In 2010, Google Inc. said it had indexed just 0.004 percent of the information on the Internet.

@sam82490: @ggreenwald @froomkin Context: "In 2010, Google said it had indexed just 0.004% of the information on the Internet." http://t.co/D2hsCjmxLY

http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-23/u-s-surveillance-is-not-aimed-at-terrorists.html

N.J. Senate Race: For First Time, NSA Surveillance Is Major Election Issue

New Jersey voters are selecting major-party candidates Tuesday for the Oct. 16 special election for U.S. Senate to replace Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who died June 3. It is the first election for a national-level job since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in June exposed massive government phone and Internet surveillance programs.

Four Democrats are vying for the party's Senate nomination and Rep. Rush Holt is by far the NSA's most vocal critic.

"They're stretching the law or outright exceeding the bounds of the law," Holt told U.S. News. "We owe this recent increase in attention to Snowden and [Guardian reporter Glenn] Greenwald."

Holt voted for the Amash amendment last month to defund the bulk collection of American phone records and introduced the "Surveillance State Repeal Act" to go a step further by repealing the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/08/09/nj-senate-nsa-surveillance-is-major-election-issue

@ggreenwald: Would the WH prefer mass, indiscriminate, bulk, unvetted simultaneous disclosure?

@ggreenwald: Would the WH prefer mass, indiscriminate, bulk, unvetted simultaneous disclosure? https://t.co/7zXQtVqwQi

President Obama's Surprise Revelation of Sealed Benghazi Indictment

Official Calls Obama's Surprise Revelations 'Crazy'

By MIKE LEVINE
Updated 34 min ago

President Obama surprised aides when he revealed today the existence of a sealed indictment in the Benghazi, Libya, attack, leaving some wondering if he crossed a legal line.

At a press conference at the White House, President Obama was asked whether justice would come to those responsible for the terrorist attack nearly a year ago in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador.

"[W]e have informed, I think, the public that there's a sealed indictment," the president responded. "It's sealed for a reason. But we are intent on capturing those who carried out this attack, and we're going to stay on it until we get them."

That marked the only official confirmation so far of a sealed indictment in the Benghazi case. For days, officials across the law enforcement and intelligence communities have refused to publicly confirm reports of a sealed indictment.

After all, according to federal law, "no person may disclose [a sealed] indictment's existence," and a "knowing violation … may be punished as a contempt of court." Contempt of court carries a maximum sentence of six months in jail.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-obamas-surprise-revelation-sealed-benghazi-indictment/t/story?id=19920474

For Henrietta Lacks' famous cells, new and unique protection

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Information about the most famous and valuable human cells in the history of science is about to become a little harder for researchers to get.

The National Institutes of Health announced on Wednesday that it had reached an agreement with the family of the late Henrietta Lacks, the African-American woman whose cancer cells scientists took without her permission 62 years ago and used to create an endlessly replicating cell line now used in countless labs worldwide.

Under the unprecedented pact, a grandson and a great-granddaughter of Lacks, whose story was told in the 2010 best-selling book "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," will help decide which biomedical researchers will have access to the complete genome data in cells derived from her cervical tumor, called HeLa cells. That data - which can be used to infer medical and other information about Lacks' family - will be stored in a secure, NIH-controlled database.


In February 1951, physicians at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore took a biopsy of Lacks' aggressive cervical cancer when the tobacco farmer and mother of five was 31. The tissue sample, taken without her knowledge, gave rise to the first line of human cells that could grow endlessly in lab dishes.

Lacks died eight months later, decades before federal law prohibited taking biological samples without consent. Her cells, however, seem immortal, and have been used for both basic biomedical research and the development of polio and other vaccines, cancer therapies, in vitro fertilization techniques, and drugs for herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia and Parkinson's disease. Although HeLa cells came from a tumor, that does not prevent them from being used to study some normal processes.

For decades her children did not know that her cells - the subject of more than 74,000 scientific papers - were being used. Many were profoundly disturbed when they learned that part of the mother who was taken from them as a young woman lived on in labs that did not even know that "HeLa" stood for a real person.


More than 60 years after Lacks' cells were taken, they are still the basis for groundbreaking science. In this week's Nature, scientists report that they may have solved the mystery of why Lacks' cells have been able to survive and proliferate in labs for 60 years, giving rise to innumerable cell lines, where other cancer and normal cells die out.

