, a la Palin's Alaska stock!), the DPS correspondence contains many a facepalmy, "Reno 911" moment, like when officers can't get their dial-up Dells to work, or when they use their government accounts to talk about their wives' labor pains. Awkward.
But there are also borderline admissions to racial profiling, by way of warnings to each other -- having everything to do with SB 1070, and making the alleged LulzSec mission, well, kind of accomplished.
For instance, re: ACLU racial-profiling probe, one official says:
"The statistics are from our own data. We need to monitor our personnel and act if there are indications of bias. If we fail to act, I am confident that an outside entity will be established to act for us."
Officers are also very wary of the media:
"Though media representatives may tell you that all of them are critical and time sensitive... if in doubt as to whether a release is time sensitive, it is probably not. Please do not overuse this option."
In one Yuma County traffic stop, a vehicle is pulled over because it looks "suspicious" (aka, has brown people inside); soon after, both driver and passenger are found to be "illegally present in the United States." Kind of hard to pretend that one didn't put a little profiling to use.
The emails and attachments go on in that fashion. No blatant admissions, but lots of gaps in judicial process and cautionary tales between coppers.
Best of all, though, are the hilariously designed "newsletters" and various for-dummies guides (i.e., "How to Crack Your Child's Secret Online Language") circulated within the department. As with the Palin emails, the leak is more embarrassing than anything. Very "The Office." (Boing Boing has a pretty nice collection of excerpts going, too.)
Still, one non-lulzy thing is clear: Arizona law-enforcement officials, however bumbling, knew not to be blatant.
We'd be very interested to see a leak like this in SoCal, perhaps in Orange or San Diego Counties -- those closet Yumas where officials feel they can get away with anything under the guise of being a liberal blue state. Not that we're asking a major hacker group for a highly illegal government breach or anything. Ahem.
[@simone_electra/swilson@laweekly.com]
Simone Wilson @'LAWeekly'
Grievous Angel

Anti-Flotilla video fraud linked to PM Netanyahu’s office, official Israeli hasbara agents



Israeli actor in anti-Gaza Flotilla pinkwashing video identified

Acid Tests

 Leary contemplates his navel
The psychedelic era of the 1960s is remembered for its music, its art and, of course, its drugs. Its science is somewhat further down the list. But before the rise of the counterculture, researchers had been studying LSD as a treatment for everything from alcoholism to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), with promising results.
Timothy Leary, a psychologist at Harvard University, was one of the best-known workers in the field, but it was also he who was widely blamed for discrediting it, by his unconventional research methods and his lax handling of drugs. Now, the details of Leary’s research will be made public, with the recent purchase of his papers by the New York Public Library. These papers will be interesting not only culturally, but also scientifically, as they reflect what happened between the early medical promise of hallucinogens and their subsequent blacklisting by authorities around the world.
American researchers began experimenting with LSD in 1949, at first using it to simulate mental illness. Once its psychedelic effects were realised, they then tried it in psychotherapy and as a treatment for alcoholism, for which it became known at the time as a miracle cure.
By 1965 over 1,000 papers had been published describing positive results for LSD therapy. It, and its close chemical relative psilocybin, isolated from hallucinogenic mushrooms, were reported as having potential for treating anxiety disorders, OCD, depression, bereavement and even sexual dysfunction. Unfortunately, most of the studies that came to these conclusions were flawed: many results were anecdotal, and control groups were not established to take account of the placebo effect.
Still, the field was ripe for further study. But alongside growing public fear of LSD, Leary’s leadership had become a liability. He was seen less and less as a disinterested researcher, and more and more as a propagandist. In 1962, amid wide publicity, the Harvard Psilocybin Project was shut down. Leary took his research to an estate in upstate New York, where he also hosted a stream of drug parties. Eventually both LSD and psilocybin were proscribed.
Which was a pity because, like many other drugs the authorities have taken against as a result of their recreational uses, hallucinogens have medical applications as well. But time heals all wounds and now, cautiously, study of the medical use of hallucinogens is returning.
Psilocybin has shown promise in treating forms of OCD that are resistant to other therapies, in relieving cluster headaches (a common form of chronic headache) and in alleviating the anxiety experienced by terminally ill cancer patients. The first clinical study of LSD in over 35 years, also on terminally ill patients, is expected to finish this summer. Peter Gasser, the Swiss doctor leading the experiment, says that a combination of LSD and psychotherapy reduced anxiety levels of all 12 participants in the study, though the statistical significance of the data has yet to be analysed.
Research into LSD is not confined to medicine. Franz Vollenweider, of the Heffter Research Institute in Zurich, for example, is scanning people’s brains to try to understand how hallucinogenic drugs cause changes in consciousness.
And biotechnology may lead to a new generation of hallucinogenic drugs. Edwin Wintermute and his colleagues at Harvard have engineered yeast cells to carry out two of six steps in the pathway needed to make lysergic acid, the precursor of LSD. They hope to add the other four shortly. Once the pathway has been created, it can be tweaked. That might result in LSD-like drugs that are better than the original.
Even if that does not happen, making lysergic acid in yeast is still a good idea. The chemical is used as the starting point for other drugs, including nicergoline, a treatment for senile dementia. The current process for manufacturing it is a rather messy one involving ergot, a parasite of rye.
It may, of course, be that LSD has no clinical uses. Even when no stigma attaches to the drugs involved, most clinical trials end in failure. But it is worth seeing whether LSD might fulfil its early promise. And if the publication of Leary’s archive speeds that process up by exorcising a ghost that still haunts LSD research, then the New York Public Library will have done the world a service.
@'The Economist'
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