(Reuters) - China made its first substantive comments on Monday to reports of U.S. surveillance of the Internet, demanding that Washington explain its monitoring programs to the international community.

Several nations, including U.S. allies, have reacted angrily to revelations by an ex-CIA employee over a week ago that U.S. authorities had tapped the servers of internet companies for personal data.

"We believe the United States should pay attention to the international community's concerns and demands and give the international community the necessary explanation," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a daily briefing.

The Chinese government has previously not commented directly on the case, simply repeating the government's standard line that China is one of the world's biggest victims of hacking attacks.

A senior source with ties to the Communist Party leadership said Beijing was reluctant to jeopardize recently improved ties with Washington.

The explosive revelations of the U.S. National Security Agency's (NSA) spying programs were provided by Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee and NSA contractor currently holed up in Hong Kong, a China-controlled city.

Snowden told the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's main English language newspaper, last week that Americans had spied extensively on targets in China and Hong Kong...

June 15, 2013
by Peter Kirsanow
Western Virginia Gazette

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- The Senate has begun debate on the proposed immigration reform bill. If this bill becomes law, there is one likely outcome for low-skilled West Virginia workers: Disaster.

The assurances of the bill's proponents that the bill will somehow help the economy obscure copious evidence that the bill will wreak enormous damage to the employment prospects of American workers who have already seen their wages and employment rates plummet over the last several years.

Indeed, it is no secret that the employment picture for low-skilled workers is abysmal. The national unemployment rate has been above 7.5 percent for more than four years and millions have dropped out of the workforce entirely. Among those without a high school diploma, the unemployment rate in May reached 11.1 percent, and for blacks without a high school diploma, it is more than 24 percent. The labor-force participation rate is at historic lows and long-term unemployment is the worst since the Great Depression. The workweek is shrinking, as well as wage rates. Barely one in two adult black males has a full-time job. A record 47 million people are on food stamps.

The immigration reform bill has the potential to make things even worse. Not only will the bill grant amnesty to 11 million illegal immigrants, it will act as a magnet for future illegal immigration and substantially increase the number of legal immigrants. It is conservatively estimated that the bill will result in 30 million to 33 million additional immigrants over the next 10 years.

The bill is structured so that most of the immigrants will be low-skilled. These immigrants will compete with Americans in the low-skilled labor markets. The competition is most fierce in some of the industries in which blacks historically have been highly concentrated, such as construction, agriculture and service. Since the supply of low-skilled workers already exceeds the demand, the massive influx in low-skilled immigrants bodes ill for all such workers, but particularly black males. Evidence adduced before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights shows that immigration accounts for 40 percent of the 18-point percentage decline in black employment rates over the last several decades -- the bulk of the decline occurring among black males. That's hundreds of thousands of blacks thrown out of work; hundreds of thousands who can't support their families without taxpayer assistance.

The evidence adduced by the commission shows that not only does illegal immigration depress the employment levels of low-skilled Americans, it drives down the wages for available jobs. For example, an economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimated that as a result of the growth of undocumented workers, the annual earnings of actual documented workers in Georgia in 2007 were $960 lower than they were in 2000. In the leisure hospitality sectors of the economy, the wages were $1,520 lower.

A $960 annual decrease in wages may not seem like much to some members of Congress, but as President Obama observed when he signed the extension of the payroll tax cut in 2012, an extra $80 a month makes a big difference to many families. It means $80 more toward rent, groceries and the cost of gasoline. Besides, why should American workers suffer any decline in their wages because of illegal immigration?

Recent history shows that a grant of legal status to illegal immigrants results in a further influx of illegal immigrants who will crowd out low-skilled workers from the workforce. Contrary to the mythology promoted by some supporters of the bill, this isn't because low-skill Americans -- regardless of race -- are unwilling to work. It's because they're unwilling to work at the cut-rate wages (and often substandard conditions) offered to illegal immigrants -- a cohort highly unlikely to complain to the EEOC, OSHA or the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor. This inexorably increases the number of low-skill Americans depending upon the government for subsistence, swells the ranks of the unemployed and reduces the wages of those that do have a job.

Before the federal government grants legal status to illegal immigrants, serious deliberation must be given to the affect such grant will have on the employment and earnings prospects of low-skilled Americans. History shows that granting such legal status is not without profound and substantial costs to American workers.

Does Congress care?

Kirsanow is a labor and employment attorney in Cleveland, a former member of the National Labor Relations Board, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and the former chairman of the Center for New Black Leadership. 

by Declan McCullagh
CNET.com
June 15, 2013 4:39 PM PDT

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler's disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.

The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii "wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president."

There are serious "constitutional problems" with this approach, said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated warrantless wiretapping cases. "It epitomizes the problem of secret laws."