The human papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer, apparently inserted itself near a cancer-causing gene on chromosome 8 in Lacks' genome, found Jay Shendure of the University of Washington and his colleagues. The HPV activated the "oncogene," perhaps accounting for the aggressiveness of the cancer that killed Lacks as well as HeLa cells' ability to reproduce every 24 hours and never stop.

http://in.mobile.reuters.com/article/idINDEE9760DJ20130807?irpc=932

"Parallel construction" is really intelligence laundering

Fmr. Obama aide slams president’s comments on NSA

A former special advisor to President Barack Obama and co-host of CNN's "Crossfire" Van Jones criticized the president's recent statements about the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance programs.

"We don't have a domestic spying program," Obama said on "The Tonight Show" Tuesday. "What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an email address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat."

Jones said that the president's policies suggest otherwise.

"Everybody knows I love this president, but this is ridiculous," said Jones. "We do have a spying program, and we need to figure out how to balance these out."

Jones also criticized the Obama administration's treatment of whistleblowers.

"You are prosecuting more whistleblowers than every American president combined," said Jones. "You can't yuck it up and say, well, whistleblowers come on out and we'll treat you right."

http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/07/fmr-obama-aide-slams-presidents-comments-on-nsa/

Get real...SOD spies on Americans to tell DEA agents who, when & where to make up a reason to search

Then they hide the original spying and pretend they conveniently noticed speeding or a taillight out, or weaving or who knows whatever story to clean it up for the prosecution and trial. Agents are directed to lie and perjure themselves on the stand about the true origins of the case if it gets that far, but they depend on defendants pleading out.

Do you all understand how truly insidious this is?


A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. "You'd be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.' And so we'd alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it," the agent said.

After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as "parallel construction."


http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805

The US is increasingly a society of the rulers and the ruled, the surveillers and the surveilled

The truth is that, thanks to our “spies,” we know a great deal more about how our American world, our government, really works, but we still don’t know what this thing that’s being built really is. Even its creators may be at sea when it comes to what exactly they are in the process of constructing. They want us to trust them, but we the people shouldn’t put our trust in the generals, high-level bureaucrats, and spooks who don’t even blink when they lie to our representatives, pay no price for doing so, and are creating a world that is, and is meant to be, beyond our control. We lack words for what is happening to us. We still have to name it.

It is at least clearer that our world, our society, is becoming ever more imperial in nature, reflecting in part the way our post-9/11 wars have come home. With its widening economic inequalities, the United States is increasingly a society of the rulers and the ruled, the surveillers and the surveilled. Those surveillers have hundreds of thousands of spies to keep track of us and others on this planet, and no matter what they do, no matter what lines they cross, no matter how egregious their acts may be, they are never punished for them, not even losing their jobs. We, on the other hand, have a tiny number of volunteer surveillers on our side. The minute they make themselves known or are tracked down by the national security state, they automatically lose their jobs and that’s only the beginning of the punishments levied on them.

Those who run our new surveillance state have not the slightest hesitation about sacrificing us on the altar of their plans — all for the greater good, as they define it.

This, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with any imaginable definition of democracy or the long-gone republic. This is part of the new way of life of imperial America in which a government of the surveillers, by the surveillers, for the surveillers shall not perish from the Earth.

Those who watch us — they would undoubtedly say “watch over,” as in protect — are no Nathan Hales. Their version of his line might be: I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country: yours.

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/06/what_would_nathan_hale_think_of_the_nsa_partner/

Brazilian scientists to test AIDS vaccine on monkeys

AFP - Brazilian scientists have developed an HIV vaccine and plan to begin testing on monkeys later this year, a sponsor institution said Monday.

Known as the HIVBr18, the vaccine against the virus that causes AIDS was developed and patented by a team from the Medicine Faculty of the University of Sao Paulo, the Sao Paulo state Research Foundation (FAPESP) said.

The scientists said that, at its current stage of development, the vaccine would not totally eliminate the virus from the organism.

But the vaccine would be able to maintain it at a viral load low enough that the infected person will neither develop an immunodeficiency nor transmit the virus, they explained.

http://www.france24.com/en/20130806-brazilian-scientists-test-aids-vaccine-monkeys