The NSA yesterday declined to comment to CNET. A representative said Nadler was not immediately available. (This is unrelated to last week's disclosure that the NSA is currently collecting records of the metadata of all domestic Verizon calls, but not the actual contents of the conversations.)...

by "barefoot accountant"
June 15, 2013

Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels believed that if one told a big lie and repeated it many times that the majority of the general public would believe it. In fact, Goebbels further believed and said, “the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed.” Such techniques were not invented by Hitler or Goebbels. Vladimir Lenin was aware of their effectiveness prior to Hitler’s rise to power. Telling lies to the general public is not only not new, it also is not a governmental practice restricted to foreign lands.

After William Casey's first staff meeting as head of the CIA in 1981, he was quoted as saying, "I'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." And one may recall the lies of the Nixon administration during the Watergate investigations of the 1970s in its attempt to deny its innumerable crimes. What they all believed and knew is that you could fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and too many of the people too much of the time. What Casey and other American politicians also know is that you need not fool all of the people all of the time, since if you fool enough of the electorate enough of the time, you could discredit the rest of the people and get re-elected as well as push through your political agenda. Recall that Hitler seized power by fooling only a third of the people.

Of course, politicians employing propaganda to achieve political ends and control of the populace need the assistance of the media to do so. Radio and films were used very successfully by the Nazis to brainwash the people of Germany against the Jews and other races. Today the radio, the press, television, and the internet are all exploited by governmental forces to distort the truth and disseminate false information in order to achieve political ends. Yes, political ideology, driven by greed and desire for power and control, justify the means however untrue and unjust the message is. So one should not be incredulous about whether this technique of deliberately promulgating disinformation is occurring today in our American debate about taxes...

June 12th, 2013
06:32 PM ET

CNN Political Unit

By Ashley Fantz and Jill Dougherty, CNN
June 12, 2013 -- Updated 1039 GMT (1839 HKT)

Washington (CNN) -- Senior State Department and Diplomatic Security officials may have covered up or stopped investigations of inappropriate or even criminal misconduct by staff, according to an internal memo from the department's Office of the Inspector General.

The timeline surrounding the allegations places the incidents during former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's tenure, opening the possibility that a widening scandal might taint both her record and her possible political aspirations. Clinton has also taken heat for the department's response to the September 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

The memo itself, purportedly written by Ambassador Larry Dinger, describes some of the information as coming from office chatter.

"Sometimes the sources are one or more agents who became aware of the case from colleagues in what, given cubicles, can be a collegial environment," the memo says.

Regarding the latest allegations, CNN was provided the documents by a lawyer for a whistle-blower who is a former senior inspector general investigator.

They include:

• An active U.S. ambassador "routinely ditched his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children," the memo says. The ambassador's protective detail and others "were well aware of the behavior," the memo asserts. When a diplomatic security officer tried to investigate, undersecretary of state for management Patrick Kennedy allegedly ordered the investigator "not to open a formal investigation."

On Tuesday, CNN obtained a statement from the ambassador, who vigorously denied the allegations, calling them "baseless."

A source close to the investigation of the ambassador told CNN that the ambassador's security detail reported to the inspector general that the ambassador would leave his house at night without notifying the detail. The detail followed the ambassador and saw the ambassador once go to a park that's known for illegal activity, the source told CNN. The detail said they never witnessed the ambassador engage in any sexual activity, the source said.

The ambassador went to Washington and was asked what he was doing and he denied any wrongdoing, the source told CNN. The ambassador explained that sometimes he fights with his wife, needs air and he goes for a walk in the park because he likes it.

Kennedy also issued a statement Tuesday, saying it is his responsibility "to make sure the department and all of our employees -- no matter their rank -- are held to the highest standard, and I have never once interfered, nor would I condone interfering, in any investigation."

• A State Department security official in Beirut allegedly "engaged in sexual assaults" against foreign nationals working as embassy guards. The security official, the Office of the Inspector General says, was also accused of committing "similar assaults during assignments in Baghdad, and possibly Khartoum and Monrovia." The office's memo says that an inspector general's investigator who went to Beirut to try to conduct an investigation was not given enough time to complete the job.

• A member of Clinton's security detail allegedly "engaged prostitutes while on official trips in foreign countries." The inspector general's agent assigned to investigate "concluded" that the "prostitution problem was endemic."

• In Iraq, an "underground drug ring" may have been operating near the U.S. Embassy and "supplying" drugs to State Department security contractors, but an agent sent to investigate the allegations was prevented from completing the job.

The allegations were first reported Monday by CBS...

by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY)
June 12, 2013
FoxNews.com

In the United States, we are supposed to have a government that is limited with its parameters established by our Constitution. This notion that the federal government can monitor everyone’s phone data is a major departure from how Americans have traditionally viewed the role of government.

If this is acceptable practice, as the White House and many in both parties now say it is, then there are literally no constitutional protections that can be guaranteed anymore to citizens.
In the name of security, say our leaders, the Constitution has become negotiable.

This is what the White House is saying when it defends the National Security Agency’s gathering of Verizon’s client data en masse, or what President Obama calls a “modest encroachment” on our rights, as he assures us that “Nobody is listening to your phone calls.”

Perhaps he can also assure us that nobody at the Internal Revenue Service is targeting political dissidents.

Perhaps he can assure us that nobody at the Justice Department is seizing reporters’ phone records.

Sorry, Mr. President, but “trust me” is not good enough.

President Obama says, “You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.” But we couldn’t have 100 percent security even if we turned America into a total police state—something too many seem eager for—because there’s no such thing as a risk free society.

When balancing liberty against security, the American tradition has always been to err on the side of liberty. Targeting potential terror suspects by obtaining a warrant is an “inconvenience” the Founders’ intentionally put upon the government in order to protect the privacy of citizens.
Now this president turns this core constitutional principle on its head.

There are also Republicans who seem to want more power for government and less for citizens. One senator, a particularly zealous defender of the surveillance state, has said that he would be fine with “censoring the mail” if “necessary” to keep us safe.

This senator would open citizens’ mail, detain them indefinitely if he decided they were dangerous, claw his way through their trash, peek in their bedrooms if he decided they were an enemy, and then if they dared to ask for a lawyer, he would bark: "Shut up! You don’t get a lawyer!"

Such arrogance and tone deafness! 

A government as omnipotent as this may be powerful enough to spy on all of its citizens all of the time, but doesn’t seem to be able to even stop terrorists like the Boston Marathon bombers and the “underwear bomber” – both of whom set off warnings before they were noticed.

Instead of monitoring billions of phone calls and spying on law-abiding Americans, perhaps we should have been done more targeted monitoring of the Boston bombing suspects, one of whom traveling to Chechnya, largely undetected.

Clutching desperately for relevance, some Republican Senators point wildly at the Boston Marathon bombing and grit out, "See, I told you so!  America is too part of the battlefield.”

Duh! No one is arguing that our enemies won’t attack us here and that we shouldn't defend ourselves. Constitutionalists simply argue that we can defend the homeland and the Bill of Rights simultaneously, and to relinquish concrete liberties for an illusive security is a fool's errand.

I can remember not so long ago, when the war caucus—and we don’t need to name any names—were all saying “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.”

Now, they are saying we have to give up our liberties to fight them here? Who is winning this battle?

Regardless, anytime we give up our liberty—we lose.

National security is the federal government’s top priority. We have always balanced liberty with common sense security precautions. There are unquestionably exceptions to every rule.

But those who continue to defend the National Security Agency’s actions are essentially saying that something that would be controversial even as an exception—blanket phone trolling by the government—is now the new rule. They are saying it’s OK to spy on citizens’ phone data without a warrant, not just one time or a few times, but all the time.

They are saying that suspending the Bill of Rights is now the new normal. 

In my world, the Constitution still applies.

Republican Rand Paul represents Kentucky in the United States Senate.

By Shaun Waterman
The Washington Times
Friday, June 7, 2013

The National Security Agency’s collection of phone data from all of Verizon’s U.S. customers is just the “tip of the iceberg,” says a former NSA official who estimates the agency has data on as many as 20 trillion phone calls and emails by U.S. citizens.

William Binney, an award-winning mathematician and noted NSA whistleblower, says the collection dates back to when the super-secret agency began domestic surveillance after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I believe they’ve been collecting data about all domestic calls since October 2001,” said Mr. Binney, who worked at NSA for more than 30 years. “That’s more than a billion calls a day.”

He called his figures “back of the envelope” estimates, adding that they include emails as well as telephone calls.

Mr. Binney, who left the agency in October 2001, said the data were collected under a highly classified NSA program code-named “Stellar Wind,” which was part of the warrantless domestic wiretapping effort — the Terrorist Surveillance Program — launched on orders from President George W. Bush.

The Terrorist Surveillance Program was revealed by The New York Times in 2005, but officials said it only monitored calls between Americans and suspected terrorists abroad. The Bush administration said it based the program’s legal authority on the president’s powers as commander-in-chief.

Congress subsequently amended the law governing wiretapping by spy agencies — the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — to provide legislative authority for the program and require supervision by the special secret court the 1978 act established.

Britain’s Guardian newspaper posted online late Wednesday a copy of the “Top Secret” FISA court order directing telecommunications giant Verizon to hand over “metadata” about every call made or received by all of its customers in the United States. Such metadata include the calling and receiving phone numbers, the time of day and length of the call, and the whereabouts of the two parties.

Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian (UK)
Friday 7 June 2013

A slide depicting the top-secret PRISM program

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers.

Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

In a statement, Google said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

Several senior tech executives insisted that they had no knowledge of PRISM or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a program. "If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge," one said.

An Apple spokesman said it had "never heard" of PRISM.

The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012.

The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US...

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by James Hall
May 29, 2013

The lingering questions about the nature of the Google – NSA relationship, jeopardize business confidence in the use of their services and ad programs. The persistent claims that Google data integration is coordinated with the NSA and that the Utah Data Center has linkage with the Google server network, gains traction when the government refuses public disclosure of the full historical relationship.

Once online, the data lives eternally. Act accordingly.

englishnews@chosun.com / May 28, 2013 09:39 KST

Senior Chinese official and roaming regional ambassador Wang Jiarui recently described his country's ties with North Korea as merely "normal relations between states," a lawmaker here said Monday.

Yoo Ki-june of the Saenuri Party's Supreme Council was speaking after he led a group of 10 ruling and opposition lawmakers on a visit to China last week.

Yoo told Saenuri leaders that the group met senior Chinese officials like Wang, the director of the Communist Party's International Department, and Chongqing party secretary Sun Zhengcai, who handle Korean affairs. "In my meetings with them, I sensed a lot of change in Chinese diplomacy toward North Korea," Yoo said.

Yoo later told the Chosun lbo, "Wang called Beijing-Pyongyang ties 'normal relations between states' while explaining his country's relations with North Korea since the North's third nuclear test. He implied that Pyongyang is so recalcitrant that it's hard for Beijing to influence it."

"In the past, China tried to defend the North even if it had made mistakes, but this time all Chinese officials we met openly complained about the North," Yoo added.

In a separate telephone interview, Democratic Party lawmaker Ahn Gyu-baek, who was also part of the group, also said, "When we met Wang, I urged China to play a leading role in persuading the North to return to the six-party nuclear talks. But he said that the U.S. and South Korea rather than China are key to the role. It sounded as if there was some change" in China's relations with the North.

By Ramsey Cox - 05/22/13 01:08 PM ET
TheHill.com

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Wednesday that he doesn’t trust members of his own party to negotiate a budget conference report.

Cruz's remark came after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he thought it was “bizarre” that a member of his own party was objecting to forming a conference committee with the House to work out a budget. 

McCain said the objections suggested Senate Republicans didn’t trust House Republicans to hold the party line in negotiations.

Cruz responded that he doesn't trust Republicans. 

“The senior senator of Arizona urged senators to trust House Republicans ... and frankly, I don’t trust Republicans,” Cruz said. “It’s the leaders of both parties that got us in this mess. ... A lot of Republicans were complicit in this spending spree.”

By Barnini Chakraborty
Published May 22, 2013
FoxNews.com

WASHINGTON –  Lois Lerner, the director of the IRS division that singled out conservative groups, is expected to invoke the Fifth Amendment Wednesday when she appears before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Fox News has learned.

That means Lerner, head of the exempt organizations division, probably won’t answer any questions on what she knew about IRS agents going after Tea Party-related groups. That also means she probably won’t say why she sat on the information for so long before it became public.

Lerner’s attorney, William Taylor III, asked committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., in a letter if she could skip Wednesday’s hearing since she would be pleading the Fifth.

Taylor argued in the letter that forcing Lerner to appear “would have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her.” 

Late Tuesday, the House oversight committee released a statement saying Lerner was still under subpoena and would be required to appear in the morning. 

“Chairman Issa remains hopeful that she will ultimately decide to testify tomorrow about her knowledge of outrageous IRS targeting of Americans for their political beliefs,” committee spokesman Ali Ahmad said in a statement. 

Other former or outgoing IRS officials have already testified, and will continue to give their testimony on Wednesday. But Lerner, who is the official who first acknowledged the IRS program, has faced significant scrutiny. 

Since the Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation into the IRS scandal and the House committee indicated it would question Lerner about why she provided incomplete information to the committee at least four times last year, Taylor wrote that his client would be invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. 

Sunday, May 19, 2013
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) In the face of the outrageous IRS intimidation scandal now sweeping across America, gun control advocates are changing their tune. All of a sudden, the idea that the federal government could engage in tyranny against the People of America is no longer a "conspiracy theory." It's historical fact right in your face thanks to all the recent scandals now bursting onto the scene: IRS intimidation, secret targeting of non-profit groups for possible "thought crimes," the Department of Justice seizing AP phone records and so on.

Just which liberals are changing their minds on all this? Piers Morgan, for starters. The man who once called Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America a "very stupid man" on live national television is suddenly reversing course. Here's what Morgan now says in the wake of the IRS intimidation scandal:

"I've had some of the pro-gun lobbyists on here saying to me, well the reason we need to be armed is because of tyranny from our own government, and I've always laughed at them. I've always said don't be so ridiculous. Your government won't turn itself on you. But actually when you look at this [IRS scandal]... actually this is vaguely tyrannical behavior by the American government. I think what the IRS did is bordering on tyrannical behavior, I think what the Department of Justice has done to the Associated Press is bordering on tyrannical behavior."...

By Drew Prindle
May 16, 2013
DigitalTrends.com

You don’t have to be a secret agent or a notorious hacktivist to care about anonymity. Even regular Joes like you and I have plenty of good reasons to care about the privacy and security of our online activity. Pretty soon, just about everything we do on the Web will be logged, analyzed, and used for things outside of our control. In a lot of ways, it’s already happening – but that’s not to say there’s nothing you can do about it.

This guide will help you learn ways to anonymize the majority of your Internet-based communications and activities. But before we get started, it should go without saying that if you’re trying to stay anonymous online, you shouldn’t use your real name when creating any account and shouldn’t sign in with any profile that has your personal information connected to it (ie, Google, Facebook, Twitter). We’ve left out the obvious stuff here and instead focused on offering a quick summary of ways that you can keep your identity and location hidden while browsing, communicating, and downloading and transferring files.

The best thing you can do to stay anonymous online is to hide your IP address. This is the easiest way to trace your online activity back to you. If someone knows your IP address, they can easily determine the geographic location of the server that hosts that address and get a rough idea of where you’re located. Broadly speaking, there are three ways to obscure your IP address and hide your location:

1. Use a proxy server. If you want all of your online activity to be anonymized, the best way to do it is to pretend to be someone else. This is basically what a proxy server does: it routes your connection through a different server so your IP address isn’t so easy to track down. There are hundreds of free proxies out there, and finding a good one is just a matter of searching. Most major browsers offer proxy server extensions that can be activated in just one click
2. Use a Virtual Private Network (VPN). For most intents and purposes, a VPN obscures your IP address just as well as a proxy does – and in some cases even better. They work differently, but achieve the same result. Essentially, a VPN is a private network that uses a public network (usually the Internet) to connect remote sites or users together. So, if I were to log into Digital Trends’ VPN, anyone looking at my IP address would think I’m in New York when I’m actually on the West Coast. Here’s a list of good VPN services to get you started.
3. Use TOR. Short for The Onion Router, TOR is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Browsing with TOR is a lot like simultaneously using hundreds of different proxies that are randomized periodically. But it’s a lot more than just a secure browser. We won’t get into the details here, but you should definitely check out its site if you’re concerned about anonymity.  

Using proxies, VPNs, and TOR will obscure your IP address from prying eyes, but sending emails presents a different anonymity challenge. Let’s say you want to send somebody an email, but you don’t want them to know your email address. Generally speaking, there are two ways to go about this:

1. Use an alias. An alias is essentially a forwarding address. When you send mail through an alias, the recipient will only see your forwarding address, and not your real email. Since all mail is forwarded to your regular inbox, this method will keep your real email address secret, but it will not, however, keep you from being spammed like crazy.
2. Use a disposable email account. This can be done in two ways: either you can just create a new email account with a fake name and use it for the duration of your needs, or you can use a disposable email service. These services work by creating a temporary forwarding address that is deleted after a certain amount of time, so they’re great for signing up for stuff on sites you don’t trust and keeping your inbox from being flooded with spam.

Also, using a VPN and communicating through an anonymized email address will keep your identity hidden, but it still leaves open the possibility of your emails being intercepted through a man-in-the-middle scheme. To avoid this, you can encrypt your emails before you send them. Here’s how:

• Use HTTPS in your Web-based email client. This will add SSL/TLS encryption to all of your Web-based communications. It’s not bulletproof, but it definitely helps. Just make sure the URL of your webmail has an S (for Secure) after the HTTP. Gmail users, for example could use https://mail.google.com. We also recommend using the HTTPS Everywhere extension. 
• Use PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) software. We won’t go into great detail on how to install/use PGP, but you might want to consider looking into it. While using HTTPS will encrypt your data on a network level , PGP software will encrypt the actual files themselves. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it. 

In addition to email, you might want to encrypt any instant messaging you do for the same reasons. We recommend the following two chat clients:

• TOR chat: a lightweight and easy-to-use chat client that uses TOR’s location hiding services. It uses SSL/TLS encryption.
• Cryptocat: a Web-based chat client that uses the AES-256 encryption standard, which is extremely hard to break. It also supports group chats, so its perfect for all those top-secret world domination meetings you have with your buddies.

Getting files from the Internet is easy, but the sender has access to your IP address when you download files. In the case of BitTorrent, there are thousands of different peers that can see your IP address at any given moment, which means downloading is one of the least anonymous things you can do on the Web. However, if done correctly, it is possible to download and share files while keeping your IP address and identity concealed.

• If you’re downloading directly form a file hosting site like MediaFire or Mega, you can just use a proxy or VPN to obscure your IP. 
• If you’re using BitTorrent to download stuff, using a proxy or VPN will keep your identity hidden, but rather than just using any old service, we recommend using BT Guard. At its core, BT Guard is exactly the same as any other VPN or proxy service with the one difference being that the site is designed specifically for heavy BitTorrent users. Don’t worry about DMCA violation notices you might elicit – BT Guard just ignores them for you.

This tutorial touches on a lot but is by no means comprehensive. If you have any good tips or tricks for staying anonymous online, we encourage you to share them in the comments.

By Geoff Duncan
May 14, 2013
DigitalTrends.com

Major password breaches are so common they’re becoming like storms and traffic jams: One day you hear about tens of thousands of Twitter users compromised or several million at LinkedIn, the next it might be upwards of 50 million at Evernote or LivingSocial.

But despite their fallibility, passwords won’t be replaced any time soon. Two-factor authentication technologies using our mobile devices and even biometrics can help keep us secure, but so far none are foolproof, and precious few are even convenient.

How can we make our passwords more hack-resistant and manage all the passwords we need?

Most attackers don’t break passwords by going to Gmail or Facebook and making guesses; that’s slow, and most services block access after a few failed attempts. However, if attackers steal account data through a security hole, they can make thousands, millions, or even billions of guesses per second offline using their own computers. If that sounds outlandish, consider that Stricture Consulting Group last year showed off a small computer cluster made from off-the-shelf components that could test as many as 350 billion passwords per second. Some password-cracking operations harness hundreds (or thousands) of computers via botnets or legitimate cloud-computing platforms, while others just use everyday PCs. They’re fast too.

The quality of a password doesn’t matter if a service stores your password as plain text and an attacker steals it. (Don’t laugh: it happens.) If passwords are encrypted, however, size and randomness are two factors that determine a password’s strength or entropy — basically, a measure of the possible combinations a password can have.

“The higher the entropy, the longer it will take, on average, for a brute-force attack to succeed,” noted Joe Kissel, author of the ebook Take Control of Your Passwords. So, all things being equal, you want a high-entropy password.”

The benefit of a password’s size is obvious: More characters means more possible combinations. The benefit of randomness is less subtle. A password like YesThisIsMyGreatNewRandomPassphrase wins points for size — 36 characters! — but loses points for randomness, since it’s just upper- and lower-case letters. (It’s also less random because it’s in English: Attackers try to take advantage of common letter patterns.)

Something like *5FRRcr62{d~OkP!{AKaxzevQZb6L{~S1F~b would be more secure — it’s both big and highly random. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible for most people to remember…but it’s easy for a computer to remember.

There’s no magic formula for making passwords both very strong and easy to remember. However, here are some ideas:...

And it asked what books people were reading.

A POLITICO review of documents from 11 tea party and conservative groups that the IRS scrutinized in 2012 shows the agency wanted to know everything — in some cases, it even seemed curious what members were thinking. The review included interviews with groups or their representatives from Hawaii, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere.

The long-awaited Treasury Department inspector general report released Tuesday says the agency itself decided some of its questions to conservative groups were way over the line — especially the one about donors.

The report shows that top IRS officials put a stop to some of the questions in early 2012, including the ones that asked tea party groups who their donors were, what issues were important to them and whether their top officers ever planned to run for office. And they told the investigators they planned to destroy the donor lists that had already been sent in.

But interviews with members of the groups paint a more dramatic picture than the bland language of the report, which just says the IRS “requested irrelevant (unnecessary) information because of a lack of managerial review, at all levels, of questions before they were sent to organizations seeking tax-exempt status.”

“They were asking for a U-Haul truck’s worth of information,” said Toby Marie Walker, the president of the Waco Tea Party.

Published May 13, 2013
FoxNews.com

An IRS campaign to apply additional scrutiny to conservative groups went beyond targeting "Tea Party" and "patriot" groups to include those focused on government spending, the Constitution and several other broad areas. 

The additional guidelines created by the agency were part of a timeline, obtained by Fox News, from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which is looking into the controversial IRS practice. IRS officials apologized Friday for the scrutiny, but new information suggests senior leaders were apprised of the effort as early as 2011 despite public denials from the top. 

Republican lawmakers have vowed to investigate and hold hearings, calling the revelations deeply troubling. 

"The conclusion that the IRS came to is that they did have agents who were engaged in intimidation of political groups," Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers told "Fox News Sunday." "I don't care if you're a conservative, a liberal, a Democrat or a Republican, this should send a chill up your spine. It needs to have a full investigation." 

The internal IG timeline shows a unit in the agency was looking at Tea Party and "patriot" groups dating back to early 2010. But it shows that list of criteria drastically expanding by the time a June 2011 briefing was held. It then included groups focused on government spending, government debt, taxes, and education on ways to "make America a better place to live." It even flagged groups whose file included criticism of "how the country is being run." 

By early 2012, the criteria were updated to include organizations involved in "limiting/expanding government," education on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and social economic reform. 

Taken together, the findings of the IG and the initial admissions by the IRS Friday are fueling complaints from Republicans on Capitol Hill. 

Evidence that the IRS was flagging such groups in 2011 was included in a draft inspector general's report obtained Saturday by Fox News and other news organizations and expected to be released in full later this week...

By Juliet Eilperin, Published: May 12, 2013 at 2:30 pm
Washington Post

At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials targeted nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency’s inspector general.

The documents, obtained by The Washington Post  from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that on June 29, 2011, IRS staffers held a briefing with senior agency official Lois G. Lerner in which they described giving special attention to instances where “statements in the case file criticize how the country is being run.” Lerner, who  oversees tax-exempt groups for the agency, raised objections and the agency revised its criteria a week later.

But six months later, the IRS applied a new political test to groups that applied for tax-exempt status as “social welfare” groups, the document says. On Jan. 15, 2012 the agency decided to target “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement.,” according to the appendix in the IG report, which was requested by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and has yet to be released.

The new revelations are likely to intensify criticism of the IRS, which has been under fire since agency officials acknowledged they had deliberately targeted groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their name for heightened scrutiny.

During an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) described the practice as “absolutely chilling” and called on President Obama to condemn the effort.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday he’s not satisfied with the Obama administration’s handling of the controversy. The IG report was “leaked by the IRS. to try to spin the output,” Issa said, and lawmakers now need to go through the full report so they can “see what the instituted changes need to be to make this not happen again...

Thursday, 09 May 2013 06:23 PM
By Greg Richter and Kathleen Walter
NewsMax.com

The continuation of a false narrative for weeks after the terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya that left U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead is "not understandable and is not forgivable," former director of the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency Gen.l Michael Hayden told Newsmax TV.

Hayden, in an exclusive interview, said he's been in the shoes of the State Department staff who had to deal with the aftermath of the Benghazi terrorist attacks. Knowing what they were going through, he tells Newsmax that he doesn't want to accuse anyone of wrongdoing in how they handled the situation while it was ongoing – or immediately afterward.

But he is curious about why so few options were available in the first place and why the State Department and the White House weeks later were sticking with the narrative of a demonstration over a video.

"I’ve been in these kinds of circumstances where if you’ve got a worldview, if you’ve got a narrative that you believe in, you try to make the facts presented to you fit the narrative," Hayden said. "I fear there may have been some people in our government who kind of fell into that trap in the days after Benghazi, which is understandable and, frankly, forgivable, and then in the weeks after Benghazi, which is not understandable and is not forgivable."

"Anyone like me who saw those events would quickly conclude it was a terrorist attack," Hayden said. "It was fairly complex, synchronized, direct and indirect fire weapons on multiple locations, and it took place in a part of Libya that was the heartland of the Libyan Islamic fighting group."

"I mean, the immediate explanation that this was a bad movie review, that just beggared comprehension," he said.

By Frosty Wooldridge
May 4, 2013
NewsWithViews.com

Senate Bill 744, Comprehensive Immigration Reform, promises the most prolific invasion of America since Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. But with one deadly difference: those storms subsided so we could repair the damage.

If S744 passes, we face endless immigration numbers to the tune of a minimum of 33 million immigrants within the first decade. Passing that bill means an increase of legal immigration from its current 1 million annually to 1.5 million annually. All totaled with immigrants, their offspring, chain migration and diversity visas, a mind numbing 100 million immigrants will land on America within 37 years—by 2050. (Source: www.NumbersUSA.org; US Population Projections by Fogel/Martin; PEW Research Center)

Even more sobering, we face a total population growth via “population momentum” of 138 million people to grow from 316 million in 2013 to 438 million people by 2050.

Their horrific impact on our schools, medical systems, infrastructure, water, resources, energy and environment cannot be calculated, but will exceed anything anyone can imagine. The impact of 100 million immigrants can and will degrade our quality of life and standard of living beyond anyone’s understanding. Their impact upon our environment cannot be measured, but it will be catastrophic for all Americans.

"Unlimited population growth cannot be sustained; you cannot sustain growth in the rates of consumption of resources. No species can overrun the carrying capacity of a finite land mass. This Law cannot be repealed and is not negotiable.” Dr. Albert Bartlett, www.albartlett.org, University of Colorado, USA.

Dennis Lynch created one of the most powerful films on illegal immigration. (six minutes) The number of Asian/Chinese coming across the border is rarely mentioned. But if you stop and consider the implications you will likely come to the same conclusion as many of us. An unsecured southern border presents a clear and present danger to all of us and this specific threat has little to do with cheap labor.

(Illegals migrate from the interior of Mexico, but come from as far south as Brazil.)

These immigrants bring incompatible cultures, religions and political clout. They displace American citizens, utilize welfare, housing and food stamps. They overwhelm villages, towns and cities...

Today, California pays over $10 billion in services annually for its estimated 3 to 4 million illegal aliens and its countless legal immigrants.

Published May 04, 2013
FoxNews.com

A Washington group is criticizing the Senate immigration bill because it allows for up to $150 million for organizations to advertise citizenship opportunities and to help illegal immigrants sign up to become citizens.

The nonpartisan Center for Immigration Services calls the money “slush funds” and earlier this week cited several concerns -- particularly that the money can go to the same groups that helped craft the legislation and that the spending appears to have no cap or oversight.

“It’s virtually a blank check,” Jon Feere, a Center for Immigration Services legal policy analyst, told FoxNews.com. “And the groups that helped draft this bill can now give themselves taxpayer dollars.”

The money is divided into two parts. The first is $100 million in grants to public and private nonprofit groups for programs that help people apply for provisional immigrant status, which includes assistance with completing applications and gathering proof of identification.

The other part in $50 million for additional assistance that includes legal help and public-awareness campaigns that tell illegal immigrants about the “eligibility and benefits of registered immigration status.”

The 844-page bill calls for the grant programs to run through 2018 and be administered by the secretary of Homeland Security through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

englishnews@chosun.com / Apr. 24, 2013 12:30 KST

In a further lurch to the far right, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told lawmakers on Tuesday that he does not believe Japan's occupation of other Asian countries during World War II can be considered "invasions."

Abe claimed there are no set international or academic definitions of the word. "It depends on the point of view of individual countries," he said, referring to a statement in 1995 by then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, which apologized to all Asian victims of Japanese aggression and from which rightwingers are scrambling to distance themselves.

Japan occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945 and invaded China and several Southeast Asian nations during an aggressive expansion to create what was billed as the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere."

Experts here slammed Abe's remarks. Ko Sang-tu at Yonsei University said, "That is simply absurd. It's like saying Hitler's invasion of Poland wasn't really an invasion. If a German chancellor had said the same thing, he or she would have had to resign."

Abe told lawmakers on Monday that he does not feel bound by the Murayama statement. The global press was alarmed, with the New York Times saying he sought to whitewash his country's World War II atrocities, while the Economist warned that the right-leaning Japanese Cabinet is a bad sign for the region.

Abe said Japan's pacifist constitution was put together by what he called "occupying forces," referring to the victorious U.S. at the end of the war.

The constitution, which stipulates the country's desire for peace and pledges a policy of non-aggression, effectively "entrusted the lives and safety of the public to the goodwill of other countries," he claimed.

This suggests he is throwing his weight behind moves from the far right to revise the constitution so the Japanese military can launch pre-emptive strikes abroad.

Japanese lawmakers pay homage at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on Tuesday. /Reuters-Newsis

On Monday, Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso and other Japanese politicians visited Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, which houses the remains of Japan's war dead including convicted war criminals. On Tuesday, 168 members of the Diet followed suit, the biggest number of lawmakers since 1989.

The Japanese media were critical of the stunt. The Asahi Shimbun urged cabinet members to exercise "restraint" in speech as well as action, while the Mainichi Shimbun warned Japan's "national interests are at risk" if such strain is put on cooperation with China and South Korea in trying to rein in North Korea.

by Chris Cassidy
Boston Globe
Monday, April 29, 2013

The Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance — a bonanza ranging from cash and food stamps to Section 8 housing from 2002 to 2012, the Herald has learned.

“The breadth of the benefits the family was receiving was stunning,” said a person with knowledge of documents handed over to a legislative committee today.

The state has handed over more than 500 documents to the 11-member House Post Audit and Oversight Committee, which today met for the first time and plans to call in officials from the Department of Transitional Assistance to testify.

“I can assure members of the public that this committee will actively review every single piece of information we can find because clearly the public has a substantial right to know what benefits, if any, this family or individuals accused of some horrific crimes were receiving,” said state Rep. David Linsky (D-Natick), the committee’s chairman.

Linsky’s committee has requested documents from the DTA, the state’s Medicaid director and Health and Human Services Secretary John Polanowicz. But so far the committee has not released the records publicly, citing a privilege the DTA is asserting under state law.

Transitional assistance officials also told the Herald tonight that the agency was conducting its own investigation into whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s family ever notified the DTA about his extended trip to Russia, and has since expanded its probe to include a full history of the benefits received by the entire Tsarnaev family.